Heart of Fire Read Free Page B

kissed her anyway,
    "Don't pout, sweetheart," he had said, stroking her hair. "I'll be back in a few months, half a year at the most."
    "You don't have to go," she had replied, unrelenting.
    "But I have this chance to find the Empress, to prove that the Anzar existed. You know what that would mean, don't you?"
    At thirteen she had already had an alarmingly realistic outlook on life. "Tenure," she had said, and he had laughed.
    "Well, that too. But think of what it would be like to prove the legend true, to hold the Heart of the Empress in my hand, to give its beauty to the world."
    She had scowled. "You'd better be careful," she had scolded, shaking her finger at him. "The Amazon isn't a cakewalk, you know."
    "I know. I'll watch every step, I promise."
    But he hadn't. That morning was the last time she had seen him. They got the news about three months later, and it took another two months before his body was retrieved and returned for burial. Great-Aunt Ruby had come to stay with Jillian while the professor was gone, so Jillian's schooling wouldn't be interrupted, but after his death the house was abruptly sold and she found herself permanently installed in Great-Aunt Ruby's tiny bungalow. Rick, though he was her closest relative, hadn't wanted to burden himself with an adolescent girl. Besides, Rick had never forgiven his father for remarrying after the death of Rick's own mother, and he had moved out as soon as he finished high school. Rick and Jillian had never been close; he had barely tolerated her. The situation had never improved.
    Her father's pursuit of the Anzar legend had ended his life and totally changed hers, not just in losing her father but in uprooting her from everything she had known, and even in the present his last quest overshadowed her own career. She flipped through the notebook, wanting to see his most personal thoughts about the legend that had cost her so much, but there wasn't a chapter devoted to the Anzar. She laid the notebook aside and picked up another, but it didn't contain anything about that ancient tribe either.
    She went through two more notebooks before she found it, lying under the third notebook, which she had just picked up. It was plainly labeled on the front of the notebook in a heavy black script: The South American Anzar Civilization . It alone, of all the legends he had investigated, rated a notebook by itself. A thrill of excitement went through her as she lifted it out of the box and carefully opened it, wondering if she would be able to see what had so captured his interest that he had risked his reputation and his life to pursue it, and lost both.
    He had collected several fables and legends from various sources, she saw, all of which contained some reference to the Empress or the Queen's Heart. The origins of these fables were impossible to pin down, though Cyrus Sherwood had meticulously researched them. They were neither Incan nor Mayan, yet seemed to originate from some advanced civilization. The fables had also referred to "the city of stone under the sea of green, the land of the Anzar." In several versions of the fable, with minor variations, a great warrior queen fell in love with a fierce warrior from another tribe, but he was killed while defending the city of stone, and his warrior queen, from a tribe of bloodless winged demons. The warrior queen, or empress, was devastated by his death and swore on his body that her heart would never belong to another, in this life or the next, through all eternity. She lived to a great old age, and when she died, her heart turned into a red jewel, which was taken from her body and placed on the tomb of her beloved warrior so it would belong to him through all eternity, just as she had pledged. Supposedly the red jewel had magical powers; it cast a spell of protection over the Anzar that kept them forever hidden in their city of stone under the green sea. It was the sort of tale that had sprung up in endless variations all over