The Bible Repairman and Other Stories

by Tim Powers

  “Ah, well I had to see, didn’t I,” said Fenton, “that you were the lot I’ve been looking for, before I did any confiding. But your klepht has it right – sow our army from up here.”

  Trelawny let himself relax – the man’s caution had been natural enough, and he was clearly an ally – and he tried to imagine thousands of kiln-fired clay pellets spraying out over the Velitza Gorge on some moonlit night, the boom and flare of the guns and then the clouds of pale stones fading as they fell away into the echoing shadows.

  And then in the darkness of the forest floor the things would lose their rigidity and begin to move, and burrow through the mulch offallen leaves into the soil, like cicadas – to emerge in man-like forms at the next full moon. And Trelawny would be the immortal gate between the two species.

  He laughed, and nearly tossed the coward Byron’s toe out into the windy abyss; but it might still be useful in establishing the link.

  “My army,” he whispered.

  Fenton might have heard him. “When,” he asked, “will you – ?” He stuck a thumb into his own waistcoat below his ribs and twisted it, as if mimicking turning a key.

  Odysseus clearly caught his meaning. “Uno ano,” he said.

  Trelawny nodded. One year from now, he thought, at Midsummer’s Eve. But even now the sun seemed to burn his skin if he was exposed to it for more than a minute or so. During the long trek from Missolonghi he had worn his turban tucked around his face during the day – and even then he had been half-blinded by the sun-glare much of the time – but he wasn’t wearing his turban now.

  “We can talk later,” he said, “around the fires.”

  The other two nodded, perhaps sympathetically, and Trelawny turned away and hurried back up the stone steps into the shadows of the cave’s depths.

  Back in his room with the door closed, he pulled back the baggy sleeve of his white shirt and stared at the cut in his forearm. As Odysseus had predicted, it hadn’t stopped bleeding. According to Odysseus it wouldn’t heal until next year’s midsummer, when a more substantial cut would be made in his flesh, and a transcendent healing would follow. The bigger incision would have to be made with a new, virgin knife, but apparently Mount Parnassus had several veins of the lightweight gray metal.

  Trelawny leaped when something twitched in his pocket – he was used to lice, and even took a certain anti-civilization pride in finding them in his hair, but he didn’t want mice or beetles in his clothing – but then the wick of the tilted candle on the table sprang into flame again, and he realized that the agitated thing in his pocket was Byron’s toe.

  “‘Deucalion and Pyrrha,’” came Byron’s faint whisper from the flame. “‘Consecrated.’”

  Trelawny sat down on his narrow bed, then sagged backward across the straw-filled mattress and stared at the low ceiling beams. “Why do you care,” he said. “You’re dead.”

  “I hoped to see you,” said the flame, “back in Missolonghi – before I died. I don’t have many friends that I relied on, but you’re one of them.”

  “You liked me the way you’d like a dog,” said Trelawny, still blinking at the ceiling. The candle-smoke smelled of Macassar oil and cigars. “You always said I was a liar.”

  “I never flattered friends – not trusted friends. I never let dissimulations stand unchallenged, when I wanted honesty.” The frail flame shook with what might have been a wry laugh. “I only wanted it from very few.”

  “I never gave you honesty,” said Trelawny belligerently, and a moment later he was startled at his own admission – but, he thought, it’s only a dead man I’m talking to. “My mentor, the privateer captain de Ruyters – my Arab wife, Zela – none of it was true.”

  “I always knew, old friend. ‘Deucalion and Pyrrha,’ though – and ‘consecration.’ What ordeal is it they’re planning for you, here?”

  “‘Old friend.’” Trelawny closed his eyes, frowning. “Odysseus has a surgeon – he’s going to put a tiny statue into my abdomen, below my ribs. A statue of a woman, in fired clay.”

  “‘He took one of his ribs, and closed the flesh where it had been.’ And you want to reverse what Yahweh did, and put the woman back.” Byron’s tone was light, but his faint voice wobbled.

  Trelawny laughed softly. “It frightens you even now? Reversing history, yes. When clay is fired in a kiln, the vivifying element is removed from the air – wood can’t burn, it turns into charcoal instead – and this is how all the air was, back in the days when the Nephelim flourished. For the right man, the clay can still … wake up.”

  Byron’s voice was definitely quivering now. “The Carbonari, charcoal-burners, try to dominate their trade, because of this. They work to keep it out of hands like … yours.”

  “The Carbonari,” said Trelawny scornfully, “the Popes, the Archbishops of Canterbury! And you too – all of you afraid of a power that might diminish your – your dim, brief flames!”

  Byron’s ghost had begun to say something more, but Trelawny interrupted, harshly, “And your flame, ‘old friend,’ is out.”

  And with that he leaped off of the bed and smacked his palm onto the candle, and the room was dark again.

  For a moment he thought of Byron’s question – Shelley didn’t say what sort of … fond attentions these things pay to families of humans they adopt? – but then he thought, My army, and stepped to the door to join the others, regardless of the sunlight.

  III

  June 11, 1825

  “…it is our will

  That thus enchains us to permitted ill –

  We might be otherwise –”

  – Percy Shelley, “

  Julian and Maddalo”

  In the month since he and Tersitza had been turned back in their attempted midnight flight from the mountain, she had several times asked Edward Trelawny about the vrykolakas that had barred their escape. It seemed to him that she was morbidly fascinated by it, though she wouldn’t elaborate on her claim, that night, to have seen it herself.

  On this Saturday noon, though, Trelawny made his hopping and shuffling way down from his house in the high inner reaches of the cave to find her sitting at a table in the sunlight on the broad stone floor at the front of the cave and talking to Fenton about it.

  And another young English Philhellene, a newly arrived friend of Fenton’s named Whitcombe, was leaning on the parapet close enough to hear. He had only been staying at the cave for four days now, and Trelawny hadn’t yet talked to him at any length.

  A cannon barrel gleamed fiercely in the sunlight just beyond their table, and even up here, hundreds of feet above the treetops in the Velitza Gorge, the air was stiflingly hot. Fenton was bareheaded, but Tersitza was wearing a white turban with the loose ends tucked across her face.

  Reluctant to venture out into the direct rays of the sun, Trelawny had hung back in the shadows, and though he could hardly focus his eyes on the figures out in the glaring light, he had heard Fenton laugh.

  “In ten days your teeth will be fine,” said the Scotsman now in his cacophonous Greek. “You’ll be able to bite through stone.”

  Trelawny recalled that Tersitza had been complaining of a toothache for the last several days.

  “And throats,” Tersitza said lightly. “I wish I had had the courage to approach her, on those nights I glimpsed her on the mountain. She wasn’t threatening, I now believe – just – bigger than me, in all ways. Bigger than flesh.”

  Whitcombe turned to look toward Tersitza and Fenton, but Fenton shifted his head to glance at him; Trelawny couldn’t see Fenton’s expression, but Whitcombe looked away and resumed staring out over the gorge.

  Fenton turned back to face Tersitza. “It’s good you didn’t,” he said. “You’re not family quite yet.”

  Tersitza shifted on her chair and held up her arm so that her shawl fell back. Trelawny noticed a narrow band of white cloth above her elbow, and he thought he saw a spot of blood on it.

  “Almost I am, now.” She let the shawl fal
l forward, covering the band. “But I wish I had been awake, last month, when she stopped Edward and me from leaving her. For a while, he says, she took the form of a beautiful woman.”

  “No more beautiful than yourself, I’m sure,” purred Fenton, “and no more immortal than you’ll be, in ten days.”

  Whitcombe moved away to the right along the parapet, toward one of the cannons that was aimed out at the hillside of the gorge. Two rifles leaned against the low wall near him.

  She’ll be their prey, and change to one of them, Byron had said a year ago; supposing that you care about the child.

  At the time, Trelawny had not cared about Tersitza. The troubles of humans was not a concern of mine. Now his belly was cold with the certainty that her arm had been ritually cut in the same way that his had, by the lightweight gray-metal knife. Odysseus was imprisoned in Athens – could Fenton have presided over the ceremony?

  Trelawny stepped soundlessly back into the deeper shadows. Ten days from now would be Midsummer’s Eve, when Trelawny was expected to undergo the consecration to the mountain. He was supposed to have had the fired-clay statue inserted into his abdomen weeks ago, and the surgeon here was increasingly suspicious of Trelawny’s excuses and postponements.

  Where the hell was Bacon? It was almost four months now since he had gone off to retrieve the talisman from Captain Hamilton of the frigate Cambrian. Hamilton was the senior British Navy officer in the Aegean Sea, and his father-in-law had reportedly acquired the talisman when Percy Shelley’s ashes were buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome two years ago.

  Trelawny recalled his meeting in February with Major Francis D’Arcy Bacon, on indefinite leave from the 19th Light Dragoons.

  It had been the last time Trelawny had seen Odysseus; they had ridden with a dozen of Odysseus’s palikars to the abandoned ruins of Talanta, ten miles east of Parnassus, to meet with the Turk captain Omer Pasha and arrange a private three-month truce. “It is the only way in which I can save my people from being massacred,” Odysseus had told Trelawny; “if Ghouras will send me no supplies for my army, I can’t defend the Athenian passes, and I must find what allies I can.”

  Trelawny had been uneasy about making a secret peace with the Turkish enemy, and he had remembered Byron’s posthumous warnings about Odysseus’s purpose. But he had just nodded, as if Odysseus’s explanation of the meeting with Omer Pasha was entirely satisfactory.

  Rain had been thrashing down outside the ruined Greek church on the night of the meeting, and an attack from Ghouras’s troops in the area seemed likely, so the horses had been brought into the church still saddled, and the mutually mistrustful Turks and Greeks kept their rifles and swords close by them as they crouched against the walls or sat around the fire on the cracked marble floor.

  After Odysseus and Omer Pasha had concluded their pact, and a dinner of roasted goat had been followed by coffee and the lighting of pipes, several of Odysseus’s palikars had stepped in from the rainy night escorting a couple of disheveled strangers and announced that they had captured two Franks.

  One of the captives, a tall sandy-haired man of perhaps forty, looked around at the scowling crowd of Greek and Turkish soldiers in the firelight and said in English to his companion, “What a set of cut-throats! Are they Greeks or Turks?”

  Trelawny sat against the cracked plaster wall not far from the fire, puffing at a clay pipe, but he knew he was indistinguishable from the rest of Odysseus’s men.

  “Mind what you say,” the other man said quietly.

  “Oh, they only want our money,” the first man went on. He took off his wet hat and shook rainwater onto the floor. “I hope they’ll give us something to eat before they cut our throats – I’m famished.”

  In halting but comprehensible Greek, the man explained to Odysseus that he and his companion were neutral travelers simply out to see the country, and though neither Odysseus nor Omer Pasha appeared to believe him, Odysseus invited him to sit down and have some of the no-longer-hot goat meat.

  The tall man, who introduced himself as Major Bacon, sat down beside Trelawny; and as he gnawed at a rib he stared at Trelawny.

  After a while he muttered quietly, “You’ve got the Neffy brand, then, haven’t you?”

  “‘Neffy,’” repeated Trelawny, also speaking quietly. “As in Nephelim? The ‘giants that were in the earth in those days,’ in the sixth chapter of Genesis?”

  Bacon had dropped the goat bone he’d been holding, and now asked Odysseus for raki, the local brandy. Odysseus spoke to one of his palikars, and the man stood up and handed Bacon a cup of wine.

  “If they’re robbers,” Bacon called to his unhappy companion on the other side of the fire, “they’re good fellows, and I drink success to their next foray.”

  Lowering his voice, he said to Trelawny, “You’re English? You certainly don’t look it. No, I said you’re a … hefty man.” He forced a laugh. “But hardly a giant.”

  “It’s all right,” Trelawny told him, staring into the pile of burning logs on the ruined marble floor. “I do have the, the ‘Neffy’ brand, I know.” He touched his forearm, but he knew that the mark showed in his face too, in his eyes.

  Ah.” The major retrieved his goat bone and stared at it thoughtfully. “Not … altogether happy about it, are we?”

  Trelawny glanced at Bacon, wondering what this stranger might know about the ancient race that slept unquietly in Mount Parnassus, and their imminent awakening.

  “Not altogether,” he ventured.

  “Would you … get away, if you could?”

  Trelawny thought of young Tersitza, asleep in his bed back in the cave on the mountain, and sighed. “Yes.”

  Bacon pursed his lips and seemed to come to a decision. “Think of an excuse for you and I to talk away from these men.”

  After a pause, Trelawny nodded, then got up and crossed to where Odysseus sat, and whispered to him that Bacon was willing to carry a letter to the British Navy asking for Odysseus’s safe passage to Corfu or Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea. With Ghouras in charge of Athens now and already trying to arrest Odysseus, it would in fact be a valuable option to have.

  But ever since the day he had talked to Byron’s ghost, Trelawny had been trying to figure out a way to get a message to Captain Hamilton of the HMS Cambrian.

  “Good,” said the klepht. “Have him write it.”

  Trelawny straightened, nodded to Bacon, and then led the way to a doorless confessional in the shadows away from the fire.

  When Major Bacon had joined him, carrying his cup of wine, Trelawny told him about the proposed letter.

  “Very good,” said Bacon, settling onto the priest’s bench in the confessional’s center booth. “I can write such a letter, in fact.”

  “I do want you to write to this Captain Hamilton,” said Trelawny. There was only a leather-covered kneeler in his booth, in which parishioners had once knelt to confess their sins, so he leaned against the plaster wall. “I have another purpose.”

  “You can tell me what to write. But – you’re marked with the metal from fossile alum! And I gather you have some idea of what sort of … antediluvian creature you’re a vassal to.”

  “Not just any vassal.” Trelawny smiled unhappily and quoted Louis XV. “Après moi le déluge.” Who are you? How do you know about these things?”

  The older man grinned, though not happily.

  “I was a vassal to them myself, boy, until two and a half years ago, when the link between the two species was broken in Venice. Before it was broken, I watched my wife and my infant son die, and – and met them again later, when they had crawled back up out of their graves.” His voice was flat, not inviting comment on events that he had clearly come to some sort of costly terms with. “None of it troubled me at the time. I was … married, to one of the Nephelim, and the troubles of humans was not a concern of mine.”

  “But it – is, now,” Trelawny hazarded cautiously.

  “There are other wives and sons,” Ba
con said, “besides mine. I make what amends I can, for the sake of my soul. When I learned that some fugitive members of the Hapsburg royalty were in Moscow, hoping to interest Czar Alexander in reviving the Nephelim connection, I went there, and – prevented it. Then I learned that a Greek warlord had taken possession of the Muses’ very mountain and had lately performed human sacrifices in the villages of Euboaea, so I came here.” He looked at Trelawny curiously. “The warlord had a partner in those sacrifices, a foreigner.”

  Trelawny looked back toward the fire. “Already,” he said hoarsely, “the troubles of humans was not a concern of mine.”

  “But it is now?”

  “I didn’t know – quite how jealous these things are – until an old friend told me. I have two daughters back in England, and, lately, a wife.”

  “Stay in touch with your old friend,” advised Bacon. “We tend to need reminding.”

  “He’s dead. He was dead when he told me.”

  Bacon laughed. “I’m dead myself, in every important respect.” He nodded toward the men around the fire. “My traveling companion is one of the Philhellene rabble, whom I hired as a guide in Smyrna. He still fears death.”

  Trelawny wasn’t sure if he himself did or not. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to convince Captain Hamilton of the facts you and I know, and then have him get from his father-in-law a … piece of bone that he once stole as a souvenir.”

  “Ah?”

  “When I got to Rome in April of ‘23, I supervised the re-burying of Percy Shelley’s ashes. You’ve heard of Shelley?” “Atheist poet?”

  Trelawny frowned. “Among other things. He … apparently!… killed himself to save his own wife and son from these things. He was born into the family of these creatures, and even before his death he had begun to petrify. I was at his cremation in Viareggio in August 1825 of ‘22, and when we scraped his ashes into a wooden box, I noticed that his jawbone had not burned. But when I arrived in Rome I found that his ashes had been buried in an anonymous corner of the cemetery, and I insisted that the box be dug up again and re-buried in a more prominent spot – and I looked in the box before I buried it.”