Mountain of Black Glass (43 page)

But, as he realized when he could sit up straight, there was no shelter anymore. Only the mast still stood upright on the deck, and of that only the bottom half. The sail had snagged on the edge of the raft, but most of it was now floating in the water; the rest of the mast, still attached to the sail, trailed a few meters behind the raft. Of the remainder of Calypso's gifts, the jars of water and food, no sign remained except a pale shape that might have been one of the urns bobbing on a distant swell a hundred meters beyond his reach. Other than the twin silhouettes of Charybdis and Scylla's peak, now so far behind him they were only pastel shadows, he was surrounded by a featureless circular horizon of water.

Murmuring with weariness and pain, Paul tied the veil around his neck and set himself to the agonizing task of reeling in the heavy sail. He tugged the splintered mast on board as well, although the effort made his arm ache like a rotten tooth, then pulled up an edge of the sodden canvas and crawled beneath it. Within moments he fell into exhausted sleep.

 

When he crawled out from beneath the sail, he was not certain whether the sun being lower meant that he had slept for only a few hours or had slumbered the clock 'round and had lost a full day. Nor, he realized, did he care.

Knowing the drinkable water was gone made his mild thirst seem worse than it was, but it also set him thinking about his real body again. Who was taking care of it? Obviously they were feeding and hydrating him sufficiently—he was far less interested in eating or drinking than would have been the case otherwise. But what were they
doing
with him? Were nurses or other attendants watching over him with compassionate concern? Or was he stuck in some kind of automated life support, little more than a prisoner of the shadowy Grail Brotherhood that Nandi had mentioned? It was strange to think of his body as such a separate thing, something not really connected to him. But it was connected, of course, even though he could not feel it in any direct way. It had to be.

The whole muddle was a little like his only experience with hallucinogenic drugs—an ill-fated, ill-conceived attempt back in his schooldays to be like his friend Niles. Niles Peneddyn, of course, had taken to the world of consciousness-alteration with the same insouciance he approached everything else, from sex to Alpine skiing—as a series of lighthearted adventures that would someday make entertaining vignettes for his autobiography. But that was the difference between them: Niles sailed through life and past danger, but Paul wound up vomiting seawater, dragging broken mast and sodden sailcloth behind him.

Psilocybin for Niles had meant new colors and new insights. For Paul it had meant an entire day of panic, of sounds that hurt his ears and a visual world that had slipped beyond comfortable recognition. He had ended the experience curled in his dormitory bed with a blanket over his head, waiting for the drug to wear off, but at the peak of the experience he had been convinced that he had gone mad or even comatose, that his own body was out of his reach and he was doomed to spend decades prisoned in one tiny, walled-off section of his mind while his material form was wheeled around in a nursing home pushchair, dribbling helplessly down its chin.

In fact,
he thought,
I should be terrified of that right now.
His body was no longer his to control, after all, his psilocybin nightmare made real—or virtual, anyway. But the world around him, false though it might be, seemed so genuine that he did not feel that same sense of claustrophobic terror.

He had been idly watching Calypso's urn bobbing on the waves, but it was only as he let the memories drift away that he realized something was wrong: it was a very strange shape for an urn, and in fact seemed to be draped across a collection of flotsam in a most un-ceramic way. He rose, wincing as he pushed himself upright, and squinted into the angled sun.

The urn was a body.

It was such a strange realization, the conceptual expansion of his current world from solitary to double-occupied, even if one occupant might be a corpse, that Paul needed long moments to grasp the situation and engage his sense of responsibility. It would have been different if there had been an obvious, easy way to reach the body, but the assaults of Scylla and Charybdis had not only destroyed the mast but also denuded his little craft of everything useful, including his long-handled oars. If he were going to perform a rescue, or more likely formalize the need for a burial at sea, he would have to swim.

It was a depressing, miserable thought. His arm was certainly sprained if not broken, the other castaway was almost certainly dead and probably hadn't been a real person to begin with, and God only knew what kind of Homeric monsters roamed these deeps. Not to mention that big fellow with the beard, Poseidon, programmed for some nasty dislike of the Odysseus sim Paul was currently inhabiting.

More importantly, he was feeling the need to go forward. Despite the setbacks, he had survived the journey to this point and was more than ever determined to get to Troy, whatever that might mean. He was struggling hard to take his fate back into his own hands—how much effort could he afford to waste on other things? How many wrong paths could he afford to take?

Paul sat and stared at the silent, motionless figure as the sun inched down the heavens toward evening.

 

In the end it was the paradox of need that decided him. If his own helplessness felt so great and so painful, how could he simply turn his back on another person? What would that make him? How could he even judge what was true self-interest in any case—what if the floating figure turned out to be another Nandi . . . or Gally?

Besides,
he thought ruefully as he lowered himself over the side,
it's not like it's that easy to tell who the real persons are back in the real world either. You just have to do what's right and hope for the best.

Despite the relatively short distance it was a hard, painful, and frightening swim; Paul had to keep lifting his head to make sure he was going in the right direction, resisting the small waves which wanted to tug him aside into green nothingness. When he finally reached the body and its floating bier, he grabbed the nearest timber—splintered scrap from someone else's wrecked boat—and hung on until he regained his breath. The victim was no one he recognized, which was not terribly surprising—a man dark as Nandi but much larger. The stranger wore nothing but a kind of skirt of rough cloth with a bronze knife shoved under the waistband; his exposed skin had the sun-reddened look of a plum. But most importantly, his chest rose and fell with shallow breath, which eliminated Paul's easy option of swimming back unencumbered to the raft, secure in the knowledge that he had done his best.

Clinging to the flotsam with his good hand, but still using his other arm far more extensively than was sensible, Paul first knotted together the ends of the feather-veil and looped it around the man's chest under his arms, then drew the stranger's knife and slipped it into his own belt. He pushed his own head through the loop, taking the veil in his teeth like a horse's bit, and gently slid the man off the wreckage and onto his back. It made an awkward configuration.

The trip back was even more harrowing than the trip out, but if sea monsters or angry gods lurked beneath the waves, they contented themselves with watching Paul's struggling, agonized, mostly one-armed progress. The veil dug painfully at the corners of his mouth, and the stranger seemed to come close to wakefulness several times, contorting himself and dragging at Paul's already less-than-Olympian crawl stroke. At last, after what seemed an hour fighting through the swells, each wave heavy as a sandbag, he reached the side of the raft. With a last heroic effort he dragged the stranger up onto the deck, then slumped beside him, gasping. Tiny prickles of light like infant stars swam before his eyes against the deepening blue of the sky.

 

She came to him in the dream, as she often did, but this time without the urgency of other visitations. Instead he saw her as a bird in a forest, flitting from tree to tree while he followed beneath her, imploring her to come down, afraid against all logic that she would fall.

Paul woke up to the gentle roll of the raft. The body that he had so laboriously brought back through the waters and wrestled onto the deck was gone. He sat up, sickly certain that the stranger had rolled off the raft and drowned, but the man was sitting on the other side of the deck, his muscled, darkly-tanned back to Paul. He had the broken top of the mast and a hank of sail on his lap.

“You're . . . you're alive,” Paul said, aware that it was not the most perceptive opening he could have chosen.

The stranger turned, his handsome, mustached face almost a mask of indifference. He indicated the objects “If we make a small sail, we can reach one of the islands.”

Paul was not quite ready to begin a conversation about boat repair. “You . . . when I saw you I thought you were dead. You must have been floating there for hours at least. What happened?”

The stranger shrugged. “Caught in that damned riptide outside the strait, smashed against the rocks.”

Paul started to introduce himself, then hesitated. He was certainly not going to give his real name to this stranger, and even the name “Odysseus” could bring trouble with it. He struggled to remember what the ancient Greeks had made of words with “j” in them. “My name is . . . Ionas,” he said at last.

The other nodded, but seemed in no hurry to reciprocate. “Hold this sail so I can cut it. What's left we can use to make a shelter. I do not want to spend another day in the sun.”

Paul crawled forward across the deck and held the heavy cloth straight while the stranger sawed at it with his knife, which he had apparently reclaimed while Paul was sleeping. Nothing was said about the changes of possession, but the sharp and shiny fact of it was like a third person between them, a woman that they could not both have. Paul studied the man, trying to decide how he fit in. Although there had been much variation among Odysseus' subjects on Ithaca, the stranger still seemed too dark to be Greek, and he had the first mustache Paul had seen since entering this simulation. He decided from the man's careless skill with blade and sailcloth that the stranger must be a Phoenician or a Cretan, one of the seagoing peoples whose names still held a dusty place in Paul's memories from school.

They rigged the makeshift sail as the last light faded from the sky, using the broken piece of mast as an improvised yard, lashing it crossways to the rest of the mast with strips of cloth. As the cool breezes rose, the stranger made a crude tent with the rest of the sail, although there was no longer an immediate need.

“If we bear that way,” the stranger said, frowning at the first stars of the evening, then pointing to the starboard side, “we'll hit land in a day or so. We just don't want to go anywhere near . . .” He stopped and looked at Paul, as though he had only just remembered the other man's existence. “Where are you bound?”

“Troy.” Paul tried to look at the stars as though he could make sense of them, but had no more idea at that moment of where Troy was than he knew where his real, mundane and beloved England might be.

“Troy?” The stranger cocked a jet-black eyebrow, but said nothing more. Paul thought he might be considering taking the raft for himself—perhaps he was a deserter from the Trojan War, Paul suddenly thought, and had to struggle not to glance at the knife which rested back in the man's waistband. The stranger was at least three inches taller than Paul and a couple of stone heavier, and all of it looked like muscle. He suddenly felt apprehensive about going to sleep, despite the tug of fatigue, but reminded himself that the stranger had not harmed him after the rescue, when he had the chance.

“What is your name?” Paul asked suddenly.

The other looked at him for another long moment, as though the question were a strange one. “Azador,” he said at last, with the air of settling someone else's argument. “I am Azador.”

 

It was a good thing, Paul reflected, that he had grown used to his own company, because Azador was not exactly a fountain of conversation. The stranger sat in silence for nearly an hour as the stars wheeled through the immense blackness above and around them, responding to Paul's sleepy comments and questions with grunts or the occasional laconic non-answer, then at last he stretched out on the deck, pillowed his head on his arm, and closed his eyes.

Paul had also recently had the company of Calypso, and if most of the conversation had been sweet nothings or passionate exhortations, that was still much better than nothing, so he was more bemused than annoyed by the stranger's silence. Perhaps it was an accurate reflection of the ancient mind, he thought—the behavior of an era before social chatter.

It was not much longer before he fell asleep himself, needing neither blanket nor pillow in the balmy night. The slow, sky-wide pinwheel of stars was the last thing he saw.

 

He woke in the last dim hours of darkness, uncertain at first of what had brought him up from sleep. Gradually he became aware of a strange, soft melody as many-threaded as Penelope's tapestry, so faint at first that it seemed almost an exhalation of the sea and its luminous foam. He listened in sleepy absorption for a long while, following the rise and fall of the individual components, the strands of melody that emerged and then fell back into the greater chorus, until he suddenly realized that he was listening to the sound of voices singing—human voices, or something much like them. He sat up and discovered Azador was also awake, listening with head cocked to one side like a dog.

“What . . . ?” Paul asked, but the stranger raised his hand; Paul fell silent again and they both sat, letting the distant music wash over them. Because of the other man's obvious tension, what had seemed strangely beautiful at first seemed almost menacing now, although it had grown no louder: Paul found himself fighting an urge to put his hands over his ears. A weaker but more frightening inclination began to make itself felt as well, a whisper of suggestion that he might slip over the side into the comfortable waters and make his way toward the voices and thus discover their secret.