Chương 91: 82. Hubris

Every first-year wants to dig the temple. The temple is the photograph, the thing that got them on the plane. The temple was also stripped to its footings two thousand years before they were born. So I take them round the back instead, to the rubbish pit nobody sketches, and I make them sit in it. The midden is where the truth went to hide.

— The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr They went after her across the square, and at the far lip of it, where the ground tipped away towards the city, Sarah stopped and looked down at Athens. The rest of them stopped with her. Beyond the low wall of the old marketplace the city ran out in tiers of pale concrete going grey, and looked innocuous enough. The air carried pine and hot stone and the smell of salt, and that was all.

"Right," Sarah said. The brisk doctor controlling the joy of a girl coming home.

"Down to the water. On the far side. Petros will hear us coming before we knock."

"Not down the main road," Donna said. Sarah turned.

"It's the fastest way."

"Which is why we're not taking it." Donna had stopped at the edge where the ground fell towards the streets, reading sightlines.

"Fast roads are where the checkpoints go. If this place is half as organised as it looks, somebody owns those streets, and I'd rather meet them after we've got a wall at our backs and a story we've practised." She looked back at Sarah.

"You grew up here. Is there another way down? Off the big roads. Slower is fine. Slower and safer is the whole point." Sarah was quiet for a moment, and then her eyes grew sharper as she remembered something.

"There's the hill," she said, and lifted her chin at the line of low wooded rises to the south-west, dark green going black against the dying sky.

"There are three of them covered with pine and there is a path through it. We used to call it the forest when we were kids, which it isn't, but try telling a seven-year-old that." She gave a small smile at the memory.

"My cousins and I would go up after church and not come down till someone was bleeding or it got dark. You can cross the whole spine of it and never touch a main road. It comes out west of the centre, and from there it's downhill to the port. It's longer though, by about an hour."

"That'll do," Donna said. Steve had turned his head towards the hills, and Arthur watched the change come over him, the one where a fact surfaced and then merged with ten others in his head.

"That route is not a coincidence," Steve said, coming up beside Sarah and pointing along the same dark spine.

"There's a road under that."

"It's an old one. It runs through the gap between the two big hills, down a natural hollow, and it runs unbroken to the port. The Athenians walled it, on both sides, a corridor half a kilometre wide running the whole distance to Piraeus." He was warming up now.

"It's most of the reason this city outlived the things it outlived. You could only starve Athens if you took the port and the road between, and the road sat inside the walls. Grain came up it under siege with an enemy in the fields on either side and unable to lay a hand on it. They called the hollow Koile. It means, near enough, the hollow."

"So your clever ancient road," Donna said, "is the back way to Sarah's mum's house."

"It is the most important back way in the history of the Western—""It's the back way." Donna had already started moving.

"Good. We take the back way."

"He is going to be unbearable the whole way over that hill," Donna said to Arthur, not bothering to lower her voice.

"I can hear you," Steve said.

"I know you can." They had gone a dozen paces along the rim of the square when Steve stopped, and this time he had turned the other way, back and up, towards the great flat-topped rock that stood over all of it with its broken columns bathed in light.

"Hang on," he said.

"Hang on a moment."

"Steve." Sarah did not turn round. The single word had a whole sentence inside it, and most of the sentence was about beds.

"No, listen, I've been so busy reading the back roads that I missed the thing sitting right on top of us." He came back to them, the pencil pointing up.

"That is the Acropolis. There is no older, no higher, no more sacred piece of ground in this whole country, and most likely not in this whole half of the world. If you handed a stranger a map of Greece and told them to put one finger on the most important site in the country, every last one of them would put it on that rock."

"You're describing tourists," Donna said.

"Tourists and I agree on this, unfortunate though it might be," he said, a sour look on his face.

"And here is what only occurred to me just now. If you are a Curator and planning nodes, chances are you would choose the Parthenon. Think about it. In Marseille one of the nodes was Notre-Dame de la Garde, and in Malta it was the Hypogeum. Both are the most important landmarks of those cities." He spread his hands at the rock, the idea fully alight in him now.

"So if that is one of ours, and we climb up and activate it tonight, before we have cracked a single riddle, then whatever sequence we are supposed to be walking, we have skipped straight to the end of it and saved ourselves the middle."

"We could be finished with Greece by morning. And if I am wrong, we have lost an hour. I will take that trade." Sarah put the heels of both hands over her eyes.

"I have been thinking about bed and a bath for weeks," she said into her palms.

"Weeks. And the first thing you want to do is climb a rock."

"I do want to climb the rock," Steve admitted.

"I'll own that freely. But that is not the reason I'm right." Donna had not said anything yet. She was looking up at the Acropolis and running the arithmetic she always ran, and Arthur watched her arrive at the answer before she said it out loud.

"It isn't stupid," she said.

"If he's right and it works, it takes away a week of jumping through hoops and people watching us do it." She turned to Arthur.

"You've gone quiet." He had been thinking about the customs house. The fifty men, the cart down to Mdina, the summons with no reason attached to it. They had walked into the last city blind and it had very nearly taken everything they had, and anything that got them out of this leg of the test faster was worth an hour of his legs. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"If it works, it's the best hour we spend all month," he said.

"If it doesn't, we've lost an hour and a climb. I can live with the climb." He looked up at the rock as he said it. There was no pull off it, none of the low steady weight a live node put on him when one was close, but that could simply be because they hadn't activated it yet.

"Quiet and quick. Sarah leads and we follow like sightseers." Archie's geometry turned once over Arthur's shoulder. The geometry was much denser and more intricate than in Malta.

"You wish to climb to the Acropolis and wake it," Archie said.

"That's the plan," Steve said.

"Any objection?" The pause had a new quality to it now, something standing behind it.

"None that you would accept until you have walked up the hill," Archie said.

"Proceed. You will have your answer at the top."

"Even he wants to see it," Steve said, and started for the rock.

"That is the opposite of what he said," Donna said, and went after him. The only way up was the western end, and Arthur saw it the moment they came round under the cliff. The Acropolis had been a fortress long before it was ever a temple, a sheer grey table with the city lapping at its foot, and on three sides the cliff fell away. The one break in it was at the far western shoulder, where the ground climbed up to meet a ramp and a gate. They did not take the straight line to it. Donna would not have it.

She put them on a track that ran along the foot of the north cliff, half lost under scrub and fallen pine, deep in the shadow of the monolith. Steve started to tell them the track had a name, that it had circled the foot of the rock for two and a half thousand years, and Donna told him she did not care what it had been called as long as it kept them off the open ground, and he let it go. The fight had happened at the gate.

They smelled it before they saw it, the sourness of ground where men had bled and not been carried away. Someone had dragged a market stall and a length of iron railing across the foot of the ramp into a barricade, and the barricade had not held. Spent brass lay down the steps, dull among the bright chips where rounds had struck the marble. A stain had dried brown across the lowest step, a single boot lay beside it, and the flies had found both. Whoever fought here had wanted the rock badly, from both sides.

Whoever had won had not stayed to hold it. Donna crouched and turned a casing over with one finger without lifting it.

"Weeks old," she said.

"This must have happened right at the start, when firearms still worked." She stood.

"Somebody went for the high ground and somebody else made them bleed for it. Good to know the city fights over its hills." She looked up the ramp.

"Let's be careful. If anyone's still up there, we came up for the view and cores and we're very sorry to disturb them." They came up through the broken gate and onto the top of the rock to find it empty, and for a moment even Donna stopped. The Parthenon stood at the far end of the summit, shifts of light cutting through its columns. The columns stood in a long wreck of marble gone the colour of old bone. Steve had stopped walking.

He stood with his arms held a little out from his sides, like a man steadying himself on the deck of a moving boat, and for once he said nothing at all, which from Steve was the loudest thing he could have done.

"All right?" Arthur asked him.

"The last time I was here, I shared this space with what felt like a billion tourists," Steve said, his voice full of wonder.

"Give me one minute. Then I promise I'll go back to being insufferable." Sarah put a hand on his shoulder, and the three of them let him have his minute. Then they went to work. They knew a node when they were near one by now, having woken six of them. There was always something to find: a dais, a shape waiting in the dark, a surface that answered when you touched it. So they searched for it.

Steve went over the temple stone by stone with his pencil out and his nose a hand's width from the marble, following the faint old Ether lines that ran in the surface, the same dim tracery that ran in every ancient stone. Arthur went about putting his hands on columns and wall reliefs. Nothing. Arthur walked the long flank of the temple and there was no pull anywhere along it. All he could feel was the wind and the bone-grey stone.

Donna stood watch by the gate and grew visibly less patient with every shade the sky went darker. Steve struck the architrave with the flat of his hand, as Arthur struck his shield, and got a stinging palm for it. He tried three more stones. He laid his copied symbols against the carvings and found nothing in them that answered.

In the end he stood in the centre of the floor, where a great statue had stood three thousand years before, and said to the empty air, feeling like a fool and knowing he looked like one, "We're here. We made it all this way. You can open up now." The air stayed air. An hour went by and the most sacred high place in all of Greece lay quiet under their hands and stayed a heap of very old, very ordinary stone. Donna and Sarah came back, having made another circuit round the temple.

It was Arthur who called it in the end. He went and sat down on the fallen drum of a column beside Steve, who had his elbows on his knees, and said the thing all of them had arrived at by then.

"It's not going to happen tonight, Steve. Whatever this is, it isn't ours to open. Not like this." Steve nodded slowly.

"Yeah," he said.

"Yeah, all right. I just had to find out." Archie's geometry turned over the two of them, and for the first time in an hour he spoke.

"You have your answer," Archie said. Donna's head came round.

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning even if this temple were a major node, it would not activate out of order. It would not have woken for you an hour ago, and it will not wake for you tomorrow either." The slow facets caught the last of the light and gave it back.

"A node of this kind opens in its turn, wherever it stands in the chain. The previous node opens the lock. You do not arrive at the end of a road by walking to the end of it and asking it to be the start. The order is the lock." The silence held a moment while that went down, and then Steve said it slowly, working it as he spoke.

"So even if it is a node, we could not have done a thing with it tonight. Not until we'd cleared whatever stands ahead of it in the line."

"Correct." Donna had gone very still, which in Donna was a great deal worse than loud.

"You knew that," she said.

"Back in the square. You knew it the moment Steve pointed us up here, and you told him to proceed."

"I did."

"And you let us climb anyway."

"I did," Archie agreed.

"We have burned an hour and a half that we did not need to," Donna said in irritation.

"One sentence from you down there would have saved us a lot of light."

"I find demonstration holds where explanation slides off," Archie said.

"All of you agreed that this was a worthwhile detour, ignoring the fact that all of this was constructed, calibrated and set into motion thousands of years before. Do you think an order that could mastermind something like that will leave such an obvious loophole?" Donna did not respond, and Archie continued.

"The path is designed for a reason, and it cannot be gamed. There is no cheat or shortcut or bug to exploit. Now you have seen that yourself." Nobody had an answer ready for that, and after a moment Sarah gave a short laugh.

"You are right. And that was good. I hate that," she said.

"Thank you," Archie said.

"It was not a compliment."

"I have elected to receive it as one." And as tired as they all were, on the top of a rock with a wasted hour behind them, that was what did it. Donna let out something that was half a laugh and half a swear. Steve put his face in his hands and shook. Even Arthur felt the corner of his mouth pull, the whole weight of the day tipping over for a second into the plain stupid comedy of being lectured, fairly, by a turning shape with no face to lecture them with.

Then Donna stood and put a hand down and hauled Steve up off his column. The sky was losing light and they still had over an hour of travel in front of them. They went down using the same route they had used to come up and then turned west into the trees. The pines closed over them and blotted the last of the light. The old walled road was somewhere around here waiting to be found. They went in single file, Arthur at the front, Sarah behind him calling the turns from memory, Steve next, Donna at the back.

The ground was treacherous with needles and roots, and by degrees the woods went quiet. The birds were quiet. The small movements in the scrub had stopped. There was nothing left but the sound of their own feet and breathing. He looked up. Something was wrong with the branches over the path. They hung too heavy in places, sagging in long low loops, and one of the loops was the wrong colour. Then the branches moved, and he had time for one word.

"Down..." It came off the branch without a sound and settled across his shoulders with the weight of a falling man. Then the weight closed into a grip, and the grip began, with a patient and enormous strength, to tighten.