infrequent. We come together at various places to share our revelations with one another and to –'
Before she could say more, a guard barked, 'Put that down.'
There was a sudden commotion as guards rushed down. At the center of their alarm were two of those people who had come in behind Thomas and January. It was the younger man with long hair. He was hefting an iron sword from one of the displays.
'It is for me,' his blind companion apologized, and accepted the heavy sword into his open palms. 'I asked my companion, Santos –'
'It's all right, gentlemen,' January told the guards. 'Dr. de l'Orme is a renowned specialist.'
'Bernard de l'Orme?' Ali whispered. He had parted jungles and rivers to uncover sites throughout Asia. Reading about him, she had always thought of him as a physical giant.
Unconcerned, de l'Orme went on touching the early Saxon blade and leather-wrapped handle, seeing it with his fingertips. He smelled the leather, licked the iron.
'Marvelous,' he pronounced.
'What are you doing?' January asked him.
'Remembering a story,' he answered. 'An Argentine poet once told of two gauchos who entered a deadly knife fight because the knife itself compelled them.'
The blind man held up the ancient sword used by man and his demon both. 'I was just wondering about the memory of iron,' he said.
'My friends,' Thomas welcomed his sleuths, 'we should begin.'
Ali watched them materialize from the darkened library stacks. Suddenly, Ali felt only half dressed. In Vatican City, winter was still scourging the brick streets with sleet. By contrast, her little Christmas holiday in New York City was feeling downright Roman, as balmy as late summer. But her sundress served to emphasize these old people's fragility, for they were cold despite the warmth outside. Some wore
fashionable ski parkas, while others shivered in layers of wool or tweed.
They gathered around a table made of English oak, cut and polished before the era of great cathedrals. It had survived wars and terrors, kings, popes, and bourgeoisie, and even researchers. The walls were massed with nautical charts drawn before America was a word.
Here was the set of gleaming instruments Captain Bligh had used to guide his castaways back to civilization. A glass case held a stick-and-shell map used by Micronesian fishermen to follow ocean currents between islands. In the corner stood the complicated Ptolemaic astrolabe that had been used in Galileo's inquisition. Columbus's map of the New World occupied a corner of one wall, raw, exotic; painted upon a sheepskin, its legs used to indicate the cardinal directions.
There was also a large blow-up of Bud Parsifal's famous snapshot from the moon showing the great blue pearl in space. Rather immodestly, the former astronaut took a position immediately beneath his photo, and Ali recognized him. January stayed by her side, now and then whispering names, and Ali was grateful for her presence.
As they seated themselves, the door opened and a final addition limped in. Ali at first thought he was a hadal. He had melted plastic for skin, it seemed. Darkened ski goggles were strapped to his misshapen head, sealing out the room light. The sight startled her, and she recoiled, never having seen a hadal, alive or dead. He took the chair next to her, and she could hear him panting heavily.
'I didn't think you were going to make it,' January said to him across Ali.
'A little trouble with my stomach,' he replied. 'The water, maybe. It always takes me a few weeks to adjust.'
He was human, Ali realized. His shortness of breath was a common symptom of veterans freshly returning to higher altitudes. She'd never seen one so physically marauded by the depths.
'Ali, meet Major Branch. He's something of a secret. He's with the Army, sort of an informal liaison with us. An old friend. I found him in a military hospital years ago.'
'Sometimes I think you should have left me there,' he bantered, and offered his hand to Ali. 'Elias will do.' He grimaced at her, then she saw it was a smile – without lips. The hand was like a rock. Despite the bull-like muscles, it was impossible to tell his age. Fire and wounds had erased the normal landmarks.
Besides Thomas and January, Ali counted eleven of them, including de l'Orme's protege, Santos. Except for her and Santos and this character beside her, they were old. All told, they combined almost seven hundred years of life experience and genius
– not to mention a working memory of all recorded history. They were venerable, if somewhat forgotten. Most had left the universities or companies or governments where they had distinguished themselves. Their awards and reputations were no longer useful. Nowadays they lived lives of the mind, helped along by their daily medicines. Their bones were brittle.
The Beowulf Circle was a strange gang of paladins. Ali surveyed the chilly bunch, placing faces, remembering names. With little overlap, they represented more disciplines than most universities had colleges to contain.
Again, Ali wished for something besides this sundress. It hung upon her like an albatross. Her long hair tickled her spine. She could feel her body beneath the cloth.
'You might have told us you would be taking us from our families,' grumbled a man whose face Ali knew from old Time magazines. Desmond Lynch, the medievalist and peacenik. He had earned a Nobel Prize for his 1952 biography of Duns Scotus, the thirteenth-century philosopher, then had used the prize as a bully pulpit to condemn everything from the McCarthy witch-hunts to the Bomb and, later, the war in Vietnam. Ancient history. 'So far from home,' he said. 'Into such weather. And at Christmas!'
Thomas smiled at him. 'Is it so bad?'
Lynch made himself look deadly behind his briarwood cane. 'Don't be taking us for granted,' he warned.
'You have my oath on that,' said Thomas more soberly. 'I'm old enough not to take one heartbeat for granted.'
They were listening, all of them. Thomas moved from face to face around the table.
'If the moment were not so critical,' he said, 'I would never trespass upon you with a mission so dangerous. But it is. And I must. And so we are here.'
'But here?' a tiny woman asked from a child's wheelchair. 'And in this season? It does seem so... un-Christian of you, Father.'
Vera Wallach, Ali recalled. The New Zealand physician. She had singlehandedly defeated the Church and banana republicans in Nicaragua, introducing birth control during the Sandinista revolution. She had faced bayonets and crucifixes, and still managed to bring her sacrament to the poor: condoms.
'Yes,' growled a thin man. 'The hour is godforsaken. Why now?' He was Hoaks, the mathematician. Ali had noticed him toying with a map that inverted the continental shelves and gave a view of the surface from inside the globe.
'But it's always this way,' said January, countering the ill humor. 'It's Thomas's way of imposing his mysteries on us.'
'It could be worse,' commented Rau, the untouchable, another Nobel winner. Born to the lowest caste in Uttar Pradesh, he had still managed the climb to India's lower house of Parliament. There he had served as his party's speaker for many years. Later, Ali would learn, Rau had been on the verge of renouncing the world, shedding his clothes and name, and throwing himself onto the pathway of saddhus living day to day by gifts of rice.
Thomas gave them several more minutes to greet one another and curse him. In whispers to Ali, January went on describing various characters. There was the Alexandrian, Mustafah, of a Coptic family that extended on his mother's side to Caesars. Though Christian, he was an expert on sharia, or Islamic law, one of the few to ever be able to explain it to westerners. Saddled with emphysema, he could speak only in short bursts.
Across the table sat an industrialist named Foley, who had made several side fortunes, one in
