Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear gh-2

by Gabriel Hunt

  Tigranes, meanwhile, took a similarly detailed survey of Gabriel, gazing critically at him from head to toe and, unlike Gabriel, looking progressively less satisfied with what he saw as his assessment went on. He frowned at the leather jacket and the frown deepened when he got to the holster poking out at the bottom.

  “Another?” The old man’s voice was low and quiet, almost a whisper. “You bring another to me who cares nothing for my ancient duty, who cares only to satisfy his demands, who will mock and denigrate what he does not understand?”

  “No—” Christos began, but Gabriel stepped forward, put a hand on the boy’s arm to silence him. Perhaps he was wasting his time—but if, on the other hand, the old man was what he seemed, Gabriel did not want to get turned away at the door as the Americans working for DeGroet had been.

  “Honored father,” he said, in Greek, “I do not have the privilege of knowing you, but I promise, I mock nothing of the ancient world. I am a student of the ancient ways and hold them in the highest respect.”

  Tigranes eyed him warily.

  “Your instrument,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward the harp, “is it a phorminx or a kithara? It’s not a barbitos, I don’t think…is it?”

  Tigranes continued staring at him, his heavy eyelids narrowing to slits. “Of course it is not a barbitos,” he said, finally. “I am no woman, playing melodies for the pleasure of the household.”

  “Then it is a phorminx?” Gabriel pressed.

  “Yes,” Tigranes said grudgingly. “It is a phorminx.”

  “And do you…use it?”

  “To play merry refrains, you mean?” Tigranes said. “For visitors to dance and drink to? Is this what you have in mind, young man?”

  “Of course not,” Gabriel said. “That would be an insult to the instrument. You don’t dance to the music of the phorminx—you declaim heroic poetry.”

  Tigranes’ eyes widened at this, and he looked to Christos, who nodded.

  “Come upstairs,” Tigranes said.

  The man’s living quarters were as austere as the building’s exterior would lead one to expect. There were no signs of electricity or other modern conveniences. Through a rear window in what clearly served as Tigranes’ bedroom Gabriel saw a privy out back; in one corner of the room he saw a clay pitcher resting by a straw pallet. This room occupied roughly half of the second floor. Passing through it, Gabriel reached an even emptier sitting room whose only furnishings were drawn on the wall, a crude mural in the Attic style of a young man reclining on a bench before a seated, older man holding a lyre.

  Tigranes sat cross-legged on the floor and Gabriel followed suit. Christos discreetly remained in the room outside.

  “What is that picture?” Gabriel asked, nodding toward the mural.

  “That,” Tigranes said, “is my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. Fifty grandfathers ago.”

  “He was a bard?” Gabriel said, using the ancient term for it: rhapsode, one who sews stories together.

  “All the men in my family have been bards,” Tigranes said, but he used a term more ancient still: aoidos. “From the earliest of days to the present.”

  “Here on Chios?”

  Tigranes nodded, but said no more.

  “And your…ancestor,” Gabriel said, reaching for a way to draw the old man out, “he…taught pupils?”

  “My ancestor did teach a pupil,” Tigranes said. “His son. And his son taught his son, and so on. But you misunderstand what you see here. He is not the teacher in this picture.” He patted the wall by the image of the boy on the bench. “The young man—that is my ancestor.”

  “I see,” Gabriel said. “And who is the old man teaching him?”

  “Homer,” Tigranes said.

  Chapter 13

  “Homer,” Gabriel said.

  “Homeros, the prince of the aoidi, yes—you did not know he was from Chios?”

  Gabriel knew that Chios was one of several places in the region that laid claim to being the birthplace of Homer—it was the Mediterranean’s answer to George Washington slept here.

  “I…I did not,” Gabriel said.

  “Have you never seen the Daskalopetra? The throne from which Homer taught? It is beside the beach at Vrontados.”

  He’d seen it, on one previous visit—a jutting stub of stone overlooking the sea. Any man might have sat there, or no man might; none but sea birds rested on it now.

  “From father to son for twenty-eight hundred years,” Tigranes said, “the words of Homer have passed, a sacred trust. The stories of Achilleus and Odysseus and Oedipus—”

  “Oedipus?” Gabriel said, and Tigranes nodded. He said: “My father taught me as his father taught him, the sixteen thousand verses of the Iliad, the twelve thousand of the Odyssey, and the seven thousand of the Oedipodea.” He drew a clawlike hand across the strings of his phorminx and an ancient chord hung in the air. “Sing, muse, the passion and hubris of Oedipus of Thebes, unhappiest of mortals, whose fate was writ before his birth…”

  As he continued reciting the poem, line after line of hexameter spilling forth, Gabriel felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. It was the same feeling he got when walking into a sealed tomb for the first time, entering a place no man had set foot for centuries; or holding in his hands an artifact believed lost forever—which, after a fashion, is what this was. You could buy a copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey in any bookstore, in any language, in any country on the face of the earth. You could find it, god help you, in bits and pixels on the Internet. But the Oedipodea was one of the lost works of the ancient world, the only known written copy having been destroyed in the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

  “It’s…beautiful,” Gabriel said when Tigranes reached the end of the introductory apostrophe and paused for breath. “And you say it is the work of Homer? I thought I remembered the Oedipodea being credited to someone else.”

  Tigranes made a disgusted sound. “Cinaethon of Sparta,” he said, scoffing, “that’s what Pausanias said. And Plutarch. But what did they know? Did their fathers learn it at the feet of the poet himself?”

  Gabriel understood now why Christos had brought him here. This was not the improvisation of a madman on a mountaintop—even the portion he had heard so far had the authenticity and coherence of a genuine artifact, a traditional lyric learned by rote as one might memorize and transmit a liturgy, from mind to mind and voice to voice across a sea of generations. It was a record of a forgotten time, one that very likely existed nowhere in the world but in this old man’s head. And it was a record with a particular relevance to the question he had posed in the tavern, since whether by Cinaethon or by Homer the Oedipodea would have told the story of Oedipus’ life—ending, famously, with his killing his father, marrying his mother, and putting his own eyes out when he learned what he had done…but beginning, just as famously, with his triumph over one of Greece’s most ancient monsters, the riddle-posing sphinx.

  “Do you,” Gabriel began, “do you know the whole thing? All seven thousand verses?”

  Tigranes’ eyes blazed and his chin rose haughtily. “All seven thousand! Of course!” He passed a hand before his eyes. “It is my duty to remember. Until the day I die.” His voice fell, taking on a tone of sadness. “I repeat them daily, though only to myself now. For I have no son, no one to teach. They will die with me. But not,” he said, rousing some fire again, “a day sooner.”

  “I would greatly like to hear the rest,” Gabriel said.

  “Then prepare yourself,” the old man said, his voice dropping into a rehearsed cadence, rich in timbre and suffused with pride, “for a story of four nights’ telling, an adventure unlike any you have heard before, for four nights of bloody deeds and terrible loss, of men brave and desperate, of women cruelly shamed.” His hand played among the strings of his phorminx, and the air jangled with a dissonant tune that spoke of distant shores, of men struggling under the heat of a foreign sun. “Prepare for four nights of splendor and depravity, four night
s of—”

  Christos’ voice interrupted then from the other room, where he was standing at the window. “Better make it four minutes,” he said. “We’ve got company.”

  “Excuse me,” Gabriel said. He rushed to the window. Through it he saw the alleyway behind Tigranes’ home and the rooftops of the one-story buildings clustered around. Past those, he could see a sliver of the entry path leading into Anavatos, and, as they passed, the men coming up along it. Walking two abreast, it looked like a latter-day siege force: a dozen men at least, all armed, and bringing up the rear, standing a foot taller than any of the others, a man Gabriel had hoped never to see again. Andras.

  Gabriel ducked out of sight, drew Christos close. “Is there any way out of here other than the way we came in?”

  “Out of the building or out of Anavatos?”

  “Either.”

  “No,” Christos said.

  “There has to be another way out of the building,” Gabriel said. “There always is.” He looked around. “We can go out the window.”

  “With an eighty-year-old man?” Christos said. “We can’t leave Tigranes here. They’d torture him to make him talk. They’d kill him.”

  Gabriel ran into the other room, where Tigranes still sat, one hand poised over the strings. The expression on his face said how little he liked being interrupted once he’d begun declaiming, but that he was prepared to forgive all if Gabriel apologized and quietly returned to his seat. Well, he could have his apology, but the rest would have to wait.

  “Honored father,” Gabriel said, putting one hand under Tigranes’ elbow and lifting him to his feet, “I regret that we won’t be able to properly begin the Oedipodea yet. There are some men on their way, and we can’t let them find us here.”

  “Take your hands off me,” Tigranes said, and Gabriel released his arm. The old man smoothed down his chiton.

  “We’ve got a few minutes at most,” Christos said.

  “You wish to avoid these men?” Tigranes said.

  “We have to,” Gabriel said.

  “Very well. Follow me.” And Tigranes headed down the stairs, his sandals slapping against the stone once more.

  At the ground floor, he led them past the open front archway (Gabriel glanced outside: no men in sight, not yet), to a small chamber at the far wall. A closet, really—they could barely all fit inside and there was no door to it. As soon as anyone entered the building they’d be seen.

  “This is no good,” Gabriel said, turning to Tigranes, but Tigranes wasn’t there.

  Christos and Gabriel looked at each other, baffled—the old man, who had been standing behind them, had vanished somehow while they weren’t looking. Then they heard the slap of his sandals overhead.

  Gabriel looked up. There was no ceiling to the closet, and Tigranes was ten feet up, climbing the wall using hand- and toeholds carved into the stone like the rungs of a ladder, the phorminx hanging across his back from a leather strap. He was moving quickly; for an octogenarian, the man was remarkably spry.

  Gabriel gestured for Christos to go up next, and while the young man did, Gabriel drew his Colt. From the street outside he heard voices. The men were talking, in Greek.

  So Andras had rounded up some local talent this time.

  Then he heard Andras himself, speaking English, telling them to shut the hell up. And in the quiet that fell he heard one gun after another being armed.

  He looked up. Christos was ten feet overhead now and Tigranes was nowhere to be seen. As Gabriel watched, he saw the upper half of Christos’ body vanish as well—into what he could only assume, since he couldn’t see it from below, was a hole in the wall separating this building from the one beside it.

  “Old man!” came a shout from the street. “Come out and talk!”

  Gabriel holstered his pistol and began climbing.

  “We will count to three and then we will come in. You don’t want this, Tigranes. It’ll go easier for you if you just come out.”

  A moment later the counting began, but Gabriel only heard the first number—Tria!—before he reached the hole Tigranes and Christos had entered and dove into it himself. Christos was in front of him, crawling swiftly on his hands and knees along a stone tunnel, its inner walls the pink and beige of cut sandstone, light coming in through crevices where the ancient mortar had crumbled away. Past him, Gabriel could just make out Tigranes’ chiton-covered rear and the phorminx lying against his back, nearly scraping the ceiling as he crawled.

  Judging from the length of the tunnel, it had to pass through quite a few adjacent buildings, turning periodically as the angles of the neighboring houses required. They passed several openings leading down to closets like the one through which they’d entered. Apparently the residents of Anavatos hadn’t relied solely on the inaccessibility of their town for purposes of holding out against a siege—tunnels like these would have helped them resist occupation as well.

  Though in the end, of course, it hadn’t been enough. Gabriel did his best not to think about this.

  From some distance back they heard, very quietly, the sound of shouting and pounding footsteps.

  “Ask him where we get out,” Gabriel whispered to Christos, who passed the question along. He whispered back a moment later: “Next one over.”

  Then Christos disappeared around a turn in the tunnel, and when Gabriel made the turn himself he saw Christos and Tigranes both on their knees in a wider chamber with a chimney leading up. “Where does this lead us?” Gabriel asked.

  “To the end,” Tigranes said, and started climbing.

  Well, that would more or less have to be the answer, Gabriel supposed: there were only so many buildings standing side by side and no tunnel could go on forever. Perhaps there would be a way for them to climb down the wall of the last building and then get behind Andras and his men, sneak back to the road and return on foot back to a more inhabited part of the island…

  Gabriel followed Christos up the short shaft of rock and stepped out onto a flat surface. It wasn’t the roof of a building. It was the stony ground at the edge of a cliff.

  This was the end, indeed—the end of Anavatos, the edge at which the town’s inhabitants had made their final stand, and from which they had leapt to their deaths. Only one hardy tree grew here, its roots clinging to the rock and dangling over the edge.

  “What did you bring us here for?” Gabriel said, looking out over the sheer fall and the rocks far below. “There’s no way out!”

  A shout rose in the distance: “Over there! I see them!”

  “There is,” Tigranes said, “there is a way—”

  “Then you’d better tell us pretty quickly what it is,” Gabriel said. He pulled his gun. Two bullets—damn it, how did he wind up down to two bullets again? And no telling whether they’d even fire…

  “Down the mountain,” Tigranes began.

  “What,” Christos said, the fear evident in his voice, “climbing down the side?”

  “To a point,” Tigranes said.

  “Where?” Christos said.

  But there was no time for an answer as men rose into view just yards away, arms and legs pumping as they ran toward the dead end where their prey was cornered.

  Gabriel pulled the trigger and a gunshot split the air, taking one of the men down. But the others kept coming.

  “Get into the tunnel,” he shouted, “we’ve got to go back—” And he made for the opening of the chimney. But before he could get there, a man emerged from it, a short Greek with hair the color of steel wool and a jagged scar across his forehead. The man was holding a gun and he fired it without pausing even to aim, and it was only that overeagerness that saved Gabriel from catching a bullet in the chest. Gabriel threw himself against the man, knocking his gun away and taking him to the ground. But another came up right behind him. This one did take the time to aim, steadying his gun hand carefully while Gabriel and the scarred man grappled on the ground at his feet.

  “No!” Christos shouted, and launc
hed himself at the standing gunman, tackling him around the knees. They fell to the ground in a heap, the barrel of the gunman’s pistol just millimeters from where Gabriel lay below the scarred Greek, his throat clutched in the shorter man’s hands. Gabriel’s saw the gunman’s eyes spark with a vicious elation, saw his finger tighten on the trigger—

  Desperately, Gabriel rolled over as the gun beside him fired. The explosion was deafening. But it was his enemy’s head the bullet entered, not his own. The man’s hands fell away from his throat and Gabriel staggered to his feet. He kicked the gun out of the other man’s hand while Christos slugged him, hard, in the face.

  “Enough!” came a nasal voice and it took Gabriel a moment to realize the word had been spoken in Hungarian, not Greek. He looked up, raising his Colt at the same time. Andras was standing near the edge of the cliff, one meaty arm around Tigranes’ throat, the other holding a pistol to the old man’s temple.

  “Drop your gun, Hunt,” Andras said, “or the old man dies.”

  “Lajos would skin you alive if you killed him,” Gabriel said. “He’s the only man on earth who knows about the sphinx.”

  “What Mr. DeGroet does or doesn’t do is my problem,” Andras said, “not yours. Drop your gun.”

  Behind him, Gabriel heard the sound of footsteps racing up to within a yard or two, then pattering to a halt. Five men, six men—who knew how many. Too many. One bullet just wasn’t enough, even if he’d been willing to risk Tigranes’ life. Which he wasn’t.

  Gabriel reluctantly released the hammer of his Colt and let it slide from his hand to the ground.

  He felt men take hold of each of his elbows roughly, felt his wrists drawn together behind his back, felt a length of rope binding them together. A few feet away, he saw another pair of men take hold of Christos.

  Andras came forward, dragging Tigranes with him. He bent to pick up Gabriel’s gun.

  “That’s a very nice weapon,” he said. “An antique, isn’t it? I think I’ll keep it.”

  “You son of a—” Gabriel started, but Andras slapped him brutally across the face with the side of his Colt. He felt the slash on his cheek from DeGroet’s sword reopen and start bleeding again.