Ascendancies (84 page)

But then, at Hildegart's counseling, the hapless slaves were freed and dismissed. Instead of using harsh whips and chains, the Blemmye simply tossed a few small diamonds into the rubble at the bottom of the pit.

Word soon spread of a secret diamond mine. Strong men from far and wide arrived secretly in many eager gangs. Without orders, pay, or any words of persuasion, they imported their own tools into the wasteland.

Then the miners fought recklessly and even stabbed each other for the privilege of expanding the Blemmye's diggings. Miraculous tons of limestone were quarried, enough rock to provide firm foundations for every structure in the Blemmye's Paradise. The miners wept with delight at the discovery of every precious stone.

When no more diamonds appeared, the miners soon wearied of their sport. The secret mine was abandoned and swiftly forgotten.

Within this cavernous dugout, then, was where the Blemmye had hidden his darling.

The Silent Master removed a counterweighted sheet of glass and iron. From the black gulf, an eye-watering, hellish stink of lime and sulfur wafted forth.

Strapping two panes of glass to his enormous face, the Blemmye inhaled sharply through his great trumpet of a nose. Then he rushed headlong into the stinking gloom.

Hildegart urged Sinan to retreat from the gush of foul miasma, but the Assassin resisted her urgings. “I always wondered what our Master did with all that brimstone. This is astonishing.”

“The Blemmye loves a creature from Hell,” said Hildegart, crossing herself.

“Well, if this is Hell, then we ourselves built it, my dear.” Sinan shrouded his eyes and peered within the acid murk. “I see so many bones in there. I must go in there, you know, I must bear witness and write of all this.… Why don't you come along with me?”

“Are you joking? A mine is no place for a woman!”

“Of course it is, my dear! You simply must come down into Hell with me. You're the only aide memoire available, and besides, you know that I rely on your judgment.”

When Hildegart stiffly refused him, Sinan shrugged at her womanly fears and rushed forward into the gassy murk. Hildegart wept for him, and began to pray—praying for her own sake, because Sinan's salvation was entirely beyond retrieval.

At the fifth bead of her rosary, the brave Assassin reappeared, half-leading his stricken Master. They were tugging and heaving together at a great, white, armored plate, a bone-colored thing like a gigantic shard of pottery.

This broken armor, with a few tangled limbs and bits of dry gut, that was all that was left of the Blemmye's Lady. She had been something like a great, boiled, stinking crab. Something like a barb-tailed desert scorpion, living under a rock.

In her silent life, cloistered deep within the smoking, stony earth, the Blemmye's Lady had fed well, and grown into a size so vast and bony and monstrous that she could no longer fit through the narrow cave mouth. Sinan and the Blemmye were barely able to tug her skeletal remnants into daylight.

The Blemmye pawed at a hidden trigger, and the great iron door swung shut behind him with a hollow boom. He wheezed and coughed, and snorted loudly through his dripping nose.

Sinan, who had breathed less deeply of the hellish fumes, was the first to recover. He spat, and wiped his streaming eyes, then gestured to Hildegart for pen and ink.

Then Sinan sat atop a limestone boulder. He ignored her questions with a shake of his turbaned head, and fervently scribbled his notes.

Hildegart followed the laboring Blemmye as he tugged at his bony, rattling burden. The Silent Master trembled like a dying ox as he hauled the big skidding carcass. His sturdy leather boots had been lacerated, as if chopped by picks and hatchets.

Ignoring his wounds, the Blemmye dragged the riddled corpse of his beloved, yard by painful yard, down the slope toward the Dead Sea. The empty carapace was full of broken holes. The she-demon had been pecked to pieces from within.

Hildegart had never seen the Blemmye hurt. But she had seen enough wounded men to know the look of mortal despair, even on a face as strange as his.

The Blemmye collapsed in anguish at the rim of the sullen salt lake.

Hildegart smoothed the empty sand before him with her sandaled foot. Then she wrote to him with a long brass pin from the clasp of her cloak. “Master, let us return to your Paradise. There I will tend to your wounds.”

The Blemmye plucked a small table knife from his belt and scratched rapidly in the sand. “My fate is of no more consequence / I care only for my darling's children / though born in this unhappy place / they are scions of a great and noble people.”

“Master, let us write of this together in some much better place.”

The Blemmye brushed away her words with the palm of his hand. “I have touched my poor beloved for the last time in my life / How pitifully rare were our meetings / We sent each other many words through the black gulfs and seas amid the stars / to understand one sentence was the patient work of years / her people and mine were mortal enemies amid the stars / And yet she trusted me / She chose to become mine / She fled with me to live in exile to this distant unknown realm / Now she has left me to face our dark fate alone / It was always her dear way to give her life for others / Alas my sweet correspondent has finally perished of her generosity.”

The Blemmye tugged in fitful despair at his lacerated boots.

Resignedly, Hildegart knelt and pulled the torn boots from her Master's feet. His wounds were talon slashes, fearsome animal bites. She pulled the cotton wimple from her head and tore it into strips.

“I promised her that I would guard her children / sheltering them as I always sheltered her / That foolish vow has broken my spirit / I will fail her in my promise, for I cannot live without her / Her goodness and her greatness of spirit / She was so wise, and knew so many things / Great marvels I could never have guessed, known, or dreamed of / What a strange soul she had, and how she loved me / What wondrous things we shared together from our different worlds / Oh, how she could write!”

Sinan arrived. The Assassin's eyes were reddened with the fumes, but he had composed himself.

“What have you been doing?” Hildegart demanded, as she worked to bind the Blemmye's bleeding, toeless feet.

“Listen to this feat of verse!” Sinan declared. He lifted his parchment, cleared his throat, and began to recite. “‘With my own eyes, I witnessed the corpses of the massacred! Lacerated and disjointed, with heads cracked open and throats split; spines broken, necks shattered; noses mutilated, hair colored with blood! Their tender lips were shriveled, their skulls cracked and pierced; their feet were slashed and fingers sliced away and scattered; their ribs staved in and smashed. With their life's last breath exhaled, their very ghosts were crushed, and they lay like dead stones among stones!'”

Hildegart's bloodied fingers faltered on the knot of her rough bandage. The sun beat against her bared head. Her ears roared. Her vision faded.

When she came to, Sinan was tenderly sponging her face with water from his canteen.

“You swooned,” he told her.

“Yes,” she said faintly, “yes, that overcame me.”

“Of course it would,” he agreed, eyes shining, “for those wondrous verses possessed me in one divine rush! As if my very pen had learned to speak the truth!”

“Is that what you saw in Hell?” she said.

“Oh no,” he told her, “that was what I witnessed in the siege of Jerusalem. I was never able to describe that experience before, but just now, I was very inspired.” Sinan shrugged. “Inside that ugly mine, there is not much to see. There is dark acrid smoke there, many chewed bones. The imps within, they screeched and rustled everywhere, like bats and lizards. And that infernal stench!” Sinan looked sidelong at the Blemmye's wounded shins. “See how the little devils attacked him, as he walked through the thick of them, to fetch out their dam.”

Though the Blemmye did not understand Sinan's words, the tone of the Assassin's voice seemed to stir him. He sat up, his black eyes filmy and grievous. He took up his knife again, and carved fresh letters into the sand. “Now we will take the precious corpse of my beloved / and sink her to her last rest in this strange sea she loved so much. / This quiet lake was the kindest place to her of any in your world.”

Sinan put his verses away, and pulled at one whitened limb of the Blemmye's ruined lover. The bony armor rocked and tilted like a pecked and broken Roc's egg. The wounded Blemmye stood on his bleeding feet, lifting and shoving at the wall of bone with all his failing strength. The two of them splashed waist-deep into the evil water.

As the skeleton sank into the shallows, there was a sudden stirring and skittering. From a bent corner of the shell, shaking itself like a wet bird, came a small and quite horrible young demon. It had claws, and a stinging tail, and a circlet of eyes like a spider. It hopped and chirped and screeched.

Sinan wisely froze in place, like a man confronting a leopard. But the Blemmye could not keep his composure. He snorted aloud and fled splashing toward the shore.

The small demon rushed after the Blemmye as if born to the chase. It quickly felled him to the salty shore. At once, it began to feed on him.

Sinan armed himself with the closest weapon at hand: he tore a bony flipper from the mother's corpse. He waded ashore in a rush, and swung this bone like a mace across the heaving back of the imp. Its armor was as tough as any crab's, though, and the heavy blow only enraged it.

The little demon turned on the Assassin with awful speed, and likely would have killed a fighter less experienced. Sinan, though, was wise enough to outfox the young devil. He dodged its feral lunges, striking down and cracking the vulnerable joints in its twitching, bony limbs. When the monster faltered, foaming and hissing, he closed on it with a short, curved dagger from within his robe.

Sinan rose at last from the young beast's corpse, his robes ripped and his arm bloodied. He hid his blade away again, then dragged the dead monster to the salt shore. There he heaved it with a shudder of loathing into the still water beside its mother.

Hildegart knelt beside the panting Blemmye. His wounds had multiplied.

The Blemmye blinked, faint with anguish. His strength was fading visibly, yet he still had something left to write. He scraped at the sand with a trembling fingertip. “Take me to my Paradise and bind my wounds / See to it that I live / I shall reveal to you great wonders and secrets / beyond the comprehension of your prophets.”

Sinan took Hildegart by the arm.

“I'm no longer much concerned about our horses, my dear,” he told her. He knelt and smoothed out their Master's writing. A spatter of his own blood fell on the sand beside the Blemmye's oozings.

“That ugly monster has hurt you, my brave hero!”

“Do you know how many times this poor old body of mine has known a wound?” Sinan's left arm had been badly scored by the creature's lashing tail. He gritted his teeth as she tied off his arm with a scarf. “What a joy that battle was, my darling. I have never killed anything that I wanted to kill so much.”

The Blemmye propped his headless body on one elbow. He beckoned at them feebly.

Hildegart felt a moment of sheer hatred for him, for his weakness, for his foolish yieldings to the temptations of darkness. ‘What it is that the Blemmye wants to write of now, these
great secrets
that he promises us?”

“It will be much the same as it was before,” Sinan said with disgust. “That mystical raving about the Sun being only a star. He'll tell us that other stars are suns, with other worlds and other peoples.”

Hildegart shivered. “I always hated that!”

“The world is very, very old, he'll insist on that nonsense, as well. Come, let us help him, my dear. We shall have to patch the Master up, for there is no one else fit to do it.”

“Thousands of years,” Hildegart quoted, unmoving where she stood. “Then, thousands of thousands of years. And thousands, of thousands, of thousands. Then thirteen and a half of those units. Those are the years since the birth of the universe.”

“How is it you can remember all that? Your skills at numeration are beyond compare!” Sinan trembled suddenly, in an after-combat mix of rage, fear, and weariness. “My dear, please give me counsel, in your wisdom: did his huge numbers ever make any sense to you? Any kind of sense at all?”

“No,” she told him.

The Assassin looked wearily at the fainting Blemmye. He lowered his voice. “Well, I can fully trust your counsel in this matter, can't I? Tell me that you are quite sure about all that.”

Hildegart felt a rush of affection for him. She recognized that look of sincere, weighty puzzlement on his face; he'd often looked like that in the days when they had played chess together, whiling away pleasant evenings as lord and concubine. It was Sinan who had taught her chess; Sinan had taught Hildegart the very existence of chess. Chess was a wonderful game, with the crippled Shah, and the swift Vizier, and all their valiant knights, stern fortresses and crushing elephants. When she began to defeat him at chess, he only laughed and praised her cleverness; he seemed to enjoy their game all the more.

“My dear, brave Sinan, I can promise you: God Himself doesn't need such infinities, not even for His angels to dance on the heads of pins.” Hildegart felt light-headed without her wimple, and she ran her hands self-consciously across her braids. “Why does he think that big numbers are some kind of reward for us? What's wrong with gold and diamonds?”

Sinan shrugged again, favoring his wounded arm. “I think his grief has turned his mind. We must haul him away from his darling now. We must put him to bed, if we can. No man can be trusted at the brink of his lover's grave.”

Hildegart gazed with loathing at the demonic skeleton. The dense salt water still bore the she-monster up, but her porous wreck was drowning, like a boat hull riddled with holes. A dark suspicion rose within Hildegart's heart. Then a cold fear came. “Sinan, wait one moment longer. Listen to me now. What number of evil imps were bred inside that great incubus of his?”