Beneath Ceaseless Skies #110

by Doyle, Noreen

  “We are anticipating the holiday opening,” Taggett said. “A number of top subscribers have booked passage, the Pretish consul is already asking after his own ticket to the event, and Reverend Hopewell of the Mission House of Mercy has agreed to give the benediction, too; says he’s spoken to you.” (Which Pendergast confirmed.) “But—”

  Pendergast and Klein both knew what was coming.

  “The pylon,” Pendergast supplied.

  “Yes, the pylon, seems rather....”

  “‘Fragmentary’?” Klein suggested.

  “I was going to say ‘unfinished,’ but the sense is almost the same, isn’t it?”

  “Nearly,” Klein said as he offered the ledger.

  Much frowning and harrumphing, now, from Taggett. “It’s a close thing. You won’t go supernumerary on us?”

  “There’s enough to pay the gangs for expeditiousness,” Pendergast said, stepping into Klein’s role. Klein had no reason to naysay him. “And to pay our rais, Hoozeyn.”

  “You have all the materiel, then?”

  “No-o,” Klein said.

  Pendergast was saved from intervening in what could have become an unpleasant exchange with Taggett by the rushed entry of Jon Fox, with news that he had found the beard broken off the largest statue of Ósorathó in the holy of holies.

  “God’s beard, you mean!” Pendergast corrected. He understood the importance of emphasizing to laymen like Taggett that the Pink Chapel was not merely another expression of some Fiáró-king’s vainglory. The building was instead ancient evidence that some germ of True Faith had put forth a blossom during the era of willful pagan ignorance, and this had to be right because it said so in the newsletter. “Really, Fox, we do not have money to waste on—” and, for the benefit of the observant Taggett, Pendergast launched into his argument about “proof of antiquity.” Particularly on this matter of the beard, Taggett (who himself had a handsome one) remained unsympathetic to Pendergast’s pragmatism.

  Jon clucked his tongue. “Catch, Walter,” he said.

  Only the games of bat-ball that the Club played twice monthly with some lower members of the Pretish consul’s staff saved Pendergast from physical harm. At the moment, the “ball” rushed at him from Jon’s underhand. For want of a mitt, he caught it with both hands, cushioning the blow against his stomach. The “ball” was a fragment from the curled-up end of a braided emblematic prosthetic beard, carved of rosy-pink granite.

  Jon said, “The rest are at this address.” He pulled a business card from his pocket. “Send seven bricks for new door-stops, along with a bottle of wine if you’ve any left, and they’re ours. Ah, the Club’s. The Chapel’s, yes. God’s, even, if you wish.” He left the card on the desk and went off to tend to his own matters.

  “Say, Pendergast,” said Taggett, tapping the card, “isn’t that your stationer?” And he went back to Baker & Son to enjoy a laugh among his own kind.

  “Fox is getting cheeky,” Klein said, after.

  Pendergast hefted the fragment in his hand. “He knows all, and what he doesn’t know, he thinks he can find. There’s limits, Klein. Natural limits. Beyond them is but God and the Devil.”

  “I don’t doubt that. But maybe we shouldn’t complain about Fox when he oversteps.”

  “Eh, you’re exactly right.” He placed the bit of beard into Klein’s care for the inventory. “Does no good to complain about Fox any more than it does to complain about the Devil.” And so, quite simply, Walter Pendergast ceased to do so.

  * * *

  There remained much else to complain about. Jon could not fail to notice that, in the days following Taggett’s visit, Pendergast became vexed and secretive. Jon caught him stuffing papers into a drawer, once, and locking it; and at another opportunity, Pendergast rushed furtively from a telegraph office—and not the one at Baker & Son. With Farrington and Klein about, it seemed that nothing (or at least no more than usual) was amiss, but Jon witnessed sufficient evidence to believe that this was not, really, the case.

  All this was more than enough to intrigue Jon, although first he established, through subtle inquiry with Klein, that it was not a financial matter. Some while later Jon heard Pendergast, locked in the R. C. office, say to someone else, whose voice Jon could not quite hear: “That’s right... a foolish mistake... a stupid one. When I drafted the plans, I duplicated a block in the inventory and put the double in place on paper.... Yes, the prince’s face, the one we call the Son, yes, his very eye...! Yes, the one on the pylon, in the front. The eye of God’s Son! Can you imagine not having it? Well, we don’t have it.... The shrine will be nothing without this prince, His crowning glory! Nothing at all, for want of that one block.... Baker & Son will call back the funds and the reputation our branch will be ruined. That will crush Professor Wenfreys, who had such hope for us! And, by God, it’ll crush us with him. We’ll all look like fools to the Autorité des Antiquités, not to mention the Research Club home office. If Fox would bring me that block, by God’s bod, he’d be back in the R. C. before Hoozeyn could put His crowning glory into place.... No, no one else knows.... They mustn’t know. No, I can’t ask Fox directly! But no, even if I did—I think Fox would fail, surely, the odds of finding it are so miniscule. We’ll be proper Emerishmen and put on a brave face until the end. No, I’m telling you he won’t find it. He can’t. No, I’m certain....”

  “Won’t! Can’t!” Jon repeated to himself as he stalked off, having heard more than enough. “By God’s bod, it would serve Pendergast right if I didn’t even try. I’ve saved him and the Research Club with its wicked by-laws from more trouble than either’s worth.” He knew this was not true, at least in the case of the Club. If he ever hoped to excavate or otherwise explore legally much beyond the bounds of Qáreyá, he would need the R. C. He then forswore his former oath and resolved to save the Research Club and take Pendergast down a notch or two by turning “won’t” and “can’t” into “will” and “did.”

  * * *

  Jon Fox could scarcely scour all of Qáreyá himself for a single eye. Neither did he want to publicize the Club’s unfortunate circumstance. He might like to expose Pendergast’s epigraphic error, but that no one else had caught the gaffe would cast doubt over all the resident Club members. There were some—Provench antiquarians, chiefly—who would take advantage. When a bit of careful fishing in the waters of Farrington and Klein yielded not the slightest nibble about the trouble, Jon decided that he would, for the while, maintain Pendergast’s secret, at least until he could expose it by providing its solution. So he sought out a dragoman who had served him before, one whom he knew (or believed) he could keep quiet about the matter.

  He found this dragoman in the company of a Provench tourist-party just returned from the Sooq-Qáreyá, which, despite its name, is not Qáreyá’s famous bazaar but rather one of its ancient necropoleis. The party comprised a family: husband, wife, and an offspring of each sex. The wife was posing their dragoman (a young woman from Lower Ópet) and the donkey-driver (a Lower Ópetian boy barely ten years old) at either side of the male and female offspring, who were looking quite bored with the end of the day’s adventures. The husband peered toward his waist, advanced the film in his box camera, and took a photograph. Then, having come a little nearer to his dragoman, another. The man was evidently taken by the novelty of his dragoman’s dress: female trousers, head-cloth, and all.

  A whinge from the young son broke his father’s reverie and rekindled an argument evidently laid aside for the photograph-taking: the husband saying, in Provench, “I will pay whatever you ask!” to which the dragoman replied, in Harábese, “Lá! Lá! Lá!” when her entreaties in Provench (“Non! Non! Non!”) went disregarded. After a minute of this she demanded and received her báqsheesh, gave something from it to the donkey-boy, and quit their company.

  “The boy wanted my qafiyeh!” Iánheh said with great indignation to Jon Fox by way of greeting. And she pulled the ukhl that held the yellow-striped scarf tighter onto her head.
By law, she was required to wear that while seeking or undertaking employment; it was fair warning to all that she was a kópeet, who worshiped no God of the upper case: neither her neighbors’ ál-Reyá nor the Good Lord of the Calosian foreigners. “And what do you want, sáyeed?”

  “An eye,” Jon answered shortly, and did what he could, delicately, to explain about the missing element of the Pink Chapel, a place she knew from its days of ruin.

  She said, “Looking to add another piece of it? I’d thought they were stealing it from behind those curtains, one stone at a time, just as they’d swept away the fishermen and launderers with their magic stamps and seals and signs! Can you give me a piece of the stone? Many walls have eyes, but I suppose that you, sáyeed, being who you are, will insist upon the right one.”

  Her simple request proved to be more easily said by Iánheh than done by Jon. Not a week before, someone had tried to steal something from the Pink Chapel. Klein suspected that the thieves were after lumber and rope used for the workmen’s scaffolding. Baker & Son supplied armed guards; colonial veterans, mostly, of wars fought in the New World against the native empires. None except Pendergast, Farrington, Klein, Hoozeyn and his workmen, and a few others, was allowed at the site, either inside or outside the tarpaulins. Jon was not among the exceptions.

  So Jon went back at night, with a dark lantern, and tested the acuity of Baker’s Guns. Although they were not much lacking, Jon was able to retrieve an otherwise useless unadorned fragment the size of his palm with only a single shot fired in his direction.

  * * *

  He delivered this to Iánheh early the next morning. She might have been grateful for being spared another day as a novelty for foreigners. Instead she returned a demand for money: most of a day’s wages. When Jon expressed reluctance, she said, “Isn’t your Club providing, sáyeed?”

  “Not—not in advance,” he said, wary of admitting that much insolvency.

  “Ha! You’re coming up in the world, sáyeed, if they treat you as one of us now! Well, I’ve been before as you are now, so I’ll let pity rule sense. Come back tomorrow morning with just a little money and we shall see what has happened by then.”

  * * *

  Jon went back tomorrow and the next day, to find that she had no news. He spent the other hours of these days haunting the Research Club office and library. On the third day, Iánheh was not at the Bab-ál-Lámeh at all. And so he worried. As did Pendergast, whose private fretting about “His crowning glory” became more intense and even a bit louder, at least in Jon’s presence. “Here I am working to possibly no end, and you—you sniff around the place like a street dog!” he snapped when Jon came ‘round on the third day and would not leave the office. “Don’t you have some child to tutor, some view to photograph, somewhere else to be—something to look for?”

  Cheered now, Jon smiled, said that indeed he did, and left Pendergast to fret in secret over “His crowning glory.”

  On the fourth day, Iánheh was again at the Bab-ál-Láhem. She said, “Come back tomorrow morning.”

  “You’ve said that every day! I do, and there’s nothing!”

  “I didn’t say that two days ago, and still you were here yesterday. Or so a gatekeeper told me. Did he lie? No. I think you still have hope, sáyeed.”

  “Hope or habit?”

  “Hope, maybe, would be better for you. I spoke to a juice-seller who knows a banker who once loaned money to a raisá ál-maamal-ál-feerákh (that’s a mistress of an egg-hatchery, sáyeed!), whose sister’s cousin (they weren’t full sisters) had developed the cancer, and so she spoke to—well, never mind. I have yet to track down the former second wife of the man the sister’s cousin spoke to. So come back tomorrow.”

  “And how many more tomorrows after that?” Jon calculated how many tomorrows lay between today and the deadline specified in the contract.

  “If the former second wife of the man who referred the cousin of the ráisa’s sister is still alive, sáyeed, then maybe not too many. But if she is dead, I’ll have to go looking for her children or her late brother’s widow.... And there are tourists, sáyeed, so many tourists! You can’t spend all your days waiting for me! Surely Pró-fey-soor Pendergast has something else for you to do?”

  Jon said, “I am doing quite enough for him now. Maybe too much, but I’ll get my due.” And he gave his dragoman a little more money, in order to shorten what could be a very long string of tomorrows.

  * * *

  The next day, Iánheh led Jon away from the gate. Not through it, out to the desert, but, still inside the ancient wall, up the narrow way in the very shadow of the wall, and onto an even narrower street that cut into the blocks of buildings where tin-smiths and brass-smiths worked, and thence to another, and another, deep into the labyrinth that is Old Qáreyá. They left behind the tourist shops and even the places that catered to the native-born middle class of the city, until, after what seemed to Jon to be the remainder of the morning, they had arrived in the Oom-ál-Faqr.

  Here neither smiths nor produce-sellers offer wares. There is no selling, no buying. People come and (God willing) they go, but otherwise all is in a kind of stillness broken only by subsidence. This is the district of the manufactory of Poverty; all other industries are memories only, preserved by the existence of buildings (surely, someone constructed them!) and scraps of pottery and rags and other made goods that have not yet been taken by decay. Many who pass through do not long linger, by the gracious mercy of God. So Jon hoped.

  She brought him to a cul-de-sac some fifty feet long and so narrow that he could touch his palms to both walls even with his elbows slightly bent. Iánheh sat down on the broader street and gave every indication that she intended to go no farther. “Your work now, sáyeed.”

  The surface level of the street and cul-de-sac had at one time been higher than they were at present. Over the centuries, passage of many feet had worn them down, and stones had been brought in to provide steps up the little embankments to doorsills that now stood a foot or two above the level of the ground. Methodically Jon examined the canyon walls between which he found himself. These were, in overwhelming measure, mud-brick, some baked and some not, some crumbling and some still strong. There was limestone too and granite of several shades, and some of the few doorways and windows had proper sills and jambs of stone, though the windows and doors had been bricked up. They thus reminded Jon of the spirit-doors in the ancient tombs at the Sooq-Qáreyá.

  There were ghosts here, too, of a sort. He found fossils in the limestone, mollusks that had lived and died on an ancient sea-bed, but no trace of the artistic hand of man, nor of the Pink Chapel’s rosy hue of granite. “Iánheh could be mistaken, and not for the first time,” he said to himself. “This seems to be a very dangerous place to be mistaken about—or in.”

  Near the end of the cul-de-sac, Jon felt exposed. There was a doorway, an honest, open doorway, leading from the narrow alley directly into the shell of what had been a tiny house of perhaps only one room. Beyond the makeshift steps and threshold (all grey granite, Jon noted), in dim light filtered through the slats of a ruined ceiling, he saw a foorn, a brick bakery oven, on which it was clear that no one had either cooked or slept in a very long time. A small stack of rude clay dishes, clean of dust or dirt, occupied a corner, and nearby leaned a palm-fiber broom of the short-handled sort. These were, apart from the buildings themselves and the well-worn street, the only trace of active human life he had found since entering the alley.

  Jon retreated to the narrow alley and inspected the foundation. This consisted of the usual mud bricks, but here and there stone blocks had been inserted. A few of them, set into the ground, bore faint traces that he made out to be the ancient Ópetian glyphs. He took the broom from the house and swept the dirt away. Had there been a mattock, he would have appropriated that too and started digging.

  When he bent down to inspect the inscription, he glimpsed an ear, rudely scratched into the mud brick. And below it: a piece of granit
e, grey with dust, but with a rosy hint.

  Jon, his attention caught by shadows of written words, had failed initially to apperceive a relief far better preserved. It was of an eye, staring blindly across the alley, and, below the eye, its brow, a few bare inches above the old ground. These were clean and pink, as if kept polished. Above the eye were worn four furrows, as if centuries of fingers had caressed tears into the cheeks of all that remained of this figure. There was the suggestion of more of the inverted profile, too: a nose, its nostril.

  Jon put his hand to where a thousand—no, many more—hands had touched these once-princely features. He felt a sting, as if he had reached into a haystack and been stuck by a needle. “His crowning glory,” Jon murmured. “Ah, Iánheh....”

  A voice said in Harábese, “Foreigners do not often come to honor the god.”

  Jon sat up, now acutely aware that his physical attitude (and his mental one) had been much like that of prayer. Indeed, anyone come to view this fragment of relief had to assume the same position.

  Having cursed both Iánheh for not whistling an alarm and himself if she were blameless (which she was), Jon Fox found himself looking at an Ópetian man who could be called barely of middle age. This Ópetian wore a healthy moustache without any trace of gray and a smile that hid its teeth. His garment—a robe two tones of gray and very worn—did not match his grooming. Jon wondered if this man fathomed that his Harábese had been understood. The Ópetian picked up the broom and swept off the threshold as if he were a housewife.

  Jon gathered his Harábese vocabulary and asked, “Is this a place of the kópees?” For that would explain some matters, even though this man wore a tárboosh with a turban wrapped neat around it, not a qafiyeh with yellow striping.

  Now the man started. He said, in good Provench that evidenced a solid, middle-class education, “It is a place of anyone who cares to ask a favor of the djinee.”