The morning rites had started!
Light glinted on the stone limbs of the god. Figures poured into the Temple, miniature and far away. They must see her! But the hymns, sonorous and gigantic, rose like floodwater, and she suddenly thought that if she fell, she would drown in the sound of it.
Snake was pulling her up. Stone against her arm, against her cheek. She clenched her other fist tightly at her side. Another hand came down to help. Then another. Then she was lying among the metal pipes, and he was prying her fingers from his wrist. He tugged her to her feet, and for a moment she looked out over the crowded hall.
Nervous energy contracted coldly along her body, and the sudden sight of the great drop filled her eyes and her head. She staggered. Snake caught her and at last helped her back to the ladder. “We’ve got it!” she said to him before they started down. She breathed deeply. Then she checked in her palm to see if it was still there. It was. Again she looked out over the people. Light on the upturned faces made them look like pearls on the dark floor. Exaltation suddenly burst in her shoulders, flooded her legs and arms, and for a moment washed the pain away. Snake, with one hand on her shoulder, was grinning. “We’ve got it!” she said again.
They went down the ladder inside the statue’s skull. Snake preceded her out the ear. He reached around, caught the cord, and let himself down to the shoulder.
She hesitated, then put the jewel in her mouth, and followed him. Standing beside him once more, she removed it and rubbed her shoulders. “Boy, am I going to have some charley horse by tomorrow,” she said. “Do me a favor and untie my bag for me?”
Snake untied the parcel from the end of the cord, and together they climbed down the biceps and back over the forearm to the trapdoor in the wrist.
She glanced down at the worshipers. “I wonder which one is old Dunderhead?” But Snake was taking the jewel from her hand. She let him have it and watched him raise it up above his head.
He raised the jewel and the pearls disappeared as heads bent all through the Temple.
“That’s the ticket!” Argo grinned. “Come on.” But Snake did not go into the tunnel. Instead he walked around the fist, took hold of one of the bronze wheat stems, and slid down through an opening between thumb and forefinger. “That way?” asked Argo. “Oh, well, I guess so. You know I’m going to write an epic about this. In alliterative verse. You know what it is, alliterative verse?”
But Snake had already gone. She followed him, clutching the great stems with her knees. He was waiting for her at the leaves. Nestled there, they gazed once more at the fascinated congregation.
Again Snake held aloft the jewel, and again heads bowed. The hymn began to repeat itself, individual words lost in the sonority of the hall. The tones drew out, beat against themselves in echo, filled their ears, made her wrists and the back of her neck chill. They started down the bottom length of the stem, coming quickly. When they stood at last on the base, she put her hand on his shoulder and looked across the altar rail. The congregation pressed close, although she did not recognize an individual face. The mass of people stood there, enormous and familiar. As Snake started forward, holding up the jewel, the people fell back. Snake climbed over the altar rail, then helped her over.
Her shoulders were beginning to hurt now, and the enormity of the theft started chills up and down, up and down her back. The altar steps, as she put her foot down, were awfully cold.
They walked forward again, and the last note of the hymn echoed to silence, filling the hall with the roaring hush of hundreds breathing.
Simultaneously, she and Snake got the urge to look back at the height of Hama behind them. All three eyes were shut. A hundred dark robes rustled about them as they started forward again.
There was a spotlight on them, she realized. That was why the people, beyond the circular effulgence around them, seemed so dim. Blood beat at the bottom of her tongue. They walked forward among shadowed faces, among parting cloaks and robes.
The last of the figures stepped aside from the Temple door, and she could see the sunlight out in the garden. They stood a moment. Snake held high the jewel. Then they ran from the door and over the bright steps.
The hymn began again behind them, as if their departure were a signal. Music poured after them. When they reached the bottom step, they whirled like beasts, expecting the congregation to come welling darkly out after them.
There was only the music. It flowed into the light that washed around them, a transparent river, a sea.
Over the music they heard a brittle chirping from the trees. Fixed with fear, they watched the Temple door. No one came out. Snake suddenly stood back and grinned.
She scratched her red hair, shifted her weight, and looked at Snake. “I guess they’re not coming.” She sounded almost disappointed. Then she giggled. “I guess we got it.”
“Don’t move,” repeated Hama Incarnate.
“Now look…” began Urson.
“You are perfectly safe,” the god continued, “unless you do something foolish. You have shown great wisdom. Continue to show it. I have a lot to explain to you.”
“Like what?” asked Geo.
“I’ll start with the lizard.” The god smiled.
“The what?” asked Iimmi.
“The singing lizards,” said Hama. “You walked through a grove of trees just a few minutes ago. You had just been through the most frightening time in your lives. Suddenly you heard a singing in the trees. What was it?”
“I thought it was a bird,” Iimmi said.
“But why a bird?” asked the god.
“Because that’s what a bird sounds like,” stated Urson impatiently. “Who needs an old lizard singing to them on a morning like this?”
“Your second point is much better than your first,” said the god. “You do not need a lizard, but you did need a bird. A bird means spring, life, good luck, cheerfulness. To you. You think of a bird singing and you think thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years. Poets have written of it in every language: Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel 2X4 in New English. You expected a bird because after what you had been through, you needed to hear a bird. Lizards run from under wet rocks, scurry over gravestones. A lizard is not what you needed.”
“So what do lizards have to do with why we’re here?” demanded Urson.
“Why are you here?” repeated the god, subtly changing Urson’s question. “There are many reasons, I am sure. You tell me some of them.”
“You have done wrongs to Argo…at least to Argo of Leptar,” Geo explained. “We have come to undo them. You have kidnapped the young Argo, as well as her grandmother, apparently. We have come to take her back. You have misused the jewels. We have come to take the last one from you.”
Hama smiled. “Only a poet could see the wisdom in such honesty. I thought I might have to wheedle to get that much out of you.”
“I was pretty certain you knew that much already,” Geo said.
“True.” Then his tone changed. “Do you know how the jewels work?”
They shook their heads.
“They are basically very simple mechanical contrivances that are difficult in execution but simple in concept. I will explain. Human thoughts, it was discovered after the Great Fire during the first glorious years of the City of New Hope, did not produce waves similar to radio waves; but the electrical synapse pattern, it was found, could affect radio waves, in the same way a mine detector reacts to the existence of metal.”