The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (17 page)

But his stories had become so real to him, as he had repeated them in ever-more-colorful detail to Shelley and Mary and the rest of the expatriate British circle in Pisa in the early months of 1822, that Trelawny’s memory served them up to his recall far more vividly than it did the tawdry, humiliating details of the actual events.

And now he
was
living the sort of life he had only imagined – only foreseen! – back in Italy. He habitually dressed now in Suliote costume, the red and gold vest and the sheepskin
capote,
with pistols and a sword in his sash, and he was second-in-command to Odysseus Androutses, a real brigand chief, and together they had killed dozens of Ali Pasha’s Turkish soldiers on the occupied island of Euboaea.

But the memories of ambushing Turks and burning their villages on Euboaea brought up bile to the back of his throat now, and made him want to goad the horses into a foolhardy gallop through the patchy moonlight. It wasn’t the fact of having killed the men, and women and children too, that twisted his stomach, but the knowledge that the killings had been an offering, a deliberate mass human sacrifice.

And he suspected that when Odysseus had afterward performed the blood-brother ritual with him in the vast cave high up on Mount Parnassus, in which Trelawny had cut a gash in his own forearm with the knife made of lightweight gray metal, that had been a human sacrifice too. A
humanity
sacrifice, at any rate.

With an abrupt chilling shock he realized that the wind at his back shouldn’t be warm, nor smell of jasmine. Quickly he reached across to take the slack reins of Tersitza’s horse, but he had no sooner grabbed the swinging leather strap than a cracking sound to his left made him look back over his shoulder –

– the sound had been like a rock splitting, and for an instant he had been afraid that he would see again, here, the black bird-headed thing, apparently made of stone, that had been haunting his dreams and had seemed in them to be the spirit of the mountain –

– but it was a girl that he saw, pacing him on a third horse; and her horse’s hooves made no sound on the flinty riverbed. Her luminous eyes were as empty of human emotion as a snake’s, though by no means empty of emotion.

But he recognized her – she could be no one else than Zela, the Arabian princess who had died while pregnant with his child thirteen years ago. Her narrow little body was draped in pale veils that were white in the moonlight, but he was certain that they were actually yellow, the Arab color of mourning.

The smell of jasmine had intensified and become something else, something like the inorganically sweet smell of sheared metal.

She smiled at him, baring white teeth, and her soft voice cut through the clatter of the wind in the olive branches:
“Out of this wood do not desire to go,

Thou shalt remain here whether thou wilt or no.”

His face went cold when he abruptly remembered that Zela had never existed outside his stories.

Even as he called, “Tersitza!” and goaded his own horse forward and pulled on the reins of hers, he recognized the lines the phantom girl had quoted – they were from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and it was on this upcoming midsummer’s eve that he was to be consecrated to the mountain.

Tersitza was still slumped in her saddle, and Trelawny pulled his mount closer to hers and then leaned across and with a grunt of effort lifted her right out of the saddle and sat her limp form on his thighs as her cape came loose and blew away. Glancing down at her in the moment before he kicked his horse into a gallop, he saw that her eyes were closed, and he was profoundly reassured to feel for a moment her warm breath on his hand.

With one arm around her shoulders he leaned forward as far as he could over the horse’s flexing neck and squinted ahead to see any low branches he might be bearing down on. Tersitza’s riderless horse was falling behind, and the hoofbeats of Trelawny’s were a rapid drumming in the windy gorge.

Peripherally he could see that Zela was rushing forward right beside him, a yard away to his left, though her horse’s legs were moving no faster than before, and the moonlight was luminously steady on her even as it rushed past in patches all around her, and her voice was still clear in his ears:

“I am a spirit of no common rate.

The summer soon will tend upon my state,

And I do love thee. Therefore stay with me.”

Trelawny didn’t spare her a glance, but from the corner of his eye he could see that her veils were not being tossed in the headwind. His breath was choppy and shallow, and the wind was cold now on his sweating face.

The village of Tithorea couldn’t be more than five miles ahead of them now, and this phantom didn’t appear to be a physical body. As long as his horse didn’t stumble in the moonlight –

Abruptly the Zela phantom was gone, but after a moment of unreasoning relief Trelawny cursed and pulled back on the reins, for somehow they weren’t in the Velitza Gorge anymore.

His horse clopped and shook to a panting halt. Trelawny could feel cold air on his bared teeth as he squinted around at the dozens or hundreds of tumbled skeletons that webbed the sides of the path now, below the rocky slopes; many of the further ones straddled the bigger skeletons of fallen horses, and the bony hands of those closer clutched ropes tied around the skulls of camels on the rocky ground. The jagged moonlit ridges far above seemed as remote as the stars they eclipsed, and faintly on the wind he could hear high feminine voices combining in alien harmonies.

He made himself breathe deeply and unclench his fists from the reins and stretch his fingers. He recognized the place, at least – the devils of Parnassus hadn’t transported them to some hellish valley on the moon.

They were in the Dervenakia Pass, where the army of the Turkish general Dramali Pasha had been trapped and massacred by the wild mountain Greek tribes nearly two years ago. The smell of decay was only a frail taint now on the night wind.

But the Dervenakia Pass was in the Morea – across the Gulf of Corinth, easily fifty miles south of where Trelawny and Tersitza had been a moment ago.

Very well, he thought stoutly, nodding as he forced down his panic – very well, I know the way to Argos from here, we can –

A clanking of stones on the road ahead jerked his head in that direction, and his tenuous hope flickered out.

A tall spidery thing like a black animated gargoyle stood in the moonlit path now, a hundred feet ahead. More rocks were breaking away from the walls of the pass and tumbling across the ground to attach themselves to it, adding to its height as he watched. Its stone beak swung heavily back and forth in the moonlight.

Its lengthening black shadow shifted across the scattered white ribcages and skulls behind it, and the high faraway voices were singing louder now, spiralling up toward a crescendo beyond the range of human hearing.

Trelawny’s eyes were wide, and he wasn’t breathing, or even thinking. His horse was rigidly still.

The figure ahead of them was even taller when it straightened somewhat, its long, mismatched stalactite arms lifting toward the horse and riders – and though it only roughly resembled a human body, Trelawny was certain that it was female. And when it spoke, in an echoing voice like rushing water choked and sluiced and spilled by a slow millwheel –
“And I will purge thy mortal grossness so That thou shalt like an airy spirit go,”

– he knew it was the same creature that had seemed to be riding at his left hand in the Velitza Gorge.

His face and palms tingled in the cold wind, as if damp with some moisture more volatile than sweat.
Thy mortal grossness.

The thing ahead of them was hideous, but that wasn’t why Trelawny ached uselessly to tear his eyes from it – the stones it was animating were crude, but they weren’t
it.
The entity confronting him was an immortal ethereal thing, “an airy spirit” that only touched matter as a well-shod man might carelessly leave bootprints in mud, while Trelawny and Tersitza
consisted
of matter – fluids and veined organic sacs and tangled hairs, pulsing and
temporary.

Trelawny yearned to hide from the thing’s intolerable attention, but he couldn’t presume to move. Abruptly he began breathing again, a harsh hot panting, and it humiliated him.

He was still holding Tersitza’s limp, gently breathing little body in front of himself, as if it were an offering, and for a moment of infinite relief he felt the thing ahead shift its attention to her for a moment before fixing its psychic weight on him again.

The voice came only in his head now, again using lines from his memory but no longer bothering to cater to his fleshy ears by agitating the cold air:

I claim the ancient privilege of Athens:

As she is mine, I may dispose of her.

Since the thing had referred to Tersitza, Trelawny was able to look down at the girl. And though she was obviously as miniscule and ephemeral a thing as he now knew himself to be, her helpless vulnerability couldn’t be ignored, and he scraped together the fragments of his crumpled identity enough to answer. “No,” he whispered.

The thing in the path ahead of them was growing still taller and wider, its misshapen head beginning to blot out part of the night sky, but with adamantine patience it spoke again in his head:

All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.

That was what Satan had offered Christ, in the gospel of Matthew. Edward Trelawny realized that this vast thing was offering him a chance to become something like its peer, to purge him of his body-bound mortality.

How I would have soared above Byron here,
he thought.

But he wrapped his awkwardly jointed arms around Tersitza and pulled her bony form to himself.

“No,” he said again, and his voice was clearer now.

He looked up from under his eyebrows, blinking away the stinging sweat – and then clenched his eyes shut, for the thing was rushing at him, expanding in his view –

– but there was no obliterating impact. After some tense length of time he began breathing again, and the taint of old decay was gone, and what he smelled on the chilly mountain breeze now was tobacco and roasted pigeon.

He opened his eyes. Tersitza was still slumped unconscious across his lap on the saddle, but the giant stone form whose slopes began a mile in front of them was Mount Parnassus, its high shoulders hidden behind clouds in the moonlight. His horse stamped restlessly in damp leaves.

They were back in the Velitza Gorge again, as abruptly as they had been taken out of it – if indeed they
had
actually been out of it, and the spirit of the mountain had not simply manifested itself to him in a scene conjured, as its statements and first appearance had been, from Trelawny’s memory and imagination.

To his right through the dark tangles of the oak branches he could see the cooking fires and the palikars’ tents around the ruined Chapel of St. George.

He hugged Tersitza to him, already beginning to wish he could have accepted the stone thing’s magnanimous offer.

The girl stirred at last, then sat up and glanced around.

“We’re no further than this?” she whispered, shivering in his arms.

She had spoken in her native Greek, and he answered haltingly in the same language. “We were turned back.” He was suddenly exhausted, and it was an effort to recall the Greek words. “We lost your horse.”

“And my cape is gone.” She ran her hands through her long black hair, feeling her scalp. “Was I hurt? I can’t remember meeting Ghouras’s soldiers!” She turned her pale little face up to him and her dark eyes looked intently into his. “Were you wounded?”

“No.” For a moment he considered letting her believe that it had indeed been the palikars of Odysseus’s rival who had forced them back to the mountain – but then he sighed and said, “It wasn’t Ghouras who stopped us. It was – magic, enchantment.” He wished he dared to tell her that he had been trying to save her from a fate literally worse than death – the opposite of death, in fact – and that it was her brother who had put her in that peril. “It was the mountain, your brother’s mountain, that drove us back. Pulled us back.”