The Codex

8

By the time Tom had finished doctoring the sick horse, the sun was setting over Toh Ateen mesa, casting long golden shadows across the sagebrush and chamisa. Beyond rose up a thousand-foot wall of sculpted sandstone, glowing red in the dying light. Tom gave the animal another quick lookover and patted him on the neck. He turned to the Navajo girl — the horse’s owner. “He’s going to make it. Just a touch of sand colic.”

She broke into a relieved smile.

“Right now he’s hungry. Lead him around the corral a few times and then give him a scoop of psyllium mixed in with his oats. Let him water afterwards. Wait half an hour, then give him some hay. He’ll be fine.”

The Navajo grandmother who had ridden on horseback five miles to the vet clinic to get him — the road was washed out, as usual — took his hand. “Thank you, doctor.”

Tom gave a little bow. “At your service.” He thought ahead to the ride back to Bluff with anticipation. He was glad the road had washed out, giving him the excuse for a long ride. It had wasted half his day, but the trail had taken him through some of the most beautiful red-rock country in the Southwest, through the Jurassic sandstone beds known as the Morrison Formation, rich with dinosaur fossils. There were a lot of remote canyons running up into Toh Ateen mesa, and Tom wondered if any paleontologists had ever explored up there. Probably not. Someday, he thought, he’d take a little side trip up one of those canyons…

He shook his head and smiled to himself. The desert was a fine place to clear your mind, and he had had a lot of clearing to do. This crazy business with his father had been the biggest shock of his life.

“What do we owe you, doctor?” the grandmother asked, breaking his reverie.

Tom glanced around at the shabby tar-paper hogan, the broken-down car half sunk in tumbleweeds, the skinny sheep milling in the pen.

“Five dollars.”

The woman fished into her velveteen blouse and removed some soiled dollar bills, counting out five for him.

Tom had touched his hat and had just turned to get his horse when he noticed a tiny cloud of dust on the horizon. The two Navajos had also noticed it. A horse and rider were approaching fast from the north, from the direction he had come, the dark speck getting bigger in the great golden bowl of the desert. He wondered if it was Shane, his vet partner. It alarmed him. It would have to be one hell of an emergency for Shane to ride out there to get him.

As the figure materialized, he realized it wasn’t Shane but a woman. And she was riding his horse Knock.

The woman trotted into the settlement, covered with dust from her journey, the horse lathered up and blowing. She stopped and swung down. She had been riding bareback without even a bridle across almost eight miles of empty desert. Absolutely, totally crazy. And what was she doing with his best horse and not one of Shane’s glue-plugs? He was going to kill Shane.

She strode toward him. “I’m Sally Colorado,” she said. “I tried to find you at your clinic, but your partner said you’d ridden out here. So here I am.” With a rustle of honey-colored hair, she held out her hand. Tom, caught off guard, took it. Her hair had spilled down her shoulders over a white cotton shirt, now powdered with dust. The shirt was tucked in at a slender waist, which itself was snugged into a pair of jeans. There was a faint scent of peppermint about her. When she smiled it seemed her eyes had changed color from green to blue, so bright was the effect. She wore a pair of turquoise earrings, but the color in her eyes was even richer than the color of the stone.

After a moment Tom realized he was still holding her hand, and released it.

“I just had to find you,” she said. “I couldn’t wait.”

“An emergency?”

“It’s not a vet emergency, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then what kind of emergency is it?”

“I’ll tell you on the ride back.”

“Damn it,” Tom exploded, “I can’t believe Shane let you take my best horse and ride it like that, without a saddle or bridle. You could have been killed!”

“Shane didn’t give him to me.” The girl smiled.

“How did you get him, then?”

“I stole him.”

It took a moment of consternation before Tom could bring himself to laugh.

The sun had set by the time they headed north, riding together, back to Bluff. For a while they rode in silence, and then Tom finally said, “All right. Let’s hear what was so important that you had to steal a horse for it and risk your neck.”

“Well…” she hesitated.

“I’m all ears, Miss… Colorado. If that’s really your name.”

“It’s an odd name, I know. My great-grandfather was in vaudeville. He did the patent medicine circuit dressed as an Indian, and he took Colorado as his stage name. It was better than our old name — Smith — and so it kind of stuck. Call me Sally.”

“All right, Sally. Let’s hear your story.” Tom found himself watching her ride with a feeling of pleasure. She looked like she’d been born on a horse. A lot of money must have gone into that straight, easy, and centered seat of hers.

“I’m an anthropologist,” Sally began. “More specifically, I’m an ethnopharmacologist. I study indigenous medicine with Professor Julian Clyve at Yale. He was the man who cracked Mayan hieroglyphics a few years ago. A really brilliant piece of work. It was in all the papers.”

“No doubt.” She had a sharp, clean profile, a small nose, and a funny way of sticking out her lower lip. She had a little dimple when she smiled, but only on one side of her mouth. Her hair was dark gold, and it bent in a glistening curve over her slender shoulders before heading down her back. She was an amazingly beautiful woman.

“Professor Clyve has assembled the largest collection of Mayan writing in existence, a library of every inscription known in ancient Mayan. It consists of rubbings from stone inscriptions, pages from Mayan codices, and copies of inscriptions on pots and tablets. His library is consulted by scholars from all over the world.”

Tom could just see the doddering old pedagogue shuffling among his heaps of dusty manuscripts.

“The greatest of the Mayan inscriptions were contained in what we call codices. They were the original books of the Maya, written in glyphs on bark paper. The Spanish burned most of them as books of the devil, but a couple of incomplete codices managed to survive here and there. A complete Mayan codex has never been found. Last year, Professor Clyve found this in the back of a filing cabinet that belonged to one of his deceased colleagues.”

She drew a folded sheet of paper out of her breast pocket and handed it to him. Tom took it. It was an old, yellowing photocopy of a page of a manuscript written in hieroglyphics, with some drawings of leaves and flowers in the margins. It looked vaguely familiar. Tom wondered where he had seen it before.

“Writing was invented only three times independently in the history of the human race. Mayan hieroglyphics was one of them.”

“My Mayan reading skills are a little rusty. What does it say?”

“It describes the medicinal qualities of a certain plant found in the Central American rainforest.”

“What does it do? Cure cancer?”

Sally smiled. “If only. The plant is called the K’ik’-te, or blood tree. This page describes how you boil the bark, add ashes as an alkali, and apply the paste as a poultice to a wound.”

“Interesting.” Tom handed the sheet back to her.

“It’s more than interesting: It’s medically correct. There’s a mild antibiotic in the bark.”

They were now on the slickrock plateau. A pair of coyotes howled mournfully in a distant canyon. They had to go single file now. Sally rode behind while Tom listened.

“That page comes from a Mayan codex of medicine. It was probably written around 800 A.D., at the height of the Classic Maya civilization. It contains two thousand medical prescriptions and preparations, not just from plants but from everything in the rainforest — insects, animals, and even minerals. There may in fact be a cure for cancer in there, or at least some types of cancer. Professor Clyve asked me to locate the owner and see if I couldn’t arrange for him to translate and publish the codex. It’s the only complete Mayan codex known. It would be a stunning cap to his already distinguished career.”

“And for yours, too, I imagine.”

“Yes. Here’s a book that contains all the medicinal secrets of the rainforest, accumulated over centuries. We’re talking about the richest rainforest in the world, with hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals — many still unknown to science. The Maya knew every plant, every animal, everything in that rainforest. And everything they knew went into this book.”

She trotted her horse alongside him. Her loose hair spilled and swung as she caught up. “Do you realize what this means?”

“Surely,” said Tom, “medicine has advanced a long way from the ancient Maya.”

Sally Colorado snorted. “Twenty-five percent of all our drugs originally came from plants. And yet, only one-half of one percent of the world’s 265,000 plant species have been evaluated for their medicinal properties. Think of the potential! The most successful and effective drug in history — aspirin — was originally discovered in the bark of a tree used by natives to cure aches and pains. Taxol, an important anticancer drug, also comes from tree bark. Cortisone comes from yams, and the heart medication digitalis comes from foxglove. Penicillin was first extracted from mold. Tom, this codex could be the greatest medical discovery ever.”

“I see your point.”

“When Professor Clyve and I translate and publish this codex, it will revolutionize medicine. And if that doesn’t convince you, here’s something else. The Central American rainforest is disappearing under the loggers’ saws. This book will save it. The rainforest will suddenly be worth a lot more standing up than cut down. Drug companies will pay those countries billions in royalties.”

“No doubt keeping a tidy profit themselves. So what’s this book got to do with me?”

A full moon was now rising over the Hobgoblin Rocks, painting them silver. It was a lovely evening.

“The Codex belongs to your father.”

Tom stopped his horse and looked at her.

“Maxwell Broadbent stole it from a Mayan tomb almost forty years ago. He wrote to Yale asking for help in translating it. But Mayan script hadn’t been cracked then. The man who got the letter assumed it was a fake and shoved it in an old file without even answering. Professor Clyve found it forty years later. He instantly knew it was real. No one could fake Mayan script forty years ago for the simple reason that no one could read it. But Professor Clyve could read it: He’s the only man on earth, in fact, who can read Mayan script fluently. I’ve been trying to reach your father for weeks, but he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. So finally in desperation I tracked you down.”

Tom stared at her in the gathering twilight, and then he began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked hotly.

Tom took a deep breath. “Sally, I’ve got some bad news for you.”

When he had finished telling her everything, there was a long silence.

Sally said, “You’ve got to be joking.”

“No.”

“He had no right!”

“Right or not, that’s what he did.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Tom sighed. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean, nothing? You’re not giving up your inheritance, are you?”

Tom didn’t answer at once. They had reached the top of the plateau, and they paused to look at the view. The myriad canyons running down to the San Juan River were etched like dark fractals into the moonlit landscape; beyond, he could see the yellow cluster of lights of the town of Bluff and, at the edge of town, the cluster of buildings that made up his modest veterinary practice. To the left the immense stone vertebrae of Comb Ridge rose up, ghostly bones in the moonlight. It reminded him all over again of why he was here. In the days following the shock of learning what his father had done with their inheritance, he had picked up one of his favorite books: Plato’s Republic. He read once again the passages on the myth of Er, in which Odysseus was asked what kind of existence he would choose in his next life. What had the great Odysseus, warrior, lover, sailor, explorer, and king, chosen to be? An anonymous man living in some out-of-the way corner, “disregarded by the others.” All he wanted was a life of peace and simplicity.

Plato had approved. And so did Tom.

That, Tom reminded himself, was why he had originally come to Bluff. Life with Maxwell Broadbent as a father was impossible: a never-ending drama of exhortation, challenge, competition, criticism, and instruction. He had come here to escape, to find peace, to leave all that behind. That, and of course, Sarah. Sarah: His father had even tried to select their girlfriends — disastrously.

He ventured a glance at Sally. A cool night breeze was stirring her hair, and her face was turned into the moonlight, her lips slightly parted in pleasure and awe at the stupendous view. One hand lay on her thigh, her slender body resting lightly in the saddle. God, she was beautiful.

He angrily pushed that out of his mind. His life was now pretty much how he wanted it. He hadn’t managed to become a paleontologist — his father had scotched that — but being a vet in Utah was the next best thing. Why screw it up? He’d been down that road before. “Yes,” he finally responded. “I’m giving it up.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I can explain it.”

“Try.”

“You have to understand my father. All my life, he tried to control everything my two brothers and I did. He managed us. He had big plans for us. But no matter what I did, what any of us did, it was never good enough. We were never good enough for him. And now this. I’m not going to play his game any longer. Enough is enough.”

He paused, wondering why he was telling her so much.

“Go on,” she said.

“He wanted me to become a doctor. I wanted to be a paleontologist, to hunt for dinosaur fossils. Father thought that was ridiculous—‘infantile,’ he called it. We compromised on vet school. Naturally, he expected me to go to Kentucky and doctor million-dollar racehorses and maybe become an equine medical researcher, making great discoveries and putting the Broadbent name in the history books. Instead I came out here to the Navajo reservation. This is what I want to do; this is what I love doing. These horses need me and these people need me. And this landscape, southern Utah, is the most beautiful in the world, with some of the greatest Jurassic and Cretaceous fossil beds anywhere. But my father thought that me coming out here to the rez was a huge failure and disappointment. There was no money in it, no prestige, nothing splendid about it. Here I’d taken his money to go to vet school and cheated him by coming out here.”

He stopped. Now he’d really said too much.

“And so that’s it? You’re just going to let the whole inheritance go, Codex and all?”

“That’s right.”

“Just like that?”

“Most people live their lives without a legacy. My vet practice isn’t a bad living. I love this life, this country. Look around. What more could you want?”

He found Sally looking at him instead, her hair faintly luminous in the silvery light of the moon. “How much are you giving up, if I may ask?”

He felt a twinge, not for the first time, at the sheer size of it. “A hundred million, give or take.”

Sally whistled. There was a long silence. A coyote howled somewhere in the canyons below them, answered by a further howl. She finally said, “Jesus, you’ve got guts.”

He shrugged.

“And your brothers?”

“Philip’s joined with my father’s old partner to go find the hidden tomb. Vernon’s going it alone, I hear. Why don’t you team up with one of them?”

He found her looking at him rather intently in the dark. Finally she said, “I already tried. Vernon left the country a week ago, and Philip’s also disappeared. They went to Honduras. You were my last choice.”

Tom shook his head. “Honduras? That was fast. When they return with the loot, you can get the Codex from them. I’ll give you my blessing.”

Another long silence. “I can’t risk it. They have no idea what it is, what it’s worth. Anything could happen.”

“I’m sorry, Sally, I can’t help you.”

“Professor Clyve and I need your help. The world needs your help.”

Tom stared into the dark cottonwood groves in the floodplain of the San Juan River. An owl called from a distant juniper.

“My mind is made up,” he said.

She remained looking at him, her hair in heavy disarray down her shoulders and back, her lower lip firmly set. The cottonwoods were casting a dappled moonlight over her body, the fuzzy silver spots of light rippling and shifting with the breeze. “Really?”

He sighed. “Really.”

“At least give me a little help here. I’m not asking for much, Tom. Come to Santa Fe with me. You can introduce me to your father’s lawyers, his friends. You can tell me about his travels, his habits. Give me two days. Help me do this. Just two days.”

“No.”

“Ever had a horse die on you?”

“All the time.”

“A horse you loved?”

Tom immediately thought of his own horse Pedernal, who died from an antibiotic-resistant strain of strangles. He would never again own a horse as beautiful.

“Would better drugs have saved it?” Sally asked.

Tom looked toward the distant lights of Bluff. Two days wasn’t much, and she did have a point. “All right. You win. Two days.”