Oracle of the Dead(50)

“Unlikely. The tunnel is unthinkably ancient. You can feel it. This statue is old, but nowhere near that old. If the Aborigines carved the tunnel, it was for some Aboriginal purpose, incomprehensible to us. This must have been carved within recent generations, maybe a few centuries ago.”

“Do you think there’s anyone who could tell us when it was made?” Hermes said. “I don’t know much about sculpture, but it looks pretty crude to me.”

“Probably not,” I said. “I know a lot of art connoisseurs, but they always think that there was no sculpture worth noticing before the great age of Athens and don’t pay much attention to the older stuff. I doubt it’s very important to our investigation in any case. It just tells us what I expected: that this unbelievable place has served a number of peoples in a number of functions over the centuries. That means there’s nothing terribly sacred about the relationship of the Hecate cult with this place. They’re just another pack of immigrants who moved in and adapted it to their own purposes.” In addition I was beginning to suspect that the Hecate cult itself, or at least some of its adherents, had been using this convenient facility for a number of differing purposes, among them murder and robbery.

We found a few more of the vent holes, but nothing more. “All right,” I said. “To the river chamber.” So we made our way lower into the chamber where this had all begun, when the priest Eugaeon had surfaced in the bubbling water. Here I had extra torches ignited and lamps lit. Soon we had a very tolerable light, dimmed and diffused somewhat by the ever present mist from the water. While I set the other men to searching walls, floor, and ceiling, Hermes and I stripped and went into the water. In the excellent light, this was quite pleasant, making up for the lack of a decent bathing facility near the temples.

I went first to the place where the water, as we now knew, emerged from the other place, an unknown distance away, where it was accessed from the other tunnel. The current was quite strong, making it difficult to hold my place. The water was chest-deep to me, the bottom perfectly smooth beneath my feet. There seemed to be no growth of lichen or any of the usual slimy stuff that grows where water and stone meet. The heat of the water may have accounted for that, or possibly its sulfur content. The channel where the water entered seemed to be almost as wide as my outspread arms, and the same distance from the surface of the water to the floor. I felt that, had I been able to make my way against the current, I might have walked to the access from the other temple.

From there I went to the opposite wall of the chamber, where the water ran out. Hermes was examining the bottom, feeling every inch of it carefully, with his feet. “Absolutely smooth,” he reported. “No rocks, no sand, nothing—wait.” He stooped, ducked under the water, and came up a moment later with something. “Felt it with my foot,” he said, handing the thing to me. It was a bone pin about as long as my hand, the sort women use to dress their hair.

“Let’s keep searching the bottom,” I said, and commenced to feeling with my soles. In a short time we came up with a bronze stylus for writing on wax tablets, a necklace of blue Egyptian beads with the clasp broken, and a woman’s sandal, but nothing more.

“What do we make of this?” Hermes said. “Offerings?”

“It’s an impoverished god who’d accept such trash as sacrifices,” I said. “Petitioners have to wade into the water to get their prophecy. Maybe this stuff just got dropped and lost in the water over the years.”

I waded on, still feeling with my feet, until I was almost at the far wall and the current around my feet and calves began to quicken. I turned to the men who were searching the chamber. “Anything yet?”

“Nothing, Praetor,” said one man who stood on another’s shoulders to search the ceiling. “Not even one of those vent holes in this room. It’s probably why the mist stays here.”

“Well,” I said, feeling my way closer to the outlet, “you just keep on . . . Awwk!” Something that felt like a giant hand grabbed my ankles and jerked me beneath the water. I was almost to the wall and I grabbed at it, my hands scrabbling at the rough rock, nails scraping and splintering against it as I was dragged into the outlet fissure, feeling my legs scrape against the side. I was drowning and I knew that this was definitely not the way I wanted to die, unable to breathe in the utter darkness of a subterranean tunnel.

I was losing what little purchase I had on the rough stone, knowing I was lost forever, when strong hands seized my wrists and pulled hard, almost disjointing my shoulders, so powerful was the current that was trying to drag me the other way. Then other hands grasped me and tugged and I was free of the fearful current. My head broke water and I coughed and sputtered and they carried me from the water and sat me on the stone floor.