She Walks in Darkness (12 page)

Space swam before us, immense black space from which that hissing rose, sinister, sibilant, as if rising from the throats of a myriad serpents, writhing in the depths below.

Floriano let out a yell.
“Madre di dio!”

He whirled, sprang at his father. The cold face did not change, but the hand that held the pistol swung, snake-swift, with scientific precision. Floriano yelled again and reeled back, a bloody gash across his temple.

“I have told you to speak English. Control yourself. You have only one thing to fear here: me.”

That last probably was true enough,
I thought, struggling to regain my balance. Floriano’s lunge had nearly jerked me off my feet.

“Again I apologize for my son, signora. There is no cause for alarm. See.” He raised the flashlight again. We had come out of the passage, stood upon a kind of landing. I saw a wide stone staircase leading down into a huge cavern. White, hissing steam veiled one end. I looked and understood.

“Gas! Natural gas. Like the pillars Richard says they have at Larderello.”

“Yes. This is a land of underground fires. Can you wonder, signora, that when the early Rasenna found this cave and the abyss within it—for it is an abyss from which this curtain of steam rises—they took it for an entrance to the Underworld? A shrine built by Mania herself to herself?”

“There are snakes! I saw them!” Floriano’s eyes were dazed, but still wild, suspicious. “Down there.”

He pointed, and Prince Mino’s lip curled. “True. Yet I hardly think they will bite you, my son.”

He tilted the flashlight, and we saw the far side of the cavern. A building round as a ring stood there, the strangest, most fantastic building I have ever seen. Monstrous figures, red, black, blue, and purple, swarmed over it, reared angrily from its roof. But in the center of that roof, high above them all, stood the gigantic figure of a woman crowned with snakes.

No wonder that Floriano, catching just a glimpse of those snakes in the torch rays, had thought them alive. They seemed to hiss and curl, a crown of living death. The face below had an awful beauty, not base, not vicious, majestic, perhaps even noble, but infinitely remote from the heat of all passion, from all the softening gentleness of pity. She stared with unwinking black eyes into that hissing curtain of steam that could never warm her. Whether those eyes were made of obsidian or some other shiny black stone I don’t know, but they looked alive.

One long, exquisite hand, thrice the size of any mortal woman’s, hung at her side. The other held a staff upon which perched a dove. That winged symbol united her with Heaven and the immensities of space, even as the serpent crown allied her with the crawling things of the depths.

“Eos.” I said it aloud. “Eos.” But no, that misnamed dawn goddess in the garden far above us was only a shadow of this. Of the goddess behind all goddesses, “One from with many names,” the creatress who created all only to feed death. Life seemed shrunken to a thing made only that one might suffer the agony of giving it up. Since I could not turn my eyes away, I closed them.

“Mania, Queen of the Dead and of the Underworld.” Prince Mino’s voice held something like reverence, the last quality I ever had expected to hear in it. “Mother and murderess. From that broad breast all life sprang, and to it all life must return.”

“She can’t be a mother! She couldn’t be!” My voice broke; in some dreadful way that I could not explain, even to myself, I knew that she could be.

“Our beginning and our end. The queen to whom we must all bow at last. So the ancient Rasenna saw her, and when one by one their Twelve Cities fell and they knew that they had no empire left save in her, the Unconquerable, they brought their greatest treasures here, to her keeping.”

“The treasure!” Incredibly, the eagerness was back in Floriano’s voice. He leapt forward, but once more his father’s voice stopped him. “Not so fast, my son. You do not wish the lady to fall.”

Floriano did not care whether I fell or not, and several times on those stairs I thought we both would. When we reached the cavern floor he ran forward, half-dragging me. He seemed to have forgotten his pain and weakness. Even his father, following us like a grim shepherd.

I heard his voice behind us, fast in his own dream: “Through generation after generation those galleries above us were hewn and widened, turned into tombs. Pilgrims from all Twelve Cities sought burial here.”

“Paying high for the privilege, no doubt. Priests always have been greedy liars.” Floriano found breath enough to sneer.

“For rest under the mother’s own wings? To them it was worth the price, my son. But gold could not buy entrance into this holy of holies. It was opened but once a year, and then only those might enter whom the goddess had summoned in a dream. It was so with other ancient sanctuaries of the chthonian Powers, but seldom, surely, with so much cause as here.”

“But those dream-summoned fools brought gold to pay for their she-devil’s favor!” Floriano’s laugh was evil.

“Don’t call her that. Not here.” I don’t know why I spoke. We had almost reached the temple now. She was towering above us, very near, the curtain of mist behind her now. It seemed to cling to her great arms, to fall from them, like vast, gauzy wings. Give her power to swoop and seize, like Eos—

“We have arrived. I have a lamp inside. When I have lit it, I will call you.” Prince Mino stepped across the threshold, and we waited, Floriano licking his lips, his hands clenching and unclenching.

Then light streamed from the doorway, Prince Mino called “Enter,” and we rushed in. Or Floriano did, nearly upsetting me.

I gasped, thinking we were in the midst of a whole crowd of people. Then I saw that they were statues, and every one of them a masterpiece. Statues of bronze and terra cotta, of men and women; there was even one of a child, his hair all shining silver; Tages, I supposed. Some had faces and bodies of terrible power; others were laughing, delighting with fierce exuberance in their own youth and beauty. It was hard to believe that they were not alive. Whenever I looked away from one, the shining black obsidian eyes of the others
seemed to follow me. There may have been coffers at their feet, jewels on some of them; I don’t know. They were overwhelming, and a little nervously I looked away from them, at the painted walls that had been built higher than most Etruscan walls, to support that mighty Figure on the roof.

There was nothing evil; all must have dated back to the days when the Twelve Cities of the Rasenna were still young and happy. Horses galloped along those ring-round walls, through fields of brilliant poppies. Birds flew above them. From the rear wall, Mania herself looked down, with the same noble, aweing face that the statue wore above, but here the promise of eternal life was in it, the warm beauty of the Earth Mother in whose brown breast the seed is buried, only to rise again. I forgot that I was under sentence of death; I only wished that Richard were here too, to enjoy all this.

“The gold!” Floriano demanded hotly, impatiently. “Where is the gold?” He had found his voice again. I think that for a little while all those shining, watching obsidian eyes must have daunted him.

“Be patient, my son; you shall see the treasure. But this room should interest you in other ways. Here Mattia and I laid Roger Carstairs’s body for a little while. Poor old Mattia never could rid himself of his peasant superstitions; he wished to say a prayer over the corpse before we consigned it to the abyss, and I humored him. I said no prayer, but my heart was heavy last night when I carried him down into these depths. He always shrank from them, endured them only for my sake. He would have wanted a grave beneath the sun.”

“You brought him down here?” Floriano looked startled. “You actually bent your noble back to carry your good dog to his last resting place? He was good, in his fool’s way. I wish it had been you I met in the cellars! Killing you would have been a joy that I would have remembered gladly all the days of my life, no matter how long I lived.”

“Almost we met,” his father said dryly. “I came in time to see you running upstairs. Fleeing from a dead man, with that cowardice you got from the Credis. I was unarmed then, or your death might have been quick. Which would have been a pity. It will not be, now.”

I heard the quick indrawing of Floriano’s breath, felt myself shiver. Yet to have carried Mattia Rossi’s body down here must have been a terrible task for an old man. Had some quirk of the sentiment he despised moved him, kept him from letting his old servant’s body lie untended on the stones? Or had he feared discovery, a real search of the vaults? It might be important to know, though I could not imagine much gentleness in him.

I said, “You brought Roger’s body down here—cremated it in a way—so that there would be no evidence?”

“You might put it so. Then Mattia and I did the work that was not undone until after my return two months ago. A small explosion that crumbled walls and ceiling, and hid the entrance to this Tomb of the Guardians. Sealing off all access both to them and to what they guarded. We knew that some murdering traitor was prowling in the vaults, though I did not yet suspect you, my son.”

“You never did suspect me!” Floriano’s ugly, spiteful laugh at his father. “I can still see your face, when that fat old fool of a colonel told you that I had accused you.
I!”
He laughed again, but suddenly the laughter stopped.

Yet Prince Mino’s face looked as impassive as ever. “You were afraid then, as you are afraid now. But with less cause.”

In those quiet words was something very frightening. Something that left the statue-filled room extremely silent, in some way very cold.

Prince Mino himself broke that silence. “Our reckoning nears, but I will keep my word. First you shall see what all these years you have dreamed of seeing. What Mania’s priests—gold-greedy tricksters though you think them—gave their lives to guard.”

“Where is it?” Once again, Floriano had forgotten all else. “Where is it?”

There was an altar; I had been so busy looking at all the works of marvelous craftsmanship that I had hardly noticed it until now. Prince Mino walked around it, stooped, and lifted two dully gleaming bronze caskets that he laid upon the smooth stone surface of its top.

With a cry like a hungry beast’s Floriano sprang. My knees bumped hard against the altar stone as he sank to his, both hands clawing at the nearer casket.

“Stop!” His father’s voice cut through that trance of greed. Floriano obeyed, his hands still curved like talons.

“If those chests held trash they would still be priceless.” Was Prince Mino’s grim contempt mixed with pain? “Yet to you—whom I still believe to have sprung from my own loins—they are worthless, save for their contents. Look at them; that at least you shall do! Look!”

I did look. Those caskets were works of art. Warriors, monsters, weird sphinxes crowned their exquisitely carved sides. The handle of one was formed by two tiny winged figures carrying a cauldron; that of its mate by a dead warrior borne between two living comrades, grief plain upon the miniature faces beneath their thumbnail-sized helmets. All the figures were perfect, even to the nails upon the toes of their tiny feet.

I don’t think Floriano ever saw them. He just knelt there, panting in savage impatience. For so many years he had dreamed of this hour: of the golden discovery that would lift him above all slights, real or imagined, give him power and prestige—those ancient substitutes for self-respect—as well as splendor and luxury. Deep down inside himself, he must have believed that the glory of that sight would give him strength to sweep his father and all other obstacles from his path.

And his father stood there and kept him waiting.

The mad irony of it all suddenly struck me: an old man who was about to take two human lives hurt, even outraged by his son’s disrespect for two pieces of carved metal; a young man who was about to die thinking of nothing but gold that he never would get a chance to spend. I could have laughed at both of them, although I was about to die too. Prince Mino might have been sentimental about his old servant, but he wasn’t going to be sentimental about Floriano. Or me.

“Stand back, my son.” At last Prince Mino moved.

With deft, loving fingers he opened one casket. Even more lovingly he lifted out the contents, carefully laying down roll after roll of dry-looking brown stuff.

Linen! Intricately figured linen, perhaps ages old.

A sobbing groan burst from Floriano, the kind of sound an animal might make in thwarted hunger. “The other! The other!”

Prince Mino opened the other casket, emptied it almost as carefully and gently. It held baked clay tablets, which seemed to bear the same queer figures as the linen, but there a few thin sheets of much tarnished metal. The old man looked down at them, and his face shone with ecstasy. There was a kind of glory on it.

“Treasure indeed, my son. Treasure beyond all the dreams that scholars have dreamed through the centuries.”

Floriano howled like a wolf. Again he sprang at his father; again Prince Mino struck. Together Floriano and I crashed down upon the hard stones, and as I struggled to raise myself upon one arm, bruised and shaken, I heard him sobbing, moaning in utter misery: “Books! Books—only books!”

Bell-like again, Prince Mino’s voice rang out above us. “The lost
Etruscan Discipline
, that Augustus once enshrined in Rome’s holiest temple. He had only copies, that great emperor—copies written in the bastard alphabet inspired by the corrupting Greeks. I have the originals, written in characters that were ancient long before the Rasenna landed in Italy. Long before Knossos fell; maybe before Menes united the Two Lands and made Egypt a nation. Characters that inspired the hieroglyphs of the Maya, that great American people whose books fanatical Spanish savages destroyed even as Rome destroyed the Rasenna.”