Rudy Of The Lost Heart
I come to with the coppery taste of blood in my mouth. His leg is pressed up hard between my thighs, and his body is heavy over me. My vision swims… I can barely see him as he grunts with exertion.
A shriek fights it’s way up through my constricted body. Before it blows past my teeth, he says, voice calm and creamy:
“Don’t scream, girl. Don’t make a noise…”
And that’s how Sebastian Sax calms me down.
“… I’m trying to think.”
He props himself there, above me, concentration wrought on his face. A thought seems to occur to him, and I feel the muscles bunch up in his arms on either side of me, and see the strain on his face in the dim light of our torches, lost somewhere nearby.
After a few moments, he stops straining, seeming to think about our situation again for a minute. Then he pushes back again, and if there’s a difference to his movements this time, I can’t tell what it is.
A little longer this time, and he relaxes once again. I realise that the blood in my mouth is his, as he slumps down and a few more drops fall onto my face.
“Bloody earthquakes…” My dashing companion, the most famous archaeologist in the world – for what that’s worth – mutters, ” This part of the world is positively filthy with them.”
Having him here with me makes me calmer, but still and all, this isn’t a situation I’m particularly built for. I’m still a mite disoriented, and my aching head slightly offsets the rising panic I’m feeling, as I realise that we are in the ground. We must have been at the dig when the tremors hit, in one of the excavation shafts, and I have no sense of how far in we are. Were we on our way up, or on our way down?
“Don’t you remember?” Sebastian says, when I ask him. “We were on our way up, at considerable pace.” He shifts around in place, the movement putting a slightly uncomfortable pressure at the point between my legs where his knee is resting. That takes my mind off the fear a little. He has been a perfect gentleman for the entirety of our trip, and to be frank, it is starting to drive me to distraction. I roll my eyes and whimper by way of diversion, and he looks down at me, concerned, and apologetic. Bless him, he thinks he’s hurting me!
“What on earth are you doing, Sebastian?”
“Well, dear heart… as I understand it, we may be here for some short time, and I believe that I have something in my hip flask that will see us through in just such an eventuality.”
“Booze?” I squawk. “At a time like this?”
He wriggles a little more carefully, and I realise that he is, somehow, shielding me from a considerable volume of debris with his own body. With a wince and a wink, he manages to get into his jacket pocket, and out with the spirits.
“Can you think of a better time?” He says, and manages a pained half-grin.
I see his point, and take an offered sip.
“If you don’t mind me saying, you seem to be taking this whole ‘buried alive’ thing rather well…”
“Well, you see, dear Sian, with a history like mine, you get used to subterranean spaces…” He gulps a gulp of whiskey down, and wipes his lips awkwardly against his shoulder. “Besides, I’m fairly sure someone will be along for us in a bit. Being buried alive is the least of our worries.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, probably nothing.” Seguing nicely into: “Did I ever tell you about the month I spent under Manhattan?”
“What? Eh? Um… no, Sebastian, I don’t think you did. In the sewers, do you mean?”
“Oh, no, further down then that. While exploring old native remains that had somehow fetched up on Ellis Island, I came across a hidden tunnel… which of course, with my usual New York luck, slipped rather casually into a much steeper shaft. I was knocked unconscious, of course. One almost always is, in such circumstances…”
The urge, once you’ve spent some time with Sebastian, is always to disbelieve, but the thing is, you half get the feeling that he’s deliberately playing down his experiences, rather then building them up. Certainly, I’ve only been travelling with him a few months, and I’ve seen some things, I can tell you…
When he tells me that he woke up somewhere a mile or so under Central Park, in an ornate citadel carved into the stone, I almost argue the nonsense of it, though. Except that the story is utterly fascinating.
“It was utterly fascinating.” He says. “A secret and ancient civilisation – around a thousand souls, all existing in exclusion of the city above. A system of tunnels vast enough yet deep enough that it had thus far remained utterly undiscovered. The most peculiar thing, though, was that everybody down there spoke with a strong New York accent. One might write a paper on the theory that the peculiar way of speaking in that city comes not from the cultural or geographical history of the colonials, but from the stone the city rests on itself.”
“Well, I don’t mean to seem skeptical, but I find it strange that such a place could exist unnoticed for such a long time, Sebastian.” A fascinating idea, but utterly impossible, I’ve more or less decided.
“Of course, my dear, you might think that, but then how would you explain the similar places that exist on almost every major landmass on the planet, and more then one in places?” He forces another awkward swig, and tried to suppress a cough. The movement pushes him closer against me, and I’m transported for a second, away from myself. Suddenly a whole world under the earth seems more likely then the claustrophobic crush that we find ourselves in.
“This particular society was a monarchy of sorts, and I was soon to meet their hard young virgin queen, Radinia.” He notices my raised eyebrow, and rallies… “Not quite the measure of our own dear monarch, of course. More of a tribal leader on a primitive scale. Quite a beauty, though – tan and supple – and one has to wonder how that is always the case in these places, when the sun must be such a distant and forgotten visitor.”
“Didn’t you ask such things?” In for a penny, I’m thinking. “You were there for a month, after all.”
“That is true, indeed. And there were many things that I should have liked to have asked, given the time, but the queen took quite a shine to the notion that I was some kind of crusading adventurer, and as often seems to occur in situations like that, she insisted at spear-point that I undertake a quest for her.”
“Oh, honestly…”
“Yes, honestly! An artifact… well, more likely, a bit of a royal family heirloom, had been stolen from her when she was but a princess, and she had an inkling that the culprits had hidden it even deeper in the earth, somewhere beneath an incredibly old and grand shrine on the outskirts of their city. It was my mission to find the thing, a grapefruit-sized piece set in gold, with a huge rough-hewn heart-shaped gemstone as it’s centre-piece…”
He cocks his head to one side, listening suddenly, and then relaxes again, shifting position onto his opposite arm. Grains of dirt sift down over his shoulder, and go down the front of my blouse – I pre-emptively feel a stab of irritation, knowing that that will itch like buggery later.
“Of course, it was my duty as an Englishman to try and do as the lady asked. And of course, there was the matter of the spears…”
“Of course.” I grin.
I can hear something now, as well. Distant shouts, muffled through the mess above us.
“Hm.” Sebastian Sax mutters, matter of factly. “I thought this might be a possibility. Far too early and angry sounding to be relief workers, don’t you think?”
“What?” I say, eyes suddenly wide, remembering. “Sebastian, what did you mean when you said that being buried alive wasn’t something we’d need to worry about?” The shouts are closer now, and the ground behind and above Sebastian is shifting, as unmistakably the load that he is carrying gets lighter. He shrugs and rolls his joints, his movements now more free.
“Well, now, sweet girl, I don’t think I said that, exactly. I suspect that being buried alive is positively frightful.” He takes a sniff of his whiskey, and, once offered and finished with by myself, he slides it back into it’s own pocket in his jacket. His leg has moved from between mine, now, and I almost miss it. Except that there’s something in his current ambiguity that I recognise, and have learned to be a little nervous of. “I just knew that it wasn’t likely to be our fate. We were only a few yards from the shaft entrance when the tremors hit, after all.”
“So what on earth were you on about? And… if those aren’t relief workers, who on earth are they?” Patches of light start to show above us, as the entrance to the shaft, apparently not that far away, is cleared. The shouts, in the local tongue, are louder now, too.
“Well, you see… this dig was always on shaky ground, if you’ll pardon my pun. Of course, it was all legal and above board, and government sanctioned, but the thing is, in a place like this, what that means can change from minute to minute.”
“Oh. What exactly are you trying to tell me, Sebastian?”
“Well, I’m rather flustered that you don’t actually remember. Scant minutes before the cave collapsed, I had received word that the military arm of the ruling body had heard about our latest find…” We both glance at the rucksack that he has just wrapped his fingers around, “and they have had a quick rethink on what should be done with it. And when they couldn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion they had an… ah… reshuffle instead.”
“They’re not a rescue party, is what you’re saying?” I mutter, as the final rocks and dirt are removed, and we can uncurl ourselves, and begin to stand. “They probably want to shoot us?”
“Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying.” He gives a shrug with his eyebrows, and flashed that grin again, the one that set a fire under my adventurous spirit, and shook me from the safety of my humdrum studies.
“Oh, dear.” And now that I look, blinking through the sudden light, I can see the outlines of a dozen men at the cave face, and what I can only imagine are the hard, sharp shapes of army-issue rifles, all pointing at Sebastian Sax. For his part, Sebastian simply shakes the dirt off his shoulders, collecting himself. Looking at him, I’m not as scared as I probably should be. “Before we go out there, just tell me… what happened with the quest? What happened with the queen?”
“Well, now, Sian dear. I’ll tell you the whole story later. But for now, all you need to know is this…” His expression makes me swoon like someone five years younger – he is so bloody debonaire. “I left her with her dignity… And her virginity she gave me for free.”
With that, he turns, rucksack over his back, and walks towards the one soldier who looks most in charge. The sound of a dozen guns clattering, their safeties off, doesn’t even seem to make the man flinch.
Sebastian Sax, the man who’ll always leave me wondering what might happen next…
