“Please,” she cried, “please.”
I tried again, stretching as far as I could, but again our fingertips just brushed and this time she lost what balance she had and started to fall and then she screamed and somehow I lunged and caught her left wrist with my right hand. I held on until I got my left hand around her wrist. I had her then, but I knew it wouldn’t last long because her wrist was wet and it was beginning to slip through my hands.
“Pull, damn you,” I yelled and I began to feel them lifting us slowly, but not fast enough because all I now had was her hand and it was beginning to go. “Faster,” I screamed and they tried and her nails dug into my palms as she fought against dying.
There wasn’t anything I could do. I looked into her face which was full of mute pleading that begged me not to let her go, but all I had were her fingers now and they began to slip away. And then someone landed on my back, his legs locked around my waist. It was the Italian and he grabbed Gordana’s wrist just as her fingers slipped from my grasp. Using his legs to climb with, he worked his way up over my hips dragging Gordana after him. I could hear Knight and Wisdom swear as they pulled on my legs which now supported both Gordana and the Italian. Then I was hanging only by one leg as someone grabbed the Italian and pulled him up. I closed my eyes again.
“Who’s got me?” I called.
“I have, I think,” Wisdom said.
“Could you sort of pull me up, if it’s not too much bother?”
“Wait a second.”
“Stick your other leg up,” Knight said.
“I thought it was,” I said and felt hands on my right ankle. They began to pull.
“How’s the view?” Wisdom said.
“Vertiginous,” I said, proud that I could think of the word, and then I was over the edge and lying in the snow next to Gordana. Her face was turned toward me and she was crying.
“Thank you, Philip,” she said softly. “Thank you so much.”
“I almost dropped you,” I said.
“You were very brave.”
I smiled a little and tried to remember if anyone had ever told me that before.
25
We had stopped. My pony jerked his head and snorted again. The flashlight bobbed its way back toward me and the Italian caught the bridle of my pony.
“This is it,” he said.
“What?”
“You walk from here.”
I slid down from the horse into a couple of feet of snow. My feet were numb.
“I don’t see a hell of a lot,” I said.
The Italian shined his flashlight ahead and it revealed a large gray boulder. “You go around that rock and up about fifty feet and you’re there.”
“The castle?”
He sighed as if he were sick of the whole mess. I was ready to agree with him. “It’s not a castle. It’s just part of what’s left of a castle, one of the main halls. They turned it into a kind of a hunting lodge and there’re a lot of rooms upstairs that they taught the kids in when it was a school. We just used the main hall.”
“Where’s Killingsworth?” I said.
“By the fire.”
“Just sitting there?”
“You can untie him.”
“What about the horses?”
“What about them?”
“I was wondering how we’d get back.”
The Italian shined his light in my face. Then he flicked it off. I was blinded — or might as well have been. “How you get back is your problem,” he said.
“My problem is making sure that you don’t get back too soon. The horses go with us.” He said something then in Serbo-Croatian and he got a guttural answer from a voice I hadn’t heard before.
“This is my partner,” the Italian said. “You don’t have to see what he looks like, do you?”
“I’ll just imagine something,” I said.
“Okay. You get the women off and I’ll get the rest of them.”
I waded through the snow to Gordana’s pony. “We walk from here,” I said and reached up and helped her down. She seemed weak. “Just stand here by your horse.”
Arrie was already down from hers. “What’s going on?” she said.
“We walk the rest of the way,” I said. “It’s not far.”
“Who was the man who came by?” she said.
“The Italian’s partner,” I said. “Did you get a good look at him?”
“No,” she said. “Should I’ve?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I could hear the rest of them talking as they dismounted. Then the Italian came up to us and took the reins of Arrie’s horse. He handed me the flashlight. “We got another one,” he said.
I started to shine the flashlight around but he forced it down. “You don’t really wanta get a look at him, do you?” the Italian said.
“I don’t give a damn about him. I just want to see if you’ve collected them all.”
“They’re right behind me,” he said.
I raised my voice. “All right. We have to walk about fifty feet. I’ll go first. Then the women. Knight, you come last. Okay?”
“Fine,” Knight said. “I’m freezing.”
“Everybody is,” I said.
“There’re some tins of stuff to eat up there and there should be enough wood to last you till morning,” the Italian said.
“When we walk back,” I said.
“I need the edge,” he said. “You object?”
“Would it do any good?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t object.”
I shined the light in the Italian’s face. He slapped his hand over his eyes. “Christ,” he said.
“Wait here until I take a look around that boulder,” I said. “I just want to make sure that there’s really something up there.”
I waded through the snow and went around the boulder. The beam of the flashlight didn’t carry far, but the trail widened through the trees and up ahead there was a large dark mass of something. It could have been a castle or a silent herd of elephants. I turned and made my way back.
“There’s something up there,” I said.
“It’s what I said it was,” the Italian said, his voice edged with exasperation. “You just go around that boulder and on about fifty feet and there’s a big wooden door. It’s not locked. You go through that and you’re home. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said and led the two horses around me down the trail. He didn’t bother to say good-bye.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We rounded the boulder and waded through the snow for fifty feet until we came to a wall built of wide blocks of gray stone. I shined the flashlight over it and the wall curved slightly. I shined it up and the wall seemed to go up forever. The wooden door that the Italian had promised was there and it was large enough to drive a school bus through. I tugged at the door, but nothing happened. I pushed and it opened easily. I went through followed by Arrie and Gordana, then Wisdom, Tavro, and Knight.
The flashlight revealed an immense bare room with no windows. The walls were coated with a thick gray plaster that looked as if it had been slapped on by hand and smoothed with a stiff brush. A flight of stone stairs with no railing curved up. A dim flickering light came from the top of the stairs. I started up them.
“Look at St. Ives,” Wisdom whispered hoarsely, “not a nerve in his body.”
“You could follow a man like that through hell itself,” Knight said in a deep, reverent voice that almost had me wishing that he wasn’t such a good actor.
At the top of the stairs was another large wooden door built of thick planks that was half open. I pushed it all the way open. Across from me, not more than forty feet or so, was a fireplace — the kind that you could walk into and give the steer a couple of turns if it needed it. It made the five-foot logs that burned in it look like a campfire. I glanced up and the ceiling was there all right, not more than twenty-five feet away. The floor was made of slate slabs. I guessed the room itself to be almost sixty feet long and to my right was another stone staircase without railings that ran up the wall and ended at a landing. To my left were tall narrow windows that reached almost from floor to ceiling. They were leaded, but some of the panes were broken. In front of the fireplace was a rough wooden table with benches on either side. Next to the table was an ordinary straight-backed wooden chair. A man sat in it with his hands tied to its arms. He stared at me and I stared back at Amfred Killingsworth, United States Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.