Chapter 252: The Wisdom of Fools
The passage swallowed them whole, with torchlight crawling over the stonework.
At last, the way opened into the very room that had nearly killed James and Mary the first time they came through.
There was no poison waiting to finish them this time.
Whatever had filled the chamber had leaked away through seams in the stone that had loosened enough, and the diggers had checked the air with an unlit torch before they let the expedition near the place.
The little skeleton was still curled in the corner where it had fallen, and every basket of spoil was left it exactly where it was.
James glanced down as he passed. "Not half so frightenin’ now the death-stink’s cleared out. Why, near enough feels like home."
"Ye’d charm the Devil into sharin’ his hearth with ye, James." Mary snickered by his side.
Jim wrinkled his nose at the old mud-and-stone stank that refused to leave with the poison. "Christ above, an’ I thought I’d smelt the worst the world had to offer me by now. Seems I’ll have to scratch that down an’ make room for this bastard."
"Well, what’s sittin’ at the very top o’ that list now, then?" Kit grinned and asked.
Beyond the skeleton, the chamber widened, and the treasure revealed to them.
Sailors and diggers were all around, their arms wrapped around chests full of gold coins and bound in copper green with age, oilskin sacks so heavy they needed two men apiece.
Jade masks and little golden idols came up with them, some like feathered snakes, others like men with birds’ heads, the things no Christian church would have thought worth to put on a wall.
Behind James came the rest of the party, through the chamber toward the wall at the far end. That was the one place the diggers had left alone.
Kit watched the workers with open envy.
"Tell me there’s still a bit o’ gold left for a poor bastard."
Bran bumped him. "Ye’ll get what them two idle hands o’ yers have earned, Kit, an’ that’s not so much as a copper."
The wall at the end had escaped every pick and basket that had gone through the rest of the chamber. Once the torchlight found it properly, James saw why they had all left it alone.
The murals told a whole life in stone, from egg to crown, and reading it sent shivers cold up their backs.
At one end, little kneeling figures, no taller than a thumb, gathered around a nest among the roots of a carved tree. An egg rested inside it beneath a field of carved stars.
Beside it, a hatchling rose from carved reeds while the same little figures fled in every direction.
Farther along, the serpent had grown jaws wide enough to swallow a man, with a carved river beneath it crowded with the drowning.
Beyond that, it lay coiled while rows of tiny worshippers bowed flat, their arms full of offerings.
At the far end, crowned over everything, a great winged and feathered serpent rose from the stone.
A carved sun sat against one side of its head and a carved moon against the other, while the little kneeling figures stretched away into the stone as far as the carving continued.
Five raised studs were put into the story, one at each stage.
The egg, the hatchling, the wide crocodile jaw, the coiled hooded serpent, and the crowned figure above them all. Each had been carved deep enough for a man’s thumb to press.
Kit had never met a strange wall he could leave alone.
Before anyone could stop him, he put his thumb against the crocodile’s jaw. It gave beneath him, soft and sudden, with a low stone grinding sound.
"God’s teeth, it moved!" Kit shouted, and everyone crowded around him at once.
Jim bent close and squinted at the hatchling. "Christ alive, would ye look at the wee shape o’ that bastard! I’ve seen the like before, I have, though I’ll be damned if I’m sayin’ where with the lasses standin’ there."
Bran kicked his arse. "Then spit it out, Jim, or shut yer bloody gob an’ stop wagglin’ the hint under our noses."
James put his thumb against the crowned serpent at the top and looked from it to the mask tucked beneath his arm, then to the key at his hip.
"That’s the very fella off the mask, and off the key besides."
Mary reached past him and pressed the coiled figure lower down. It yielded just as easily.
"Every one o’ them gives. Whole bloody wall’s meant to be pressed, if I’m readin’ it right."
Bran folded her arms. "I’ll wager me last copper they have to be pressed in the right order. Why else would the bloody wall give us five?"
Barrel frowned at the row.
"Which order, then?"
Not a soul had an answer.
One by one, every face turned from the wall to the others, each person plainly hoping someone else would prove himself clever enough to solve it first.
Kit shoved past Barrel and put his thumbs against the crocodile and the hatchling together.
Bran pushed in beside him before he was done and pressed the crowned serpent first, loudly insisting that one ought to greet the fiercest beast in the room before worrying about the small ones.
Within a few heartbeats their two grand ideas had become one grand mess. Neither waited for the other, and the wall gave them a low grinding sound, followed by every stud they had touched sliding back with the stone.
Kit rounded on her. "Ye bloody well spoiled it! I’d got the whole order goin’, an’ then ye come shovin’ yer hands in halfway through!"
"Yer order was bollocks from the start, Kit. I only gave the damned thing the finishin’ touch."
Jim watched them with open amusement.
"All noise, all fury, an’ not a bloody thing accomplished."
"Aye," Ox nodded.
Kit and Bran both turned their fresh anger on him. Ox merely shrugged and stepped aside, apparently happy to let someone else suffer for the next attempt.
Jim stepped forward with all the confidence and bravado of the world. "Seen this trick before, I have. Recife, years back, took me half a day to get the thing open, but I remember what worked."
He pressed the five studs in an order no one had asked him to invent.
The wall told him precisely the same answer it had given Kit and Bran. The same stone grinding, every stud sinking back into place.
For one moment Jim simply stared at it. His own remembered adventure had failed him, and he seemed almost offended by the discovery.
He recovered quickly.
Before anyone could enjoy the moment, he launched into the story of how the exact same thing had happened the first time, and how he had eventually opened that door only after a Portuguese priest and a length of good rope had joined the business.
Mary asked, flatly unconvinced.
"So the priest and the rope did the hard work for ye, did they?"
James grinned through the whole performance and let Jim carry on a little longer.
Then he nodded toward the wall.
"All very fine, Jim. But did the damned door ever open?"
Jim answered by raising his voice and talking straight over the question.
Once Jim had talked himself to the end of the road, James stepped forward.
He pressed the crowned serpent before going backward toward the smaller figures. "The captain starts with the biggest bastard in the room, then he works his way down to the little ones."
Mary shook her head, while the wall gave him the same refusal it had given all the others.
James straightened without looking troubled and turned toward Mary, ready to see what she intended to try.
Mary offered little more explanation than that. "Crocodile first. That’s where this bloody mess began for us, ain’t it? First step we took in the swamps, first damned thing that caught our eye."
She pressed the crocodile and then forward, trusting her memory more than any clever theory.
Her attempt failed just as his had. The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder before the stone while it gave its familiar low grind.
James could only laugh. "Bloody instinct and hard-earned memory, laid low by the same wee bit of stone. Christ, what a humiliation."
"Aye, well..."
Mary’s eyes moved toward Kit. "Least we had the good sense to be wrong quiet-like, instead o’ bellowin’ our heads off and makin’ spectacles o’ ourselves."
"Oi! Hold yer tongue! I’ll not have ye lumpin’ me in with Jim!" Kit protested.
"If anythin’, lad, ye’ve come off bloody well by bein’ compared to Jim at all." Bran grunted.
Barrel watched the wall without appearing troubled by the number of clever people who had already failed.
"Which one smallest?" he asked Ox.
Ox pointed.
"That one."
The two of them pressed the row in order without another word.
Egg first, crowned serpent last. It simply seemed the right way to begin, so obvious everyone else subconsciously thought it couldn’t be the answer.
This time the wall answered differently.
A deep grinding shift rolled through the stone, nothing like the shallow scrape that had followed every attempt before it.
The whole party went silent, every head turning toward the noise.
James was the first to find his voice, half laughing. "Well, I’ll be damned! Straight to the heart of the bloody thing, and without so much as a sentence between ye."
"I... just thought little ones ought go first." Barrel averted his eyes, ears faintly red.
At last the far wall moved.
The whole section of carved stone ground inward and aside on a hinge buried there, and centuries of dust sifted through the torchlight until fresh darkness appeared where solid rock had been only a heartbeat before.
Every voice in the party started to make a ruckus of it.
James just shook his head at them and stepped into the passage, torch raised, and the rest of the party followed him one by one.