Chương 96: 87. Kastella

Donna asked me tonight whether any of the old stories could be true now. Dragons, giants, the dog at the gate of the underworld. I gave her the answer I have given a decade of first-years: a myth is a memory passed through a thousand mouths, the flood becomes a god, the plague becomes a monster, and the monster is always a metaphor. She seemed satisfied with that. So was I. — The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr Arthur studied the trails for a while before he gave Steve an answer.

A strip of torn cloth snagged in the nearest shrub still had its button attached.

"Well, nothing good," he said.

"I'm not too inclined to chase blood trails right now." They walked back down the path to a fallen trunk with open ground on three sides and the dead lorry still in view below. Sarah did a once-over on his back wounds again with all the warmth of a customs inspection.

"The deep one has closed at the surface," she said.

"If you tear it open doing something heroic, I will let you heal the old-fashioned way." Steve had the ledger open on his knee and was sketching the slope in quick strokes, the trails drawn as converging arrows.

"We should follow them while the light is this good. A dozen drag trails meeting at one point seems like something we ought to follow."

"Says every murder victim who goes down to the cellar," Donna said.

"There could be people up there," Steve said, still sketching, and that brought Donna up short.

"I can tell you where we are. That hill is Kastella," Sarah said, gazing up the slope.

"There is a church on the crown and an open-air theatre on the seaward side."

"We grew up running around this area. Petros and I used to race from the church door to the city for the last piece of whatever Yiayia was baking." She looked at Steve.

"There is nowhere on that hill for a pack to den. There has never been anything else on it."

"Trails don't lie."

"We are also four people with failing equipment, and I'm only mostly alright," Arthur said.

"We barely survived the last engagement. I'd rather not book a rematch today."

"Nobody is booking anything," Donna said.

"I'll go up and look. Alone, eyes only, no engagement. I am faster on my own and a great deal quieter without Steve identifying the vegetation."

"I do not identify vegetation."

"You named the pine scrub by species on the walk out this morning."

"That was context." Arthur turned the idea over and found the joint he disliked.

"I don't like splitting the group with those things in the neighbourhood."

"We killed the neighbourhood," Donna said.

"If there were others around here, we would have seen them by now. The numbers are on my side, and if they aren't, I am very good at running."

"Thirty minutes," Sarah said.

"If you are not back in thirty minutes, I am coming up that hill with Arthur's hammer, since I won't let him swing it today."

"Thirty." Donna smiled, and went. The pines hid her within thirty metres, and after that there was nothing to do but mind the slope and feel uneasy about it. Sarah repacked her kit twice. Steve filled one page with the trail diagram and a second with something that had Greek letters in it, and Arthur sat on the trunk and brooded.

"Archie," he said.

"Can you see anything up that hill that we can't?" Density on this slope is elevated and rises with altitude.

"How elevated?" Higher than the tunnels beneath the Acropolis. The gradient suggests it has not finished climbing. Steve looked up from his ledger.

"Density doesn't pool uphill on its own. Water runs down. Cold air runs down. If it is thicker up there than down here, something up there is concentrating it."

"Could it be a node?" Sarah asked. Arthur searched for the telltale pull of a node, and the slope gave him nothing.

"If it is, it isn't awake. Nothing is pulling." Donna came back in what seemed like twenty minutes, moving easily, and the first thing she did was hold up an empty hand.

"There are no creatures up there, or none that showed themselves to me. I followed the trails to the top of the hill. But something weird is happening up there."

"Define weird," Steve said.

"Lots of stones up there, but they all look clean. No weather marks, like the mason left last week." Sarah stood up.

"Show me." They went up together with weapons out, Donna leading them along the path she took. The trails braided and ran ahead of them like an arrow laid on the ground. The pines opened, and Arthur stopped walking. Stone was coming out of the hillside. Rows of pale, close-fitted blocks stood clear of the scrub. All of them were clean-edged and square-cut, ancient in every line of their making and impossibly new in their condition.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. His eye went looking for the things that accompany exposed masonry and found none of them. There was no trench. There was no spoil heap, no cut in the turf, no place where the hillside showed work by human hands. The ground lay undisturbed against the lowest row of stone, and the dead grass along it was bent outward, pushed aside from below.

"Nobody excavated this," he said.

"There is no trench, no spoil, no cut. The ground around it has never been dug."

"That was never here," Sarah said.

"Arthur, I had my first kiss about two hundred metres from where you are standing. That was never here." Between two rows of stone, where the masonry ran back into the hill, stood an opening. It was dark against the pale stone all around it, and the gradient beyond ran downward.

"That has to be a dungeon," he said. Saturation Anomaly, Archie corrected. Concentration without grounding produces distortion.

"There is a story I have been chewing on since the first one stood up on two legs this morning, and it comes from a mountain called Lykaion, in Arcadia, in the middle of the Peloponnese," Steve broke in.

"There was a sanctuary of Zeus on the summit, and once a year they held a sacrifice up there, and the tradition said that human flesh was mixed into the sacrificial meal. Any man who ate it became a wolf for nine years." Donna folded her arms.

"I already hate this story."

"If he kept away from human flesh for those nine years, he became a man again. Pausanias even names one who managed it, a boxer called Damarchus, who turned back after nine years and went on to win at Olympia. It is the oldest werewolf story in the world." He let out a slow breath.

"The creatures we fought this morning rear up on two legs to strike, and the drag trails hint at what they have been feeding on. I think it is the same story running in reverse. I can't prove a word of that, but I am writing it down anyway."

"Are you saying the things we fought are coming out of the dungeon?" Arthur turned towards Steve.

"Do you have another explanation? The blood tracks end here."

"What? Like a dungeon break?"

"Well, it sounds stupid when you say it like that."

"Archie, is that possible? Creatures from a dungeon, escaping it?" Arthur asked. I will repeat, since it seems you are unable to grasp the correct terminology. What you see here is a saturation anomaly, not a dungeon, Archie said, rotating towards Arthur with what seemed like mild irritation in the otherwise monotone register. A saturation anomaly does not impose a physical constraint on passage. That is another reason you should not refer to it as a dungeon, which by definition implies physical constraint.

"So you are saying it is possible for creatures to actually come out of the dungeon." I suspect you are doing this on purpose. The answer to that question is yes. After a period of time, it is indeed possible for creatures to leave the anomaly that, for lack of a better word, spawns them. Archie paused before continuing. This would not be so fantastical if your species kept in touch with its myths. Oweynagat, the roots of Yggdrasil, the Maya Xibalba, the Hyakki Yagyo, the gates of Ganzir. I could go on.

Arthur glanced at Steve, who stood there with his mouth open.

"You cannot be serious," Steve whispered. I assure you, I am always serious, Archie replied.

"Well, what is the floating cube referring to?" Donna asked impatiently.

"Actually, if dungeon breaks are real, I think we should talk while retracing our steps." I am certain you are doing this on purpose, Archie said, and moved down the path.

"We come back with better equipment and full reserves, and then check what kind of dungeon this is." Arthur gave the black doorway a last look, then turned his back on it.

"Let's get going. Your mother is going to kill me if we're late," he said to Sarah.

"It's the middle of the afternoon, Arthur."

"I'm building in a margin."

"Are you trying to impress my mother, Arthur?"

"When I'm living under her roof, absolutely." That got a laugh out of all four of them as they walked back down. They were inside the pines before Donna picked the thread back up.

"Professor, you never answered me. What was the cube talking about?"

"Doors," Steve said.

"Every one of those names is a door." He had the ledger out and was writing as he walked, which on that slope with loose rocks was its own act of faith.

"Oweynagat is a cave in the west of Ireland, at Rathcroghan. The medieval monks called it Ireland's gate to Hell. The stories say that monsters come out of it to spread death and destruction."

"Wonderful," Donna said.

"Go on."

"Xibalba is the Maya underworld, and you enter it through real caves. Ganzir is the gate of the Sumerian underworld."

"And the Japanese one?"

"The Hyakki Yagyo is a parade. One hundred demons walking through the streets of the capital at night, and anyone caught outside when it passed was taken." He closed the ledger.

"Five cultures. No contact between most of them. And the shape of the story is almost the same. A door in the ground, things living below it, and a day the things come out."

"On Malta," he continued, "we talked about the flood myths. How every ancient civilisation remembers a flood. And it turns out every civilisation also remembers a door in the ground that monsters come out of. That's twice now that the whole world agrees on something impossible."

"Archie. These stories. Did somebody leave them for us?" Steve asked.

"And by somebody I obviously mean the Curators." Your species was not left to face this uninformed. The stories survived. The understanding that they were instructions did not. THE ETHER ATLAS — FIELD NOTES OF STEVEN PARR Piraeus THE SCHLIEMANN PROBLEM Heinrich Schliemann read the Iliad as a site report, dug where it pointed, and found Troy.

He was vain, he was careless, and he cut a trench through three thousand years of stratigraphy to reach the city he had already decided on, and my profession has spent a century and a half teaching students not to be him. I have delivered that lecture myself, with slides. The slide everyone remembers is the great trench, because the lesson of the trench is that the text is not a map. As of this afternoon I owe the man an apology. Not for his methods.

For the part we buried under the joke, which is that he was right about the only thing that mattered. The text was a map. He took a story every educated person in Europe knew by heart, read it at its word, and put a spade through the proof. So here is the part I am not ready to say out loud. If five door stories from five cultures are procedures, then the rest of the corpus is documentation. Every hybrid in the Greek bestiary stops being decoration and starts reading like a field report filed against a site.

The wolves that walk like men were one entry. The catalogue I was trained to call mythology has not been read properly in a very long time, because everyone qualified to read it was also trained, by lectures like mine, to know better. ✎ I started the list anyway. Back page, in pencil, where it can be erased. The pencil is not caution. It is a courtesy to the man I was this morning.