The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (22 page)

“Be healed,” she said.

And he flung the stone out sideways, into the abyss. “No,” he grated to Tersitza and the mountain.

IV

August 1825

It was nearly two months later that Major Bacon came at last to the cave, climbing barefoot up the ladders in the noonday sun because the height was too unnerving for him to attempt the ascent in boots. At the top of the second ladder, hanging over a drop of more than seven hundred feet, he had to shout several times to the suspicious faces that peered down at him from the parapet twenty feet above.

“Trelawny!” he yelled up at them. “I’m looking for
Edward Trelawny,
you ignorant brigands!”

You clods, you stones, you worse than senseless things, he thought worriedly. Midsummer’s Eve was more than a month past, and though Shelley’s charred jawbone was wrapped in an altar cloth in Bacon’s haversack, it would be of no use if Trelawny had already been transformed into the new link between humanity and the Nephelim. He hoped poor idiot Whitcombe had been able to accomplish something.

Bacon allowed himself a moment to stare at the pitted limestone directly in front of his rung-clutching hands – looking up was even more terrifying than looking down past his feet at the distant rocky gorge, and he felt as if his bowels had turned to ice water. But at a scuffling sound from above he looked up again.

A girl’s face had appeared now at the cave’s rim, scowling down at him. “Bacon?” she called.

His stomach was too fluttery on this windy, vertiginous perch for him to do more than scream back the Greek word for assent,
“Neh!”

The girl disappeared, and after sixty fast, shallow breaths Bacon had begun considering the ordeal of feeling for the next rung down with his bare right foot, and then putting his full weight on that rung and doing it again, back down forty feet of rickety ladders to the narrow ledge that was still seven hundred vertical feet above the roofs of the barracks and stables at the foot of the mountain … but then he heard a clattering from above and saw that several men were angling another ladder out from the cave and lashing its top end to a boom that projected out over the low wall at the edge.

Bacon had to duck when the ladder swung free, and the bottom end of it swished through the air a foot over his head.

He stayed crouched at the top of the second ladder until the third one had largely stopped swinging. It stood out at right angles from the cliff-face, and the high-altitude breeze chilled Bacon’s sweating face as he reached up with one hand and gripped the bottom rung. A moment later his other hand had clutched it too, and he climbed up it rapidly, before it could swing away from the fixed ladder and leave his feet flailing free.

No more than a minute later he was sitting on the cave floor several yards back from the edge, panting and pressing his palms against the solid stone.

Five or six disreputable Greeks with rifles stood around him in the shade of the cave’s roof, but their scowls might have been habitual, for the rifles were pointed at the floor.

“Trelawny?” said the girl who had peered at him over the edge. She was standing beside Bacon, dressed in a loose white chiton that left her arms bare to the shoulders, and she seemed very young. The big dark eyes in her thin face stared intently at him.

Bacon stared back, and did not see the feverish hunger he remembered seeing in the eyes of his unnaturally resurrected wife and son.

After a pause,
“Neh,”
Bacon said again. “Here?”

She nodded, perhaps just at the affirmative, and rocked her head toward the back of the cave, and then began walking up the shelved layers of stone into the deeper shadows.

Bacon sighed mightily and got to his feet.

Several little houses had been built of wood and stone on the higher levels, and the girl led him to one of them and pulled open the flimsy door.

The room within, lit by a lantern on the table, smelled like an ill-kept dog kennel, and at first the frail figure on the bed did seem to show the sick, predatory alertness of those favored by the Nephelim – but a second glance convinced Bacon that it was only extreme physical illness that gave the sunken eyes their glittering semblance of eagerness.

A dirty cloth was visible under the bearded jaw, bound over the top of the head, and the figure apparently couldn’t speak; but when its eyes lit in recognition and a skeletal hand wobbled toward him, Bacon recognized the man.

“My God,” he said. “Trelawny?”

The man on the bed looked toward Tersitza and touched his jaw. The girl crossed to him and worked with both hands at the knotted cloth, and when it fell away, Trelawny opened his mouth and said, clearly, “Yes.”

Bacon leaned against the wall and ventured to smile. Clearly Trelawny had somehow not been granted the near-godhood that had been planned for him.

“Here I am,” Bacon said, “come to redeem my pledge of rendering you a service –” He paused to look around the room. “ – and to enable you to quit Greece.”

“You,” said Trelawny hoarsely, “are a friend indeed.”

Bacon unslung the haversack from his shoulder and crouched to unstrap it. He lifted out the altar-cloth and unfolded it, exposing the arch of dark bone with its row of knobby teeth.

Tersitza was looking on anxiously, and a couple of bearded faces were peering in through the door, but there was no comprehension in their expressions.

Half of the jawbone-section was gray stone, and the hinge-end was blackened yellow bone. “Shall I break it?” Bacon asked. “No,” said Trelawny. “It’s for me to do.”

He held out his skeletal arm again, and Bacon straightened up and crossed to the bed and laid the bone in Trelawny’s withered palm.

Trelawny’s right arm seemed to be useless, but he gripped the bone between the fingertips and the heel of his left hand, and then the tendons stood out like cords on his trembling forearm as he squeezed the thing.

Tersitza opened her mouth and took a half-step forward, then hesitated.

The bone snapped.

The floor shook, as if the whole mountain had been massively struck.

Bacon flinched, then with hollow flippancy quoted the Book of Judges: “With the jawbone of an ass you have slain your thousands.”

He noticed tears glittering on the girl’s cheeks, though she made no sound.

Trelawny opened his shaking hand and two pieces fell onto the floor, the stone half separate from the organic half.

“Give me the bit that was Shelley,” said Trelawny, “the human half of him.”

Bacon bent down and retrieved it, and handed it to Trelawny. By the dim lantern-light Bacon looked around at their audience, and decided he could talk safely if he spoke in rapid English.

“You aren’t the link between the species,” he said. “It didn’t happen, obviously. Why not?”

“A young man shot me,” said Trelawny, “in the back, before the appointed day. He fled directly after. My people here,” he added with a nod toward the girl and the men in the doorway, “caught him and wanted to kill him, but I let him go two weeks ago.”

“Ah,” said Bacon. After a moment he asked, “Why’d you let him go?”

“He was – trying to
save
me, actually. When he shot me. Well, save Tersitza and my unborn child, at any rate.” Trelawny clutched the fragment of Shelley’s jaw. “Odysseus and his agents –” He looked toward the wall, and Bacon guessed that he was deliberately not looking at the girl, “ – had arranged to insert the fired-clay statue into me by a more direct sort of surgery, since I was reluctant to have it done with a scalpel; they loaded a rifle with it.”

Bacon raised his eyebrows and looked at the wasted figure on the bed – clearly Trelawny’s jaw and right arm had been injured. It seemed unlikely that a shot in the back could have done all this damage. “But Whitcombe shot you first?” he hazarded.

The girl and the men in the doorway shifted at the mention of the name.

And Trelawny was staring at him. “You – know him?”

“I
sent
him, man.”

“Sent him to shoot me in the back?”

“If that was what the situation called for.” Seeing Trelawny’s sunken eyes fixed on him, he grinned and added, “The troubles of humans is still not a
big
concern of mine. But his shot obviously didn’t kill you, quite – didn’t they then shoot the statue into you?”

Trelawny was shaking, and he seemed to spit. “Did I call you a
friend,
a moment ago?”

“Yes, and I am your friend. I don’t indulge my friends when hard measures are needed to save them – save their souls, if not their lives.” He smiled. “I have very few friends.”

“God help them.”

“Rather than another, yes.”

Trelawny scowled at him. “Whitcombe didn’t shoot me
first
– it was him that shot the bloody statue into me.”

“He
did?”
Bacon shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why are you – as you are, then?”

“Your man Whitcombe loaded their rifle with a
second
ball, too – one made of silver. And he made sure that he was the one who fired it, so the addition wouldn’t be noticed.”

Bacon laughed softly. “Ah, clever boy! Silver repels vampires, certainly. And that …
cancelled
the stone one?”

“No, damn you. The stone ball, the statue, broke, as it broke my bones; half of it broke my jaw and came out through my mouth. ‘Jawbone of an ass’ there, if you like. All the
silver
ball accomplished was to restrain
them
–” Now he did glance at the girl, “ – from forcibly feeding it to me, shoving it back in.” He exhaled harshly. “I had to
choose
to throw away the mountain’s offer of salvation – and accept,” he added, waving his frail hand at his diminished body, “this, instead.”

Bacon nodded and crossed his arms. “I learned some things about your chum Shelley,” he said, “while I was off fetching that there bit of bone. It seems he made a costly choice too, finally, at the end – and he didn’t get the privilege of complaining about it, after.”

Trelawny managed to draw himself up in the bed, and Bacon was more able to recognize the man he had met on that rainy night in the ruined chapel at Talanta six months ago. “I’m not complaining,” said Trelawny. “Just giving you honesty.” He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “I only give it to a very few.”

Four days later at noon they left the cave – Trelawny and his Italian servant, Bacon, Tersitza and her younger brother. Odysseus’s mother and his palikars chose to stay behind in the Muses’ mountain. A rope had to be tied under Trelawny’s arms and run through the pulley on the boom, for he couldn’t negotiate the ladders.

At the foot of the mountain at last, Trelawny was lifted into a saddle, and it was all he could do to keep from falling off the horse as their party wound slowly down the dry Kakoreme riverbed. Trelawny was squinting in the sun-glare, but now only because of his long stay in the dimness of the cave.

Tersitza sat cross-legged on a mule, and she replied only in curt monosyllables to the remarks Trelawny was able to articulate. They passed the stones marking Fenton’s grave without comment.

The bone fragment of Shelley’s jaw was tucked into Trelawny’s sash beside his pistols and his sword, and he touched the angular lump of it and wished he believed in God so he could pray.

From behind them a deep boom rolled down the gorge, followed a moment later by another, and Trelawny knew that the palikars in the cave were firing the guns as a parting salute, with no projectiles loaded. The ready tears of long convalescence blurred his vision.