The Glory That Was

Chapter Fourteen

Bulnes reminded himself that the more urgent problem for him right now was to escape to the upper world again before his imposture was penetrated.

He backtracked briskly. When he arrived at the place where he had entered the tunnel system, he found a group of three people. One sat at the control panel — not the blond man with the German accent, but a dish-faced Slavic type — while two others, one in work clothes and one with a peaked cap and pistol holster that suggested a security organization, talked to him.

All three looked around as Bulnes came toward them, and he of the pistol said, "Hey, you seen Muller?"

"No," said Bulnes. "What's become of him?"

"That's what we're trying to find out. Surkov here came to relieve him, and he wasn't there. If he's wandered off to get a brew, it'll be the last of his job."

The other standing man said, "I don't think Manfred would do that. He's pretty conscientious about regs."

Bulnes felt his scalp prickle with the knowledge that Manfred Muller lay bound only a few meters away. If these employees of the System didn't locate him soon, he would probably get his gag loose and yell.

Bulnes asked the seated man, "Didn't he at least leave a note for you?"

"Not one liddle think. Nothing but dis empty sit."

"Have you checked the lavatory?" said Bulnes. The guard said, "I got my partner doing that now."

At that instant another man appeared in the tunnel, a stout character wrapped in a himation. As he walked up, Surkov said, "Hallo, Pierre."

"Hallo yourself." Pierre unpinned his badge and laid it on the shelf below the control panel. "What is all this? A conditioned man get into the tunnels?"

"Muller has disappeared himself," said Surkov, handing Pierre the clipboard from the shelf.

Pierre signed the sheet, took a good look at himself in the full-length mirror on the opposite wall, rearranged his himation, and started to climb the stairs. Surkov reached for the control buttons.

"Hey, come back here!" said the guard. "Surkov, you never more than glanced at the picture on the badge. That man could be anybody at all."

"No, he could not. I know him. I play bezique with him." He waved the badge under the guard's nose and pushed one of the buttons. With a whirr of machinery the trap door began to open.

Bulnes had meant to deposit his badge and boldly walk out likewise, trusting to the human weakness that causes every security routine to become slipshod with familiarity. Now, however, that the guard was there, and since They knew something had befallen Surkov's predecessor, somebody would be sure to take a sharp look at the thief's badge adorning Bulnes's chiton, and realize that the face depicted there did not look at all like that of the man who wore it.

"Be seeing you," said Bulnes, and strolled up the slope of the main tunnel with ostentatious casualness.

Not until he had gone a good hundred meters did he dare look back. By then, the curvature of the tunnel hid the trio around the portal. The upward slope became more and more pronounced. The damned thing must surely have risen above ground level by now. Bulnes tried to orient himself but found he had completely lost track of above-ground directions. From the height, however, he guessed that the tunnel was ascending inside either the Akropolis or the Areopagos, or Mount Lykabettos.

At last the passage ended in a stair with a niche beside it where a man sat at a control board, very much like the portal through which Bulnes had entered the system. Bulnes walked boldly toward the man, unpinning his badge as he came. He laid the badge on the shelf and had his hand out for the pencil to sign the register even before the man had picked it up. He signed "Djon Hwait," laid down the pencil, and started up the stairs without a word, as if confident that the gate keeper would press the button that opened the trap.

The gate keeper reached for the control buttons, then hesitated. "Hey!" he said.

Bulnes paused to look back. "Well?"

"You forgot your key."

"Oh. Sorry." Although Bulnes did not know what the key was for, he came back down a few steps with his hand out.

The man handed him a big bronze object with a long curved prong, more like a kind of sickle than a key.

Bulnes said, "Thanks" and started back up the steps. The trap opened. Bulnes paused long enough for it to reach nearly full gape, then went up, thrusting his head into the darkness.

At that instant, an alarm bell rang loudly.

"Hey!" said the gate keeper again.

This time Bulnes kept on going.

"Come back!" said the gate keeper, reaching for a button. With a slight change in the quality of its whirr, the trap door began to close again. A glance showed Bulnes that the gate keeper was fumbling in an open drawer, no doubt for a gun.

Bulnes hurled the bronze key in his hand at the head of the gate keeper. The heavy object bounced off the man's balding cranium. As the key clattered to the floor, and the man started to fall after it, Bulnes turned. He skipped up the remaining three steps and hurled himself away from the opening. The trap door brushed his heels as he leaped out and closed with a thump and a click behind him.

Blinded by sudden darkness, Bulnes cracked his shin on some unseen object. Cursing under his breath, he began feeling his way. He was in a large room cluttered with all sorts of furniture and piles of objects, some of metal and some of cloth.

Any minute, he expected the trap door to reopen to void men and guns. His throwing the key had seemed like the smart expedient, but if this room turned out to be locked from the outside, it would not prove to have been so clever after all.

As he steered his course among the obstacles he at last found a wall and began feeling his way along it. He covered one wall, bumped his head against an unseen bronze statue, made a right angle, and continued some meters along the next wall before he came to a door. And what a door! A huge bronze affair, as wide as he could span with his arms, and, moreover, one of a pair.

The door was closed (as he found by fumbling) by a large bolt on the inside. He pushed the bolt, and then the door itself. The huge valves swung silently open.

Bulnes found himself facing a row of small Doric columns interconnected by a metal railing, and beyond that a larger row. Ahead, slightly to the right, the massive form of Athene Promachos towered against the stars, topped by the triple-crested helmet of the goddess. He now knew where he was — on the porch at the west or rear of the Parthenon. The room in which he had emerged from the tunnel system was the storage room occupying the rear third of the building. This room, Flin had explained, was the true "Parthenon," the temple as a whole being properly the New Hekatompedon.

Bulnes turned, pushed the great doors closed again, and hurried to the bronze rail and climbed over.

He trotted down the steps at the end of the Parthenon and sprinted for the Propylaia, dodging art works by starlight. He had almost reached his goal when from the forest of columns in front of him a deep voice with a Scythian accent spoke: "Who there?"

Damn the Scythians! Bulnes ducked behind a statue and paused, watching and listening. Boots stamped on the marble in front of him. He headed back the way he had come, crouching. Any minute now, the back doors of the Parthenon might fly open to disgorge more enemies.

Right in front of him, Bulnes recognized a statue to which Flin had called his attention when he had shown him the place. It was Myron's bronze Athene, a slender, girlish goddess more to Bulnes's taste than the beefy colossal Promachos by Pheidias. As Bulnes remembered his colleague's chatter, this statue was to be one of a pair. The other statue not yet mounted was to be that of the satyr Marsyas.

Marsyas's base was there even if the satyr himself was not. With the Scythian archer coming up behind him and the puppet-masters in the Parthenon in front, Bulnes adopted a desperate expedient. He shucked his chiton, wrapped it around the papyrus, and threw the bundle away.

Then he mounted the pedestal of the statue of Marsyas, naked, and struck a statuesque pose. It was too bad his skin was too dark to pass for marble and too light for bronze. But, in the starlight, perhaps nobody would notice.

The doors of the Parthenon opened, and a small group of men came out. By rolling his eyes Bulnes saw that they were dressed in chitons. They spread out purposefully. One passed not far from Bulnes, but behind him. It took all the will power Bulnes could summon not to turn his head.

The voice of the Scythian archer came again from the direction of the Propylaia. Somebody blew a whistle, and the men in the chitons ran back to the Parthenon. In a matter of seconds they were all inside, and the doors closed again.

This time the Scythian came on with determination, calling out: "Who there? Who you? I see you! Come out, you thief!"

Bulnes stood very still as the fellow clumped past, not ten meters away. The policeman continued on his way to the west end of the Parthenon. He sniffed around the porch, like a willing but 'none too intelligent watchdog, and then walked back toward the Propylaia. Bulnes cursed silently and waited a few minutes longer. Heat lightning flickered on the horizon.

When the Scythian failed to reappear, and the rear doors of the Parthenon stayed shut, Bulnes slipped down from his pedestal, donned his chemise, rolled up his battered papyrus, and set . out for the north side of the Akropolis. Flin had said something about stairways down the mountainside at this point.

It took him an hour of solid, sweat-soaked searching to find the stairway he sought. It was hidden behind a screen of bushes and architectural froufrou so that none would have suspected its presence. The stair led down, not on the outside, but into a cleft where the whole north side of the Akropolis had come adrift from the main body of the rock. The stair sloped down through the crack between this colossal slab and the solid part of the crag.

Bulnes had to feel his way step by step through nearly total darkness. He should, he thought, be approaching those caves on the north side of the Akropolis that Flin had pointed out. He had to move, however, at such a snaillike pace that it took him nearly half an hour to cover a hundred meters.

The stair at last leveled out, -its risers becoming shorter and shorter until he was shuffling along a path at the base of the cleft. After many minutes more of feeling his way, he got a glimmer of light from ahead: yellow lamplight, if he was any judge. There came a murmur of voices.

Now and then, the cleft came together so that he had to squeeze through the gap. The voices grew louder. Bulnes found himself standing at the back of a cave — no doubt one of those he had seen from below. It was actually a double cave, two caverns 'having a common mouth. The light and sound were coming from the other, mostly out of sight around the rocky bulkhead that divided them.

There was a stir of motion at the cave entrance. A man in a long chiton came around the bulkhead toward Bulnes. Bulnes shrank back into his tunnel.

The man came, not at Bulnes, but toward his left. Arriving at the cave wall, back where the rocks narrowed, the man pulled aside a curtain and squeezed into a hole in the rock. The curtain fell back into place, inconspicuous among the other offerings and objects ranged around the wall of the cave.

When the man did not reappear, Bulnes stole forward toward the cave entrance to where he could see the proceedings. The other cave contained an altar before which stood a priest. Something burned on the altar. On a ledge that ran along the cliff, level with the cave floor, stood a row of men — evidently the suppliants or worshipers.

The priest had his arms up in a gesture of blessing, intoning a prayer. When he had finished, he said, "You may ask, O man!"

The first man in line stretched his arms out, palms up, and called loudly: "Otototoi, Theoi, Ge! Apollon! Apollon!"

When he had repeated the exclamation three times, a hollow, inhuman voice resounded from the back of the cave, "I am here, O man. Speak!"

Bulnes nearly jumped out of his skin when the voice first sounded, though a second's reflection showed him what the true cause of it must be. The suppliant continued, "O Averter of Evil, tell me what I should do to make my wife conceive?"

"Let her eat three mustard-seeds while facing east on the night of the next full moon, at moon-rise, and do thou pay ten drachma! to the priest of this shrine of Apollo. Next!"

The next man wanted to know if the trading voyage in which he had invested eight mnai would be successful, and so on. Bulnes grinned, realizing whither the other priest had been bound when he disappeared into the hole in the back of the cave.

This method of milking the Athenian public also gave Bulnes the germ of an idea. More than one man could play Apollo.

He waited until the last inquirer had received his reply, paid his scot, and departed; until the two priests had tidied up their caves, counted their money, put out their lamps, and departed. Then Bulnes came out of hiding and prowled along the ledge until he came to the north wing of the Propylaia, stole down the steps, and thence homeward. Poor Wiyem would have to go supper-less; it would be impossible to buy food this late.

Bulnes staggered into the inn of Podokles, pacified the growling watchdog, and fell asleep almost before his head struck his pallet.