The Vivero Letter

I

As I went under I jack-knifed to dive deeper, keeping a lookout for Katherine. I saw her, but to my horrified astonishment she was going up again — right to the surface. I twisted in the water and went after her, wondering what the hell she thought she was doing, and grabbed her just before she broke into the air.

Then I saw what was wrong. The mask had been ripped from her head, probably by impact with the water, and the airline was inextricably tangled and wound among the bottles on her back in such a position that it was impossible for her to even touch it. She was fast running out of air, but she kept her head, and let it dribble evenly and slowly from her mouth just as she had done when I surprised her in Fallon’s swimming pool back in Mexico City. She didn’t even panic when I grabbed her, but let me pull her under water to the side of the cenote.

We broke into air and she gasped. I spat out my mouthpiece and disentangled her airline, and she paused before putting the mask on. ‘Thanks!’ she said. ‘But isn’t it dangerous here?’

We were right at the side of the cenote nearest the hill and protected from plunging fire by the sheer wall of the cenote, but if anyone got past Fallon we’d be sitting ducks. I said, ‘Swim under water for the shot line, then wait for me. Don’t worry about the shooting — water is hard stuff — it stops a bullet dead within six inches. You’ll be all right if you’re a couple of feet under; as safe as behind armour plate.’

She ducked under the water and vanished. I couldn’t see her because of the dancing reflections and the popple on the water caused by the driving wind, but the boys on the hillside evidently could because of the spurts of water that suddenly flicked in a line. I hoped I was right about that bit of folklore about bullets hitting water, and I breathed with relief as there was a surge of water at the raft as she went beneath it and was safe.

It was time for me to go. I went down and swam for the raft, going down about four feet. I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a bullet dropping vertically through the water, its tip flattened by the impact. The folklore was right, after all.

I found her clinging to the shot line beneath the raft, and pointed downwards with my thumb. Obediently she dived, keeping one hand in contact with the rope, and I followed her. We went down to the sixty-five-foot level where a marker on the rope indicated that we were as deep as the cave, and we swam for it and surfaced inside with a deep sense of relief. Katherine bobbed up beside me and I helped her climb on to the ledge, then I switched on the light.

‘We made it,’ I said.

She took off her mask wearily. ‘For how long?’ she asked, and looked at me accusingly. ‘You left Fallon to die; you abandoned him.’

‘It was his own decision,’ I said shortly. ‘Switch off your valve; you’re wasting air.’

She reached for it mechanically, and I turned my attention to the cave. It was fairly big and I judged the volume to be in excess of three thousand cubic feet — we’d had to pump a hell of a lot of air into it from the surface to expel the water. At that depth the air was compressed to three atmospheres, therefore it contained three times as much oxygen as an equal volume at the surface, which was a help. But with every breath we were exhaling carbon dioxide and as the level of CO₂ built up so we would get into trouble.

I rested for a while and watched the light reflect yellowly from the pile of gold plate at the further end of the ledge. The problem was simple; the solution less so. The longer we stayed down, the longer we would have to decompress on the way up — but the bottles in the back-packs didn’t hold enough air for lengthy decompression. At last I bent down and swished my mask in the water before putting it on.

Katherine sat up. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I won’t be long,’ I said. ‘Just to the bottom of the cenote to find a way of stretching our stay here. You’ll be all right — just relax and take things easy.’

‘Can I help?’

I debated that one, then said, ‘No. You’ll just use up air. There’s enough in the cave to keep us going, and I might need what you have in that bottle.’

She looked up at the light and shivered. ‘I hope that doesn’t go out. It’s strange that it still works.’

‘The batteries topside are still full of juice,’ I said. ‘That’s not so strange. Keep cheerful — I won’t be long.’

I donned my mask, slipped into the water and swam out of the cave, and then made for the bottom. I found one of our working lights and debated whether or not to switch it on because it could be seen from the surface. In the end I risked it — there wasn’t anything Gatt could do to get at me short of inventing a depth charge to blow me up, and I didn’t think he could do that at short notice.

I was looking for the air cylinders Rudetsky and I had pushed off the raft and I found them spread out to hell and gone. Finding the manifold that had followed the cylinders was a bit more tricky but I discovered it under the coils of air hose that spread like a huge snake, and I smiled with satisfaction as I saw the spanner still tied to it by a loop of rope. Without that spanner I’d have been totally sunk.

Heaving the cylinders into one place was a labour fit for Hercules but I managed it at last and set about coupling up the manifold. Divers have very much the same problem of weightlessness as astronauts, and every time I tried to tighten a nut my body rotated around the cylinder in the other direction. I was down there nearly an hour but finally I got the cylinders attached to the manifold with all cocks open, and the hose on to the manifold outlet with the end valve closed. Now all the air in the cylinders was available on demand at the end of the hose.

I swam up to the cave, pulling the hose behind the, and popped up beside the ledge holding it triumphantly aloft. Katherine was sitting at the further end of the ledge, and when I said, ‘Grab this!’ she didn’t do a damn thing but merely turned and looked at me.

I hoisted myself out of the water, holding the end of the hose with difficulty, and then hauled in a good length of it and anchored it by sitting on it. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I demanded.

She made no answer for some time, then said cheerlessly, ‘I’ve been thinking about Fallon.’

‘Oh!’

‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked with passion in her voice, but the sudden violence left her as soon as it had come. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ she asked more calmly.

I considered it. ‘Probably,’ I said at last.

‘My God, I’ve misjudged you,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘You’re a cold man, really. You’ve just left a man to die and you don’t care a damn.’

‘What I feel is my business. It was Fallon’s decision — he made it himself.’

‘But you took advantage of it.’

‘So did you,’ I pointed out.

‘I know,’ she said desolately. ‘I know. But I’m not a man; I can’t kill and fight.’

‘I wasn’t brought up to it myself,’ I said acidly. ‘Not like Gatt. But you’d kill if you had to, Katherine. Just like the rest of us. You’re a human being — a killer by definition. We can all kill but some of us have to be forced to it.’

‘And you didn’t feel you had to defend Fallon,’ she said quietly.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I said equally quietly. ‘Because I’d be defending a dead man. Fallon knew that, Katie; he’s dying of cancer. He’s known it ever since Mexico City, which is why he’s been so bloody irresponsible. And now it’s on his conscience. He wanted to make his peace, Katie; he wanted to purge his conscience. Do you think I should have denied him that — even though we’re all going to die anyway?’

I could hardly hear her. ‘Oh, God!’ she breathed. ‘I didn’t know — I didn’t know.’

I felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit mixed up. I’d forgotten you didn’t know. He told me just before Gatt’s attack. He was going back to Mexico City to die in three months. Not much to look forward to, is it?’

‘So that’s why he could hardly bear to leave here.’ Her voice broke in a sob. ‘I watched him looking over the city as though he were in love with it. He’d stroke the things we brought up from here.’

‘He was a man taking farewell of everything he loved,’ I said.

She was quiet for a time, then she said, ‘I’m sorry. Jemmy, I’m sorry for the things I said. I’d give a lot not to have said them.’

‘Forget it.’ I busied myself with securing the hose, then began to contemplate what I’d do with it. The average diver doesn’t memorize the Admiralty diving tables, and I was no exception. However, I’d been consulting them freely of late, especially in relation to the depths in the cenote, and I had a fairly good idea of the figures involved. Sooner or later we’d have to go to the surface and that meant decompressing on the way up, the amount of decompression time depending on the depth attained and the length of time spent there.

I had just spent an hour at nearly a hundred feet and came back to sixty-five and I reckoned if I spent another hour, at least, in the cave, then I could write off the descent to the bottom of the cenote as far as decompression went. The nitrogen would already be easing itself quietly from my tissues without bubbling.

That left the ascent to the surface. The longer we spent in the cave the more decompression time we’d need, and the decompression time was strictly controlled by the amount of air available in the big cylinders at the bottom of the cenote. It would be unfortunate, to say the least, to run out of air while, say, at the twenty-foot decompression stop. A choice between staying in the water and asphyxiation, and going up and getting the bends. The trouble was that I didn’t know how much air was left in the cylinders — Rudetsky had been doing the surface work on the raft and he wasn’t available to tell me.

So I took a chance and assumed they were half full and carried on from there. My small back-pack bottles were nearly empty, but the ones on Katherine’s harness were nearly full, so that was a small reserve. I finally figured out that if we spent a total of just over three hours in the cave I would need an hour and three-quarters, decompression — a total of five hours since we had dived under the bullets. There could possibly have been a change up on top in five hours. I grinned tightly. There wasn’t any harm in being optimistic — Gatt might even have shot himself in frustration.

I consulted my watch and considered it lucky that I’d made a habit of wearing the waterproof and pressureproof diver’s watch all the time. We’d been down an hour and a half, so that left about the same time to go before vacating the cave. I stretched out on the hard rock, still weighing down the hose, and prepared to wait it out.

‘Jemmy!’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody ever called me Katie before — except my father.’

‘Don’t look upon me as a father-figure,’ I said gruffly.

‘I won’t,’ she promised solemnly.

The light went out — not with a last despairing glimmer as the batteries packed in, but suddenly, as though a switch had been turned off. Katherine gave a startled cry, and I called out. Take it easy, Katie girl! Nothing to worry about.’

‘Is it the batteries?’

‘Probably,’ I said, but I knew it wasn’t. Someone had turned the light off deliberately or the circuit had been damaged. We were left in a darkness that could be felt physically — a clammy black cloak wrapped around us. Darkness, as such, had never worried me, but I knew it could have peculiar effects on others, so I stretched out my hand. ‘Katie, come here!’ I said. ‘Let’s not get too far away from each other.’

I felt her hand in mine. ‘I hope we’ll never be that.’

So we talked and talked in the blackness of that cave — talked about every damned thing there was to talk about — about her father and his work at the college, about my sports of fencing and swimming, about Hay Tree Farm, about the Bahamas, about my future, about her future — about our future. We were forgetful enough in that darkness to believe we had a future.

Once she said, ‘Where did the wind come from so suddenly?’

‘What wind?’

‘Just before we ran for the cenote.’

I came back to the real and bloody world with a jerk. ‘I don’t know. Rider was telling me there was a hurricane off-coast. Maybe it swung inland. He was keeping an ear open for the weather forecasts, I do know that.’ The crash of the chopper and the chase in the forest seemed to have happened an eon before.

I looked at my watch and the luminous dial swam ghostlike in the darkness. It was just about time to go and I said so. Katherine was practical about it. ‘I’ll get ready,’ she said.

My mouth was dry and I could hardly get the words out. ‘You’re not coming,’ I said.

There was a brief gasp in the darkness. ‘Why not?’

‘There’s only enough air to take one of us to the top. If we both go we’ll both die. You can’t go because God knows what you’d find up there. Even if Gatt has given up you’d still have to find the compressor parts which Rudetsky hid away and get the compressor going again. Could you do that?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘No, I couldn’t.’

‘Then I must do it. God knows I don’t like leaving you here, but it’s the best way.’

‘How long will you be?’

‘Nearly two hours going up and maybe another hour to get the compressor going. You won’t run out of air here, Katie; you should have enough for another seven or eight hours.’

‘Seven hours will be too late, won’t it? If it’s as much as seven hours you won’t be coming back at all. Isn’t that right, Jemmy?’

It was — and I knew it. ‘I’ll be back long before then,’ I said, but both of us knew the chances against it.

Her voice was pensive. ‘I’d rather drown than just run out of air slowly.’

‘For God’s sake!’ I burst out. ‘You’ll stay in this bloody cave until I get back, do you hear me? You’ll stay here — promise me!’

‘I’ll stay,’ she said softly, and then she was suddenly in my arms. ‘Kiss me, darling.’ Her lips were on mine and I held her tight, despite those damned clammy and unromantic rubber wet-suits we wore.

At last I pushed her away. ‘We can’t waste time,’ I said, and bent down, groping for the hose. My fingers encountered something metallic which clattered on the rock, and I grasped it, then found the hose with my other hand. I pulled down the mask and whatever I was holding was in my way so I thrust it impatiently under the harness straps. ‘I’ll be back,’ I promised, and slipped into the water, dragging the hose.

The last thing I heard before going under the water was Katie’s voice echoing desolately round the cave. ‘I love you — love you.’

II

I was holding the weight of about seventy feet of hose which tended to drag me down and I lost some height before I reached the shot line, but once there I was able to hold on to it while I hauled up more hose. When I felt resistance I stopped, and fastened the hose to the line with one of my fin-fasteners. I wouldn’t need the fins from now on and the hose needed to be fastened so as to take the weight off me. That done, I went up slowly to the thirty foot mark, letting the air bubble from my mouth as it expanded in my lungs due to the lessening pressure and holding down my speed to less than that of the rising bubbles.

At thirty feet I climbed into the slings on the shot line and plugged the air hose into the demand valve on the harness, thus taking air from the big bottles at the bottom of the cenote and leaving the smaller harness bottles as a reserve. Then I looked at my watch. I would have to wait fifteen minutes at thirty feet, thirty-five minutes at twenty feet, and fifty minutes at ten feet.

Decompression is a slow and wearisome business at the best of times but this time the uncertainty of what I was about to meet when out of the water made it much worse. At the ten-foot level the suspense was awful because I knew I would be perfectly visible to anyone standing on the edge of the cenote. To make matters more nerve-racking the air gave out after only ten minutes at ten feet and I had to switch on to reserve; there had not been as much in the big cylinders as I thought and I was cutting things damned fine. And Katherine had been a little wasteful with the air from her bottles because it ran out fifteen minutes before my time was up, and I was forced to the surface.

I came up under the raft and hoped it wouldn’t matter, pleased to be able to gulp in mouthfuls of sun-warmed air. I clung on to the underside of the raft with my head in the air space and listened intently. There was nothing to be heard apart from the soughing of the wind, which seemed to have dropped considerably in strength while we had been under water. I certainly heard no voices or anything human.

After a while I swam from under the raft and wearily climbed on board and shook off the scuba harness. Something clattered to the deck of the raft and I looked around in alarm for fear that it might have been heard before I bent to pick it up. It was a gold piece from the cave — the little statue of the Mayan maiden that Vivero had cast. I thrust it into my belt and then listened again and heard nothing of consequence.

I swam ashore to the rough dock that Rudetsky had made and trudged up the steps that had been hewn in the clifflike side of the cenote. At the top I stood in shaken amazement. The camp was a total wreck — most of the huts had disappeared completely, leaving only the foundations, and the whole area was a tangle of broken branches and even whole tree trunks from God knows where. And there was not a man in sight.

I looked towards the hut where we had made our stand and saw it was crushed and smashed under the weight of a big tree whose roots pointed skywards incongruously. Twigs cracked underfoot as I picked my way towards it and, as I got near, a brightly coloured bird flew out of the wreckage with a flutter of wings that momentarily alarmed me.

I prowled around, then stepped inside, climbing with difficulty over branches as thick as my own body. Somewhere among this lot were the spare scuba bottles I needed to bring Katherine to surface.

And somewhere among this lot was Fallon!

I found two machetes lying crossed as though someone had laid them down for sword dancing and took one to cut away at the smaller branches near where I would expect to find Fallon. After ten minutes of chopping I disclosed a hand and an arm outflung in death, but a few more cuts revealed the blood-smeared face of Smith. I tried again a little further along the line of the wall and this time I found him.

He was pinned to the ground by the branch that had struck him down, and when I put my hand on his arm I found, to my astonishment, that he was still warm. Quickly, I felt the pulse at his wrist and detected the faintest pulsation. Fallon was still alive! He had died neither by the hand of Gatt nor of the ancient enemy, but, incredibly, was still alive in spite of the violence of nature that had crashed a whole tree on to the hut.

I swung the machete and began to chop him free, which was not too difficult because he lay in the angle between floor and wall which had protected him from the tree in the first place, and I was soon able to drag him free and to put him in better comfort out of the sun. When I had done that he was still unconscious but his colour had improved and there didn’t seem much wrong with him apart from the dark bruise on the side of his head. I thought he would presently regain consciousness naturally, so I left him for more important work.

The compressor parts had been hidden in a hole near the hut and covered with earth, but the whole area was covered with torn tree branches and other debris, including whole tree trunks. I wondered momentarily where they had come from and looked across the cenote to the hillside behind, and the sight of it took my breath in sharply. The ridge had been wiped clean of vegetation as if Rudetsky’s gang had worked on it with power saw and flame-thrower.

There had been a wind — a big wind — that had assaulted the shallow-rooted forest trees and torn them clean out. I turned to look again at the hut and saw that the tree whose roots stuck up so ridiculously into the air must have been hurled from high on the hillside to strike downwards like some strange spear. And that was why the whole camp area, as far as I could see, was a wreck of timber and leafage.

The hillside was scraped clean to reveal the bare rock that had been hidden beneath the thin soil and, on top of the ridge, the temple of Yum Chac stood proudly against the sky very much as it must have looked when Vivero first saw it. I stepped back to get a better view of the whole ridge and looked past the ruined hut, and a great feeling of awe came upon me.

Because I saw Vivero’s sign written in burning gold in the side of the ridge. I am not, in any sense, a religious man, but my legs turned to water and I sank down upon my knees and tears came to my eyes. The sceptic, of course, would write it off as a mere trick of the sun, of light and shade, and would point to parallels in other parts of the world where some natural rock formations are famous and well known. But that sceptic would not have gone through what I had gone through that day.

It may have been a trick of light and shade, but it was undeniably real — as real as if carved by a master sculptor. The setting sun, shining fitfully through scudding clouds, shed a lurid yellow light along the ridge and illuminated a great figure of Christ Crucified. The arms, spread along the ridge, showed every tortured muscle, and the nail heads in the palms of the hands cast deep shadows. The broad-chested torso shrank to a hollow stomach at the foot of the ridge, and there was a gaping hole in the side, just under the rib cage, which a sceptic would have dismissed as a mere cave. All the rib structure showed as clearly as in an anatomical drawing, as though that mighty chest was gasping for breath.

But it was the face that drew the attention. The great head lolled on one side against a shoulder and an outcrop of spiky rocks formed the crown of thorns against the darkening sky. Deep shadows drew harsh lines of pain from the nose to the corners of the mouth; the hooded eyes, crowfooted at the corners, stared across Quintana Roo; and the lips seemed about to part as though to bellow in a great voice of stone, ‘Eloi! Eloi, Lama Sabacthani!’

I found my hands trembling and I could imagine what impression this miracle would have made on Vivero, a child of a simpler, yet deeper, faith than ours. No wonder he wanted his sons to take the city of Uaxuanoc; no wonder he had kept it secret and had baited his letter with gold. If this had been discovered in Vivero’s time, it would have been one of the wonders of the Christian world, and the discoverer might even have been revered as a saint.

Probably this effect was not a daily occurrence and might depend on certain angles of the sun and, perhaps, times of year even. The Mayas, brought up in a different pictorial tradition and with no knowledge of Christianity, might not even have recognized it for what it was. But Vivero certainly had.

I knelt entranced in the middle of that devastated camp and looked up at this great wonder which had been hidden for so many centuries under a curtain of trees. The light changed as a cloud passed over the sun, and the expression of that huge and distant face changed from a gentle sorrow to inexpressible agony. I suddenly felt very afraid, and closed my eyes.

There was a crackle of twigs. ‘That’s right; say your prayers, Wheale,’ said a grating voice.

I opened my eyes and turned my head. Gatt was standing just to one side with a revolver in his hand. He looked as though the whole forest had fallen on top of him. Gone was the neat elegance of the morning; he had lost his jacket, and his shirt was torn and ragged, revealing a hairy chest streaked with bloody scratches. His trousers were ripped at the knees and, as he walked around me, I saw that he had lost one shoe and was limping a little. But even so he was in better shape than I was — he had a gun!

He rubbed his hand over one sweaty cheek, streaking it with dirt, and lifted the other which held the revolver. ‘Just you stay right there — on your knees.’ He walked on a little further until he was directly in front of me.

‘Have you seen what’s behind you?’ I asked quietly.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen it,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Some effect, hey? Better than Mount Rushmore.’ He grinned. ‘Expecting it to do you some good, Wheale?’

I said nothing, but just looked at him. The machete was at my side and within reach of my fingers if I stooped a little. I didn’t think Gatt would let me get that far.

‘So you been praying, boy? Well, you gotta right.’ The cultivated accent had vanished along with the elegance of his clothes; he had gone back to his primitive beginnings. ‘You got every right because I’m gonna kill you. You wanna pray some more? Go right ahead — be my guest’

I still kept my mouth shut, and he laughed. ‘Cat got your tongue? Got nothing to say to Jack Gatt? You were pretty gabby this morning, Wheale. Now, I’ll tell you something — confidential between you and me. You got plenty time to pray because you’re not going to die quick or easy. I’m going to put a hot slug right in your guts and you’ll take a long, long time to join our pal over there.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘You know who I mean — Holy Jesus up in the sky.’

There was a maniac gleam in his eyes and a tic convulsed his right cheek. He was now right round the bend and beyond the reach of reason. Gone was any idea he might have had of making me dive for the treasure — all he wanted was the violence of revenge, a booby prize for being cheated.

I looked at the gun he was holding and couldn’t see any bullets in it. What I don’t know about firearms would fill a library of books, but the revolver I’d used had rotated the cylinder when the trigger was pressed to bring a cartridge under the hammer, and before the gun was fired that cartridge would be visible from the front. I couldn’t see any such cartridge in Gatt’s gun.

‘You’ve caused me a lot of trouble,’ said Gatt. ‘More trouble than any man I knew.’ He laughed raucously, ‘Get it? I put that in the past tense because guys who cause me any kind of trouble don’t stay alive. And neither will you.’ He was relaxed and enjoying his cat-and-mouse game.

I was anything but relaxed. I was about to stake my life on there not being two kinds of revolver. Slowly I stooped and curled my fingers around the handle of the machete. Gatt tensed and jerked the gun. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Dr.op it!’

I didn’t. Instead, I started to get to my feet. ‘All right buster,’ shouted Gatt. ‘Here it comes!’ He squeezed the trigger and the hammer fell on an empty chamber with a dry click. He looked at it with startled eyes, and then backed away fast as he saw me coming at him with the upraised machete, turned tail and ran with me after him.

He scrambled over a tree trunk and became entangled in branches. I took a swing at him and a spray of leaves and twigs flew up into the air. Gatt yelped in fear and broke free, trying to make for the open ground and the forest beyond, but I ran around the tree, cutting him off, and he backed away towards the cenote.

He was still holding the useless gun which he raised and tried to fire again, giving me another bad moment, but it clicked harmlessly. I stepped forward again, manoeuvring him backwards, and he stepped back cautiously, not daring to take his eyes off me until he stumbled over the concrete foundations of the hut.

I will say he was quick. He threw the gun at me with an unexpected movement and I ducked involuntarily, and when I recovered he also was armed with a machete, which he had picked up from the floor of the hut. He squared his shoulders and a new confidence seemed to come over him as he hefted the broad-bladed weapon. His lips parted and his mouth broke into a grin, but there was no humour in his watchful eyes.

I automatically fell into the sabre stance — the classic ‘on guard’ position. As from a great distance seemed to come the ghostly voice of the maître d’armes crying. ‘Use your fingers on the cut, Wheale!’ I hefted the machete. This was no light sporting sabre to be twitched about by finger action as the Hungarian masters have taught; it could be more appropriately compared with a naval cutlass.

Gatt jumped and took a swipe at me and I instinctively parried with a clash of steel, then jumped back six feet and felt the sweat start out on my chest beneath the rubber suit. I had used the wrong parry, forgetting the machete had no guard for the hand. Gatt had used a sideways slash and I had parried in seconde, catching his blade on mine. If I hadn’t jumped back his blade would have slid along mine and chopped my hand off — something that couldn’t happen with a sabre.

I feinted at him to gain time to think and to watch his reaction to an attack. He tried to parry clumsily, missed my blade, jumped back and nearly fell. But he was agile for his age, and recovered quickly, successfully parrying again. I gave ground, well satisfied with what I had learned. Gatt was definitely no fencer. As a young mafioso he may have been an adept with a knife, but a machete is more like a sword than an overgrown knife, and I had the advantage.

So here we were, fulfilling the hypothetical prophecy of Pat Harris — Gatt and I alone in Quintana Roo with Gatt separated from his bodyguards. I was determined to make it as quick and as short as possible; I was going to kill Gatt as soon as I could. I didn’t forget, however, that he was still highly dangerous, and advanced on him with due caution.

He had the sense to manoeuvre sideways so he would not have the wreckage of the hut behind him. That suited me because he could not retreat very far without coming to the edge of the cenote. He was sweating and breathing heavily, standing square on with his feet apart. He moved again, fast, and chopped down in a swing that would have cleaved my skull had it connected. I parried in quinte and stood my ground, which he didn’t expect. For a split second he was very close and his eyes widened in fear as I released his blade and cut at his flank. It was only by a monstrous leap backwards that he avoided it, and the point of my machete ripped his shirt away.

I took advantage and pressed home the attack and he gave way slowly, his eyes looking apprehensively at my blade which is the wrong thing to watch — he ought to have been looking at my sword hand. In desperation he attacked again and I parried, but my foot slipped on a branch which rolled under the instep and I staggered sideways. I lost contact with his blade and it sliced downwards into my side in a shallow cut.

But I recovered and engaged his blade again and drove him back with a series of feints. He parried frantically, waving the machete from side to side. I gave ground then and put my hand to my side as though tiring and he momentarily dropped his guard in relief. Then I went in for the kill — a fleche and a lunge in the high line; he parried and I deceived his parry and chopped at his head.

The edge of the machete hit the side of his head just below the ear and I instinctively drew it back into a cut as I had been taught, and the blade sliced deep into his neck. He was dead before he knew it because I had damn near cut his head off. He twisted as he fell and rolled to the edge of the cenote, then slowly toppled over to fall with a thump on the wooden dock.

I didn’t bother to look at him. I just staggered to the nearest support, which was a fallen tree, and leaned on the trunk. Then I vomited and nearly brought my heart up.

III

I must have passed out for a while because the next thing I knew was that I was lying on the ground, staring sideways at a column of industrious ants that looked as big as elephants from that angle. I picked myself up wearily and sat on the trunk of the tree. There was something nagging at the back of my head — something I had to do. My head ached abominably and little pointless thoughts chattered about like bats in an attic.

Oh, yes; that’s what I had to do. I had to make sure that Jack Edgecombe didn’t make a balls-up of the farm; he wasn’t too enthusiastic in the first place and a man like that could make an awful mess of all the Mayan rains. There was that pillar I’d found right next to the oak tree great-grand-father had planted — Old Cross-eyes I’d called him, and Fallon had been very pleased, but I mustn’t let Jack Edgecombe near him. Never mind, old Mr. Mount would see to everything — he’d get a farm agent in to see to the excavation of the Temple of Yum Chac.

I put my hands to my eyes and wiped away the tears. Why the devil was I crying? There was nothing to cry about. I would go home now and Madge Edgecombe would make me tea, with scones spread thick with Devonshire cream and homemade strawberry jam. She’d use the Georgian silver set my mother had liked so much, and it would all be served on that big tray.

That big tray!

That brought it all back with a rush and my head nearly burst with the terror of it. I looked at my hand which was covered with drying blood and I wondered whose blood it was. I had killed a lot of men — I didn’t know how many — so whose blood was this?

There and then I made a vow. That I would go back to England, to the sheltered combes of Devon, and I would never leave Hay Tree Farm again. I would stick close to the land of my people, the land that Wheales had toiled over for generations, and never again would I be such a damned fool as to look for adventure. There would be adventure enough for me in raising fat cattle and sinking a pint in the Kingsbridge Inn, and if ever again anyone called me a grey little man I would laugh, agree that it was so, and say I wouldn’t have it otherwise.

My side hurt and I put my hand to it and it came away sticky with blood. When I looked down I saw that Gatt had cut a slice from my hide, chopping through the wet-suit as cleanly as a butcher with a cleaver. Bone showed — the bones of my ribs — and the pain was just beginning.

I suddenly thought of Katherine in the cave. Oh, God, I didn’t want to go into the cenote again! But a man can do anything he has to, particularly a grey little man. Gatt wasn’t a grey man — more like red in tooth and claw — but the grey men of the world are more than a match for the Gatts of this world — for one thing, there are more of them — and the grey men don’t like being pushed around.

I pulled my weary bones together, ready to go looking again for those compressor parts and brushed the back of my hand across my eyes to rid them of the trace of those tears of weakness. When I looked across the city of Uaxuanoc there were ghosts there, drifting about in the ruins and coming closer — indistinct white figures with rifles.

They came soft-footed and looked at me with hard eyes, attracting each other with faint shouts of triumph, until there were a dozen of them in a big semi-circle surrounding me — the chicleros of Quintana Roo.

Oh, God! I thought desperately. Is the killing never going to end? I bent down and groped for the machete, nestled the hilt in the palm of my hands, then rose creakingly to my feet. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ I whispered. ‘Come on! Let’s get it over with!’

They closed in slowly, with caution and an odd respect in their eyes. I lifted the machete and one man unslung his rifle and I heard the metallic noise as he slammed home a round into the breech. There was a great throbbing sound in my ears, my vision darkened, and I felt myself swaying. Through a dark mist I saw the circle of men waver, and some began to run, and they shouted loudly.

I looked up to see a cloud of locusts descending from the sky, and then I pitched forward and saw the ground coming up at me.

IV

‘Wake up!’ said the voice distantly. ‘Wake up, Jemmy!’

I moved and felt pain. Someone, somewhere, was speaking crisp and fluent Spanish, then the voice said close to my ear, ‘Jemmy, are you okay?’ More distantly it said, ‘Someone bring a stretcher.’

I opened my eyes and looked at the darkening sky. ‘Who is the stretcher for?’

A head swam into view and I screwed up my eyes and saw it was Pat Harris. ‘Jemmy, are you okay? Who beat you up? Those goddamn chicleros?’

I eased myself up on one elbow and he supported my back with his arm. ‘Where did you come from?’

‘We came in the choppers. The army’s moved in.’ He moved a little. ‘Look, there they are.’

I stared at the five helicopters standing outside the camp, and at the busy men in uniform moving about briskly. Two of them were trotting my way with a stretcher. The locusts coming from heaven, I thought; they were helicopters.

‘I’m sorry we couldn’t get here sooner,’ said Pat. ‘It was that goddamn storm. We got a flick from the tail of a hurricane and had to put down half way.’

‘Where have you come from?’

‘Campeche — the other side of Yucatán. I flew over this morning and saw all hell breaking loose here — so I whistled up the Mexican army. If it hadn’t been for the storm we’d have been here six hours ago. Say, where is everybody?’

That was a good question. I said creakily, ‘Most of us are dead.’

He stared at me as I sat up. ‘Dead!’

I nodded wearily. ‘Fallon’s still alive — I think. He’s over there.’ I grabbed his arm. ‘Jesus! Katherine’s down in the cenote — in a cave. I’ve got to get her out.’

He looked at me as though I had gone mad. ‘In a cave! In the cenote!’ he echoed stupidly.

I shook his arm. ‘Yes, you damn fool! She’ll die if I don’t get her out. We were hiding from Gatt.’

Pat saw I was serious and was galvanized as though someone had given him an electric shock. ‘You can’t go down there — not in your condition,’ he said. ‘Some of these boys are trained swimmers — I’ll go see the teniente.’

I watched him walk across to a group of the soldiers, then I got to my feet, feeling every pain of it, and limped to the cenote and stood on the edge, looking down at the dark water. Pat came back at a run. ‘The teniente has four scuba-trained swimmers and some oxygen bottles. If you’ll tell them where the girl is, they can take oxygen down to her.’ He looked down at the cenote. ‘Good Christ!’ he said involuntarily. ‘Who’s that?’

He was looking down at the body of Gatt which lay sprawled on the wooden dock. His mouth was open in a ghastly grin — but it wasn’t really his mouth. ‘It’s Gatt,’ I said unemotionally. ‘I told you I’d kill him.’

I was drained of all emotion; there was no power in me to laugh or to cry, to feel sorrow or joy. I looked down at the body without feeling anything at all, but Harris looked sick. I turned away and looked towards the helicopters. ‘Where are those bloody divers?’

They came at last and I explained haltingly what they were to do, and Pat interpreted. One of the men put on my harness and they jury-rigged an oxygen bottle and he went down. I hoped he wouldn’t frighten Katie when he popped up in the cave. But her Spanish was good and I thought it would be all right.

I watched them carry Fallon away on a stretcher towards one of the choppers while a medico bandaged me up. Harris said in wonder, ‘They’re still finding bodies — there must have been a massacre.’

‘Something like that,’ I said indifferently.

I wouldn’t move from that spot at the edge of the cenote until Katie was brought up, and I had to wait quite a while until they flew in proper diving gear from Campeche. After that it was easy and she came up from the cave under her own steam and I was proud of her.

We walked to the helicopter together with me leaning on her because suddenly all the strength had left me. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us in the future — I didn’t know if such an experience as we had undergone was such a perfect beginning to a marriage, but I was willing to try if she was.

I don’t remember much about anything after that, not until I woke up in a hospital in Mexico City with Katie sitting by the bedside. That was many days afterwards. But I vaguely remember that the sun was just coming up as the chopper took off and I was clutching that little gold lady which Vivero had made. Christ was not to be seen, but I remember the dark shape of the Temple of Yum Chac looming above the water and drifting away forever beneath the heavily beating blades.