The tension slackened on the rope and the two men were quick to slip the hook out. They immediately dragged the bag, which was soaking with water at a terrific rate, upstream. With the hook gone, the end of the bag spilled open and sand poured out to vanish in the current of the tunnel. Thyatis felt the sand brush against her ankles as it whipped past.
Better than rats gnawing, she thought. She let go of the rope and hoped that Bagratuni’s man at the top thought to let the rope with the collar down slowly, or she’d be brained as it fell sixty feet down the shaft. A moment later it descended jerkily and she grabbed it.
“Bring the next,” she whispered. Another log, already sporting the cross of iron rods, appeared out of the darkness on the shoulders of the next three men. “Closer,” she said, holding out the collar. The numbness in her feet crept higher, into her thighs.
“Any sign?” Thyatis spoke softly, though the black veil wrapped around her face muffled her voice. Sahul, who was crouching next to her on the rooftop, shook his head. The Roman woman grimaced and eased back from the lip. The street below was quiet and deserted. Two of Bagratuni’s nephews had run down it a few minutes before and had doused the lanterns halfway down the street. Most of the street was pitch black. Thyatis sighed and squared her shoulders. She beckoned across the dark rooftop for Jusuf and Bagratuni. They crawled quietly over to her and Sahul.
There was no moon, and the sky was clear, showing only a vast expanse of glittering diamonds and twinkling emeralds. On the rooftop it was almost impossible to see the men crouched on it, dressed in dark clothing and their faces wrapped in dark gauze. Only their hands betrayed them, pale blobs in the darkness. The Armenians had smeared soot on their hands as well.
It was very quiet on the rooftop, and Thyatis could hear the chanting from the ceremonies in the Temple of the Flame clearly. Earlier she had watched nearly two hundred
Persian notables and their wives, concubines, and children file into the temple. The snap and roar of the great fire on the altar at the center of the temple echoed out of the little windows set high into the walls of the church. Her squad leaders crouched in a circle in front of her, only their eyes showing.
“Anagathios,” she whispered, “has not returned from his foray into the old palace. There has been no sign that he has been discovered, so either the Persians are cleverer than I think or something has happened to hold him up. Tonight is our best chance, so we’re going to go ahead.”
Jusuf shook his head in dismay, but stopped when Thya-tis glared at him.
She turned to Sahul. “Is the first pylon complete?”
The elderly Bulgar nodded and rolled up onto the balls of his feet, his fingertips resting on the roof tiles.
“Good,” she said, “send it forward.”
Sahul scuttled away across the rooftop, keeping to the trail of blankets that had been laid out to muffle the sounds of men moving on the plaster roof. He reached the men at the first log and signed that they should move forward. At the edge of the roof, two men who had been waiting patiently for the “go” signal swung up a heavy frame of wood with a half circle cut out of the top. The man on the left reached into a waxed leather bucket at his side and scooped a huge glob of grease out. He smeared this around the inner part of the half circle. While he prepared the guide, a team of twelve men had lifted up the first pylon from the rooftop. Sahul moved along the thirty-foot length of the pylon, checking to see that the iron rods securely fastened each joint.
The pylon had been hauled up from the sewers in eight-foot-long sections and then slotted together on the rooftop only minutes before. Each cross-section had been cut in such a way that it slotted into the cross-section on another log. The rods had then been driven into the socket holes with padded mallets, forming a joining cross-brace. Thyatis swore that the logs, cut of average-quality cedar, would hold the weight of a man. Sahul was not so sure, but then he didn’t think that they could have hauled ten logs into a hostile city and assembled them on the roof of a fire-temple without discovery either.
The lead end of the pylon slid into the brace guide and slithered across the grease. At the back of the pylon, a metal ring had been screwed into the end of the last pole. Sahul held his hand up to halt the forward movement of the pylon while two of the Bulgars tied two heavy ropes to the ring. The ropes ran down from the end of the pylon to another, heavier ring that been drilled into the plaster of the rooftop.
This, from Thyatis’ viewpoint, had been the most dangerous part of the operation. The heavy ring was screwed into a foot-thick roof beam under the plaster. It had taken two nights of careful work to bore into the beam and set it without alerting the priests in the temple below. Still, without the anchor, maintaining control of the pylon would be impossible. Sahul, seeing that the ropes were, secured and all personnel on the rooftop who were not already holding up the pylon or manning the guide were in position on the anchor ropes, signed to begin running the pylon out.
The man at the wooden guide raised his hand, and the pylon slid out through it three feet. He dropped his hand and the pylon halted. The second man reached down into a large wicker basket by his side and took out an eleven-inch-long wooden peg with his left hand. His right hand already held another mallet, this one with a very well padded head on it. He slid the peg into a hole bored in the side of the log and drove it home with one sharp rap of the mallet.
The first man scanned the street below, and everyone paused, listening. The chanting from the fire temple continued, rising and falling in pitch. No one moved in the old palace or on the street. The guide man raised his hand and opened his fist. The men on the pylon spun the pylon a
Thomas Harcan half turn. The man with the mallet drove a second peg in, offset six inches from the first.
Pegs were driven into the pylon-at two-foot intervals. From her position at the end of the pylon, with half an ear cocked for the sound of discovery, Thyatis worried the grains of sand in the hourglass away. The pylon was thirty feet long, needing thirty pegs. It took a half-grain to rotate the pylon, drive a peg, rotate it back, and advance it another three feet. Fifteen grains dripped past with infinite slowness. She had thought at first to have the guide frame possess a slot, to allow the pegs to be driven in during the assembly of the pylon. Efforts to build a frame strong enough had failed, so she sweated out the fifteen grains. It seemed to take forever.
As the pylon slid out over the street, each man carrying it trotted back on the trail of blankets to the anchor ropes as his section disappeared through the guide. Ten feet of the back of the pylon would remain on the higher roof end, just long enough to allow the anchor ropes to guide it down. Thyatis moved to the front of the roof, next to the guide. The pylon had begun to wobble as it reached farther and farther out over the street. The end of the pylon began to flex back and forth in a semicircle. Thyatis held her breath. Behind her, nearly all of the men were dug in on the anchor ropes, trying to keep the pylon steady. Seeing its wobble, Thyatis realized too late that she should have had anchor ropes on the sides of the pylon as well as the back end. Too late now, she thought. The pylon slithered to one side and the guide frame gave an alarmingly loud creak as it took the pressure.
“Drop the pylon.” She hissed at the men on the anchor ropes. “Slowly!”
The men on the rope began to release it, an inch at a time, and the pylon dipped toward the roof garden across the street. The pylon was out far enough now that it was actually above the garden. It trembled lower and Thyatis hissed in alarm as the end suddenly angled to one side and slewed through an immature orange tree with a crash. She and the lookout stared each direction in the street in alarm. Thyatis whirled, motioning for the anchormen to lower the pylon the rest of the way.