And he dreamed that Paschos approached him on a fine black horse. And he dreamed that Paschos fed him butterflies, whose wings spelled words, and Paschos wrapped his shivering body in Phoenician silk…
And eventually he realized that he had not been dreaming about Paschos…
“THE FIRES HAVE burned out,” Paschos told him, days later, maybe weeks. “None of the forests were destroyed, just the caves. The Vascones say, ‘The lamps knew when their work was complete. No more, no less.’ Ibrim has gone too.”
Gwellyn propped himself up on his elbows, the first morning he had strength enough to do that since his return. “We must set out for Jakob,” he said.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Paschos said.
“We’ll talk about that now.” Gwellyn managed to sit up, shaking.
Paschos looked away. “I sent men back up there, as soon as we returned to this village. They found nothing.”
“Then we’ll go and look again! How far up the path did they go?”
“To the place that a horse can go no further,” Paschos replied. “Then they continued on foot to the cave of the singers.”
“How could you know where that is?” Gwellyn asked. “Only Mitxeleta…” And then he remembered something—something which he had thought of in his dreams, or perhaps had realized during the singing. “Euskaldunak, Vascones—Euska, Vasco, Paschos—you have some deeper connection to these people, don’t you?”
Paschos nodded slowly. “Vascones have been part of my family since Justinian the First—his armies reclaimed part of the southern part of this continent, by the gates of Hercules, for the Empire, for a while. There was much mixture of people then—there still is in Constantinople.”
“How much of this did you know when you first joined our party?” Gwellyn asked, and thought again of Jakob, and vowed again to go look for him.
“Not much, not much at all,” Paschos replied. “I had an interest in the singers—lots of philosophers do, quietly, for such interests do not help their professional reputations. Jakob knew of it, though, and likely that is why he invited me to come along. But I knew nothing of a Vascones connection—I learned that only after we arrived here. My prior knowledge of the language helped… I knew Mitxeleta meant the ‘butterfly’. I talked to people who knew her. Eventually I pieced enough together to head out in the right direction…”
They set out again five days later, at Gwellyn’s unbending insistence, to look for Jakob. They brought along extra men and extra horses. Ibrim was not among them. He had left weeks earlier for points south, Paschos informed Gwellyn.
They found nothing. Just the remains of small cooking fires in the place from which the horses could no longer proceed—Jakob’s last fires, Gwellyn thought, and cried within—and nothing at all outside the cave that Paschos and Gwellyn reached again on foot.
They entered the cave and looked around. With Mitxeleta gone, there had been no one left in the village able—or willing, Paschos said he couldn’t tell—to prepare the living lamps. So they made do with ugly lamps that burned fat, and gave off a pungent smell. It didn’t matter. There were no pictures on the walls or the ceiling anywhere in the cavern. “The moving pictures were in the cave within the cave within the cave within the cave,” Gwellyn said, “when we saw them below.”
Paschos nodded, but they could find no entrances to other caves within this huge hollow. At one point, in a far corner, there might have once been a portal to something else, but it looked like it had been covered long ago with boulders that no ten men, let alone two, could move.
“Can you tell if these were placed here in olden times, or if old, moldy rocks were placed here recently?” Gwellyn asked.
“Impossible to know with certainty,” Paschos said. “But those fungi between the boulders look like they have been growing here a very long time.”
“And how can we know that we’re not looking at some sort of very quick-growing fungus?”
Paschos smiled in the light of the acrid fat lamp. “I see you’ve progressed far in the path of the creative Aristotelian zoologist. You’re right—there is no way of knowing absolutely that a rapidly growing fungus is not at work here. But even if it was, we still have the problem of how to move these immense rocks. I doubt, knowing the superstition of the villagers below, that we could find anything close to the necessary number of men to accompany us this far.”
Gwellyn had to agree—the fact that the villagers who had accompanied them on the horse trail had refused to go beyond where the horses could not continue had not been lost on him.
“And in all likelihood, these rocks have indeed been here many years,” Paschos made the decisive argument. “Most of the time, the first, obvious interpretation of evidence is more or less the correct one—not everything in life is underhanded.”
They proceeded back downward.
“If Jakob died somewhere here, then we should be able to find his body,” Gwellyn said. “It’s not right that he should just be left lying in the woods someplace.”
“If he died, his soul will not be left lying there,” Paschos replied, softly. “But perhaps he did not die—perhaps some people from farther up the mountain came down to the place with the horses and found Jakob and he went back up the mountain with them. I know there are no footprints beyond, but if you want to start thinking about fast-growing fungus, you can also think about fast-growing grass, or grass and soil somehow resilient to lasting footprints… The possibilities are almost endless… We are free to speculate on the side of hope…”
It’s a nice speculation, I wish I could believe it, Gwellyn thought.
They rejoined the men and the horses below—Paschos had been right that they could be relied upon…
“Tell me again why Ibrim left?” Gwellyn asked, as they rode back into the village. He had been too concerned about Jakob to focus on Ibrim, until now.
“He did his job here,” Paschos replied. “We who love knowledge will always owe a debt to him—he took a human life on behalf of knowledge, the life of one of his brethren, a life that would have brought much grief to this area, as well as robbed the future of some of its most precious wisdom. Most of us would never have had the courage to do that—I don’t think I have. True, his murder of Aziz set the Vascones to burning the wondrous caves right around here. But there must be others. This village is just one among many Vascone settlements here. And I cannot believe that the caves, if they come from a time in which the singers were many, or close after, are limited just to this area—there must be others, to the north, to the south…”
“But how would we know where to find them?”
“You and I might never know,” Paschos said. “But at least Ibrim saved those caves, wherever they might be, for the future—he represents the compassionate, wise side of Islam. He felt it was wise to go back to his people now, to urge them not to proceed much farther along this coast. He was very moved by that night in the cave…”
“Will Islam conquer Byzantium now?” Gwellyn asked.
“Perhaps, someday,” Paschos replied. “But, in the long run, it will not matter—both traditions will continue. The world has gone beyond one culture totally destroying another, I think.”
“Not the way it was for the singers, though…”
“I envy your day with the singers and Jakob and Mitxeleta,” Paschos said. “I hope you can tell me everything you know about it.”
“I will,” Gwellyn said. “I will try. But there is much I learned that cannot be communicated with words—much that I am only realizing I now know as I live each minute. There are important lessons there—crucial lessons, life-and-death lessons, for all human beings. Once I thought I would write those down, and leave those for my people. Now I’m not sure I know how…”
“Tell me anyway,” Paschos said.
GWELLYN MADE HIS way south five months later, to board a ship that would return him to the southern continent.
“He was always on the edge of being a lost soul,�
� Paschos said to the one of the villagers he had befriended and confided in. “Ibrim comes from a great new tradition, I come from a great old tradition, Jakob came from a great ancient tradition—but Gwellyn came from almost no tradition at all, none that we know of. I hope he finds some peace.”
“Where is he going?” the villager asked.
“He is trying to return to an island,” Paschos said, “where the monkeys are nearly human, and the winds are soft and the nights as sheer as silk in moonlight…”
He is returning to his Lilee, Paschos thought, and I hope he makes it.
Paschos did not tell Gwellyn the one thing that might have kept him near the land of the Vascones. It was not about Jakob, for Paschos knew as much or as little about Jakob’s whereabouts now, if he was alive, as did Gwellyn.
What Paschos did not tell Gwellyn is that he had fathered a child, with the woman he had spent that one night with shortly after his arrival in Cantabria.
Paschos did not tell Gwellyn because he understood that although Gwellyn had made love to that woman, he did not love her. Paschos had seen Gwellyn’s face when he looked at Lilee, and although Paschos did not partake of that species of love himself, he recognized it clearly enough when it was staring him in the faces of others. Gwellyn had travelled so far, so long, consuming most of his young adulthood in his quest for the singers, that he deserved this chance for happiness. The Epicureans were right—happiness was good in its own right.
Paschos himself would see to the child—he had always yearned to be a father, even if he had no taste for the way in which fathers usually came to be…
He would take care of Gwellyn’s child. He had spoken at length to the woman. He would marry her, he might even do his husbandly duty from time to time. He would live his life here and help her raise her child in the Hebrew religion which she professed. In that way, he would also repay the debt he owed to Jakob, for inviting him to join in this expedition in the first place…
And as for the singers, well, they could rest in peace.
At least, that’s what Paschos of Constantinople, the Aristotelian zoologist, hoped…
PART
THREE
THE
SUBATOMIC
SYMPTOM
SEVEN
“Take a look at this, Phil.”
Dave Spencer, the Medical Examiner I usually worked with, had called me downtown to his examining room.
“What, they have a sale at the Museum of Natural History, and you picked this one up for the office?” The corpse looked like it had come out of one of those dioramas of Neanderthals I had been seeing at the Museum since I was a kid.
Dave chuckled. “The guy died—maximum—not more than 48 hours ago. But the bone structure assessments that just came back confirm what he looks like: those definitely are Neanderthal specifications.”
I looked more closely at the remains. Still had some charred shreds of unidentifiable clothing. The last Neanderthal I’d seen in the flesh, as it were, was on some cable special on The Learning Channel a few months ago. There wasn’t much of a face left on this one, but otherwise he could have been the cable guy’s brother for all I could tell.
“He seems pretty far gone for someone alive two days ago. You sure he wasn’t frozen somewhere before the last Ice Age, thawed out in the last two days, and that’s thrown off your estimate?”
“Well take a look at this,” Dave said. “It’s not the height of fashion, but I doubt it goes back before the last Ice Age.” He pulled out a tray from a side cabinet. On it was…a blue silk hanky, with hues ranging from turquoise to violet. I examined it as best I could without touching.
“Looks like something my aunt once gave me for graduation,” I said. “A Sears special.”
“Exactly,” Dave said.
“And what? You find this on the guy?”
Dave nodded.
“Well,” I said. “Someone must have put it on the fossil—as a joke.”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “Except he’s not in any way fossilized. Apparently mummified—like those bog people they keep digging up—but not fossilized. And that wouldn’t explain why his general description—height, bone structure—matches that of an NYU janitor who disappeared last week.”
“What, the janitor was a Neanderthal?”
Dave shrugged. “They say he looked like one.”
“How old was he?” I asked.
“In his 60s, though no one knows for sure,” Dave said. “He was a refugee from some place or other in Central Europe. Usually cleaned up in the basement of the library, reading everything he could get his hands on when he wasn’t working. Highly intelligent, according to the librarians. Been around for years.”
I looked carefully again at the corpse. “So you’re thinking one of our modern Cro-Magnon species murdered this bibliophile with Neanderthal genes?”
Dave shook his head. “We haven’t gotten the DNA analyses back. And there are no really reliable DNA profiles yet for Neanderthals. But yeah, maybe, about the murder angle. Though so far it looks like he just died of old age—natural causes.”
“Seems I’ve heard that refrain before.”
“Tell me about it,” Dave agreed. “And then we also have the problem of the carbon dating.”
I looked back up at the ME.
“First test I ordered when I was called in on this,” he said.
“And?”
“And the gentleman before you is about thirty thousand years old,” Dave replied, “give or take the usual slim range for error.”
I whistled. “Jeez. I’ve pulled an all-nighter too at the library. But thirty thousand years is definitely pushing it.”
RUTH DELANY WAS the New York University librarian I got to interview. She eyed my papers, my face, my photo-ID, my face. “You’re NYPD Forensics, Dr. D’Amato?”
I nodded.
“My uncle was on the job for years,” she said. “Never made it beyond beat cop. Lots of prejudice against African-Americans on the force back then.”
“True.” I sighed. “But you know, beat cop isn’t the worst—at least you get out in the world. Certainly the best part of the job, as far as I’m concerned.”
She looked at my face again. “And you’ve been out there on television too. Haven’t I seen you on that cable show?”
“Yep,” I said. “Every last Sunday of the month, 10:30-11 on—”
“That’s it.” She appeared to relax a little. “What can I tell you about Stefan Antonescu?”
“Well, how about telling me everything you know—for starters,” I replied.
“OK.” She smiled, then mused. “I’ll be working here 12 years this November, and Stefan—Mr. Antonescu—was here when I started. Harmless sort, did a good job, really loved his work—or at least loved being in a library. I never saw him on a break without a book or magazine in his hands.”
“A vanishing breed,” I said. “Most people who haunt libraries these days do it through the Internet.”
“Not Stefan,” Delany said. “He was strictly a book and magazine man. Said he liked the feel of paper in his hands. I think I feel that way too sometimes.”
“Don’t we all,” I said. “Was Mr. Antonescu some kind of student—you know, working part-time, taking a course every semester or two?” A dozen or more years, though, was a long time even for an older part-time student to be working his way through college. On the other hand, I could tell already that time-frames were going to be oddly attenuated in this case—though on yet a third hand, it wasn’t even really a case yet, just some corpse appearing and a similar guy disappearing in the same place, both with Neanderthal characteristics, and the corpse dating thirty thousand years. Which smelled like hoax, or something pretty damned bizarre, even if this wasn’t a case. I rubbed my hands together. More than two hands and strange coincidences seemed to be my specialty…
“Well, Stefan wasn’t really a student,” Delany said. “He may have sat in on a course somewhere along the line, but the library w
as his only real passion. I think he regarded this place as his home. He’d come here to read even on days he was off-work.”
“Really… Is that common?”
“You’d be surprised,” Delany said. “Lots of lonely people in this world, Doctor. If one or two of them find some comfort in centering their lives around our books, our magazines, well,” she shrugged, “it’s OK with us. I think just about every library has people like that. Sometimes they’re maintenance staff, sometimes they just hang out.”
“Are there any other janitors around here like Stefan Antonescu?” I asked.
“No, Stefan is the only one on the staff with that kind of love for reading. Everyone was always so shocked at first to find that out about him. You know, I think it was those features—those heavy-set features. People always assume that people who look like that are, you know…”
“Stupid?”
“Well, yes,” Delany said. “It’s so unfair to judge people’s intelligence by their looks.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Especially people who look like Neanderthals. I knew a guy in college who looked like that—everyone thought he was on the wrestling team, but his love was numbers. He was a whiz in my calculus class. The truth is we don’t even how intelligent the Neanderthals themselves actually were. Maybe they were more intelligent than our ancestors—after all, their cranial capacity was larger.”
“Stefan was a human being,” Delany said, “just like you and me. And anyway, I thought Neanderthals were our ancestors.”
“Well, it’s more complicated than that. But getting back to Stefan—anything special he liked to read?”
She nodded. “Silk. That was his thing.”
“Really. As in—what?—satin sheets, expensive ties, handkerchiefs…”
“As in everything,” she said. “His consuming interest was silk. Just last month I noticed him reading some physical anthropology tome about silk culture in China in prehistoric times. It was outside my area of interest, frankly.”
The Silk Code Page 13