The Giant's Almanac Andrew Zurcher (books to read fiction TXT) 📖

A heat and stench rose from within, warm air and something like leaf mould. Arwan got his legs into the void and on to the rungs, then started down, hand over hand.

‘Now you,’ said Mr Ahmadi to Clare. ‘I’ll bring the boy.’

Ned followed, then Fitz, and Mr Ahmadi above him. They made slow progress in the dark, descending a narrow and airless square shaft with rusted metal on every side. The rungs under Fitz’s hands, cool and wet to the touch, had sharp edges that seemed to cut into the insides of his knuckles, so that every step quickly became an agony. For three or four minutes they climbed in the dark, labouring to breathe, until the shaft gave out into a low, hot tunnel. Pipes ran down its ceiling, and thick electrical cords.

‘Run,’ said Arwan, shoving Fitz to the front and handing him the torch.

Fitz ran. The utility tunnel lay straight for about a hundred metres, then dog-legged to the left and right, then ran straight again. Fitz could hear the others pounding behind him, trying to keep up with the light. Passing the powdered ruins of a rudimentary wall, he came into a broader passage; here the ceiling rose, and the pipes, lagged, radiated less heat. At the end of the passage, a sharp turn opened on to a metal gate, locked with a heavy chain. Fitz almost crashed into it. He held the bars of the gate with his fists.

For the first time that night, as he heaved for breath through his burning lungs, he felt tired.

Behind him the others arrived, panting, and at last Arwan – whose loping, lumbering strides almost made running unnecessary. They made way for him as he drew a little key from his coat pocket and opened the padlock.

‘So,’ he said, turning. ‘I will leave you here.’ He made to leave.

‘Arwan,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘Tell her I’m on my way.’

The big man nodded – a heavy, serious motion of his massive, bearded head.

They watched the reflected light from Arwan’s torch fade as his footsteps also faded, one after the other, down the far passage. In the darkness their own breathing mingled for a few moments before Fitz reached for his lamp.

Mr Ahmadi put a hand to his arm. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Wait.’

Sure enough, before much longer a door opened somewhere in the distance, and they heard a new sound of footsteps approaching – coming closer, fading, then closer again – then a click, and a droning, buzzing noise heralded the yellow dawning of a glowing electrical light that, as it brightened, revealed a large room beyond the metal gate.

A tall, bearded man appeared suddenly from the side. Dressed in an oversized tweed jacket, corduroy trousers and brogues, and with one pair of glasses on his weathered nose and another hanging from a loop of twine round his neck, he looked as if he had just stood up from his carrel in a dusty library crammed with illegible manuscripts. He set his hand to the gate, and pulled it open with all the force of his large frame, dragging the chain noisily through the bars. He put out his hand.

‘Habi, Ned,’ he said to each of them in turn, shaking their hands with firm warmth. ‘Clare,’ he added, turning to her, and putting out his hand. ‘I’m Farzan. Welcome to the British Museum.’

The adults stepped lightly through the gate. Fitz alone had stepped back – back the way a thing might go back in its box. He was retreating into the passage – until Farzan caught his gaze, and he stopped.

The Professor looked at him for a long while, with a tightening of his gaze gently pinning the boy in his place, as if he were a specimen being fixed in a display case. One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile as he recognized where Fitz himself had returned his gaze – and he followed it.

There, in the centre of the room, alone and now bathed in yellow light, stood the statue of a boy, full size, cast in bronze. In places green and stained by the centuries, in other places shining with the smooth polish of long handling, the figure was obviously ancient. He stood legs parted with one arm by his side, the other extended as if to beckon or summon someone. Over his eyes, now blank, seemed to hang the shadow of a brightness to which his parted lips also spoke, as if he were on the cusp of an invitation or command, some articulate regality that, for all his slender proportions, his whole form communicated. He wore a rough tunic over trousers, and round his neck hung a massive chain of something like gems, or metalwork. A graceful coronet on his head suggested crenellations. But none of this held Fitz’s attention.

What had seized his attention, what dazzled and terrified him, was that the boy was familiar to him in every detail, from the shape of his chin to the length of his arm, from his graceful wrist and delicately jointed fingers, to his mass of thick hair. In attitude and expression, in his stance and in his gesture, in every point of his appearance, one boy answered the other’s eyes as a photograph might, or a mirror. He was looking at himself. The boy was Fitz.

‘Ah,’ said Professor Farzan, turning back to Fitz. The other adults had fallen silent, caught for a moment between a thought and its catastrophic consequence, and Farzan stepped a pace from them, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his tweed jacket. ‘And welcome to you, too, my boy. Welcome to the British Museum. Welcome to the shāhanshāh, the king of kings.’

5

Dilaram

Ten minutes later, they all stood in a long panelled drawing room, lit by a single standing lamp. All the curtains were drawn, and many of the armchairs at the far end of