The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (20 page)

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,” Bacon 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.”

“The jawbone was gone?”

Trelawny nodded. “I questioned everyone, and eventually learned that Captain Hamilton’s father-in-law had been present, and had been seen to take something out of the box, as a, a
souvenir.
My dead friend said that if I could break one of Shelley’s bones right in Mount Parnassus itself, and sever the Nephelim element from the human element, that might, I don’t know, constitute a
rupture
or
defilement
of the arrangement I’ve made with them.”

Bacon shook his head. “I know the
Cambrian
is in the Aegean Sea somewhere,” he said, “but it’d be God’s own chore to find him and then try to get this bone, just – I’m sorry! – to save one man’s family.”

“I’m not ‘just one man,’” said Trelawny, and to his alarm he felt the old pride welling up in him; “I’m to be the bridge,” he went on quickly, “they’re going to implant a fired-clay statue into my ribs, and then at this Midsummer’s Eve I’ll be consecrated as the overlap, the gate between the species!
I’ll
be – don’t you see? – the restoration of the link.”

For several seconds Bacon was silent in his booth. “No,” he said finally with a smile that made his gleaming face look haggard in the firelight, “I won’t gain anything by killing you, will I? You
klepht
will only find another racial traitor to do it with. No lack of candidates, I imagine.” He stared toward the fire. “I wonder if killing your bandit-chief would effectively prevent it.”

“His one-time ally and now chief rival, Ghouras of Athens, would step in. Already he’s trying to.”

“And others behind him, I suppose. The Greeks can’t forget Deucalion and Pyrrha or the Muses in Parnassus.” He sighed and stood up. “Write your letter, I’ll take it – and I’ll return with this atheist’s jawbone as quickly as I’m able.”

Trelawny stepped away from the wall. “Before Midsummer’s Eve,” he said, suppressing a shiver that might have been fear or shameful hope, “or you may as well give it back to Hamilton’s father-in-law to use as a paperweight.”

Behind him, the newcomer Whitcombe was staring in evident alarm at the three people by the table. The wind from below tossed his blond hair.

“Do it today,” said Tersitza. “You need time to heal from it. You don’t want to be carried down the mountain to Delphi on a stretcher, on Midsummer’s Eve!”

“I’ll have the surgery tomorrow, or the day after,” said Trelawny, wishing he didn’t have to blink tears out of his eyes in the glare. “Today you and I ride to Tithorea.”

“But Ghouras’s men have blockaded the gorge,” said Tersitza patiently. “Wait, and we’ll be able to ride right over them.” She laughed.
“Fly
right over them.”

“You’re not getting cold feet, are you, old man?” said Fenton. “Not the pirate prince of the Indian Ocean?”

“I keep my word,” said Trelawny stiffly. I did vow at our wedding to protect her, he told himself. That takes precedence, even if she doesn’t want protection.

“But – are you serious?”

“Completely.”

“Ghouras will just arrest you both and lock you up with her brother.”

“Ghouras wants this cave, he wants the mountain, not us – and he knows he can’t take it by force. He’ll negotiate.” This is good, he thought – it almost makes sense.

“And you think it will help to take Tersitza with you.”

Trelawny could think of no plausible reason for that condition, so he only said, “Yes.”

Fenton frowned and shrugged. “Odysseus told us that you’re in command here while he’s away. If you’re confident you can come back, and if you
want
to be carried to Delphi with a bleeding incision …”

“I heal fast,” said Trelawny. He turned to Tersitza and said, “We can meet with Ghouras at Tithorea, I’m certain. We’ll be back here in two days at most.”

And I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I hope Ghouras’s men
do
simply arrest us, and forcibly take us to Athens, away from this monstrous mountain.

Tersitza’s eyes were shadowed by her turban, and Trelawny couldn’t tell whether she was looking at him or at Fenton.

But after a pause her shoulders slumped and she sighed, fluttering the cloth over her face. “Very well, my husband.”

“I
would
advise keeping your pistols handy,” Fenton said.

“Yes of course,” said Trelawny.

“Why not at least get in a bit of target practice, then?” Fenton said. “Just while the palikars climb down to get your horses saddled? Whitcombe here can join us.” He peered with apparent sympathy at Trelawny. “Though I must say you look a little shaky to compete this afternoon.”

“Even with a pistol I’m a better shot than you two with your carbines,” Trelawny muttered, “any day.”

Relieved that they had given in to his proposal so easily, Trelawny quickly called for the Italian servant he always addressed as Everett, and told him to set up a plank for a target at the far left side of the terrace.

Both Fenton and Whitcombe had rifles ready and leaning against the parapet, and now they picked them up and checked the flints and the powder in the pans.

Trelawny drew a pistol from his sash and stepped between them and the target to shoot first. When Everett had set up the board and hurried back into the shadows, Trelawny swung his arm up and fired, and though the smoke stung his already watering eyes and the boom of the shot set his ears ringing, he heard the plank clatter forward onto the stone.

He stepped forward to prop the board up again, but paused when he heard Tersitza shout urgently to one of the Greeks, “Fire the cannons!”

Trelawny knew the cannons were aimed out over the gorge, loaded with the fired-clay pellets that were to come alive at the next full moon – but it wouldn’t work
now,
the statue hadn’t been implanted in him yet.

He opened his mouth to ask her why –

And a sudden hard blow to his back and jaw sent him staggering forward as a rifle-shot cracked behind him; he caught his balance and straightened, dizzy and stunned and choking on hot blood, and then he coughed and spat blood down the front of his shirt and cried hoarsely, “I’ve been shot!”

Dimly he was aware that Fenton had rushed up and was supporting him now, shouting something, but Trelawny turned to Tersitza, who was waving at someone behind him; and a moment later the stone floor shook under Trelawny’s feet as the unmistakable boom of a cannon shot jarred the terrace.