I woke up with light in my face; Ironel was beside me; her face was cameo-pale against the shadows.
“Richard—I am afraid for Pieter.”
I got up and went to him. He lay on his back on the bed. His eyes were closed and sunken, his face drawn into a tortured rictus. He snarled between his locked teeth, and his hands raked at the coverlet.
“No,” he ground out the words. “Never… bend the knee… better… eternal destruction…” His voice ran off into a mutter.
I put my fingers against his neck. He was hot as new-cast iron. The wound in his forehead was swollen and inflamed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We need medicines we don’t have.”
“Richard,” the girl said. “Chazz says we must bring Pieter to him.”
I looked at her. Her eyes were big and dark, her hair red-black, a damp curl against her white skin.
“We shouldn’t move him.”
“But—Chazz cannot come here, Richard!”
I looked at Roosevelt. I didn’t know much about medicine, but I’d seen a dying man before. I lifted him and the girl led the way down through the dark halls among the black vines and the fallen statuary and out into the perfumed night.
Stone mermaids cavorted in a dry fountain at the center of a weed-choked garden. Ironel pulled aside the leafy branch of a twisted bush that grew up through a crack in the basin, exposing an opening. Stone steps led down at a steep angle into an odor of mushrooms and wet clay. Ironel led the way. In a room at the bottom, she flashed my handlight on sagging shelves loaded with dusty wine bottles. At the far side the wall was broken away by what looked like a giant rat-hole. The odor that came from it was like the ape-house at the zoo.
Ironel didn’t seem to notice. She went to the opening, called:
“Chazz—it’s I, Ironel—and Richard, my friend. We’ve brought Pieter!”
A sound came back, like boulders grinding together under the earth. Ironel turned to me.
“Chazz says we may bring him in.”
I went down through the opening; it was a smooth-walled tunnel cut through damp earth. It curved, dipped, ended at a complicated wall of lumpy wet leather that blocked the tunnel. Ironel put the light on the wall and I saw it was a face, six feet high, six feet wide, with a vast hooked nose, sunken eyelids that lifted to show the glint of eyes the size of basketballs. There was matted hair as coarse as mammoth fur on the cheeks and on the sloping, wrinkled forehead. Where there wasn’t hair, the skin was black, scaled, and creased like a rhino’s hide. The edges of broken teeth the size of bargain tombstones showed under the purple edge of the lip. The mouth opened and the voice rumbled forth.
“He says to put him down here,” Ironel relayed. I did as she asked. Roosevelt lay like a corpse, death-pale now. The big eyes roved over him. A tongue like a pink feather blanket peered out from the vast mouth, tested the air, went in again.
“This one made the rocks fall,” the big voice boomed out, clearer now—or maybe I was just getting used to hearing an earthquake talk.
“He didn’t know, Chazz dear,” Ironel said in a pleading tone. “He meant no harm.”
“A stone hurt me,” Chazz said. He rotated his huge skull, and the edge of a black-crusted cut big enough to lay an arm in came into view.
“Poor Chazz—did it hurt very much?”
“Not much, Ironel.” The face came back up and a tear that would have filed a teacup splashed down across the leather face. “Don’t feel bad for Chazz. Chazz is all right, Ironel.”
“And—can you help Pieter?”
Again the incredible eyeballs rotated, stared at the unconscious man. The lids came down, half-covering them like wrinkled leather blinds.
“I can try,” the monster rumbled. “I feel the hurt place… there. Bad, bad hurt—but it’s not that which is killing Pieter. No—it’s the things that pull—there and there! But I push… push against them…” his voice went into a mutter like a glacier breaking apart in a spring thaw. Roosevelt stirred, made vague sounds. Ironel put her hand on his forehead. I held the light and saw the color come slowly back into his face. He sighed and his hands moved restlessly, then lay still. His breathing eased.
“Ahhh,” Chazz groaned. “Bad things still there, Ironel! I fix him—but I feel bad things stir there still! Better I kill him now—”
“Chazz—no!” Ironel threw herself half across Roosevelt. “You mustn’t!”
“I feel things there, inside him,” Chazz said. “Things that make me afraid!”
“He’s only a man, Chazz—he said so himself. Like Richard! Tell him, Richard!” Ironel caught at my arm. “Tell Chazz that Pieter is our friend!”
“What kind of bad things do you feel inside him, Chazz?” I asked the big face. He rolled his whale’s eyes at me.
“When the stones fell, I felt them,” he said. “And when I reached into him—I felt them again. Black things prowl there, in the red caverns of his sleeping brain, Richard. He would, mold all the world to an image he keeps secret there.”
“Back home, he’s an important man,” I said. “He came here to try to save his world. He made a mistake, and it almost killed him. I don’t think there’s any harm in him now.”
Chazz groaned. “I have known him in my dreams, as I slept here under the earth. Why does he come, Richard? And why you? For of you, too, I have dreamed, moving across the bright, restless pattern of the world. A doom hangs about your head, and about his. But I cannot tell which doom is the stronger.” He groaned again. “I fear him, Richard. But for Ironel’s sake, I give him his destiny. Now take him from me. His mind stirs and the pain of that stirring cuts to my heart.”
I lifted Roosevelt and carried him back through the stinking tunnel and up to Ironel’s room.
She woke me with half a golden melon on a gold plate and a cluster of red grapes the size of plums. Roosevelt was better, now, she said. I went over and looked at him, lying there on his back, still unconscious. He didn’t look any different to me, but his temperature seemed to be normal, and his pulse and breathing too. Maybe I was a better brain surgeon than I thought.
Ironel took me for a tour of her kingdom: the lower floors of the building where she slept, the garden, what was left of the street the earthquake had shaken up. With the early morning light slanting down through the leaves that overgrew it, it had a sort of eerie, silent beauty. Ironel led me by the hand, showed me little clumps of flowers growing in hidden places, a clear pool in a basin that must have been a beautiful fountain once, led me to where there were pretty stones lying scattered in the rank grass—the fragments of an alabaster statue.
We went down chipped marble steps under huge old trees and bathed in a black pool, climbed up in a ruined tower, and looked out through a stone-filigreed window at the view of other towers thrusting up through the jungle. In the evening, we sat on a bench in the garden and listened to the hooting and screeching and hissing of night things that prowled just beyond the borders of the garden. Sometimes she talked, chattered away about her friends and her games; other times she sang strange little tuneless songs. And sometimes, she just smiled into the vague distance, like a flower, glad to be alive. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t ask them. She was like a sleeping child; I didn’t want to wake her. That night she came to my bed and slept with me, like a child.