Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (10 page)

In the light spilling in from the opening, Tigranes held up the broken frame of his phorminx. Its strings hung loose, the wood around them splintered.

He laid it down on the ground sadly, folding the strap over it like the corner of a shroud.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel whispered and Tigranes nodded. None of them wanted to speak too loudly or too much, not while the men above were still hunting for them.

Tigranes gestured for them to follow and, with one hand on the wall to steady himself, led them deeper into the cave. It went on for quite a while, enough so that the light from outside dwindled to a white patch in the darkness—but there was a flickering orange light growing larger from the other direction.

They reached the end of the narrow cleft and made a ninety-degree turn. The sight that greeted them stopped Gabriel and Christos in their tracks.

It was more cavern than cave, a chamber at least fifty feet around and thirty high, seemingly naturally formed, with a pool of water at the center of it; and rising from this pool was a short pedestal of stone carved into the broad, ridged shape of an Ionic column. The capitals of this abbreviated column curled to either side like the horns of a ram. There was a marble seat on top of the capital, a squarish throne, and a larger-than-life-size statue of a muscular man reposed upon it, bare-chested,
a stone lyre gripped in one arm. His face was long, his nose and brows prominent. Carved locks of hair tumbled about his ears and down his neck, while a chiseled beard roiled beneath his jaw.

Flame spouted from a pair of shallow stone bowls carved into the wall beside the room’s entrance—natural gas, Gabriel judged from the smell, an eternal flame ignited untold lifetimes ago that had cast its flickering light on this hidden temple ever since.

“What
is
this place?” Gabriel said.

“It is our Homereion,” Tigranes answered, stepping into the pool, which was only ankle-deep. He walked to the base of the statue, touched his fingers to his lips and pressed them to the carved throne. “A tribute to Chios’ glorious son. There was one like it at Alexandria, greater even than this, built by Ptolemy—the fourth Ptolemy. There was one in Smyrna, one in Ephesus…but this was the very first, built just fifty years after the master’s death. My father brought me here when I was a child of three or four. He carried me in his arms and laid me down right here.” He reached up to pat the statue’s lap, where the stone folds of a toga cast undulant shadows across the figure’s carved knees.

“Why didn’t the residents of Anavatos come down here?” Gabriel said. “In 1822, when the Turks came—rather than leaping to their deaths?”

“Some did—a few,” Tigranes said. “Those who knew of its existence. We kept it secret. Only the Homeridae were permitted to know. The children of Homer.”

“Allowing hundreds of people to die, just to keep a secret—”

“I may be old,” Tigranes said, walking back out of the pool, “but I am not quite
that
old. Please don’t blame me for something that happened a century before I was born.”

Gabriel nodded. “Of course,” he said.

“Anyway, what do you think would have happened if its existence had been widely known? The Turks would have found out, just as they found out about Anavatos in the first place—by bribing some foolish woman who gave the secret away in return for a few drachmae. They would have come here and slaughtered everyone, and destroyed the Homereion, too. This way at least the handful of people who did know about it were able to survive. And the Homereion as well.”

He found his way to a dry spot at the margin of the room, sat down, and took off his sandals, wiped them on the hem of his chiton. Christos sat beside him. Gabriel remained standing.

“The men who were chasing us,” he said, “the ones working for Andras and DeGroet—they’re going to come back. They may not have the equipment they’d need here—ropes, rappelling gear—but they can get it at Avgonyma, and then they’ll be back. We might have a couple of hours, but not more.”

“Why would they come back?” Christos said. “Why not leave us in peace?”

“You know the answer to that,” Gabriel said. “Because DeGroet will punish them brutally if they let us escape, and pay handsomely if they deliver us to him.” And, Gabriel thought, just imagine what he’d pay to see this place.

“Is there any way out of here,” Gabriel asked, “any back entrance, any way out other than the way we came in?”

Tigranes shook his head. “There is only one other chamber—and the only way in or out is through here.”

It was as bad as he’d feared. Still—

“Might as well see it,” Gabriel said, offering Tigranes a hand to help him to his feet. Tigranes pointedly ignored it and got up on his own. Gabriel found himself hoping he’d be in the shape this old fellow was in when
he turned eighty. Then he chastised himself for foolish optimism. What made him think he’d live to forty, never mind eighty?

Tigranes led them around the edge of the room till they were behind the statue. He stopped when he came to an opening in the wall, a low archway he had to duck to pass through. Gabriel bent and followed close behind.

The room beyond the archway was small and dark, lit only by reflected light from outside.

There was no pool in this room, no column, no oblate bowls with dancing flames.

But there was a stone figure.

And behind it, painted on the wall, there was a map.

Gabriel approached the statue slowly, walking in a careful circle around it, looking at it closely from all angles, or as closely as the limited light would permit. The carving, the artistry—it was the same, unmistakably so. And while the Greeks of Homer’s day had surely been more sophisticated sculptors than the Egyptians of Khafre’s, the style here was still incongruous. This was more the vital realism of a Michelangelo, a Bernini. And the figure—

It was the figure of a lioness, lying prone upon the ground, her paws outstretched; except that two-thirds of the way up, her torso became that of a woman, sleek fur replaced by hairless skin, small high breasts bare; and from her human shoulders sprouted a pair of stone wings, which lay neatly folded along her spine. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, as though she were calling out for someone. On her brow the sculptor had given her a diadem, a band to hold back her intricately carved ridges of hair. The statue of Homer outside had been idealized—he looked practically like a god, like Poseidon on his throne looking
down upon the waters at his feet. This figure, this sphinx, was more modest—smaller, for one thing, and somehow, though it seemed perverse to think in these terms, less fantastical. Her eyelids, Gabriel noted, had wrinkles at their edges—he ran a finger over them and felt the tiny grooves in the stone. Her breasts—the nipples drooped slightly, as with age. The row upon row of feathers on each wing—each had been carved with meticulous care and craftsmanship.

On her flank, an inscription had been chiseled in angular Greek letters:

Accursed daughter of Echidna, rest eternal be yours

Your people shall forget you not, though generations pass

Your precious one shall hold your image close where you hold his

And your holy treasure speeds on Hermes’ wings to Taprobane,

Returning to the Cradle of Fear

Gabriel reached into the statue’s open mouth.

“What are you doing?” Tigranes said. And Christos said, “You shouldn’t—”

Gabriel pulled his hand away and came toward them. He held between his fingers a silver coin. On one side was an image of an eagle; on the other, a male face, in profile. He extended it toward Tigranes, who shook his head, and then to Christos, who peered closely at its surface. “The writing on it…is this coin Greek?”

“Egyptian,” Gabriel said.

He turned his attention to the wall. It had been painted with a single enormous teardrop shape; above this, in the
uppermost corner of the wall, was the hint of a coastline to the north. It was the reverse of the map he’d found in Egypt: this one showed the island in full and the landmass of India only in part. It also had details painted in—not many, but enough to indicate a path from a spot on the coast to a location inland, very near the center of the island. If this was supposed to be Sri Lanka—Taprobane, as it was known in the days of Alexander—the destination marked would be just northeast of Dambulla. He’d been there once, in pursuit of a priceless wooden Bodhisattva figure stolen from the famous Golden Temple. He hadn’t paid much attention to anything else while he was there—but he had seen the occasional sphinx mixed in among the other figures on wall murals and carvings.

As he recalled, the legends of Sri Lanka spoke of it as a “man-lion”—
narasimha
—and it played the role of guardian, much as it had here in Greece. Across the sea in southern India, they gave it a Sanskrit name,
purush-amriga
—the human-beast. Under one name or another sphinxes popped up throughout the lands of Asia. But just what the connections were between the island of Sri Lanka, the Egyptian sphinx, and the sphinx depicted here—presumably the one from the
Oedipodea
—was a mystery to Gabriel. And if there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was a mystery. Especially one people were willing to kill each other over.

“I think the time has come for us to find out a bit more about this sphinx,” he said to Tigranes. “If you know anything—”

“I do,” Tigranes said, nodding slowly. “The tale of Oedipus is but half the matter of the
Oedipodea.
The poet also told the story of the sphinx: her birth, her fierce defense of Thebes, her departure thence for Chios’ shores—”

“We don’t have four nights, I’m afraid,” Gabriel said.

“That’s quite all right,” Tigranes said. “I’ll begin where you wish.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t do that,” Gabriel said, “that you could only recite the entire poem from the start.”

“Do you believe everything someone tells you?” Tigranes said with a sly hint of a smile. “Here, let us go out into the main chamber again. I will feel my instrument’s absence less in the shadow of my master.”

They returned to the room with the statue of Homer in it, sat down at the edge of the pool. Tigranes began to speak, to sing, his voice echoing gently from wall to wall. Gabriel looked up at the statue. With the firelight playing over its carved features, you could almost imagine that it, and not Tigranes, was reciting the ancient words.

And the story of the sphinx unfolded. Gabriel didn’t interrupt, just listened, and as he did, pieces of the puzzle finally began to fall into place.

“Are you saying she really existed, all those centuries ago?” Christos said when Tigranes fell silent. He’d been listening even more intently than Gabriel, if that was possible. “She really lived?”

“What, the sphinx? She was as real,” Tigranes said, “as Oedipus—as real as the Minotaur and the Lernean Hydra—as real as Zeus and Apollo and all the rest of them. How real that is, each man must decide for himself. I, for one, am prepared to believe she was as real as you or I. This world has many strange things in it, and one must never fall into the trap of saying, ‘I have never seen it, so it follows that no man has; and as no man has ever seen it, thus it cannot be.’”

This was a lesson Gabriel had learned many times himself over the years, when his voyages to some of the world’s more obscure corners had brought him face to face with things other people might say were impossible. Why, earlier this very year he’d fought side by side in the Guatemalan jungle with a man no less than 150 years old, kept youthful by the waters of, well, if it wasn’t literally the Fountain of Youth it might as well have been. Cierra Alamanzar had been with him; they had both witnessed it. But could they tell anyone what they’d seen without being called liars or worse? They could not. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Still, a sphinx—an actual, living beast, half lion and
half human? If ever something deserved to be called impossible…

“So you’re saying,” Christos began again, “that—”

“I am saying nothing,” Tigranes corrected him. “It is Homer who said it. I merely recount what he reported.”

“And he reported,” Gabriel said, “that the island of Taprobane, source of cinnamon and spice, of coconuts and tea, also bred sphinxes for export to Egypt and Greece?”

“Not just sphinxes,” Tigranes said. “All manner of monstrous crossbreed. The men of Taprobane were the greatest breeders of the ancient world. You could not get a sphinx anywhere else—not for all the gold and rubies in the richest treasury on earth. So great men came to Taprobane in secret, and not only the rulers of Egypt and Greece, either—every kingdom from the Indies to Ultima Thule came.”

“To the cradle of fear,” Gabriel said.

“Yes. The cradle of fear. The place every king and sultan and emperor the world over sent to for his guardian beasts, his fearsome defenders of temples and labyrinths, of secrets great or small.”

“And how did this island come to develop this…specialty?” Gabriel said.

“How did the men of Arabia come to tame stallions? Who knows? Homer does not say. He merely tells us that they played this role for longer than man’s memory can tell.”

Gabriel pondered the story. No doubt it had its roots in some germ of truth, but how much or how little those roots resembled the distant branches that had flowered elaborately in the millennia since, there was no way to know. No doubt the early Sri Lankans had bred
something,
perhaps a variety of fearsome beasts, perhaps ones their visitors from far-flung lands found strange
and unfamiliar, and that fact had blossomed in the telling into a reputation for breeding monsters. Or maybe, who knows, the men of Sri Lanka might have been extraordinary sculptors, ones who traveled the world overseeing the creation of monumental statues like that of the Great Sphinx at Giza, and over time their reputation for fashioning beasts of stone and clay got transmuted into a reputation for breeding their living, breathing counterparts. It was easy to imagine how that might happen.

Still…the story, true or false, unquestionably had the power to compel the imagination, to enthrall—and perhaps not just credulous youths such as Steve McQueen here. Even a worldly sort like Lajos DeGroet might find his attention seized by all this talk of holy treasure.

“Do you have any idea what the treasure is that the inscription speaks of? And who it was that was supposed to return it to Taprobane?”

“The story goes,” Tigranes said, “that the men from Taprobane made the long voyage here themselves to collect it, and left behind them the map and the inscription you see as a reminder that they’d been. Directions, if you will, that they might be found again should the need for their services once more arise. But as for what the treasure was, no one knows. Some have speculated that it was wealth that our sphinx had received in tribute, some that it might have been a religious artifact created in her honor. Some…”

“Yes?”

“Some think it refers to some part of the sphinx herself, collected at the time of her death—her heart, perhaps, or her eyes. They were thought to be the seat of her power, you see.”

“Power? What power?”

“All sphinxes were said to have the power to destroy their enemies with a glance,” Tigranes said. “By rendering them physically paralyzed with fear.”

Gabriel thought of the Great Sphinx of Egypt, called Abul-Hôl, the Father of Fear. And his Greek counterpart, called “Strangler” after her method of putting victims to death—perhaps the ancient Greeks had meant not literal, physical strangulation but the inducement of a terror so extreme its victim couldn’t breathe?

The children of the cradle of fear, bringing fear to the four corners of the world.

Gabriel felt a chill go down his spine. Was Lajos DeGroet simply after new trophies for his collection or was he searching for something considerably more sinister—more dangerous? Certainly the amount of firepower he’d flown over to Egypt had suggested something deadlier than your average relic-hunting expedition. But what could this man possibly have hoped to find in the belly of the Sphinx? Some artifact that might give him this legendary power of the sphinx, the power to terrify with a glance? And if so…to what end? To what use would a man in possession of ungodly wealth, a private army, a staggering ego and unmatched ambition put such a power? Gabriel didn’t know the answer—he just knew he was glad DeGroet hadn’t yet found what he was looking for.

But of course now—

Damn it, now he
would
find it. The one advantage Gabriel had had was that back in Egypt DeGroet hadn’t found the coin in the statue’s mouth. He’d only found the partial map the chamber had contained, and no clue as to where the remainder might be located. But now he knew that Gabriel was on Chios…and soon his men, in searching for the three of them, would stumble upon this temple. And then the rest of the map would be his.

They heard a sound then.

It came from outside, where the tunnel began. It was the sound of a heavy rope uncoiling and slapping against the stone wall. And then a second one.

They all looked at each other.

“Come on,” Gabriel said.

“What are you going to do?” Christos whispered.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I’ll think of something.”

They retraced their steps through the tunnel, watching the white patch in the distance grow larger as they neared it. They could see the two ropes, hanging in front of the opening, and as they watched, a figure carefully let itself down on one of them in a mountaineering harness. The figure was brightly backlit, so Gabriel couldn’t make out the person’s features; he only hoped this meant he had the benefit on his side of being hidden in relative darkness. He flattened himself against the tunnel wall and drew his Colt, empty though it was. Sometimes you played a weak hand just because all your chips were in the pot and it was the hand you had.

He cocked the pistol loudly. “Set one foot in here and you’re a dead man,” Gabriel said, his voice bristling with as much self-confidence as he could project.

“That’s a hell of a way to greet an old friend,” a familiar voice replied, somewhat unsteadily.

And then Sheba unlatched herself from the rope and stepped into the tunnel.

Gabriel rushed forward. He swept her up in his arms and lifted her off her feet, buried his face in her hair. He could feel that she was trembling. “How…how did you get here?”

“A girl could grow old waiting for you to bring her a pair of shoes.”

He unzipped the pocket of his jacket, found the pair
of loafers crumpled beside Andras’ broken cell phone. He took them out. “I got you these.”

“That’s all right,” Sheba said. She took a deep breath, let it out. Her voice steadied. “I took care of myself.”

She had. She was wearing khaki pants and a ribbed white tank top under a lightweight jacket, and on her feet she had what looked like steel-toed climbing boots. Gabriel tossed the loafers aside.

“Sheba,” Gabriel said, switching back to Greek for the purpose of making introductions, “this is Christos.” The young man extended a hand, and she shook it. He seemed to be having some difficulty raising his eyes higher than the snug fabric of her tank top. “And this is Tigranes.”

“Tigranes?” she said. “That’s an interesting name. You know they say that was Homer’s name, originally, before—”

“Before his captivity, yes. I know.” Tigranes smiled. “I am surprised, however, that a young woman such as yourself, a foreigner, would know this.”

“Sheba’s a surprising young woman indeed,” Gabriel said, “and she knows practically everything.” He pulled her to one side. “I think,” he whispered in English, “you just made a friend for life.”

“Who are they?” she whispered back.

“They’re on our side. That’s all that matters.” Gabriel walked closer to the ledge, inspected the ropes. Reaching out, he tugged on each in turn. They were both solidly anchored. But thinking back to Sheba’s terror on the battlements in Hungary, he knew that climbing down the face of a cliff—even a short distance, even on a well-anchored rope—couldn’t have been easy for her.

“Where did you get the equipment?” he asked.

“Same place I picked up your trail. You’d said you were going to Avgonyma, so I followed you there—”

“Barefoot?”

“I found a pair of sandals in the house,” Sheba said. “Pretty flimsy, but good enough to get me to Avgonyma.”

“Where you found…?”

“Everything you see. The boots were the hardest to come by, but I found a merchant who had hiking and climbing gear. The most interesting thing happened while I was there haggling with him, though—these two trucks drove up and a dozen men poured out with a story of having been through a gun battle and trapped ‘the American’ on the side of the mountain.”

“The American,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t think it might be some other American?”

“Trapped on the side of a mountain after a gun battle? Not for a moment.”

“And all this equipment—how did you get your hands on it? I would have expected the Greeks to grab whatever the guy had.”

“Oh, they did,” Sheba said. “They grabbed it and loaded it into one of the trucks.”

“And?”

“And I stole the truck,” Sheba said.

“You stole the truck,” Gabriel said.

“That’s right.”

“But didn’t you say they had another truck?” Gabriel said.

“They did,” Sheba said. “What they have now is a gas tank full of sand.”

Gabriel kissed her, hard, on the lips. “You’re something else,” he said when they finally came up for air. “I owe you one.”

“You owe me two,” Sheba whispered. “But who’s counting?”

“Let’s get out of here,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go up first? Christos and I can follow and then we can pull Tigranes up—”

“You don’t need to
pull
Tigranes anywhere,” Tigranes said. “I can climb a rope, young man.”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go first, then.”

Tigranes clamped his weathered palms around the rope and was up it in a flash. Christos followed, more slowly, and then it was time for Sheba to go. She took care reattaching her safety harness.

“I appreciate what it meant for you to come here,” Gabriel told her, steadying the rope so she could climb on. “I know you’re no fan of heights.”

“Heights are okay,” Sheba said, her voice trembling again. “It’s just falling I can’t stand.” And she began the short climb, pulling herself up hand over hand.

Gabriel took one more look around, at the broken phorminx lying on the ground and the dark tunnel beyond. A more ruthless sort, he thought, might try to arrange some sort of rockfall, some way of closing up the opening forever so DeGroet’s men couldn’t find it. But DeGroet had been right, back in Giza. Even if there had been a way, he couldn’t bring himself to do it—not if it meant destroying something this precious and irreplaceable.

There’d be another way to stop DeGroet. There always was another way.

He grabbed hold of the rope with his hands and feet and climbed it to the top.