And the saints would be sure to get him out again, I thought selfishly. I could cling to his robes or something when they came to save him.
Theodora was a different matter. “You have to stay here,” I told her, “to take care of Antonia.”
“She’s sleeping in Gwennie’s room right now,” said Theodora. “Apparently it’s a nostalgic visit, reminiscent of her first visit to Yurt when she was just a little girl—just seven or eight years ago to us, more than half a lifetime to her.
She’s almost grown up, Daimbert, and you can’t have missed the fact that she has a mind of her own. I don’t think she’s going to need ‘taking care’ of much longer.”
“Anybody who releases an Ifrit from its bottle,” I said darkly, “seriously needs to be looked after.”
“Regardless of Antonia,” said Theodora, brushing her lips against my cheek, “when I married you, standing in front of the bishop, I promised to stay with you through better and through worse. You’ve slipped away from me before, but I’m not going to let you do so again. Going to Hell certainly strikes me as one of the ‘worse’ patches for which the oath prepares us.”
“If we’re going to do this,” said Joachim, “it had better be immediately, before the rest of the castle wakes up and finds out what we’re doing, before Elerius summons a demon without giving us a chance to follow it.”
He rose and stretched, then gave me a somewhat quirked smile. “Knowing you, Daimbert, has certainly been the one of the most interesting aspects of my life.”
I had been able to contemplate doing this only by keeping from thinking very much about the probable outcome. But at the bishop’s words I went cold down to my toes. This sounded like something someone said when he assumed his life was effectively over.
We slipped out of my chambers and went silent as wraiths across the empty courtyard, to where a rusted iron door marked the entrance to the cellars. They had been dug, centuries ago, too close to the well, and were always damp. When I first came to Yurt the cellars had been locked for years. Now the door had stood open for still more years, and the first level of abandoned storerooms was used to grow mushrooms.
I had taken a magic light from my room, and it lit our way as we descended the stairs, past the mushrooms, to the dark, slick tunnels beneath. There were faint scurrying sounds in the distance, but other than that the silence of the tunnels was so heavy it roared in our ears, and the sounds of our feet against stone seemed like great slaps. “Tell me, Joachim,” I asked quietly, “what’s really on the other side?”
He looked back over his shoulder at me, his eyes catching a reflection of light. “On the other side, of course, is us sitting having a glass of wine together, talking with some amazement of how we were able to overcome Elerius.”
That wasn’t what I meant, but then he doubtless knew that. I lifted the light higher, and we kept on walking. Damp cold bit into us. Theodora’s hand in mind seemed like the only warm thing left in the world.
At the very bottom of the cellars, past rooms and tunnels and slimy stone walls dripping with moisture, were sheets of wood and boards all nailed together, covering a spot on the floor. Three pentagrams encircled the spot; the chalk of one had been partially washed away by the damp, but the other two still held. Below, as I knew all too well, was a hole leading to Hell.
I closed my eyes and must have stood, incapable of movement, for several minutes, before Theodora asked, “What should we use to pry up the boards?”
I opened my eyes. “Magic, of course.”
Wizardry still made a number of things easier, including my own destruction. I set the light to one side and started ripping up boards with magic, then using a lifting spell to stack them against the wall.
The hole was exactly as I remembered it, utterly black and bottomless. Curling up from it, greenish in the lamplight, came a tendril of brimstone.
“This is your last chance,” I said to the other two. “You really should not come with me.”
Theodora did not answer but only held tighter to my hand. Joachim took my other hand. “Shall I count to three,” he suggested, “and we can all jump together?”
IV
We seemed to fall for a very long time. When we jumped, feet-first, into the gaping hole, my eyes squeezed shut and I gripped the others’ hands so tightly I could have broken their bones, expecting any second to smack into the floor of Hell. But there was at first no sensation at all. When I opened my eyes, all was dark, and I couldn’t tell if we were suspended or still falling. Faintly in the distance I could hear blood-chilling wails, which sounded like the cries of lost souls—and probably were. Something brushed against us, something like a huge wing. Close by I heard a gnashing of teeth—either the despair of the damned, or else the pleasurable anticipation by some unspeakable winged monster of sinking its teeth into a new soul. Joachim and Theodora were totally silent beside me. After what could have been a few minutes or a few hours, the sensation of hanging suspended changed, and we were very clearly falling again. Wind rushed by us, and a faint light glowed beneath our feet. We shot from darkness into light, and the next moment the three of us were standing on a dark and dusty plain, beneath a lowering sky. Off on the horizon dull orange flames were reflected against the clouds above. The land around us was unfeatured, except for the prospect straight before us. There ran a black river, steaming and fetid, running so rapidly that swimming would have been hopeless. As the waves crested and broke against the rocks, I thought I saw, faint within them, traces of human shapes. On our side of the river was a boat. And standing in the boat, leaning on a pole, was a hooded figure with no face.
“I think we have to cross that river,” said Theodora in a small voice.
I didn’t like the looks of either the boatman or the boat— too creaky, I thought, as likely to drop us into that polluted river as carry us across. “Maybe I can fly us over instead,” I suggested.
But Joachim shook his head. “Magic won’t work here.”
Not believing him, I tried a simple spell of illusion—and found that my magic was gone. This was definitely going to make it harder to find and follow whatever demon Elerius might summon. Well, I had myself commented that only the supernatural was going to be any use against him.
“What happens,” Theodora asked quietly, “if we try to cross in that boat and it capsizes in the middle of the river?”
“Then we drown, of course,” said Joachim. “We can die just as easily in the netherworld as in the land of the living— probably easier. But there is nowhere else to go except across the river.”
We slowly walked closer. A voice came out of the blackness of the ferryman’s hood, a spectral voice that vibrated across the dead landscape. “That will be three silver pennies for the three of you.”
Theodora groped in her pocket. “I’ve got it.”
I wondered what happened to the dead who hadn’t thought to bring exact change with them. Theodora reached out to drop the coins into the ferryman’s skeletal hand, her skin brushing against his.
He jerked his hand back so fast he almost dropped the coins. “You’re alive!” he snapped, and raised his pole threateningly. “What are you doing in Hell?”
It was going to be hard to explain. I stepped as casually as I could between him and Theodora. “We’re looking for someone.”
He brandished the pole in my face. “I’ve only let a few of the living in here during all of eternity, and every time it was a mistake. All they wanted was to take the dead back out with them.”
“We do not come for the dead,” said Joachim, very stern, and for a moment even the ferryman seemed intimidated. “Our mission lies elsewhere.”
“All right, then,” the ferryman retorted after a brief pause, “you can go on with your ‘mission,’ but let me tell you right now. With or without the souls of the dead, once you cross this river you won’t be crossing it back in my boat!”
“Then we are agreed,” said Joachim, still stern. I glanced around, wonderi
ng how else we were supposed to get out of here, and looked upward in the hope of a last glimpse of the cellars of Yurt, whose deserted dank corridors now seemed positively appealing. But there was no hole in the sky, no indication of anything but arid sand, lurid flames in the distance, and this black river.
Theodora scrambled into the boat and moved up toward the prow, and Joachim and I followed. The boat, as I feared, seemed scarcely capable of ferrying even one of us across, much less three. It shifted alarmingly under our weight, and small jets of foul water shot between the boards. The ferryman pushed off with his pole, and we were immediately seized by the current, spinning around and almost crashing against a rock, from which he fended us off just in time. We sat very still, trying to keep out of his way, as he poled desperately. I couldn’t help but notice that we seemed to be making no headway.
“The weight of flesh,” the ferryman gasped, as a wave broke over the railing, “is more than this boat was made to handle!”
“We paid you in silver,” said Joachim firmly, “and you agreed to take us. You cannot turn back now.”
The boat spun again, and again as waves splashed high around us I thought I saw the shapes of human body parts, faintly outlined in the spray. The remains, I wondered, of those who had not made the crossing successfully?
But the ferryman kept on poling. He worked us out of one eddy, and in momentarily smoother water he was able to make a dozen yards of forward progress. Then the current hit us again, and we were swept downstream, far away now from where we had first begun to cross. Off in the distance I could hear a heavy roaring, as of this river pouring over a precipice.
Theodora’s face was white, and her lips tight together. I squeezed her arm, wondering what would happen after we shot over the waterfall. Would we just continue our journey across Hell, being dead now, or would we have to start all over again?
The river banks were closer together here and steeper. Caught in another eddy, the boat spun right next to the shore—and then came joltingly to a halt, as the prow caught on a hidden rock. Theodora was thrown into my lap by the force of the impact.
“Out,” said the ferryman. “All of you, out!” Water was now gushing into the boat—we were going to be in the river in a few seconds anyway.
A scrubby tree, that looked as if it had never borne a leaf, leaned over the bank, just beyond my reach. But Joachim, with his longer arms, stretched up and seized it. “Hold onto me,” he told us, swung a foot over the boat’s railing to plant it against the nearly vertical riverbank, and started to climb.
Theodora and I clung to his shoulders like children, and for a second the bishop seemed to have grown, twentyfeet tall and enormously muscular. Then he had pulled his way far enough up the bank that we were able to snatch at branches ourselves, and drag ourselves to safety. Behind us, the boat, freed of ourweight, leaped higher in the water. The ferryman did something in the prow, then started poling steadily and easily back upstream, without a backward glance.
We sat on the rocky ground for a moment, catching our breaths. “This was an even more idiotic idea than I thought,” I said, wondering how Joachim had managed to grow like that, and shy to ask him. He looked perfectly normal now, wringing fetid water out of his vestments.
“As long as we cannot go back,” he said, “we should go on.”
The landscape still was dry and unfeatured, the occasional bush twisted and dessicated. “I somehow thought Hell would be more, well, violent,” said Theodora, “not just have flames off on the horizon.”
“We are not yet actually in Hell,” said Joachim. “These are only the outskirts.”
We started walking along the riverbank. Here we were on a high ridge and were able to look for what seemed many miles across the depressing outskirts of Hell. The sounds of the waterfall before us grew closer. Beyond the churning black river below us, I spotted another river, also aiming toward the waterfall, and on our other side, off across the stony plain, were the beds of two more.
“These are the four rivers of Hades,” said Joachim, sounding almost pleased, “just as I have seen them described.”
“When people die,” Theodora asked, “do they all have to make this entire journey, starting with the ferryman?”
“When I was dead,” I provided, “I don’t remember seeing anything like this.”
The bishop looked thoughtful. “Hell is very old,” he said, “the first creation of Lucifer when he rebelled against God and tried to make himself God’s equal. All humans came here between the Fall and the time of Christ. Some of theearliest recorded visions of Hell took place before the beginning of the Christian era, and all mention the ferryman and the four rivers. With the coming of Christ, however, and the coming of salvation, I think that those who die with pure hearts skip this—and even the damned may not now start at the beginning.” That would avoid the problem of not carrying silver pennies, I thought. “We, however, entered living.”
We had now come so close to the waterfall that we had to stop talking because of its noise. All four rivers came together here, and the ridge along which we had been walking ended in a promontory, thrusting out into a chasm, down into which the stinking black water of the rivers poured. Arching over that chasm was a bridge. It was narrow, spiked, and wet with spray from the roaring water. Its rusted iron span was no more than twelve or fifteen inches wide, and in the distance it seemed to shrink to the width of the hair. On the far side of the chasm, a quarter mile away, rose a castle’s dark walls. Theodora and I looked at each other. Neither one of us liked the appearance of that bridge, but it seemed the only way on.
Joachim did not hesitate. He started across the bridge at once, placing his feet carefully between the spikes, his arms out to the side to keep his balance. The moment he stepped on the bridge there was a sharp sizzling sound, and for a second he stopped with a cry. He half turned toward us, and I saw that the silver crucifix he always wore around his neck was gone. But then he turned resolutely back toward Hell, and again started placing his feet between the spikes of the bridge that would take him there. He was our guide, and our only hope of ever finding our way out of here. I gave Theodora what was supposed to be a reassuring smile and started after him.
As soon as I stepped on the bridge, I was hit by a powerful wind. Reeking with the scent of the fetid waters below, the wind made me sway so that for a second I almost lost my balance. I snatched at one of the spikes to steady myself, then jerked my hand back with a red slice across the palm. For a second I went totally motionless, my knees refusing to move as I contemplated the drop into the roaring waterfall below. I took a quick peek, to see if I could see the bottom of the chasm into which the water raced, and could not.
Theodora spoke behind me, her voice low under the thunder of the water. “Hell doesn’t want us.”
I started to take a deep breath, almost choked on the foul smell wafting up toward us, and took a few quick shallow breaths instead. I couldn’t spend the rest of eternity here, especially since Theodora, with her much better climbing ability, was waiting behind me to go on. If Hell didn’t want us, that must mean we were on the side of right. By sheer will, I urged my feet forward.
Another step, and another. And then, strangely yet undeniably, the bridge was getting wider. The spikes shrank and seemed less sharp, and I was able to step without each step being an exercise in swaying and determination. Ahead, I saw that Joachim had already reached the far side. I didn’t dare go too fast, for fear that I would fall when three-quarters of the way across and have made most of the difficult crossing for nothing. But in a few minutes of grim balancing I too was on the far bank, and Theodora was right behind me.
“Here,” said Joachim, “is where we truly enter Hell.”
Hell was guarded by a castle’s soaring stone walls, as though it actually wanted to keep out the souls of the damned. But its gate was open. An inscription over it read, “Through me lies the way to eternal pain. Through me runs the path of the lost. Abandon all hope, ye who enter
.” Standing in the gateway was a enormous black hound with three heads. Its six eyes were a bright red, and its fangs long and sharp. But it wagged its tail at us, its three tongues lolling from its mouths. “How are we supposed to get by that?” Theodora asked, staying back behind me.
But Joachim advanced confidently. “It shouldn’t stop us. These walls aren’t for us. They are to prevent the escape of the damned.” And indeed as he advanced the dog stepped to one side. Its monstrous heads were on a level with the bishop’s, and it gave him a quick lick with each tongue as he went by. I pulled Theodora rapidly past while it was distracted. Two steps, three steps beyond the gate, and we were into Hell. Spreading at our feet was a lake of molten fire. I stopped and looked back at the hound. Immediately it bared its fangs and began to growl, crouched ready to spring on me if I took even one step back. I turned quickly around and moved closer to the burning lake. Going on remained our only choice.
The heat from the lake beat against our faces, and the air was heavy with the smell of sulphur. “I hope we aren’t going to have to resort to an inadequate ferry boat again,” said Theodora.
But the bishop shook his head. “There should be a path around the lake.”
I put a hand on his arm. “Who are those?” Standing in the lake, up to their chests in burning pitch, were human shapes. They were clearer than the forms I had thought I had seen in the first river of Hades, but when I looked at them directly they faded. Only when I looked at them sideways did they gain any solidity. Fire licked at their naked skin, covered with raw burns and with bites from giant snakes that writhed in the flames. The human shapes twisted in pain, and their mouths moved as if screaming, but I could hear nothing.
Is This Apocalypse Necessary? Page 42
