Then she went to the closet.
She pulled down a white tunic, wriggled into it, and tied the leather strap around her waist. Then she looked at the clock. “Yikes!” she said quietly, ran out the door, almost slammed it to behind her. But she whirled, caught it on her palms before it banged, then with gingerly care closed it the final centimeter. Are you trying to get caught? she asked herself as she tiptoed to the next door.
She opened it and looked in. Dunderhead looks cute when he’s asleep, she thought. The cord on the floor ran from under the table by the Priest’s bed, over the stones, carefully following the zigzag crevices. The end lay in the corner of the doorsill. You really couldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it, which had more or less been the idea when she’d put it there last night before the priests returned from vespers. The far end was tied in a knot of her own invention to the electric plug of his alarm clock. Dunderhead had an annoying habit of resetting his clock every evening (in her plans for this morning she had catalogued all his habitual actions, this one observed three nights running as she hung upside down from the bulky stone portcullis outside his window) to make sure the red second hand still swept away the minutes.
She tugged on the string and saw it leap from the crevices to a straight line. It lifted from the floor as she drew tighter. The plug blipped quietly onto the floor, and the string went slack.
She pulled the string again until the slack left, and raised the end a few inches from the floor. With her free hand she plucked the cord and watched the vibration run up and down. The knot’s invention was ingenious. At the vibration, two opposed loops shook away from a third, and a four-millimeter length of rubber band that had been sewn in tightened and released a fourth loop from a small length of number-four-gauge wire with a holding tonsure of three quarters of a gram, and the opposing vibration returning up the cord loosed a similar apparatus on the other side of the plug. The knot fell away, and she wound the string quickly around her hand. She stood up and closed the door. The oiled lock was perfectly silent. In fact the doorknob was still just the slightest bit greasy, she noted. Careless.
She went back to her room. Sunlight from the high window fell over the table. Glancing at her own clock, she saw it was still very early in the morning. She took the parts of the motor up. “I guess we try you out today? No?” She grinned. “Yes!” She put the parts in the paper bag, strode out of the room, and slammed the…whirled and caught it once more. “Gnnnnnnn,” she repeated. “Do you want to get caught?” Now she frowned. “Yes. And remember that too. Or you’ll never get through this.”
As she walked down the hall, she heard through one of the windows the chirp of a blue lizard from the garden. “Just the sound I wanted to hear.” Her smile came back. “Good sign.”
Turning into the Temple, she started down the side aisle. The great black columns passed her. Suddenly she stopped. Something had moved between the columns on the other side, swift as a bird’s shadow. At least she thought it had. “Remember,” she reminded herself, “you have guilt feelings about this whole thing, you want to get caught, and you could very easily be manufacturing delusions to scare yourself out of going through with it.” She passed two more columns. And saw it again. “Or,” she went on, “you could be purposefully ignoring the very obvious fact that there is somebody over there. So watch it.”
Then she saw it again; somebody with no clothes on (for all practical purposes) was sneaking between the pillars. And he had four arms. That made her start to think of something else, but the thought as it arrowed toward recognition suddenly got deflected, turned completely about, and jammed into her brain: he was staring directly at her, and she was afraid.
If he starts walking toward me, she thought, I’m going to be scared out of my ears. So I better start walking toward him. Besides, I want to see what he looks like. She left the columns. Glancing quickly both ways, she saw that the Temple was deserted save for them.
He’s a kid, she thought, three quarters of the way across. My age, she added, and again a foreign thought tried to intrude itself on her but never made it: he was coming toward her now. At last he stopped before her. His muscles lay like wire under his brown skin; black hair massed low on his forehead, and his eyes gleamed deep beneath the black shrub of brows.
She gulped. “What are you doing here? Do you know somebody could catch you in here and get mad as hell? If somebody comes along, they might even think you were trying to steal Hama’s eye.” I shouldn’t have said that, because he moved funny. “You better get out of here because everybody will be up here in a half hour for morning services.”
At that news, he suddenly darted past her and sprinted toward the altar.
“Hey!” she called and ran after him.
Snake vaulted the brass altar rail.
“Wait a minute!” she called, catching up. “Wait, will you!”
Snake turned as she slung her leg across the brass bar. “Look, so I gave away my hand. But that was only guilt feelings. You gave yours away too, though.”
Snake frowned, tilted his head, then grinned.
“We’ll help each other, see. You want it too, don’t you?” She pointed up to the head of the statue towering above them. “So let’s cooperate. I’ll take it for a little while. Then you can have it.” He was listening, she saw; she guessed her strategy was working. “We’ll help each other. Shake on it?” She stuck out her right hand.
All four hands reached forward.
Whoops, she thought, I hope he’s not offended….
But the four hands grasped hers, and she added her left to the juncture. “All right. Come on. Now, I had all this figured out last night. We don’t have much time. Let’s go around…” But he reached out and took the coil of string from where she had stuck it in her belt. He walked to where the stalks of wheat spired from the altar base up through Hama’s fist. With the twine in one hand, he grabbed a stalk with the other three and, hand over hand over hand, hoisted himself up to where the first broad metal leaves branched from the stalk. His dirty feet swung out frogwise; then he caught the stem with his toes and at last hoisted himself to the frond. He looked down at her.
“I can’t climb up there,” she said. “I don’t have your elevation power.”
Snake shrugged.
“Oh, damn,” she said. “I’ll do it my way.” She ran across the altar to the great foot of the statue. Because he sat cross-legged, Hama’s foot was on his side. Using toes for steps, she clambered to the dark bulge of the deity’s divine bunion. She made her way across the ankle, up the shin, and back down the black thigh, till she stood at the crevice where the leg and torso met.
Out beyond the great knee, Snake regarded her from his perch in the groin of the yellow leaf. They were at equal height.
“Yoo-hoo!” She waved. “Meet you at the clavicle.” Then she stuck her tongue out. The stylized ripples in Hama’s loincloth afforded her another ten feet. The bulge in the contrastingly realistic belly of the god made a treacherous ledge along which she inched until she arrived at the cavernous navel. Her hands left wet prints on the black stone.
Glancing out, she saw that Snake had gotten to the next cluster of leaves.
The god’s belly button, from this intimate distance, revealed itself as a circular door, about four feet in diameter. She dried her hands on her blouse, crouched before the door, and began to work the combination. She missed the first number twice, dried her hands off, and began again. According to the plans in the main safe of the Temple (on which she had first practiced combination breaking), there was a ladder behind this door that led up into the statue. She remembered it clearly and saved her life by doing so.