Episode 66 · Against the Current

He was old. He had the crooked shoulders of a man who has carried loads all his life, and his hands were black with soot to the elbows. A bundle of firewood was tied to his back with rope. He looked down at the water, at them, without surprise, the way a man on a harbor wall watches boats come in out of the dark.

Beside Soles, Maxim went rigid.

In the red light Soles could see him: soaked, the crowbar still in his hand, his face lifted toward the step.

— Tertius, Maxim said, so quietly that Soles barely heard it.

The old man did not answer to the name. He looked at Maxim the way you look at someone you have been waiting for, then shifted the firewood on his back with a tired movement made a thousand times.

— Fire, he said.

His voice was rough, with an accent Soles did not know. That was all he said.

Maxim stared at him. Then up the spiral, at the light coming down from far above. Then, slowly, he turned his back on it.

The firelight caught him from behind and threw his shadow across the water, long and straight, like a road laid out in front of him.

Maxim stood looking down that shadow. His lips moved as if he were checking something against a list.

— The water’s coming in where the mouth is, he said.

His voice did not shake.

— We go against the current. That’s the way out. Where the coldest water comes from.

No one asked how he knew. Once he said it, Soles felt it too: under the warm water swirling back from the temple ran a colder stream, coming down from the tunnel mouth, pressing on his shins.

— Hold on to me, Maxim said. To each other. Not to the walls.

They held on: Soles to Maxim’s shoulder, Tesa’s good hand to Soles’s jacket, Krista to the back of Tesa’s coat. Varren came last.

Maxim set off against the water.

The red light stayed behind them and pushed their shadows ahead. Soles did not turn. Once, behind them, he heard firewood set down on a stone step and the heavy feet of a man climbing a spiral stair, slowly, as he must have climbed it every night of his life.

Then the light went out.

But they were in the tunnel. Cold water hit their chests. Ahead, Maxim felt for the bend with the crowbar; beyond it the low roof would force them down.

At the bend he stopped. Soles braced behind him, but the water took his trailing foot. He struck Tesa, who folded her broken hand against her chest. Krista’s grip slipped from the wet coat.

Her cry went down the tunnel.

Soles turned and reached with his left hand. He caught a sleeve. The cut pulled under the soaked bandage; his fingers gave, and the sleeve slid through them. Krista went backward toward the chamber, her chin barely above water.

He started after her. Maxim’s hand closed on his coat.

No footing. I’ll take him with me.

Soles stopped fighting the grip. He flattened his feet against the inside of the bend and held, making a brace instead of another body in the current.

Varren caught Krista beneath the collar. Water broke over her mouth. She clawed at his arm, pulling him sideways, and he moved one foot against the wall. Then he drew her upright beside him, almost gently. His shoulder barely shifted.

Tesa had turned. Her eyes went from Krista to the hand holding her.

— Stay low, Soles said. At the bend.

Varren put Krista’s hands back on Tesa’s coat and held Krista’s belt himself. This time they bent before the roof reached them and moved one at a time, letting each person find a foothold before the next moved. Soles’s left hand throbbed against his chest. Krista’s coughing carried back through the dark.

As they climbed toward the mouth, the water fell from their chests to their knees. At the end of the tunnel there was a gray patch.

Not light. Only less dark.

They came out through the grate one by one, on hands and knees, through the water pouring into the hole, and dropped onto the gravel between the blocks. Soles lay on his back, face to the sky. It was low and white, as it had been all week.

He rose on one elbow.

The old riverbed was not a riverbed anymore.

Water had risen over the reeds, over the lower blocks, over the gravel where he had fought Tesa. The wooden footbridge had snapped in the middle; the half on their bank floated crooked, caught on its hinges. Across the channel the stone bank had collapsed along dozens of paces, and through the breach the water ran on toward the garden.

Soles got to his feet. His ribs hurt less than they should have. He knew why: cold, fear, the body putting the bill off until later. It would come.

Along with the vault, he understood, the walled-up drains below had given way. The water the blocks had held back for years was looking for its old road, through the garden, where it had run before anyone moved the stones.

The water over his ankles was warm. Warm like the water in the round room. Soles pulled his foot out of it without meaning to.

Beyond the iron fence the garden paths were underwater. The greenhouses stood in it up to their lower panes, and one leaned to the side, glass broken, like a stranded boat. On the terrace from Krista’s photographs, the tables were floating.

Maxim lifted his wrist and looked at his old watch, fogged inside. He shook it and looked again.

— How long were we down there?

No one answered. They had gone down soon after eleven. To Soles it had felt like an hour.

Maxim turned the watch toward them. It was nearly seven.

Maxim turned toward the road, not the garden.

— Someone’s coming, he said.

The road was empty. Soles heard nothing.

Then, far off, a siren started. At the end of the road appeared the lights of a fire engine, then another, then the blue of the police.

Maxim did not look surprised. He looked at his hands. They were black, though he had not touched soot. He rubbed them together slowly and turned his eyes back to the bend in the road, to the place where the next car would appear, before it appeared.

Krista was kneeling on the gravel. The paper from the wooden room was in her hand, wet, stuck to her fingers, the ink spreading at the edges. She smoothed it on her knee like an old photograph.

— What does it say? Soles asked.

The lines were not letters. They were the signs from the temple walls: branching lines, closed circles, open ones.

Krista read them slowly, her lips moving, the way a child reads a hard line. She stopped, started again, stopped.

— I don’t know this language, she said quietly. I never have.

— But?

— But I know what this line says. The way you know what someone has just said to you. Only this one. Not the rest.

She read it in a low voice:

— What has opened does not close again.

No one spoke.

Tesa sat a little apart on a block the water had not reached, her broken hand in her lap. She was not looking at the garden. She was looking at Varren.

He stood beside her, wet through, hands in his pockets, watching the garden like everyone else, with the calm face of a man who sees a disaster and does not yet know its size.

Tesa leaned toward him, then looked away. She spoke so quietly that Soles, three paces off, barely caught it, and only because the siren stopped just then.

— Your palms were dry, she said. Down there.

Varren did not look at his hands. He did not take them out of his pockets. He smiled slowly, as at a child who has said something sweet and meaningless.

— It was dark down there, Tesa. You couldn’t see what was in your own hand. Let’s go home.

They did not go home.