The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (19 page)

Boots were echoingly scuffing up the stone levels toward Trelawny’s house, and he hastily pocketed Byron’s toe and swatted the two candles. Both went out, though the one wedged in the table stayed upright.

Trelawny strode to the flimsy door and pulled it open. The broad silhouette of Odysseus seemed to dwarf the figure of Fenton against the distant daylight as the pair stepped up the last stone rise.

“Come down to the edge,” said Odysseus in Italian; he went on in Greek, “where the guns will go.”

Trelawny followed the two men down the steps to the wide flat area at the front of the cave. Four six-foot sections of the stone wall had been disassembled so that the cannons might be mounted in the gaps, and Trelawny, squinting uncomfortably in the sunlight that slanted into the front of the cave, noted that only the two notches in the center of the wall threatened the road that wound its way up the gorge.

“But why aim the other two out at the slopes?” he asked Odysseus. “The Turks are hardly likely to come blundering in among the trees.”

“To everything there is a season,” said Fenton with a smile, “a time to gather stones together, and a time to cast away stones.” His Scottish accent was especially incongruous in this cave sacred to ancient Hellenic gods. It was apparently too great a strain on Odysseus’s frail grasp of English, for he turned to Trelawny and raised his bushy black eyebrows.

Trelawny slowly translated what Fenton had said.

The
klepht
nodded. “When you are consecrated,” he said to Trelawny, “we will sow the same seeds as Deucalion and Pyrrha did.”

“Deucalion and Pyrrha,” said Fenton, rubbing his hands together and bobbing his head as he blinked out at the gorge, “I caught that bit. The giants in the earth.”

Trelawny glanced at Odysseus, but the squinting eyes in the sun-browned face told him nothing.

To Fenton, Trelawny said, carefully, “You seem to know more about our purpose than you told me at first.” He shivered, for the gusts up from the gorge were chilly.

“Ah, well I had to see, didn’t I,” said Fenton, “that you were the lot I’ve been looking for, before I did any
confiding.
But your
klepht
has it right – sow our army from up here.”

Trelawny let himself relax – the man’s caution had been natural enough, and he was clearly an ally – and he tried to imagine thousands of kiln-fired clay pellets spraying out over the Velitza Gorge on some moonlit night, the boom and flare of the guns and then the clouds of pale stones fading as they fell away into the echoing shadows.

And then in the darkness of the forest floor the things would lose their rigidity and begin to move, and burrow through the mulch offallen leaves into the soil, like cicadas – to emerge in man-like forms at the next full moon. And Trelawny would be the immortal gate between the two species.

He laughed, and nearly tossed the coward Byron’s toe out into the windy abyss; but it might still be useful in establishing the link.

“My army,” he whispered.

Fenton might have heard him. “When,” he asked, “will you – ?” He stuck a thumb into his own waistcoat below his ribs and twisted it, as if mimicking turning a key.

Odysseus clearly caught his meaning.
“Uno ano,”
he said.

Trelawny nodded. One year from now, he thought, at Midsummer’s Eve. But even now the sun seemed to burn his skin if he was exposed to it for more than a minute or so. During the long trek from Missolonghi he had worn his turban tucked around his face during the day – and even then he had been half-blinded by the sun-glare much of the time – but he wasn’t wearing his turban now.

“We can talk later,” he said, “around the fires.”

The other two nodded, perhaps sympathetically, and Trelawny turned away and hurried back up the stone steps into the shadows of the cave’s depths.

Back in his room with the door closed, he pulled back the baggy sleeve of his white shirt and stared at the cut in his forearm. As Odysseus had predicted, it hadn’t stopped bleeding. According to Odysseus it wouldn’t heal until next year’s midsummer, when a more substantial cut would be made in his flesh, and a transcendent healing would follow. The bigger incision would have to be made with a new, virgin knife, but apparently Mount Parnassus had several veins of the lightweight gray metal.

Trelawny leaped when something twitched in his pocket – he was used to lice, and even took a certain anti-civilization pride in finding them in his hair, but he didn’t want mice or beetles in his clothing – but then the wick of the tilted candle on the table sprang into flame again, and he realized that the agitated thing in his pocket was Byron’s toe.

“‘Deucalion and Pyrrha,’” came Byron’s faint whisper from the flame. “‘Consecrated.’”

Trelawny sat down on his narrow bed, then sagged backward across the straw-filled mattress and stared at the low ceiling beams. “Why do you care,” he said. “You’re dead.”

“I hoped to see you,” said the flame, “back in Missolonghi – before I died. I don’t have many friends that I relied on, but you’re one of them.”

“You liked me the way you’d like a dog,” said Trelawny, still blinking at the ceiling. The candle-smoke smelled of Macassar oil and cigars. “You always said I was a liar.”

“I never flattered friends – not trusted friends. I never let dissimulations stand unchallenged, when I wanted honesty.” The frail flame shook with what might have been a wry laugh. “I only wanted it from very few.”

“I never gave you honesty,” said Trelawny belligerently, and a moment later he was startled at his own admission – but, he thought, it’s only a dead man I’m talking to. “My mentor, the privateer captain de Ruyters – my Arab wife, Zela – none of it was true.”

“I always knew, old friend. ‘Deucalion and Pyrrha,’ though – and ‘consecration.’ What ordeal is it they’re planning for you, here?”

“‘Old friend.’” Trelawny closed his eyes, frowning. “Odysseus has a surgeon – he’s going to put a tiny statue into my abdomen, below my ribs. A statue of a woman, in fired clay.”

“‘He took one of his ribs, and closed the flesh where it had been.’ And you want to reverse what Yahweh did, and put the woman back.” Byron’s tone was light, but his faint voice wobbled.

Trelawny laughed softly. “It frightens you even
now?
Reversing history, yes. When clay is fired in a kiln, the vivifying element is removed from the air – wood can’t burn, it turns into charcoal instead – and this is how all the air was, back in the days when the Nephelim flourished. For the right man, the clay can still … wake up.”

Byron’s voice was definitely quivering now. “The Carbonari, charcoal-burners, try to dominate their trade, because of this. They work to keep it out of hands like … yours.”

“The Carbonari,” said Trelawny scornfully, “the Popes, the Archbishops of Canterbury! And you too – all of you afraid of a power that might diminish your – your dim, brief flames!”

Byron’s ghost had begun to say something more, but Trelawny interrupted, harshly, “And
your
flame, ‘old friend,’ is out.”

And with that he leaped off of the bed and smacked his palm onto the candle, and the room was dark again.

For a moment he thought of Byron’s question –
Shelley didn’t say what sort
of … fond attentions
these things pay to families of humans they adopt?
– but then he thought,
My army,
and stepped to the door to join the others, regardless of the sunlight.

III

June 11, 1825

“…it is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill –
We might be otherwise –”

– Percy Shelley, “
Julian and Maddalo”

In the month since he and Tersitza had been turned back in their attempted midnight flight from the mountain, she had several times asked Edward Trelawny about the
vrykolakas
that had barred their escape. It seemed to him that she was morbidly fascinated by it, though she wouldn’t elaborate on her claim, that night, to have seen it herself.

On this Saturday noon, though, Trelawny made his hopping and shuffling way down from his house in the high inner reaches of the cave to find her sitting at a table in the sunlight on the broad stone floor at the front of the cave and talking to Fenton about it.

And another young English Philhellene, a newly arrived friend of Fenton’s named Whitcombe, was leaning on the parapet close enough to hear. He had only been staying at the cave for four days now, and Trelawny hadn’t yet talked to him at any length.

A cannon barrel gleamed fiercely in the sunlight just beyond their table, and even up here, hundreds of feet above the treetops in the Velitza Gorge, the air was stiflingly hot. Fenton was bareheaded, but Tersitza was wearing a white turban with the loose ends tucked across her face.

Reluctant to venture out into the direct rays of the sun, Trelawny had hung back in the shadows, and though he could hardly focus his eyes on the figures out in the glaring light, he had heard Fenton laugh.

“In ten days your teeth will be fine,” said the Scotsman now in his cacophonous Greek. “You’ll be able to bite through stone.”

Trelawny recalled that Tersitza had been complaining of a toothache for the last several days.

“And throats,” Tersitza said lightly. “I wish I had had the courage to approach her, on those nights I glimpsed her on the mountain. She
wasn’t
threatening, I now believe – just – bigger than me, in all ways. Bigger than flesh.”

Whitcombe turned to look toward Tersitza and Fenton, but Fenton shifted his head to glance at him; Trelawny couldn’t see Fenton’s expression, but Whitcombe looked away and resumed staring out over the gorge.

Fenton turned back to face Tersitza. “It’s good you didn’t,” he said. “You’re not family quite yet.”

Tersitza shifted on her chair and held up her arm so that her shawl fell back. Trelawny noticed a narrow band of white cloth above her elbow, and he thought he saw a spot of blood on it.

“Almost I am, now.” She let the shawl fall forward, covering the band. “But I wish I had been awake, last month, when she stopped Edward and me from leaving her. For a while, he says, she took the form of a beautiful woman.”

“No more beautiful than yourself, I’m sure,” purred Fenton, “and no more immortal than you’ll be, in ten days.”

Whitcombe moved away to the right along the parapet, toward one of the cannons that was aimed out at the hillside of the gorge. Two rifles leaned against the low wall near him.

She’ll be their prey, and change to one of them,
Byron had said a year ago;
supposing that you care about the child.

At the time, Trelawny had not cared about Tersitza.
The troubles of humans was not a concern of mine.
Now his belly was cold with the certainty that her arm had been ritually cut in the same way that his had, by the lightweight gray-metal knife. Odysseus was imprisoned in Athens – could Fenton have presided over the ceremony?

Trelawny stepped soundlessly back into the deeper shadows. Ten days from now would be Midsummer’s Eve, when Trelawny was expected to undergo the consecration to the mountain. He was supposed to have had the fired-clay statue inserted into his abdomen weeks ago, and the surgeon here was increasingly suspicious of Trelawny’s excuses and postponements.

Where the hell was Bacon? It was almost four months now since he had gone off to retrieve the talisman from Captain Hamilton of the frigate
Cambrian.
Hamilton was the senior British Navy officer in the Aegean Sea, and his father-in-law had reportedly acquired the talisman when Percy Shelley’s ashes were buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome two years ago.

Trelawny recalled his meeting in February with Major Francis D’Arcy Bacon, on indefinite leave from the 19th Light Dragoons.

It had been the last time Trelawny had seen Odysseus; they had ridden with a dozen of Odysseus’s palikars to the abandoned ruins of Talanta, ten miles east of Parnassus, to meet with the Turk captain Omer Pasha and arrange a private three-month truce. “It is the only way in which I can save my people from being massacred,” Odysseus had told Trelawny; “if Ghouras will send me no supplies for my army, I can’t defend the Athenian passes, and I must find what allies I can.”