Read Online The Fifth Harmonic by F. Paul Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

and then he was handing it through the doorway.
    Will peered through the two-inch opening and found the cavity half filled with thin white liquid. Coconut milk. He sipped. It wasn't cold, but it was cool, mildly coconut-flavored, and definitely refreshing. Ambrosio had opened one for himself and was quaffing the contents, letting it dribble over his chin. He tossed his away and looked at Will.
    “Another?”
    Will hadn't finished his yet. “No mas, gracias.”
    Ambrosio grinned. “Muy bueno! Habla Espanol?”
    “Not as well as you speak English, I'm afraid.”
    Ambrosio resumed his place behind the steering wheel, and this time they moved forward. He wheeled toward an opening in the greenery and headed along a rutted path. Will could make out only one set of tire tracks in the mud, the ones Ambrosio had made on his way here.
    And then they were among the trees, so thick and huge, so intensely green and old , Will felt as if he'd somehow slipped back into the Cretaceous and that dinosaurs were lurking just ahead. The jungle quickly closed around them, over them, behind them, and the clearing slipped from view.
    He fought a wave of claustrophobic angst, but it eased as Ambrosio began pointing out the local flora and fauna: squat palmettos, fluorescent parrots and macaws, the huge leaves of elephant taro, orange-beaked toucans, ocote pitch pines, a scurrying, brown, tailless paca, graceful acacias, chattering spider monkeys, and a spotted boa constrictor hanging from a eucalyptus branch.
    Nothing here seemed to live alone. The trees were draped with lianas, with some of the vine trunks as thick around as a man's thigh. These in turn were layered with gray-green epiphytic growths and the occasional bright splotch of an orchid.
    The sheer density of life here awed Will. He felt as if he were bumping along a capillary in some huge living organism.
    “See those trees there?” Ambrosio said, pointing to a cluster of trunks with dark fluted bark and high leaves. “That is mahogany. Many dzul come here to cut it down and take it way.”
    “Dzul?”
    “Foreigners. They come and cut-cut-cut, and never make peace with Yumtzil.” He glanced at Will as if anticipating the question. “Yumtzil is the forest lord. Bad thing to forget forest lord.”
    “I'll remember that. Are Chac and Yumtzil Maya gods?”
    “Si. We have many, many gods.”
    “Does Maya—not the people, your kinswoman—worship those gods?”
    Ambrosio shook his head. “Maya is half dzul. She has her own ways, and they are much older than ours.”
    Older? Will was hardly an authority, but he didn't think American civilization got much older than the Mayas’.
    And he thought he'd detected something new in Ambrosio's voice as he spoke of his kinswoman, but couldn't quite identify it.
    “Does she offend your gods with her different ways?”
    Ambrosio laughed. “No. Our gods are not jealous like yours.”
    “Like mine?” Will hadn't had been much of a churchgoer since he was a teenager, but he was still nominally a Presbyterian.
    “Dzul gods—very jealous.”
    “Oh, I see. The Christian God.”
    “And Jewish God and Moslem God. All want to be the only god. Maya gods not like that. All live together. Much better that way.”
    “Can't argue with that. So what do your people think of Maya and her ‘old ways’?”
    “She is sometimes called curandera , a healer, and some call her Ixchel —‘She-of-the-Rainbow.’”
    “A lovely name,” Will said. Had her jade eyes earned her that one?
    “And some even call her Xtabay .”
    Will saw Ambrosio bite his lip as if he'd said something he shouldn't have.
    “What does Xtabay mean?”
    Ambrosio sighed. “Xtabay is a spirit who lures men deep into the woods and abandons them there.”
    Will felt his insides constrict into a fearful knot. Is that what Maya's got planned for me?
    “But do not believe that,” Ambrosio added quickly. “That is just an old tale used to frighten young men. The people who call her