by Tim Powers
All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.
That was what Satan had offered Christ, in the gospel of Matthew. Edward Trelawny realized that this vast thing was offering him a chance to become something like its peer, to purge him of his body-bound mortality.
How I would have soared above Byron here, he thought.
But he wrapped his awkwardly jointed arms around Tersitza and pulled her bony form to himself.
“No,” he said again, and his voice was clearer now.
He looked up from under his eyebrows, blinking away the stinging sweat – and then clenched his eyes shut, for the thing was rushing at him, expanding in his view –
– but there was no obliterating impact. After some tense length of time he began breathing again, and the taint of old decay was gone, and what he smelled on the chilly mountain breeze now was tobacco and roasted pigeon.
He opened his eyes. Tersitza was still slumped unconscious across his lap on the saddle, but the giant stone form whose slopes began a mile in front of them was Mount Parnassus, its high shoulders hidden behind clouds in the moonlight. His horse stamped restlessly in damp leaves.
They were back in the Velitza Gorge again, as abruptly as they had been taken out of it – if indeed they had actually been out of it, and the spirit of the mountain had not simply manifested itself to him in a scene conjured, as its statements and first appearance had been, from Trelawny’s memory and imagination.
To his right through the dark tangles of the oak branches he could see the cooking fires and the palikars’ tents around the ruined Chapel of St. George.
He hugged Tersitza to him, already beginning to wish he could have accepted the stone thing’s magnanimous offer.
The girl stirred at last, then sat up and glanced around.
“We’re no further than this?” she whispered, shivering in his arms.
She had spoken in her native Greek, and he answered haltingly in the same language. “We were turned back.” He was suddenly exhausted, and it was an effort to recall the Greek words. “We lost your horse.”
“And my cape is gone.” She ran her hands through her long black hair, feeling her scalp. “Was I hurt? I can’t remember meeting Ghouras’s soldiers!” She turned her pale little face up to him and her dark eyes looked intently into his. “Were you wounded?”
“No.” For a moment he considered letting her believe that it had indeed been the palikars of Odysseus’s rival who had forced them back to the mountain – but then he sighed and said, “It wasn’t Ghouras who stopped us. It was – magic, enchantment.” He wished he dared to tell her that he had been trying to save her from a fate literally worse than death – the opposite of death, in fact – and that it was her brother who had put her in that peril. “It was the mountain, your brother’s mountain, that drove us back. Pulled us back.”
“Enchantment?” She kept her voice down, but her whisper was hoarse with scorn. “Are you a coward after all? Odysseus is your blood-brother, and you are scared away from rescuing him by some … nymphs, dryads? Fauns?”
“You –” he whispered furiously, “ – would be dead now, if I had not.
And I would be …”
“Dead as well,” she said. “Turn back – I would rather be dead than have a coward for a husband.”
Trelawny was mightily tempted to do as she said. I could be with Zela, he thought. Again. At last.
But he whispered, “Keep your voice down,” and he waved toward the campfires at the old monastery, dimly visible through the trees. “Do you want to rouse Ghouras’s men too?”
Yes, he could be with Zela – but Zela was a phantom who had never existed, and this girl, for all her maddening irrationality, was real, vulnerable flesh and blood.
You protect the ones you love. He clung to the thought. Even if they ignorantly resent you for it.
“We’re not turning back,” he said. Somewhere an owl whistled its low note through the trees.
“Give me a couple of pistols,” Tersitza hissed, “and I’ll go by myself!”
She was serious, and he found that his anger was gone. He admired courage, even – or especially – pointless courage. “On foot?” he asked with a smile. “It wasn’t fauns and dryads.”
For a few moments she was silent, and the wind rattled the dark branches around them. “I suppose it was a vrykolakas,” she said with apparent carelessness, though he felt her shudder as she spoke the word. Vrykolakas was the Greek term for vampire.
“It was,” he said, “but one made of stone instead of flesh.” He remembered the vision of Zela riding beside them. “Though it could mimic flesh.”
She exhaled a wavering breath, and seemed to shrink in his arms. He opened his mouth to say something more, but she gripped his wrist with cold fingers.
“I – have seen it,” she said humbly, almost too softly for him to hear. “It was the mountain, the ghost of the mountain. I –” She looked ahead toward the imposing silhouette of Mount Parnassus, which now blocked half the sky in front of them. “I had hoped we were escaping it tonight.”
“So,” said Trelawny, “had I.”
He flicked the reins, and the horse started forward along the familiar track to its stable in the guardhouse at the foot of the mountain, near the path that would lead Trelawny and his wife back up to the ladders that mounted to their house in Odysseus’s cave, eight hundred feet above the gorge.
II
June 1824
“…and fortunate is he
For whom the Muses have regard!
His song Falls from his lips contented. Though he be
Harried by grief and guilt his whole life long,
Let him but hear the Muses’ servant sing
Of older beings and the gods, and then
His memory is cleared of everything
That troubled him within the world of men.”
– Hesiod’s Theogony,
the Ceniza-Bendiga translation,
lines 96-102
After encountering the fleeing palikars just east of Missolonghi a year ago, and learning from them that Byron had died only a few days earlier, Edward Trelawny had pressed on with his own party of palikars and reached the marshy seacoast town the next day.
Down at the end of a row of shabby wooden houses under a gray sky, the house Byron had worked and died in stood on the shore of a wide, shallow lagoon. Trelawny had been escorted upstairs by Byron’s old servant Fletcher, and had found the lord’s coffin laid out across two trestles in the leaden glow of narrow uncurtained windows.
Fletcher had pulled back the black pall and the white shroud, and Trelawny had scowled and pursed his lips at the evidences of an autopsy – the aristocratic face bore an expression of stoic calm, though thinned by the fever that had killed him, but the disordered gray-streaked brown hair half-concealed a crude ring cut in his scalp where physicians had removed part of his brain, and the body’s torso was divided by a long incision.
When Fletcher left the room, Trelawny drew his Suliote dagger and forced himself to cut off the small toe of Byron’s twisted left foot. Byron was gone, but even a relic of the man might have some value as a rafiq.
Byron had been a co-representative in Greece of the London Greek Committee, which had put together a Stock Exchange loan to fund the war for Greek independence, and though a big sum of cash was daily expected, all that had been provided so far in Missolonghi were several cannons. By claiming to be Byron’s secretary, Trelawny prevailed on the remaining representative – an idealistic but naïve British colonel called Stanhope – to let him take away a howitzer and three three-pounders and ammunition, for the defense of eastern Attica by Odysseus Androutses. Trelawny even managed to commandeer fifty-five horses and twenty artillerymen to haul the guns across the seventy-five miles back to the Velitza Gorge and the foot of Mount Parnassus, where Odysseus’s soldiers built a crane to hoist the guns and crates up to the fortified cave.
Mavre Troupa, the Black Hole, was what th
e Greeks called the cave, but Trelawny had been relieved to get back to its lofty security.
The climb up to its broad lip was exhilarating – the last sixty feet of the eight hundred were a sheer vertical face, negotiated by clambering up ladders made of larch branches bolted to the crumbling sandstone, and the last twenty-foot ladder had a tendency to swing like a pendulum in the wind, for it was attached only at the top so that it could be pulled up in case of a siege.
The cave itself was a fairly flat terrace two hundred feet wide, with a high arching stone ceiling; the cave floor shelved up in rocky platforms as it receded into the shadows of the mountain’s heart, and the various levels were wide enough for several small stone-and-lumber houses to have been built on them – Odysseus’s mother and siblings lived in several of them – and the remote tunnels were walled off as storerooms, filled with sufficient wine and oil and olives and cheese to last out the longest conceivable siege. There was even a seasonal spring in the southern corner of the enormous cave, and an English engineer had begun work on a cistern so that the citizens of the cave could have water on hand even in the summer.
Philhellenes, the Englishmen who had come to fight for Greece’s freedom – mostly young, mostly inspired by Byron’s old poetry and recent example – seemed to Trelawny to be underfoot throughout the country these days, and, though he was one of them himself, he felt that unlike them he had shed his old links and actually become a Greek … as dark as any, attired identically, and second-in-command to a genuine mountain king right out of Sophocles.
One of these Philhellenes was the artillery officer who had come along with him on the arduous trip to Parnassus from Missolonghi, a Scotsman in his thirties who claimed to have fought in the Spanish wars; his last name was Fenton, and he had faced the rain and the muddy labor of carting the cannons to the mountain with a kind of tireless ferocious cheer – and he frequently quoted the poetry of Robert Burns. Trelawny admired him.
Trelawny’s newly acquired artillerymen stayed at the guardhouse and tents below, with the bulk of Odysseus’s soldiers, but Odysseus welcomed Trelawny and Fenton when they had climbed up the final ladder to the fortified cave and stood panting on the wooden platform that projected out over the misty abyss.
Trelawny had been a little nervous about the introduction, and ready to speak up for Fenton, but Odysseus seemed almost to recognize the wiry Scotsman – not as if they had met before, but as if Odysseus was familiar with some category of men that included Fenton, and had a wry and cautious respect for its members.
The bandit-chief’s eyes narrowed under his striped head-cloth as he smiled, and in the mix of Italian and Greek by which he communicated with Westerners he said, “I can see that you will be of assistance and encouragement to my dear friend Trelawny,” and led him away to show him where the new guns might best be mounted on the battlements that lined the cave’s rim.
Satisfied that his peculiar friends would find each other’s company tolerable, and eager to get out of the glaring daylight at the front of the cave, Trelawny hurried past the groups of palikars who were clustered around the several fire-pit rings on the cave floor, and leaped up the natural stone steps to the more shadowed level where his own small wooden house had been built.
He pulled his sword and pistols free of his sash and clanked them on the table, struck a flame with his tinderbox and lit a candle, then carefully lifted out of a pocket the handkerchief that was wrapped around Byron’s toe. Byron was now, in a sense, physically on Mount Parnassus, in the mountain, but Trelawny had no idea how he might use the toe to facilitate contact with the species with whom he and Odysseus hoped to make an alliance: the creatures referred to in the Old Testament as the Nephelim, the giants that were “in the earth in those days.”
There was no contact between that species and humanity now, but there had been, as recently as two and a half years ago; and Byron had been one of their partners before the bridge between them had been broken. Trelawny believed they left some physical trace on the bodies of their human symbiotes, and so Byron’s toe might at least be a reminder to them of the lost alliance – and the Nephelim, the Greek Muses, could not now even in spirit venture far from Mount Parnassus, so Trelawny had brought it to them.
He laid the little cloth bundle on the table and flipped aside the hemmed edges. Byron’s toe had turned black during the month since Trelawny had taken it in Missolonghi, and he touched it gingerly.
Over the vaguely buttery smell of the candle, Trelawny was startled to catch the scent of the Macassar oil Byron had always used on his hair.
And then Byron spoke to him.
The voice was faint, and seemed to shake out of the candle flame: “Trelawny, man! This is – a huge mistake.”
Trelawny became aware that he had recoiled away from the table and banged the back of his head against one of the upright beams of the house; but he took a deep breath and walked back and leaned his hands on the table to stare into the flame.
“Will you –” he began, but the voice interrupted him.
“How did you do this? How am I returned?”
“After Shelley drowned,” stammered Trelawny, glancing nervously at the narrow window that looked out on the dim upper levels of the cave, “we recovered his boat – it was rammed in the storm by an Italian vessel, a felucca –”
“It wasn’t rammed,” whispered Byron’s voice, “he drowned deliberately, foundered his boat and sank, to save his wife and last child.” The flame quivered, as if with a sigh. “But you did retrieve his boat.”
Trelawny frowned, for he was certain that their mutual friend Shelley had not committed suicide; but he let the point pass and went on.
“And,” he said, “and one of his notebooks was aboard, and legible once I dried it out. I let Mary take it, but not before I cut several pages out of it. In those pages Shelley explained how a man might become immortal.”
“And save Greece too,” said Byron’s voice, fainter but even now still capable of conveying dry mockery, “just incidentally.”
“Yes,” said Trelawny loudly, and then he went on in a whisper, “and save Greece. That’s no … mere excuse. I’m a Greek now, more than I was ever an Englishman.”
“And now you mean to be a slave.” The voice was almost too faint for Trelawny to hear. “To live forever, yes, perhaps – but not your own man any longer – not a man at all, but just a … shackled traitor to your race.” The flame wavered. “Is there a second candle you could light?”
Trelawny snatched another candle from a wicker basket hung on the wall and lit its wick from the flame of the first candle. Not seeing a candle-holder, he drew his dagger and cut the bottom of the candle into a wedge which he jammed between two boards of the table-top.
“Our bodies,” came Byron’s voice again, stronger now emanating from the two flames, “those of us who wed those things, are sacramentals of that marriage bond. And Shelley meant his carcass to be lost, or burned. He was half one of them from birth, he said, and had begun to turn to stone like them. If you could bring his poor bones here, and break away what’s human from what’s stone, you might undo this … overture of yours.”
“I’m not you,” said Trelawny hoarsely. “I’m not afraid of becoming a god.”
“Did Shelley – in this notebook that you found – describe these things that might be summoned back? Do you know what the Muses look like now?”
Trelawny didn’t answer right away, for Shelley had in fact drawn a sketch of one of his supernatural mentors, on a page Trelawny hadn’t cut out and taken away; the thing was grotesque, an awkward hunchbacked, bird-beaked monster.
“The physical forms they might take,” Trelawny said finally, “on one occasion or another –”
“You’ve got two children, daughters, haven’t you?” Byron went on. “Still back in England? Shelley didn’t say what sort of … fond attentions these things pay to families of humans they adopt? If you and your mad klepht call up these things, your daughters won’t surv
ive, rely on it. And then – that little girl, your warlord’s sister? – she’ll be their prey, and change to one of them – supposing that you care about the child. All human family is sacrificed –”
Boots were echoingly scuffing up the stone levels toward Trelawny’s house, and he hastily pocketed Byron’s toe and swatted the two candles. Both went out, though the one wedged in the table stayed upright.
Trelawny strode to the flimsy door and pulled it open. The broad silhouette of Odysseus seemed to dwarf the figure of Fenton against the distant daylight as the pair stepped up the last stone rise.
“Come down to the edge,” said Odysseus in Italian; he went on in Greek, “where the guns will go.”
Trelawny followed the two men down the steps to the wide flat area at the front of the cave. Four six-foot sections of the stone wall had been disassembled so that the cannons might be mounted in the gaps, and Trelawny, squinting uncomfortably in the sunlight that slanted into the front of the cave, noted that only the two notches in the center of the wall threatened the road that wound its way up the gorge.
“But why aim the other two out at the slopes?” he asked Odysseus. “The Turks are hardly likely to come blundering in among the trees.”
“To everything there is a season,” said Fenton with a smile, “a time to gather stones together, and a time to cast away stones.” His Scottish accent was especially incongruous in this cave sacred to ancient Hellenic gods. It was apparently too great a strain on Odysseus’s frail grasp of English, for he turned to Trelawny and raised his bushy black eyebrows.
Trelawny slowly translated what Fenton had said.
The klepht nodded. “When you are consecrated,” he said to Trelawny, “we will sow the same seeds as Deucalion and Pyrrha did.”
“Deucalion and Pyrrha,” said Fenton, rubbing his hands together and bobbing his head as he blinked out at the gorge, “I caught that bit. The giants in the earth.”
Trelawny glanced at Odysseus, but the squinting eyes in the sun-browned face told him nothing.
To Fenton, Trelawny said, carefully, “You seem to know more about our purpose than you told me at first.” He shivered, for the gusts up from the gorge were chilly.