Lucia's Masks Page 19

  The demons they battled, each in their fastness, were pride (lest they succumb to the folly of elitism) and despair (lest they never see their own time emerge from darkness). Each morning brought the necessary demand that they renew their hope. In their separateness one from the other they fed the spirit in their respective ways, whether through ritual action and prayer, disciplines of attention, or multi-chambered silence. Through the encrypted messages, they offered each other solace, and a basis for faith. They shared their latest daily gleanings from a scrupulous sweep of readings meteorological, atmospheric, and astronomical. They were alert to the slightest cultural shift. Reports of a pen scratching words on paper, or of a clay figure baking in the sun, were cause for elation. They transmitted to each other that most rare sound of living voices mingled in song. Listening, Chandelier’s father had believed the space inside the Egg transfigured. He seemed to stand directly beneath a star-clustered dome, and the current that moved through his veins was purest longing.

  But the sign for which the Arêté watched with keenest anticipation had so far eluded them. And that was birdsong. When the songbirds returned, Chandelier’s father explained, it would be safe for them to leave the Egg.

  Chandelier never told his father that he found this prospect terrifying. It was one thing to study sky, ocean, mountains, and savannah on film. It was quite another to visit them.

  Chandelier feared the real world might be too much for him. He feared he might fall down or go mad.

  Of course, he strove to master his anxiety, and even before the explosion, it was to Snake he turned as his prime mentor who knew all about survival. Chandelier had encountered many gods and heroes and mythic beings in his books. But from their very first meeting, when Snake slithered from his secret underworld in the myths of Earth’s beginnings, Chandelier was mesmerized. The fine hair on the boy’s wrists and at the back of his neck stood erect. His entire body, his spine especially, was alert to Snake’s majesty and supple energizing power.

  Coiled. Circular. An emerald zigzag. A dark bolt distinguishing earth from sky. The boy marvelled at Snake’s guile, his shape-shifting, his flickering tongue. He knew there was no situation from which Snake could not extricate himself, whether by stealth or hypnosis or darting venom. In story after story where Snake reigned, Chandelier saw a visceral truth confirmed. Here was his life’s spirit guide. He knew he would never find a better one. He read of Snake as the founder of great cities, and of the Serpent as Time itself. He saw Snake make his sinewy belly a platform to support a dancing god with eyes of fire. He saw Snake as a healer, curled round a slender staff, a counsellor to physicians through the ages.

  Snake, he implores as he runs, please help Bird Girl.

  And he saw Snake maligned, his wisdom misconstrued in tales where he was cursed and miscast as the evil seducer of humankind. In this mistaken form, Snake was made demon and dragon, to be slain again and again by a warrior angel with trident and sword. Of course, the sinewy one did not die, no matter how often he was slain. He rose up again shining, because he was Snake.

  Chandelier recognized that any willful defamations of Snake’s character only proved the paradox his father had taught him: that the sacred was also the cursed, the two aspects so entwined they made a single shape, like the old skin Snake sloughed off in resurrection. The boy looked and saw only Snake’s gleaming, benevolent, heroic self. What other being was so at ease underground, sliding along the earth’s surface, or through water? Snake was a climber too, up poles, pinnacles, and cliffs; so heights were no obstacle.

  Now, as Chandelier bends double, his breath spent in pursuit of the archer who shot Bird Girl, he wishes such a saviour hero for her. She cannot die. She simply cannot. His hands are balled in fists, one of them tight round the little slab of green stone with its metal paddle which he had seized from the ruins of the Egg. It perturbs him that he still cannot remember what this object is. He has kept it safe because it belonged to his father. This fact alone makes the thing precious.

  He looks around and sees the Outpacer some distance behind him, striving to catch his breath. The cowl of the man’s gown touches the earth.

  “We have lost him,” the Outpacer says. “See here.” He points to a wide fissure in the earth that the boy must have passed moment ago, unseeing. “I believe this is the opening to a tunnel. There may be a whole network of channels under the earth, or perhaps this leads into the chambered caves the plague doctor spoke of.”

  “And there!” The Outpacer points to his left. Chandelier has to rub his eyes before he can properly make out a peculiar dark hump. He blinks and sees that the hump has a yawning black mouth. The boy has never before seen a cave. Immediately he thinks of bears, aurochs, ossuaries, and magical pigments.

  “We must hurry back.” Chandelier hears a catch in the man’s voice. Like a tear in a purse, he thinks, through which a treasure is escaping.

  Do we all love Bird Girl then, the boy wonders, as they speed back. The knot in his throat keeps tightening. As he runs, he tries to summon up images of hope. He remembers pictures from his mother’s books of exquisite, flower-like faces turned skyward, and the miraculous sign that would appear, sometimes in the shape of a shaft of light or an angel. But these static images will not do for Bird Girl. He needs movement and sprightliness. He needs a landscape in which to picture her bounding and leaping about — flying even, in her exuberance.

  The image that comes to him is of the hills that so often defined the horizon in the paintings of the Quattrocento his mother loved. His eye had always been drawn to those soft undulations that served to show how deep and wide the world was within the picture’s frame. Sometimes bare; sometimes dotted with slim trees, the foremost hills were crowned with purple or burnt sienna — a name, once learned, he loved to roll upon his tongue. In all those images, he had thought he perceived a slight movement. He was certain that hills embodied an actual joy. They must, he told himself, be the laughter of earth.

  Since he emerged from the Egg, Chandelier had seen no hills, only flatness and forest, and the wretched Cityscape and sewer land he would prefer to forget. Hills were a wonder yet to come. I will lift up my eyes, he promised himself, and there they will be. He pictures how he and Bird Girl would make their way up to the rounded peak toward the source of that vivid colour. She would run, skip, and leap up the yielding slope. Once they reached the top, they would breathe quietly, absorbing the plenitude of space. And perhaps there, the actual shining world of myth and story would reveal itself to both of them, and Snake would show himself and speak.

  Where is Snake, he wonders anxiously, as he and Outpacer plunge through the last of the brush to the place where Lucia kneels, pressing a cloth to Bird Girl’s wound. Candace stands sorrowful at Bird Girl’s feet. Harry, leaning heavily on his stick, stares down at the girl’s small face, almost unrecognizable in its waxen pallor. It seems to Chandelier that Harry’s grizzled face has noticeably sagged since the arrow struck.

  “We lost the bastard,” the Outpacer whispers. Candace frowns. Harry’s mouth twists over his lower teeth.

  “We have cleaned the wound and put on some ointment,” Lucia says. “Now we can only hope.” Her brow furrows under the taut band of her kerchief.

  “Lola is dead,” she tells them. “She sucked out a lot of the venom before we could stop her . . . ”

  The Outpacer puts a hand to his hidden face. “My God! Who else among us would have made such a sacrifice?

  “The boy and I will bury Lola.”

  Chandelier begins to summon his courage. He is afraid that when he touches Lola’s corpse, he will feel again the clamminess of his father’s severed hand. He wishes Snake would come, for isn’t his friend a cool and wily fellow, well acquainted with death?

  Help me.

  It is then the rain begins to fall. At first the boy assumes the sizzling sound he hears behind him is the Outpacer lighting his torch. He turns round and sees a small crater in the earth from which a dense sulfurous smok
e rises. He is reminded of the stink of the Egg’s smoldering remnants. His eyes begin to water and so it is through a glaze that he sees a huge drop of rust-red rain fall directly ahead of him. The instant it touches the earth, the rain burns a hole and the stench catches in his throat despite his mask.

  The Outpacer has picked up Bird Girl, and is shielding her body with the skirt of his gown which he has pulled up to cover her, leaving his legs bare. “Run,” he yells. “We must take shelter. Follow me, and be quick.”

  Candace is screaming. Harry is gesturing wildly, urging the boy to speed ahead after the Outpacer. Chandelier shakes his head, and seizes Harry’s hand, pulling him forward. The boy struggles to resist the terrible urge to look up. He knows that if he obeys this foolish compulsion, he may scald his face badly or even go blind. What or who is bleeding above them? Or is this Sky weeping for himself, his tears stained by the innards of the Sun?

  “Go boy! Let’s get a move on.” Chandelier cannot recall Harry ever moving so quickly before, but they are still the last in the line. Lucia, who is just ahead of them, keeps looking back to make sure they have not stumbled.

  The deadly drops are spaced far apart, and it is this that saves them. Plunk, the boy hears. Sizzle. Plunk and sizzle. This destructive percussion keeps them company as they run, but the sound is always a little to their left or to their right, or just behind or ahead.

  Who is slowing down the rain, the boy wonders. Is it Snake? Or are his parents watching over him? This idea has never occurred to him before.

  Once he and Harry reach the cave mouth and retreat inside with the others, the Sky-being of Chandelier’s imagining begins to roar. Then Sky lets loose a curtain of blood.

  “Farther back,” calls the Outpacer, in a sharp tone the boy has never heard him use before. “Keep close to the wall.”

  The boy clutches Harry’s hand tighter, and together they inch their way toward the Outpacer’s voice, their backs grazing the damp cave wall. How dark it is, and how cold.

  Even as he forms this thought, the cave mouth reveals itself as a crimson gash. An ear-shattering roaring invades the world. The boy’s flesh contracts. There follows the sound of an explosion so massive that the stone behind their backs shifts and groans. “Courage,” he hears Harry say. Or was it Snake who spoke? This is a new kind of pain, the boy thinks.

  They are all being tortured by the roaring and the booming. Chandelier begins to wonder if this is indeed the end of all things; if soon he will see his parents, made whole again and happy. He seeks comfort in this idea.

  “Keep moving,” the Outpacer cries out. “Carefully. Cautiously. Stay close to the wall. This is the fireball the doctor predicted. We will survive this.”

  The fireball. It will demolish everything in its path, the plague doctor said, including human flesh and bone. The boy’s heart lurches in his chest as he pictures the fire consuming Lola’s body. There will be nothing left of her now, not even ash.

  Not even that. Where then would she be?

  Foolish boy. You know the answer to that. This is Snake again.

  Yes, of course he knows the answer. Lola’s story goes into the deep well of what we are.

  At that instant the entire interior of the cave is briefly lit with a lurid glow. For a split-second only, just as long as the hellish light lasts, Chandelier sees a face he does not recognize. Plunged again into darkness, he reconstructs the image in his mind’s eye as the group progresses onward into the heart of the rock. The unknown man, with the stern, lean face of a warrior angel, wears a monk’s gown. In his arms he bears the slight, slumped figure of a young girl.

  Chandelier is so amazed that he stops, and Harry’s shoulder bumps his.

  “Boy, what’s wrong?”

  He cannot say: I have seen the naked face of the Outpacer and he looks like a warrior angel; so he simply whispers, “Nothing, sorry.” He and Harry inch forward once again.

  A putrid smell makes the boy’s nostrils prickle. Harry coughs.

  “There is sweeter air ahead,” the Outpacer calls out. “Keep moving.”

  How odd it is to hear the hooded man’s voice and be able to picture his face.

  “Speak your names, please.” The Outpacer sounds anxious, and the echo intensifies his concern. “Let me know you are all here.”

  “Candace.”

  “Lucia.”

  “Harry.”

  “Chandelier.”

  But no one hears the boy speak his name. For at that moment, the toe of his fabric boot dislodges a stone that clatters and flies out from under his foot. He rights himself, squeezes Harry’s hand, and listens to the intense hush in which they are all now immersed. Some ten full heartbeats later, they hear a splash.

  “Oh, my God!” The boy thinks it was Lucia who spoke, yet the voice was so fear-filled, he cannot be certain.

  “Stay calm, all of you,” the Outpacer says. “Press your backs against the wall.

  “Lucia, could you strike a match? Can you manage this?”

  “Yes.”

  Ah, thinks the boy. It is all right. This is the Lucia he knows who is speaking.

  They wait. Then they hear the rasp of the struck match.

  In the brief light Lucia makes, the boy sees first the gleaming wetness of the cave walls. We are inside the mouth of one of the old gods, he thinks, the first ones. He looks down and gasps, as they all do. They are standing on a ledge barely two feet wide. Far below them is a ravine whose ebony water, churning and alive, speaks of its deadly depth.

  Now they are in the dark again. They all instinctively press back against walls that are wetter, slippier, and so much more inhospitable than when they first entered the cave.

  A woman sobs. Is it Candace or Lucia? Or is it Bird Girl?

  He hears Lucia speak in words he does not understand: “Per me si va ne la città dolente . . . Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chi entrate.”

  He registers the raw fear in the words nonetheless, and some other emotion he cannot identify — something heavy that slows her speech and makes her sound unlike herself.

  “Courage!” This from Harry.

  “Take courage! Let us keep on.” This is the Outpacer.

  “Speranza. Sì.” Harry again.

  “Speranza,” Lucia repeats.

  “Another match, Lucia.” As the match strikes, the boy concentrates this time on looking directly ahead, toward the back of the cave. At first he cannot believe his eyes. What appears to be a ring of dazzling white stones marks out the boundary of a solid platform of rock, wide and deep enough for them all to sit and rest; even to lie down and to sleep.

  “It is quite solid and safe.” Already the Outpacer is standing on the platform, encouraging them to join him. His hood is once again in place, the boy notes. He sees how carefully the man has laid Bird Girl down in the centre of the stone floor. The Outpacer stands above her still form, rummaging in the deep pockets of his habit.

  Lucia’s match goes out.

  “I have a small flashlight,” the Outpacer tells them. “I am sure it has several hours of power left.” A small tube of light illuminates Bird Girl’s prone figure. With the utmost care and caution, they all make their way along the remainder of the narrow ledge to the platform which seems to grow out of the roots of the cave, like a tongue in a mouth.

  “Ugh!” Candace yelps. The Outpacer swings his torch to where she stands, her hand covering her mouth. Candace points to a hollow in the cave wall, from which a skull grins down at them. He then sweeps the slim beam around the perimeter of the platform, where his light discovers an assortment of gleaming bones: rib cages, clavicles, tibias, and many more skulls.

  “We have been preceded,” he says. “We will be protected by this circle,” he tells them. Harry murmurs his agreement. What choice do they have but to believe this, the boy wonders.

  “We will wait here,” the Outpacer tells them, like a father speaking in stern reassurance to his children, “some eight to ten hours. Then I will make the first foray o
ut to ensure it is safe for us to leave.

  “For now we must conserve our strength. We have survived the firestorm. We have brought Bird Girl through this ordeal.

  “We must persist; head north speedily as the doctor advised.”

  To Chandelier’s great surprise, the Outpacer begins to sing. The boy is so weary he cannot take in all the words. Later he remembers “valour” and “constant be” or perhaps it was a “constant bee.” The song’s quietly thumping beat makes him think of a healthy heart in a great strong chest on which he might lay his head. Perhaps that is why, despite the day’s harrowing event and tormenting worry, he falls asleep. When he wakes, his head is nestled against Harry’s hip.

  “The Outpacer went out about ten minutes ago,” Harry whispers. “Soon we will have news of when we can leave this damp and wretched place.”

  “Bird Girl?” the boy asks. He cannot keep the apprehension out of his voice.

  “She is still breathing, although a bit raggedly,” Lucia answers. “There is hope,” she adds. “Speranza.”

  “Speranza,” the boy repeats. The sound of this word has a power to brighten and quicken his spirit when he speaks it quietly to himself.

  “What’s that?” Lucia asks. “Hush.”

  At that moment they hear the unmistakable slide of shoe soles on loose stone; and the rub of cloth against the slick stone wall. Someone has entered the cave.

  “The Outpacer?” whispers Harry to Chandelier and Lucia, for they are the only three awake. Lucia shakes her head, even though they can barely see each other in the dark.

  “He would have called out to us,” she responds in a hush. She flicks on the flashlight, and sends the beam sweeping over the wall. A man with a shock of orange hair is making his way rapidly along the narrow ledge. He is dressed completely in black. Over his right shoulder is slung the strap of a quiver.