The Stone Light (29 page)

But the stream of pilgrims and travelers between the
feet of the rock giants were getting the worst of it. The endless ribbon was frayed. In panic, those who’d managed to get inside the gap streamed forward, plunging and stumbling over one another, pulling themselves up, running on two, four, and more legs; some emitted screams that sounded almost human, others high whistles, scratchy growls, or sounds for which there are no words and no descriptions.

Even if the two battling stone giants did not completely fill the gap, anyone daring to run between them ran the danger of being ground up on the spot. It was suicide to fly through the gate.

“I’m going to try it,” cried Vermithrax.

Merle looked over her shoulder again, nodded encouragingly to Junipa first, then looked at their pursuers. The Lilim were relentlessly on their heels. Vermithrax was flying more slowly on account of the fighters, and the Lilim had caught up to them a little. Lord Light still rode at their head. She wondered how he’d succeeded in waking the fighters from a distance. Before, when it had looked as if the sphinx would kill him, Merle had assumed that the Stone Light had withdrawn from Burbridge. But now it appeared to be back, perhaps stronger than ever; there was no doubt that the Light, with its power over stone and rock, had called the Eternal Fighters to life. Suddenly Merle had the thought that possibly this whole place, perhaps the whole of Hell, was already possessed by the
Stone Light. And she wondered if it hadn’t been a mistake to look at the Egyptian Empire as the greatest danger for the world. Perhaps they’d deluded themselves; perhaps the Pharaoh or even Lord Light or Hell were not the ones who were the worst threat to them all. Perhaps an entirely different war was taking place here in concealment. The Stone Light strove for more. First Hell. Then the upper world. And then, with Junipa’s help, all the other worlds that might exist somewhere behind the walls of dream and imagination.

Vermithrax suddenly pulled in his wings and let himself drop. Something gigantic rushed away over them and cracked with deafening thunder against the rock wall—the elbow of a fighter as big as a church tower.

Junipa’s hold around Merle’s waist was so tight that she could hardly breathe, but it didn’t matter, for she was almost forgetting to breathe with the tension. Stone splinters rattled down on them, and it was thanks to Vermithrax’s speed alone that they weren’t struck by any of the larger pieces. Suddenly everything else was meaningless. They dove into the middle of the fight between the two titans, and now saw nothing more but high stone walls and ramparts that relentlessly shifted, grinding and cracking, rubbing against each other and sometimes slowly, sometimes with lightning speed, moving toward or away from them. Vermithrax flew hair-raising maneuvers to avoid the bodies of the fighters, his wingtip
sometimes touching the curve of a muscle here or the crest of a rib there.

Then, just as abruptly as the fighters had popped up, they were behind them. Vermithrax carried the two girls out of immediate danger, past the edges of the rock gap, and out into the breadth of the plain, high over the heads of scattered Lilim hordes, who flowed fan-shaped in front of the fighting place of the stone giants and sought their safety in flight.

“Have we made it?” asked Junipa in Merle’s ear. The words sounded breathy, tired, and feeble.

“At least we’re out of the city.” Was that any ground for relief? Merle didn’t know, and she was sorry that she couldn’t be more encouraging for Junipa.

Before Lord Light’s swarm reached the fighters, the two titans froze, closely intertwined with one another as before. The flying Lilim, headed by the one carrying Lord Light, shot unhindered between the bodies. The fighters had crushed hundreds of Lilim under their feet, and the survivors were still fleeing in all directions; it would be a long time before anyone dared to come here again. Yet Merle saw a few Lilim stop on the ground and gesticulate toward the red sky with a multitude of the most various limbs at Lord Light and his companions. Then Vermithrax strengthened the beat of his wings, and his speed became so fast that Merle had to blink to keep the headwind from making her eyes burn.

The falcon had flown through the rock gap and the bodies of the fighters much more quickly than Vermithrax. But now Vermithrax caught up again and soon was staying just in sight of the bird. He was their only chance. On their own, they’d never find the gateway they’d used to enter. No one could have committed to memory the route the heralds had used, and so they knew neither where to find that entrance nor how long it would take to get there.

Seth must know another way out of Hell.

Merle had hundreds of questions she would have liked to put to Junipa. But they were both completely exhausted. Her curiosity could wait.

The wasteland seemed even more monotonous to her now than during their flight with the heralds. The jagged rock fans and fissures, the cracks in the ground, the pointed rock promontories, and long-solidified lava glaciers repeated themselves over and over and over again, as if they had in truth been flying in circles for an eternity. Only small variations, differing formations here and there, confirmed to Merle that they were always going straight ahead, that Seth wasn’t fooling them.

At some point, long after Merle’s sense of time had failed and she was having trouble not losing her grip with weariness, an outline peeled itself away from the red glow on the horizon. At first she thought it was a wind spout, perhaps of a cyclone. Then she realized that it was massive and didn’t move from the spot.

A column. Miles high, so that it linked the floor of Hell with the ceiling.

As they approached they could make out openings, irregularly arranged, but all the same size. Windows.

“That’s no column,” whispered Merle in astonishment. “That’s a tower!”

“The falcon is heading straight for it,” said Vermithrax.

“Is that the exit?” asked Junipa, her voice weak.

Merle shrugged her shoulders. “Seth at least seems to think it is. Anyway, he’s led us here.”

“Yes,” said the Queen,
“but not us alone.”

Merle didn’t have to look back to know that the Queen spoke the truth. The swarm of Lilim was still behind them, flying just as tirelessly as Vermithrax and the priest of Horus.

“This could become exciting,” she murmured.

“And shortly,” said Junipa, who, unlike her, had looked back.

Now Merle couldn’t resist either and looked behind them.

The Lilim were barely fifty yards away.

She could see Burbridge’s smile.

14
F
LOTSAM

T
HE SEA TURTLE SHELL DANCED ON THE WAVES LIKE AN
autumn leaf sailing down from a tree. Serafin’s stomach had been cramped for hours, as if he were actually falling, an endless drop into an uncertain chasm, and something in him seemed to be tensing for the impact—for
something
that would put an end to the monotony.

He’d already been looking out at the unchanging sea for so long that he saw its image when he closed his eyes: a sky hung with clouds, and under it the gray, wavy desert of the sea, stirred up but not stormy, cold but not icy, as if the water itself couldn’t decide what it wanted. There was
no land to be seen anywhere. Their condition hadn’t grown any more hopeful a while ago, when the mermaids who’d been pulling them had vanished without a trace. They’d dived away from one moment to the next, and he had only to look into Eft’s eyes to read how perplexed she was.

Eft sat between Dario and Tiziano in one of the horn segments of the sea turtle shell, holding the knapsack containing Arcimboldo’s mirror mask pressed firmly against her. Serafin grieved with her, certainly, but in spite of all that, he’d have appreciated it if she’d pushed away her despondency for a while and given a few thoughts to the future. The immediate future.

It didn’t look good. Not by any means.

Aristide had given up babbling to himself, though. Serafin had been afraid that either Dario or Tiziano would throw the boy overboard, but by daybreak, Aristide had finally grown quiet. Now he stared numbly ahead of him, didn’t answer when spoken to, but nodded occasionally or shook his head if someone asked him a question.

But strangest of all was the way Lalapeya was behaving. The sphinx, in her human form, crouched half over the edge of the shell and let her hand dangle in the water up to her wrist. Someone—Serafin thought it was Tiziano—had remarked that perhaps Lalapeya hoped to catch a fish for breakfast, but no one laughed. And anyway, by now the time for breakfast was long past.

The sphinx’s silence filled Serafin with anger, almost more than the situation into which Lalapeya had brought them. After endless hours on the water, first in darkness and now in the bright daylight, she still hadn’t considered it necessary to explain the experiences of the night to them. She brooded to herself, gazed into emptiness—and let her hand hang in the water as if she were only waiting for someone underneath to grab it.

But whoever she might be waiting for refused her the favor.

“Lalapeya,” said Serafin for the hundredth time, “what happened on San Michele? How long had that … that thing been lying there?”

He thought, She will say “a long time.”

“A long time,” she said.

Dario shifted backward and forward against the horn wall at his back, but he didn’t find the comfort he was seeking. “That was no ordinary sphinx.”

“Oh, really?” Tiziano made a face. “As if we hadn’t noticed that ourselves.”

“What I mean,” said Dario sharply, staring angrily at his friend as he spoke, “is that it wasn’t just a
large
sphinx. Or a
gigantic
sphinx. That thing lying buried under San Michele was … more.” The appropriate words failed him; he shook his head and was silent again.

Serafin agreed with him. “More,” he said shortly, and after a pause: “A sphinx god.”

Aristide, confused, silent Aristide, looked up and said his first words in many hours: “If it was a god, then it was an evil one.”

As if Lalapeya had suddenly awakened from a trance that had carried her far from the boys and the sea turtle shell, even from the sea, she said: “Not evil. Only old. Unimaginably old. The first son of the Mother.” She took her hand out of the water, stared at it for a long moment, as if it belonged to someone else’s body, then went on, “He was already lying under there before there was Egypt—and I mean the
ancient
Egypt! At a time when other powers ruled the world, the suboceanic cultures and the lords of the deep and—” She broke off, shook her head, and began again: “He lay there a long time. At that time no humans lived in the lagoon, and he was brought there so that no one would disturb his rest. He
was
a god, at least by your measures, even if at that time no one called him that. And they wanted to be sure that he would remain there undisturbed forever. Therefore, guards were put in place to watch over him.”

“Guards such as you,” said Serafin.

The sphinx nodded, looking infinitely beautiful in her grief. “I wasn’t the first, but that isn’t important. I watched the lagoon for so long that I gave up counting the years. I came here when there was still no city, no houses or fishermen’s huts at all. But then I watched men come, take possession of the islands, and settle there. Perhaps I
ought to have prevented it, who knows? But I always liked you humans, and I saw nothing wrong with your living there where
he
lay buried. I did what I could to protect his honor and rest. It was I who saw to it that San Michele would also become a cemetery for you humans, too. And I took pains to be a friend to the mermaids, for they are the true masters of the lagoon—or at least they always were until the humans made a sport of catching them and killing them or hitching them before their boats.”

Eft had been listening attentively for some time, and now she nodded in agreement. “You gave us the cemetery of the mermaids. A place that the humans could not find. To this very day.”

“I’ve only done what I could do best,” said Lalapeya. “I’ve watched the dead. Just as I have done for thousands of years. And it was easy. At first I had only to be there, only wait. Then it was time to build a house, finally a palace, all in order not to attract attention, to give no one reason to mistrust.” She dropped her eyes, and for a moment it seemed as if she were about to put her hand into the water again, almost mournfully, guiltily. “When the lagoon was still uninhabited, the loneliness didn’t bother me. That only came later, when all the others turned up, the mermaids and the humans. And naturally, the Flowing Queen. I had to see how it was to have friends, to trust others. Therefore I gave the mermaids a place for their dead, but they avoided me too.”

“We honored you,” said Eft.

“Honored!” Lalapeya sighed softly. “I wanted friendship and instead I got honor. One has nothing to do with the other. I was always lonely and would have remained so, if not …” She fell silent. “When the great war began, when the Egyptians conquered the world, I knew that it was time to act. I heard that they possessed the power to awaken the dead and to enslave them—and then finally I understood that I, without knowing it, had been awaiting this moment down all the ages. Everything suddenly made sense. If the Egyptians succeeded in making the
god,
as you called him, be their tool … if they actually succeeded in that, yes, then they would truly be masters of the world.”