The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “The Sandalman has it.”

  “Then he knows when the ship will be here. We’ve got to get her out of here.”

  “Yes,” Lacau said. He let go of the blue-and-white fringe, and it fell across her foot. He shut the door of the refrigerator.

  “Let me out of the cage,” I said. “I’ll help you. Whatever you’re going to do, I’ll help you.”

  He looked at me a long minute, as if he were trying to decide whether he could trust me. “I’ll let you out,” he said finally. “But not yet.”

  It was dark again before he came to get me. He had come through the center area twice. The first time he got a shovel from the jumble of equipment stacked against the cargo cartons. The second time he opened the refrigerator again to get out an injection kit for Evelyn’s shot, and I stood in the cage and stared at the princess, waiting for her to turn her head. Sitting there afterwards, waiting for Lacau to finish doing whatever it was he did not trust me to help him with, I was surprised to see that the wire of the cage had not mashed and flattened my hands like tallow.

  It had been dark over an hour when Lacau came and let me out. He had a coil of yellow extension cords with him, and the shovel. He leaned it against the pile of flattened cartons, dumped the cords on the floor beside it, and unlocked the cage.

  “We have to move the refrigerator,” he said. “We’ll put it against the back wall of the tent so we can load it into the ship as soon as it lands.”

  I went over to the heap of cords and began to untangle them. I didn’t ask him where he’d gotten them. One of them looked like the cord to Evelyn’s respirator. We plugged the cords together, and then Lacau unplugged the refrigerator. My grip on the cord tightened as he did it, even though I knew he was going to plug it into the extension cord and hook it up again and the whole process wasn’t going to take more than thirty seconds. He plugged it in carefully, as if he were afraid the lights would go off when he did it, but they didn’t even flicker.

  They dimmed a little when we picked the refrigerator up between us, but it weighed less than I thought it would. As soon as we shuffled past the first row of packing crates, I saw what Lacau had been doing at least part of the day. He’d moved as many boxes as he could to the east side of the tent and up against the wall, leaving a passage wide enough for us to get through with the refrigerator and a space for it against the wall of the tent. He’d hooked a light up, too. The extension cord didn’t quite reach, and we had to set the refrigerator down a few meters from the wall of the tent. It was still close enough. If the ship got here in time.

  “Is the Sandalman here yet?” I said. Lacau was walking rapidly back to the center area, and I wasn’t at all sure I should follow him. I wasn’t going to let myself be locked in that cage for the Sandalman’s soldiers to find. I stayed where I was.

  “Do you have a recorder?” Lacau said. He stopped and looked at me. “Do you have a recorder?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I want you to record Evelyn’s testimony,” he said. “We’ll need it if the Commission is called in.”

  “I don’t have a recorder,” I said.

  “I won’t lock you in again,” he said. He reached in his pocket and tossed me something. It was the handlock to the cage. “If you don’t trust me, you can give it to Evelyn’s bey.”

  “There’s a record button on the translator,” I said.

  And we went in and interviewed Evelyn and she told me there was a curse and I didn’t believe her. And the Sandalman came.

  Lacau seemed unconcerned that the Sandalman was camped on the ridge above us. “I’ve unscrewed all the light bulbs,” he said, “and they can’t see into this room. I put a tarp on the roof this afternoon.” He sat back down next to Evelyn. “They have lanterns, but they won’t try coming down that ridge at night.”

  “What happens when the sun comes up?” I said.

  “I think she’s coming around,” he said. “Turn the recorder on. Evelyn, we’ve got a recorder here. We need you to tell us what happened. Can you talk?”

  “Last day,” Evelyn said.

  “Yes,” Lacau said. “This is the last day. The ship will be here in the morning to take us home. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “Last day,” she said again. “In tomb. Loading princess. Cold.”

  “What was that last word?” Lacau said.

  “It sounded like, ‘cold,’” I said.

  “It was cold in the tomb, wasn’t it, Evie? Is that what you mean?”

  She tried to shake her head. “Coke,” she said. “Sandalman. Here. Must be thirsty. Coke.”

  “The Sandalman gave you a Coke? Was the poison in the Coke? Is that how he poisoned the team?”

  “Yes,” she said, and it came out like a sigh, as if that was what she had been trying to tell us all along.

  “What kind of poison was it, Evelyn?”

  “Blue.”

  Lacau jerked around to look at me. “Did she say, ‘blood’?”

  I shook my head. “Ask her again,” I said.

  “Blood,” Evelyn said clearly. “Keep her.”

  “What’s she talking about?” I said. “A kheper bite can’t kill you. It doesn’t even make you sick.”

  “No,” Lacau said, “but enough kheper poison could. I should have seen the similarities, the replacement of the cell structure, the waxiness. The ancient beys used a concentrated distillation of kheper-infected blood for embalming. ‘Beware the curse of kings and khepers.’ How do you suppose the Sandalman figured it out?”

  Maybe he hadn’t had to, I thought. Maybe he’d had the poison all along. Maybe his ancestors, landing on Colchis, had been as curious as the beys they were going to steal a planet from. “Show us how your embalming process works,” they might have said, and then, when they’d seen the obvious benefits, they’d said to the smartest of the beys, just like the Sandalman had said to Howard and Evelyn and the rest of the team, “Here. Have a Coke. You must be thirsty.”

  I thought of the beautiful princess, leaning against her hand. And Evelyn. And Evelyn’s bey, sitting in front of the photosene flame, all unaware.

  “Is it contagious?” I said for the last time. “Would Evelyn’s blood be poisonous, too?”

  Lacau blinked at me as if he could not make out what I was saying. “Only if you drank it, I think,” he said after a minute. He looked down at Evelyn. “She was asking me to poison the bey,” he said. “But I couldn’t understand her. It was before you got here with the translator.”

  “You’d have done it, wouldn’t you?” I said. “If you’d known what the poison was, that her blood was poisonous, you’d have killed the bey to save the treasure?”

  He wasn’t listening to me. He was looking up at the roof of the tent where the tarp didn’t quite cover. “Is it getting light?” he said.

  “Not for another hour,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “I would have done almost anything for her.” His voice was so full of longing it embarrassed me to listen to him. “But not that.”

  He gave Evelyn a second shot and blew out the lamp. After a few minutes he said, “There are three injection kits left. In the morning I’m going to give Evelyn all of them.” I wondered if he was looking at me the way he had when I was in the cage, wondering if he could trust me to do what had to be done.

  “Will it kill her?” I said.

  “I hope so,” he said. “There’s no way we can move her.”

  “I know,” I said, and we sat in the darkness for a long time.

  “Two days,” he said, and his voice was full of that same longing. “The incubation period was only two days.”

  And then we sat there not saying anything, waiting for the sun to come up.

  When it did, Lacau took me into what had been Howard’s room, where he had cut a flap-like window in the plastic wall that faced the ridge, and I saw what he had done. The Sandalman’s soldiers lined the top of the ridge. They were too far away to be able to see the snakes rippling across their f
aces, but I knew they were looking down at the dome, and on the sand in front of us, laid end to end, were the bodies.

  “How long have they been there?” I said.

  “I put them out there yesterday afternoon. After Borchardt died.”

  “You dug Howard up?” I said. Howard was lying nearest us. He did not look as bad as I had imagined he would. He had almost no honeycombs, and although his skin looked waxy and soft like the skin over Evelyn’s cheekbones, he looked almost like I remembered him. The sun had done that. He was melting out there in the sun.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Sandalman knows it’s a poison, but the rest of the suhundulim don’t. They’ll never cross that line of bodies. They’re afraid of catching the virus.”

  “He’ll tell them,” I said.

  “Would you believe him?” he said. “Would you cross that line because he told you it wasn’t a virus?”

  “It’s a good thing you left me in the cage,” I said. “I wouldn’t have helped you do this.”

  Light flashed from the ridge. “Are they firing at us?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “The Sandalman’s head bey has something shiny in her hand that’s reflecting the sunlight.”

  It was the bey from the compound. She had my press card and was moving it back and forth so it flashed sunlight.

  “She wasn’t there before,” Lacau said. “The Sandalman must have brought her out to show his soldiers she hasn’t caught the virus and they won’t either.”

  “What?” I said. “Why would she catch it? I thought Evelyn’s bey was the one who was with the team.”

  He was frowning at me. “Evelyn’s bey never went anywhere near the Spine. She’s a maidservant the Sandalman gave Evelyn. How did you get the idea she was the Sandalman’s representative?” He looked at me in disbelief. “You don’t think the Sandalman would let us anywhere near his bey after we’d negotiated for the extra days, do you? He wouldn’t have trusted us not to poison her like he poisoned the team. He locked her up tight in his compound before he went north,” he said bitterly.

  “And Evelyn knew that,” I said. “She knew the Sandalman had gone north. She knew he’d left his bey behind. Didn’t she?”

  Lacau didn’t answer. He was watching the bey. The Sandalman offered her something, and she took it. It looked like a bucket. She had to stick the press card in her mouth to free both hands so she could lift it. The Sandalman said something to her, and she started down the ridge, spilling liquid from the bucket as she went. The Sandalman had left his bey behind at the compound, locked up, but the guards had run off like the guards at the dome, and a curious bey could open any lock.

  “She doesn’t seem to be sick, does she?” Lacau said bitterly. “And our week is up. The team caught it in two days.”

  “Two,” I said. “Did Evelyn know the Sandalman left his bey behind?”

  “Yes,” Lacau said, watching the ridge. “I told her.”

  The little bey was down the ridge and onto the plain. The Sandalman yelled something at her, and she began to run. The bucket banged against her legs, and more liquid spilled out. As soon as she reached the line of bodies, she stopped and looked back at the ridge. The Sandalman yelled again. He was a long way away, but the ridge amplified his voice. I could hear him quite clearly.

  “Pour,” he said. “Pour fire,” and the little bey tipped the bucket and started down the row.

  “Photosene,” Lacau said tonelessly. “The sunlight will ignite it.”

  A lot had spilled out of the bucket on the way down, none of it on the bey, for which I was thankful. There were only a few drops left to shake over Howard. The bey dropped the bucket and danced back. At the other end of the row, Callender’s shirt took fire. I shut my eyes.

  “Two lousy days,” Lacau said. Callender’s mustache was on fire. Borchardt smouldered and then flared up yellowly like a candle. Lacau didn’t even see me leave.

  I followed the electrical cords back to Evelyn’s room, half-running. The bey wasn’t there. I flipped on the translator and yanked the drape up and looked down at her. “What was in the message, Evelyn?” I said.

  The sound of her breathing was so loud nothing was going to get through on the translator. Her eyes were closed.

  “You knew the Sandalman had already gone north when you sent me back to the compound, didn’t you?” The translator was picking up my own voice and echoing it back to me. “You knew I was lying when I told you I’d delivered the message to the Sandalman. But you didn’t care. Because the message wasn’t for him. It was for his bey.”

  She said something. The translator couldn’t do anything with it, but it didn’t matter. I knew what it was. “Yes,” she said, and I felt a sudden desire to hit her; to watch the honeycombed cheeks cave in under the force of my hand and mash against bone.

  “You knew she’d put it in her mouth, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said; and opened her eyes. There was a dull roaring outside.

  “You murdered her,” I said.

  “Had to. To save the treasure,” she said. “Sorry. Curse.”

  “There isn’t any curse,” I said, clenching my hands at my sides so I wouldn’t hit her. “That was just a story you made up to stall me till the poison could take effect, wasn’t it?”

  She started to cough. The bey darted in front of me with the Coke bottle. She put the straw in Evelyn’s mouth, propped Evelyn’s head up with her hand, and tilted her gently forward so she could drink.

  “You’d have killed your own bey, too, if you had to, wouldn’t you?” I said. “For the treasure. For the goddamned treasure!”

  “Curse,” Evelyn, said.

  “The ship’s here,” Lacau said behind me, “but we’ll never make it. Howard’s the only one left. They’re sending the bey down with more photosene.”

  “We’ll make it,” I said, and switched the translator off. I took out my knife and slit the wall of the tent behind Evelyn’s hammock. Evelyn’s bey scampered to her feet and came over to where we were standing. The Sandalman’s bey was halfway across the plain with the bucket. She was moving more slowly this time, and none of the photosene was splashing out. Above, on the ridge, the Sandalman’s soldiers edged forward.

  “We can load the treasure,” I said. “Evelyn’s seen to that.”

  The bey made it to the bodies. She started to tip the bucket onto Howard, then seemed to change her mind, and set the bucket down. The Sandalman yelled something at her. She took hold of the bucket, let go of it again, and fell over.

  “You see,” I said. “It was a virus after all.”

  There was a sound from above her like a stuttering sigh, and the Sandalman’s soldiers began to back away from the edge of the ridge.

  A loading crew was there before we even had the back of the tent sliced open. Lacau pointed them at the nearest boxes, and they didn’t even ask any questions. They just started carrying them out to the ship. Lacau and I picked up the refrigerator, gently, gently, so as not to bang the princess’s shins, and carried her across the sand to the ship’s loading bay.

  The captain took one look at her and yelled for the rest of his crew to come and help load. “Hurry,” he said after us. “They’re bringing up some kind of weapon on the ridge there.”

  We hurried. We handed stuff out the back door, and the crew ran the boxes across the sand faster than Evelyn’s bey getting a drink of water in a Coke bottle; and we still weren’t fast enough. There was a soft whoosh and splat on the roof overhead, and liquid trickled down the plastic mesh over our heads.

  “He’s got a photosene cannon,” Lacau said. “Is the blue vase out?”

  “Where’s Evelyn’s bey?” I said, and took off for Evelyn’s room. The mesh drape above the hammock was already melting, the fire slicing through it like a knife. The little bey was flattened against the inner wall where I had seen her that first night, watching the fire. I grabbed her up under my arm and dived for the center area.

  I couldn’t get through. The packi
ng cases that lined the tent were a wall of roaring flame. I ducked back into Evelyn’s room. I saw immediately that we could not get out that way either, and just as immediately I remembered the slit I’d made in the wall.

  I clamped my hand over the bey’s mouth so she wouldn’t breathe in the fumes from the melting plastic, held my breath, and started past the hammock.

  Evelyn was still alive.

  I could not hear her wheezing above the fire, but I could see her chest rise and fall before it began to melt. She was lying with her face pressed against the side of the melting hammock, and she turned her face toward me as I stopped as if she had heard me. The honeycombs on her face widened and flattened, and then smoothed out with the heat, and for a minute I saw her as she must have looked when Bradstreet saw her and said that she was beautiful, as she must have looked when the Sandalman gave her his own bey. The face she turned to me was the face that I had waited all my life to see. And only saw too late.

  She guttered out like a candle, and I stood there and watched her, and by the time she was dead the roof had caved in on Lacau and two of the crew. And the blue vase had already been broken in a mad dash to the ship with the last of the treasure.

  But we saved the princess. And I got my story.

  It is the story of the century, At least that’s what Bradstreet’s boss called it when he fired him. My boss is asking for forty columns a day. I give them to him.

  They are great stories. In them Evelyn is a beautiful victim and Lacau is a hero. I am a hero, too. After all, I helped save the treasure. The stories I burn don’t tell how Lacau dug up Howard and built a fort with him or how I got the Lisii team killed. In the stories I burn there is only one villain.

  I send forty columns a day out over the burner and try to put the blue vase back together and in what time is left I write this story, which I will not send anywhere. The bey fiddles with the lights.

  Our cabin has a system of air-current-sensitive highlights that dim and brighten automatically as you move. The bey cannot get enough of them. She does not even mess with the blue vase or try to put the pieces in her mouth.