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And then there was one
by Heidi Ahlmen
Some days you just shouldn't climb out of your sleeping bag. If you do you just might end up like Lara Croft, running through the slopping wet rainforest in Sri Lanka, stark naked and a priceless death shroud of some long-since forlorn monk flapping behind you like a fifteen dollar scarf you'd just bought from a roadside stand.
All the signs were there in the morning; the stale-tasting brew of tea after she had dared to use unboiled water from an old well which - as she had later on realized - had served as the final resting place for a pair of deer and whose corpses now peeked out from the water, half-decayed and eyes staring emptily into space. It had caused her stomach to do some cautionary flipflops but she'd seen and experienced worse so she decided to pay it no further mind. Field archaeology was no profession for someone with a weak stomach - so high was the number of disgusting things one would eventually encounter while traveling: corpses of unlucky colleagues, cadavers beheaded by local tribes as for some reason the priciest artifacts always lay in temples located further away from civilization as one would like to even think about. And, if you were unlucky enough, you might end up as a stomach-turning sight for future archaeologists, your moss-covered guts trailing on the ground like the roots of a tree. Or you would just be buried under the rubble of the latest luxury hotel building site.
Better to stay alive then.
Lara had left most of her gear in the capital city of Colombo since she had not anticipated a long trek into the woods. Losing her jeep was another thing she had not foreseen and thus her return home had been delayed. The car had gotten stuck in the mud, and water seeping into the gears had given it good reason to stop cooperating completely and in the small village she had stranded in no one owned any sort of motor vehicles so even a thick wad of notes was to no avail.
Thus she had had to continue by foot. Returning empty-handed was not an option; it was a matter of honour to keep a schedule even if it meant the slight uncomfortability of doing some more walking than she had planned.
Sri Lanka was not one of her favourite locations, nor did it help that there still was a strong animosity between the major ethnic groups causing an eruption of civil war-like upheaval almost regularly. The atmosphere in even the capital was ominous and made even Lara watch her back more closely than usually.
After the village she had dug out her compass again and set out to the humid, steaming jungle with just a well-packed backpack. The temple she was looking for was almost halfway between Batticaloa and Arugam Bay. With the car she could've gotten as far as sixty miles from the location, now she had a hundred to cover.
The next days weren't much to mention. Clothes sopping wet, hair hanging in sweaty locks she made her way through the bushes, her arm muscles aching from heavy use of the machete. Fatigue could not stop her for this was what she loved - the thrill of the search - even though the nitty-gritty of it was basically walking, walking and more walking.
It was monsoon season, and Sri Lanka literally bathed in the thousand shades of rain in existence: from light, irritating drizzle to bucketfuls of water puring straight in one's collar. Lighting a fire was not an option as the nearest dry wood probably existed no nearer than Tanzania. Lara tried to enjoy her canned peas and granola bars but after over a decade of similar camping meals in musty ruins did get a bit unvarying and tedious.
That morning, after breakfast, she'd given in to the rain and changed into her wetsuit. For the first time in four days she had felt warm and relatively dry. She had then realized she'd been shivering non-stop for days - even despite her extensively outdoorsy persona and trekking experience she was not masochist enough to like being cold because of the extreme humidity of jungle areas. Nor was she a comrade of the ever-present louse and spiders either.
The artifact she was looking for held more sentimental and historical value than the monetary compensation one could expect at an auction. A death shroud of the first Buddhist monk ever to venture into the island, it was both a holy relic and – like the Turin shroud even though it was probably a fake - a valuable means to maybe even reconstruct some sort of an image of the man: what he had looked like, how he had lived. Lara's customer - a wealthy Sri Lankan businessman with a taste for relics - had given his word that it would be placed on display in a museum and studied thoroughly. If he bailed out of this word, Lara had sworn she would have his feathers ruffled, or preferably do some ruffling herself. Unlike some more mercenary-type treasure hunters, Lara prioritized her commissions by absolute historical value and not the size of her paycheck. Though during property taxation season she had sometimes made exceptions.
The temple had been surprisingly easy to find - it just sat there, between two ancient-lookings jacaranda trees looking like it might collapse any minute. The rickety-looking structure had probably kept most locals from wandering in. Careful not to touch the stony structures, Lara squeezed gently into the first chamber between the collapsed stone archways that had once lined the entrance. The temple was not very large or the walls notably high, but the delicacy or the stonework compensated for the lack of grandeur in size.
Size was one of the reasons that made Lara enjoy hunting down similar artifacts. Carrying a coat of armour -sized object and dodging the ever-present hostile bullets just didn't hold much allure.
Another sign that the day was going to the dogs was the lack of fresh air in the temple. Despite the quite large entrance opening the air was stale and visibility low. There probably were some underground caverns which somehow sucked the air or created some sort of a barrier for draft of any kind. This usually meant the possibility of traps, sometimes even toxic fumes. But this was rare, and Lara decided to pay it no mind. A cave is a cave and caves are stale. Otherwise it would be just like claiming water isn't wet.
She cursed her own carelessness some thirty minutes later upon discovering the source of the staleness - an awesome society of bats keeping house in one of the side caverns. The smell of sulphur and ammonia nearly knocked Lara off her feet. Usually she had more luck in finding the right hallway.
After rambling through caverns and antechambers, she found the shroud in a niche next to the telltale pile of bones. It did not look very valuable and the fact had probably kept people from paying any attention to it. The jars of what must've been valuables next to the whitened pile of bone dust on the burial dais, however, told that all things considered marketable were long-since gone.
She grabbed the shroud a bit too hard, and the old silky threads it had been woven from gave way and the whole thing ripped in two. Oh bugger. This would inevitably lower her pay, and the intricate writing on the shroud was now partly unreadable.
This sort of thing just never happens to me!
But now it had, and there was no point in hanging around - the stench of ammonia seemed to be following her like an overloyal lapdog.
She made her way out of the temple just as she began hearing voices outside.
Evening had come and curfew was probably already on in the larger cities. In the jungle no one was around to watch over when and where you minded your business, and the tamil guerrillas who were causing the Sri Lankan upheaval used this to their advantage. The voices Lara was hearing were engrossed in heated conversation and the subject was evidently Lara's backpack, which she had left outside the temple. And now she was standing right next to the entrance, in plain sight.
It did not take long for the men to notice her even though her quick attempt to snuck back in, and before she even realized, she was running. Usually she would've tried to reason with the men, perhaps bribe them with a selection of her weaponry, but the fact that they had her backpack prevented such means. Which meant that running was the only option. Sometimes hand-to-hand combat was a possibility as well, but she knew that where there were two guerrillas, there were soon bound to be dozens more. Two she could handle, dozens were a bit off even her scale.
Shotgun-sounding rounds clicked into nearby trees as Lara dodged low-hanging tree branches and tried to reason a suitable escape direction. She knew well and good that with her stamina she could easily outrun the men, especially ones with such an undernourished and thin build. But their weaponry still posed a threat. She was too far from medical aid to be injured severely and survive.
The subject became a lot more acute for her when she nearly rushed off a cliff the edge of which had been well hidden by thick undergrowth and bushes. She cut a corner and did a quick change of direction, increasing her speed.
When she was certain the men had either stopped or split into teams, she allowed herself to come to a halt and knelt down in the dirt to even her breathing before she would have to continue. She wiped her forehead with her hand, stretching her neck which had gotten sore from hunching in the low caverns of the temple.
Her luck had still not returned. In a matter of second she began to notice a burning, pinching sensation in her leg, advancing alarmingly fast up her torso. She stood up and as she realized the cause of the peculiar sensation, she began to violently rip the wetsuit off her: wandering ants, the slightly poisonous variety which would cause a nasty rash with fever if she did not discard her clothing, now swarming with the little critters.
Then the footsteps continued, and there wasn't even time to feel ridiculous hunching naked under a tree before she decided it was time to run again. Perhaps the ants had irritated her enough to give her a boost - so fast did she leave behind the men in pursuit. They fired a few cautionary rounds into the jungle. Lara looked back while crossing a foresty patch to make sure there was no one in sight and suddenly missed a step, her left hip joint groaning as balance was uncomfortably thrown from one leg onto another. She landed hand-first in the mud, and halfway down she felt a cracking pain in her foot. Great, just bloody great. She rolled onto her side and pulled her leg out of the whatever hole she had accidentally stepped into. She bit her lip to revert her attention from the soaring pain; the skin in her leg had opened, revealing the ends of a broken tibial bone. Blood was gushing out, and she did not even want to think about the dirtiness of the wound and all the possible bacteria creeping into the now open house of her circulatory system.
And she had nothing to tie it with. Biting the end of her plait to aid concentration and ward off the plain, she pulled the bones into place, feeling the slight nausea caused by the diminishing volume of blood in her leg. She looked at herself - no clothes, no bandages to tie the damned thing. And still, she had to find a way to stop the flow.
And then there was one.
She realized she was still holding the shroud.
With a groan, she used the ripped shroud to stop the blood. Knowing she could now say goodbye to her paycheck she tried to stand. The pain was immense but bearable in her scale. Maybe her luck would turn and she would find a road. Maybe. As for the moment her main concern was to survival. As it had always been.
Two days later, she half-crawled into the nearest village, much to the amusement of the locals, what with her rather scanty clothing.
Sometimes one really just really ought to stay in bed.