The Descent Part 55

Their path snaked across the shield of olive stone, carved into solid rock, where the natural fissures gave out. Chunks of enormous stalact.i.te bridged a section. Iron chains traversed blank spots.

The climb down took all of Ike's attention. The pathway was old and bordered by a precipice falling a thousand feet to the floor. The girl decided this was her opportunity to terminate the relationship. She abruptly pitched herself off the edge, body and soul. It was a good effort and almost took Ike over with her, but he managed to pull her kicking and thrashing back to safety. For the next three days he had to be on constant guard against any further such episodes.

Near the bottom, fog drifted in big ragged islands, like New Mexico clouds. Ike thought the waterfalls must be feeding the fog. They came to a series of broken columns forming a sprawling course of polygonal stairs. Each column had snapped off at a ninety-degree angle, exposing neat, flat tops. Ike noticed the girl's thighs trembling from the descent, and gave her a rest.

They were eating little, mostly insects and some of the shoots topping reeds that grew by the water. Ike could have gone scavenging, but chose not to. Progress aside, he was using the hunger to make the girl more pliable. They were deep in enemy territory, and he meant to get deeper without her setting off any alarms. He figured hunger was kinder than tightened ropes.

The sound of waterfalls pouring from the walls made a steady thunder. They moved among fins of rock that sliced the fog and menaced them with false trails. They pa.s.sed skeletons of animals that had grown exhausted in the maze.

The fog had a pulse to it, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes it lowered around their heads or feet. It was only by chance that Ike heard a party of hadals approaching through one such tidal bank of fog.

Ike wasted no time bulld.o.g.g.i.ng his prisoner to the ground before she could make any trouble. They stretched flat, bellies to the stone, and then for good measure he climbed on top of her and clamped one hand over her mouth. She struggled, but quickly ran out of breath. He settled his cheek onto her thick hair, and his eyes ranged beneath the ceiling of fog. Its cold ma.s.s hung just inches above the stone.

Suddenly a foot appeared by Ike's head. It seemed to reach down from the fog. He could have grabbed the ankle without reaching. Its toes were long. The foot gripped the stone floor as if shoveling gravity. The arch had flattened wide over a lifetime of travels. Ike looked at his own fingers, and they appeared thin and weak next to that brute testament of cracked and yellow nails and veined weight.

The foot relinquished its hold upon the earth as its mate set down just ahead. The creature walked on, soft as a ballerina. Ike's mind raced. Size sixteen, at least.

The creature was followed by others. Ike counted six. Or seven. Or eight. Were they searching for him and the girl? He doubted it. Probably it was a hunting party, or interceptors, their stone-age equivalent of centurions.

The padding of feet stopped not far ahead. Soon Ike could hear the hadals at the site of a kill, cracking sticks. Bones, he knew. By the sound of it, their prey had been larger than hominid. Then he heard what sounded like strips of carpet being torn. It was skin, he realized. They were rawhiding the dead thing, whatever it was. He was tempted to wait until they left, then go scavenge the remains. But while the fog held, he got the girl on her feet and they made a broad arc around the party.

The panels of stone grew wild with aboriginal scrawl, old and new. The hadal script - cut or painted ten thousand years ago - overlaid images overlaid on other images. It was like text foxing through text in old books, a ghost language.

They continued through the labyrinth, Ike leading his hostage by the rope. Like barbarians approaching Rome, they pa.s.sed increasingly sophisticated landmarks. They walked beneath eroded archways carved from the bedrock. The trail became a tangle of once smoothly laid pavers buckled by eons of earth movement. Along one untouched portion, the path lay perfectly flat, and they walked for half a mile upon a mosaic of luminous cobbles.

Among these fins of rock, the thunder of waterfalls was muted. The canyon floor would have been flooded if not for ca.n.a.ls that cleverly channeled the water along the sides of their path. Here and there the acequias had broken down with time and they waded through water. For the most part the system was intact. Occasionally they heard music, and it was water pa.s.sing through the remains of instruments that were built into the walkway.

They were getting close to the center, Ike could tell from the girl's apprehension. Also, they reached a long bank of human mummies bracketing the trail.

Ike and the girl made their way between them. What was left of Walker and his men had been tied standing up, thirty of them. Their thighs and biceps had been ritually mutilated. They looked barrel-chested because their abdomens had been emptied. The eyes had been scooped out and replaced with marble orbs, round and white. The stone eyes were slightly too large, which gave them a ferocious, bulging, insect stare. Calvino was there, and the black lieutenant, and finally Walker's head. As an act of contempt, they had laced Walker's dried heart into his beard for all to see. If they had respected him as an enemy, it would have been eaten on the spot.

Ike was glad now that he'd starved his prisoner. At full strength, she would have presented a serious challenge to his stealth. As it was, she could barely walk a mile without resting. Soon she could feast and be free, he hoped. And Ali - the visitor in his dreams each night - would be restored to him.

On January 23, the girl attempted to drown herself in one of the ca.n.a.ls, leaping into the water and wedging her body under an outcrop. Ike had to drag her out, and it was almost too late. He cut the rope gag and finally got the water out of her lungs. She lay limp by his knees, defeated and ill. Exhausted by their battle, both rested.

Somewhat later she began singing. Her eyes were still closed. It was a song for her own comfort, sung softly, in hadal, with the clicks and intonations of a private verse. At first Ike had no idea what it was, her singing was so small. Then he heard, and it was like being shot through the heart.

Ike rocked back on his heels, disbelieving. He listened more closely. The words were too intricate for his small lexicon. But the tune was there, scarcely a whisper: 'Amazing Grace.'

The song sent him reeling. It was familiar to her, and beloved, he could tell, as it was to him. This was the last thing he had ever heard from Kora, her singing as she sank into the abyss beneath Tibet so many years ago. It was the very anthem he had cast himself into the darkness for. I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see. She had put her own words to it, but the tune was identical.

He had taken Isaac's claim of fatherhood to be the truth, but saw no resemblance to that beast at all. Prompted by the song, Ike now recognized Kora's features in the girl. Ike groped for other explanations. Perhaps the girl had been taught the melody by Kora. Or Ali had sung it to her. But for days, he had been carrying a vague, troubling sense of already knowing her.

There was something about her cheekbones and forehead, the way that jaw thrust forward in moments of obstinacy, and the general length of her body. Other details drew his attention, too. Could it really be? So much was the image of her mother. But so much was not, her eyes, the shape of her hands, that jaw.

Wearily she opened her eyes. He had not seen Kora in them because they were not Kora's turquoise eyes. Maybe he was wrong. And yet the eyes were familiar. Then it struck him. She had his eyes. This was his own daughter.

Ike sagged against the wall. Her age was right. The color of her hair. He compared their hands, and she had his same long fingers, his same nails. 'G.o.d,' he whispered. What now?

'Ma. You. Where,' he said in his fractured hadal.

She quit singing. Her eyes rode up to his, and her thoughts were easy to read. She saw his daze, and it suggested an opportunity. But when she tried prying herself from the wet stone, her body refused to cooperate.

'Please speak more clearly, animal man,' she said politely, in high dialect.

To Ike's ear, she had expressed something like What? He tried again, reversing his question and fumbling for the right syntax and possessive. 'Where. You own. Mother. To be.'

She snorted, and he knew his attempts sounded like grunting to her. All the while she kept her eyes directed away from his knife with the black blade. That was her object of desire, Ike knew. She wanted to kill him.

This time he traced a sign on the ground, then linked it with another sign. 'You,' he said. 'Mother.'

She made a gentle sweeping motion with her fingers, and that was his answer. One did not speak about the dead. They became someone - or something - else. And since you could never be sure who or what form that reincarnation might have taken, it was most judicious to give the dead no mention. Ike let it go at that.

Of course Kora was dead. And if she was not, there would probably be no recognizing what was left. Yet here was their legacy. And he needed her as a p.a.w.n to trade away for Ali. That had been his working plan. Suddenly it felt as though the life raft he had crafted from wreckage had just wrecked all over again.

It was excruciating, the appearance of a daughter he had never known, changed into what he had almost been changed into. What was he supposed to do now, rescue her? And what then? Obviously the hadals had taken her in and made her one of them. She had no idea who he was or what world he came from. To be honest, he had little idea himself. What kind of rescue was that?

He looked at the girl's thin, painted back. Since capturing her, he had treated her like chattel. The only thing good to say was that he had not beaten or raped or killed her. My daughter? He hung his head.

How could he possibly trade away his own flesh and blood, even for a woman he loved? But if he did not, Ali would remain in their bondage forever. Ike tried to clear his mind. The girl was ignorant of her past. However harsh, she had a life among the hadals. To take her out of here would mean tearing her by the roots from the only people she knew. And to leave Ali meant... what? Ali could not possibly know he had survived the fortress explosion, much less that he was searching for her. Likewise, she would never know if he turned around and dragged this child away from the darkness. Indeed, knowing her, even if she did know, Ali would approve. And where would that leave him? He had become a curse. Everyone he loved disappeared.

He considered letting the girl go. But that would only be cowardice on his part. The decision was his to make. He had to make it. It was one or the other, at best. He was too much of a realist to waste a moment imagining the whole happy family could make it out. He was tormented the rest of that night.

When the girl awoke, Ike presented her with a meal of larvae and pallid tubers, and loosened her ropes. He knew it would only complicate matters to restore her strength, and that the slightest guilt at having depleted the child was a dangerous moralism. But he could no longer go on starving his own daughter.

Guessing she would never tell it to him, he asked her name. She averted her eyes at the rudeness. No hadal would give such power to a slave. Soon after he started her downward on the trail, though more slowly in consideration of her fatigue.

The revelation tortured him. After his return to the human side, Ike had vowed to keep his choices black and white. Stick to your code. Stray, and you died. If you couldn't decide a matter in three seconds, it was too complicated.

The simplest thing by far, the safest thing, would have been to cut loose and escape while he could. Ike had never been a believer in predestination. G.o.d didn't do it to you, you did it to yourself. But the present situation contradicted him.

The mystery of it weighed on Ike, and their slow descent slowed more. The heaviness he felt had nothing to do with their alt.i.tude, now eleven miles deep. To the contrary, as the air pressure thickened, he was engorged with more oxygen, and the effect was a hardy lightness of the kind one felt coming down off a mountain. But now the unwanted effect of so much oxygen in his brain was more thoughts and more questions.

Though he couldn't say exactly how, Ike was certain he must have selected each circ.u.mstance leading to his own downfall. And yet what choices had his daughter made to be born in darkness and never know the light or her true father or her own people?

The journey down was a journey of water sounds. Blindfolded, Ali pa.s.sed the first number of days listening to the sea scythe by as amphibians drew their raft on. The next days were spent descending alongside cascades and behind immense falls. Finally, reaching more even ground, she walked across streams bridged with stones. The water was her thread.

They kept her separate from the two mercenaries who'd been captured alive. But on one occasion her blindfold slipped and she saw them in the perpetual twilight cast by phosph.o.r.escent lichen. The men were bound with ropes of braided rawhide, and arrows still projected from their wounds. One looked at Ali with horrified eyes, and she made the sign of the cross for his benefit. Then her hadal escort cinched the blindfold over her eyes again, and they went on. Only later did Ali realize why the mercenaries weren't blindfolded, too. The hadals didn't care if the two soldiers saw the path down, because neither would ever have the opportunity to climb back out.

That was the beginning of her hope. They weren't going to kill her anytime soon. Thinking of the two soldiers' certain fate, she felt guilty for her optimism. But Ali clung to it with a greed she'd never known. It had never occurred to her before how base a thing survival was. There was nothing heroic about it.

Prodded, tugged, carried, pushed, she staggered into a cavity that could have been the center of her being. She wasn't harmed. They didn't violate her. But she suffered.

For one thing, she was famished, not that they didn't try to feed her. Ali refused the meat they offered, though. The monster who led them came to her. 'But you have to eat, my dear,' he said in perfect King's English. 'How else will you finish the hajj?'

'I know where the meat came from,' she answered. 'I knew those people.'

'Ah, of course. You're not hungry enough.'

'Who are you?' she rasped.

'A pilgrim, like you.'

But Ali knew. Before the blindfold, she'd seen him orchestrating the hadals, commanding them, delegating tasks. Even without such evidence, he certainly looked the way Satan might, with his cowled brow and the twist of asymmetrical horns and the script drawn upon his flesh. He stood taller than most of the hadals, and earned more scars, and there was something about his eyes that declared a knowledge of life she didn't want to know.

After that, Ali was given a diet of insects and small fish. She forced it down. The trek went on. Her legs ached at night from striking against rocks. Ali welcomed the pain. It was a way not to mourn for a while. Perhaps if she'd been carrying arrows like the mercenaries were, it would have been possible not to mourn at all. But the reality was always there, waiting. Ike was dead.

At last they reached the remains of a city so old it was more like a mountain in collapse. This was their destination. Ali knew because they finally took off her blindfold and she was able to walk without being guided.

Weary, frightened, mesmerized, Ali picked her way higher. The city was up to its neck in a tropical glacier of flowstone, which spun off a faint incandescence. The result was less light than gloom, and that was enough. Ali could see that the city lay at the bottom of an enormous chasm. A slow mineral flood had all but swallowed much of the city, but many of the structures were erect and honeycombed with rooms. The walls and colonnades were embellished with carved animals and depictions of ancient hadal life, all of it blended in subtle arabesques.

Debauched by time and geological siege, the city was nevertheless inhabited, or at least in use. To Ali's shock, thousands of hadals - tens of thousands, for all she knew - had come to rest in this place. Here lay the answer to where the hadals had gone. From around the world, they had poured down to this sanctuary. Just as Ike had said, they were in flight. This was their exodus.

As the war party threaded through the city, Ali saw toddlers resting against their mothers' thighs, exhausted with flu. She looked, but there were very few infants or aged in the listless mob. Weapons of all types lay on the ground, apparently too heavy to lift.

In their listlessness, the hadals imparted a sense of having reached the end of the earth. It had always been a mystery to Ali why refugees - no matter what race - stopped where they did, why they didn't keep going on. There was a fine line between a refugee and a pioneer; and it had to do with momentum once you crossed a certain border. Why had these hadals not continued deeper? she wondered.

They climbed a hill in the center of the city. At the top, the remnants of a building stood above the amberlike flowstone. Ali was led into a hallway that spiraled within the ruins. Her prison cell was a library. They left her alone.

Ali looked around, astounded by the treasury. This was to be her h.e.l.l, then, a library of undeciphered text? If so, they'd matched the wrong punishment with her. They had left a clay lamp for her like those Ike had lit. A small flame twitched at the snout of oil.

Ali started to explore by its light, but wasn't careful enough carrying it, and the flame guttered out. She stood in the darkness, filled with uncertainty, scared and lonely. Suddenly the journey caught up with her, and she simply lay down and fell asleep.

When Ali woke, hours later, a second lamp was flickering in the room's far corner. As she approached the flame, a figure rose against the wall, wrapped in rags and a burlap cloak. 'Who are you?' a man's voice demanded. He sounded weary and spiritless, like a ghost. Ali rejoiced. Clearly he was a fellow prisoner. She wasn't alone!

'Who are you?' she asked, and folded the man's hood back from his face.

It was beyond belief. 'Thomas!' she cried.

'Ali!' he grated. 'Can it be?'

She embraced him, and felt the bones of his back and rib cage.

The Jesuit had the same furrowed face as when she'd first met him at the museum in New York. But his brow had thickened and he had weeks of grizzled beard, and his hair was long and gray and thick with filth. Crusted blood matted his hair. His eyes were unchanged. They'd always been deeply traveled.

'What have they done to you?' she asked. 'How long have you been here? Why are you in this place?'

She helped the old man sit, and brought water for him to drink. He rested against the wall and kept patting her hand, overjoyed. 'It's the Lord's will,' he kept repeating.

For hours they exchanged their stories. He had come looking for her, Thomas said, once news of the expedition's disappearance reached the surface. 'Your benefactor, January, was tireless in reminding me of the Beowulf group's responsibilities to you. Finally I decided there was only one thing to do. Search for you myself.'

'But that's absurd,' said Ali. A man his age, and all alone.

'And yet, look,' said Thomas.

He'd descended from a tunnel in Javanese ruins, praying against the darkness, guessing at the expedition's trajectory. 'I wasn't very good at it,' he confessed. 'In no time I got lost. My batteries wore down. I ran out of food. When the hadals found me, it was more an act of charity than capture. Who can say why they didn't kill me? Or you?'

Ever since, Thomas had languished among these mounds of text. 'I thought they'd leave my bones here among the books,' he said. 'But now you're here!'

In turn, Ali told of the expedition's sad demise. She related Ike's self-immolation in the hadal fortress. 'But are you sure he died?' Thomas asked.

'I saw it myself.' Her voice caught. Thomas expressed his condolences.

'It was G.o.d's will,' Ali recovered. 'And it was His will that led us here, to this library. Now we shall attempt to accomplish the work we were meant for. Together we may come closer to the original word.'

'You are a remarkable woman,' Thomas said.

They set about the task with acute focus, grouping texts and comparing observations. At first delicately, then avidly, they examined the books, leaves, codices, scrolls, and tablets. None of it was shelved neatly. It was almost as if the ma.s.s of writings had acc.u.mulated here like a pile of snowflakes. Setting the lamp to one side, they burrowed into the largest pile.

The material on top was the most current, some in English or j.a.panese or Chinese. The deeper they worked, the older the writings were. Pages disintegrated in Ali's fingers. On others, the ink had foxed through layer after layer of writings. Some books were locked tight with mineral seep. But much of it yielded lettering and glyphs. Luckily the room was s.p.a.cious, because they soon had a virtual tree of languages laid out on the floor, pile by pile of books.

At the end of five days, Ali and Thomas had excavated alphabets no linguist had ever seen. Stepping back from their work, it was obvious to Ali they'd barely made a dent in the heaped writings. Here lay the beginnings of all literature, all history. In a sense, it promised to contain the beginnings of memory, human and hadal both. What might lie at its center?

'We need to rest. We need to pace ourselves,' Thomas cautioned. He had a bad cough. Ali helped him to his corner, and forced herself to sit, too. But she was excited.

'Ike told me once, the hadals want to be like us,' she said. 'But they're already like us. And we're like them. This is the key to their Eden. It won't give them back their ancient regime. But it can bind them, and give them concordance as a people. It can bridge the gap between them and us. This is the beginning of their return to the light. Or at least of the sovereignty of their race. Maybe we can find a mutual language. Maybe we can make a place for them among us. Or they can make a place for us among them. But it all starts here.'

The torture of Walker's men began. Their screams drifted up to Ali and Thomas. Periodically the sounds tapered off. After a night of silence, Ali was certain the men had died. But then the screaming started again. With pauses, it would go on for many days.

Before they could continue their scholarship, Ali and Thomas received a visitor. 'He's the one I told you about,' she whispered to him. 'He leads them, I think.'

'You might be right about him,' Thomas said. 'But what does he want with us?'

The monster approached with a plastic tube marked HELIOS. It was badly scratched. Ali immediately recognized her map case. He went directly to her, and she could smell fresh blood on him. His feet were bare. He shook out the roll of maps and opened them. 'These came into my possession,' he said in his crisp English.

Ali wanted to ask how, but thought better of it. Obviously, Gitner and his band of scientists had failed to escape. 'They're mine,' she said.

'Yes, I know. The soldiers told me. Also, I've studied the maps, and your authorship is clear. Unfortunately they're not real maps, but only your approximation of things. They show how your expedition proceeded in general. I need more. Details. Detours. Side trips. Diversions. And camps, every camp, every night. Who was in them, who wasn't. I need everything. You have to re-create the entire expedition for me. It's crucial.'

Ali glanced at Thomas, fearful. How could she possibly remember it all? 'I can try,' she said.

'Try?' The monster was smelling her. 'But your very existence depends on your memory. I would do more than try.'

Thomas stepped forward. 'I'll help her,' he volunteered.

'Help her quickly, then,' the monster said. 'Now your life depends on it, too.'

On February 11, at 1420 hours and 9,856 fathoms, they reached a cliff overlooking a valley. It was not the bottom of the pit; you could see a gaping hole in the far distance. But it was a geological pause in that abyss they had been following.

Before she tried again to martyr herself, Ike tied his nameless daughter to a horn of rock along the wall. Then he flopped on his stomach along the edge to get a view of the land and sort through his options.

It had the shape and size of a crater, lit with a sienna gloom. Veins of luminous minerals spidered through the encircling walls, and the fog was lambent, flickering like tongues. He could make out the architecture of this enormous hollow, two or three miles across, and its honeycombed walls and the vast, intricate city it cupped.

Five hundred meters beneath his perch, the city occupied the entire floor. It was at once magnificent and dest.i.tute. From this height he could clearly see the whole obsolete metropolis.

Spires and pyramids stood in ruins. In the distance, one or two towering structures rose nearly as high as the rim, though their tops had crumbled away. Ca.n.a.ls had harrowed the avenues deep, carving meandering canyons. Much was in collapse or flooded or had been overrun with flowstone. Several giant stalact.i.tes had grown so heavy they had fallen from the invisible ceiling and speared buildings.

It took Ike time to adjust to the scale of this place. Only then did he begin to distinguish the mult.i.tudes. They were so numerous and packed together and enfeebled that all he saw at first was a broad stain upon the floor. But the stain had a slight motion to it, like the slow agitation of glaciers. Here and there, winged creatures launched from cliffside aeries, darting through the fog.