The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [116]
It was dark, but some sunlight had followed me in, and there was enough light from a hole broken in the roof somewhere, so that I could see dimly. The temple was as filthy and forlorn as the stairway that led to it. Only the strength of the vaulted roof had saved the place from falling in under the weight of the hillside above. The furnishings had gone long since, the braziers, benches, carvings; this, like the scoured ruin overhead, was a shell empty of its tenant. The four lesser altars had been broken and defaced, but the central altar stood there still, fixed and massive, with its carved dedication to the unconquered god, MITHRAE INVICTO, but above the altar, in the apse, axe and hammer and fire had obliterated the story of the bull and the conquering god. All that remained of the picture of the bull-slaying was an ear of wheat, down in one corner, its carving still sharp and new and miraculously unspoiled. The air, sour with the smell of some fungus, caught at the lungs.
It seemed fitting to say a prayer to the god departed. As I spoke aloud, something in the echo of my voice came, not like an echo, but an answer. I had been wrong. The place was not yet empty. It had been holy, and was stripped of its holiness; but something was still held down to that cold altar. The sour smell was not the smell of fungus. It was unlit incense, and cold ashes, and unsaid prayers.
I had been his servant once. There was no one here but I. Slowly, I walked forward into the center of the temple, and held out my open hands.
***
Light, and colour, and fire. White robes and chanting. Fires licking upwards like light blowing. The bellow of a dying bull and the smell of blood. Outside somewhere the sun blazing and a city rejoicing to welcome its new king, and the sound of laughter and marching feet. Round me incense pouring heavy and sweet, and a voice that said through it, calm and small: "Throw down my altar. It is time to throw it down."
***
I came to myself coughing, with the air round me swirling thick with dust, and the sound of a crash still echoing round and round the vaulted chamber. The air trembled and rang. At my feet lay the altar, hurled over on its back into the curve of the apse.
I stared, dazed still and with swimming sight, at the hole it had torn in the floor where it had stood. My head sang with the echo; the hands I held stiffly before me were filthy, and one of them showed a bleeding gash. The altar was heavy, of massive stone, and in my right mind I would never have laid hands to it; but here it lay at my feet, with the echo of its fall dying in the roof, followed by the whisper of settling masonry as the crumbled pavement began to slide down into the hole where the altar had stood.
Something showed in the depths of the hole: a hard straight edge and a corner too sharp for stone. A box. I knelt down and reached for it.
It was of metal, and very heavy, but the lid lifted easily. Whoever had buried it had trusted the god's protection rather than a lock. Inside, my hands met canvas cloth, long rotten, which tore; then inside that again, wrappings of oiled leather. Something long and slender and supple; here at last it was. Gently, I took the wrappings off the sword and held it naked across my hands.
A hundred years since they had put it here, those men who had made their way back from Rome. It shone in my hands, as bright and dangerous and beautiful as on the day it had been made. It was no wonder, I thought, that already in that hundred years it had become a thing of legend. It was easy to believe that the old smith, Weland himself, who was old before the Romans came, might have made this last artifact before he faded with the other small gods of wood and stream and river, into the misty hills,