Turms stood up from his chair and in two quick strides crossed the distance between them. Raising both hands, he placed them on Douglas’ shoulders and looked deeply into his eyes—holding the gaze longer than Douglas found comfortable. Even so, Douglas sensed he was in the presence of a wise and munificent soul, one with enormous power and intelligence. He returned the gaze as steadily as he was able.
In a moment the great king tapped both hands on his shoulders and contact was broken. Turms turned his head and rattled off a string of commands to his senior assistant, who bowed, approached Douglas, took his arm, and began leading him away. The king called after his departing guests, and Douglas offered him a similar bow of respect and added his thanks—though for what, he did not yet know.
The king’s steward led them out through another room to a side door onto another portico where two guards in light armour with thin, wicked-looking iron spears or javelins across their laps were sitting on wooden stools. They jumped to attention at the appearance of the servant, who offered a brief explanation of, Douglas guessed, the king’s commands; then Douglas and Snipe were led down a short flight of steps and away through an olive grove to a small house a few dozen metres distant from the king’s residence. They were shown into the house, which was sparsely furnished in two rooms—the first an all-purpose room combining a living space with a table and chairs for eating. The second, smaller room at the rear of the lodge was furnished with stools, a lamp, and several thick mats and cushions for sleeping.
They were, Douglas understood, being offered the use of these quarters, which he appreciated. The presence of the armed guards, however, cast something of a shadow over the transaction. He did not have time to wonder about this, for the bald steward, after showing them the rooms, turned to face Douglas and said, “Latica Etruii.”
The steward then placed his fingertips on his own lips, said the words again, then touched Douglas on the lips.
“Latica Etruii,” Douglas said, nodding. Was he to be taught to speak the language? Placing his palm on his chest, he said his name, then pointed to the servant, raising his eyebrows in expectation. “What is your name?”
The steward smiled with pleasure, tapped himself on the chest, and pronounced, “Pacha.”
“My thanks, Pacha,” Douglas told him in Latin.
The servant departed then, but not before posting one of the guards at the door of the guest lodge.
“I do not like the look of this, Snipe,” Douglas muttered, watching Pacha the portly assistant and the other guard disappear into the olive grove. Douglas waited until they were gone, then decided on a simple test. He stepped boldly from the house onto the narrow porch. The soldier merely watched him. It was only when Douglas made to step off the porch onto the path that the guard actively intervened; he called a word and gestured for Douglas to come back. When Douglas failed to heed his command, the guard moved from his post and retrieved his charge, bringing him back to the portico.
“Stati!” said the guard, much as one would command a straying dog.
Douglas nodded his understanding and walked back into the house. “Well, that much is clear at least,” he announced. Snipe, who was poking at something in a corner of the room, did not deign to look up. Douglas pulled a chair from the table and sat down.
No use getting worked up about it, he thought. The situation, though highly inconvenient, could easily have been worse. Apparently they were to be taught the language of Etruria. And lest there be any doubt or mistake, they would remain the guests of the king until they learned it.
CHAPTER 12
In Which a Shocking Hypothesis Is Mooted
For J. Anthony Clarke, the internationally renowned astrophysicist, interdimensional travel was a mind-blowing revelation on a par with discovering the Grand Unified Theory, the God particle, life on Mars, superstrings, and the Loch Ness monster all at once. Every fibre of his being vibrated with the knowledge that he had experienced a phenomenon of unrivalled transformational power. Ecstatic as he was over this game-changing discovery, he immediately put aside every scientific interest and concentrated instead on his overriding domestic concern. For Tony Clarke, anxious father of a missing daughter, the experience was merely confirmation that he was on the right track.
This leap between dimensional worlds—or what had Cass called it? The Ghost Road?—this radical shift in both location and time was something he could happily spend the rest of his life studying and documenting. Already the physicist in him was formulating the ways and means of quantifying certain aspects of the phenomenon that could lead to a testable hypothesis. Shocking as it might be to the scientific establishment—shocking, mind-blowing, consciousness-altering as it was to himself—exploring the phenomenon would be his life’s great work.
But first he had to find his daughter.
For that, Tony had to trust the services of his guide, Friday. Laconic, disapproving, pedantic grudge that he was, the Yavapai native was nevertheless a man of his word. He had agreed to help and, so far, that was what he was doing.
From the Nazca desert the two had made a jump to another place—a world, or at least a region of small farms and villages linked by dirt roads—vaguely reminiscent of Eastern Europe, although Tony couldn’t tell for sure. In any case, it was not Antarctica and it was not Peru. At first blush the place seemed to hold out some promise as a destination Cassandra might have discovered. But after the better part of a day of wandering around to no effect, Tony concluded that it was highly unlikely that his daughter would have found much in the way of help or even interest here. “I’m guessing she went back the way she came,” Tony said, though less certain than before as the fingers of doubt steadily tightened their grip.
“That is what I would do,” Friday concurred.
“Then we go back,” Tony decided, a note of defeat edging into his normally buoyant tone. “And on the way you can tell me about how to recognise a Ghost Road when I see one. What are the telltale signs?”
Reversing their course, Friday led them back along the river to where a track from the rocky bluffs joined the road that wound alongside the riverbank. The sun lowered in the afternoon sky and the air was growing perceptively cooler as they climbed the hillside to the cleft in the rocks through which they had emerged into this pastoral, if uninteresting, world. While they walked, Tony contemplated the awful possibility of not being able to find his daughter. What would he do then? He had no idea.
“We are early,” Friday announced. “It is not time.”
Tony glanced up and looked around to find that they had indeed arrived back at the hilltop ravine by which they had entered this world. He gazed at the river valley spreading out below them—had they really climbed it that quickly? Lost in thought, he had been completely oblivious to their hike. He glanced at the narrow gap in the rocky escarpment before them, then looked at the sky, judging the time of day. “How do you know? How do you sense when the Ghost Road is . . . um, active? Once it is active, is there any way to tell where you will end up? That is, where the Coyote Bridge will take you?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“It’s my job.”
While they waited for the Ghost Road to open, Friday schooled his insatiable pupil on the finer points of what Tony now thought of as Ghost Road and Coyote Bridge navigation. Finally Friday raised his eyes to the sky. The sun had sunk behind the hilltops, casting the rocky ravine in shadow. The air streaming through the rift in the rocks was cool with the breath of evening and the moon was breaching the horizon to the east. He nodded. “We can go.”
“Well then,” Tony replied, taking a deep breath to steady himself, “let’s get on with it.”
Friday turned and stepped into the narrow divide between solid walls of wind-eroded stone. Tony followed, keenly attentive to every move and action on the part of his guide, memorising the sequence for further study: first a little walk down a path until arriving at the active part of the path, the bridge; then moving into or through th
e force field created by the line of force, which was signalled by an atmospheric disturbance—rain, or wind, or fog, or all three at once—in greater or lesser measure. If successful, these actions resulted in the instantaneous translocation to a new reality or dimension of the universe without crossing any distance between—a true quantum jump. The journey, so swiftly accomplished, came at the cost of a little motion sickness. But the nausea soon passed; moreover, Tony noticed his body was growing accustomed to these leaps and the resulting sickness was gradually lessening—which he took as a sign that the malady would decrease with repeated experience until it was no longer a feature to be dreaded. Friday, for example, did not appear in the least affected by this intense, yet transitory, kinetosis.
Ever the observant scientist, Tony was enumerating all these things when the mist-laden clouds closed around him and he lost sight of Friday just two steps ahead of him. There was a splash of cold rain on his face and the bite of a chill wind, then a blur of confused motion and . . . silence.
He landed on his heels with a jolt that travelled up his leg, causing him to jam his knee. He took a hobbling step and the knee seized, almost pitching him forward onto a path of cobbled stone. The next moment the motion sickness caught up with him and slammed him hard. His empty stomach bunched into a tight ball and he retched with dry heaves.
Steadying himself against the near wall, he raised his head and looked around to find that he was in what seemed to be an alleyway between two whitewashed walls so narrow that, standing in the middle, he could have touched both sides with outstretched hands. The air was humid and hot, and the scaly branches of a sycamore tree overhung the alleyway. From beyond the nearby walls, dogs were barking. At one end the path terminated at a blank wall; at the other, a stone archway gave onto a sun-filled expanse beyond which Tony could not see.
Nor could he see any sign of Friday.
He waited for a while, trying to decide what to do, then waited some more. When Friday failed to appear, it occurred to Tony that perhaps his taciturn companion had arrived ahead of him and was waiting somewhere nearby. In any case, he decided, it would not hurt to have a look around. He moved to the mouth of the narrow alleyway and peered out onto a street unlike any in his experience—save from films, or old black-and-white newsreels. But here, shimmering beneath a blazing hot sun, in living colour, was a scene his grandfather and great-grandfather would have recognised—if, that is, either one of them had ever travelled beyond the family farm in Pennsylvania.
The people he saw moving about were dressed in long, flowing robes of bird’s-egg blue or coffee-coloured beige, lightweight stuff that gave them a floaty aspect. The women wore headscarves in bright patterns; there were striped pantaloons, ample white shirts with black vests, and red fezes for the men—and the few vehicles that were not either donkey carts or handbarrows were sun-bleached automobiles of 1930s vintage. The street itself was lined with shops and booths under faded maroon-and-white-striped awnings.
The fact that the inhabitants of this place appeared to go about their business without a glance in his direction gave him a fair bit of courage to venture a few steps from the alley—at least far enough to see if he could spot Friday somewhere on the street. To the left he saw a row of vendors’ stalls and tiny shops—fruit, leather goods, cloth, spices—and mingling patrons, women with net bags in twos and threes drifting leisurely along the stalls and shop fronts. Ahead, some distance down the road, he saw an archway of classical design in antique white marble and beyond it another arch—this one of banded black-and-white flanked by wide timber doors. It was, he recognised, the entrance to one of those rambling covered markets abounding in Middle Eastern countries—a souk, or bazaar—a busy place, judging by the numbers of shoppers passing in and out through the entrance.
As he stood taking this in, he became aware that he had come under the scrutiny of another. At the same moment, he felt a tug on his sleeve. Looking down, he met a pair of bright brown eyes set in the round, smiling face of a boy with wiry jet-black hair—a lad of perhaps eight or nine years, dressed in dirty cream-coloured trousers that were too short and ragged at the knees and an oversized tunic of the same stuff, frayed at the collar.
“Hello there,” said Tony. “Do you speak English?”
The boy glanced behind him, and Tony saw that he was accompanied by a young girl who could not have been more than a year or two older. Like her grubby companion, her simple dress was stained and bedraggled, but her face and hands were clean, and her hair was neatly combed and braided beneath a bright blue scarf. Aware that he was about to be accosted by beggars, Tony patted his pockets for some change.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any money,” he began, then realised the lad was holding out a piece of paper to him. “Oh? What’s this?”
The boy urged the bit of paper on him. Tony took the scrap, a little bigger than a business card, turned it over, and saw a message written in English. It read:
Lost? Lonely?
Looking for Something to Believe In?
We Can Help
For Information
Come to 22 Hanania Street nr.
Beit Hanania
The Zetetic Society
Tony read the paper again. An advertisement? He passed the message back to the boy, who merely shook his head and pushed it back at Tony. “No? You want me to have it?” he said. “What does it mean?”
“Come with us, mister,” said the girl, stepping up.
“You speak English?” said Tony hopefully. “Is this where I am? Damascus?”
“You come with us,” she said again and stepped away, paused, and beckoned him to follow.
Aware that he was probably a fool falling into a local scam of the kind perpetrated on unwary foreigners, Tony was sufficiently intrigued by the enigmatic note to follow, at least until he found whatever it was the youngsters were selling. “All right. I’ll come with you,” he said. “But no funny business.”
The young boy fell into step beside him, and the girl led them into a dizzying tangle of tiny streets and paths and byways through neighbourhoods of open-air kiosks and little workshops like tiny factories turning out wooden bowls and spoons and chairs; here a potter making jars and cups; there a rug maker weaving grass mats; and just beyond, a woman making lace tablecloths and bed coverings . . . and on and on. The passersby paid Tony and his small escorts no attention whatever; he might have been invisible for all the notice he received. Apparently foreigners were such a common presence as to be beneath regard.
Down one street after another they went. At each turn Tony felt more foolish for having agreed to come along, and more certain it would all end badly. Finally, as they entered a quiet street lined with larger, more imposing buildings fronted by black-and-white stonework doorways, he decided that the goose chase had gone on long enough. He stopped. “Okay,” he declared. “This is it. I am finished.”
The girl stopped in the middle of the street and turned around. “You come.”
“No.” Tony shook his head. It was late afternoon and hot, the sky above had the faded quality of worn denim, and he was tired and thirsty and longing for some small confirmation that he would not be beaten and robbed by bandits. “I quit. I’m not going any farther.”
“You come,” insisted the girl. She turned and walked to a nearby doorway. “Is here.”
“Sorry.” Tony shook his head slowly.
The little boy tugged on his sleeve and pointed at the door where the girl waited. “No, sorry. I’m going back,” said Tony, glancing over his shoulder. “If I can find my way.”
The girl, still watching him, rose up on her tiptoes and, taking the brass knocker, rapped loudly on the door. She knocked again and gestured for Tony to come along. He refused—
—and was still refusing when there came the click of a lock, the door opened, and the kindly face of an elderly woman with a severe haircut peered out, squinting behind her wire-rim glasses into the bright sunlit street.
“Oh, hello
, Afifah, have you brought me a visitor?” she asked in a gentle Scottish accent.
“There,” replied the girl, pointing at Tony, still standing in the street.
The woman stepped from the door. “Hello, Fadi.” She waved to the boy. “Who have you brought me?”
The boy tugged on Tony’s sleeve and pointed to the woman, urging him to go to her.
“Come along with you,” she called. “I won’t bite.”
Tony, deciding that he had little to fear from a white-haired old woman, took a few steps closer. “Hello,” he said. “I’m not sure there hasn’t been some mistake.”
“You’ll have to come closer. I’m not going to shout.”
He moved to the doorway where the stout, tweed-skirted old dear waited with folded hands. “Was there something you wanted?”
“My daughter,” Tony blurted without thinking. “I’m looking for my daughter. She is lost and I’m trying to find her.”
This was not how he had planned to begin any potential conversation, but the accumulated strangeness of the day’s events finally overwhelmed his natural detachment, and his emotional control finally gave way to the moment. He abandoned any attempt to reverse his headlong plunge and concluded, as if by way of explanation, “I’ve come from the United States.”
“Oh my,” replied the woman in her buttery Highland brogue. “Then you had better come in, if you’ve come that far.”
As she stepped back and opened the black-painted door a little wider, Tony saw the polished brass plate engraved with the words Zetetic Society.
CHAPTER 13
In Which Landlubbers Take to the Sea
The Shadow Lamp Page 11
