The Jewels of Aptor Part 30

The ear was hollow, too. It led back into a cylindrical chamber which went up through the head of the G.o.d. The architect who had designed the statue had conveniently left the G.o.d's lid flipped. They climbed the ladder and emerged amid the tangle of pipes which represented the hair of the G.o.d. They made their way forward through the ma.s.s of pipes to where the forehead sloped dangerously forward. They could see the foreshortened nose and the rim of the statue's middle eye above that.

There wasn't much of anything after that for the next thousand feet until the base of the altar. "Now you can really be some help," she told him. "Hold on to my wrist and let me down. I'll get the jewel."

They grabbed wrists, and Snake's three other hands, as well as the joints of his knees, locked around the base of five pipes that sprouted around them.

Slowly she slid forward, until her free hand slipped on the stone and she dropped the length of their two arms and swung just above the statue's nose. The eye opened in front of her. The lid arced above her, and the white of either side of the ebony iris shone faintly in the half darkness. At the center of the iris, in a small hollow, sitting on the top of a metal support, was the jewel.

She reached her free hand toward it as she swung.

From somewhere a gong suddenly sounded. Light flooded over her. Looking up, she saw white sockets of light s.h.i.+ning down into her own eyes.

Panicking, she almost released Snake's wrist. But a voice in her head (hers or someone else's, she couldn't tell) rang out. _Hold ... on ...

d.a.m.n ... it ..._

Then she grabbed the jewel. The metal shaft in which the jewel had stood was not steady, and tilted as her hand came away from it. The tilting must have set off some clockwork mechanism, because the great eyelid was slowly lowering over the ivory and ebony eye. She swung again at the end of the rope of bone and flesh; half blinded by the lights above her, she looked over her shoulder, into the temple below. There was singing, the beginning of a processional hymn. The morning rites had started!

Light glinted on the stone limbs of the G.o.d. Figures were pouring into the temple. They must have seen her, but the hymn, sonorous and gigantic, rose like flood water, and she suddenly thought that if she fell, she would drown in the sound of it.

Snake was pulling her up. Stone against her arm, against her cheek. She clenched her other fist tightly at her side. Another hand came down and helped pull her. Then another. Then she was lying among the metal pipes, and he was loosening her fingers from his wrist. He tugged her to her feet, and for a moment she was looking out over the now filled temple.

Nervous energy contracted coldly along her body, and the sudden sight of the great drop filled her eyes and her head, and she staggered. Snake caught her and at last helped her back to the ladder. "We've got it,"

she said to him before they started down. She breathed deeply. Then she checked in her palm to see if it was still there; it was, and again she looked out over the people below. Light on the up-turned faces made them look like scattered pearls on the dark floor. An exaltation suddenly burst in her shoulders, flooded her legs and arms and for a moment washed the pain away. Snake, with one hand on her shoulder, was grinning also. "We've got it!" she said again.

They went down the ladder into the statue's skull. Snake preceded her out the hollow ear. He reached around, caught the cord, and let himself down to the shoulder.

She hesitated for a moment, then put the jewel in her mouth, and followed him. Standing beside him once more, she removed it, and then rubbed her shoulders. "Boy, am I going to have some Charley horse by tomorrow," she said. "Do me a favor and untie my bag for me?"

Snake untied the parcel from the end of the cord, and together now they climbed down the bicep and back over the forearm to the trap door in the wrist.

She glanced down at the faces of the wors.h.i.+pers just before they disappeared into the tunnel. Snake was taking the jewel from her hand.

She let him have it, and watched him raise it up above his head.

Immediately, when he raised the jewel, the pearls of faces went out like extinguished flames as heads bent all through the temple.

"That's the ticket," grinned Argo. "Come on." But Snake did not go into the tunnel. Instead he walked around the fist, took hold of one of the bronze wheat stems, and slid down through an opening between the thumb and forefinger. "That way?" asked Argo. "Oh well, I guess so. You know I'm going to write an epic about this."

But Snake had already gone. She followed him, clutching her feet around a great bunch of stems. He was waiting for her at the plateau of leaves, and nestled there, they gazed out once more at the fascinated congregation.

Again Snake held aloft the jewel, and again heads bowed. The hymn began to repeat itself, the individual words lost in the sonority of the hall.

They started down the last length of stems now, coming quickly. When they stood at last on the base, she put her hand on his shoulder and looked across the bra.s.s altar rail. The congregation pressed close, although she did not recognize an individual face. Yet a ma.s.s of people stood there, enormous and familiar. As Snake started forward, holding up the jewel, the people fell back from the rail. Snake climbed over the altar rail, and then helped her over.

Her shoulders were beginning to hurt now, and the enormity of the theft ran chills up and down, up and down her spine. The black marble altar step as she put her foot down was awfully cold.

They started forward again, and the last note of the hymn echoed to silence, filling the hall with the roaring quiet of the hushed breathing of hundreds.

Simultaneously, both she and Snake got the urge to look back at the great diminis.h.i.+ng height of Hama behind them. All three eyes were shut firmly now. A quiet composed of the rustling of a hundred dark robes upon another hundred hissed about them as they started forward again.

There was a spotlight on them, she suddenly realized. That was why the people, hovering back from the circular effulgence over the floor around them seemed so dim. Her heart had become a pulse at the bottom of her tongue. They kept on going forward, into the shadowed faces, into the parting sea of dark cloaks and hoods.

Then the last of the figures stepped aside from the temple door, and she could see the sunlight out in the garden. They stood still for a moment, Snake holding high the jewel; then they burst forward, out through the door and down over the bright steps.

Instantly the hymn began again behind them, as if their departure had been a signal. The music flooded after them, and when they reached the bottom step, they both whirled, crouching like animals, expecting the congregation to come welling darkly out after them. But there was only the music, flowing into the light, was.h.i.+ng around them, a transparent river, a sea.

"_Freeze the drop in the hand, and break the earth with singing.

Hail the height of a man, and also the height of a woman._"

Over the music came a brittle chirping from the trees. Fixed with fear, they watched the temple door as the hymn progressed. Then Snake suddenly stood up straight and grinned.

She scratched her red hair, s.h.i.+fted her weight, and looked at Snake. "I guess they're not coming," she said, sounding almost disappointed. Then she giggled. "Well, I guess we got it."

"Don't move," repeated Hama Incarnate.

"Now look--" began Urson.

"You are perfectly safe," the G.o.d continued, "unless you do anything foolish. You have shown great wisdom. Continue to show it. I have a lot to explain to you."

"Like what?" asked Geo.

"I'll start with the lizards," smiled the G.o.d.

"The what?" asked Iimmi.

"The singing lizards," said Hama. "You walked through a grove of trees just a few minutes ago. You had just been through a series of happenings that was probably the most frightening in your life. Suddenly you heard a singing in the trees. What was it?"

"I thought it was a bird," Iimmi said.

"But why a bird?" asked the G.o.d.

"Because that's what a bird sounds like," stated Urson impatiently. "Who needs an old lizard singing to them on a morning like this?"

"Your second point is much better than your first," said the G.o.d. "You do not need a lizard, but you did need a bird. A bird means spring, life, good luck, cheerfulness. You think of a bird singing and you think of thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years. Poets have written of it in every language, Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel X24 in New English. You expected a bird because after what you had been through, you needed to hear a bird. Lizards run from under wet rocks, scurry over gravestones.

A lizard is not what you needed."

"So what do lizards have to do with why we're here?" demanded Urson.

"Why are you here?" repeated the G.o.d, subtly changing Urson's question.

"There are many reasons, I am sure. You tell me some of them."

"You have done wrongs to Argo--at least to Argo of Leptar," Geo explained. "We have come to undo them. You have kidnaped the young Argo, as well as her mother apparently. We have come to take her back. You have misused the jewels. We have come to take the last one from you."

Hama smiled. "Only a poet could see the wisdom in such honesty. I thought I might have to wheedle to get that much out of you."

"I guess it was pretty certain that you knew that much already," Geo said.

"True," answered Hama. Then his tone changed. "Do you know how the jewels work?"

They shook their heads.