Lara Croft: The Greatest Treasure
by Sarah Crisman
scrisman@juno.com

* * * * *

“Come on, Lara. You’re acting like you’ve never been wrong before.”
Lara Croft was many things to many people. To some, she was the embodiment of a dream, living a life of peril, danger and excitement unrivaled by any ten action movie stars. To others, she was little more than a globe-trotting thief who picked her way through the bones of those less fortunate to bring herself the ever-so-popular fortune and glory aspired to by so many other archaeologists. Some considered her a few sandwiches short of a picnic, a psychopathic woman who only used her brains and cunning when it wouldn’t be wise to rush in with both barrels of her magnums blazing. The poster girl for female liberation, the fantasy of any adolescent male between the ages of 15 and 35, a wise-cracking, gun-toting tomb raider who shot first and didn’t bother with the “asking questions” part of the cliché. Untouchable, unobtainable, the ultimate prize, she was forever out of reach to the rest of the world, a comic juxtaposition in the woman who couldn’t be had seeking out the artifact that couldn’t be found.
To most of the world, Lara Croft was perfect. She was everything, had everything, knew everything. And most of the world was wrong.
The problem with being a legend in your own time is that no matter how well you reinforce the walls around it, sometimes your pride gets the better of you. Sometimes you begin to believe what everyone else is saying. Sometimes you start to buy your own press.
That’s normally when the trouble starts.
The voice in her head, egging her on, came from a time long ago. A friend who had come and gone, been there for her when she was first getting started. She didn’t permit herself the luxury of many of those anymore. Business partners were one thing. Associates were permissible. Good friends were something of a luxury that not even the wealthy, independent Lara Croft felt she could afford very often.
“Go away,” she whispered to the voice in her head. “I don’t need you to remind me right now.” But it was a lie. She wouldn’t have heard it if she didn’t need it.

By all rights, it should have been there. Everything she had studied, the clues she had followed, the pieces of the puzzle that she had painstakingly put together…all of them had led her to this point. But all she found here was the ending of someone else’s adventure story.
The cave was there. The entrance was right where it should have been. The key to activate the opening mechanism had worked like a charm. The interior was lined with the usual bevy of dummy passageways, gas-filled chambers, tilting floors, spiked pits, poisoned darts, scything blades and everything else that spelled out in great detail why there was no “Welcome” mat outside.
All of them she had passed easily, with a trained eye that could spot the obvious a mile off. And most importantly of all, there were no skeletons. There were no remains. No anachronisms out of time, like bent wristwatches or rotting rucksacks to show that someone else had been here before her. The tomb was hers. She had worked for it, solved the riddles left behind by people who hadn’t walked the earth for centuries, and spared no expense when it came to transportation, translation and preparation.
And yet, somehow, she had been wrong.
The chamber holding the artifact was there, just where the crudely-assembled map said it would be. She saw the statue before her, a one-and-a-half-meter-tall representation of a tribal leader who had protected her small village from war, famine, plague and pestilence for over one hundred years. The woman’s name was long lost to time, but the statue showed her in exquisite detail. Long hair flowed down her back like dozens of intertwining waterfalls. The carving of the toga-like animal hide gown she wore over one shoulder precisely covered her right breast, leaving the left, where her heart would have been, exposed. A belt of some sort dangled from her waist, tied at her hip with a perfect knot and slip that held the sheath for a knife. A small skirt, likely fashioned from the same hide as the toga-like top, hung loose down her thighs, ending in a series of small slits to allow fluid movement. Her legs were bare down to her feet, save for a small wrap around her left ankle and the carving of what appeared to be a metallic band around the middle toe of her right foot.
She stood not in the stature that so many other tribal leaders were given, with their chins held high and defiant, their countenance a glowering scowl, their eyes holding a deadly gleam. Instead, she had been immortalized as soft, quiet, deferential. Her eyes held no desire for death or destruction, only the soft glimmer of one who loves with a child’s sense of wonder. The knife’s sheath was empty. Her arms were cast down at her sides at gentle angles, as though she was a bird who was starting to spread her wings and fly. Indeed, given a pair of wings on her back, a golden halo and a harp in one hand, she could very easily have been mistaken for an angel.
Lara wasn’t interested in angels. The statue, while beautiful, did not have what she had come seeking.
She spent hours exploring the room, checking for hidden alcoves, switches that could be manipulated, secret passages that led somewhere. Everything that the manuscripts she had so painstakingly researched, pieced together and translated had been in agreement: the room was supposed to contain the tribe’s greatest treasure, that which had permitted them to survive so long in the face of the unending conflict that had scattered and destroyed most of their neighbors. It was spoken of lovingly, reverently, and had been entombed here forever when the tribe’s last days had been upon them in the hopes that in the future, someone worthy would find it and use its power to return harmony to the area.
Instead, there was nothing but the statue of a woman who hadn’t lived since before Lara’s great-great-great-great grandparents had drawn breath.
She looked at the statue, almost expecting it to come to life, to try and crush her, to animate and taunt her in some long-dead language about what happens to those who defile the tombs of ancient ancestors. But it did none of this. She simply stood upon her plinth, arms held open and inviting at her side, as if to invite Lara to partake of whatever treasure should have been there at her feet.
A treasure that wasn’t there.
And then, the voice of her friend and companion from long ago wormed through her head. And she cursed it, because she had been wrong all this time. All the work, all the money, all the time…all for naught.
She kicked a nearby rock in frustration. It bounced back into the corridor behind her, and Lara heard the feeble ‘thunk’ of a reed arrow as it darted out of the wall, arced pathetically through the air, then skidded across the floor of the cave. The noise was audible for longer than it should have been in the silence of the cavern.
Lara blew her bangs out of her eyes and sat down on the pedestal of the statue in front of her, resting her head in her hands, then turned to look up at the statue. “You’re not playing fair, you know,” she muttered to the creation of long-dead artisans. “I can deal with failure, because at least I know I tried. I can deal with someone beating me to the treasure, because at least I know I’ll have another opportunity to acquire it later. I could even deal with death, because I look it in the eye nearly every day. And believe me, there’ve even been times I would have welcomed it with open arms.”
Lara stood up and paced the room again, looking for anything she might have missed the last time she checked. Finding nothing, she turned again to the statue and addressed it a second time, pulling herself up to her full height. “I can bloody well accept trying and failing. But I can’t accept this.” She stepped closer to the statue. Was it mocking her?
“Oh? You want to know what this is, hmmm? How very kind of you to ask. This is simply not being given the opportunity to try one way or the other.” She ran her fingers through her hair until she felt the tightness where the braid of her ponytail began. “If I go after something and I fail, I have only myself to blame. Sure, I may not always know when to back off, when to call it quits, but it’s always on my head. Don’t you see?”
The statue didn’t reply.
“No, of course you don’t,” Lara continued. “You don’t see, because I’m talking to a hunk of stone. I can’t even talk to you, because I don’t know your name. I don’t even know if you had a name. I just know you existed, and you had something extraordinary. I don’t expect you to hand it over to me straight out like I’m making a banking transaction, but I don’t appreciate all the clues your followers left all over the place leading me here for nothing.”
Lara stalked around the room and kicked another stone into the corridor. Again, there was the pathetic twang of a dart of some kind, but there was no power behind it. Like the first, it hit the floor long before it hit the opposite wall, and rolled to a stop.
“And that’s another thing,” Lara said, wagging her finger at the statue like a teacher from her old finishing school used to do. “This tomb? This is a joke. Maybe since you have so much free time, you could look up a couple of fellows named Qualopec and Tihocan. They knew how to build tombs and how to keep the meddlers out. But your home here is a joke. Any danger that might have presented itself in here, I saw before it could have possibly hurt me. I mean, look at this!”
Lara left the chamber briefly, fetched one of the lame darts off the floor, and brought it back inside. “Look at it!” she demanded of the statue, waving it in front of the woman’s face as though she were scolding a child. “You call this a trap? This dart couldn’t kill an arthritic flea that had already been covered in bug spray.” She poked her finger at the tip of the dart. “Where’s the hollow point? Where’s the poison that kills you in five horrible, agonizing seconds while you writhe about on the floor, foaming at the mouth?” She broke the frail dart in her hand easily and scattered the pieces on the floor.
“This isn’t a sacred site. It’s like a fantasy dreamed up by a child who doesn’t want to hurt anyone. No wonder there’s nothing here. Any treasure in this place would have been looted by the first quadriplegic who drove his wheelchair through the entrance. I know of baboons who could have gotten in here and robbed you blind, much less someone like me who took the time to connect all the fancy little dots you left behind for capable people to find.”
Lara turned around and pointed her guns at the statue’s head. “Well? Don’t you have something to say for yourself?”
It didn’t.
Slowly, Lara lowered her guns and placed them back into her holsters with a sigh. “Wipe that look off your face, will you?” she asked the statue. “How am I supposed to be angry with someone who looks like that? You’re worse than a puppy, and everybody knows you can’t stay mad at a puppy for more than a few seconds.”
She slowly sat down at the base of the statue again. “I had a puppy once. A long time ago. Daddy bought him for me as a Christmas gift when I was little. I remember opening that box and seeing those eyes, and I fell in love for the first time because he was all mine to take care of and he needed me.
“Daddy didn’t see things that way after a while though. My puppy chewed up one of his slippers, and he got angry.” She stood up again and stuffed a hand in her pocket. “It was so stupid. He had fourteen different pairs of house slippers. And it was a puppy. It didn’t know any better. And he could have sent Winston out for another pair, for another dozen pairs or one hundred pairs or one million pairs. But instead, when I came home from school that day, Daddy told me what happened and said I had to get rid of my puppy. I tried to tell him that it wasn’t the puppy’s fault. I cried. I told him that I had wanted to name the puppy ‘Snoopy’ after the dog in the tabloid cartoon. I promised him I would buy him a new pair of slippers out of my own allowance.”
Lara sat down again, folded her arms across her knees, and rested her face in the gap. “But it didn’t matter. Later that day, Daddy had Winston take the puppy away and I never saw him again.”
For a few moments, Lara’s shoulders shook. Tears, pent up for over a decade, spilled to the dusty floor and were soaked up immediately. Every so often, a soft cry or a sniffle would echo off the walls.
And then it was over.
Lara wiped her face on her sleeve, then withdrew a bandana from the back pocket of her shorts and blew her nose loudly into it. She sniffled once, put the bandana away, and looked up at the statue again.
“I didn’t come in here to tell you that,” she said, looking into the eyes that seemed to be, even now, staring back at her with heart-felt sorrow and understanding. “I’ve never told anyone about it before. I guess all things considered, you’re about the best person to tell though. You seem like you’re very good at keeping secrets.”
Lara sighed and put her hand on the statue’s shoulder. “I wish you were here now. Maybe you would help me understand. Why are you here? What’s the treasure you hold so dear in this place?”
A voice, softer than a whisper, caused Lara’s head to turn around. There was no one in the room with her, but she knew she had heard something…
There it was again. Lara strained to determine which direction it was coming from, but it wasn’t coming from anywhere in the room that she could tell. It was everywhere around her in the air, filling her mind. It was a grown man, sobbing quietly and speaking in a language Lara wasn’t familiar with. But as she heard the words, she understood them.
“…try to understand, but I cannot. He is my son, but he will not listen to me…”
Lara heard another voice added to this one, a woman’s.
“…couldn’t have known it was what she wanted. Please help me to…”
And a third, this one of a younger male.
“…died yesterday from the sickness. I was out hunting, and I did not get the chance to tell my father…”
Voice after voice resonated, one after the other: children and adults, male and female, young and old. Each one confessing, each one telling a story, each one begging the woman now immortalized in the statue to help them in some way to overcome some burden of the long-distant past.
And after every request, the answer was the same.
It came from the same powerful voice, and though Lara knew in her mind she had heard thousands upon thousands of pleas for help that extended over the course of decades lost to history, the voice that answered them was always the same. It never wavered, it never changed, it never broke with age or confusion or anger or impatience or judgment. Over and over and over again, Lara heard the same reply.
Slowly, the voices in her mind died out. The requests, the supplications, the questions receded into the air from whence they came and Lara wondered if it had been some sort of dream or elaborate trick.
Then, slowly, she understood. There were traps here because the woman in the statue knew that people would expect there to be traps and they would be scared away by what they saw. But those who were in true need, who desired to find that which she had left with her people as the greatest treasure of all their civilization, would find nothing to truly block their path save for their own misconceptions.
Those who sought the treasure with an eye on keeping it would never find it, for the treasure was not something that could be kept. It had to be given away, or else it was of no use to anyone.
Lara looked up at the statue again, leaned against the stone woman whose name was still unknown, and gently kissed her cheek with a whisper of, “Thank you.” Then she turned and walked slowly out of the room.
On the way back, she performed none of her daring acrobatic routines that had allowed her to evade the traps. She walked, steadily and slowly forward, ignoring the slots in the wall that contained no blades to suddenly whirl and decapitate the unwary. She ignored the floors that had looked unsteady and ready to dump the clumsy explorer into a pit and walked directly across them. No poisoned darts or falling boulders struck her. And as she left the entrance, she heard the door slowly grind to a close behind her, sealing away the cavern for the next intrepid explorer who might or might not discover the truth behind the treasure within.
Out in the open again, Lara pondered the answer the woman of the statue had given to everyone in the past who had come seeking her knowledge.
Leave your trouble here…and forgive as you yourself are forgiven.
She made her way back to the camp she had set up earlier that afternoon, then crawled into her tent and rummaged around until she found the satellite phone. She powered it on, waited for the signal that indicated she had a carrier wave, then dialed a number she had not used in a long time.
Someone picked up on the other end, and she hesitated as the man said, “Hello?” then repeated it again a few moments later. Finally, she found her voice. “Hello, Daddy? There’s something I need to tell you…”