by SUZAN STILL
§
Light and voices again. A splitting headache. Mouth unbearably dry. Heart hammering arrhythmically. She tried to concentrate, to understand. A mixture of English and Spanish. The word drug. A surge of oblivion, overwhelming her like a black wave.
§
Finally, the ground under her stopped spinning. Voices no longer eddied and chuckled around her like fast-flowing water. Still the headache, still the dry mouth, but her heart no longer felt as if it were bursting.
She heard her first coherent sentence: “She ought to be coming out of it soon.” English. The voice deep and male. Not the voice of her attacker. She lay still, gathering her strength; gathering her wits.
A hand gripped her shoulder and rocked her, not ungently.
“You in there?” The same deep voice. Rocking again. “Come on. It’s time to wake up.” She thought she detected an element of concern. She tried to speak and heard an unintelligible mutter in what might be her own voice. The hand shook her again.
Calypso opened one eye and winced at blindingly bright light. She clamped her eye closed again and whispered, “Water.”
There was a pause and then a hand slid under her neck and her head was bent upwards. A glass was pressed against her lips. Water coursed into her mouth and down her throat. She choked, gagged, began to cough. The coughing made her head ache unbearably.
The hand had not moved from her neck. When the coughing subsided, the voice said, “Take another sip. Not so fast this time. Just a sip.”
She sipped. Cool water penetrated the parched recesses of her mouth and a trifle of the desperation subsided behind its fluid promise. She sipped again and then rolled her head back as a wave of dizziness hit her.
“Dizzy.” Her voice was scratchy and weak.
“It’ll be wearing off soon.” The hand went away. She lay inert, savoring the wetness of the water, asking nothing more of herself. Then she slept.
§
When she awoke, there were no voices. Through slitted eyes, she took in a room washed in evening light entering one small, high window set in a wall of roughly plastered stone. Her hand wandered out from her side and felt the abrasion of a wool blanket. She blinked, tried to focus.
Above her, a ceiling of pale plaster was washed with rose in the falling light, with triangles of deep indigo shadow hanging like kites in the corners. She raised her head and caught sight of a crude wooden table and chair and a fire burning low on a small hearth, before her head dropped back of its own weight. She closed her eyes. The nausea had passed, and the headache. Her mind felt clear but she was completely without volition.
She heard a heavy wooden door scrape open and then closed. Footsteps. They stopped next to her bed.
“You’re awake.” The same male voice. Not unkind. Not frightening. She opened her eyes.
A man of medium height stood over her. He was broad-shouldered and powerful looking despite his age. Calypso put him somewhere in his late sixties. His skin was brown like the local indigenous, but he spoke uninflected English. Black hair salted with white framed a slightly pocked face made handsome by strong bones and deep-set, intelligent eyes.
“You were out a long time.”
“How long?” she whispered.
“Twelve hours or more.”
“Why?”
“The Devil’s Breath.”
Calypso shook her head.
“Scopolamine. You got too big a hit.”
She rolled her head to see him more clearly and was surprised that he was wearing a black cassock.
“Priest?”
He gazed down at her and said with a small smile, “Of a sort.”
Calypso frowned and tried to sit up. The man reached down and restrained her with a hand on her shoulder.
“Better stay down awhile.” He reached behind him, dragged the wooden chair beside her bed and sat. “What’s your name?”
Calypso was suddenly wary. She and Javier and Rancho Cielo were known throughout the canyons. How could she be sure it was safe to reveal her identity? She countered: “What’s yours?”
“You can call me Father Keat.” He said it with the same small, self-deprecating smile.
Calypso nodded. “You can call me Jane.”
The man nodded with a chuckle. “All right, Jane.” He cocked his head and regarded her appraisingly. “So how do you feel?”
“Better now. I thought my heart was going to burst.”
He nodded. “Tachycardia. And then bradycardia. Your heart rate was down to thirty-three beats per minute. You had me worried.”
“What happened?”
“You met up with Los Lobos, man and wolf. They’re quite a team.”
“Why did he. . .?”
“It’s our policy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. Just rest for now.”
Calypso had a sudden rush of remembrance and pushed herself up on one elbow.
“What about Hill?”
Father Keat did not answer. Instead, he took a stout Mexican tumbler of handblown glass from the table and held it again to her lips.
“Drink. You’re dehydrated.” She drank. “I’ll come by later.” He stood.
“What about Hill?” she asked again. Even to her, her voice sounded like the wail of a child.
“We’ll talk about Mr. Hill later.” Father Keat rose, threw a log on the fire and exited, closing the door firmly behind him.
§
Calypso awoke to a deep, mellifluous voice speaking English.
“Hey! You’re awake.”
She blinked her eyes, frowned, and squinted in the low light. The fire burning on the hearth sent soft, undulant waves of light across the man’s face, half of which was burnished by firelight and half hidden deep in shadow. One massive hand rested on a black-clad thigh thick as an oak trunk. The hand was black.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better. Hungry. Thirsty.”
The black hand moved, reached, brought the white glass to her lips. “Icepick’ll be bringing some food, in a few minutes.”
“Icepick?”
“You’ll get used to the names. Mine’s Lone-R. That’s capital-L-o-n-e-dash-capital-R.” He smiled down at her serenely. He had huge, dark, wide-set eyes, the kind she had seen in photographs of Tibetan rinpoches, that bespoke lifetimes of spiritual evolution. His head was shaved and it shone in the firelight like an orb of onyx. She noticed he wore a black priest’s robe like Father Keat’s.
“Father Lone-R?” she asked, with a ghost of her old verve.
“Not yet. I’m still an acolyte.”
“You’re wearing the same robes as Father Keat.”
A chuckle rumbled out of his vast chest.
“Yeah. We watched The Matrix and really dug seein’ Keanu Reeves kickin’ ass in that black coat. So we decided to wear ‘em, too.”
“Where am I, Lone-R? Who are you people, anyway?” Despite his impressive size and the rock-hard muscles of his forearm as he served her water, Calypso felt safe with this huge man.
“You’re in our monk house, here in the bottom of the canyon. A few miles from Batopilas.”
“You’re monks?”
“Yeah. In a manner of speaking. We call ourselves The Ghosts.”
Calypso frowned. Was she still under the influence of The Devil’s Breath?
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“Am I safe here?”
He chuckled, again.
“You kiddin’? This place is a fortress. You wouldn’t be as safe in the Pentagon!”
“A fortified monastery.”
“Exactly.” He clenched his hands and cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a pistol going off and Calypso jumped. “That’s exactly right. We’re a fuckin’ fortified monastery.”
There was a sharp knock at the door and Lone-R went to answer it. He opened it just as the man on the other side—Icepick, Calypso presumed—was turning his back to give the door an
other clout with his boot heel. He held a tray of steaming food in both hands and above his black cowboy boots he wore the same style of black robe that Lone-R wore.
As he came to her bedside, Calypso observed him. On this man, the small, high collar of the flowing robe looked appropriate. The skirts moved gracefully, as if the man were a dancer. Above the collar, however, his face was ashen and blank, as if he had spent too many hours in a cell meditating. About seventy, wrinkled and with a thatch of steely gray hair, he exuded an icy chill that forbade any contact. Without speaking, he deposited the tray on the table, turned as if pirouetting, and departed, pulling the door closed almost soundlessly.
After Lone-R had helped her rise from the bed and sit at the table, Calypso tried again.
“I guess what I really mean is,” she said, holding the fork poised over her food and shooting him a glance, “am I safe here with all of you?”
Lone-R didn’t answer directly. He looked at the floor for several seconds, while Calypso dug into the pile of black beans and rice on her plate and found them disappointingly bland.
“I’m going to tell you a Mexican joke,” he said at last. “Up in the Sierra, there’s a knock at the door of this little cabin. The owner goes to the door and opens it. On his doorstep there’s this seven-foot tall Indian, a real hijo de la chingada, wearing a double banderilla, a .9 stuck in his belt, and he’s carrying an AK-47.
“The Indian says to the guy, ‘I’m a householder and I need your help.’
“The guy’s pretty tough-lookin’ himself, with three days growth of beard and a pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants. He doesn’t even answer. He just takes out his gun and shoots the Indian dead.
“The guy’s pal gets up from the table, where he’s been drinking tequila and taking little hits of coke from the end of his knife, and he comes over and looks down at the dead Indian and says ‘That guy was a real hijo de la chingada. Muy peligroso, very dangerous.Tiene el derecho. You did the right thing to shoot him.’
“The guy looks at his friend and says, ‘You fool! I didn’t shoot him because he was dangerous; I shot him because he was a householder!’” Lone-R threw back his head and laughed uproariously.
Calypso managed a half-hearted smile. She understood the joke because she was inured to the upside-down, macho humor of northern Mexico that vaunted death. No man of the Sierra would admit to being afraid of a seven-foot Indian hijo de la chigada, but his overblown machismo would demand death to tender feelings for a householder in trouble.
“Good one,” she whispered.
“So how can I tell if you’re safe or not? You’re no seven-foot Indian—but you’re probably a householder.” He watched for her reaction with his fathomless eyes.
Calypso kept her head down and toyed with her food.
“What do you want?” she asked finally. “Money?”
Lone-R shrugged. “Not for me to say.”
“Whose job is it to say?”
“The brotherhood’s. It’ll be put before all the Ghosts.”
“What will be?”
Lone-R grunted and shrugged. “Your fate.”
“And what about my friend? Is he okay?”
Lone-R shrugged again and turned away. “¿Quien sabe?” he
§
The food must have been laced with drugs. When Calypso came to, she was in a barren room of the same plastered stone, lying on the floor on a bare mattress. A flat screen TV was playing a rerun of The Sopranos without the sound. She tried to sit up, was hit with a headache as if a hatchet had been buried in her skull, and flopped back with a groan.
She lay looking around the simple room: the bare, ticking-covered mattress and the television made up the furnishings. There was a hearth, on which a fire had burned down to embers, and a small barred window. In the corner a door stood wide open, revealing a tiny cubicle holding a listing toilet and a basin with exposed pipes underneath.
She sat up, holding her head in her hands to stifle the headache. Her mouth was dry as dust. She staggered to her feet and made her looping, weak-kneed way to the window. Even though she was accustomed to the canyons, where the ground refused all horizontality in favor of universal verticality, the view out the window made her gasp. She was perched high on a cliff that plummeted at least a thousand feet, to be lost in the tops of trees. Immediately below her she could see, by craning her head, that there were two stories of stone building beneath her, blending seamlessly into the living rock below.
She reeled to the door and tried the latch. Locked. She went to the bathroom, used the toilet, washed her hands, dashed water on her face, and drank from the faucet. Then she collapsed back onto the mattress, pulled her knees into fetal posture, and stayed that way for hours.
Sunlight swung a slow arc through the room and then, with a burst of rose light against the eastern wall, died. From where she lay, she watched a few stars emerge, pale and glittering against the lingering electric blue of the sky. There was no sound except her shallow breathing and the shove of wind against the outer walls.
Something in the austerity and loftiness of the room soothed her. Despite Rancho Cielo’s vertiginous perch on the edge of the Urique Canyon and the miles of unimproved roads between it and the nearest town, the house was often as busy as a Greyhound bus terminal. Ranch hands, indigenous women and children coming for classes, and local elders holding political meetings with Javier, all passed through, day and night. She and Javier lived busy lives.
She lay listening to the whine of the wind against the window and fell into a deep reverie that took her far from her fear. Something in her situation haunted her with its familiarity, and she thought of her manuscript and the story of the locket. She fingered the necklace through her shirt. Surely, if the Ghosts hadn’t stolen it while she was unconscious, it was a good sign.
And then it hit her: Lone-R, huge and black, sitting beside her bed! The strangeness of her predicament and the odd parallel of his presence swept her back nine hundred years, to the part of the locket’s story that she had related to Hill, as they navigated the cave.
6
The Story of Blanche de Muret Continues
It was not my good fortune to fall straight into the water below, but I must tumble in air, barking elbows and knees and head upon the rocks that lined the well. I grazed my scalp and it all but knocked me senseless. It was as if I were within my very worst nightmare of falling. And all the while there was a terrible, high-pitched sound accompanying me that I did not realize until later was my own scream of terror.
The shock of icy water, as I plunged headfirst into it, brought me again to my senses. I went down and down into absolute blackness, fighting with arms and legs to slow my dive, and then to regain the surface. I came puffing and blowing into air again and clung straight away to the rocks of the wall, although they were slimy and smelled most dank.
As I hung there kicking my legs to stay afloat, my eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom. Around me, I could see nothing, so profound was the darkness but looking above, my eye could follow the shaft of the well to where it ended in a dazzling dot of light, far above me.
In very truth, I did not know whether to congratulate myself for having survived this ordeal, or to be bitterly disappointed that my fall had not been my demise. For it seemed my condition was now hopeless beyond redemption and that I were better dead.
Just as I was thinking that my situation could not be worse, it swiftly became so. I looked above me and, around the light at the top of the shaft, I could see dark dots that must surely be the heads of those who were peering within, hoping for sight of me. Then I saw something cross the disk of light and fall, and I realized in terror that they had thrown the bucket into the well!
Hastily, I filled my lungs and dove, and not a moment to spare, for the bucket hit the water above me like an explosion. In the darkness, I felt it drift down to my right, as I fought once more toward the surface.
The bucket was immediately pulled up again, and then those
on the surface commenced pelting me with stones. These came rattling down the shaft like thunder and filled me with terror. I dove again and felt a stone graze my shoulder as it plummeted past me through the inky water into oblivion.
I stayed beneath the water until I could no longer and then I surfaced. Still rocks rattled down toward me, but I must have air or die.
As I struggled, gasping and thrashing in the water, I heard a sudden noise that sounded like an exclamation of astonishment, a sound I was sure that I myself had not made. As I blinked water from my eyes and looked frantically about me, I saw a faint glow coming from the far side of the shaft.
To my amazement the light grew brighter, until I could plainly see an opening, like that of the tunnel of a mine, and therein, straining my own credulity, stood a woman, bucket in hand, staring at me in alarm.
I floundered toward her and reached out my hand to her in desperation, and she, in a reflex of common human solicitude, reached back to me. Our hands met and she pulled me toward her. At that moment, a stone came racketing down the shaft and as I was almost saved, struck me on the head with such force that I was instantly senseless.
§
Now begins what is surely the strangest part of this chronicle, for if I had not myself experienced what follows, I doubt not I should believe another such account to be a lie. And yet, these things did happen to me and I am rendering as honest an account of them as I am able. I beg the reader, therefore, to remember my status as a highborn lady and to consider my character, known by all to be unblemished, as he reads what next befell me and to credit me with speaking the truth.
For when I came again to myself, I found I was in a most strange and marvelous setting! What first I saw was the face of her whom I assumed to be my rescuer, bending over me in honest concern. As I came slowly back to myself and was able to look around, I found I was lying in the oddest chamber imaginable.
It appeared I must be still underground. The ceiling and walls of this room were hung with stones in the shape of rough cylinders and cones. Some hung from the roof, pointed at the ends, like daggers suspended there. Others rose from the sandy floor on which I lay, like teeth embedded in a jaw. Still others extended from the floor full to the ceiling, making columns. And withal, these shapes were of the purest white, but in the light of the many oil lamps burning there, glowed with a moving and swirling opalescence like the aurora borealis that once my dear father showed me on a cold winter’s night in Muret.