The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “Then get her a drink of water,” I said.

  He took the Coke* bottle off the crate by the hammock, put the straw in it, and leaned into the darkness to tilt Evelyn’s head forward so she could drink. I turned the translator off. It was bad enough listening to her try to talk. I didn’t think I could stand listening to her try to drink.

  After what seemed like an hour, he set the Coke bottle down on the crate again. “Evelyn,” he said. “Try to tell us what happened. Did you go in the tomb?”

  I switched the translator back on and kept my finger ready on the record button. There was no point in recording the tortured sounds she was making.

  “Curse,” Evelyn said clearly, and I pushed the button down. “Don’t open it. Don’t open it.” She stopped and tried to swallow. “Wuhdayuh?”

  “What day is it?” the translator said.

  She tried to swallow again, and Lacau reached for the Coke bottle, pulled the straw out, and handed it to the bey. “Go get some more water.” The little bey stood up, her black eyes still fixed on the flame, and took the bottle. “Hurry,” Lacau said.

  “Hurry,” Evelyn said. “Before bey.”

  “Did you open the tomb when the bey went to get the Sandalman?”

  “Oh, don’t open it. Don’t open it. Sorry. Didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what, Evelyn?” Lacau said.

  The bey was still staring, fascinated, at the flame, her mouth open so that I could see her shiny black teeth. I looked at the thick green bottle she was holding in her dirty-looking hands. The straw in it was glass, too, thick and uneven and full of bubbles, probably made out at the bottling plant. Its sides were scored with long scratches. Evelyn had made those scratches when she sucked the water up through the straw. One more day and she’ll have it cut to ribbons, I thought, and then remembered we didn’t have one more day. Not unless Evelyn’s bey suddenly pitched forward into the red flame, honeycombs sharpening on her dirty brown skin, inside her throat, inside her lungs.

  “Hurry,” Evelyn said into the hypnotic silence, and the little bey looked over at the hammock as if she had just woken up and hurried out of the room with the Coke bottle. “Hurry. What day is it? Have to save the treasure. He’ll murder her.”

  “Who, Evelyn? Who’ll murder her? Who will he murder?”

  “We shouldn’t have gone in,” she said, and let her breath out in a sigh that sounded like sand scratching on glass. “Beware. Curse of kings.”

  “She’s quoting what was on the door seal,” Lacau said. He straightened up. “They did go in the tomb,” he said. “I suppose you got that on your recorder.”

  “No,” I said, and pushed “erase.” “She still isn’t down from the dilaudid. I’ll start recording when she starts making sense.”

  “The Commission would have found for the Sandalman,” Lacau said. “Howard swore they didn’t go in, that they waited for the Sandalman.”

  “What difference does it make?” I said. “Evelyn won’t be alive to testify at any Commission hearing and neither will we if the Sandalman and his soldiers get here before the ship, so what the hell difference does it make? There won’t be any treasure left either after the commission gets through, so why are we making this damned recording? By the time the Commission hears it, it’ll be too late to save her.”

  “What if it was something in the tomb, after all? What if it was a virus?”

  “It wasn’t,” I said. “The Sandalman poisoned them. If it was a virus, then why doesn’t the bey have it? She was in the tomb with them, wasn’t she?”

  “Hurry,” somebody said, and I thought for a minute it was Evelyn, but it was the bey. She came running into the room, the Coke bottle splashing water everywhere.

  “What is it?” Lacau said. “Is the ship here?”

  She yanked at his hand. “Hurry,” she said, and dragged him down the long hall of packing crates.

  “Hurry,” Evelyn said softly, like an echo, and I got up and went over to the hammock. I could hardly see her, which made it a little easier. I unclenched my fists and said, “It’s me, Evelyn. It’s Jack.”

  “Jack,” she said. I could hardly hear her. Lacau had clipped the mike to the plastic mesh that was pulled up to her neck, but she was fading fast and starting to wheeze again. She needed a shot of the morphate. It would ease her breathing, but this soon after the dilaudid it would put her out like a light.

  “I delivered the message to the Sandalman,” I said, leaning over to catch what she would say. “What was in the message, Evelyn?”

  “Jack,” she said. “What day is it?”

  I had to think. It felt like I had been here years. “Wednesday,” I said.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. She closed her eyes and seemed to relax almost into sleep.

  I was not going to get anything out of her. I sprayed on plasticgloves, picked up the injection kit, and broke it open. The morphate would put her out in minutes, but until then she would be free from the pain and maybe coherent.

  Her arm had fallen over the side of the hammock. I moved the lamp a little closer and tried to find a place to give the injection. Her whole arm was covered with a network of honeycombed white ridges, some of them nearly two centimeters high now. They had softened and thickened since the first time I’d seen her. Then they had been thin and razor-sharp. There was no way I was going to be able to find a vein among them, but as I watched, the heat from the photosene flame softened a circle of skin on her forearm, and the five-sided ridges collapsed around it so I could get the hypo in.

  I jabbed twice before blood pooled up in the soft depression where the needle had gone in. It dripped onto the floor. I looked around, but there was nothing to wipe it up with. Lacau had used the last of the cotton this morning. I took a piece of paper off my notebook and blotted the blood with it.

  The bey had come back in. She ducked under my elbow with a piece of plastic mesh held out flat. I folded the paper up and dropped it in the center of the plastic. The bey folded the plastic mesh over it and folded up the ends, making it into a kind of packet, careful not to touch the blood. I stood and looked at it.

  “Jack,” Evelyn said. “She was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” I said and reached over to adjust the fix again. All I got was feedback. “Who was murdered, Evelyn?”

  “The princess. They killed her. For the treasure.” The morphate was taking effect. I could make her words out easily, though they didn’t make sense. Nobody had murdered the princess. She had been dead ten thousand years. I leaned farther over her.

  “Tell me what was in the message you gave me to take to the Sandalman, Evelyn,” I said.

  The lights came on. She put her hand over her face as if to hide it. “Murdered the Sandalman’s bey. Had to. To save the treasure.”

  I looked over at the little bey. She was still holding the packet of plastic, turning it over and over in her dirty-looking hands.

  “Nobody murdered the bey,” I said. “She’s right here.”

  She didn’t hear me. The shot was taking effect. Her hand relaxed and then slid down to her breast. Where it had pressed against her forehead and cheek, the fingers had left deep imprints in the wax-soft skin. The pressure of her fingers had flattened the honeycombed ridges at the ends of her fingers and pushed them back so that the ends of her bones were sticking out.

  She opened her eyes. “Jack,” she said clearly, and her voice was so hopeless I reached over and turned the translator off. “Too late.”

  Lacau pushed past me and lifted up the mesh drape. “What did she say?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” I said, peeling off the plastic gloves and throwing them in the open packing crate we were using for the things Evelyn had touched. The bey was still playing with the plastic packet she had wrapped around the blood-soaked paper. I grabbed it away from her and put it in the box. “She’s delirious,” I said. “I gave her her shot. Is the ship here?”

  “No,” he said, “but the Sandalman is.”

&nb
sp; “Curse,” Evelyn said. But I didn’t believe her.

  I had been burning eight columns about a curse when I intercepted the message from Lacau. I was halfway across Colchis’s endless desert continent with the Lisii team. I had run out of stories on the team’s incredible find, which consisted of two clay pots and some black bones. Two pots was more than Howard’s team out at the Spine had come up with in five years, and my hotline had been making noises about pulling me off on the next circuit ship.

  I didn’t think they would as long as AP kept Bradstreet on the planet. When and if anybody found the treasure they were all looking for, the hotline that had somebody on Colchis would be the one that got the scoop. And in the meantime good stories would see to it that I was in the right place at the right time when the story of the century finally broke, so I’d hotfooted it up north to cover a two-bit suhundulim massacre and then out here to Lisii. When the pots gave out I made up a curse.

  It wasn’t much of a curse—no murders, no avalanches, no mysterious fires—but every time somebody sprained an ankle or got bitten by a kheper, I got at least four columns out of it.

  After my first one, headered, “Curse of Kings Strikes Again,” went out, Howard, over at the Spine, sent me a ground-to-ground that read, “The curse has to be in the same place as the treasure, Jackie-boy!”

  I burned back, “If the treasure’s over there, what am I doing stuck out here? Find something so I can come back.”

  I didn’t get an answer to that, and the Lisii team didn’t find any more bones, and the curse grew and grew. Six rocks the size of my thumbnail rattled down a lava slope the Lisii team had just walked down, and I headered my story, “Mysterious Rockfall Nearly Buries Archaeologists: Is King’s Curse Responsible?” and was feeding it into the burner when I heard the sizzle I’d set up to alert me to the consul’s transmissions. Hotline reporters weren’t supposed to trespass on official transmissions, and Lacau, the consul over at the Spine, had double-cooked his to make sure we didn’t, but burners have only so many firelines, and I’d had enough time on Lisii to try them all.

  It was a ship-in-area request. He’d put, “Hurry,” at the end of it. The circuit ship was only a month away, and he couldn’t wait for it. They’d found something.

  I burned the rest of my story. Then I hit ground-to-ground and sent Howard a copy of the header with the tag, “Found anything yet?” I didn’t get an answer.

  I went out and found the team and asked them if there was anything anybody needed from the base camp, one of my shock boards had gone bad and I was going to run in. I made a list of what they wanted, loaded my equipment in the jeep, and took off for the Spine.

  I burned stories all the way, sending them ground-to-ground to the relay I kept in my tent back at Lisii, so it would look to Bradstreet like my stories were still coming from there. I had to stop the jeep every time and set up the burn equipment, but I didn’t want him heading for the Spine. He was still up north, waiting for another massacre, but he had a Swallow that could get him to the Spine in a day and a half.

  So I sent out a story headered, “Khepers Threaten Team’s Life—Curse’s Agents?” about the tick-like khepers, who sucked the blood out of anybody dumb enough to stick his hand down a hole. Since the Lisii team made their living doing just that, their arms were spotted with white circles of dead skin where the poison had entered their blood. The bites didn’t heal, and your blood was toxic for a week or so, which prompted somebody to put up a sign on the barracks that read, “No Nibbling Allowed,” with a skull-and-crossbones under it. I didn’t say that in my story, of course. I made them out to be agents of the dead curse, wreaking vengeance on whoever dared disturb the sleep of Colchis’s ancient kings.

  The second day out I intercepted an answer from a ship. It was an Amenti freighter, and it was a long way away, but it was coming. It could make it in a week. Lacau’s answer was only one word. “Hurry.”

  If I was going to beat the ship in, I couldn’t waste any more time burning stories. I pulled out some back-up tapes I’d made, deliberately dateless, and sent those: a flattering piece on Lacau, the long-suffering consul who has to keep the peace and divide the treasure, interviews with Howard and Borchardt, a not-so-flattering piece on the local dictator-type, the Sandalman, a recap of the accidental discovery of the ransacked tombs in the Spine that had brought Howard and his gang here in the first place. I was taking a risk doing all these stories on the Spine, but I hoped Bradstreet would check the transmission-point and decide I was trying to throw him off. With luck he’d tear off to Lisii in his damned Swallow, convinced the team had struck pay dirt and I was trying to keep it a secret till I got my scoop.

  I skidded into the Sandalman’s village six days after I left Lisii. I was still a day and a half from the Spine, but with the ship due in two days they had to be here, where it would land, and not out at the Spine.

  There was a deathly silence over the white clay settlement that reminded me of someplace else. It was a little after five. Afternoon nap time. Nobody would be up till at least six, but I knocked on the consul’s door anyway. Nobody was home, and the place was locked up tight. I peeked in through the cloth blinds, but I couldn’t see much. What I could see was that Lacau’s burn equipment wasn’t on the desk, and that worried me. There was nobody home in the low building the Spine team used as a barracks either, and where the hell was everybody? They wouldn’t still be out at the Spine, not with a ship coming in tomorrow. Maybe the ship had come and gone two days ahead of schedule.

  I hadn’t burned a story since the day before yesterday. I’d run out of tapes and I hadn’t dared risk taking the time to stop and set up the equipment when it might mean getting there too late. Over at Lisii I had been careful every once in awhile to let my stories pile up for two or three days and then send them all at once so that Bradstreet wouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions when I missed a deadline. He was going to catch on pretty soon, though, and I didn’t have anything else to do. I wasn’t going to go tearing off to the Spine until I’d talked to somebody and made sure that was where they were, and I couldn’t go at night anyway, so I sat down on the low clay step of the barracks porch, set up my burn equipment, and ran a check on the ship. Still on its way. It would be here day after tomorrow. So where was the team? Curse Strikes Again? Team Disappears?

  I couldn’t do that story, so I whipped off a couple of columns on the one member of the Howard team I hadn’t met—Evelyn Herbert. She’d joined the team right after I went north to cover the massacre, and I didn’t know much about her. Bradstreet had said she was beautiful. Actually that wasn’t what he’d said. He said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, but that was because we were stuck in Khamsin and had drunk a fifth of gin in endless bottles of Coke. “She has this face,” he said, “like Helen of Troy’s. A face that could launch…” The comparison had petered out since if there was anything on Colchis to launch neither of us was sober enough to think of it. “Even the Sandalman’s crazy about her.”

  I had refused to believe that. “No, really,” Bradstreet had protested sloppily, “he’s given her presents, he even gave her her own bey, he wanted her to move into his private compound but she wouldn’t. I tell you, you’ve got to see her. She’s beautiful.”

  I still hadn’t believed it, but it made a good story. I burned it as the romance of the century, and that took care of yesterday’s story. But what about today’s?

  I went around and knocked on all the doors again. It was still awfully quiet, and I’d remembered what it reminded me of—Khamsin right after the massacre. What if Lacau’s hysterical, “hurry!” had had something to do with the Sandalman? What if the Sandalman had taken one look at the treasure and decided he wanted it all for himself? I sat back down, and burned a story on the Commission. Whenever there was a controversy over archaeological finds, the Commission on Antiquities came and sat on it until everybody was bored and ready to give up. Everyone took them far more seriously than they deserved to
be taken. Once they’d even been called in to settle who owned a planet when a dig turned up proof that the so-called natives had really landed in a spaceship several thousand years before. The Commission took this on with a straight face, even if it was like the Neanderthals demanding Earth back, listened to evidence for something over four years, as if they were actually going to do something, and finally recessed to review the accumulated heaps of testimony and let the opposing sides fight it out for themselves. They were still in recess ten years later, but I didn’t say that in the story. I wrote up the Commission as the arm of archeological justice—fair but stern and woe to anybody who gets greedy. Maybe it would make the Sandalman think twice about massacring Howard’s team and taking all the treasure for himself, if he hadn’t done that already.

  There still weren’t any signs of life, and what if that meant there weren’t any signs of life? I went the round of the doors again, afraid one of them would swing open on a heap of bodies. But unlike Khamsin, there were no signs of destruction either. There hadn’t been a massacre. They were probably all over at the Sandalman’s divvying up the treasure.

  There was no way to see into the high-walled compound. I rattled the fancy iron gate, and a bey I didn’t recognize came out. She was carrying a photosene lantern, bringing it out to be lit before the sun went down, and I was not sure she’d heard me banging on the gate. She looked old.

  It’s hard to tell with beys, who never get bigger than twelve-year-olds. Their black hair doesn’t turn gray and they don’t usually lose their black teeth, but this one was wearing a black robe instead of a shift, which meant she had a high station in the Sandalman’s household even though I didn’t remember her, and her forearms were covered with kheper bites. Either she was exceptionally curious, even for a bey, or she’d been around awhile.