Labyrinth Gate by Kate Elliott
“You say you thought you saw Pin—” Chryse’s considering gaze rested on that child where she huddled against Mog on a blanket at Charity’s feet. “But I wonder—did the child you saw wear a little cap?”
Julian only shrugged. “I don’t remember. Why do you ask?”
“Just a hunch,” replied Chryse cryptically.
The bonfire was alight again, a more sober flame now, damped still by remnants of wet brush. Someone had removed the effigy, or buried it in the stack. In the fire’s dull light, augmented by the illumination of the moon at its height, the slow activity of late night could be seen like the shadowed stage of a play.
Thomas Southern stood remonstrating with the worker Hawthorpe, a brash young man who had, it transpired, wagered with another fellow that he could climb to the Evening Palace at night unaided by light or companionship. A search party had interrupted the bet and brought him back.
A makeshift litter sat close by the fire. Four stout workers had carried Billy back to camp on it, after another ten had dug a rough stairway down and hoisted the injured man out of the hole. The solicitous Daisy knelt now at Billy’s side as Cook, who also served as the camp wise-woman and healer, inspected his leg.
Charity sat swathed in blankets, the children beside her, the professor behind her, absorbed in his own thoughts. Next to her stood Lucias, who was speaking with Maretha. At a comment from her, he frowned, giving the angelic mien of his face an uncharacteristically mulish look in the fire’s flickering glow.
Chryse felt Sanjay approach from behind, even before he spoke.
“All accounted for.” He rested a hand familiarly on the small of her back. “That last fellow, Tagmoss—evidently he was in his tent all along and the initial search missed him.” He shrugged. “I’d say we got off light enough. Considering.”
“Not all accounted for,” began Julian, but a movement in the shadows interrupted his words. With a low muttering, like the sudden withdrawal of water from beach, the workers dispersed back into their camp, leaving only Southern in the circle of bare ground surrounding the fire.
The glow seemed to increase slightly, as though touched by fresh fuel, and the earl walked into the ring of light. There was uncanny animation in his face, as any combustible substance ignites when brought to flame. He wore the same black evening clothes he had worn to supper, immaculate still except for a single fold in his cravat that now bore a small blot: in this light it seemed impossible that it be anything but a tiny oval stain of blood. His gaze came to rest on his wife.
“You tried to murder me!” Lucias’s voice cracked, lancing high above its usual light tenor.
The earl’s expression, stiff as ice, did not change, but his gaze lowered to examine the boy. “I beg your pardon?” His voice was soft.
“Lucias.” Sanjay moved to stand in the space between the two. “You said yourself you never saw the man’s face.”
“And the only voice you heard,” added Julian with a hint of a smile, “you took to be mine.”
Lucias’s expression stiffened and he flung himself away abruptly, running to the laborers’ camp.
“I’ll go.” Kate hurried off after him.
“Undoubtedly,” said the earl smoothly as he walked over to Maretha, “I provide the most convenient suspect, as well as the favored one.” He extended a hand towards the fire, as if warming it, then lay it on Maretha’s sleeve, a gesture possessive rather than affectionate. She did not move, but her expression tightened. “An interesting turn of events,” he continued. He seemed amused, knowing, perhaps, some piece to the puzzle that the others had not yet seen. “The place where the man fell—” His gaze shifted to Sanjay. “Did you recognize it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sanjay. “If my sketches are correct, I believe that mound marks the center of the city.”
“I feel sure they are correct.”
Professor Farr, who had been standing quietly all the while, came forward now. “But this is marvelous! We’ll bring in the blasting powder tomorrow and blast out the dirt—this must surely be a major structure of the city—a central temple, perhaps, or the marketplace.”
Maretha slipped her arm out of the earl’s grasp and crossed over to Farr. “Father.” Her voice was quiet. “Surely you wanted to dig more slowly in such a potentially vital place. If only to preserve the frescos that the young woman saw there.”
He blinked and adjusted his spectacles. “So I did, my dear. I had quite forgotten in the excitement.”
“But I don’t understand,” continued Maretha, “how we can have been digging in that area these past weeks and found nothing, when this fellow fell through so easily.”
“Perhaps it was not wanting to be found,” said the earl. “It is High Summer’s Eve, after all.”
“Why would that be important?” asked Chryse.
The lift of his eyebrows was so close a copy of Julian imitating him that it seemed a terribly sophisticated double parody, except that the earl did not joke. “I forget, Madame, that you may not be as familiar with the ancient customs as a native of our land would be.”
Chryse looked at Maretha.
“I suppose,” said Maretha slowly, “that a correspondence could be seen. Of course it is the longest day of the year—but in the ancient stories it is referred to as the imprisonment of the sun, the days getting shorter from then on, you understand.” She clasped her hands in front of her as if they were cold.
“Imprisonment below,” finished the earl, with an unreadable glance at his wife, “in the depths—in the night—is the fate decreed for the sun, and for the person representing the sun. Or so one might deduce, studying old customs and older legends.”
“And if one believed such tales—” Maretha considered the earl, looking strangely disturbed. “That might explain why we had such strange manifestations tonight.” She shook her head. “No, you can scarcely expect me to believe that the city itself revealed its secrets only when it attempted to fulfill some ancient ritual—” She trailed off, shifting her gaze to the fire: a more comfortable, and safer, resting place than his eyes.
“Believe what you will,” said the earl in the tone of one who already knows the answer.
“Aren’t those the same legends that tell of a treasure hidden here?” asked Chryse. As she spoke, Sanjay moved back to stand by her again, and they exchanged speculative glances.
Much to their surprise, the earl lifted a hand to touch the stained fold of his cravat. “Never doubt there is treasure here. It is the form it takes that will prove unexpected to those whose only idea of treasure is gold.”
“So one must know not only where to look, but how,” said Sanjay, musing.
The earl’s lips curved, giving a chill to his face that in another person would have been a smile. “You have the gift of sight,” he said. “An advantage that even the most adept sorcerer does not possess. You must use it wisely.” He turned away, raising one hand in an imperious gesture toward his wife. “Maretha.” It was a command, but one tinted by the excitement that the night had seemed to arouse in him.
Her face was still of emotion except for a paling in her lips, pressed tight. But as she walked across to take his arm, she looked in her turn at the professor.
“Father? Charity? Are you coming with us?” The professor helped Charity up and, with the two children hanging on her skirts, they followed. If the earl was amused by this gambit, he did not show it. The party faded into the night, heading back to their tents.
“Not at all surprised, was he,” said Julian, “by any of our interesting events tonight.”
“Should he have been?” Thomas Southern’s comment startled the other three because they had forgotten he was there. “Your lordship,” he added as an afterthought, as he always did. He was looking after the group that had just left, a frown creasing the usual undisturbed clarity of his face. “His is a godless soul, undismayed by manifestations of the Daughter.”
Julian chuckled. “Tell me, Southern, do you believe our prec
Southern at last shifted to look at the others. His expression was perfectly serious. “We have all sinned. But we have hope of Our Lady’s mercy. He does not believe in the salvation of Our Blessed Mother and Her Son. For that he is doubly damned. If you will excuse me.” His hands clasped behind him, lost in some rumination none of the other three could guess, he walked slowly out of the dwindling circle of firelight towards the laborers’ camp.
“Speak for yourself.” Julian laughed. “Lady knows we Haldanes will burn as hot as any.”
“I’m cold,” said Chryse, tugging her cloak a little tighter around her shoulders.
Sanjay was staring at the fire as if he saw something there. “Why do I have the feeling that he was challenging me?” he said in a low voice.
“Thomas?”
He shook his head. “The earl.”
Chryse looked at Julian. They both shrugged. “But Sanjay,” she continued, turning back to her husband, “he’s saying that the city itself is in some way aware, isn’t he? As if it holds power, as a person might.”
“The treasure might hold power,” said Julian. “Even if it is only gold and jewels, it holds power in some fashion over men’s minds.”
“But that’s not what he means, or not entirely it. You know that.” She stared out; in the moonglow she could see the faintest outlines of the ruins, speckled close by with the handful of lanterns that now illuminated the two camps. “As if it had some kind of life of its own. And after tonight … Sanjay, do you believe that?”
Sanjay still gazed at the fire, but his eyes were on a vague height he could see beyond, through the lick of flame and curl of smoke. A figure stood there, too sharply defined at such distance for the available light and with a nebulosity that made him realize that no one but he could see it. A human figure, perhaps, or at least humanlike; more than that he could not make out, except for the stark and obvious shape of a bow held with complete confidence in its hands. Inevitably, he thought of the three arrows that had saved Lucias.
“Yes,” he replied. “I believe it.” He clasped her hand in his, gave Julian a brief smile. “Let’s go back. I think the rest of the night will be quiet.” They began to walk.
“It makes you wonder, though,” said Chryse in a soft voice, “about what the other holidays will be like.”
Maretha had to restrain her father a second time from bringing out the blasting powder when the initial excavations into the central mound revealed two walls of incomplete frescos that led into solidly-packed earth on all sides. Once she had reminded him that he had meant to use more precise and careful methods, he lapsed back into his usual routine of mornings spent bothering the laborers with pointless details and confused directions, which Maretha would later countermand, and afternoons scribbling in an unreadable scrawl his observations and conclusions, at such great length that only his daughter had the patience to decipher and then recopy them.
There was some muttering amongst the workers about hauntings and black magic and the earl, but the weather kept so fine and clear, and Thomas Southern so piously determined to maintain order in the work force he was hired to supervise, that the doomsayers found little support.
The edifice in the center of the valley emerged slowly, long curves of frescoed wall that averaged a man’s height but in places rose even higher. Intermittent tiling marked the floor of the structure. The work progressed at a sedate pace out of Maretha’s concern for the delicate paintings that covered the stone.
As the weeks passed, no further incidents disturbed the site. The grumbling and complaining of the workers subsided until only a few remnants—warding spells and charms to protect from ghosts and the evil eye, a short swell of agitation when it became apparent they might have to dig underground—remained to interrupt the progress of the excavation.
Late in the month of Tew, when the weather might reasonably be expected to be at its hottest, a cool spell descended suddenly. The day dawned cloudy, and eventually a slight drizzle wet the hard ground, damping the laborers’ clothing. Chryse and Maretha, caught out without cloaks, had come inside to change and now sat in easy camaraderie in the big tent cataloguing glyphs with the aid of Sanjay’s recent sketches.
In one corner of the tent Charity lay half sitting on a couch, dozing over the weekly menu that she was preparing for Mistress Cook. In sleep she looked even more beautiful. The fresh air had given her cheeks heightened color, and the abundance of food to be had at an earl’s table, even in such conditions as this, had filled her out, adding a lusciousness to the suggestion of her figure beneath her gown.
“What do you suppose it represents?” asked Chryse as she smoothed out a crease in one of the sketches. A host of figures, a procession, perhaps, filled the page: the hindquarters of hounds, a trio of bare-bosomed, full-skirted women, five men attired for war or for hunting, all traced in two colors: one a frequently-interrupted line of the actual remains, one a light continuous line of Sanjay’s superimposed reconstruction. On a page next to it, she could compare it with an exact rendering of the find, a fragmented picture obscured by large gaps of worn-away stone that an observer who was not also an artist might have difficulty making sense of.
Maretha raised her head. She had grown more relaxed as the dig progressed, free of her father’s constant presence, seeing little of her husband, engaged in work she found stimulating. The smile that lit her features now made her face quite handsome, unmarked by worry or by that disquieting sense of confinement and foreboding that sometimes came over her.
“What I suppose it represents would certainly be more a reflection of my thoughts than any accurate explanation of its real meaning, don’t you think?” she asked.
“But Maretha, if you aren’t qualified to guess, then who is?”
“No one, I think. No one but one who has lived in that time and seen the hand that painted these frescos.” She paused to compare two glyphs, made a little sound of satisfaction under her breath, and quickly penciled in the new glyph below the other in her catalog. “Once I’ve studied this material for as many years as my father has, I might be willing to write a paper on my theories.”
Chryse, watching her face, was struck by the lack of resemblance between Maretha and her father; one could see the Farr blood more readily in Charity. She had never seen a picture of Maretha’s mother. “Would you agree with your father?”
“I don’t know.” She looked troubled, as if the admission was blasphemous. “I think ritual must have been of primary importance in the life of this city, and this culture, but how to interpret that ritual—She set down her pen and examined her fingers. “My father and the earl are certainly more knowledgeable than I am, so one must give serious consideration to their theories.”
“Even if one doesn’t find human sacrifice palatable?”
“Who are we to judge? Think back to the circumstances in which we found Mog and Pin. Were the ancients necessarily any more cruel?”
In the silence Chryse carefully penned three glyphs onto a clean sheet of parchment, double-checking them several times from Sanjay’s drawing. “You might check this top one against number sixty-two.” She lifted the paper to survey it in a different angle of light. “I wish that these people had had the forethought to standardize their notational system. They’re making it difficult for us.” She set down the paper to take a sip of tea, then leaned back in her chair, stretching, unclosing and closing her right hand. “We should have brought a piano along. I’m getting out of practice.”
Maretha chuckled. “Perhaps I can ask my husband to have one sent up here.”
“Do you think he would?” Chryse’s reply was more jest than serious, so it surprised her when that shuttered look descended on Maretha’s face, like the closing of windows in a house.
“He might. He treats me very well.”
“You sound as if you can’t understand why he should. Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself? It was no easy bargain on your side. I think you deser
But Maretha only shook her head, her eyes dropped, her shoulders bowing in a way Chryse hadn’t seen since before her wedding. “I told him I wouldn’t—” Her left hand toyed nervously with her pen. “That I didn’t believe he married me because he needed an heir.”
“I’m not sure—”
“I haven’t—We haven’t—I couldn’t bring myself to—” Maretha flushed. “He hasn’t touched me, in that way.”
“Oh.” Chryse’s voice was as soft, if less impassioned. “But isn’t that what you wanted? To be free of him?”
“I wanted my freedom,” said Maretha fiercely. “But I feel the bargain has not been paid in full on my part. What can he want of me, Chryse? What can he want?”
“I don’t know. He wanted to come here, after all.” Maretha did not respond. “I’m sorry, Maretha.”
Maretha lifted her gaze finally to look at the blonde woman. “I agreed to it. I could have refused to marry him.”
On the couch, Charity stirred and yawned and sighed deep from her chest. Her hands shifted to rest on her belly.
“Easy to say now,” said Chryse. “I’m not so sure it would have been so easy then.”
Maretha glanced away from her, towards her cousin, not in any furtive way, or as if she were avoiding the unspoken question, but as if she were distracted by the sight of Charity asleep. “I still wonder why he chose me when he could have had Charity.”
“Oh, Maretha.” Chryse sounded a little disgusted. “Humility is all very well, but too much humility is as much a vice as too much vanity.”
Maretha laughed. The sound startled Charity out of her doze; she blinked slowly and all at once lost her grip on the menu. It fluttered to the floor just as the tent flap stirred, a larger echo of the sound, and Sanjay came into the tent.
Charity made a little oh of surprise and sat up quickly, straightening her dress. Sanjay kissed Chryse on the forehead and smiled at Maretha, proffered a short bow in Charity’s direction. His face shone with excitement.