Chapter 28: Marcos
MATTHEW uprooted the spear on which Babro Du had stuck up the burning scroll from the soft ground and retrieved the priceless item from it. The Huns keeping night watch and some of the Chinese prisoners wide-awake stared at him with awe as he pulled out the rolled up papyrus from the weapon’s sharp tip and unrolled it despite the dancing flames.
“It’s torn,” Stephanie discovered while admiring the harmless fire.
“We can still use it,” Matthew told her, rolling it up. The spear had gone through many layers of the material and he had to do this carefully in order to avoid another tear. “C’mon.”
“What do we do now?”
“We send Yung Ji home and look for Fat George and Rupert.” Matthew didn’t tell her she was going home as well.
When they came up to the small cave, a Hun handed Stephanie one of the lighted torches from the ring. Mondo’s two wives and five children were moving their belongings out of the cave as Yung Ji watched them with foreboding. Peter, meanwhile, still held his wounded side. Stephanie made to go to him and Matthew stopped her.
“We cannot risk him knowing now, Steph,” he told her. “We must do this inside the cave and out of sight.”
The barbarian guards around thought the Chinese boy didn’t want his sister to go near a Hun and glared at him.
“Matthew’s right, Steph,” Nora told her little sister, and the angry Huns all turned their eyes on her. “Uh—sorry,” she quickly apologized.
Stephanie relaxed, shrugging off the incident and nodding at Matthew. “What of the Booklords?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. Haven’t seen them since.”
“They disappeared during the fight,” Nora supplied. “I guess they gave up when the flames refused to go out.”
“They must be watching us,” Peter said, resting his head on Nora’s shoulder. “I feel—feel so weak.”
One of Mondo’s wives nodded at Nora and between them, they helped the struggling Peter into the cave, the woman’s younger ones and Yung Ji closely behind her. As soon as Nora entered the cave, she realized its interior was bigger than they had all thought outside. Even big enough for Mondo, himself. Only its entrance still looked too small for him, she concluded.
The scroll’s mysterious fire was dying out and Stephanie handed Nora the torch when it finally did.
“We must now be quick,” Matthew warned. “We can’t allow the Booklords to meet us here.”
“We must now send you home, Peter,” Nora told her fat friend, helping him to sit down on the only bed-like structure in the place.
“I’m not injured, you know,” he protested. “I’m just . . . tired, that’s all.”
Yung Ji sat beside him, looking lost.
“You’ve done enough for us already, Peter,” Matthew said. “You must go home now.”
“Yeah, you’ve helped us a lot,” Nora agreed with pure gratitude. “We—We couldn’t have gotten here without you.” She meant it and stooped to kiss him on the cheek.
Stephanie rolled her eyes and looked away, giggling, while Matthew unfolded the scroll again, ignoring her.
Yung Ji was the first to go before he could realize what was really happening, and then Peter followed him with a big smile on his face. He would miss them all.
It was then they all saw the blood on the bed.
“Oh, no,” Nora wailed. “He must’ve been wounded!”
“He can’t go back home with that, you know,” Matthew allayed.
“What do you mean?” Stephanie whined.
“Peter was injured in Greece, remember?” Matthew told her. “He didn’t come here with his wounds—it all disappeared.” He stooped to break off a small twig from the branch of a shrub used to make the bed. “It’s now your turn, Steph.”
“No, it’s not,” the little girl said. “I might end up in the desert this time! I want to be with you guys.”
“Nora?”
“She’s—She’s got a point,” Nora surprised him with. “We . . . don’t want that happening again, do we?”
“Of course not.” Matthew sighed, rubbing off Peter’s blood on the twig.
“What’s with the stick?” Nora asked him.
“Dealing with Xerxes?” he replied. “Let’s send him back from his time.”
Stephanie’s eyes were huge. “But—But we’ll change history,” she warned. “We should be looking for Fat George now and—and not doing this.”
“Mr. Heaver says Xerxes is a Greek transliteration of a Persian word, Matt,” Nora said. “This may not work.”
“And yet it just might,” Matthew argued. “He slapped you, remember? Think of all those we might be saving by doing this.”
“They’ll still die before we get back home,” Stephanie dryly reasoned.
“Persia might fall sooner than it did,” Matthew shot back. “That is revenge enough.”
“And how would you know if it does?”
“Nora?”
All eyes turned to the older girl. She was the joker.
“Nora?” Stephanie reminded her sister when it became obvious that the older girl was wasting time.
“Uh—Do it,” Nora told Matthew and grabbed Stephanie’s hand just in case.
Matthew wrote ‘Xerxes’ on the scroll.
Nothing happened.
“You see,” he told Stephanie as he rolled up the scroll. “We must’ve sent him out of Greece by now.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Stephanie asked him. “We have to leave now?”
“Right—sorry.” Matthew quickly spread out the papyrus again. All the names were now glowing and that was somehow comforting.
Someone coughed near the entrance.
“I’ll take care of it,” Nora announced before the other two could air their views. She swiftly moved to the cave’s mouth.
It was a night watch.
“Tell your master, Mo Shi, that Gojan regrets to tell him his rival’s belongings can only be brought here tomorrow. There is a Council of War, and he is requested to join the Elders in Mondo’s cave immediately,” the man delivered in Hunnish.
Nora nodded and turned back into the cave.
“That was risky,” Matthew told her with admiration.
“What did he say?” Stephanie asked her senior sister, frowning.
“Mumbo jumbo, what else? Look we’ve gotta go now,” Nora stressed instead.
“Okay,” Matthew replied, having noted Fat George’s name. “Hold hands.” The girls obeyed him and he touched the name.
Nothing happened. Matthew’s head started aching again. “What now?” he panicked, holding his head with one hand.
“You should be telling us,” Stephanie snapped.
“We might have gone off without knowing it,” Nora suggested.
“I must’ve used up all my fingers,” Matthew said.
“Let me try,” Stephanie proposed, and the ritual was repeated.
Still, nothing happened.
“Let’s see what’s outside,” Nora said, moving to the cave’s mouth. She was in time to see black-cloaked figures coming down the small pathway leading to the cave and turned away with alarm. “The Booklords are coming!” she whispered uneasily. “We must get out now!” She doused the torch by rubbing it on the ground.
“What of the Huns?” Stephanie asked half-heartedly.
“We’ll try and slip through them,” Matthew told her, grabbing her hand. He couldn’t understand why the book had failed to help them this time, but he knew they must not end up like Liu Hang. The Booklords really messed up that one.
The three children could only make it to the door before it was blocked by these creatures from the underworld.
“No way out?” Nora shrieked as they backed away from this exit. She looked down at the only available weapon, which she had mistakenly quenched with good intent.
It was no good as a stick.
“What now?” Stephanie cried with fright. “There’s no other way out!?
??
“And the book is worthless here!” Matthew exclaimed, watching his backward steps. The black figures were cramming into the cave as the Quentins withdrew from them. These particular tormentors looked and moved like human beings, but beyond this they could not be discerned any further. Matthew held Stephanie, who had her arms tightly wrapped around him, and his brain refused to find a solution to the situation.
“We’re goners!” Nora screamed with frustration. “It’s all over!”
Solid rock stopped their retreat and they were overpowered.