Mountain of Black Glass (44 page)

“It is the sirens,” Azador said abruptly. In contrast with the distant melodies, his voice seemed harsh as a crow's. Paul found himself disliking the man just because he had spoken while the voices were singing. “If I had known we were even this close, I would not have slept.”

Paul shook his head, befuddled. The distant music seemed to cling to his thoughts like spiderwebs. “The sirens . . .” He remembered now—Odysseus had sailed near them, making his men first stop their ears with wax while he himself stood tied to the mast so he could hear their fabled melodies without casting himself into the water.

Paul decided to focus on other distractions, anything to keep his thoughts away from the seductive, disturbing music floating across the black sea. “Have you been here before?”

Azador made another of his unhelpful sounds, then relented a little. “I have been many places.”

“Where are you from originally?”

The stranger snorted. “Not here. Not this stupid ocean, these stupid islands. No, I am looking for someone.”

“Who?”

Azador fixed Paul with a look, then turned back toward the singing darkness. “The wind is carrying us past them. We were lucky.”

Paul reached down and slid his fingers between two of the planks, anchoring himself against the pull that, although weak, still troubled him. A part of him wanted to try to make sense of how this effect might work, to puzzle out the whys and wherefores of virtual sirens—he dimly felt there was something crucial to be discovered—but then, as the lure of the music grew a little less, a stronger, deeper emotion took a grip on him, an unexpected mixture of awe and delight.

Whatever this is,
he thought,
this network, this . . . whatever . . . it is really quite a magical world.

Somewhere in the failing darkness, perhaps with intent, perhaps as mindlessly as crickets scraping in the hedgerows, the sirens continued to create their terrible song. Safe now from its pull, Paul Jonas sailed slowly through a warm night in the ancient world, and for a little while gave himself over to wonder.

 

Azador was, if anything, even less forthcoming in the light of the following day: those of Paul's questions he did not deflect with a shrug or an uninformative grunt he simply ignored.

For all his recalcitrance, he was a useful companion. He knew far more than Paul did about the simple, important things that for the moment made up their world: wind and tides and knots and wood. He had managed to salvage enough torn ends of rope from the sail to splice together new braces, giving them far more control over the raft, and had also rigged a corner of unused sailcloth as a dew catcher, so when the sun rose they had water to drink. Later in the day the stranger even managed to catch a shining fish with a swift stab of his arm into the bottle-green waters off the raft's port side. They had no fire, and Paul as usual did not feel particularly hungry, but despite a certain queasiness there was still something marvelous about eating the raw flesh. Paul found that he was almost enjoying himself, an unusual sensation.

As he relished a cupped palm full of dew-water, taking a first tiny sip to sluice the fish taste from his mouth before letting the rest pour down, he had a sudden vision of himself doing the same thing, but somewhere else entirely. He closed his eyes and for a brief moment could see plants all around him, thick as a tropical jungle. He felt a trickle of sweet water going down his throat, then more water splashing against his face . . . a woman's voice, laughing . . .

Her voice,
he suddenly knew.
The angel.
But it was nothing that had ever happened to him—not in the parts of his life he could remember.

The unlikeliest of things broke his concentration, and the memory blew away like smoke.

“Where are you from, Ionas?” Azador asked.

Dragged from what seemed an achingly significant memory, faced with an actual question from his taciturn companion, Paul goggled for a moment. “Ithaca,” he managed to say at last.

Azador nodded. “Did you see a woman there, a dark-skinned woman? With a monkey for a pet?”

Nonplussed, Paul could only tell the man truthfully that he had not. “Is she a friend of yours?”

“Hah! She has something of mine and I want it back. No one takes what is Azador's.”

Paul sensed an opening, but was unsure of how to keep the conversation going, and unsure also whether there was any point to it. Did he really want to know the precoded life story of some Phoenician sailor in a virtual
Odyssey
? The chances that a castaway would have anything useful to say to him were almost nil. In any case, there were more present and practical uses for Azador's sudden talkativeness.

“So do you know this part of the ocean?” Paul asked. “How long will it take us to get to Troy?”

Azador examined the fish skeleton eye to eye, like Hamlet considering the skull of Yorick, then flicked it high in the air over the side of the raft. A gull came down out of the sun, appearing as if from nowhere, and snatched it before it touched the water. “I don't know. The currents are bad, and there are many islands, many rocks.” He squinted out across the water for a moment. “We must make a landing soon anyway. This broken mast will not last long before it splits, so we need more wood. Also, I must have meat.”

Paul laughed at the serious way he said it. “We just had a fish—although it would have been nice to cook it.”

“Not fish,” Azador grunted in disgust, “
meat.
A man needs meat to eat or he will not remain a man.”

Paul shrugged. It seemed like the least of their problems, but he was not going to argue with a fellow who knew how to splice rope and catch dew.

 

The beginnings of foul weather were blowing up in the late afternoon, a pall of clouds moving swiftly out of the west, when they caught sight of the island and its tall hills thick with vegetation. As the tiller and compromised mast creaked at the raft's crossways lurch into the wind, they could see no obvious signs of human habitation, no gleam of stone walls or whitewashed clay houses; if there were fires burning anywhere, they were lost in the deepening mist and clouds.

“I do not know this place,” Azador said, breaking an hour's silence. “But see, there is grass high on the hills.” He grinned tightly. “There will be goats, perhaps, or even sheep.”

“There might be people living there, too,” Paul pointed out. “We can't just take somebody's sheep, can we?”

“Every man is the hero of his own song,” Azador replied—somewhat cryptically, Paul thought.

They beached the raft and made their way up through the rocky hills as the clouds drew closer. At first it was a pleasure simply to be off the ocean and onto dry land, but by the time that they could again see their craft on the rocky strand below, looking small as a playing card, thunder was murmuring overhead and a few fat raindrops had begun to fall. The stones grew slick beneath Paul's feet, but Azador's half-naked figure ranged up the hills ahead of him, agile as one of the goats he sought, and Paul could only curse quietly and struggle along after him.

After more than an hour had passed, with rain falling heavily now and lightning cracking across the sky, they reached the summit of the hill, climbing up out of a grove of beech trees that shivered in the rising wind to find themselves knee-deep in rough grass. The rocky spine of the hill thrust up before them in a last ridge, a massive outcropping several hundred meters across, fenced by wind-twisted pines. A huge hole, the entrance to a cave, opened into the stone ridge like the door of a misshapen house. It tugged at Paul's memory, and as the grass swished in the wind and sawed at his legs and the rain spattered down, he suddenly felt that they were terribly exposed.

Azador had already taken a step toward the opening when Paul reached out and grabbed his muscled arm. “Don't!”

“What are you talking about?” Azador glowered. “Do you want to stand here until the lightning comes down and cooks you? Who pissed in your head and told you it was brains?”

Before Paul could explain his premonition, something rustled in the grove of trees behind them, a faint but growing noise that was not the wind. Paul looked at Azador. Without a word, they both dropped onto their bellies in the grass.

The rustle became a rattle. Something big was moving through the grass stems only a stone's throw away. Lightning flashed, momentarily turning the twilight world white and black; when the crack of thunder followed a few seconds later, Paul flinched.

Azador lifted himself onto his elbows and pulled the stems wide so he could see. Thunder roared again; in the silence afterward, Paul heard a surprising sound. Azador was quietly laughing.

“Look,” he said, and smacked Paul on the shoulder. “Look, you coward!”

Paul raised himself up a little way so he could peer through the space Azador had made. A flock of sheep was moving past them, a river of patiently suffering eyes and dripping, drooping wool. Azador had just clambered to his knees when they heard a new sound, a deep but distant thump. Azador froze, but the sheep seemed undisturbed and trotted on across the plateau toward the cave. The sound repeated, louder this time, then again, like the slow beating of a huge bass drum. Paul had time only to wonder why the ground was trembling when lightning painted the sky white again and their raft appeared, sailing toward them above the treetops.

Azador stared at the apparition, his jaw slack with shock. His hand crept up his chest as if it had a will of its own and made the sign of the cross. The thumping grew louder. The raft continued toward them, bobbing just above the top of the trees as though the swaying branches were ocean waves. Thunder followed the lightning, then lightning blazed afresh.

The man-shaped creature that crunched out of the trees, carrying their raft above his head, was the biggest living thing Paul had ever seen. Although the monster's legs were massively broad compared to human proportions, its knees were nevertheless as high above the ground as a tall man's head. The rest of the body, while of more ordinary dimensions, was still huge: the top of the creature's shaggy head loomed seven or eight meters in the air. Azador gasped something that was lost in the thunder, and Paul suddenly realized that his companion's head was visible above the grass. He shoved Azador to the ground even as the monstrous creature paused, still holding the raft high, and turned in their direction. The giant's mouth was full of broken teeth, its beard a wet tangle matted across its chest, but as it peered between the grass stems, it was the single eye big as a dinner plate that told Paul what they faced.

Again the lightning flared. The huge eye was staring right at the spot where they hid, and for a moment Paul was certain it had seen them, that any instant it would lumber toward them to twist their bones from their sockets. As they crouched in frozen terror the eye blinked, slow as a bullfrog blink, and then the Cyclops took a crunching step, then another, but away instead of toward them, trudging on toward its cave.

Paul was still holding his breath as the thing paused to prop the raft against the rock face, an ambulatory carpet of sheep crowding around its ankles. It bent and lifted away a stone that had bottle-stopped the shadowed mouth of the cave, then let the silent sheep file in. When they had cleared the doorway, the monster tossed the heavy, timbered craft in after them as though it were a tea tray, then followed.

When they heard the stone grind back into place, Paul and Azador leaped up and ran back into the trees as fast as their wobbly legs would carry them.

 

Paul lay huddled in the bottom of a culvert filling with rainwater. His heart was still racing but no longer felt like it might actually explode. His thoughts were a jumble.

“The bastard . . . has our . . . our boat!” Azador was so breathless he could hardly speak.

Paul lifted his chin out of the water and crawled a little way up the slope. Despite the terror, something else was tugging at him, something to do with Azador . . . and how he had crossed himself . . .

“Without it, we will die on this stupid island!” Azador hissed, but he had recovered himself and sounded more angry than frightened.

. . . But this wasn't even just ancient Greece, this was
Homer's
Greece, and therefore about a thousand years before . . . before . . .

“Jesus Christ!” Paul said. “You aren't from here at all! You—you're from outside!”

Azador turned to stare at him. With his curly black hair plastered to his head by the rain and his mustache draggled like otter whiskers, he looked a little less boldly handsome. “What?”

“You aren't from Greece—not this Greece, anyway. You're from outside the system. You're real!”

Azador regarded him defiantly. “And you?”

Paul realized he had given away whatever advantage the knowledge might have gained him. “Shit.”

The other man shrugged. “We do not have time for such things. That big bastard will use our boat for his fire. Then we will never get away from here.”

“So? What are we going to do, go knock on his cave door and ask for it back? That's a Cyclops. Didn't you read
The Odyssey?
Those things eat people the way you eat goats!”

Azador looked irritated, whether at the mention of reading or the reminder of the goat meat he was not eating. “He will use it for his fire,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Well, if he does, he does.” Paul was struggling to think carefully, but the thunder was rattling his skull and he still had not recovered from the spectacle of a very ugly man as big as a two-story house. “Even if we could roll that stone out of the way, we couldn't get inside in time to stop him. But maybe he'll just add it to the woodpile. Or maybe he'll want to salvage some of the cloth and the ropes.” He let out a shuddering breath and took another. “But we couldn't
do
anything about it anyway—Christ! You saw the size of that thing!”