CHAPTER 9

Jimmy woke up when the first rays of the rising sun washed the valley from over the mountain peaks. Eugene was gone. He was relieved to see his backpack where he had left it the night before. Eugene, he hoped, went in search of food and not tracking back up the mountain to find the bus; Eugene was many things, but stupid was not one of them. Jimmy walked into the wood to relieve himself and then walked further out of the wood to better locate where they camped.

The vista that unfolded in front of him was a magnificent breathtaking panorama. The woods rolled toward the far blue mountains, broken every so often by grassy meadows. Their stream traced its narrow course into the distance, a jagged crack in the trees, and for the first time in months, Jimmy had closed his eyes and simply basked in the warmth of the sun.

Still no sign of Eugene.

Jimmy opened his backpack, nothing was missing, the computer, passport and wallet and the open ticket back to the USA, all were where he had stashed them last. He pulled out his pills, and measured the morning dose into his hand. Taking his medicine down to the stream, he drank his fill and swallowed the drugs. So what if the water contained parasites—it was the best he had ever had.

As he rose from the stream, Eugene ran out of the woods, grinning like a maniac. “Jimmy! Dude, you’re not going to believe it!”

“Did you find food?”

“Food? Forget food,” Eugene interrupted, ripping his shirt out of his pants, and sent a cascade of colorful stones tumbling into the grass at Jimmy’s feet.

Jimmy stared down at the grass, which had unexpectedly begun to glitter. “What…”

“Jewels,” said Eugene, laughing breathlessly. “Gems! Do you have any idea what these things are worth?” He scooped a handful of rocks off the ground and thrust them toward Jimmy. “Man, look at the size of these things! Just look at them!” he insisted, pulling more from his pockets. “Rubies, emeralds, they’ve got to be. And this”—he retrieved a final stone from one pocket and held it up for inspection—“this has to be diamond. I scratched stuff against it and everything! It’s a diamond, Jimmy, a fucking diamond!”

Jimmy took the softball-sized rock from Eugene and squatted beside the stream, washing the last traces of dirt from its surface. When he stood and held it to the sun, he could find no fissure within the stone, no flaw to mar its surface, and was nearly blinded by the light it reflected.

“I told you to stick with me,” Eugene grinned, slapping Jimmy on the back.

Jimmy continued to stare at the diamond in his cupped hands. “Perfection,” he whispered.

“You’re telling me! And this one,” said Eugene, dropping a dark blue sapphire into Jimmy’s palms. “And this one, and this purple one—what do you call them? Doesn’t matter,” he continued in a rush, “they’re all huge!”

“The beauty of Sheba,” Jimmy whispered, gazing at the flawless stones before him.

Eugene waved his hand in front of Jimmy’s face to break his trance. “Dude, you’re not listening to me—we’re rich. We’re friggin’ rich! There’s practically a quarry over there, just down the river. Here, forget the river,” he said, taking the jewels back from Jimmy. “You can keep your river—I want this on the map as ‘Eugene’s Quarry.’ Go on, write it down or map it out or whatever it is you have to do,” he was in trance. “Jimmy, listen to me, first things first: Eugene’s Quarry. I’m rich, I want the world to know it, and since I’m feeling damn generous this fine morning, you’re rich, too.” He laughed to himself, then looked more closely at Jimmy’s face. “Hey, are you okay, kid? Have you taken your medicine yet?”

“Yeah,” he answered faintly. “I’ve got enough for, well, maybe five more days,” He lied.

“Perfect. One day to collect diamonds, a day or two across the valley to the village, a ride back around the lake, and then we’re in civilization again. That’s at least two days to get a refill in Addis Ababa—you’ll make it. So, about that map…”

“My battery’s getting low,” said Jimmy. “I’m only going to have a few minutes of power when I turn it back on, and I’ve got to use it wisely. Getting that GPS link working took a lot of juice,” he explained. “More than I thought it would. I’ll draw it on my paper map, if you’ll show me where it is, but I think we’d better eat first. These are pretty,” he said, plucking a stone off the ground and tossing it from hand to hand, “but they aren’t exactly edible, you know?”

“Help yourself,” Eugene interrupted, “I’m not hungry. I’ll be in my quarry when you’re ready,” he added, then jogged back into the trees.

Jimmy watched him go, hearing his intermittent cackling grow fainter, then sighed and shook his head. Priorities had to come first, and that meant food.

He returned to his backpack and weighed the idea of taking it with him. It couldn’t be left alone for long—the strangers with the guns might find the courage to come after them—but Jimmy’s shoulders had been rubbed raw by the straps, and the thought of a walk without the encumbrance of the backpack was appealing.

And then there was the matter of Eugene.

Eugene might just grab his share of jewels, fill the backpack, and take off with it while Jimmy was away—leaving Jimmy alone in the wilderness, with no computer, no credit cards, no passport, and no ticket home. Granted, he had been kinder lately—and he had said that the quarry was partly Jimmy’s—but Jimmy had seen that hungry look in his eye once before.

But if he couldn’t trust Eugene, then who in the world could he trust out here?

Jimmy wrestled with his conscience for a moment longer, then reached a compromise. He pulled on his windbreaker, zipped his medicine bag into its pocket, patted the slight bulge against his right hip where he had tucked his Swiss Army knife, then closed his backpack, leaned it against the ancient olive tree, and set off down the stream.

When he was younger and still able to spend his summers playing in the woods, his grandfather had taught him how to identify edible plants, as much for the fun of being able to impart this seemingly mystical knowledge to his grandson as to keep Jimmy out of the emergency room. Jimmy had learned to recognize poisonous plants, to trust birds around berries, and to avoid certain mushrooms (though by that time, he had decided he would only eat mushrooms as a last resort, anyway). The shortcuts he had learned in upstate New York worked poorly when applied in Ethiopia, however, and Jimmy kept his eyes peeled for wildlife, trying to decide what could be eaten and what would give him stomach cramps. He followed the water, turning his attention to the stream in hopes of finding fish.

As he continued downriver, the clear stream broadened and the current began to pick up. Jimmy noticed a flash near the bottom and stepped in, anticipating a fish, then saw that the flicker that had caught his eye was another diamond tucked in among the darker stones. He scanned the bottom and saw another flash, then another, and realized that he was standing on millions of dollars’ worth of fine jewels.

The thought was simultaneously disappointing and thrilling—disappointing for the lack of fish to appease his appetite and thrilling because of the riches at his feet.

Jimmy recalled a story his grandfather had told him about three French Foreign Legionnaires who got lost in the Sahara. They were near death from thirst, hunger, and exhaustion when they came upon a row of crates full of riches—“Like something out of the Arabian Nights,” his grandpa had said. A caravan of camels carrying this treasure across the Sahara had been buried in a sand storm. The camels and their drivers had disappeared ages ago, and now the sand, once again shifting, had exposed the crates to the three dying soldiers. “Centuries after Richard III exclaimed, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’ those three lost soldiers would have given all the riches of Arabia for a glass of water,” Grandpa said, settling back in his chair and folding his arms. “They died out there, hugging millions of dollars.”

And here, Jimmy thought, he had medicine for three days. Beyond that, all of the diamonds and emerald of the world weren’t worth a friggin’ cent.

He stepped back onto the bank and walked on, keeping one eye on the water in case something decided to surface, then rounded a bend in the river and found himself on top of a cliff. The drop had been invisible from his perch in the olive tree, so thick was the vegetation in the valley, but Jimmy leaned over the side and found a navigable rock wall, its bottom obscured by the canopy.

He paused for a few seconds, wondering if he should wait for Eugene, then decided his companion had more pressing issues on his mind and slipped over the edge.

The rocks held fast and the natural handholds were well spaced, giving Jimmy an easy climb to the bottom. He jumped the last two feet, then brushed off his hands, looked around, and found himself in an olive grove. No—not just olives, he realized. Figs. Dates. Oranges and limes. Bananas. A stunted pomegranate tree. And grapes everywhere, their vines winding up the trunks, their branches laden with purple fruit.

Jimmy hesitated only an instant before beginning to gorge himself on the nearest cluster of ripe grapes, stuffing them into his mouth in fours and fives and spitting the seeds into the dirt. He thought briefly of washing them—the waterfall descended into a shallow pool, after all—then thought better of it. No, this was perfection, this was all he needed.

He froze when he heard a voice down the river, and cocked his head toward the sound. There, again—high laughter, melodic and playful.

Women’s voices.

Curious, Jimmy finished the rest of his grapes in one bite, then dropped the vine and crept down the river as the laughter grew louder.

The rift in the valley floor that had created the waterfall curved in a semicircle around a natural pool, the result of a long-dead volcano, but it did so unevenly. The arm farthest from the pool abutted the orchard Jimmy had discovered. The other arm, however—the one that hugged the basin—also held a small cave, its entrance heavily shrouded by vines. Perched on the ledge of the cave, hidden from view as they stared down at the four women bathing in the pool below, were a teenage boy, a middle-aged man, and two soldiers.

Had he been present, Eugene would have remarked upon the strangeness of the watchers, not for the fact that they were taking in the scenery—Eugene, like many of the boys in his high school, had known about the crack between the two locker rooms that was just wide enough to offer a view of the girls’ shower—but for their appearance. The urbanites in Addis Ababa, the villagers at the end of the road, the three would be muggers and the hundred pursuing peasants—all had what he had come to think of as more or less African features. Granted, a few had seemed almost Indian in appearance, but most of the Ethiopians he had known had seemed distinctly Ethiopian. The watchers, however, though dark-haired and dark-eyed, had the tanned complexion of the Middle East, and their features revealed a blending of Semite nations . Moreover, although Eugene had lived in the country long enough to gain a basic grasp of Amharic, the watchers’ whispers would have been as incomprehensible to him as Amharic was to Jimmy.

The boy, stout and short for his age, peered out through the vines as Jimmy peeked from around a tree across the crater at the naked women. He watched in silence, drumming the fingers of one hand against his yellow silk tunic, then turned his deep-set eyes up to the man beside him, whose oddly feminine face betrayed no emotion. When the boy spoke, his eyes narrowed to slits. “A stranger among us.”

The man nodded. “So it seems, my lord.”

One of the soldiers whispered, “He slipped by the Levites?”

“Impossible,” said the feminine man, and pointed to three shadows in the trees behind Jimmy. “Nothing slips by the Levites, imbecile.”

The soldier retreated, chastened, but his companion approached and whispered, “Sir, if the stranger is present, this may not be the best time…”

At that, the boy turned and glared at the soldier, who hastily stepped back. “You would disobey me?” he hissed.

“Never, my lord,” the soldier whispered. “I was just…”

“I don’t care if you’re afraid,” he interrupted. “There won’t be a better time, and I will have her. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord,” he replied, bowing his head.

The boy waved him back into the cave. “At least try to act like men,” he sighed, returning to his position at the ledge. “You’re making me think that Laban is more of a man than you. Am I correct?”

The soldiers mumbled denials, while Laban, who had been selected as a potential bodyguard for the priests’ tribe in his youth, colored slightly. There was great honor in serving the High Priest, most assuredly, and the High Priest had shown enormous confidence in Laban by giving him charge of the young prince, but there was also a penalty for those chosen to serve the High Priest, a price exactly early and unfailingly. Ordinarily, he seldom missed his manhood, but Prince Amnon had grown old enough to know the difference between men and eunuchs, and had learned that one was preferable to the other.

It was of no consequence. He took his place beside the boy and watched the women bathe.

Jimmy peeked out again from behind an orange tree and blinked hard to make sure he was not hallucinating. There, standing thigh-deep in the water, was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

She knelt and closed her large, dark eyes, smiling patiently as one of the women beside her poured water over her head, and Jimmy stared as the girl’s dark hair rippled and dripped into the pool. When she stood again, another woman had brought a white cloth out to her, and began to wring out the girl’s hair. Another dried her shoulders, and when the third approached with a blue silk robe, the girl playfully flicked water toward her with her toe. The robe-bearer laughed, and the girl beamed, exposing her pearl-like teeth, then called out a response.

At that moment, Jimmy silently cursed the school system that had mandated Spanish classes instead of…well, whatever it was the naked women were speaking. He couldn’t make sense of anything they said, but he knew he liked what he was hearing.

High above them, Prince Amnon scowled down at the crater, counting bodies. Three Levites in the woods, strong and swift, watching the interloper with the brown ponytail. Four bay horses tethered to an olive tree on the far side of the water—magnificent creatures. Sitting in the shade beside them, a eunuch, and deeper in the wood his horse not as regal as the four he was guarding. And then the four women in the water, the princess and her three handmaidens, unaware that they were being watched.

There was no sign of the princess’s warriors. The three girls tending to her were not warriors, he concluded, but merely her handmaidens, nothing to worry about. The eunuch was unarmed.

Amnon turned to his soldiers and whispered a command: “A small cut on her face.”

At the order, Laban looked down at him with reproachful eyes. “My lord, she will be forever forbidden if you…”

“Not to me,” he snapped. “Just a small blemish,” he resumed, turning his attention back to the soldiers. “Once her perfection is marred, she’s mine forever. Go!”

The soldiers waited, glancing past him at the pool, and Amnon sucked his lips in anticipation. “Take care of her, and then you can do whatever you like with her women. I told you there would be ample compensation,” he said, and chuckled as the soldiers quickly slipped out of the cave.

“My lord,” said Laban, resting his hand on Amnon’s shoulder, “the situation is well in hand. Perhaps we should leave…Too many eyes…”

“Him?” Prince Amnon sneered, pointing to the stranger behind the tree. “Nonsense, I’m not going to miss the good part. Honestly, Laban, show some spine,” he added, peering out through the vines. “I didn’t know that they made you a woman.”