Watson, Ian - Novel 08 by The Gardens of Delight (v1.1) Page B

him.”
                 “Good
thinking. Denise, back the way we were. Muthoni, out the other side and cover
it. Jeremy, you wait here in case he slides down one of the other tubes. I’m
going up. I’ll find him.”
                 Muthoni
and Denise hurried out of opposite ends of the grotto, as instructed, and Sean
crouched his way into the tube. His palms and knees gripped the glass
effectively enough—if it was glass,
which he rather doubted. Wedging his back against the upper wall of the tube,
he gained purchase. He moved one palm up, then one knee, inching his back up as
he did so; then he repeated the procedure. Again and again. It strained his neck to look ahead; on the other hand it upset his sense of
balance to look back down the tube—besides, his testicles dangled ridiculously,
seeming to have grown inordinately long and vulnerable. So he stared at his
hands.
                 The
tube wall darkened for a while: there was stone beyond the crystal, clamping it
in its vice. Then light flooded back; he was through the roof. He hauled
himself over the crystal lip on to the pink stone table.
                 Knossos had disappeared. Various other crystal
tubes jutted out around him, but Jeremy would be covering those. A number of
vents led down into the caves in the legs. Alternatively, a rock-slab doorway
in the blue-veined base of the onion-domed spire stood open like Ali Baba’s
cave. Was Knossos inside the spire, climbing up? Sean stared
aloft.
                 A movement high up the other erection—the great stone agave
leaf—caught his attention. This stone leaf was as broad as an oak tree at its
base where it grew, like a mineral-plant, out of the table-top. Right up at its
zenith where it curved over in the air, tapering narrowly, climbed the naked figure they had seen earlier. He was balancing one-legged,
with his arms above his head, high on a thin bridge to nowhere: a Blondin of
the sky, swaying slightly. He might have seen where Knossos went! Abruptly the naked climber
cart-wheeled along the leaf and stood upon one hand in perfect balance, looking
down at Sean. Incredibly, he held the pose.
                 Sean
cupped his hands. “Which way did Knossos go?” he bellowed. “Which way?”
                 The
naked climber pivoted onward, continuing his cartwheel along the
ever-narrowing down-curve of that toothed stone frond—which was only inches
wide toward the tip. He couldn’t possibly recover himself! Nor did he try to.
High over Sean’s head he converted his somersault into a dive, as though the
stone table-top far beneath him was a pool of water. Down he plummeted
silently, without a cry, his hands flush with his body.
                 Briefly,
Sean imagined that he could catch him or at least break his fall, but realized
he would be injured or killed if he got in the diver’s way. He ran helplessly
aside, instead. The diver smashed head first into the stone. His head broke
open, in a bloody porridge.
                 Lazily,
as though it had been waiting for this moment, a white heron flapped up over
the rim of the table. Landing, it stalked long-leggedly towards the corpse,
dipping its head and tossing it up into the air as though gulping down a fish. Greedy to fish among the dead man’s brains? Sean ran at the
tall bird. He waved his arms to ward it off. Instead of flapping away in panic
the heron slashed at him, drawing blood from his thigh with its beak, narrowly
missing his genitals. As Sean retreated, the bird mounted the man’s chest. It
continued to toss its head up and down, but it scavenged nothing. It was bowing to the dead man. What had Jeremy
said? That the heron is sent to people. It was a living bird, but it was also a message . . . And the
heron is the bird of . . . natural death? Then this death was natural?
Appropriate? Not an aberration or a fit of lunacy or an act of suicide? Perhaps
the