The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (54 page)

“Yes,” I said. The bey stuck the hold strip in her mouth.

“Ever since I saw the treasure, I…”

I stood up. “You’d kill a harmless bey for a goddamned blue vase?” I said angrily. “When you’ll get the treasure anyway? You can take blood samples. You can prove the team was poisoned. The Commission will
award you the treasure.”

“The Commission will close the planet.”

“What difference will that make?”

“They will destroy the treasure,” Lacau said, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

“What are you talking about? They won’t let the Sandalman or his cronies anywhere near the treasure. They’ll see to it nobody damages the merchandise. They’ll take their own sweet time about it, but you’ll get your
treasure.”

“You haven’t seen
the treasure;” he said. “You…” He put up his hands in a gesture of despair. “You don’t understand.”

“Then maybe you’d better show me this wonderful treasure,” I said.

His shoulders slumped. “All right,” he said, and everything in me said: Story.

He locked me in the cage again while he hooked the respirator back up to Borchardt. I didn’t ask to go with him. I had
known Borchardt almost as long as I had Howard, although I hadn’t liked him as well. But I wouldn’t have wished this on him. It was nearly noon. The sun was practically overhead and hot enough to burn a hole right through the plastic. Lacau came back in half an hour, looking worse than ever.

He sat down on a packing crate and put his hands up to his head. “Borchardt’s dead,” he said: “He died
while we were in with Evelyn.”

“Let me out of the cage,” I said.

“Borchardt had a theory about the beys,” Lacau said. “About their curiosity. He looked on it as a curse.”

“Curse,” Evelyn’s bey had said, huddled against the wall.

“Let me out of the cage,” I said.

“He thought that when the suhundulim came the beys were curious about them and the ‘snakes underneath,’ so curious they let them
stay. And the suhundulim enslaved them. Borchardt maintained the beys were a great people with a highly developed civilization until the suhundulim came and took Colchis away from them.”

“Let me out of the cage, Lacau.”

He bent over and dug down into the packing case beside him. “This could never have been made by a suhundulim,” he said, and pulled it out, spilling plastic bubbles everywhere.
“It’s spun silver strung with ceramic beads so tiny you can’t see them except under a microscope. No suhundulim could make that.”

“No,” I said. It did not look like beads strung on a silver wire. It looked like a cloud, a majestic desert thunderhead. When Lacau turned it in the light coming through the plastic roof, it shaded into rose and lavender. It was beautiful.

“A suhundulim could make
this, however,” he said, and turned it around so I could see the other side. It was mashed flat, a dull gray mass. “One of the Sandalman’s bearers dropped it bringing it out of the tomb.”

He laid it carefully back in its nest of plastic bubbles and taped the box shut. He walked over and stood in front of the cage. “They will close the planet,” he said.
“Even if we could keep it out of the Sandalman’s
hands, the Commission will take a year, two years, to make a decision, maybe longer.”

“Let me out,” I said.

He turned and opened the double doors of the refrigerator and stepped back so I could see what was inside. “The electricity goes off all the time. Sometimes it stays off for days,” he said.

From the moment I had intercepted Lacau’s message, I had known it was the story of the century.
I had felt it in my bones. And here it was.

It was a statue of a girl. A child, twelve maybe. No older than that. She sat on a block of solid beaten silver. She was wearing a white and blue dress with trailing fringes, and she was leaning against the side wall of the refrigerator, her hand and forearm flat against it and her head leaning on her hand, as if she were overcome by some great grief.
I couldn’t see her face.

Her black hair was bound in the same silver stuff the cloud had been made of, and around her neck was a collar of the blue faience etched in silver. One knee was slightly forward, and I could see her foot in a silver shoe. She was made of wax, soft and white as skin, and I knew that if she could somehow turn her sorrowing face and look at me, it would be the face I had
waited all my life to see. I clutched the wire of the cage and could not get my breath.

“The beys’ civilization was very advanced,” Lacau said. “Arts, science, embalming.” He smiled at my uncomprehending frown. “She’s not a statue. She’s a bey princess.

“The embalming process turned the tissues to wax.” He leaned over her. “The tomb was in a cave that was naturally refrigerated, but we had to
bring her down from the Spine. Howard sent me back to try to find temp control equipment and coolants. This was all I could find. It was out at the bottling plant,” Lacau said, and lifted the blue-and-white fringe of her trailing skirt. “We didn’t try to move her till the last day. The Sandalman’s bearers bumped her against the door of the tomb getting her out,” he said.

The wax of her leg was
flattened and pushed up. Nearly half of the black femur was exposed.

No wonder Evelyn’s first word to me had been, “Hurry.” No wonder Lacau had laughed when I told him the Commission would keep the treasure safe. The investigation would take a year or more, and she would sit here with the electricity flickering on and off.

“We have to get her
off the planet,” I said, and my hands clutched the
mesh so hard the wire cut nearly through to the bone.

“Yes,” Lacau said, in a tone that told me what I should have known.

“The Sandalman won’t let her off Colchis,” I said. “He’s afraid the Commission will try to take the planet away from him.” And I had burned a story about the Commission to scare him. “They won’t do anything. They’re not going to give Colchis to a bunch of ten-year-olds who
keep sticking things in their mouths, no matter who was here first.”

“I know,” Lacau said.

“He poisoned the team,” I said, and turned to look at the princess, her beautiful face that I could not see turned to the wall in some ancient grief. He had killed the team, and when he got back from the north with his army he would kill us. And destroy the princess. “Where’s your burn equipment?” I said.

“The Sandalman has it.”

“Then he knows when the ship will be here.
We’ve got to get her out of here.”

“Yes,” Lacau said. He let go of the blue-and-white fringe, and it fell across her foot. He shut the door of the refrigerator.

“Let me out of the cage,” I said. “I’ll help you. Whatever you’re going to do, I’ll help you.”

He looked at me a long minute, as if he were trying to decide whether he could trust me. “I’ll let you out,” he said finally. “But not yet.”

It was dark again before he came to get me. He had come through the center area twice. The first time he got a shovel from the jumble of equipment stacked against the cargo cartons. The second time he opened the refrigerator again to get out an injection kit for Evelyn’s shot, and I stood in the cage and stared at the princess, waiting for her to turn her head. Sitting there afterwards, waiting
for Lacau to finish doing whatever it was he did not trust me to help him with, I was surprised to see that the wire of the cage had not mashed and flattened my hands like tallow.

It had been dark over an hour when Lacau came and let me out. He had a coil of yellow extension cords with him, and the shovel. He leaned it against the pile of flattened cartons, dumped the cords on the floor beside
it, and unlocked the cage.

“We have to move
the refrigerator,” he said. “We’ll put it against the back wall of the tent so we can load it into the ship as soon as it lands.”

I went over to the heap of cords and began to untangle them. I didn’t ask him where he’d gotten them. One of them looked like the cord to Evelyn’s respirator. We plugged the cords together, and then Lacau unplugged the refrigerator.
My grip on the cord tightened as he did it, even though I knew he was going to plug it into the extension cord and hook it up again and the whole process wasn’t going to take more than thirty seconds. He plugged it in carefully, as if he were afraid the lights would go off when he did it, but they didn’t even flicker.

They dimmed a little when we picked the refrigerator up between us, but it
weighed less than I thought it would. As soon as we shuffled past the first row of packing crates, I saw what Lacau had been doing at least part of the day. He’d moved as many boxes as he could to the east side of the tent and up against the wall, leaving a passage wide enough for us to get through with the refrigerator and a space for it against the wall of the tent. He’d hooked a light up, too.
The extension cord didn’t quite reach, and we had to set the refrigerator down a few meters from the wall of the tent. It was still close enough. If the ship got here in time.

“Is the Sandalman here yet?” I said. Lacau was walking rapidly back to the center area, and I wasn’t at all sure I should follow him. I wasn’t going to let myself be locked in that cage for the Sandalman’s soldiers to find.
I stayed where I was.

“Do you have a recorder?” Lacau said. He stopped and looked at me. “Do you have a recorder?”

“No,” I said.

“I want you to record Evelyn’s testimony,” he said. “We’ll need it if the Commission is called in.”

“I don’t have a recorder,” I said.

“I won’t lock you in again,” he said. He reached in his pocket and tossed me something. It was the handlock to the cage. “If you
don’t trust me, you can give it to Evelyn’s bey.”

“There’s a record button on the translator,” I said.

And we went in and interviewed Evelyn and she told me there was a curse and I didn’t believe her. And the Sandalman came.

Lacau seemed unconcerned
that the Sandalman was camped on the ridge above us. “I’ve unscrewed all the light bulbs,” he said, “and they can’t see into this room. I put a
tarp on the roof this afternoon.” He sat back down next to Evelyn. “They have lanterns, but they won’t try coming down that ridge at night.”

“What happens when the sun comes up?” I said.

“I think she’s coming around,” he said. “Turn the recorder on. Evelyn, we’ve got a recorder here. We need you to tell us what happened. Can you talk?”

“Last day,” Evelyn said.

“Yes,” Lacau said. “This is the
last day. The ship will be here in the morning to take us home. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

“Last day,” she said again. “In tomb. Loading princess. Cold.”

“What was that last word?” Lacau said.

“It sounded like, ‘cold,’” I said.

“It was cold in the tomb, wasn’t it, Evie? Is that what you mean?”

She tried to shake her head. “Coke,” she said. “Sandalman. Here. Must be thirsty. Coke.”

“The
Sandalman gave you a Coke? Was the poison in the Coke? Is that how he poisoned the team?”

“Yes,” she said, and it came out like a sigh, as if that was what she had been trying to tell us all along.

“What kind of poison was it, Evelyn?”

“Blue.”

Lacau jerked around to look at me. “Did she say, ‘blood’?”

I shook my head. “Ask her again,” I said.

“Blood,” Evelyn said clearly. “Keep her.”

“What’s
she talking about?” I said. “A kheper bite can’t kill you. It doesn’t even make you sick.”

“No,” Lacau said, “but enough kheper poison could. I should have seen the similarities, the replacement of the cell structure, the waxiness. The ancient beys used a concentrated distillation of kheper-infected blood for embalming. ‘Beware the curse of kings and khepers.’ How do you suppose the Sandalman
figured it out?”

Maybe he hadn’t had to, I thought. Maybe he’d had the poison all along. Maybe his ancestors, landing on Colchis, had been as curious as the beys they were going to steal a planet from. “Show us how your embalming process works,” they might have said, and then, when they’d seen the obvious benefits, they’d said to the smartest of the beys, just like the Sandalman had said to Howard
and Evelyn and the rest of the team, “Here. Have a Coke. You must be thirsty.”

I thought of the beautiful
princess, leaning against her hand. And Evelyn. And Evelyn’s bey, sitting in front of the photosene flame, all unaware.

“Is it contagious?” I said for the last time. “Would Evelyn’s blood be poisonous, too?”

Lacau blinked at me as if he could not make out what I was saying. “Only if you
drank it, I think,” he said after a minute. He looked down at Evelyn. “She was asking me to poison the bey,” he said. “But I couldn’t understand her. It was before you got here with the translator.”

“You’d have done it, wouldn’t you?” I said. “If you’d known what the poison was, that her blood was poisonous, you’d have killed the bey to save the treasure?”

He wasn’t listening to me. He was looking
up at the roof of the tent where the tarp didn’t quite cover. “Is it getting light?” he said.

“Not for another hour,” I said.

“No,” he said, “I would have done almost anything for her.” His voice was so full of longing it embarrassed me to listen to him. “But not that.”

He gave Evelyn a second shot and blew out the lamp. After a few minutes he said, “There are three injection kits left. In
the morning I’m going to give Evelyn all of them.” I wondered if he was looking at me the way he had when I was in the cage, wondering if he could trust me to do what had to be done.

“Will it kill her?” I said.

“I hope so,” he said. “There’s no way we can move her.”

“I know,” I said, and we sat in the darkness for a long time.

“Two days,” he said, and his voice was full of that same longing.
“The incubation period was only two days.”

And then we sat there not saying anything, waiting for the sun to come up.

When it did, Lacau took me into what had been Howard’s room, where he had cut a flap-like window in the plastic wall that faced the ridge, and I saw what he had done. The Sandalman’s soldiers lined the top of the ridge. They were too far away to be able to see the snakes rippling
across their faces, but I knew they were looking down at the dome, and on the sand in front of us, laid end to end, were the bodies.