Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (40 page)

Averill was talking to another young man, his voice drowned by the thud of the pumps, and came back grinning. “Erich says we’ve just turned up another beam-end sculpture — a Medusa, this time. Perfect for the Prime Minister’s visit!”

“Didn’t I read the others were all animal heads?” Jerry asked.

“Yes, that’s right. But now we’ve got Medusa.”

Erich was short and dark and hairy, stripped to trousers and singlet in the damp heat. He exhibited his find with appropriate pride — a woman’s face caught between a scream and a snarl, framed by writhing snakes that were nearly all intact — and Jerry leaned close to see the maker’s mark scratched into the bronze inside the cuff that held it onto the beam

“It was toward the middle of the ship,” Erich said, his voice only lightly accented. “Perhaps where the gangway was. Perhaps that’s why it’s different?”

“Jerry!”

Jerry turned, careful of his footing, smiled to see Harrison Searce clambered toward them across the boards. “Harris.”

They clasped hands, Searce shaking his head. “I’m glad to see you taking an interest again. I thought you’d quit the business for good.”

“Well, you know,” Jerry said, and tapped his cane against the peg that finished his artificial leg. “But I was traveling with friends and I couldn’t resist. Though I’m sorry my timing wasn’t better.”

“How long are you here?” Searce asked. “Once the Prime Minister’s visit is over, I can give you a proper look at the whole site.”

“I’m not sure yet,” Jerry said. “It depends on what I can talk my friends into.”

“You can talk anybody into anything,” Searce said, with a smile. “And it’s worth it, Jerry, I promise you. The things we’re finding — there’s been nothing like this in my lifetime.”

“It’s amazing,” Jerry said honestly. “I’d seen the photos, of course, but they don’t do it justice.”

“Come on up,” Searce began, and paused. “Can you make it?”

Jerry looked at the ladder that led up to the platform overlooking what was left of the ship’s deck. This was the problem, the reason he wasn’t here, wasn’t still in the field. The words were bitter on his tongue. “I could probably get up, but I can’t get down.”

“Oh, down’s no problem,” Searce said. “We’ve got lots of rope.”

There was no pity in his tone, just practicality, and Jerry smiled in spite of everything. “I’m not really dressed for it —”

“Scuse, Signor Dottore.” It was one of the workers, a foreman by the look of him, slightly less muddy, with rubber boots that reached almost to his knees. “One of the men would like to speak with you.”

“Has he found something?” Searce asked.

“He wouldn’t say,” the foreman answered. “He wanted to speak to you in person.”

“I’ve offered a bonus for each significant artifact,” Searce said, and Jerry nodded. It was a fairly common practice, though on a rich site like this, it was hard to pay the workers what a good piece was work. Although with government money to play with, and government sanctions behind them, maybe there was a chance. He remembered the tablet in his luggage, and wondered when Searce had established the policy.

“All right,” Searce said, to the foreman. “Send him over.”

“He says he’s left it in the ground,” the foreman said, and Searce gave a nod of approval.

“Well, he gets ten lire for that alone. Thanks, Marcello. Who is it?”

“That one there.” The foreman pointed to a man standing toward the edge of the site, a few yards from a new-looking shed. Tools, Jerry guessed, and maybe shelter in bad weather. “Imperiale — Gianni Imperiale. One of the new men.”

“I’m impressed,” Jerry said. His mouth was dry. There was something wrong here, he could feel it. An old hand might have the sense to leave an object where it was found, but not a new man, not a new hire. The excitement always overcame them, made them pick whatever it was up out of the ground….

“So am I,” Searce said. “Care to come along?”

The mud of the lakebed stretched toward the horizon, pocked with stones and still dotted with shallow puddles. It would be a painful walk, at best embarrassingly awkward, and at worst — at worst, he’d be stuck, someone would have to carry him out. Jerry took a breath, wanting to refuse, but the same sense of unease made him smile and nod. “Sure. Just — take it slow, if you don’t mind.”

“No worries,” Searce said. There were planks lying around seemingly at random, and he caught up a few of them, tossed them out into the mud with a nonchalance that suggested this wasn’t the first time they’d improvised a walkway. That bought them maybe ten yards, but after that it was mud all the way, and Jerry clung grimly to Searce’s shoulder, the peg leg sinking inches deep with every step. Searce didn’t seem to mind, just braced a hand under Jerry’s elbow, and at last they reached a band of more solid ground near the little hut. The man who had been leaning on his shovel straightened, frowning slightly, and Jerry felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. The man himself was a stranger, young, fair like a northern Italian, with a homely, pock-marked face, but the eyes, and the darkness behind them, were terribly familiar.

“So,” Searce called. “Imperiale, is it? What have you found?”

“A tablet, Signor Dottore. At least, I think that’s what it is.”

The ground gave way under Jerry’s leg, and he threw his weight onto his good foot just in time to keep himself from sinking knee deep. “Damn it.”

Searce stopped, offered his hand, and Jerry hauled himself free again.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Searce said. “This might be right up your alley.”

Thank God for that. Jerry managed a smile and a nod. “I’m curious, I admit. What would a tablet be doing out here?”

“An excellent question,” Searce answered. “Probably it was pulled free in one of the earlier attempts to raise the treasures? We’ll see.”

Imperiale said, “Signor Dottore, the ground is worse further on. It’s not good for a one-legged man.”

“Dr. Ballard is a colleague of mine who specializes in inscriptions,” Searce answered. “He’ll manage.”

“I could bring the tablet,” Imperiale offered. “After you’ve inspected it, of course.”

Searce glanced over his shoulder, at Jerry struggling to keep up. “We could do that. I doubt there’s any real significance in the location. This was all lakebed.”

“No, no,” Jerry said. “I’d like to see myself. Just in case.” He couldn’t let Searce be alone with the creature. That had to be what it wanted, he realized, a chance to take one of the senior archeologists. They would have plenty of time with Mussolini, showing him over the site — perhaps even time alone, or relatively alone, and that — that was what they had to stop.

“Suit yourself,” Searce answered, and Jerry hauled himself through the mud. He couldn’t see the others, couldn’t risk looking for them to warn them, and he wasn’t strong enough — didn’t have the tools or the ritual prepared — to do anything except keep it from jumping.

Imperiale — the creature — gave him a single malevolent glance as he joined them, and pointed to a spot in the mud. “I was digging there, a sample to take to the sieves. And I saw that.”

It was a rounded bit of metal, bronze rather than lead. Not a missing tablet, then, Jerry thought, though on second thought he doubted the creature could stand to get this close to one of them. Searce squatted in the mud, carefully feeling for the object’s edges.

“Definitely a tablet,” he said, and looked up with a smile. “Nice work.”

“Thank you, sir,” Imperiale answered.

Searce probed a little further, and then stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. “Let me have that,” he said, and Imperiale handed him the shovel. Searce planted its edge carefully, brought up the tablet and the surrounding mud with a single deft movement. He held it out to Jerry, who took it automatically, reaching into his pocket for his handkerchief. His fingers brushed the sigil, and it took an effort not to palm it, keep it close against his skin. He concentrated instead on cleaning off the worst of the mud, revealing a square of bronze incised with Latin and inset with a stone seal.

“Interesting,” he said, and felt the creature smile.

“It looks a little like a curse tablet,” Searce said.

Jerry shook his head. “Votive — no, memorial,” he amended, and adjusted his glasses. “See? That’s a memorial inscription.”

“Not a standard form, though.” Searce leaned close. “And — is that Etruscan?”

“
In gratitude to
— no,
in honor of the Thracian Gaius Caesar offers this token to the gods below
,” Jerry said. “And, yes, then Etruscan. That’s unusual.”

“We’ve run into some other Etruscan inscriptions at the temple site,” Searce said. “Very interesting.” He straightened, wiped his hands on his pants again, and reached for his notebook. “Good job, Imperiale. Give this to your foreman, and he’ll pay you your bonus.”

The creature hesitated, but there was no excuse for it to stay. “Thank you, sir,” it said, and backed away across the mud. Jerry put his head down, studying the inscription, but he could still feel it watching for what seemed like a very long time.

“We’ve run into some other Etruscan inscriptions at the temple site,” Searce said. “But not associated with the ships.”

Jerry fumbled in his pocket and came up with his small magnifying glass. With its help, he thought he could make out the design of the seal, worn though it was: a warrior, holding a net and spear. A gladiator. He shivered in spite of the sunlight. No, not part of the binding, not at all. This was Caligula thumbing his nose at the goddess, the thing that possessed him making an offering in pure mockery. The gladiator who had killed the king of the grove: that had to be what had released the creature in the first place, and from the gladiator, returning in triumph, it had seized an emperor. And feasted until finally the Praetorian Guard had risen against it…. And it had positioned itself to begin the terrible cycle all over again.

“The design, the seal, looks like a retiarius,” he said. “So…. Caligula lost a gladiator here? The Etruscan formula looks like ones I’ve seen on burial stele, so I’d say it was a funerary marker. If the Thracian were a favorite, maybe Caligula wanted him commemorated? Perhaps there were even games aboard the ship?”

“Maybe,” Searce agreed. “There’s certainly room. And of course there’s the story about Caligula and the Rex Nemorensis.”

Jerry nodded. That definitely wasn’t a subject he wanted to pursue. “Before I left the states, I was in touch with Bill Davenport, and he said he was particularly excited about tablet inscriptions from the ships. I was hoping there might be some more Etruscan evidence here on the ships, but you said not?”

Searce shook his head. “Bill had a bee in his bonnet about Etruscan material, I’m afraid. There’s no reason we’d find anything Etruscan on the ships, they’re much too late. We did find some nice stelae at the temple, though.”

That was that, then. Good news and bad news: the good news was, the expedition hadn’t yet found the remaining tablets. The bad news was the same — well, that and that the creature was here already. And that Mussolini was coming. The noise of the pumps beat in his ears, the smell of the mud and the rotting ship filled his lungs. Somehow, they had to stop it, and he still had no real idea how. He took a breath, and let Searce move them on, struggling back through the mud toward the solid shore.

Chapter Twenty-Four

T
hey returned to the penzione at mid-afternoon, collecting in Alma and Lewis’s room. Alma sat down on the bed with crossed legs and looked at the three men.

“It’s here,” she said.

Lewis nodded, his face stiff. “Somewhere among the workers. It was watching —”

Jerry interrupted. “It’s in a laborer called, or calling itself, Imperiale — ironic, but apparently it has something like a sense of humor. It tried to lure Harris — Dr. Searce — away from the dig, but I happened to be with him. And I stuck to him like a burr all the rest of the afternoon.” He paused. “And they haven’t found the other tablet, by the way.”

“How the hell did it get here ahead of us?” Lewis asked.

“By air?” Mitch said. “A commercial flight from Paris to Rome while we were on the train?”

“They hired a bunch of new workers,” Jerry said. “To get ready for the Prime Minister’s visit. Which, of course, is exactly what it’s waiting for. All it has to do it take one of the archeologists, someone who’s going to be close to Mussolini, showing him something, and then, hey, presto! It jumps, Il Duce has a fainting spell, and we are all screwed.”

“We could take out a laborer,” Mitch said, thoughtfully.

“It could still jump,” Jerry said. “May have already jumped, for that matter. It’s got plans of its own, its own schedule to keep. We could easily go after Imperiale and find that the creature’s long gone.”

“So what do we do?” Mitch asked.

“What we planned,” Alma said. “If we can bind it, tonight, before the Prime Minister gets here, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s jumped or not. We’re calling the creature, not its host.”

“But that means we need the other tablet, right?” Lewis said, after a moment, and Alma nodded.

“Which Jerry says they haven’t found. So let’s see what we can do. It must be somewhere on the site still.”

Jerry sank down into the curved chair at the dressing table and produced a piece of stationary. “Give me a minute. I can sketch out a rough map of the site.”

Alma unfastened the chain around her neck. Her wedding ring and the amulet hung together on it, glittering. She took a deep breath. She’d found Davenport this way when he’d fled Los Angeles. It ought to be easier to find the other tablet when they had its mate.

“Don’t lose that,” Mitch said, sliding the amulet off the chain and holding it out to her.

“I won’t.” Alma tucked it down her front to rest against her heart, loose inside her combinations. That would do for now. She’d put it back on the chain as soon as they were done.

Jerry was drawing on the paper with a fountain pen, swift sure strokes delineating the shape of lake and forest, of buildings and ruins. The boat dock, the pump house…. “Every archeologist can draw a site plan,” Jerry said, glancing sideways at Lewis with a half smile. “It’s one of those things.”