Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [251]
‘Don’t go any further,’ said Marthe. She stood up. ‘If you go down there I shall brick you in. I swear it.’
His foot on the top rung, Jerott looked up and smiled. ‘Would you?’ he said. ‘I doubt it, you know. Pierre Gilles is down there. And I don’t think somehow you want Pierre Gilles bricked up.… If you want to stop me,’ said Jerott conversationally, ‘you can always call in my Janissary.’
But Marthe had already turned her back on him and walked back into the room, without watching Jerott climb, lightly and carefully down into the hole.
I am going to the well, sweet sir, she said. It was a well, the sides green with glutinous mosses. Small, transparent creatures slid past his hands as he gripped the wet rungs, looking down at the darkly moving surface below him, whose pattern was contoured by the faintest glimmer of light.
He had climbed down a third of the ladder when the walls of the well stopped. He could see the edge of the brickwork rising past his feet as he descended and the ladder continuing below him, unsupported, into an expanse of rippling water, which was wider than the bottom of a well: which had no confines; which spread to right and to left of him as he moved down until at last he was standing within a foot of the surface, the mouth of the well a luminous square in the brick archway over his head, and his ears filled with the bellow of Thor and the hiss of storm-raising dragons: a mighty and echoing noise which drummed and seared through his head until he felt like a man caught in a millrace. Jerott looked about him, and was silent.
He stood in a limnophilous palace of marble whose faint columns, rank upon rank, marked the darkness like runes and upheld, with their ghostly carved capitals, the winged vaults of the ceilings which spread, mottled with moisture, far over his head.
Its carpet was water: water which ran green and icy and clear under his feet and licked and floated and sucked at the white marble pillars in their dim and motionless rows: a forest rooted in foam. A forest a thousand years old; built by Justinian as part of the vision by which his new Jerusalem would flower with springs and fountains and blossom: by which, conducted by pipe and conduit and aqueduct, the sweet waters flowed from the hills to the cisterns lying like this one, sunk under the city. Some were known and still used. Some were shattered by earthquake and lay exposed to the air; deep green basins transformed into gardens or sunken alleys for workshops. Some, like this, had remained secret and safe while the buildings overhead crumbled and wasted, and the trapdoors were forgotten where men in the upper air once drew their clear water from the great man-made cavern below. Or perhaps those who still lived there thought it merely a well, and lowered and raised their buckets in ignorance.
There was a boat moored at the foot of the ladder: the boat Gaultier must have used. Jerott had stepped into it when he heard a movement above, and the square of dim light over his head blazed with flickering yellow. Then as he watched Marthe appeared, climbing barefoot down the ladder, her skirt-tails tucked into her waistband; a wax torch in one hand, wincing and flaring in the eddying draughts. Then she was down, on the last rung of the ladder; her smeared face pale in the torchlight. She said, ‘Since you are here, let me take you.’
There was no sign of Gaultier. Jerott untied the rope and slotted the torch into the ring specially made for it, while Marthe lifted the pole and slid the small punt, delicately, between the long colonnades.
There were fish in the water: pale darting shapes which swarmed close under the light, flashing their thin silver sides. The columns were thick: perhaps six feet in diameter with a passage of twelve feet between each pair, and there must have been four or five hundred of them, vanishing into the green roaring gloom. How high they were, it was impossible to tell;