Episodul 55 · Just a Knife

Soles thought of the night in the mud. Of the blows that had struck him like a beam dropped from a frame. Of the moment he had pushed her off the smooth gravel and her fist had suddenly weighed nothing.

— I felt it, he said.

— I know you felt it. You were the first one who felt it and stayed on his feet.

She knocked her wrists together twice, with the dry sound of tape, though she had no tape on her hands. She rolled her shoulders. She lowered her chin. Then she put both palms on the carved roots.

— Open, she said under her breath, and leaned into the stone.

The stone moved.

Faster than under Soles’s hand, more decidedly, as if it had recognized her. The dust rose from the floor and hung in the air around their legs. The drops on the ceiling stopped at the ends of the stone. The slab drew back without a sound, a hand, two, a step, until between it and the wall there opened a gap a man could pass through.

Tesa groaned. Not loudly, through her teeth. Soles saw her begin to rock, slowly, from one foot to the other, her palms pressed to the stone, as in the ring between rounds, when you have no air left and don’t want to show it. A thread of blood ran from her nose onto her upper lip. She did not wipe it. Her breathing shortened as the gap widened.

Soles remembered the weight in his own hand, heavy and not his. Tesa’s fingers tightened against the stone. She could have let go then. She did not. She took the weight the way you take a blow you could have slipped, and held it.

— Go, she said. I’ve got one round. Three minutes. Maybe less.

— Tesa…

— Don’t talk to me. Count.

Soles checked the time on his phone before pocketing it. He would have to get Krista back through that gap while Tesa could still hold it.

Krista went through the gap first, her phone raised. Soles squeezed through after her, his arm pressed to his ribs, and the air inside hit him in the face, warm and heavy with that smell of earth turned over after rain.

The room beyond was round. The ceiling rose into a vault so high that the light of the phone did not reach the top. The walls were covered in signs, from the floor to as high as anything could be seen, row upon row, cut deep into the stone. They were not letters. They were not drawings either. They were something in between: lines that branched, closed circles, open circles, shapes that repeated with small changes, like a word written in several ways.

Krista stopped in the middle of the room and did not move. The light of the phone trembled in her hand.

— I don’t know this writing, she said. Some of these shapes repeat, but I can’t read them.

— Krista. Three minutes.

— I know.

She began at the entrance and worked around the wall, taking overlapping pictures. Between shots her eyes moved ahead, fixing the next group of signs. She might keep what she saw; the others would need the images.

Watching her, Soles remembered a balance under a laboratory lamp, the man beside it forgetting that night had fallen.

— Stay where you can hear her, he said.

— I can hear her. Go.

Soles looked too, because he could not help it.

On the wall in front of him, among the signs, was a man. Lying on his back, arms at his sides, carved from above, as if whoever had cut him had stood over him and looked down. From the man’s chest grew a tree. Its roots went into his chest, and its branches climbed the wall, among the signs, until they were lost in the dark.

Soles looked at him longer than he should have.

He knew what the world looked like seen from above. He did not know how he knew.

— Soles, Krista said, and her voice was different. Over there.

She pointed with the light to the left, where the wall opened into a small, low gap, the size of a pantry door. Soles bent down and went in.

The room beyond was small and square, with smooth walls and no signs. No trees, no men seen from above. Only bare stone and dust. And in the middle, on the floor, a chest. Krista shone her phone past his shoulder and photographed it from the doorway before turning back to the signs in the larger room.

It was not stone. It was wood, dark, almost black, its corners bound in iron. It was much newer than the room, and that showed at once, the way a plastic chair shows in an old church. On the lid, someone had made notches. Rows of short, deep notches, packed close together, so many that they had thickened into a single knotted band, like a root wrapped around a stone.

Soles felt his left wrist.

It did not hurt. He only felt it, the way you feel a place from which something has just been taken. He rubbed the skin once with his thumb, out of reflex, and stopped when he realized what he was doing.

In the large room, Krista was taking photographs. Beyond the gap, Tesa’s breathing could be heard, long and rough, let out through her mouth at even intervals.

The chest had no lock. Soles lifted the lid.

Inside was a piece of oiled leather, wrapped several times around something long and thin. He rested the bundle on the open lid and unfolded the stiff leather with his good hand.

Beneath it was a blade.

It was not long. A palm and a half, slightly curved, with the edge on the inside, like a grafting knife, like the tools Mary used to cut the roses in autumn at the edge of the greenhouse. Only it was not iron. It was stone. A dark stone, smooth as water, polished to a shine, without a single scratch. The same kind of stone as the slab the tree had been cut into.

Soles lifted it.

Nothing happened.

The dust did not rise. The drops did not stop. His hand did not grow warm. It was a blade, cold and exactly as heavy as it should be, and nothing more.

Just a knife.

He turned it in the light. The edge was perfect. Not a single nick. As if it had never cut anything, or as if it had cut so many times that the stone had learned not to break.