by Donald Tyson
A fly whined in my ear and bit the side of my neck. I crushed it under my hand, then cursed when I realized I had spilled half the water from the pot.
“We can’t stay here all night. We’ll be eaten alive.”
I returned to the river to refill the pot, then carried it with a display of assurance out of the willows and toward the distant ruins of the city. She followed me with her armload of sticks, making no further comment, but her eyes continued to scan the sky over each shoulder. I had to resist the urge to glance up, and felt annoyed with myself. If this Beast wished to kill me, it would surely do so. When we were midway between the river and the ruins, I looked around for a likely place to build a fire and unroll our bed mats. The ground rose gently to the left. We climbed the rise and made our fire on its crest in a circle of stones. When the fire burned strongly, I set the pot across two stones and began to cut pieces of dried goat meat into it. The girl scattered in a handful of dried herbs from her own pack.
While I crouched at the pot, stirring it with the blade of my knife, I noticed the mountain before me. It seemed to glow in the light from the rising crescent of the moon, which was a few days past full. Something in its outline awakened a memory. My hand stopped and my eyes narrowed. Hearing the scrape of my knife cease, the girl looked up from the fire.
“That little mountain,” I said, pointing with my chin behind her. “It’s the pyramid that was in my dream of the dark man’s cloak.”
She turned and studied it, then shook her head.
“It looks like only a hill to me.”
“It is the pyramid. I recognize it in the darkness.”
We ate our thin stew with dried bread, saying little. The desolation of the rocky plain discouraged conversation. It had a blasted appearance under the moon, as though in the distant past all softness of life had been swept from it by fire, leaving only a few green things to struggle pitifully for their existence along the river. What else could account for the loose stones that lay scattered everywhere?
I scoured my wooden bowl clean with a handful of pebbles, then set it on my pack and stood to stretch my legs.
“You can stay here beside the fire, if you wish,” I told the girl.
As I approached the base of the pyramid, I heard her footsteps. She fell into step beside me on my left side. I said nothing, but her presence comforted me. I must be growing sentimental, I reflected. In the Empty Space I had needed no comfort.
It was an eerie experience to approach the ruined pyramid under the stars, as I had approached it in my dream. I scarcely knew whether I woke or slept. Only the absence of the dark man spoiled the illusion. We climbed awkwardly up the lower slope, slipping in the loose till that showered down around our ankles with a dry clatter at each step. A broad ledge extended around the top of the base. The higher sides of the pyramid lay crumbled almost beyond recognition. Unlike the Egyptians, who constructed their monuments of stone to last the ages, the people of the river had built predominantly with brick. Some of the pieces were glazed. I picked up a fragment and squinted at it, but could not tell its color in the glow of the moon. It clinked like a shard of pot when I tossed it aside.
A scream froze my blood. I looked upward, sure that the wings of the Beast were closing to enfold me. From a fissure between the bricks of the sloping side of the pyramid came a flurry of movement. Something hit me in the chest and knocked me from my feet. The back of my head struck a brick, and I lay blinking, all strength gone from my limbs. I saw the dull flash of a blade arc upward, but before it could reverse its course, the weight that pressed on my chest was thrust aside. Martala’s curses rang on the night. I heard her dagger strike again and again into flesh. For a moment I must have lost awareness, for when next I opened my eyes, soft hands were helping me to sit up. I found myself able to move my limbs once again.
“A madman,” she said as she probed the back of my skull with her fingertips.
I winced at her touch, and felt the place. It was wet with blood beneath my hair. My head throbbed like a drum, but my wits were returned. Rolling to my knees, I crawled over to the crumpled shape that lay beside me, and heard a gurgle of breath.
He had the wild beard and hair of a madman. Even under the moon I could see its grayness. A ragged sleeveless tunic closed with a knotted sash was his only garment, other than a rough pelt of fur tied over his shoulders like a cloak. I brushed the dust from it and saw that it was the fur of a wolf. The stench that rose up from him was worse than any corpse. He gasped for air, blood bubbling at his lips, and revealed teeth so rotten, they were no more than blackened stumps lining his gums. Martala put her hand over her mouth and drew back her head, but I ignored the smell.
“Why did you try to murder me?” I asked in Greek.
He glared and groped across the ground at his side with his clawed hand. Glancing over, I saw that his dagger lay a cubit beyond his grasp.
I repeated my question in Arabic. He snarled and cursed me in a language strange to me, but similar to the language of the boatmen of Meskene. The desiccated flesh of the finger of Nectanebus gave me perfect knowledge of it, and I asked the question a third time in his own tongue.
“This place is sacred,” he said, eyelids drooping as the life ran out of his body. “Only the priests of fire may come here.”
“Are you a priest?”
“I am the last priest. Now there is no one to light the holy flame.”
His eyes began to close. I grasped his shoulders and shook him roughly. He choked on his own blood and coughed, meeting my gaze with hatred.
“What do you know of the wisest head of Babylon?”
He licked his lips, and blood welled from his mouth.
“You seek the head?”
“I seek it,” I said grimly. “Tell me where it is, and I will give you water.”
The rasping gurgle of his laughter surprised me.
“Go to the gate in the eastern part of the city. There you will see a pit between two fallen pillars. One of the pillars lies broken into three fragments. Descend, and you will find what you seek.”
“Why do you help me?” I demanded.
He made no answer, and I saw that he was dead. I let his reeking carcass fall from my hands and pushed myself to my feet. My head throbbed painfully and the stars spun around, making me stagger. Martala caught my arm and held it.
“You should sit, Alhazred. You are not fit to walk.”
Ignoring her gentle words, I pushed my way up the slope of rubble that led to the base of the fissure from which the madman had emerged. It split the pyramid as though cleft by some gigantic axe. The image was clear in my remembered dream. I saw in my mind the place where the ray of light had shone forth, and worked my way toward it, leaning upon Martala for support. At the back, the fissure narrowed so that I was forced to crawl into it on my hands and knees. The girl could not follow. Even the murk of indirect moonlight gave way to total darkness. I made my way by touch, following the image in my mind. Stretching on my belly, I reached my arm downward into a crevice. There was just enough light on the back of my cloak for the girl to see what I did.
“Are you mad? That hole may be filled with scorpions.”
I felt over the dusty bricks and between the cracks at its bottom. Bitter disappointment welled in my heart. The dark man had deceived me. The hole was empty. As I began to withdraw my hand, my fingertips brushed something that clinked with a metallic sound. Stretching my arm so far that I feared it would dislocate from its joint, I touched a smooth metal edge, and was able to fit it between two fingers. With great care I withdrew it from its resting place. Not until I closed my fist around it did I allow myself to breathe.
Martala helped me work my way out of the fissure. With every passing moment my head became clearer, although the pain did not diminish. I felt the back of my skull with my left hand and found that my bloo
d had ceased to flow. When we stood on the broad terrace beside the corpse of the mad priest, I opened my fist and looked at my prize. Martala caught her breath in amazement.
Beneath the moon it had the appearance of silver. It was a medallion no more than an inch in diameter, with a beaded edge and a loop for hanging it around the neck. One side was covered with a spiral of obscure hieroglyphs unlike those of the Egyptians. I could make nothing of them. On the opposite side the Elder Seal had been deeply cut. Its five branches, like the branches of a tree limb, gleamed in the moonlight.
“That is what the dark man wanted you to find?”
I nodded, fingering its engraved surface.
“But why?”
When there is no answer to make, it is foolish to speak.
We returned in silence to the campsite and renewed the fire with fresh wood, then led the horses away from the flies of the river. The night wind blew strong from the distant ruins, which could be seen from the hill, but it carried no refreshment. We settled ourselves on our rugs near the fire. For a long while I studied the medallion. In the firelight I saw that it was gold, not silver. There was a strangeness in its workmanship, and the metal felt unnaturally cold on my fingers, as though it sucked the heat from my flesh. I wondered if it truly was gold, or some unknown alloy of metals forged by ancient alchemy. With the disk in my hand, I drifted into uneasy sleep.
Chapter 39
The echo of a distant cry woke me. I lay wondering if I had heard it with my ruined ears, or in a dream. I sat up and saw the sun just rising above the ruins of the city. The long shadows cast by its slanting rays outlined with startling clarity the streets and buildings that had once existed. Many features were defined by nothing more than irregularities in the ground, and would have been wholly invisible under any other light. The ruins were much more extensive than I had imagined. They led around the base of the broken pyramid, and extended even to the river. I realized that we had made camp within the city itself, and that the hill upon which I sat was probably the remnant of some great temple or public building. The ruins that had survived best the passage of centuries were those constructed of stone, such as the fallen pillars and the fragments of carved statues. The much more numerous buildings of bricks, formed from dust in their making, had returned to dust, or almost to dust.
Martala stirred in sleep and broke my reflections. She yawned and stretched, blinking the dryness from her pale eyes. When she saw me watching her, she smiled with a curious expression.
“We live to see another morning, Alhazred.”
Cheese and hard bread formed our simple breakfast. I find little use for heated food, and did not intend to waste an hour of the day preparing a fire and cooking what could be eaten cold, in spite of Martala’s repeated wistful glances at the copper cooking pot. In the night, a camp fire serves other useful purposes, such as light for defense and warmth for sleeping, but to light a fire in the day merely to heat food is a foolish extravagance. The girl did not complain.
When our horses were watered and fed, I unbraided a length of the fine leather rope that we used to hobble their forelegs, and hung the gold medallion around my neck from one of its slender plaits. For a moment I wondered whether to leave it outside my cloak, but feared that it might be hooked and pulled away by some passing obstruction without my awareness. I slid it down the front of my throat and felt it cool against the skin of my chest over my heart. The coolness persisted, as it had in my hand. My conviction grew that it was no ordinary metal.
We had ridden past the fallen eastern gate of the city without taking particular notice of it on our first broad circuit of the ruins. This morning, we rode directly to the place. Each side of the gate was an elaborately carved pillar of stone wide enough at its top to lie upon. They were shaped like sitting lions, with jaws agape and a forepaw raised as though in warning. Once, the pillars must have towered like great cedars, but presently they rose no higher than a man could reach with his upstretched hand. Everything above had been overthrown in the wreck of the city, including the arching span of stone blocks that had formed the top of the gateway. Of the massive external fortification wall in which the gate had been set, no trace remained. The destroyers of the city had razed it to its foundation stones.
I wondered why they had left the lions, then realized that each was a single enormous block of stone. Their snarling faces showed marks where men had beaten them with hammers, but the stone must have been unnaturally hard, for the faces of the lions could still be distinguished.
Some way behind the gateposts lay two long pillars that touched at their ends like the spread first and second fingers of the hand. The pillar to the south had shattered in its fall to three pieces. Between them the earth sank downward, sloping toward the meeting place of the pillars and vanishing into shadow.
I dismounted and approached the pit with caution. Some subsidence in the ground had opened this cavity between the pillars. It did not have the appearance of a passage dug by men. I bent my eyes close to the sloping entrance. The wind that never fully ceased to blow in this accursed place had drifted dust over it, but there appeared to be a regular series of marks leading downward into the pit. They resembled the tracks left by the black beetles that wandered elsewhere amid the ruins, but enormously magnified. I laughed to myself at the fancy.
“What is so amusing?” Martala demanded.
Her tone held irritation. I realized that she missed her hot breakfast. Women can be frail creatures.
“Tie the horses to the broken end of that pillar and follow me.”
If I expected anything in the pit, it was the sight of some natural cavern that had collapsed at the roof and fallen in. Such caves, carved out long ago by flows of water, are not uncommon in the desert. To my surprise, I found a well-shaped vault of brickwork tall enough to allow me to walk upright and as wide as my outspread hands.
“What is this place?” the girl asked, hurrying up behind me while I stood peering into the darkness.
“A storage cellar, perhaps. Who can say?”
When we advanced into the shadowed depths of the passage and found no end to it, even when the light from the pit was a small patch on the slope of ground behind us, I knew it must be something other than a chamber. Martala laid her hand on my shoulder. It was too dark to see. We progressed more slowly by touch, feeling the way before us with our toes to avoid falling into an abyss. I stopped when we came to an opening in the wall, the mouth to a tunnel of much the same size and shape as the one we walked along. Martala felt past me until her hands touched the brickwork of its edge.
“Which way do we go?”
I stood listening. How far did these tunnels extend? And how many were there? A rat squeaked. At least we would not starve, if we became lost. From the side passage I smelled a faint odor of decay mingled with excrement.
“We will go this way,” I told her, leading her into the new tunnel.
“Why?”
“I smell death this way.”
She thought about this for a moment.
“Shouldn’t you be leading us away from it?”
“Where there is death, there is also life,” I explained with patience. “Flesh decays. Every creature must eat, and if it eats, it defecates.”
Following the stench, I made my way deeper into the bowels of the tunnels. They interconnected with each other like the web of a spider. At intervals, the roof had cracked or fallen in, allowing shafts of daylight to penetrate. We were not far below the surface. As I stood gazing at the wall beneath one of these ruptures, I realized where we walked. A white line ran across at the height of my waist, formed by salts that had leeched out of the bricks. The tunnels had once conveyed water. There were too many of them to be an aqueduct, so they could only be an ancient sewer system.
Without the indicator of the sun, it was impossible to guess how much time passed. Several
hours, at least. The tunnels were a true maze, and at last I acknowledged to myself in irritation that I must be leading us in circles. My nose, what remained of it, was not so sure a guide as I had supposed. My stomach rumbled with emptiness. I found reason to regret not humoring the girl with a hot breakfast. Licking my dry lips, I paused beneath a thin shaft of daylight from a crack in the roof and took off my water skin to drink.
“Alhazred, rats!”
Martala gave a small involuntary shriek and danced behind me as four large rats approached nervously, their noses twitching. The light from above made their eyes resemble tiny amber beads. She drew her dagger. At a glance it was obvious to me that the rats were merely curious. I corked the water skin and slung it on my shoulder, turning my back to avoid alarming them.
“They are coming closer!”
Their faint inquisitive squeaks allowed me to gauge their distance. They had few predators in the tunnels or they would not be so tame. With a practiced motion I twisted and crouched, snatching up the nearest rat in one hand. It squealed and struggled to escape my fingers, but before it could bite, I broke its neck against the wall of the tunnel. The others fled in confusion. Here was something new, a killer of their kind in their safe familiar tunnels. I slid the tip of my dagger down the belly of the dead animal and stripped off its skin with a twist and pull of my hand, then cut the meat away from its sides.
As I gnawed the raw meat, dripping with blood, I noticed Martala staring at me. I offered her the other strip of flesh. She looked at it with her lips parted and swallowed her spittle, then shook her head, stepping backward. I shrugged and finished the first piece, then began to chew the second. It was saltier than was desirable, but I had an ample supply of water.
While I gnawed the tough meat, I wondered how to best find my way through the maze of tunnels. We could easily waste the entire day wandering in loops and tracking backward over passages we had already traversed. I fell into a meditative study as I chewed. To my surprise, Martala did not interrupt my thoughts. Usually she was more talkative.
