“Thomas!” Ali made no attempt to hide her exasperation.
“I’m okay.”
Her curses echoed madly in the chamber below.
“The ladder runs all the way up,” I said. “Don’t climb yet. Best wait until I make sure we can get out.”
I paused, half expecting to hear her climbing the ladder anyway; for once, though, she seemed to heed my advice. I climbed. When I was close enough to push against the grate, I discovered it wasn’t a grate at all, but a mat composed of the twining stems of a grape plant. I sliced through them easily with my dirk, and poked my head out the opening.
I was on what once must have been an affluent street. Large, multistory buildings lined both sides. For the most part their facades had been overrun by climbing vegetation. Where bare wall showed, the facade was cracked, in some places broken away, the substructure of rough brick exposed. Debris from crumbling fascia littered the road; here and there patches of weeds had burst through the avenue deforming its once smooth surface. And brooding over all this abandonment was that massive, soulless tower, a shadow darker than night. The skin on the back of my neck prickled.
Placing both palms flat on the ground, I rolled forward and out of the hole. I crawled back to its lip. “We can get up this way,” I whispered down to Ali as loud as I dared. “Don’t stop when you’re coming up. Climb quickly. And push down hard on your feet, or you’ll slip off the ladder.”
I heard them conversing, but could not make out what they were saying. Then Ali’s voice drifted up: “I’m coming.”
Quicker than I thought possible, her head hove into view, and she swung herself nimbly—and with more agility than I could ever manage—around the bend. She looked fierce clambering towards me, and I scuttled backwards, as she vaulted out of the hole, and landed, cat-like, on her feet. She looked up and down the street, perhaps to see if the commotion had roused anyone. But I knew the place was deserted, save for those two Gardes huddled near the tower. We were far enough away that I doubted they had heard us; even if they had, they wouldn’t abandon their post in the dead of night to venture into these cursed streets. No doubt satisfied we were unobserved, she glared at me, and my simple heart lurched at her dreadful beauty.
“Christ’s blood!” she shouted, and kicked me squarely in the stomach.
Doubled over, I fell to my knees, clutching my gut, gasping for breath.
She swore again, and through my tears it looked as if she was making ready to kick me again. But she didn’t. Instead she drew her sword and placed its cold point against my neck. “Swear you will not act again without first asking me.” She pushed a little on her sword, perhaps expecting me to pull back, but I stayed rigid. I felt blood run down my gullet, and wind its way onto my chest. “Swear it!” she shouted, rage flaring in her eyes.
“Will you kill me if I don’t?”
Whatever possessed her fled; almost casually, she flicked her sword up, so that it nicked the back of my jaw. “You know I won’t.”
“In that case,” I said, “I will do whatever you wish.”
She stared at me as if I was insane, and I suppose I was. Or had been momentarily. “Will you swear it?”
“Yes,” I said. “On my faith and in God’s name.”
She said something odd then: “And if you lose faith?”
The question took me aback. Why would she pick this, of all times, to question my faith? Perhaps, I thought, she is trying to bait me. If that’s what it was, I decided to ignore it. “Then I swear on my heart and my life.”
She pulled a leaf from a nearby plant, wiped my blood from her blade, and sheathed it. “Let us hope that in your rashness you do not lose those, too.”
Sam’s distant call echoed from the pipe, startling me.
“You forgot about his chains,” Ali said.
I hadn’t. I’d known there was no way he could climb the ladder. His chain was too short to permit it. But I pretended I had not realized this, and scrambled over to the hole and leaned in. “Sam, don’t try to climb the ladder!”
Ali grasped my shoulder and pulled me back from the brink. “He won’t. I convinced him to stay put. At least until you speak to him.”
I leaned over the edge to shout down, but Ali dragged me up again. “No. Climb down the ladder. But do not descend into the dome. Speak quietly. I will watch here.” With that, she stepped lightly over the ruin in the street and faded into the shadows of a portico of the closest building. I swung my feet into the manhole and let myself down, counting the rungs until I hit the last one.
“Sam?”
“Here.”
“Ali said you wished to speak to me. I suppose it’s about how to find the backpack?”
“No, sir,” he said. “T’other boy already told me. And how I should follow the Old Road.”
I wondered if he was going to try to lure us back down into the sewer. “Then what is it you wish?”
“To settle our debt.”
“We’ve lived up to our end of the bargain, Sam.”
“That you have,” he said. “My end is what worries me.”
“Your end?”
“Said I’d take you there, and that’s what I intend.”
“You have. We can’t miss the tower from here.”
“Man of my word,” he said, in that measured way of his. “Nought left but that.”
I wondered if lack of food and illness had addled his wits. Or if maybe I’d misread him completely, and he was the most honourable man I’d ever met. “You can’t climb the ladder, Sam. The rungs are farther apart than the length of your chain. You’ll fall into the cistern. If it’s not deep enough to drown right away, its walls will be at least as slick as those of the tunnel. You’d never be able to climb out.”
“Might, if I reach high enough.”
“Don’t be foolish.”
There was a moment’s silence. “Foolish.” He said it just as I had, with the same inflection. “Ain’t that what your friend calls you?”
I wish I could have disagreed. But I felt doubly foolish now, for taking the risk on the ladder, and for hoping to use it to abandon Sam.
“Might be,” he said slowly, “I’m just as foolish.”
His chain rattled then, and I feared he’d already begun climbing. “If you fall,” I said quickly, “then so will I. I’d try to save you, Sam, as any good Christian would, and we’d both likely drown.” It was a lie, but a well-intentioned one, the sort I like to think God overlooks.
The noise of his ascent ceased. Then I heard him sigh. “Can’t say I’d feel good about that.”
“By not climbing the ladder you’d be saving my life.”
“And mine in the bargain. Another debt to owe you.”
“I expect there’s no way to talk you out of a thing when you’ve set your mind on it.”
“None can.”
“I believe that.” I decided to take another tack. “Sam, you told me you wanted to escape so that you might make amends. For a man to say that, I expect he feels he owes someone a large debt. Larger, I’d guess, than the one you think you incurred here. An honourable man would repay that first, before endangering his life, wouldn’t he?”
There was another moment of silence, and I knew he was thinking on what I’d said. Then: “Spoke too soon.”
“About what?”
“When I said ‘None can’.”
“Here’s what I think, Sam. You should make your amends first. Once that’s done, then you can pay me back whatever you believe you owe, if you still want to. But you don’t have to, because I think you fulfilled your part of the bargain already.”
“Given you haven’t left much choice, it’s a deal.”
“Good,” I said. “Deal.”
The clink of his chains echoed up to where I had wedged myself; but this time I knew it for the sound they made as they were dragged along the brick floor.
“Sam?”
The noise of his movement stopped. “What?”
“I do n
ot know why the Church believes you sinned, and I do not want to know. But you seem to me a good man.”
“Not always. But thank ye for the thought.”
“No one is all good,” I said. “It’s being good on balance that’s important.”
I believe he would have agreed with me, had his humility not prevented him.
“I will pray for you, Sam.”
“Likewise.” This time it was hard to make out his words, for he spoke over the echoing sound of his passage. Likely he was already outside the cistern and back in the sewer pipe. “Luck,” I think he said, and I heard no more, save the fading scrape of his chains.
I climbed back up the ladder and Ali materialized at my side, an apparition of the night.
“Let’s go,” I said, anxious to be away. Although I now believed Sam as good as his word, I feared he might still have a change of heart. If he did, I didn’t believe I could face him when he climbed from that hole; and, more to my shame, I did not want to hear the scream and splash should he tumble from the ladder, and so be caught in another lie.
The Babel Tower
There was a two-man watch at the base of the tower. One man patrolled while the other sat in a small camp chair in front of a sentry shack, fastidiously sharpening his halberd. Both wore breastplates and shoulder guards over the distinctive uniform of the Cent Suisse. From our vantage in a thick clutch of grass, we watched one Garde walk the same route around the sizable piazza several times, disappearing for a dozen heartbeats at the far side of the square behind logs stacked to twice a man’s height. He reappeared, then completed his circuit by marching past windowless structures built of rough timber and about which were scattered idle wheelbarrows, carts, and hods.
We retreated along the narrow lane in which we’d been crouching, and slipped through the back door of a building whose face leaned precariously over the street. Inside, the dark was almost as complete as it had been in the sewer.
“We can circle behind,” Ali said, pulling a dirk from her boot. “When the Garde is at the farther corner, out of sight behind the logs, we will take the other unawares.”
“No.” Though I didn’t want to say so, I was determined not to kill again. Which would leave Ali to deal with both men by herself. As good as she was, she was much smaller and lighter than either of the two, and her short sword would be useless against the reach of a halberd. Even if she managed to sneak across the twenty metres of open ground and take the first guard by surprise, she would almost certainly have to face the second toe-to-toe. I thought her chances poor at best.
“No?” She looked at me as if I was the most cowardly of creatures. “What would you have us do?”
“Kite would not have been so rash, nor have killed men when there was no need.”
She looked like she was about to say something dismissive, then seemed to think better of it. “I suppose you have a better plan?”
“Samuel told us the Gardes do not like to set foot on the tower.”
“So?”
“The sentry post is not near the ramp to the tower, but a good distance away—maybe two hundred metres. I think that’s because they are not so much worried about someone ascending the tower as about the prisoners stealing tools—hammers, chisels, picks, and so on. Things they could use to free themselves from their shackles.”
I saw by her expression she hadn’t considered this. She nodded. “Go on.”
“Now suppose you are one of those Gardes, and you see a man dash up the ramp. Would you follow him? I wouldn’t. He has nowhere to go. And there are hundreds of arches on the way up, so you’d have to check each one to make sure he wasn’t hiding in their shadows, perhaps with a knife at the ready. No, if I were the guard, I would just wait at the foot of the ramp. At least until sun-on, when it would be much more difficult for the man to hide—and after more Gardes arrive with the workers.”
“There are two, making it easy to check the arches.”
“Only one would follow. The other would have to stay back to guard the tools.”
“One, then,” Ali said. “Suppose one is thick-headed enough to chase us?”
“They each bear a cuirass, shoulder armour, a morion, and a halberd. That’s got to be at least twenty kilograms, maybe more. I did a rough calculation in my head, and I figure the ramp, if its inclination is a bit less than ten degrees, to be at least two and half kilometres. It will be tiring for us, hustling uphill for that distance. But for the Garde it would be exhausting. We could outdistance him easily, and still have plenty of time to see what there is to see at the summit.”
“And if we can’t figure out what to do before he reaches us?”
“Then I will stand next to you, and at least we will have three advantages we would not have had before: we will have to fight only one man, that man will be winded, and we will hold the higher ground.”
Ali chewed on her lower lip for a moment, mulling it over. I’m sure she could have raised several objections to my scheme; I certainly could have. But she didn’t. She knew that, as shaky as it was, my plan had one great strength: it was simple. And when a plan was simple, there were fewer things that could go wrong, a lesson Kite had oft repeated.
When the Garde was on the last leg of his rounds, at the farthest point from the tower, we broke from cover and tore across the piazza. We were halfway when the thump of our steps roused the guard by the shack. He leapt to his feet, and shouted a challenge, but stood his post—as I had hoped. A moment later the second Garde appeared from behind the tool shed, halberd now clutched in two hands, as he ran back to the sentry post. There was a brief exchange between them, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the pounding of our feet and my heart. Just as my toes touched the first stone at the base of the ramp, the Garde who’d been patrolling set out after us.
Ali and I raced up the ramp, which was smooth and wide enough for six men to walk abreast. The arches were massive, larger than I had thought, and there were countless rows, built one atop the other, to support the tower. Inside I glimpsed a cubical structure around which the tower was wrapped. There were no rails at the edge of the ramp, so I ran as close to the arches as I could, quickly losing sight of both Gardes as we rose; when we’d made the opposite side, we were already a good fifty metres above the piazza, and that difference grew by another fifty as we completed our first circuit—there were half a dozen more to the top. The sentry shack was far enough away that I could still see the Garde at his post, neck craned to watch us; but the other Garde was nowhere in sight. If he was on the tower as we were, or standing near the base of the ramp, I would have had to move to the edge to see him, which I didn’t dare do, not running full out as I was. I’ve never been overly fond of heights, though I can stand them well enough. But Ali seemed to have no fear, for she darted away from the tower wall and ran dangerously close to the lip, her sandals slapping within a few centimetres of the edge. Without breaking stride, she pointed down, and I took that to mean the second man had followed us up the ramp. I tried to pick up the pace.
The sentry shack came into sight again as we completed our second circuit; Ali, who’d opened some distance between us, slowed to a trot to wait for me to catch up. By my calculation we’d already run well over a thousand metres, and risen about two hundred. Running on an incline was harder than I had anticipated. My lungs were already burning, I was soaked in sweat, and my legs and thighs complained in ways they never had before. I struggled after Ali as best I could.
Ali paused at the end of the third circuit and laid herself down to peer over the edge of the ramp; I collapsed behind her, clutching at the stitch in my side, gasping for breath. Almost immediately, she sprang up, scanned the tower above us, and set off again, saying over her shoulder, “He gains,” as if she’d known all along that my plan was doomed to failure. She set off with an odd, elongated gait, and counted out each stride to herself. With a grunt, I pushed myself to my feet and struggled after her.
As we circled for the fourth time,
we passed scaffolding, wooden tubs, paddles for mixing cement and mortar, and bags of lime the prisoners had stacked near the edge of the ramp as a makeshift rail. I knew we must be near the top, and so looked up. Directly above the summit of the tower there were small differences in the firmament—the hint of an edge, a shadow that should not have been there—all invisible from the ground. For a moment I felt a strange sense of vertigo, as if I was looking down instead of up, and that the top of the tower plunged into a hole. Then everything snapped into place in the same way a line drawing of a vase suddenly becomes two faces, and I knew the tower had been built into the upper chamber of an Assumption.
Ali stopped and leaned over the bags of lime, and I followed suit. The Garde was nowhere is sight; I couldn’t even hear the thump of his steps. While I peered into the dark, Ali rolled the bag next to me over the edge; her lips moved, counting soundlessly to four before the bag hit the ramp below. Then she dragged me down into a squat behind the bags.
“Stay out of sight.” She poked her head over the bags to peer down to the ramp below. “When I tell you, heave the bags in front of you over the edge with whatever strength you have.”
I heard the slap of sandals on the ramp below. I stood. “He believes he’s doing right. I—”
“Now!”
I did not do as she asked; I did not want to kill that innocent man.
But what I was reluctant to do, she accomplished on her own. In a few seconds, she heaved three bags over the side. Her first was premature, and thudded down in front of the Garde. The second would have missed, too, had he not skidded to a halt. As he looked up, the second bag hit him square in the face. I heard the sound of the impact and two nauseating snaps of bone as the concussion drove him down like a nail being hammered into wood. Absurdly, his halberd, the butt of which he’d planted on the ramp, stood on its own for a fraction of second, before it fell slowly out from the tower, toppling over the edge of the ramp and clattering from sight.
As I began mouthing a prayer for both his soul and Ali’s, she slapped my face. I staggered backwards, and might have toppled over those bags to my death had she not grabbed my shirt and steadied me. “Do not pray for my forgiveness,” she said. “Look to your own salvation first.”
The Book of Thomas - Volume One: Heaven Page 22
