The Mask of Destiny (32 page)

Finally, the crashing and banging stopped. An eerie stillness settled in the cave. Gerald was flat on his back, breathing hard. His shaking hand found its way to his headlamp and he switched it on. The beam barely cut through the dust, like a lighthouse in fog. Then a raspy little tongue started giving him sandpaper kisses on the cheek. The kitten crawled onto Gerald's shoulder and nuzzled his chin, purring with delight.

Gerald lifted it onto his chest and looked around. There was no way to tell where the opening had been. All about him were prison walls of impenetrable rock.

He shuffled backwards to find space to sit up. But in the darkness he didn't see the sinkhole behind him.

He toppled in.

Gerald hit the water on his back. The air was knocked from his lungs. The kitten was jolted from his grasp, and it disappeared into the total darkness that consumed them both.

His torch blinked out. The rushing flow of water whipped it from his head. He flailed his arms, trying to right himself and search for the kitten. He was being carried along at a frantic pace in an underground stream. All around was dark but he could sense the roof of the tunnel whipping past not far from his head. A low-hanging rock and he would be knocked senseless. He'd drown in seconds. The stream twisted, buffeting him against the smooth rock walls as it tore along its subterranean path. Gerald was swallowing water with almost every breath, as he was jostled and pounded from side to side.

Finally he was jettisoned over a low waterfall and he tumbled into a rock pool. He found his feet and stood up in the waist-deep water. The sound of rushing water filled the black void around him.

Then came a voice.

‘Gerald!'

It was Sam. The cry seemed to come from below.

A soft light appeared, just enough for Gerald to see he was standing behind a natural weir; a rock ledge was holding back the stream. Water poured through a break in the rocks to Gerald's right, shooting out in a massive arc into the darkness.

Gerald waded up to the ledge and called out. ‘I'm up here,' he cried.

‘Jump!' It was Ruby's voice this time. ‘It's okay— there's a deep pool at the bottom.'

Gerald squinted into the darkness. A single beam swept across the surface of an inky pool about eight metres below.

‘Just let the waterfall carry you over,' Ruby called up.

Gerald had jumped from the high board at his local swimming pool only once. It hadn't ended well: a wedgie had almost split him up the middle, like an English muffin.

‘Come on,' Sam called. ‘You have to see what we've found.'

Gerald took one more look over the edge, then pushed into the current that led to the break in the dam. He was swept up in an eddy that spun him in circles and spat him into the void. The flight into black air was as close as Gerald was ever likely to get to a space walk. Time seemed to stop. He had no sense of which way was up and no notion of when he might hit the water.

He landed bum-first and disappeared under the surface, thinking he'd sink forever. He kicked hard towards what he hoped was fresh air, and made for the dancing light at the edge of the pool.

Hands reached out and dragged him up a shallow rock shelf and onto a pebbly beach.

He coughed out a mouthful of spring water. ‘Sam? Ruby? Nico? Is everyone all right?'

The beam from Sam's headlamp lit up Ruby and Nico's smiling faces and a bedraggled kitten in Sam's arms.

Gerald reached around and plucked at his pants. ‘Yep,' he muttered. ‘Giant wedgie.'

Ruby threw her arms around his neck. The embrace took him by surprise. For a moment, he stood there, mute and awkward. ‘Uh, so,' he said, finally, ‘clothes clean enough for you now?'

Ruby eased her grip and let her hands slip down till she held Gerald by his fingertips. ‘What took you so long?' she said.

‘Jarvis turned up and started using me for target practice,' Gerald said. ‘I only just got through the hole when there was a massive cave-in. We won't be getting out that way.'

Sam adjusted the lamp on his head, widening the beam as far as it would go. ‘We're down to one light,' he said. ‘But it should be enough to have a look around.'

‘A look around at what?' Gerald said.

‘Well, if you can stop groping my sister for long enough,' Sam said, spinning him around, ‘you'll probably want to see this.'

It took a moment for Gerald's eyes to adjust as the light swept up a gentle slope from the rock pool. Then he almost swallowed his tongue.

‘What?' Gerald managed to say. ‘This…this can't be true.' His mind was whirring too fast to process the information his eyes were feeding it.

Gerald took an unsteady pace forwards and stopped.

Stretched out before him, as far as the light could penetrate into the gloom, was the ancient city of Delphi— intact and untouched for the past sixteen hundred years.

Chapter 26

T
he spring bubbled and frothed and swirled past the stone wall at the lower reaches of the city, then disappeared into a shallow cave mouth at the far end of the rock pool. Sam's light provided only faint illumination but it was enough to make out the lower section of an immense metropolis that stretched up a steep incline into the shadows.

Of all the wonders that Gerald had seen on his holiday—the buried chamber under Beaconsfield, the lost city of Mamallapuram in India, the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel—the sight before him topped them all.

‘This is incredible.' Gerald's voice was barely audible. ‘What do you think, Nico?' he asked. ‘You're the local.' Gerald couldn't bring himself to ask the question: Is this the ancient city of Delphi? It was too insane to put into words.

Nico was keeping close to Sam as they stepped onto a broad expanse of flagstones that led to the city gates. His mouth hung open.

‘The Sacred Way,' he said. ‘We learned about it in school.' He reached out a hand and grabbed the strap of Sam's backpack for support. ‘But the pictures in our books were never as beautiful as this.'

They walked through a marketplace that was preserved as if snap frozen in time. Stone countertops were stacked with pots and cookware, displayed as if waiting for the doors to open for the summer sales. Awnings hung over some of the shops. Gerald reached up to a section of cloth and it turned to dust at his touch.

‘Look over here,' Ruby said, pulling Sam to a tiny shopfront. She grabbed the back of his head and directed the light onto a tray on a stone pedestal.

‘They're silver pendants.' Ruby picked up an oval-shaped piece with a tiny loop at the top for a chain to thread through. She rubbed her thumb across the surface, removing a millennium of grime. The trinket shone faintly in the light. Ruby squinted as she tried to make out the design engraved on the front. ‘An archer,' she said. ‘Apollo, I guess.'

They passed shop after shop. Everything was cloaked in dust but laid out undisturbed as if all the owners had ducked out for a lunch that had lasted sixteen hundred years.

They clung together as they entered the main gates, and gazed along the boulevard that led into the city. Sam's torchlight brushed across scores of statues on pedestals lining the Sacred Way. The unblinking eyes of the bronze honour guard stared down at Gerald, Ruby, Sam and Nico as they made their way forward.

The only sound was the plashing of the spring and the crunching of shoes over the grit-dusted paving stones. Gerald's eyes followed the bobbing light from Sam's torch. The beam played on marble columns and towering figurines. What must have once been grassed terraces planted with olive trees now lay as dusty moonscapes, cut off from the sun for centuries. Gerald crept on, uncomfortably aware of the bronze faces either side of them; they seemed to be glaring down with disapproval.

‘Anyone else feeling a little creeped out just now?' Gerald said.

‘It smells like Sam's shoe cupboard,' Ruby said, wrinkling her nose. ‘What do you think happened here?'

No one had an answer.

They passed huge bronze castings of ancient generals on horseback, and one of a bull. Chariots and spear-wielding warriors heralded their arrival in haunting silence. The skin on the back of Gerald's neck crawled as if it was alive with centipedes. He couldn't shake the feeling that every one of the statues around them was about to burst into life.

They came to a single marble column in the middle of the road. Several tall earthenware pots circled its base.

Ruby craned her neck to look up to the top of the pillar, about four metres in the air. ‘What do you think this is?' she said.

Nico ran a finger across the sealed top of one of the pots and rubbed it against his thumb. He whispered something to Sam.

‘Hey Gerald,' Sam said. ‘Do you still have that flint you bought for the camping trip?'

Gerald put his right hand to his throat. After all they'd been through, he was surprised to find the black leather cord was still around his neck. He pulled it over his head and gave it to Sam.

‘What are you going to do?' Gerald asked.

‘Nico wants to test an idea.'

Their young guide had his knife out and was running the blade around the rim of one of the pots, easing out a clay stopper the size of his fist. He pulled it free and, with Sam's help, tipped the pot and poured its contents into a shell-shaped cup on the side of the column.

‘Oil,' Sam said as they put the empty pot back on the ground. ‘Now let's see if this thing works.' He pulled the striker from the flint and dashed it along the side of the box. A nest of sparks erupted into the cup and a second later light glowed from the top of the column.

‘Brilliant!' Sam said. ‘Ancient street lighting.'

The light peeled back the darkness and bathed the area in a sepia haze.

‘Nice one, Nico,' Ruby said. ‘Look, there's another lamppost up here. Come on, Gerald. Give us a hand.'

Together, Ruby and Gerald hauled one of the oil pots to the next column. Soon another flower of light bloomed. The glow spread, and Sam let out a sharp gasp. ‘Will you look at that…'

The lamppost stood opposite a tall building with two stout columns supporting a small portico. Gerald looked through a square window in the front wall to see a chest piled high with gold coins.

‘Oh my gosh,' he breathed.

‘That's right, billionaire boy,' Sam said, making a dash for the door to the building. ‘It's our turn to be rich now.'

Gerald, Ruby and Nico joined Sam in the doorway. The walls were covered with frescos of maidens bathing in tree-lined streams. The painted faces gazed into the room at rows of golden ornaments arranged on oriental rugs across the floor. Chests of coins sat beside piles of glittering gems the size of quails' eggs.

Ruby plunged a hand deep into a bowl of pearls; the spheres dropped through her fingers in a lustrous waterfall. ‘Incredible,' she whispered.

For the next hour they walked along the Sacred Way, lighting street lamps and revealing more and more treasuries as they went.

‘This is truly extraordinary,' Ruby said. She was holding a solid gold statuette of an archer. They were inside the largest of the treasuries, a long building outside a walled-off section of the city. Every space inside was piled high with offerings to the Oracle of Delphi and to Apollo. ‘That this place has been buried here for—what?—sixteen hundred years. And look at all this stuff. It's exactly the way it was in ancient times.'

‘I guess there's no wind down here to blow the dust around, so anything inside a building is going to be preserved,' Gerald said. He was looking at a carving of a white bull the size of a house brick. ‘What is this? Ivory, do you think?'

Ruby gazed out the doorway to the path of lights that led down to the spring; it looked like a string of charms on a giant bracelet. She sat back on her heels and a thoughtful expression settled on her face.

‘I don't get it,' she said. ‘If this is the ancient city of Delphi, what are the ruins back in town?'

Gerald settled into a pile of silk cushions, each as perfect as the day it was woven. ‘The ruins are a twin,' he said.

‘A twin?'

‘Yep. Just like Castor and Pollux: one living above the ground and the other in the underworld. That's what was going through my mind when Jarvis took a shot at us. Remember the tour guide in the museum saying the cult of the twins was really popular around here.'

‘Do you think the locals buried the city to protect the treasure from the emperor?'

‘Nope,' Gerald said. ‘I think my thieving ancestors did that.'

‘What? Quintus and his sons buried the entire city of Delphi?'

‘Sure. Think about it. I couldn't figure how my rotten relatives could move this much treasure away from here. It would take a thousand horse carts and forever to do it. The trick is, they didn't move it. They left it right here.'

‘And buried it?'

‘It sits in a natural valley in the hillside. The Romans were good at engineering. Who's to say they couldn't devise some sort of structure held up by some props. Grow some grass across the top and you'd never know it was here. Then you build a fake Delphi further down the valley.'