by Aaron Elkins
The wind up here was so gusty and strong that it shredded the fog in places, and he caught a sudden, unnerving glimpse straight down over the edge. An almost perpendicular gray wall fell dizzyingly away, its upper reaches devoid of plant life other than a few scrubby wisps of broom clinging to life in tiny crevices, and a single, stubborn, gnarled Aleppo pine sticking straight out of the cliff about twenty feet beneath him. A thousand dizzying feet below, bathed in wispy sunlight, was a narrow, rocky beach, gray and desolate.
“Whoo,” Gideon breathed, pulling back from the rim and laying his hand firmly on the solid little hut for safety’s sake. A man who knew himself to be reasonably brave in most situations, he had no head—and no stomach—for heights. And the wind gusts did nothing for his sense of security.
What a miserably cold, solitary station this would have been, he thought as he bent his six-foot-one frame to gingerly squeeze through the entrance. Because of its proximity to the edge, it couldn’t be approached from directly in front. He had to do it by standing on the side of the hut, chest pressed against it, getting a death grip on the margin of the doorway with his right hand, and more or less slithering along the surface and pulling himself inside; not a comfortable maneuver, but he wasn’t about to quit now. Not that he didn’t consider it.
Inside it was a little roomier than anticipated. He was able to stand to his full height and to stretch his arms almost fully out to the sides, but not above his head. It was as moldy and dank as expected, and it smelled like a bear cave after a long winter, but, as always for Gideon, it was filled with the fascination of ancient things and long-dead inhabitants. He was standing in an enclosure, he thought happily, in which watchful men had stood before America was on anybody’s map, before the Magna Carta, before Galileo and da Vinci and Michelangelo, before the Gutenberg Bible, before—
He wasn’t alone. As his eyes adapted to the dimness, he realized that the place was still occupied. Christ, no wonder it smelled like a zoo. Two sleeping, leathery brown bats hung peacefully by their feet from the uneven roof, and an owl he’d incompletely awakened grumbled and muttered and ruffled its feathers, and then sank its head into its chest to go back to sleep. More unsettling, less than two feet from his eyes, a now-wide-awake, nesting peregrine falcon rose menacingly onto its powerful yellow legs and hissed at him, its beak agape. Beneath it lay three rust-colored eggs.
Now, a peregrine falcon isn’t much bigger than a crow, but it is a natural predator, it has a bad temper, and being confined in a small space with it is not recommended by bird books. It has the viciously hooked beak, the talons, and the ferocious yellow eyes of an eagle, and Gideon had read somewhere that when attacking its prey—or the presumed enemies of its young—it is believed to be the fastest animal in the world.
He didn’t give it a chance to prove it. In a flash he had regrasped the margin of the arched doorway and heaved himself around to the outside, tottering momentarily but frighteningly on the edge of the cliff, his heart pounding away, as a wind gust snatched at him. The sooner he—
Before his mind could grasp what was happening, he was sliding down the face of the cliff, scrabbling desperately at the rough surface for a handhold that wasn’t there.
My God, he thought dully, I’m dead. Julie—
Whump! “Ow! Oogh!” The breath was knocked out of him with a whoosh, and for a few seconds it took all his concentration to get his lungs going. Once that was accomplished, his mind started working again.
Why was he still alive? He opened his eyes.
He was sitting—literally sitting—in a tree, the lone Aleppo pine he’d seen from above, in which he was wedged remarkably solidly into a crotch between the trunk, the thick, blessedly sturdy trunk, and two not-quite-so-sturdy branches. Looking down, his eyes were caught by the twigs and stones he’d broken loose, tumbling and falling away from him, down the gray cliffside, bouncing off the wall, down, and down . . .
He stopped looking down.
What had happened was already becoming fuzzy. Had a gust of wind thrown him off balance? Had he been pushed? He tried to reconstruct the moment, the feeling just before his fall. Had there been a thrust? Had he felt hands on his hip? Had some windborne object struck him? Had there been a sound? Had he— He shook his head. No good. It had happened only seconds ago, but already the memory, if it was there at all, was dissolving, like the wisps of last night’s dream.
As the helpless, mindless panic of his fall subsided and his breathing became more regular, he took stock of his situation. The trunk seemed solid enough. It hadn’t seemed to give much when he landed on it, and he was relieved to see a set of thick roots twining into whatever earth they could find between heavy slabs of rock. The two branches supporting him were less conducive to serenity. They had given, all right, almost bouncing him back into space, and they were still quivering from the shock of it When he shifted his weight to a less painful position, he felt them bend under him, and one of them gave out an ominous, thin, snapping sound.
He stopped shifting his weight.
Still, he wasn’t dead after all; that was the critical thing. He breathed out a sigh. As long as he didn’t move, he was safe.
By now his wits had returned to the extent that the thought made him laugh. Safe, as long as he sat in, or rather on, a dwarf tree sticking out of the side of the Rock of Gibraltar, a thousand feet in the air, with nothing at all between him and the stony beach at the bottom, and twenty feet of nearly vertical cliff face between him and safety of a more permanent sort at the top.
He tried calling out, but gave it up after his second “Hello . . . is anybody there?” (He felt too ridiculous to sit there in his tree yelling, “Help!”) Whatever he yelled, he realized no one was going to answer anyway. If someone had actually pushed him, whoever had done it had probably already fled, and if not, he wasn’t about to come to his aid. To reach anyone else, his voice would have to carry up and over the top of the ridge and down the long stone stairwell to the trail. And even if his voice did carry, which it wouldn’t—not in this wind—who was there to hear him? If there was anybody out on the trail in this weather, Gideon certainly hadn’t seen him.
All right then, it was up to him to get himself out of there. Time for a plan. Julie, in her park-ranger mode, said that the best plan, the best thing you could do if you were lost or in trouble, as long as you weren’t in danger of imminent death, was to stay put. People would come and find you, especially if they had some idea of where you’d been going. And in this case, Julie knew he’d been headed for the watchtower, and Rowley knew exactly where it was. So how long would it be before they came looking? Well, at least another forty minutes: half an hour before they started worrying about him, and ten minutes to get here. After that, it would be another twenty minutes, because they’d have to go back to the cable terminal building and return with some rope. So, at a minimum, an hour, all told. Could he last that long?
Not a chance. Oh, the tree felt solid enough, even with that crack he’d heard, but the fact was, he didn’t trust himself not to fall out of the damn thing. Balance had never been his strong suit. He’d fallen into more than one stream from more than one log bridge that his companions had crossed without a problem. And that had been from heights of three or four feet, not with a thousand feet of empty space under him and fierce, spiteful gusts of wind whacking away at him. Some people were said to be seized by a near-irresistible urge to jump when they found themselves looking down from a height like this. Not him. All he had was an irresistible certainty that he’d fall out of the damn tree if he sat there long enough.
No, it was time to go.
He looked at the wall of solid rock that loomed above him. Well, not exactly what you’d call solid rock, really. Mostly, it was composed of what appeared to be a compacted, gravelly clay of some kind, with outcroppings of limestone pushing through it here and there. The Aleppo had improbably grown from one such outcropping, winding its roots through and around the limestone to reach the clay
beneath. About fifteen feet above him—only five feet below the top of the Rock—was another such outcrop. If he could manage to pull himself up onto that and then stand up on it—not a happy thought, but he could do it—he’d be home free; he could reach the top from there and pull himself up. The problem was getting to the outcropping in the first place. He could shinny the two feet from where he was to the base of the tree and get up on this outcropping. From there, given his height, he’d easily be able to reach up another eight feet.
Which left seven to be accounted for. Taking extreme care not to look down again, he hitched himself along the trunk an inch at a time, then leaned forward to test the clay near the outcropping to see if it was soft enough to dig footholds in, yet firm enough to hold his weight. Firm enough was definitely not the problem. The stuff was more like breccia than clay: a conglomerate of little pieces of rock in a coarse matrix that seemed to be some kind of hard sandstone. When he dug at it with his fingers—holding grimly on to a root with his other hand and wrapping his legs around the trunk as tightly as they would go—all he did was tear a fingernail. And now for the first time he noticed that he’d torn a couple of other nails on the way down, and scraped his knuckles as well. He’d hurt his back too, he realized, although it didn’t feel like anything serious—just an abrasion or two and maybe a strained muscle, and a little bruising; nothing too bad . . . he hoped.
But that was something to worry about later. For now, he had to get back up, and the thing to do was obvious. If there was nothing that would serve as hand- and footholds, he would have to carve out his own. Fortunately for him, the tools were right there. The roots of the Aleppo, in their unremitting search for sustenance, had split and fractured the rock, leaving a couple of football-sized chunks lodged in their coils. Tugging the smaller chunk out (no easy task for Gideon, considering his nervous-making perch) he found that it would indeed do the job; by repeatedly pounding its broken edge against the sandstone, he was able to dig out a small cavity.
But it was far too heavy to be a useful tool, a good twelve or fifteen pounds; it took two hands to keep it going for more than a short time, and he most definitely didn’t have two free hands. He was worried about his endurance too. What he needed was a smaller rock, but a quick probing of the outcrop showed that there was nothing that would do. The one other chunk that he could pull out was about the same size as the first one. All right, then, using both of them, he’d make his own. He’d spent a good many hours one summer teaching himself the craft of prehistoric stone-knapping, and although the art of fine-edge pressure-flaking had been beyond him (he’d spent more time applying Band-Aids than turning out arrowheads), he’d done pretty well with the less complex skills involved in percussion-flaking, which, at its most basic level, consisted of using a hammer stone to chip away at the edges of a core stone or “blank” to create a crude hand ax or chopper.
In simpler terms, you banged one rock against another until something gave.
It helped, of course, if the banger was harder than the bangee, and if the bangee was made of flint, or obsidian, or something else that would fracture along regular, predictable planes, but these were luxuries he didn’t have. What he had were two pieces of limestone. Setting the smaller one on the trunk between his thighs, with its cleanest edge up and at a slight angle (if you struck the edge straight on, you’d just crumble it away), he delivered his first careful blow with the other one, his aim being not merely to break the rock in two, but with a series of well-placed blows to produce a finer implement, sharp-edged and shaped to the hand.
The first blow produced nothing; only a sharp little clack. He tried again. This time the hammer stone glanced off the core and drove painfully into his thigh. He winced. That was going to be another bruise. The hell with producing a finer implement, he decided. Any old chopper would do, as long as he could operate it with one hand. He tried another blow, harder. Nothing. Even harder. A tiny chip came off the wrong rock. Frustrated, grunting with the effort, he clenched his teeth and raised the hammer stone over his head—
“What in the world are you doing down there?” Pru McGinnis’s wondering voice floated down to him from the top.
“Pru!” he cried, looking up. “Am I glad to see you!”
She looked down at him, thoughtfully chewing on her lower lip. “Umm . . . I don’t suppose you could use a little help?”
SIX
“SO I look down and what do I see?”
Pru was zestfully regaling an enthralled, aghast Julie. “It was awe-inspiring, positively cosmic, as if I was watching the very dawn of mankind re-created before me. There he was, this primitive, hulking creature crouched in his tree, grunting, at the very moment of the invention of tool-making. You could see the intense concentration on his face as he crudely hammered his rocks together, in preparation for coming down from his arboreal abode and standing erect upon the earth on his own two legs.”
A subdued Gideon offered a modest correction. “Coming up from my arboreal abode, actually.”
Which was the first time Julie relaxed enough to laugh. “But you are okay?” she asked for the third or fourth time.
“I’m fine, honey. A few dings, a few scuffs, but all in all, in pretty good shape for a guy who fell off the Rock of Gibraltar.”
And now the laughter turned to relieved giggles. “ ‘I appreciate your wifely concern,’ ” she mimicked, dropping her voice an octave and adding a supercilious, mock-English accent, “ ‘but don’t worry, I have no intention whatever of falling off the Rock of Gibraltar.’ ”
"I did not say ’whatever,’” Gideon muttered, but then ruefully laughed along with her. “Next time I’ll pay more attention.”
They were in the tiny bar-restaurant, midway through the simple, satisfying luncheon of roast chicken, chips, and salad, along with bottles of cold white Montilla wine from across the border. Julie, Gideon, and Pru were at the larger of the two tables, speaking quietly, preferring to keep their conversation private.
Between the two of them, Gideon and Pru had described how she had found him. She had been walking on the trail without anything in particular in mind when she heard a clack-clack-clack sound, “as if someone was banging two stones together.” Curious, she had climbed up to the sentry post, looked down, and found Gideon doing exactly that. She had hurried back to the cable car terminal and located an employee who was able to get hold of a stout, twenty-five-foot electrical extension cord. The two of them had then run back and used the cord to “walk” Gideon up the cliff face.
“It was really exciting,” Pru declared. “It was fun!”
“It was exciting, all right,” Gideon admitted. “I don’t know about fun. Maybe five years from now it might seem as if it was fun.”
“And you still really think you might have been pushed?” Julie asked.
He shrugged. As time had passed, a conviction that he had indeed been pushed had first grown, then shrunk. On the one hand, it seemed impossible that he could have fallen off the Rock on his own, but wasn’t that just what he’d done on those log bridges? No one had pushed him then; he’d managed to fall off without any help. Maybe the same thing had happened here. There was that nasty wind, after all. “I don’t know. I think I felt something . . . a push.” He touched his right hip, just above the hip pocket. “Here.” Another shrug. “I think.”
“You don’t sound very positive.”
“I’m not. But I just can’t believe I did it all by myself. I mean, did you ever hear of anybody accidentally falling off the Rock of Gibraltar? ”
“Most people who fell off the Rock wouldn’t be able to talk about it afterward,” Pru pointed out. “You had a little luck on your side.” She and Julie were both clearly disinclined to believe anyone had pushed him.
Julie gently touched the back of his hand. “No offense, sweetheart, but you’re . . . how do I put this? You’re really not very good with heights.”
“Tell me about it,” he said with a sigh. “All the same—”
<
br /> “Gideon, listen. Let’s assume for a minute that somebody really did push you. If that were true, it would pretty much have to be someone right here in this room, wouldn’t it? Who else would have any idea where you were? Who else that you know would be in Gibraltar? Why would anyone else want to . . . well, kill you?”
“Why would anyone in this room want to kill me?”
“That’s what I was wondering.”
He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I guess.”
A few moments of meditative silence followed, until Pru, having wrested the last shred of white meat from her half chicken, jerked her head and gestured decisively with her fork. “Okay, I’ve thought it through, and I simply can’t see anyone having pushed you. It doesn’t hold water.” She shoved her plate away and moved her wineglass nearer.
“Look,” she whispered, leaning closer in. “Do you really believe someone here—one of these people—harmless, fusty, certified academics right down to their sensible shoes—not only wanted to murder you . . . well, on second thought, that part I can believe—”
“Thank you so much.”
“—but went so far as to actually try to do it? No, that’s straining credulity. Think about it. Aside from the guts it would take, he would have had to follow you down the trail, carefully keeping out of sight, then follow you up the steps, then—”