Six for Gold

Chapter Forty-two

A loud thump from a bedroom sent Peter rushing down the hallway.

“Master? Is that you?”

He found Thomas picking Cheops up off the floor. “Sorry, Peter. The door was open and when I saw it, I couldn’t resist looking closer at the famous cat mummy.”

Thomas laid Cheops back on the pallet. The whiskered face glared at him with fixed, eternal, feline fury.

The sun was high enough to send a brilliant shaft of light through the window slit high in the plastered wall. John had been gone all night and now half the morning. Peter briefly clasped his blistered hands together and muttered a prayer for protection of his master.

“It makes me nervous waiting around, even for divine intervention,” Thomas said. “John wouldn’t be talking to Dedi about whatever’s in that accursed maze for this long. It’s time for action.”

He slapped the pommel of his sword just as Cornelia stepped into the bedroom.

She shook her head. “No, Thomas, you’d better stay right here.”

“Mistress,” Peter ventured. “I believe Thomas is right. Something dreadful must have happened.”

“I should’ve insisted on going with him!” Thomas muttered. “Nothing speaks more persuasively to a rogue like Dedi than a sharp blade!”

He stepped forward, but Cornelia blocked the doorway. “You intend to venture out after your reception last evening? It would be better to remain indoors until John decides the best course of action. We won’t know what it is until he gets back.”

Thomas grumbled, but accepted the wisdom of her words.

“If Dedi’s up to further trickery there’s no point confronting him. He’d be expecting it and doubtless have some story or other prepared,” Cornelia continued.

“But mistress-”

“Don’t worry, Peter! John may well have had a sudden notion of other paths to explore and decided to pursue his investigations further, the middle of the night or not. You and Thomas stay here, in case he returns while I’m gone.”

She pivoted and vanished down the hallway.

Thomas looked glum. “Cornelia’s right. Everyone is so excitable here, and you never know what might happen. Even so, all this skulking about is getting tiresome. Ever since that night in the Hippodrome I might just as well have been locked in one of Justinian’s dungeons.”

Peter suggested Thomas might feel better after he’d had something to eat. A hearty meal was his solution to many problems of a worldly nature. He retreated to the kitchen and began to sort through vegetables.

His thoughts returned to John. Something terrible had befallen the master. Peter was as certain of it as if he had been granted a vision.

Perhaps heaven had spoken to him?

Would a vision come from outside? Could one’s thoughts be mistaken such a visitation? Might it appear to him as a phantom or a disembodied voice?

John had gone to question Dedi about whatever was in the maze.

What could be hidden there? Most likely some blasphemous artifact. Hadn’t the place been a pagan shrine?

Yet a fragment of weathered wood might still be a piece of the True Cross even though sold by a charlatan.

Peter had witnessed the crippled pilgrim cured. The man was carried into the shrine and walked out.

One of faith might brave the maze and be rewarded with what he sought.

Peter dropped the leeks he had been holding and strode out of the kitchen.

***

John came awake at the bottom of the sea.

He was drowning.

Then he realized he could breathe, although with difficulty since his throat was swollen.

Impenetrable darkness surrounded him. Not a hint of illumination revealed his surroundings. He was aware only of powdery dust against his cheek.

He remembered being bound.

During the process he had recalled the trick Cornelia had insisted on teaching him, one learned from Captain Nikodemos on the Minotaur during their journey to Egypt.

She had been thinking of employing it in an act to garner a few coins in some village square. Nikodemos used it to win bets.

John wondered if it might not be worth much more.

His life.

His captors thought he was unconscious. They didn’t notice he kept his arms rigid, and slightly away from his body. Dim light helped conceal the maneuver. It had gained him enough slack so that now he was able to work one arm free, scraping skin off his wrist, and then the other.

After what seemed like a long time he extricated himself completely and got to his feet.

How strange that Nikodemos had been a Mithran.

A soldier of Mithra served the god, not the other way around, but perhaps sometimes…

John blinked, and ran a hand across his eyes.

He could not see his fingers.

He groped at the dark, found no obstruction, and took a step forward, half expecting to trip over some obstacle.

He thought uneasily of Dedi’s snake. His boots could be close to a reptilian head for all he knew. For that matter, the place of his confinement could be crawling with scorpions.

He took another reluctant step forward and his outstretched fingers encountered a rough vertical surface.

Not mud brick. Stone.

Gingerly, he reached up. The ceiling barely above his head was also constructed of stone.

He stepped carefully to one side, his outstretched hand again eventually meeting what he supposed was another wall. Moving slowly in case Dedi had set a trap, he made a complete circuit of the space in which he found himself.

There were openings in each wall although no door frames, and neither did his fingers encounter any ridges in the walls where blocks had been fitted together. The walls not only felt uneven, they also bulged slightly outward-or perhaps the corner angles were not square.

Initially he supposed he was disoriented by the darkness, or dizzy from near strangulation. However, after brief consideration, he was realized where he was.

Dedi had thrown him into the maze.

Doubtless it would feed the magician’s vanity to hear John beg to be rescued.

He didn’t know that John would never do so.

John rubbed his neck.

Porphyrios had intended to kill him, having already murdered Scrofa. By his own admission he was in Mehenopolis to protect his employer’s interests. If he hadn’t been thrown into a panic by a harmless donkey, he might never have blurted out his true reason for his presence there, not to mention his confession to the death during his conversation with Dedi.

John considered what to do.

At some point he expected Dedi to return, hoping to hear him plead for an escort back to daylight. Could John feign unconsciousness and helplessness and thereby take the magician by surprise?

Should he wait in ambush until he saw the light from an approaching torch?

That would work if Dedi arrived alone.

It might also be possible if the magician were accompanied by Hapymen, provided the servant was unarmed.

Yet John did not care to simply wait and see, the more so since his blade had been taken.

He felt his way to the nearest doorway, tore a small scrap of material from the bottom of his tunic, and dropped it in front of the opening.

Now he would be able to tell which rooms he had already visited.

Then he began to explore.

Hours later he rested, his back against another rough-hewn wall. Phantom lights, void of color, slid across his vision.

He had not glimpsed a hint of illumination and had soon lost track of the number of rooms he had traversed. Some featured four doorways, others two or three. A few were dead ends. He had not been able to glean anything useful about the maze from the bits of cloth he had scattered and subsequently re-encountered.

Thirsty now, he tried to swallow.

As he had done more than once in his wandering, he placed his ear to the floor and then the wall.

And as before he heard no sound, felt no vibration. There had been no sign of life in the endless empty rooms.

He had not encountered a draught.

How many rooms could the maze possibly have? Dozens? Hundreds?

He thought of the sheer size of the Rock of the Snake.

What if the maze had been carved deeply into the outcropping itself?

The unwelcome thought came to him that he might well die of thirst if he was not soon rescued or found the way out.

His hand moved reflexively in front of his face, as if to brush away the blackness.

Yet pilgrims had to be rescued from the maze. Therefore it must be simple enough to navigate it by torchlight.

John guessed there must be markings, perhaps painted, showing the route in and out. He had already run his hands along enough walls and around doorways to know there were no carvings that would serve the same purpose.

The uneven walls, some bulging slightly outwards while others curved inwards, made the unseen rooms he had traversed all the more disconcerting.

He stood, unsteadily. His throat worked spasmodically and painfully.

He ran his palm along the nearest wall.

There was something different about it.

The wall did not so much bulge here and there as curve along its entire length.

Noticeably.

What did it mean? That was the problem to be solved. A riddle, almost a game.

Like Zebulon’s game of Mehen.

No, John thought, Mehen’s maze was exactly the same as Zebulon’s board. It was hewn out in the shape of a coiled snake.

Why not? Wasn’t the shrine of which the maze formed a part dedicated to Mehen?

Despite the confusion of doorways, the path to the center, like the path to the center of Zebulon’s board, wound continuously inward.

The trick was to move inward without deviating.

He was certain of it.

And once he got to the heart of the maze he could easily work his way back out.

John trailed his fingers along the wall until he reached a doorway and stepped into the next room.

Working his way around he found the wall on the far side from the entrance seemed more curved than that in the room he had just left.

If he was not moving toward the center, he reasoned, he would soon reach a dead end.

Then he would simply try another direction.

He felt his way through the opening to the next room. Again he placed his left hand on the wall to the left of the doorway, followed it carefully around two corner angles and located the next doorway.

There was no way to measure the passage of time.

Occasionally John stopped to rest. He could feel his heart pounding. It wasn’t from exertion, but rather that the darkness pressing in from all sides, blinding his eyes, blotting out the world, was too like his dreams of drowning.

More than once it occurred to him that he could be wrong about the shape of the maze. He might simply be wandering deeper into abandoned catacombs far away from the chamber that pious pilgrims sought.

Yet it now seemed as if the curvature of the walls was increasing and the rooms less wide.

Soon he was certain of it.

He must be fast approaching the heart of the maze and whatever lay there.

He sought the next opening.

And found a door.

He pushed it open and could see again.

Ahead lay a long, narrow hallway with light at the far end.

Several strides took him around a corner, under an archway, and into a chamber whose fitful lamplight had spilt out into the corridor.

He had arrived at a circular room.

Clay lamps, arrayed on the floor along the foot of its uneven walls, cast shadows into a dome crudely chiseled from the native rock. Light danced on a tall pole topped by a horizontal cross piece displayed on a low wooden pedestal set against the wall opposite the archway.

A serpent, thicker than John’s leg, climbed around the pole, its glittering coils moving ceaselessly.

John realized the reptile’s apparent motion was an illusion created by the flickering lamps, for the upper part of the snake’s body and its head rested on the horizontal bar and their position remained unchanged.

Now he saw the truth of it.

The artifact Thomas had been given in Constantinople was not a cross with the top and the figure of the Christian’s gentle god broken from it.

Clearly it was a reproduction of this effigy-one from which the serpent had been detached.

This then must be the thing Justinian’s enemies sought.

A representation of an ancient god.

Dedi claimed to derive power from it, but he was a charlatan, wasn’t he? The cures the pilgrims sought were empty promises, weren’t they?

John looked up at the serpent.

It had been fashioned of copper. The black pits of its eyes fastened on him.

John suddenly felt cold. There was some quality beyond mere darkness in the shadows of those eyes. It was as if a hole had been punched through the brightly frescoed wall of reality to reveal a void beyond the world.

He reached up and touched the snake’s glittering coils.

There was a faint crackle and the tip of his forefinger felt as if it had been stung by one of Apollo’s bees.

It must have been his imagination.

He laid his hand against the serpent.

It felt warm.

No doubt warmth from the lamps had heated the metal from which it was constructed.

There was no doubt if any pilgrims reached this circular sanctum they would be suitably impressed and overawed, yet how could the strange artifact triumph against imperial troops or aid a plot against Justinian?

John looked behind the pedestal on which the idol stood and found what he had expected.

A wooden trapdoor.

No doubt the tunnel below led back to Dedi’s dwelling.

The lamps guttered and smoke swirled. A figure stepped into the chamber.

It was Peter.

“Master! I…I made my way through the maze by faith, it seems…”

Peter’s words trailed off as he saw the effigy. He fell to his knees, sketching a cross with a trembling hand.

His eyes glistened as he looked at John. His voice was a ragged whisper. “It is Nehushtan.”

“Nehushtan?”

“The brazen serpent, master. When the chosen people wandered in the wilderness the Lord sent fiery serpents among them. Moses prayed to Him and was commanded to make a serpent and display it upon a pole, so that whoever beheld the image would be healed. But when it came to be worshipped as an idol in the days of Hezekiah, it was destroyed. Except it was not destroyed, master, for here before us is Nehushtan itself.”