Chapter 14 The Second Throat

The deep chamber was warmer than the day outside, and it smelled of the deep spring and of the mineral walls that threw back the lamplight in gold, and the wounded were settled along the warm curve of the rock with the water skin at the head of each. Corvinus left the column to Cassius's accounting and Livia's rounds, and he took Maro, Caius, Publius, and Sextus down past the third chamber to the narrows where the barricade of the first builders' work stood. The first seal had held through the mountain's first speaking, and it had held the second night, and it was now beginning to fail. The basalt blocks of the wall stood dark and solid, and the seams between them were threaded with hairline cracks, and where a block had been set slightly out of true by hands in a hurry, a thin orange line showed through the gap like the edge of a blade of light, and the air before the wall shimmered with the heat of a thing that was still working behind it. "It is weeping," Livia said. She had come down the passage without a sound and stood with her lamp at his shoulder. "The pressure the first mouth was meant to hold has found the path the first builders could not close, and it is working its way down it even now." She held the lamp out toward the wall, and the flame leaned in the draft that moved through the narrows, toward the cracks, toward the orange light, toward the deep. "The second mouth draws the breath of the god. It will not be the first mouth's equal in fire. It will be its equal in ash. The coast, the camp, the city—all of it lies on the god's tongue, and the tongue is waking." Caius had already taken the archive from its oilcloth and was on his knees among the carvings at the base of the wall, reading the new things that shone in the lamplight. "The shaft is below us," he said. "The foundation stone of the temple sits over its neck. The first builders cut the stones to close it, and the stones are here." He looked up. "The lowest chamber. Below the store where we drew the first blocks. There is a stair the carvings mark with the sign of the finished work. It has not been walked since the singers went up to the smoke." The descent was the hardest thing Corvinus had done since the mountain spoke. The passage they had filed through in the month of the evacuation was tame against this. Below the store the rock turned and narrowed, and the air turned heavy, and the walls closed in until a man walked with his shoulders brushing the worked stone on either side. The heat came up out of the floor, not the damp warmth of the upper chamber but a dry, pressing heat that smelled of metal and made the lamp flame burn short and blue. Livia stopped at the head of a steep stair where the passage opened into a shaft of natural rock, and she held the lamp down into it, and the flame drew away from the dark as if the shaft breathed. "No farther, with the lamp low," she said. "The air below is good in the chamber itself, but the stair is a siphon. It draws the bad air in bad pockets. We go down by turns, and we do not go down shouting." They went down by turns. Maro first, then Caius, then Corvinus, then Livia with the lamp, and the shaft opened into a chamber that the lamplight could not span. It was round, and its ceiling curved away into darkness, and the walls were cut with the angular script of the first builders, and at the center of the floor, in the precise middle of the chamber, the rock rose in a lip of raw basalt, and through the lip a shaft opened, rimmed with the marks of human work, wide as a man's arms at the neck, and it descended into a blackness from which the heat rose like a breath. The second mouth. Corvinus knelt at the rim. The shaft was a throat. It went down beyond the reach of the lamp, into the orange depth where the fire of the mountain lived, and the air in the shaft moved, drawing in and out against the palm of his hand held a finger's width above the lip. The mountain was breathing through its second mouth, slow and steady, the breath of a giant asleep, and the breath was timed. Against the far wall of the chamber, stacked in the orderly rows of a storehouse that predated Rome itself, stood the stones. Cut and dressed and squared by the first builders, sized to the neck of the shaft, each one set with a notch that the archive marked and the carvings above each row repeated, they had waited in the dark for a thousand years for the hands that had been taken from them. Publius walked up, big and slow, and picked up one of the stones from the nearest row, and turned it in his scarred hands, and set it back exactly where he had taken it, the way a man treats a tool he has decided to trust. "These are cut true," Publius said. "Whoever cut them knew their work. They will mate with the neck of the shaft and they will close it, if they are seated in the order the notches say." He looked at the shaft, at the orange breathing at its bottom, and there was no fear in his face, only the settled regard of a man who had seen worse passages into worse places and had come out the far side with his name on the roll. Livia came to stand at the rim and looked down into the throat for a long count. When she spoke, her voice was the voice of the priestess, steady and flat, the voice that had read the signs in the holding camp and had drawn the two mouths in the dust. "When the second mouth is closed, the god must speak through the first. The sky will burn, and the deep chambers will hold us if we are in them when he does." She looked up at Corvinus, and the lamplight caught the angles of her face. "We have the stones. We have the work. We have the time we have, and no more. The god's breath shortens. I will read it as I read the water. When the breath is down to a drawn thread, we finish the work or we die in the god's throat." Corvinus set the sentry at the head of the stair, and the labor began. They formed the chain where the first builders had formed it, in the pressed dark of the shaft and the stair, hands to hands down the last yard of the passage where a man could not walk two abreast. The stones came up out of the store in the order of the notches, passed hand to hand down a line that stood in the heat of the breathing shaft, and Publius planted himself at the lip of the throat, at the bottom of the line, the wall of the mountain at his shoulders and the orange glow at his boots, and took the stones as they came, and set them in the neck by the notches, and chocked them with the clay and ash that the archive had marked, patient as a harbor wall taking the sea. The mountain breathed through the second mouth around the first stone, and the breath found the new edge, and the sound changed. The throat no longer drew with the whole of its width. It drew against the worked stone, and the working stone held, and the god, who was patient, and who had been waiting a very long time, began, somewhere far below the lamplight, to understand that the unfinished work was being finished. Up in the deep chamber, beyond the siphon of the stair, the wounded lay in the mineral gold and the children slept, and overhead the ridge stood empty in the afternoon, and down the ash river the dust of the approaching column crept toward the mountain like a slow tide that did not yet know what it was about to find when it arrived. Corvinus went down into the neck himself when the line faltered, because a tribune who could not hold a stone in the place of a man who had taken a javelin was a tribune who had never belonged to his men. He stood at the rim of the second mouth with the heat rising against his knees and the breath of the mountain moving against his hands, and he seated stone after stone in the neck of the god's throat, and the air in the shaft grew tighter around him, and the orange depth below the rim grew dimmer, and the mountain, which had breathed through two mouths since before the first stone was stood on the ridge, found itself speaking, by degrees, through one.