Professor Wayne Gitner of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Helios Sub-Pacific Expedition. My party is dead. I am now alone and require assistance. I repeat, please assist.'
The battery died. He laid the set aside and took up his hammer and began clawing away at the ceiling. A memory that wouldn't quite take shape kept nagging at him. He just hit harder.
In mid-swing, he stopped and lowered the hammer. Six months earlier, he had listened to his own voice enunciating the very distress signal he had just sent. He had circled to his own beginning.
For some, that might have meant a fresh start. For a man like Gitner, it meant the end.
I sit leaning against the cliff while the years go by, till the green grass grows between my feet and the red dust settles on my head, and the men of the world, thinking me dead, come with offerings... to lay by my corpse.
– HAN SHAN, Cold Mountain, c. 640 CE
22
BAD WIND
The Dolomite Alps
The scholars had been building toward this day since their first night together. For seventeen months, their journeys – Thomas's capriccios – had cast them across the globe like a throw of dice. At last they stood together again, or sat, for de l'Orme's castle perched high atop a limestone precipice, and it took very little exertion to get out of breath.
For once, Mustafah's emphysema gave him the advantage: he had an oxygen set, and could merely crank the airflow higher. Foley and Vera were sharing an Italian aspirin powder for their headaches. Parsifal, the astronaut, was making a bluff show of his athletic nature, but looked a bit green, especially as de l'Orme took them on a tour of the curving battlements overlooking the stepped crags and far plains.
'Don't like neighbors?' Gault asked. His Parkinson's had stabilized. Couched in a large wheelchair, he looked like a Pinocchio manipulated by naughty children.
'Isn't it wonderful?' said de l'Orme. 'Every morning I wake and thank God for paranoia.' He had already explained the castle's origins: a German Crusader had gone mad outside the walls of Jerusalem, and was exiled atop these rocks.
It was rather small for a castle. Built in a perfect circle on the very edge of the cliff, it almost resembled a lighthouse. They finished their tour. January was sitting where they'd left her, depleted by malaria, facing south to the sun with Thomas. Down below, lining the dead-end road, were their hired cars. Their drivers and several nurses were enjoying a picnic among the early flowers.
'Let's go inside,' said de l'Orme. 'At these heights, the sun feels very warm. But the slightest cloud can send the temperature plunging. And there's a storm coming.'
Thick logs blazing on the iron grate barely took away the room's chill. The dining hall was stark, walls bare, not even a tapestry or a boar's head. De l'Orme had no need for decorations.
They sat around a table, and a servant came in with bowls of thick, hot soup. There were no forks, just spoons for the soup and knives to cut the fruit and cheese and prosciutto. The servant poured wine and then retreated, closing the doors behind him. De l'Orme proposed a toast to their generous hearts and even more generous appetites. He was the host, but it was not really his party. Thomas had called this meeting, though no one knew why. Thomas had been brooding ever since arriving. They got on with the meal.
The food revived them. For an hour they enjoyed the company of their comrades. Most had been strangers at the outset, and their paths had intersected only rarely since Thomas had scattered them to the winds in New York City. But they had come to share a common purpose so strongly that they might as well have been brothers and sisters. They were excited by one another's tales, glad for one another's safety. January recounted her last hour with Desmond Lynch in the Phnom Penh airport. He had been heading to Rangoon, then south, in search of a Karen warlord who claimed to have met with Satan. Since then, no one had heard a word from him.
They waited for Thomas to add his own impressions, but he was distracted and melancholy. He had arrived late, bearing a square box, all but unapproachable.
'And where is Santos?' Mustafah asked de l'Orme. 'I'm beginning to think he doesn't like us.'
'Off to Johannesburg,' de l'Orme said. 'It seems another band of hadals has surrendered. To a group of unarmed diamond miners!'
'That's the third this month,' said Parsifal. 'One in the Urals. Another beneath the
Yucatan.'
'Meek as lambs,' said de l'Orme, 'chanting in unison. Like pilgrims entering
Jerusalem.'
'What a notion.'
'You'd think it would be much safer to go deeper. Away from us. It's almost as if they were afraid of the depths beneath them. As afraid as we are of the depths
beneath us.'
'Let's begin,' said Thomas.
They had been waiting a long time to synthesize their information. At last it began, knives in hand, grapes flying. It started cautiously, with a show-me-yours-and- I'll-show-you-mine prudence. In no time, the exchange turned into a highly democratic free-for-all. They psychoanalyzed Satan with the vigor of freshmen. The clues led off in a dozen directions. They knew better, but could not help egging on the wild theories with wilder theories of their own.
'I'm so relieved,' Mustafah admitted. 'I thought I was the only one coming to these extraordinary conclusions.'
'We should stick to what we know,' Foley prudishly reminded them.
'Okay,' said Vera. And it only got wilder.
He was a he, they agreed. Except for the four-thousand-year-old Sumerian tale of Queen Ereshkigal, or Allatu in the Assyrian, the monarch of the underworld was mainly a masculine presence. Even if the contemporary Satan proved to be a council of leaders, it was likely to be dominated by a masculine sensibility, an urge toward domination, a willingness to shed blood.
They extrapolated from prevailing views of animal behavior about alpha males, territorial imperative, and reproductive tyranny. Diplomacy might or might not work with such a character. A clenched fist or an empty threat would probably just incite him. The hadal leader would not be stupid: to the contrary, his reputation for deception and masks and inventiveness and cunning bargains suggested real cross-cultural genius.
He had the economic instincts of a salt trader, the courage of a soloist crossing the Arctic. He was a traveler among mankind, conversant in human languages, a student of power, an observer able to blend in without notice, an adventurer who explored at random or for profit or, like the Beowulf scholars and the Helios expedition who were exploring his lands, out of scientific curiosity.
His anonymity was a skill, an art, but not infallible. He had never been caught. But he had been sighted. No one knew exactly what he looked like, which meant he did not look like what people expected. He probably didn't have red horns or cloven hooves or a tail with a spike at the tip. That he could be grotesque or animalistic at times, and seductive or voluptuary or even beautiful at other times, suggested a switch of disguises or of lieutenants or spies. Or a lineage of Satans.
The ability to transfer memory from one consciousness to another, now clinically proven, was significant, said Mustafah. Reincarnation made possible a 'dynasty' similar to that of the Dalai Lama theocracy. That was a jolt, the notion of Satan as an ongoing religious monarchy.
'Buddhism with extreme prejudice,' quipped Parsifal.
