Rogue Angel - The Golden Elephant Part 16

She wasn't going to ask many questions right now nor get answers to them. The reconnaissance-by-fire had calmed down behind them, probably because the shooters had blazed off their whole 30-round magazines and were reloading. Occasional random bursts still ripped the heavy evening air, drowning out confused shouts from behind. All Annja could think to do was stick as close to Easy as possible. At least she seemed to know where she was going.

Without visible effort Easy vaulted a fallen log arching three feet from the forest floor. She kept running. Two men suddenly appeared behind her from a bush full of yellow flowers that seemed to be opening as night descended. They wore yellow headbands.

They carried M-16s, black and almost as long as they were tall. They raised them after the running woman, who hadn't noticed them. At this range Annja knew the gunmen could hardly miss by dumping their whole magazines after Easy.

24.

Not five minutes earlier Annja had been doing her furious best to harm Easy Ngwenya. Now she raised her right hand and summoned the Sword to save her.

Sensing something amiss, the closer man turned to look over his shoulder. She slashed backhand, descending left to right, diagonally right between wide shocked eyes staring from a mustached face.

He dropped as if his bones had instantly dissolved. Annja didn't break stride. A running horizontal forehand cut took the second gunman, totally unaware, right at the back of his sweaty neck beneath a yellow turban.

Annja ran past never glancing his way.

ANNJA PUT HER BACK to a tree and slid down. The rough bark of the bole rasped her skin through the light s.h.i.+rt she wore. She paid no attention.

They had not run that far-no more than a quarter mile, she guessed. But it had been across broken, blocked terrain, the lushly undergrown forest of the mesa top between increasingly sizable spills of masonry. And it had been high stress-nothing sucked energy out of your body as fast as combat.

Even though they had seen no sign of actual enemies since Annja had cut down the unsuspecting pair getting set to shoot Easy, her body had stayed on alert the whole way, jumping over tangles and bouncing off trees. Now she felt as if she'd kickboxed ten rounds and run a marathon.

Easy squatted on her haunches. Annja almost felt relieved to note the younger woman was panting like a dog, as well. Easy mopped at the sweat streaming freely down her high round forehead with a rag. It mostly redistributed the wetness. She took a canteen from her belt, drank deep, then tossed it to Annja without asking if the other woman wanted it.

She didn't have to. Annja needed it. She upended the bottle and drank greedily.

She threw the canteen back to Easy. "What the h.e.l.l is going on?" she asked through gasping breaths. She was trying to control her breathing, channel it into the deep, slow respiration that would most efficiently reoxygenate her fatigued muscles and calm her swirling thoughts and emotions. But it took huge force of even her strong and well-practiced will.

Easy drank again. She seemed to have her own panting under control already.

"Blue turbans," she said. "Grand Shan State Army. Marshal Qiangsha, proprietor. Self-proclaimed marshal, unquestioned warlord. Ethnic resistance army but mostly gangs. Qiangsha likes walks at sunset, Irish whiskey and sticking his enemies' heads on poles.

"Yellow turbans are Lord's Wa Army. Recruited from a tribe of backward, inbred Wa. It's politically incorrect to call them headhunters. That's exactly what this bunch were. Until they got converted from animism to fundamentalist Christianity by their current spiritual and military leader, Jerry Cromwell."

As they had fled, the sounds of a firefight broke out behind them. They died away to nothing before the two women halted to rest. Annja guessed the contestants had mainly wanted to back away and break contact with each other. n.o.body was eager to get shot, and a couple of hostile patrols that happened to b.u.mp into each other had no real motivation to hang and bang to a conclusion.

"Jerry Cromwell?" Annja asked.

"Foreign name because he's a foreign bloke. A Yank, as it happens. Former cable television preacher sort of chap. Apparently made carloads of money off the faithful in his day. Big on Armageddon. I understand he left the States in rather a hurry, ahead of a slew of charges."

"Great," Annja said. She breathed almost normally now. Her lungs felt as if she'd been inhaling superheated sand. But at least she wasn't gasping anymore. "Another disgraced televangelist."

She sat with her knees up and her wrists draped across them. She looked at the other woman. "He converted this Wa group from being headhunters?"

"I didn't say that," Easy said with a faint grin. "It was animism he got them to give up. The headhunting-maybe not."

"I'm not so sure the modern Shan bunch are much better. Heads on poles. Nice," Annja said.

"Oh, they're not," Easy said, "of course. But I suppose they'd argue that their headtaking is intended to send a message. Politics of meaning and all that. Whereas the Wa's is recreational. Much more civilized, don't you know?"

Annja grinned. She found herself liking this brash, brave young woman.

Whom, she recalled with a force like a kick to the gut, she had been trying to kill a few minutes ago. Whom she had accused of multiple murders herself.

She tried to recoup that righteous, avenging rage. She couldn't. Maybe it was just the fact she was so drained physically and emotionally-by so much more than the frenzied activities of the past few minutes. Maybe it had something to do with the fact she had just killed two men who had been trying to kill Easy Ngwenya. Then again, Annja didn't doubt for a nanosecond that they'd have killed her as quickly.

The young black woman looked at her with her head angled to one side. "Not so eager to vivisect me anymore, then?" she asked cheerfully.

Annja shook her head. "I don't know what's what's going on." going on."

Easy let herself sit all the way down on her rump, round and taut inside khaki cargo shorts not so different from the ones Annja wore.

"I have a bit of a line on local news," she said, "having been on the ground, as it were, these two days past. And wondering, I'll admit, what was keeping you."

She grinned. Annja felt a stab of irritation. But she could still muster no more than that. She was as befuddled as she was worn-out.

"But I admit I'm in a bit of a bother over why you were hollering about my murdering a lot of strangers while trying to reduce me to my component parts. If you'd care to elucidate-"

She waved a dark hand invitingly. Annja nodded.

"All right." She explained quickly and tersely the trail of corpses she thought Easy had left behind her on her search for the Temple of the Elephant.

"Oh, dear," Easy said. Her eyes were huge and round. It made her look fourteen. "I can see why you'd feel murderously inclined toward me."

She tightened her lips and tipped her head to the right again. "So why did you stop trying to kill me? Or not simply let that pair shoot me? Yes, I sensed something was going on and glanced back. And by that time one was down and the other's body was falling, so I put it from my mind and concentrated on flight."

Annja looked at her a moment. Too bad I didn't get the gift of reading a person's thoughts along with my magic sword, she thought. She hung her head loosely between her raised knees for a moment before answering.

"I'm not sure," she said. "You could have shot me back there if you wanted to. I know you're fast enough to have got a couple of rounds into me. For that matter you told me to come along with you when we ran. You let me follow. It would have been easy for you to have left me behind in the meat grinder back there."

"Right," Easy said. "I admit I'm still a bit unclear on the concept of why you leaped to the conclusion that I was guilty of all that sordid homicide."

"Well, we're after the same thing, aren't we?"

Easy grinned at her again. "As we were in China," she said, "and I didn't notice either of us strewing corpses in our wake like a plague s.h.i.+p."

Annja shrugged. "Well. You're a criminal, frankly. You're the world's most notorious pot hunter-tomb robber. Given your disrespect for the law, how was I to know what was beyond you? Especially since you make such a show of going everywhere armed."

"You're a fine one to talk about that," Easy said. "But as for my being a criminal-is Yangon officially apprised of your presence in the happy land of Myanmar, by any chance?"

Annja said nothing.

"Thought so. Do I need to point out how copiously you're in violation of the SPDC's laws? I doubt you've reported the deaths of your comrades, even poor Dr. Kennedy. That's another slew of violations right there."

Annja shook her head. "But the SPDC's a brutal dictators.h.i.+p," she said, "and its laws are unjust."

"Meaning, not to your liking," Easy said. "You're quick to condemn me for flouting laws I disagree with. Yet here you are, blithely doing the exact same thing."

Annja, cheeks flus.h.i.+ng hot, started to refute her. The words caught in her throat. She couldn't say anything to that. Not without sounding like a jacka.s.s.

"But you're desecrating valuable archaeological sites," she said, "destroying context and stealing the priceless heritage of the local peoples."

"Exactly what claims of owners.h.i.+p local peoples have to these artifacts are tenuous at best," Easy said, "especially given that the artifacts were in the vast majority of cases left behind by some other group altogether. As often as not the local people's contribution to the relics' provenance was to move in and slaughter their creators wholesale. And how often do these local groups get to keep their relics, actually ancestral or not? Doesn't the government almost always swoop in and carry them off?"

"Yes, but they're official caretakers-"

Easy snorted. "So's the Tatmadaw Kyee," she said, "and you seem to have a firm grip on the kind of care they take. Are you really that sheltered, that you don't know how often the artifacts you see in the museums, or even in crates in the bas.e.m.e.nt, are replicas-often not even good replicas-of objects sold to government-favored private collectors?"

Annja said nothing. It was one of those things archaeologists weren't supposed to talk or even think about. Just as abundant, irrefutable evidence of Mayan human sacrifice had been an open secret for at least a generation of anthropologists, at the price of ostracism and early-onset career death if they spoke aloud what they knew.

"And haven't you read any of the doc.u.mentation I've written? I've never disrupted context, Annja-you should know that if you've done your homework."

"Well-" Annja sighed and shook her head. She knew she was right. But somehow she couldn't muster the arguments to demonstrate the facts so that Easy would have to face them.

Somehow they didn't seem to matter, right here, right now.

"Does anybody ever win an argument with you, Easy?" she asked wearily.

"You know, my father took to asking that very question, in the final few years before we stopped speaking to one another altogether."

"So what now?" Annja asked after a few moments. The evening had congealed nearly to night. The sky was indigo with streaks of sullen red and green, and the evening chorus of bugs and birds and monkeys was just tuning up.

"If you're on for a bit more of a hike," her companion said, standing, "then let's go along and meet the folks."

"The folks?"

Easy nodded. "The Protectors of the Precious Elephant, who've guarded this mesa since the Bagan Empire fell to the Mongols seven centuries ago."

25.

"Many ages ago, the Kingdom of Bagan ruled over Burma."

The speaker was a man severely shrunken by the decades, who probably hadn't been big to start with. His face was full of seams and wrinkles. His white beard, though silky and growing to his navel, seemed to consist of about a dozen hairs.

Firelight danced on the faces of towering blocks of stone, and on the faces of the people cl.u.s.tered between them. These were anything but stoney-the a.s.sembled villagers were alive with eager curiosity and antic.i.p.ation.

"In those years, many were the temples they built, and glorious. And none more glorious than the Temple of the Precious Wheel, and above it the crowning glory of the Temple of the Precious Elephant!"

The onlookers gasped and murmured in appreciation. They had to have heard this story a hundred times before. But Annja knew that, just as few people ever got tired of talking about themselves, fewer still got tired of hearing about themselves. And this was the story of the people of this lost jungle-clad mesa rising from the Shan Plateau.

The old man spoke in a nasal singsong-Mandarin, in fact. That appeared to be for the benefit of the outsiders-specifically Easy, who translated for Annja. The Protectors, as the people of the mesa called themselves, spoke a Burmese dialect. But either they all also knew Chinese, or they knew the story enough to know what was being said.

"For centuries Bagan ruled wisely and well. Then came the people from the north-the Mongols who ruled China. The princes and the leaders and the monks went away to fight with them. So great was the arrogant pride of Narathihapate the Great King that he led his armies into Yunnan to meet the enemy.

"That pride was the downfall of Bagan. The Mongols defeated the forces of the king. His own son murdered him. The Mongols invaded and conquered the land."

He paused as if to draw breath, shaking his silver-topknotted head as if in weary regret of the follies of the past. And, if Annja was any judge, for dramatic effect. The old guy was a master storyteller.

"Those of the n.o.bles and monks who had not left to fight, and fall, alongside King Narathihapate fled to the capital, where in due time the Mongols crushed them. Before leaving here our masters charged us to guard the holy places. Not against wood, nor wind, nor water-these things would work what they would work, and their working would in time help to hide this sanctum from the wicked.

"We were left behind to defend the sacred things from the hands of desecrators. And so we have-no Mongol who set foot upon the plateau lived to take the tale back to his khan. Nor has any foe since.

"Yet now we are beset from two directions at once. And so we face the most bitter fight of our history or the dishonor of defeat."

The people rose to their feet shouting and waving their fists. I wonder what Phil would've made of them? Annja wondered. They were certainly isolated, simple tribal folk, to all appearances-preindustrial enough even for a purist like Dr. Kennedy. Yet far from being pacifists, they seemed eager to confront their lowland enemies. And not with protest songs and garlands of flowers, unless she misjudged their mood badly.

The village lay two or three miles in from the edge of the steep-sided mesa, and about half a mile from the jut of rock on which the Temple of the Elephant perched. The ruins beside the plaza rose to a wat wat of impressive dimensions. It was so thoroughly shrouded in jungle vegetation that from any distance, or even from the air, it would seem nothing more than a natural hill. Annja knew that was probably why the ruin had escaped detection for so long. of impressive dimensions. It was so thoroughly shrouded in jungle vegetation that from any distance, or even from the air, it would seem nothing more than a natural hill. Annja knew that was probably why the ruin had escaped detection for so long.

The dwellings were perfectly integrated into the tangle of worked stone and riotous growth. The Protectors seemed to make no use of the remaining enclosures, whether to avoid desecration or from practical concern they might cave in at any moment. Instead they wove their huts in among them. These, too, were cunningly worked, incorporating living limbs and vines in the roofs and very walls, so that they were hard to spot until you were right on them. The villagers lived off fruit and small animals, and by working hundreds of dispersed garden plots so tiny and irregular that even from the air they wouldn't scream out cultivation. cultivation.

Obviously avoiding aerial detection hadn't been part of the original intent, although the Protectors' practices worked to an extent against it. After a century of aviation, though, Annja suspected the villagers had adapted to improve their overhead security. They struck her as smart, resourceful folk. Though she was no social anthropologist, she knew the study of these people and their society would be as fascinating and fruitful in its way as exploring the entire vast complex of ruins.

Enthralled at hearing their own story, the villagers seemed to have forgotten the outsiders. Easy sat beside Annja. The younger woman was smiling and shaking her head.

"It's ironic, you know," Easy said.

"How's that?"

"These people aren't warriors, or at least, their ancestors weren't," Easy said. The bonfire, head high to Annja, gilded her face with ever-s.h.i.+fting highlights. "They're descended from the builders of the temple complex."

"I see."

"Do you?" Easy said with a slight, infuriating smile. She had a tendency to show off, Annja thought.

Still, she's smart and she's spent time here. I'd better sit on my own ego, bite my tongue and listen up.

"They aren't descended from the princes and priests," Easy explained. "But rather, the architects and the master masons. The people who designed and physically built these enormous structures."

"Oh." It put an interesting spin on the story.

"They made the perfect caretakers, of course. Over time the other people who hadn't run off to join the army or fled the Mongols probably wandered away or simply starved-this mesa won't support a large population. These folks are just barely at the point of maintaining sufficient genetic diversity, although there's intermarriage with tribes from the surrounding plateau. And people from here often go into the outside world, sometimes returning with spouses or at least children. They and their culture, and the whole wat complex, aren't lost so much as hidden."

Annja nodded. She'd experienced that before with the hidden Amazon city of Promise. But the Promessans had retreated from the world deliberately. Whereas they built a hidden civilization that was palpably more technologically advanced than the outside world, the Protectors seemed content to maintain traditional lifestyles.