by Jeff Long
For Ali, the significance lay in what this meant to hadal speech and cognition. A straight jaw provided a wider range of consonants, and an erect neck-skull structure—basicranial flexion—meant a lower larynx or voice box, and that meant more vowel range. The fact that fifteen-thousand-year-old hadal statues had straight jaws and an erect head, and Ike’s trophy head did not, suggested problems with modern hadal speech, and possibly with his cognition. Ali remembered Troy’s remarks about symmetry in the hadal brain, too. What if subterranean conditions had evolved Haddie from a creature capable of sculpting this fortress, firing these terra-cotta warriors, and plying the sea and rivers, into a virtual beast? Ike had said hadals could no longer read hadal script. What if they had lost their ability to reason? What if Satan was nothing more than a savage cretin? What if the Gitners and Spurriers of the world were right, and H. hadalis deserved no better treatment than a vicious dog?
Troy was troubled. “How could they reverse so quickly, though? Call it twenty thousand years. That’s not time enough for such a pronounced evolution, is it?”
“I can’t explain it,” Ali said. “But don’t forget, evolution is an answer to environment, and look at the environment. Radioactive rock. Chemical gases. Electromagnetic surges. Gravitational anomalies. Who knows? Simple inbreeding may be to blame.”
Ike was just ahead with Ruiz and Pia, examining three figures waving swords of fire, looking them in the face as if checking his own identity. “Is something wrong?” Ali asked.
“They’re not like this anymore,” Ike said. “They’re similar, but they’ve changed.”
Ali and Troy looked at each other.
“How do you mean?” Ali thought he would speak to some of the physical differences she and Troy had noticed.
Ike raised his hands to the entire tableaux. “Look at this. This is—this was—greatness. Magnificence. In all my time among them, there was never any hint of that. Magnificence? Never.”
They spent the rest of the first day and the next exploring. Flowstone oozed from doorways, collapsing sections. Deeper in, they found a wealth of relics, most of them human. There were ancient coins from Stygia and Crete mixed with American buffalo nickels and Spanish doubloons minted in Mexico City. They found Coke bottles, Japanese baseball cards, and a flintlock. There were books written in dead languages, a set of samurai armor, an Incan mirror, and, beneath that, figurines and clay tablets and bone carvings from civilizations long forgotten. One of their strangest discoveries was an armillary, a Renaissance-era teaching device with metal spheres inside one another to depict planetary revolutions. “What in God’s name is a hadal doing with something like this?” Ruiz wanted to know.
What kept drawing them back was the circular platform with its army surrounding the stone spire. However priceless the human artifacts were, scattered through the fortress, they were mundane compared with the tower display. On the second morning, Ike found a series of hidden nubbins on the tower itself. Using these, he made a daring, unprotected ascent to the top of the column.
They watched him balance atop the spire. For the longest time he just stood there. Then he called down for them to turn off their lights. They sat in the darkness for half an hour, bathed by the faintly incandescent floor.
When he roped down again, Ike looked shaken.
“We’re standing on their world,” he said. “This whole platform is a giant map. The spire was built as a viewing station.”
They glanced around at their feet, and all they saw were wiggling cutmarks on a flat, unpainted surface. But through the afternoon, Ike led them one at a time up the ropes and they saw with their own eyes. By the time he took Ali up for her view, Ike had made the trip six times and was becoming familiar with parts of the map. Ali found the top flat and small, just three feet square. Apparently no one but Ike had felt comfortable standing on top, so he had rigged a pair of loops for people to sit in while hanging alongside. Ali hung beside Ike, sixty feet up, while her night vision adapted.
“It’s like a giant sand mandala, but without the sand,” Ike said. “It’s weird how I keep running across pieces of mandalas down here. I’m talking about places like sub-Iran or under Gibraltar. I thought Haddie must have kidnapped a bunch of monks and put them to work decorating. But now I see.”
And so did she. In a giant circle all around her, the platform beneath them began to radiate ghostly colors.
“It’s some kind of pigment worked into the stone,” said Ike. “Maybe it was visible at ground level at one time. I like the idea of an invisible map, though. Probably commoners like us would never have had access to this knowledge. Only the elite would have been permitted to come up here and get the whole picture.”
The longer she waited, the more her vision adjusted. Details clarified. The incisions flowing with mercury became tiny rivers veining across the surface. Lines of turquoise and red and green intertwined and branched in wild patterns: tunnels.
“I think that big stain mark is our sea,” said Ike.
The black shape lay quite close to the tower base. Paths threaded in from far-flung regions. If this was reality, then there were whole worlds down here. Whether they had once been known as provinces or nations or frontiers, the gaping cavities stood like air sacs within a great round lung.
“What’s happening?” Ali gasped. “It’s coming alive.”
“Your eyes are still catching up,” Ike said. “Just wait. It’s three-dimensional.”
The flatness suddenly swelled with contours and depth. The color lines no longer overlapped but had levels all their own, dipping and rising among other lines.
“Oh,” Ali murmured, “I feel like I’m falling,”
“I know. It opens and opens and opens. It’s all in the art. Somehow, Himalayan cultures must have plagiarized it a long time ago. Now the Buddhists use it just to draw blueprints for Dharma palaces. Meditate long enough, and the geometrics turn into an optical illusion of a building. But here you get the original intent. A map of the whole inner earth.”
Even the black blot of the sea had dimensions. Ali could see its flat surface and, underneath it, the jagged contours of its floor. The river lines looked suspended in midspace.
“I’m not sure how to read this thing. There’s no north-south, no scale,” said Ike. “But there’s a definite logic here. Look at the coastline of our sea. You can pretty much see how we came.”
It was different from the way she had been drawing her own maps. Lacking compass bearings, the maps she continued to make were projections of her westward desire, essentially a straight line with bends. These lines were more languorous and full. Now she could see how tightly she had been disciplining her fear of this space. The subterranean world was practically infinite, more like the sky than the earth.
The sea was shaped like an elongated pear. Ali tried in vain to distinguish any features along the right-hand route Walker had taken. Other than extrapolating that rivers intersected his route, she couldn’t read its hazards.
“This spire must represent the map’s center, this fortress,” Ali said. “An X to mark the spot. But it’s not actually touching the sea. In fact the sea is some distance away.”
“That had me stumped, too,” Ike said. “But you see how all the lines converge here, at the spire? We’ve all looked outside and there isn’t that kind of convergence. The trail we came on continues following the shoreline. And one path leads down from the back, a single path. Now I’m thinking we’re just a spot on one of many roads.” He pointed to where a single green line departed from the sea. “That spot on that road.”
If Ike was right, and if the map’s proportions were true, then their party had covered less than a fifth of the sea’s circumference.
“Then what could this spire represent?” Ali asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it. You know the adage, all roads lead to …” He let her finish it.
“Rome?” she breathed.
Could it be?
“Why not?” he s
aid.
“The center of ancient hell?”
“Can you stand on top for a minute?” Ike asked her. “I’ll hold your legs.”
Ali worked her knees onto the meter-wide apex, and then got to her feet. From that extra height, she saw all the lines drawing in toward her feet. Abruptly she had the sensation of enormous power. It was as if, for a moment, the entire world fused in her. The center was here, and it could only be the one center, their destination. Now she understood why Ike had descended so shaken.
“While you’re up there,” Ike said, his hands firm upon her legs, “tell me if you see the map differently.”
“The lines are more distinct,” she said. With nothing to hold on to, nothing at her back or front, the panorama surged in toward her. The great web of lines seemed to be lifting higher. Suddenly it was as if she were not looking down, but up.
“Dear God,” she said.
The spire had become the pit.
She was seeing the world from deep within.
Her head began spinning.
“Get me down,” she pleaded, “before I fall.”
“I have something to show you,” Ike said to her that night. More? she thought. The afternoon’s revelations had exhausted her. He seemed happy.
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” she asked. She was tired. Hours had passed, and she was still reeling from the map’s optical illusion. And she was hungry.
“Not really,” he said.
They had made camp within the colonnaded entry, where a stream of pure water issued from an eroded spout. Their hunger was telling. Another day of explorations had weakened them. The ones who had climbed atop the spire were weakest. They lay on the ground, mostly curled around their empty stomachs. Pia was holding Spurrier, who suffered from migraines. Troy sat with Ike’s pistol facing the sea, his head slumped, halfway to sleep. From here on, things were going to get no better.
Ali changed her mind. “Lead on,” she said.
She took Ike’s hand and got to her feet. He led her inside and to a secret passage. It contained its own flight of carved stairs.
“Go slow,” he said. “Save your strength.”
They reached a tower jutting above the fortress. They had to crawl through another hidden duct to more stairs. As they climbed up the final stretch of narrow steps, she saw a rich, buttery light above. He let her go in first.
In a room overlooking the sea, Ike had lit scores of oil lamps. They were small clay leaves that cupped the oil and fed it along a groove to the flame at one tip.
“Where did you find these?” she asked. “And where did the oil come from?”
In one corner stood three large earthenware amphorae that might well have been salvaged from an ancient Greek shipwreck.
“It was all buried in storage vaults under the floor. There’s got to be fifty more of these jars down there,” he said. “This must have been something like a lighthouse. Maybe there were others like it farther along the shore, a system of relay stations.”
A single lamp might have been enough to let her see her fingertips. In their hundreds, the lamps turned the room to gold. She wondered how it would have looked to hadal ships drifting upon the black sea twenty thousand years ago.
Ali sneaked a look at Ike. He had done this for her. The light was hurting his eyes a little, but he didn’t shield them from her.
“We can’t stay here,” he said, wiping at his tears. “I want you to come with me.” He was trying not to squint. What was beautiful to her was painful to him. She was tempted to blow out some of the lamps to ease his discomfort, but decided he might be insulted.
“There’s no way out,” she said. “We can’t go on.”
“We can.” He gestured at the endless sea. “It’s not hopeless, the paths go on.”
“And what about the others?”
“They can come, too. But they’ve given up. Ali, don’t give up.” He was fervent. “Come with me.”
This was for her alone, like the light.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re different. I’m like them, though. I’m tired. I want to stay here.”
He twisted his head away.
“I know you think I’m being complacent,” she said.
“We don’t have to die,” Ike said. “No matter what happens to them, we don’t have to die here.” He was adamant. It did not escape her that he spoke to her as “we.”
“Ike,” she said, and stopped. She had fasted in her day, and knew it was too soon for the euphoria to be addling her. But her sense of contentment was rich.
“We can get out of here,” he urged.
“You’ve brought us as far as we can go,” she said. “You’ve done everything we set out to do. We’ve made our discoveries. We know that a great empire once existed down here. Now it’s over.”
“Come with me, Ali.”
“We have no food.”
His eyes shifted ever so slightly, a side glance, nothing more. He said nothing, but something about his silence contradicted her. He knew where there was food? It jarred her.
His canniness darted before her like a wild animal. I am not you, it said. Then his glance straightened and he was one of them again.
She finished. “I’m grateful for what you’ve accomplished for us. Now we just want to come to terms with where we’ve gotten in our lives. Let us make our peace,” she said. “You have no reason to stay here anymore. You should go.”
There, she thought. All of her nobleness in a cup. Now it was his turn. He would resist gallantly. He was Ike.
“I will,” he said.
A frown spoiled her brow. “You’re leaving?” she blurted, and immediately wished she hadn’t. But still, he was leaving them? Leaving her?
“I thought about staying,” he said. “I thought how romantic it would be. I imagined how people might find us ten years from now. There would be you. And there would be me.”
Ali blinked. The truth was, she’d imagined the same scene.
“And they would find me holding you,” he said. “Because that’s what I would do after you died, Ali. I would hold you in my arms forever.”
“Ike,” she said, and stopped again. Suddenly she was incapable of more than monosyllables.
“That would be legal, I think. You wouldn’t be Christ’s bride after you died, right? He could have your soul. I could have what was left.”
That was a bit morbid, yet nonetheless the truth. “If you’re asking my permission,” she said, “the answer is yes.” Yes, he could hold her. In her imagination, it had been the other way around. He had died first and she had held him. But it was all the same concept.
“The problem is,” he continued, “I thought about it some more. And to put it bluntly, I decided it was a pretty raw deal for me.”
She let her gaze drift around the glowing room.
“I’d get you,” he answered himself, “too late.”
Good-bye, Ike, she thought. It was just a matter of saying the words now.
“This isn’t easy,” he said.
“I know.” Vaya con Dios.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “It would break my heart. It would kill me.” He licked his lips. He took the leap. “To have waited too late with you.”
Her eyes sprang upon him.
Her surprise alarmed him. “I should be able to say it, if I’m going to stay,” he defended himself. “Can’t I even say that much?”
“Say what, Ike?” Her voice sounded far away to her.
“I’ve said enough.”
“It’s mutual, you know.” Mutual? That was the best she could offer?
“I know,” he said. “You love me, too. And all God’s creatures.” He crossed himself, gently mocking.
“Stop,” she said.
“Forget it,” he said, and his eyes closed in that marauded face.
It was up to her to break this impasse.
No
more ghosts. No more imagination. No more dead lovers: her Christ, his Kora.
As her hand reached out, it was like watching herself from a great distance. They might have been someone else’s fingers, except they were hers. She touched his head.
Ike recoiled from her touch. Instantly, Ali could see how sure he was she pitied him. Once upon a time, with a face untarnished and young, that might not have been a consideration. But he was wary and filled with his own repulsiveness. Naturally he would distrust a touch.
Ali had not done this forever, it seemed. It could have felt clumsy or foolish or false. If she had contrived it in any way, given the slightest thought to it beforehand, it would have failed. Which was not to say her hands were steady as she opened her buttons and slid her shoulders bare. She let the clothing drop, all of it.
Nude, she felt the warmth of the lamps on her flesh. From the corner of her eye, she saw the light from twenty eons ago turn her into gold.
As they moved into each other, she thought that here was one hunger at least that no longer had to go begging.
Chelsea’s scream woke them.
It had become her habit to wash her hair at the edge of the sea early each morning.
“Another fish in the water,” Ali murmured to Ike. She had been dreaming of orange juice and birdsong—a mourning dove—and the smell of oak smoke on the hill-country air. Ike’s arms fit around her just so. It was a shame to spoil the new day with a false alarm.
Then more shouts rose up to them in the tower. Ike lifted from the floor and leaned out the window, his back dented and pockmarked and striped with text and images and old violence.
“Something’s happened,” he said, and grabbed his clothes and knife.
Ali followed him down the stairs, the last to reach the group gathered on the shore. They were shivering. It wasn’t cold, but they had less fat on them these days. “Here’s Ike,” someone said, and the group parted.