The Codex by Douglas Preston Page B

With a rustle of honey-colored hair, she held out her hand. Tom, caught off guard, took it. Her hair had spilled down her shoulders over a white cotton shirt, now powdered with dust. The shirt was tucked in at a slender waist, which itself was snugged into a pair of jeans. There was a faint scent of peppermint about her. When she smiled it seemed her eyes had changed color from green to blue, so bright was the effect. She wore a pair of turquoise earrings, but the color in her eyes was even richer than the color of the stone.
    After a moment Tom realized he was still holding her hand, and released it.
    “I just had to find you,” she said. “I couldn’t wait.”
    “An emergency?”
    “It’s not a vet emergency, if that’s what you mean.”
    “Then what kind of emergency is it?”
    “I’ll tell you on the ride back.”
    “Damn it,” Tom exploded, “I can’t believe Shane let you take my best horse and ride it like that, without a saddle or bridle. You could have been killed!”
    “Shane didn’t give him to me.” The girl smiled.
    “How did you get him, then?”
    “I stole him.”
    It took a moment of consternation before Tom could bring himself to laugh.
     
    The sun had set by the time they headed north, riding together, back to Bluff. For a while they rode in silence, and then Tom finally said, “All right. Let’s hear what was so important that you had to steal a horse for it and risk your neck.”
    “Well ...” she hesitated.
    “I’m all ears, Miss ... Colorado. If that’s really your name.”
    “It’s an odd name, I know. My great-grandfather was in vaudeville. He did the patent medicine circuit dressed as an Indian, and he took Colorado as his stage name. It was better than our old name—Smith—and so it kind of stuck. Call me Sally.”
    “All right, Sally. Let’s hear your story.” Tom found himself watching her ride with a feeling of pleasure. She looked like she’d been born on a horse. A lot of money must have gone into that straight, easy, and centered seat of hers.
    “I’m an anthropologist,” Sally began. “More specifically, I’m an ethnopharmacologist. I study indigenous medicine with Professor Julian Clyve at Yale. He was the man who cracked Mayan hieroglyphics a few years ago. A really brilliant piece of work. It was in all the papers.”
    “No doubt.” She had a sharp, clean profile, a small nose, and a funny way of sticking out her lower lip. She had a little dimple when she smiled, but only on one side of her mouth. Her hair was dark gold, and it bent in a glistening curve over her slender shoulders before heading down her back. She was an amazingly beautiful woman.
    “Professor Clyve has assembled the largest collection of Mayan writing in existence, a library of every inscription known in ancient Mayan. It consists of rubbings from stone inscriptions, pages from Mayan codices, and copies of inscriptions on pots and tablets. His library is consulted by scholars from all over the world.”
    Tom could just see the doddering old pedagogue shuffling among his heaps of dusty manuscripts.
    “The greatest of the Mayan inscriptions were contained in what we call codices. They were the original books of the Maya, written in glyphs on bark paper. The Spanish burned most of them as books of the devil, but a couple of incomplete codices managed to survive here and there. A complete Mayan codex has never been found. Last year, Professor Clyve found this in the back of a filing cabinet that belonged to one of his deceased colleagues.”
    She drew a folded sheet of paper out of her breast pocket and handed it to him. Tom took it. It was an old, yellowing photocopy of a page of a manuscript written in hieroglyphics, with some drawings of leaves and flowers in the margins. It looked vaguely familiar. Tom wondered where he had seen it before.
    “Writing was invented only three times independently in the history of the human race. Mayan hieroglyphics was one of them.”
    “My