by Tad Williams
Martine was waiting just at the edge. She grabbed his arm and together they dived into the heatless golden brilliance.
For a moment, as Paul fell through onto hard stone, it seemed that their pursuers had come through after them: the unsteady light of torches was everywhere.
Reassured by the silence, Paul sat up. The torches hung in wall brackets along a vast stone facade, outshining even the stars in the black sky. The wall was covered with painted scenes in the stiff Egyptian style, colorful portraits of people and animal-headed gods.
He stood, feeling for broken bones, but found nothing worse than skinned knees and ripped coveralls. Beside him Martine and Florimel and T4b were also climbing to their feet. The quiet, an almost palpable thing in this gallery of vast stone walls, was broken only by the sound of his companions' breathing.
"We made it," Paul whispered. "Brilliant, Martine."
Before she could reply, a shape appeared around the edge of the building, monstrously large but as silent as a cat. In one bound it stood before them and over them, a lion-bodied, human-headed giant. Crudely stitched in many places like an ancient doll, the sphinx leaked sand from a dozen gaping seams. Its eyelids were sewn shut.
"You trespass on sacred precincts," it announced in a voice so low and powerful that it seemed to shake the stones. "This is the Temple of Anubis, Lord of Life and Death. You trespass."
Paul found himself struggling to make words come out of his mouth, terrified by the astounding size of the thing. "W–w–we . . . w–we don't . . . mean. . . ."
"You trespass."
"Run!" Paul shouted, turning, but before he had gone three steps something struck him like a velvet freight train and smashed him into darkness.
CHAPTER 25
The Hidden Bridge
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 7.0 (Eu, NAm)—"Escape!"
(visual: Zelmo on ledge)
VO: Nedra (Kamchatka T) and Zelmo (Cold Wells Carlson) are on the run from Iron Island Academy, but agents of Lord Lubar (Ignatz Reiner) shoot Zelmo with a Despair Ray, and now he is desperate to kill himself. This is last episode before "Escape!" folds into the "I Hate My Life" plotline. 5 supporting, 25 background open, cold-weather outdoor shoot. Flak to: GCN.IHMLIFE.CAST
For the third time they poled the raft across the sluggish current, steering toward the far shore. The bank seemed little more than a long stone's throw away, but after strenuous exercise by Sam and the new arrival Azador on one side, !Xabbu and Jongleur on the other, they had moved no closer.
At last they dragged the poles out and stood up straight to catch their breath. Released now to the current, the raft began to drift lazily downstream. The meadowlands on the far bank, so unexceptional, so apparently identical to the side of the river from which they had come, were beginning to seem like some mythical continent out of the past.
"Someone must swim," Jongleur said. "A person may be allowed where a boat is not."
Sam was nettled. The old man might have been proved right in his conjecture that crossing the river, not following it, was the key to traversing this strange land, but she still didn't like the assumption of command in his voice.
"We don't work for you," she said through clenched teeth. Something bumped her in the small of the back and she whirled, ready to shout at Jongleur, but it was !Xabbu who had nudged her. He gave her a significant look; it took Sam a moment to figure it out.
We're not supposed to talk about who Jongleur is, she remembered, and felt ashamed. All those years as a thief, creeping through the houses of the rich and powerful in the Middle Country—the imaginary rich and powerful anyway—and here she was, when it really counted, almost blurting out secrets for no reason. She lowered her eyes.
"He is right," Azador said. "We will not know for certain until someone tries to swim. I would do it, but with my leg. . . ." He made a gesture of regret, of heroism postponed.
Sam waited for !Xabbu to volunteer and was surprised when he did not. Usually the small man insisted on taking the primary risks before he would let anyone else, especially Sam, do something dangerous. "I guess it's me, then," she said. So all those years of morning swim practice would get some practical use. She hoped she'd get to tell her mom about it someday. The thought of something so gloriously mundane as laughing with her mother about swimming those hated laps sent a sharp spike of longing through her.
"Wait, I am not sure. . . ." !Xabbu began.
"It's okay, I'm good at this." Without giving herself more time to worry, she lifted her arms and leaped from the edge of the raft. When she surfaced she could hear Azador and Jongleur cursing at the violent rocking caused by her dive.
The water was a bit of a shock, colder than she expected, and though the current was slow, it was a steady drag that made swimming a great deal more difficult than it had been in the pool back home; still, after a few awkward kicks she got her body level and began to cut an angular path across the river, heading for the grassy, welcoming slope of the far bank.
A couple of minutes, she guessed, gauging the distance.
Within half a hundred strokes it became obvious that either the current was deceptively strong or she was suffering the same fate as the raft. She lifted her head above water and changed to a breast stroke so she could better see what was happening. She dug river water out from before her, surged against the resistance, made headway . . . but the land got no closer. Frustrated, she dove under the surface, forcing her way down until one of her hands brushed against the thick grasses waving at the bottom of the river before flattening out again. She kicked as hard as she could, wriggling her body like a fish. She was proud of her strength: she would not give up without testing herself and the simulation.
When she couldn't hold her breath any longer, she gave another two kicks, then allowed herself to glide upward. The shore was still just as far away. Disgusted, treading water, she had turned around toward the middle of the river to look for the raft when a sudden, shocking pain stabbed at her leg.
Something grabbed me. . . ! was all she had time to think before she slid under the water. She fought her way back up through agony, one leg helpless, and realized it was not some carnivorous river dweller that had struck but a cramp in her calf. It made little difference: she could not keep herself above water for more than a moment, and she was exhausted from her fruitless swim.
Sam shouted for !Xabbu, but her nose and mouth were full of water and it came out as little more than a gurgle. She simply could not kick the cramped leg. nor could she do much else. She tried to roll over on her back and go limp—the words dead man's float bubbled through her brain, a very unreassuring phrase—now the pain in her leg was excruciating and river water was rolling across her face. She had just sunk under the surface for the second time when something whacked hard against her shoulder. She grabbed at the barge pole, clutching it as though it were the shepherd's crook of her very own guardian angel. Which, in a way, it was.
"I was very frightened, Sam." !Xabbu had been unwilling to leave her side to make the fire, and had left the job to Azador. As she huddled beside the low blaze, still shivering a half hour later, she found herself actually grateful to the mustached man. "I was hoping, hoping very hard, that we could get the raft as far as you swam," !Xabbu went on. "Oh, I was frightened."
Sam was touched. In some ways, her experience seemed to have been worse for him than it had been for her. "I'm okay. You saved me."
!Xabbu only shook his head.
"So we are thwarted," said Jongleur. "We cannot cross the river, either by boat or by swimming."
Sam made an effort to stop her teeth from chattering. "But there must be a bridge. Those little animals or whatever they were—the Bubble Bunny ones—they said something about going to a bridge. We just never found out what they meant." She could not help glaring at Jongleur, since it had been his frightening temper that had driven the natives away. She thought she saw a shadow of guilt cross his face.
Maybe he's a little bit human, she deci
ded. Just a little. Of course, it might only be regret at having interfered with his own chances.
"But there are no bridges," Azador declared. "I have gone all the way around this bloody river three times. You have gone around it once yourself. Did you see bridges?"
"It's not that simple," Sam said stubbornly. "We can see the other side of the river, but that doesn't mean we can get there. So if we can see things we can't reach, why shouldn't there be things that we can't see but we can reach?" She had to stop and say it over again in her head to see if it made sense. She decided it did, more or less.
"We can do nothing more today." !Xabbu's troubled expression had not gone, but it had changed into something different, more remote. "We will think again in the morning." He reached out and touched Sam's arm. "I am happy you were not hurt, Sam."
"Just my leg, and that's better now." She smiled, hoping to cheer him a little, but wondered how convincing it was with her teeth still chattering.
For all !Xabbu's concern, he was not beside her when Sam woke sometime in the middle of the night. She could see the shadowy forms of the other two revealed by the dying coals, but no sign of the small man.
Call of nature, like, she guessed, and had almost toppled back into sleep when she remembered that there was no longer such a thing for any of them. She jerked upright. The idea of losing him, of being left alone with only Jongleur and Azador, was too horrible to consider.
I don't want any of this. I just want to go home.
She tried to calm herself, forcing herself to imagine what Renie or Orlando would do. If !Xabbu was gone she had to go and look for him, that was all. She considered rousing the others but decided against it. If she could not find any sign of him within a hundred meters or so of the campfire she would think about it again.
She was just pulling a smoldering stick out of the fire to use as a torch when she noticed that someone else had already had the same idea: a hundred meters from the camp a single spot of orange light stood out against the black velvet hills. Sam trotted toward it.
The end of !Xabbu's torch had been spiked into the soft loam of a grassy hillside; he was sitting beside it. He did not look up at her approach, and she was just beginning to feel frightened again when he shook himself out of his reverie and turned to her.
"Is everything all right, Sam?"
"Yeah, chizz. I just woke up and . . . I was worried because you were gone."
He nodded. "I am sorry. I thought you were too deeply asleep to notice." He turned back to the sky. "The stars are very strange here. There is a pattern, but I cannot hold it in my mind."
She seated herself beside him. The grass was damp, but after the mishap in the river she scarcely noticed.
"Will you not be cold?" he asked.
"I'm okay."
They sat for a while in silence, Sam fighting an urge to drive the fear away with friendly noise. At last !Xabbu cleared his throat, a sound so uncharacteristic in its uncertainty that Sam felt her skin goose pimple.
"I . . . I did a terrible wrong to you today," he said.
"You saved me."
"I let you go into the river. It should have been me, but I was afraid."
"Why should it have been you? You're as bad as Renie—you think you should do all the dangerous things before anyone else."
"The fact is that I feared the water. I was almost killed once in the river where I grew up, when I was a child. A crocodile."
"That's terrible!"
He shrugged. "That does not mean I should have let you do what I could not."
Sam hissed with exasperation. "You don't have to do everything," she said. "That's uttermost fenfen."
"But. . . ."
"Listen." She leaned toward him, forcing him to look at her. "You've saved my life a dozen times already. Remember the mountain? Remember how you got us off that disappearing trail? You've done more than your share, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't, like, do our part." She raised her hand to keep him from speaking. "Orlando got killed helping us—saving me. How could I live with myself if I wasn't taking risks, too? If I just sat back like some . . . some princess-girl in an old story, and let everyone rescue me? I don't know how things are in the Okey-dongo Delta or whatever it is, but where I come from, that scans for days and days."
!Xabbu smiled, but there was pain in it. "Renie says it is 'old-fashioned bullshit.' "
"And she'll say it again when we find her if you don't straighten up." Now Sam was the one to smile. She prayed it would be true, against all the odds. Renie and !Xabbu deserved each other in every way. So much love, so much stubbornness. She hoped they would have the rest of their lives to argue over which of them should do the harder jobs. "Is that why you came out here? Because you felt bad you didn't go into the river and I did, and I got a cramp?"
He shook his head. "Not only that. Something is troubling me, but I do not know what it is. Sometimes I need quiet to think." He smiled again. "Sometimes I need more than that. I thought I might dance."
"Dance?" If he had suggested he was considering building a rocket ship she could not have been more surprised.
"For me it is . . . like praying. Sometimes." He flicked his fingers, troubled by the inadequacy of his words. "But I am not ready. I do not feel it."
Sam didn't know what to say. After a moment, she stood. "Do you want to be alone? Or should we go back to camp?"
!Xabbu plucked his torch from the ground and rose lithely onto his feet. "I am troubled by something else," he said. "It is not enough simply to be silent about Jongleur's true story in front of Azador."
Sam felt her face warm with embarrassment. "I'm sorry—that was so stupid today."
"It is hard—unnatural—to think of such things all the time. But I think we must make it clear to Jongleur that Azador has a hatred of the Grail Brotherhood. Then I think he must keep himself quiet, if only to protect himself."
"It's so strange," Sam said as they walked back toward the remains of the campfire. "Nothing here is real, you can't trust anything. Well, almost anything." She bumped !Xabbu, a gentle nudge of comradeship. "It's all like some kind of . . . I don't know. Like a carnival. Like a masquerade."
"But a terrible one," he said. "Dangerous and terrible." They reached the campfire, and the sleeping forms of their two companions, without saying anything more.
The next day was spent in what Sam felt was a clearly hopeless search for a way to cross the river. They clambered through the reed beds alongside the river, hoping to find some clue to how others had crossed—footprints, the remains of a bridge or dock—but without success. Sam was depressed, !Xabbu reserved and thoughtful. Jongleur, as usual, spoke little, lost in his private thoughts. Only Azador seemed unbowed. In fact, he talked for much of the day, chattering compulsively about his adventures in the network, his discoveries of how things worked, of secret shortcuts within simworlds and well-hidden gateways to get out of them. Some of it was clearly bragging, but Sam could not help being impressed by the depth of his knowledge. How long had this man wandered the Grail Network?
"Where do you come from?" she asked him as they sloshed through a shallow backwater. A group of promising stones were proving to be only the cracked remains of a larger rocky shelf. "I mean, before you were here?"
"I . . . I do not wish to talk about it," he said. He scowled, poking at the silt between his feet with a length of reed. "But I have made the best use of my time here that anyone could. I have learned things the builders of this place thought would remain forever hidden. . . ."
Sam did not want to hear another recitation of his accomplishments. "Yeah, but you can't find a way across the river, so at the moment the rest of it doesn't count for much."
Azador looked hurt. Sam felt bad—unlike Jongleur, he had done nothing to harm her or her friends—so she tried to think of something else to talk about.
"But I suppose that you did a pretty good job on that raft after all." Although it had been !Xabbu's deft repairs that had made it riverwo
rthy, she knew but did not mention. "It's not your fault that the system won't let us cross that way."
He looked a little mollified.
"Are you really a Gypsy?" she asked.
His reaction was sudden and fierce. "Who told you such a foul thing?"
It was all Sam could do not to look at !Xabbu, who was holding quiet conversation with Jongleur thirty paces away across the muddy shallows. "Nobody . . . I . . . I just thought you said you were." She was furious with herself. "Maybe I just thought it because . . . because of that mustache."
He stroked the article in question as though it were an affronted animal he was soothing. "Gypsies, they are sneaks and thieves. Azador is an explorer. Do not misunderstand when I tell you of my adventures. I am a prisoner. I have the right to discover all I can, to take what I can from my captors."
"I'm sorry. I just misunderstood."
"You should be more careful." He gave her a hard stare. "This is a place where you must be cautious what you say to strangers."
Sam silently, emphatically agreed.
Another hour of fruitless investigation passed before she had a chance to talk to !Xabbu out of earshot of the others. He had joined her to scavenge in one last clump of reeds. Azador and Jongleur had given up, and were sitting on one of the meadowy hillocks, watching them.
"I'm such a scanbox," she said when she had explained what happened. "I should keep my mouth shut."
!Xabbu looked troubled. "Perhaps you blame yourself too much, as I did last night. Perhaps we have learned something, although I cannot say what. For one thing, it is very strange that he should say this now. Almost the only thing he would tell us before was that he was a Gypsy—Romany, as he called himself. He seemed very proud of it." The small man pulled aside a curtain of swaying cattails to reveal that what had looked from a distance like the remains of a wooden structure was only a tangle of tree trunks uprooted and piled by some storm. "Perhaps he is not the only one who has decided to keep his past a secret."