The crowd was subdued. There was something immensely powerful about this outcast. He had suffered enclosure and poverty and deprivation in ways they could not fathom. And yet that spine was as straight as a reed, that mind intent on transcending it all. Clearly he was at prayer.
Now they saw that the wall he was facing contained rows of circles painted onto the rock. Their lights bleached the circles faint and colorless. 'Hadal stuff,' a soldier said dismissively.
Ali went closer. The circles were filled with lightly drawn lines and scrawls, mandalas of some kind. She suspected that in darkness they would glow. But trying to glean information from them with so many lights on was useless.
'Crockett,' snapped Walker, 'get control of yourself.' Ike's strangeness was starting to frighten people, and Ali suspected the colonel was intimidated by the extent of Ike's mute suffering, as if it detracted further from his own authority.
When Ike did not move, he said, 'Cover that man.'
One of his men went forward and started to drape Ike's clothing over his shoulders.
'Colonel,' the soldier said, 'I think he might be dead. Come feel how cold he is.'
Over the next few minutes the physicians established that Ike had slowed his metabolism to a near standstill. His pulse registered less than twenty beats, his breathing less than three cycles per minute. 'I've heard of monks doing this,' someone said. 'It's some kind of meditation technique.'
The group drifted off to eat and sleep. Later that night, Ali went to check on him. It was just a courtesy, she told herself. She would have appreciated someone checking on her. She climbed the footholds to his shelf and he was still there, back erect, fingertips pressed to the ground. Keeping her light off, she approached him to drape his shirt across his shoulders, for it had fallen off. That was when she discovered the blood glazing his back. Someone else had visited Ike, and run a knife blade across the yoke of his shoulders.
Ali was outraged. 'Who did this?' she demanded in an undertone. It could have been a soldier. Or Shoat. Or a group of them.
His lungs suddenly filled. She heard the air slowly release through his nose. As in a dream, he said, 'It's all the same.'
*
When the woman parted from her group and went up a side chute away from the river, he thought she had gone to defecate. It was a racial perversity that the humans always went alone like this. At their moment of greatest vulnerability, with their bowels open and ankles trapped by clothing and clouds of odor spreading through the tunnel, just when they most needed their comrades gathered around for protection, each insisted on solitude.
But to his surprise, the female didn't void her bowels. Rather, she bathed.
She started by shedding her clothing. By the light of her headlamp, she brought her pubis to a lather with the soap bar and sleeved her palms around each thigh and ran them up and down her legs. She didn't come close to the fatted Venuses so dear to certain tribes he had observed. But neither was she bony. There was muscle in her buttocks and thighs. The pelvic girdle flared, a solid cup for childbearing. She emptied
a bottle over her shoulders and the water snaked along her contours. Right then, he determined to breed her.
Perhaps, he reasoned, Kora had died in order to make way for this woman. Or she was a consolation for Kora's death, provided by his destiny. It was even possible she was Kora, passed from one vessel to this next. Who could say? In search of a new home, souls were said to dwell in the stone, hunting ways through the cracks.
She had the unblemished flesh of a newborn. Her frame and long limbs were not without promise. Daily life could be severe, but the legs, especially, suggested an ability to keep up. He imagined the body with rings and paint and scars, once he had his way. If she survived the initiation period, he would give her a hadal name that could be felt and seen but never spoken, just as he had given many others names. Just as he had himself been given a name.
The acquisition could occur in several ways. He could lure her. He could seize her. Or he could simply dislocate one of her legs and bear her off. If all else failed, she would make good meat.
In his experience, temptation was most preferable. He was adroit, even artistic about it, and his status among hadals reflected it. Several times, near the surface, he had managed to entice small groups into his handling. Ensnare one, and she – or he – could sometimes be used to draw others. If it was a wife, her husband sometimes followed. A child generally guaranteed at least one parent. Religious pilgrims were easy. It was a game for him.
He stayed inert in the shadows, listening for others who might have been drawn here, human or otherwise. Assured of their seclusion, he finally made his move. In English.
'Hello?' He lofted the words furtively. He did nothing to disguise his desire.
She had turned for a second bottle of water, and at his voice she paused. Her head rotated left and right. The word had come from behind, but she was judging more than its direction. He liked her quickness of mind, her ability to sift the opportunities as well as the dangers.
'What are you doing out there?' the woman demanded. She was sure of herself. She made no attempt to cover herself. She faced upslope, nude, overt, blazing white. Her nakedness and beauty were tools for her.
'Watching,' he said. 'I've been watching you.'
Something in her carriage – the line of her neck, the arch of her spine – accepted the voyeurism. 'What do you want?'
'What do I want?' What would she want to hear so deep in the earth? He was reminded of Kora. 'The world,' he said. 'A life. You.'
She took it in. 'You're one of the soldiers.'
He let her own desires pronounce her. She had been watching the soldiers watch her, he realized. She had fantasized about them, though probably no one of them in particular. For she had not asked his name, only his occupation. His anonymity appealed to her. It would be less complicating. Very probably she had gone off alone like this hoping to lure just such a one here.
'Yes,' he said. He did not lie to her. 'I was a soldier once.'
'So, are you going to let me see you?' she asked, and he could tell it was not a great need. The unknown was more primary. Good lassie, he thought.
'No,' he said. 'Not yet. What if you told?'
'What if I told?' she asked.
He could smell her change. The potent smell of her sex was beginning to fill the small chamber.
'They would kill me,' he said. She turned out the light.
Ali could tell that hell was starting to get to them.
This was Jonah's vista, the beast's gut as hollowed earth. It was the basement of their souls. As children they had all learned it was forbidden to enter this place, short of God's damnation. Yet here they were, and it scared them.
Perhaps not unnaturally, it was her they began to turn to. Men and women, scientists and soldiers, began seeking her out to make their confessions. Freighted with myths, they wanted out from their burden of sins. It was a way of keeping their sanity. Strangely, she was not prepared for their need.
It was always done singly. One of them would drift back or catch her alone in camp. Sister, they would murmur. A minute before, they had called her Ali. But then they would say Sister, and she would know what they wanted of her: to become a stranger to them, a loving stranger, nameless, all-forgiving.
'I'm not a priest,' Ali told them. 'I can't absolve you.'
'You're a nun,' they would say, as if the distinction were meaningless. And then it would start, the recitation of fears and regrets, their weaknesses and rancor and vendettas, their appetites and perversions. Things they dared not speak aloud to one another, they spoke to her.
