Masters of the Maze (15 page)

“And eventually, Cum-raid Chauncey, they would come
here.
”

His host shifted uneasily on his bench, muttered, glanced around him quickly. His eyes rested for a moment on woman and child. She seemed to sense this, looked up and smiled, then went on with her playing. The music was quite strange to Nate Gordon, but after a while it began to catch his ear and take hold of him and linger.

“Shucks,” Chauncey said, in a lower tone; “if they’d ever come into Crete we’d of read about it in the books — wouldn’t we?”

Nate shook his head, violently. “Don’t cling to that hope,” he said, insistently. “That’s a straw. Ordinary common-sense applications of the laws of time and space don’t apply to the Maze. Maybe this Crete isn’t the Crete of our own history at all. No, no —

“Furthermore, it’s not the Chulpex alone. There’s this fanatic who calls himself Major Flint, him and his band of brothers, whoever they may be. They think they’re going to use the Chulpex to do most of their dirty work; then — they think — they’ll, somehow, get rid of them. And of course the Chulpex have got exactly the same notion, only in reverse. Suppose that Flint and his men
do
win? He made it, I can tell you, clear enough to me that once they’d conquered the old home world in my time-period and his, that then they’d turn their attention to the rest of time and space.”

Chauncey said, “Son of a
bitch.
” He got up and stamped the stones of the courtyard, whirled around to face Nate. “Now what in the name of God can I
do?”
he demanded. “I’ve got this de-vice, you’ve seen it, long-long thing with a short crosspiece, I don’t know exactly how it works — fact is, I don’t know how it works at all — but it sure scares the piss out of them Chulpex and sends them packin’, fast. Want I should stand there, like Horatius at the Bridge, standin’ off the Chulpex Grand Army? I can try. Might work, might not. But you say, suppose they git them some ways out of their own world, they bypass all the watched ways — what do I do then? Come out after ‘em, wherever they be, all ‘levendy-six skillion of ‘m, wavin’ my magic sword? You think it’d do a precious lot of good?

“I git along well enough here and now. I come here with a good trick or two up my sleeve, never mind what; and I made me enough to buy some land and a boat. I ain’t disliked much. But even was I to mobilize this whole blessed island, why, what good would
that
do? These people kin kill a bird on the wing with a slingshot at a hunderd steps, I seen ‘em do it. Think that’d help ag’inst your schools and schools of Chulpex? How much good would swords or bows and arrows do in the face of whatever big guns they got in your day? Why, brave though these people be, brave enough, a hunderd Minie-balls ‘d scatter ‘m. You ought to know that much.”

After a moment he said, “I got to think about this.”

He walked off, walked up and down, hand on chin. Nate got up and stretched. He had some thinking to do, himself. So far, coming here had accomplished nothing, but he had not known where else to go. Evidently Flint’s men had hold now of the Darkglen entrance, and even if they hadn’t and despite his glib assurances to Nate, Nate felt no certainty of not being picked up on a murder charge. If indeed a tentative will in his own favor had been drawn up by old Mr. Bellamy, its existence might well serve only to accuse him of having had a motive for killing the old man. “You might have thought it had been signed,” they could say.

He was by no means sure of finding the way to Et-dir-Mor via the Maze, and by no means sure of not finding Flint’s men in possession at that old man’s place, either. He thought he could reach Chauncey, though — as he had done — and they two at least shared a common language and, up to a point, a common history and pattern of thought.

Nate stretched again, and yawned. He had expended enough energy, Lord knew, to justify fatigue; and, too, this last meal had helped make him drowsy. A hand touched his arm. It was the woman, Chauncey’s wife or whatever she was. Strange, strange, she was no longer playing her kithara or whatever it was, because the tune was still going through his head. She smiled, imitated his yawn, gestured toward the room off the courtyard, bent over and patted an invisible bed.

“Might’s well catch forty winks if you can and want to,” Chauncey said, stopping in his perplexed walk back and forth. “I’ll wake you if I think of anything.
Thun
deration.”

The bed was made with straw and sheepskins with the fleeces still on them. Nate dropped off his shoes and his heavy, heavy coat, and crawled in with a groan. Straw and skins alike smelled vividly and he was commiserating with himself for not being able to fall asleep when, with a start of surprise too strong not to waken him, he fleetingly realized that he already had.

It was dark when he awoke, a darkness relieved by a huge fire and a multitude of twinkling little oil lamps. Darius Chauncey loomed against the firelight. He rose when he saw Nate, picked up two of the tiny earthen vessels with their burning, smoldering wicks. “Help yourself to a couple,” he said, “and come along …

“They ain’t a Hell of a much good,” he conceded. “From time to time I have thought of trying my hand at producing some summer-strained whale oil, glass chimbleys, a good woven and adjustable broad wick: modern, up-to-date inventions, as it were. But it’s for one thing ag’inst the unwritten rules, and then, too, I says to myself, ‘D’ri — just don’t you rock the boat.’ So I haven’t. Not so much as a tallow candle. Them few tricks I had up my sleeve, never mind what, they don’t count.

“Step down here. Step down …”

He set his lamps on a table in a chamber walled all in stone, and put the two that Nate carried on the other side, one in each corner. He pointed to something in the center, something like a small and truncated pyramid of translucent stone. “Know what that is?” he asked, gesturing. The lines of light, finer than spiderwebs, gleamed and did their strange gleaming things in the dim lamplight.

Nate nodded. “It’s a ward or a ward-stone. Et-dir-Mor told me a bit about it. He had one, too, of course. And — oh-oh! — now that I come to think of it … so do I … in … my … pocket …”

He stared at Chauncey, who stared back. Just as Nate’s voice had, word by word, fallen lower, so now the other’s grew word by word louder as he repeated, “You’ve got one — in … your …
pocket?
How — ”

Nate told him how he had found it under Joseph Bellamy’s body, how he had taken it with him when first he ventured into the strange world-between-worlds which was the Maze. “Eventually, I suppose, I just stuck it into my pocket and forgot about it.”

“Just … forgot about it. Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch. Never mind,” he said, abruptly. “Pay attention now to what I’m about to show you, and try to learn awful damn quickly. Pick it up. Hold it so. No —
so.
Like that. There, now, you let it drop a trifle. Up … over … See how the lines swell when you do it thataway?
All
right. Now — ”

Nate said, “What’s this for, that you’re trying to teach me?”

Chauncey sighed and sighed. “You maybe won’t thank me, and I may be doing wrong. But I’m going to show you how to reach the Center. And when you git there, well, you just tell the Masters all that you’ve been telling me. Maybe they’ll help you. I know they
kin.
What I don’t know, I don’t know if they
will.
”

His speech, in voice and accents, had sounded old-fashioned and comforting. It was like hearing, somehow, the archetypal American Old Man, somehow grown young. But when his voice stopped and Nate looked at him, bare-waisted and bronzed and kilted in the light of the flickering tiny lamps, he saw nothing but what belonged, seemingly, to the strange and alien world of Minoan Crete. And as for what he had been saying —

“ ‘Center?’ ‘Masters?’ The Center and the Masters of
what
?” he asked, bewildered. Again the strange tune of the strange stringed instrument ran through his mind, but it brought him no comfort.

“Why,” said Darius Chauncey, slowly, “of the Maze, of course … of the whole, entire, wonderful, damnable Maze …”

The Quechuas had trotted past him in a steady stream and at a steady pace. Some carried baskets or boxes by themselves, or were two-men teams carrying bales upon poles. Three men went by, one after the other, bent at increasing angles beneath the weight of elaborately engraved sun-disks of increasing size. Once a file of six men loped by, holding up the links of an enormous and glittering chain. Now and then one of the Quechuas, no more, would turn his eyes to look at him from the corners — a quick, quick, fearful glance — then they were gone. And once a noble in gorgeous regalia had gone by, swiftly, in a palanquin, face composed and frozen in almost unbelief, his eyes glassy with the shock of a man whose god is captive.

“Don’t bother, do not bother, hide your treasures and flee to the cloud-covered cliffs or the clamorous jungles,” Nate had wanted to tell them. “It will do no good; those you think to placate worship a god who was killed and in whose name they will, nevertheless, kill your god.”

But he had not said it. They could not have understood him, they would not have believed him. With deliberate speed, bowed down with grief and gold, they hastened to fill the insatiable chamber which held the Inca Atahualpa.

Fortunately no Spaniards passed his way. He followed the arrow-straight, stone-paved road which went up and went up; then he turned aside along a winding and probably pre-Incan trail which vanished into mists so cold he was glad of still having his overcoat. He had at one point grown hungry, but this was no problem: he stopped at the first roadside meal he saw in progress, and pointed. Bowing low, the men handed him the grilled ribs and baked potatoes; he walked on as he ate; behind him they murmured, “
Viracocha … Viracocha …
”

He walked slowly, slowly up the outer steps of the vast and crumbling and deserted temple he found at last, and down and down, down, down the inner steps. It grew gradually so dark that it was not until he chanced to blink and the skin of his face flashed into paroptic sight that he realized he had re-entered the Maze. He closed his eyes and walked straight across and through the dancing minotaurs and opened his eyes and came to an outside again where it was dark but not perfectly dark. Dimly, he saw that he was in a narrow place confined on either side by walls. It stank terribly of stale urine and there was the ugly noise of many, many angry or frightened people some distance away. He paused to consult his ward.

Far off on one of the edges was a thin line of light which was nonetheless thicker than the other lines. He had come far, and come far in a way and manner not susceptible to any means of measurement he knew of; he was terribly tired, he was frightened and oppressed; but now at last the Center was beginning to come into sight, and he could not stop.

He went on.

The great open place he next came to was paved with slabs of stone both slippery and uneven. There was not a soul in sight. He looked up and was just able to make out a great, pagodalike tower when the night exploded at his left into light and sound. A torrent swept across the square, guided by torch-flare, a torrent of shouting men whose dark faces gleaming with sweat and angry ecstasy were framed in long black hair barely confined by red headbands. Nate Gordon did not know the name of the city, nor the date within a decade; but in that glimpse he knew that the Taipings had entered the city; that was enough. He ran, he fled.

And the adherents of the Great Peace ran after him, shouting their joy and fervor and holy zeal and hatred, desirous only of taking his head and laying it at the feet of the Heavenly Wang, the potent Younger Brother of Jesus the Son of God.

Nate ran, flying and moaning, across the square and then down past the first, second, and the third hutungs; but then he had to go slow and to grope. He was gone by the time the torches reached there, but it made no difference: One may begin at any point in taking the measure of a circle, and the city was justifiably doomed in any event. Such of the women who were young and not ugly and had not perfidiously hanged themselves with their sashes, the victors saved, however, that the Heavenly Wang might take his choice of them and grace them by ascension to his terrestrial couch.

• • •

The mead was all a-flower with golden asphodel as Nate plodded across it with head hanging and feet dragging, barely noticing the perfume of them.

“Yonder comes Nathaniel,” said the first fair woman. “It is in vain that you pursue the horizon, Nathaniel. If you concern yourself with violence, you will become violent. There is no way through the mire which will not cause you to become miry. All is illusion, is it not, sisters? — all except my house, my palace, the name of which is Wisdom. There are seven times seven gates, and I will lead you through all of them in the proper order, and thus you will in time grow wise and know the proper course of things, not wasting time and substance in vain pursuit — Is it not so, sisters?”

He lifted the small, truncated pyramid of the dawn-colored ward-stone and peered at the mesh of luminous golden lines, but his eyes blurred and the lines blurred with them. He blinked and squinted, but it did no good.

“It is
not
so,” the second fair woman said, her voice ringing like a quickened bronze. “You will teach him to be at peace; he has no right to be at peace while any are at war. Go back, Nathaniel! Go back! Darius has only placed his burden upon you and sent you off with it into the wilderness; it is nothing to him if the weight of it causes you to be dashed in pieces. Do not continue this retreat, do not engage in speculation equally vain, return and fight, Nathaniel! Return and fight! Return — and I will go with you and fight by your side — Shall I not, sisters?”

The little wind danced across the field, and all the golden flowers briefly bowed their heads. Nate tried to speak, but his lips were dry and his throat was raw.

“No, you shall not,” the third fair woman said. “You would not remain, you never remain. Besides, he shall not go with you. Nathaniel. Nathaniel. There is always a menace. There is always a war. It is futile to become engaged, as futile as to try the impossible escape of introspection. Leave them and come with me, Nathaniel, for I can take you to a point beyond the circle, to a time before time, a place only to be reached through me. We will be pre-Adam and pre-Eve, Nathaniel; god and goddess, Nathaniel; Shelomo and Shulamith, Solomon and Sulamite. On me, Nathaniel, you will beget a new race which need never fall into the errors of any of the old ones …

“Come
with
me, Nathaniel — ”

“Come with
me —
”

“
Come with me —
”

“Come …”

He sat down on the fragrant ground and let the little wind ruffle his hair. When he looked up again, they were gone. He arose and trudged on and by and by he sighted the Lion Gate and he passed beneath its carven, stony lintel.

• • •

The next place was all black and white and something sniffed and snuffled and scuffled up ahead and made a noise of dragging fur and of scrabbling claws. Something very big. Something shadowy.

Nate turned around and softly went past and beyond and behind the way he had come in; then he went around. He did not look back.

• • •

Now the arms of the Maze shuttled back and forth and in and out, like great flashings. He paused and listened intently, holding his breath. Everything stopped. He did not move. Six paces ahead of him, where he would have been had he moved, two surfaces came together in an annihilating crash.
Then
he moved. And passed through safely. Behind him, the wrack continued. Ahead all was serene.

The man in the ragged turban addressed him in a French so odd and warbling that no Frenchman could have understood it. “Turn back,” he urged. “Turn back, O Ferenghi. For all that you must have embraced
Al-Islam,
or you would not dare to venture here, what will that avail you? There is cholera the length and breadth of the road to Mecca,
hadji
and
ulema
alike crawl upon their bellies like dogs in hopes of dying in the Sacred City. Turn back, O Ferenghi. There will be time enough for you to try the
haj
again. Has not the sultan’s
capidan
-pasha defeated the
giaours
at Lepanto? Turn back! Turn back!”

The frightful sun beat down upon them. Nate shook his head, and staggered on. His overcoat upon his arm sank down as though filled with stones.

The man in the ragged turban tottered on beside him. “Let not it be said that your death was on my head,” he pleaded. “Return at least to Jiddah, where there are other foreigners, and lodge there until the plague be stayed.”

Nate said, “No …”

“The brigand tribes are harrying the pilgrims like wolves. Those in the caravans are not safe; how then shall a single man on foot hope to escape?”

Nate said nothing. He put his hand to his forehead. He went on.

“Wellah!”
cried the man. “There is water, the last for leagues and leagues. Will you not at least pause and drink and gain strength?”

“No,” said Nate.

The would-be guide threw up his hands. “This is caution thrice compounded,” he moaned. “Do you fear that the cholera has got into that little spring? It may be so. Stop — Stop for just a moment.” He fumbled in his robe, took out a leather bottle. “Here is water as pure as water ever was. I filled it at the Holy Well of Zam-Zam near the Kaaba, before leaving Mecca. The plague had not reached there. For the sake of the merit, I will share it with you. Drink, my brother. Drink, or you must die.”

Nate shook his head. The man in the tattered turban grasped hold of him and thrust the wet, cool mouth of the water bottle to Nate’s parched and foul-tasting mouth. Nate shouldered him aside, the man stumbled, the bottle fell with gentle slowness so that at any moment he could have reached out and seized it, righted it. He went on. The bottle hit the sand with a thud. Water splashed, gurgled, was gone. By his side the man looked with sickened incredulity. The skin of his face stretched over an empty skull in which burned the two
ghul
-bright eyes of Shaitan the Accursed. And then he was gone, and the desert sands blew through his robe and rags.

In the middle distance the sun of fire blazed up from the walls of long-hidden Iram, the City of Brass. That way Nate followed on his burning feet.

• • •

He passed on, from outside to outside, down endless corridors echoing with the witless whistlings of the mindless minotaurs, through gate after gate. He ceased to see places. He experienced conditions and states. Nausea that racked him without ceasing. Hunger which bit him in every sense and cell. Vertigo, making mockery of such illusions as
up
and
down.
Cold such as had never numbed man before, surely, without having killed him. He could barely hold the ward-stone, scarcely see through frozen eyes. But up from the meshy weave of pulsing lines shone the tiny not-yet disk of the Center. He was not really near it. But he was perceptibly less far away.

The ward looked quite good on his table. The room was warm. He had dined well, there was a drink within reach, the manuscript in the typewriter was coming along just fine. He might have to tone it down a bit, but in general his description of the hashish-dream was calculated to convince any editor or reader who had never smoked or eaten hashish. It was, in fact, so vivid, that it almost for a moment had convinced Nate. Vast areas of it, blossoming like an evil flower, in the mind of his imagination, had not even reached the paper yet. Probably never would. There wasn’t room.

He paused in his attack on the keyboard, stretched pleasurably. If some of the details escaped while he was doing so, never mind. He had plenty. There were just a few more pages. In fact, there were only a few more fictional-factual articles to go. And then, with his $4,000 in bank drafts, travelers checks, and plain old dirty cash money, he could kiss the local scene good-bye and take off for Coimbra, Calabria, Carpathia, Carniola, and all the rest of it, pausing a bit to kick a fallen leaf in Vallimbrosa. Some particular detail — as was so often the case — nagged and tugged against being forgotten. Piss on it. A writer had to be firm, when the spirit was upon him like this, not to stop and allow this to happen, or else he would be overwhelmed. Still, it could be annoying. He must be firm.

Being firm, he got up to go to the bathroom. In the past he had found this often to be more helpful in forgetting than he could wish. Being firm, he knew that if he looked out the window he would forget important threads of his narrative.

So he looked out the window and, by an immense effort of concentration, he recognized the two men casually coming up the street.

Jack Pace and Major Flint.

The apartment and street ceased to be. He was, like one of his own characters, on the face of a cliff. He turned and began to clamber up the rocky wall. The
ping
of a bullet sounded. Powdered rock spurted into his face. He shouldered his way into a cleft in the rocks. Outside, something swooped on leathery wings and breathed its rage at him out of a huge triangle of teethy, stinking mouth. He put his back to the rock behind him, pushed, inched up. And up. And up. Soon there was nothing behind to press and lever against. He had to grope and climb. A looming shadow warned him in time enough to squirm around and kick out. The claws at the wing tip ripped at him. The creature fell away below, eddied there a moment, flapped away. He had no doubt it would be back.
Sping — ping!

He turned his defenseless back and climbed with bleeding, splintered fingernails. The tiny pterodactyls bit and gibbered at him in their noisome nest. He kicked them aside and burrowed through the filthy, foul, unbelievably foul mass of clotted dung and bones and dirt. One hand reached free, reached through. Able to close his eyes, trying to breath through his mouth, he heard the parent-thing land on the ledge. He gave a great, desperate lunge. Behind him, the tunnel in the guano collapsed with a dusty thud. The pterodactyl clucked its disconsolate confusion.