moonlight.
Its lengthening black shadow shifted across the scattered white ribcages and skulls behind it, and the high faraway voices were singing louder now, spiralling up toward a crescendo beyond the range of human hearing.
Trelawny’s eyes were wide, and he wasn’t breathing, or even thinking. His horse was rigidly still.
The figure ahead of them was even taller when it straightened somewhat, its long, mismatched stalactite arms lifting toward the horse and riders – and though it only roughly resembled a human body, Trelawny was certain that it was female. And when it spoke, in an echoing voice like rushing water choked and sluiced and spilled by a slow millwheel – “And I will purge thy mortal grossness so That thou shalt like an airy spirit go,”
– he knew it was the same creature that had seemed to be riding at his left hand in the Velitza Gorge.
His face and palms tingled in the cold wind, as if damp with some moisture more volatile than sweat. Thy mortal grossness.
The thing ahead of them was hideous, but that wasn’t why Trelawny ached uselessly to tear his eyes from it – the stones it was animating were crude, but they weren’t it. The entity confronting him was an immortal ethereal thing, “an airy spirit” that only touched matter as a well-shod man might carelessly leave bootprints in mud, while Trelawny and Tersitza consisted of matter – fluids and veined organic sacs and tangled hairs, pulsing and temporary.
Trelawny yearned to hide from the thing’s intolerable attention, but he couldn’t presume to move. Abruptly he began breathing again, a harsh hot panting, and it humiliated him.
He was still holding Tersitza’s limp, gently breathing little body in front of himself, as if it were an offering, and for a moment of infinite relief he felt the thing ahead shift its attention to her for a moment before fixing its psychic weight on him again.
The voice came only in his head now, again using lines from his memory but no longer bothering to cater to his fleshy ears by agitating the cold air:
I claim the ancient privilege of Athens:
As she is mine, I may dispose of her.
Since the thing had referred to Tersitza, Trelawny was able to look down at the girl. And though she was obviously as miniscule and ephemeral a thing as he now knew himself to be, her helpless vulnerability couldn’t be ignored, and he scraped together the fragments of his crumpled identity enough to answer. “No,” he whispered.
The thing in the path ahead of them was growing still taller and wider, its misshapen head beginning to blot out part of the night sky, but with adamantine patience it spoke again in his head:
All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.
That was what Satan had offered Christ, in the gospel of Matthew. Edward Trelawny realized that this vast thing was offering him a chance to become something like its peer, to purge him of his body-bound mortality.
How I would have soared above Byron here, he thought.
But he wrapped his awkwardly jointed arms around Tersitza and pulled her bony form to himself.
“No,” he said again, and his voice was clearer now.
He looked up from under his eyebrows, blinking away the stinging sweat – and then clenched his eyes shut, for the thing was rushing at him, expanding in his view –
– but there was no obliterating impact. After some tense length of time he began breathing again, and the taint of old decay was gone, and what he smelled on the chilly mountain breeze now was tobacco and roasted pigeon.
He opened his eyes. Tersitza was still slumped unconscious across his lap on the saddle, but the giant stone form whose slopes began a mile in front of them was Mount Parnassus, its high shoulders hidden behind clouds in the moonlight. His horse stamped restlessly in damp leaves.
They were back in the Velitza Gorge again, as abruptly as they had been taken out of it – if indeed they had actually been out of it, and the spirit of the mountain had not simply manifested itself to him in a scene conjured, as its statements and first appearance had been, from Trelawny’s memory and imagination.
To his right through the dark tangles of the oak branches he could see the cooking fires and the palikars’ tents around the ruined Chapel of St. George.
He hugged Tersitza to him, already beginning to wish he could have accepted the stone thing’s magnanimous offer.
The girl stirred at last, then