Title: The Tale of Marian
Chapter: 23/?
Rating: PG this chapter.
Pairing: OFC/Haldir
Genre: Adventure/Romance/perhaps a little Angst
Timeline: AU, modern times.
Beta: None this chapter.
Feedback: Welcomed, begged for, appreciated.
Warnings: None.
Author's Notes: This is a work in progress.
Disclaimer: See Chapter 1 for disclaimer.
THE TALE OF MARIAN
CHAPTER 23 – A New Road or a Secret Gate
8 January
It's only a few hours until our people arrive, and I can hardly
contain my excitement, and my anxiety. What if no one comes? What
will we do? It will be too late to start again, too dangerous for the
elves to stay much longer. I will have failed Haldir and the others.
I will have failed Jason.
"Too bad I don't approve of the kind of medication I could use right
now," I told Jason as we finished our final arrangements.
"What you need is a drink," he replied. So we walked from where we
had hidden the car down to Main Street all twinkling with festive
lights and busy with crowds of antique-car admirers, and slushed
across the melting snow that covered the downtown sidewalks to the
Soda Works with Bruno, two hours early.
The drink isn't helping, but Jason's company is. The bartender's
company is helping too. He's been a vague acquaintance of mine, as
bartenders in small towns can be, but I can't remember his name.
Jason and he are talking as if they were brothers. Jason introduced
me to the bartender's grandfather, an elderly Chinese gentleman who is
doing the books at the table next to ours, before the bar fills up.
His name is Lee Tsan-Yuan. His English is good, but his accent is so
strong I can barely make out what he says. Jason understands him. He
says with a meaningful look that they go way back. Knowing Jason,
this could mean back to when the old man was a baby: A person who
would have to have known that there was something strange about Jason
when I didn't, and has kept the secret. I'm not going to drink
anything else or I might get surly and resentful.
Jason is not very happy with me. I told Matt about us yesterday, but
not without talking to Jason about doing so first.
Jason agrees with me in theory, but he thinks it's too dangerous. I
think it's absolutely vital.
I told him that I thought we needed someone on the "outside" to pave
our way - someone who knew politics and had connections, who could lay
the foundations for Methentaurond to be an international treasure -
like a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but much more: A place where
people could come and study, and take their knowledge back with them,
to use everywhere. A place that would remain unchanged.
He would go to the United Nations, international environmental groups,
whoever could accomplish our goal, with a hypothetical situation: How
could a protected, international environmental treasure be set up on
the soil inside one country, who would manage it and how, if it were
to be preserved as a living laboratory? This person would have to
force the international community to look ahead - what they would
think would be far ahead - and pass a resolution or international law
that would include such a plan; a resolution with a way to enforce it.
Only once such a law was in place would we reveal that such a place
already existed. Finally we would explain what it was. Only after
the law was applied to this place would we reveal its location.
Who better to do this than Matt? "I trust Matt completely," I assured
Jason. Finally I had to remind him that it was my decision, though I
hated saying it. I'm not the one in danger, after all. But Jason
finally, reluctantly agreed.
9 January
What a night! I am exhausted with worry and travel, but at least for
now we can rest. I believe we have lost whoever tried to tail us, at
least for now. But I can't sleep, so I've taken first watch. Dieter
said that he should, because of his security roll. I told him what
was the point when I couldn't sleep anyway? He finally agreed that he
was tired from traveling (he still had jet-lag from Switzerland). But
I must wake him in a few hours. Jason is here, too, somewhere outside
the motel. He says elves don't need as much sleep as mortals. It
makes me feel safer to know that he's watching. He has much keener
eyes, and I don't even know what to look for. Dieter seems to know
instinctively that Jason is capable with things like this, so he
probably knows that I may not be. I don't know - I've never done it
before.
Who would have thought we would need to set a watch?
Arianna arrived first last night at the Soda Works, smiling and
stomping the snow off of her boots on the stairs. She looked like she
had been outfitted by Niemann-Marcus, but she was dressed
appropriately.
Yasmin and Dieter followed shortly in turn. Both of them were in well-
worn boots. At least these two wouldn't be getting blisters.
The upstairs bar was beginning to fill up. Jason ordered pitchers of
beer from our bartender, who insisted it was "on the house," and we
moved into the back meeting room.
After a short round of introductions, the door flew open and a short,
plump, older woman dressed in denim overalls and with neatly trimmed,
short red hair turning to gray stepped in and surveyed the room with
lively eyes.
"Sandy!" I exclaimed and got up to give her a hug. Our art historian
had come. I was beginning to feel better. Four of the eight had
already arrived.
"Well, don't be shy with the beer there, gorgeous," Sandy said to
Dieter as she sat down and promptly made everyone around her feel
comfortable. Dieter served her personally, glowing from her praise.
He was fairly young, but rather plain looking. Even Bruno got up and
received a good scratch behind the ears.
The bar was getting livelier. Jason excused himself to go downstairs
and wait for the others. Dieter got up and followed him as far as the
door, shutting it behind Jason and stationing himself next to it. He
was taking his security role seriously, I saw. So did Mason, our
ecologist, who was a bit taken aback when he opened the door to find
Dieter planted in front of him. His hesitation was only fleeting,
however. "Mason Wells," he said briskly, holding out his hand to give
Dieter what I could only imagine was one of those handshakes that
would have crushed my knuckles, but not Dieter's. "I was invited," he
declared, looking Dieter up and down. "And you are. . . ?"
"Dieter Berchtold," Dieter answered. "Security." They held each
other's grip just a little too long. Neither man blinked. Then Mason
smiled and stepped around Dieter, looking around the table like the
man of the hour: blond, fit, confident, and in control of the
situation. "Mason Wells," he announced again unnecessarily, and
offered his hand to each of us in turn. I took his hand first,
telling him how glad I was that he had come. Once the others saw that
I still had the use of my fingers, they offered theirs as well.
That left Tommy, Roger, and Joel. I looked at my watch. It was ten
minutes past seven. I began to get nervous again.
At fifteen after seven I heard Roger approaching the door, even over
the sound of the patrons in the bar outside. "You don't need to
babysit me all the way, I can see where I'm going," we heard him
grumble as the door opened and Jason grinned in at us, escorting Roger
inside and retreating back downstairs.
Finally, Joel showed up fashionably late. Tommy hadn't shown up at
all.
Jason came back upstairs, shrugged and shook his head. Great. What
were we going to do without a botanist? Roger couldn't manage all of
the gardens by himself.
"Maybe Tommy got lost, or he's late," I told everyone. "We'll see,
but let's get started."
I had a welcome speech all prepared, but I never got to give it.
There was a sharp knock, and we all looked around at each other. I
nodded to Dieter, and he cracked open the door.
Tsan poked his head in and said nervously, "Man downstairs, look for
meeting."
"Is his name Tommy Woo?" I asked, hoping our botanist had finally
come.
"No, grandson say two men, not Chinese. You want they should come
up?"
"No, Tsan," Jason said and went to the door. "One moment," he added
and left the room before I could ask him to stop. In a few seconds he
was back, closing and locking the door behind him.
"They're strangers," he said to me quickly. "One is coming up the
stairs. I'm afraid the other might be going around the back.
We can't risk using the alley door," Jason said pointedly to Tsan.
"Who could possibly know about us?" I asked Jason.
"Do you want to wait here and ask them?" Jason asked me reasonably,
then he turned back to Tsan. "Change of plans," he said to the old
man, and Tsan bowed his head decisively in response.
"Go with Tsan," Jason told me. "I'll meet you at the top. Marian, do
you have Haldir's cloak with you?"
I nodded, too alarmed to speak. This couldn't be happening!
"Use it," he ordered me, and disappeared out the door.
I ran after him. What was Jason doing? He'd run right into the man
coming up the stairs!
"No time," Tsan said, and Dieter blocked my way, putting a comforting
hand on my shoulder. "Our friend will be ok," Tsan said. "Follow me.
I take dog first, less noise if bark," he added, and accepted Bruno's
leash from me.
"Follow you where?" Joel said, "We're trapped." The rest of our
group murmured nervous assent.
"Not trapped," Tsan declared and crossed the room quickly with Bruno
to lift an old photograph of a mining cap away from the wall. He
reached behind it. One of the dark wood panels on the wall popped
open. We looked at him in surprise.
"Good barkeep always have back stair. Come quickly."
Fighting my urge to go after Jason, I forced myself to cross the room
and stand next to Tsan. If Jason trusted him, then so did I. I just
wished Jason was here to tell Bruno to keep quiet. "Hurry," I said,
motioning for everyone to follow him. Mason stepped forward and broke
our group paralysis, following Tsan past the panel and into the dimly
lit stairwell beyond. "Arianna, come on," I urged. "Quickly. Go!
Go!"
Sandy, Dieter and I were the last to go through. Dieter closed the
panel quietly behind us just as we heard voices in the room. If Tommy
had been delayed instead of just not coming, we couldn't wait for him
now. We hadn't even had time to hide the beer, only to grab our
things and run. Fortunately, we had instructed everyone to drop off
their hiking gear in a back room of the hotel next to our old office
earlier in the day. I hoped we'd be able to pick it up, but I didn't
know if we could risk it now.
We followed the others silently down the narrow wooden stairs. Jason
had said we were to meet him at the top: The top of what? We were
going down, not up. And what had he meant when he said for me to use
Haldir's cloak? Feverishly I tried to think back to everything I
knew, everything that anyone had ever said to me about the soft,
indispensable elvish garment. It was warm when one was cold; cool
when one was hot, I reminded myself uselessly as we stepped off the
stairs through another door and crowded into a small anteroom that I
recognized on the first floor. Luckily the door between the bar and
the room we were in was closed, though the door to the kitchen was
open. It kept off the rain, I thought to myself. It was made from
one piece of fabric. It was cold and damp in the anteroom. Just
beyond, on the opposite side from the door that led back into the bar,
was a stone arch that opened into a mine shaft hewn out of the
hillside, strung with bare electric bulbs. The shaft had been used by
the original Soda Works during the gold rush, to keep the ice for
their soda from melting and their beer cold. Now it was a curiosity,
shown to visitors who had heard about it and asked to see it. But I
also remembered that it dead-ended about a hundred feet ahead.
Absently I took one of the flashlights that was being passed around
from a drawer in a waitress's station against the wall. The cloak
collapsed into a very small bundle. I had I bundled Vanimë's cloak
into my backpack, back at the hotel. I opened the zipper of my purse
and felt the fabric of Haldir's cloak with my fingers.
"Ok, now we go into tunnel. Don't worry, not far to go," Tsan
whispered. But the shaft was a dead end! I screamed inwardly to
myself. I started to push forward toward the elderly gentleman to
remind him, but he started off around a bend before I could reach him.
We hurriedly followed him past damp and dripping tunnel sections
carved out of the hillside and spaced with darkened hundred and twenty-
year-old timber braces. The timbers, my architect's subconscious told
me as we went along, were in surprisingly good condition for their
age. I hoped they were as strong as they looked. I was beginning to
feel a little closed in.
About sixty feet into the now-stuffy but still chilly tunnel, Tsan
turned a corner and stopped. The tunnel was still wide enough for me
to see him get out a very old, very rusty key. The gate! I thought,
remembering a branch of the tunnel that was closed off with iron bars.
I knew that under the entire town and throughout the gold country was
a spiderweb of interconnecting caves and tunnels that miners had dug.
They had followed veins of quartz to look for gold after the easier
pickings of the gravelly stream channels and creek beds had been
exhausted of loose, or placer, gold. But I had been told that this
passage had been locked off because it was dangerous, partly caved in,
and a dead end as well.
"We go up now," Tsan explained shortly as he turned on his flashlight
and disappeared with a blessedly quiet Bruno into the pitch black.
"Are you sure about this?" Joel called after him softly.
"Yes, leads to street up top. Old, secret way. Map in head;
grandfather teach," I heard Tsan's voice echo urgently, and everyone
began to follow. The Irish were the mining experts, I had read, but
the Chinese had done much of the actual digging. They had been
extremely efficient miners. Tsan's grandfather might very well have
been one of them. I looked into the tunnel. It was much narrower and
lower than the one we were in, with barely room enough for one person
to walk stooped over. I had seen some tunnel entrances that had only
been dug a few feet high and just wide enough for a skinny man to
crawl into. My heart began to pound. I hoped that this didn't lead
to one of them.
At the gate, Sandy stopped abruptly in front of me.
"I can't do it," she declared. I could hear a familiar tightness in
her voice. That kind of barely controlled tightness of someone who
was claustrophobic. I thought I heard a door open, and the sounds of
the bar beyond filtered down the passage.
I thought I heard footsteps scrape on the gritty floor of the tunnel.
"Someone's coming," Dieter hissed behind us.
"Sandy, this is the only way," I urged her, completely sympathetic to
her condition. "I'm claustrophobic, too. We can do this, you and I.
We can do this together. Tsan said it's not far. Please, Sandy, we
have to go in," I whispered urgently as we heard definite footfalls
coming quickly around the corner. I grasped her shaking, sweaty hand
in my own. To my relief, Sandy took a deep breath and ducked into the
low, dark passage in the rock. If she could do it, so could I.
Dieter ducked in quickly behind us and quietly locked the gate. It
swung shut soundlessly, belying its aged appearance. I turned my
flashlight on and pointed it up the tunnel. We could see the others
further ahead. The tunnel went straight for quite a ways, then
gradually sloped up. Dieter reached out and turned off my flashlight,
squeezing my hand to stop. I squeezed Sandy's hand, hoping that the
sudden darkness wouldn't push her into a panic. I wasn't far behind
her in that regard. Vanimë's cloak, I thought wildly. What had
Vanimë said about the cloak she had given me? The footsteps were
coming closer but we had to stop or we would be heard. I could hear
Sandy breathing hard, trying to hold still. If anyone directed a
flashlight down the tunnel, they would see us.
A harsh, metallic clanging echoed down the passage. Someone was
trying the iron gate! I bit my lip, feeling even more trapped than
before. I didn't want to get stuck, underground. If anything was
going to happen to me I wanted it to happen in the air, in the open!
I forced down my rising panic. Now was the time for me to lead, to be
strong, not to fall apart, but I couldn't think! Then Vanimë's voice
echoed back to me, almost as if she was in the old gold rush tunnel
with us: "A cloak of the Galadhrim. It will shield you in need from
unfriendly eyes."
As quietly as I could I pulled Haldir's cloak out of my purse, moving
as far as I could to the side and pulling Dieter alongside me. A
bright beam of light lit up the entrance to the passage and played
along the rock wall. They had a flashlight - a strong one! In a
panic I flung the cloak in front of us, not sure what it would
accomplish but trusting Vanimë at her word when she had told me how
not to endanger Haldir. I would not endanger these people. Dieter
grabbed a corner and held it still with me across the opening. I
thanked God silently that he wasn't asking questions or telling me I
was being foolish, which was how I felt. I wondered if Sandy felt the
low ceiling of the passage closing down on her like I did. Hold on, I
told myself silently. Hold on. Breathe.
The penetrating beam of the flashlight played across the passage, then
came to rest, glowing directly on the cloak in front of us.
"Shit," I heard a man's voice say. "It's caved in, just like the
damned bartender said."
"Nobody could have gotten through here," I heard another impatient
male voice say. "Let's go around back again."
"No, you go now! I have called the police," we heard Tsan's
grandson's voice say forcefully from somewhere behind the men who had
spoken, and the light moved on. There was more speech between the
three that I couldn't understand. Then footsteps retreated down the
tunnel.
"Can we go now?" Sandy said quietly but frantically from just in front
of me. "I can't stay in here much longer."
"Neither can I," I assured her, and we went on down the passage.
"Government men," I heard Dieter growl behind me. Not much farther
ahead we felt the floor begin to rise, and then it turned a sharp
corner. Ahead of us was a set of stairs cut into the dark grey rock,
and Tsan waiting for us. I accepted Bruno's leash from him. "Good
Bruno," I told him and scratched him gratefully under his furry drool-
dampened chin. Yuck.
"How much further?" I asked Tsan tightly, eyeing the stairs. The
tunnel around them was a little higher than the passage we had just
gone through. A little higher was good. I could deal with a little
higher.
"Twenty steps, maybe twenty-five. Almost there," Tsan replied. I
remembered my trip through the cave with Haldir and the other elves,
and I grabbed Sandy's hand again. We counted together all the way up;
twenty-two steps. Then there was a wooden landing that we could stand
up straight in. Ahead of us was another flight of steps, and these
were wood also, lit by a single bare light bulb at the top. One wall
was stone, and one was old, discolored plaster. We were out of the
tunnel, and inside the back of a building. A wave of relief washed
over me, and my irrational sense that the heavy world above had been
pushing down on me instantly disappeared.
"Where are we?" Sandy asked. Her voice had lost its near-hysterical
edge and I concluded that she was feeling the same thing.
"Stone house on hill. Two blocks from my establishment," he said as
he opened the wooden door off of the top landing to reveal a narrow,
richly wallpapered hallway with several doors spaced along both sides.
"Second floor."
Tsan led us down the thickly carpeted front flight of stairs and into
a reception area with a tall stone fireplace that looked like it had
once been a living room. The others were waiting there for us. "Now
offices," he added with a conspiratorial look my way as Jason appeared
at the front door and closed it quickly behind him. "Was brothel,
long time ago."
"You mean," I asked, "men would drink in the bar, and then. . .
Jason! You knew about this," I turned to Jason and said slyly to
conceal how very, very happy I was to see him. I looked at my watch.
Barely thirty minutes had passed since I started my non-existent
speech and Jason had left us. It had seemed like hours.
"Marian, how could you even insinuate that I would ever PAY to favor
the ladies with my skillful and most indulgent attentions," he
objected, glancing at Arianna with a hurt puppy-dog look on his face.
"Besides, that was long before my time." I thought I was going to
gag.
I asked Jason how he had avoided the two men in the bar, and where he
had been. He had walked right past them and out the door, he said.
It was all about attitude. He had not been followed.
"Your chariot awaits," he then announced to me, and opened the front
door with a flourish.
"Hurry," Tsan warned us. "You not out of woods yet."
"Right back in the woods is where I'd rather be right now," I asserted
as the others followed Jason out the door. "Thank you, Mr. Lee."
Lee Tsan-Yuan smiled and bowed to me slightly. He told me that Jason
had chosen well. I wondered how he knew; what he knew. Then I
noticed a silver ring on his finger, vaguely similar to Jason's. No,
impossible, I told myself, he was much, much too old. My eyes flew to
his hair and ears, but he backed into the now-dark room and closed the
door. I turned to follow the others, only to be confronted
unexpectedly by a large white van at the curb.
"The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints?!" I read out
loud in surprise from the big logo on the side of the van. "What the.
. .? Where did. . . ?
"That's what I said," Yasmin commented with distaste as we climbed
aboard.
I looked back down the hill at the tops of the familiar old buildings
on Main Street, wet and glistening in the festive lights strung for
the antique car show: The four-story brick hotel with its solid iron
shutters; the old yellow Chamber of Commerce building whose second
story was said to be haunted by the town hangman; the gallows used to
be at that same level. How old these buildings had seemed to me only
a month or two ago - over a century old. But in the eyes of the
elves, it was only a blink in time. The stately buildings seemed to
me then to be from a simpler time, less harsh on the land than we were
today. But were they? The rivers and creeks had been dredged
indiscriminately in the fever for the shiny yellow metal, gravel and
rocks cast aside to be carried downstream by the swollen, flooded
rivers in the winter storms; storms that deposited tons of rocks and
silt in the valley below, burying farmhouses and their fields, ruining
crops and livelihoods.
We drove almost all night. If it had not been dark, driving west out
of the foothills toward Folsom and Sacramento we would have still seen
mountains of river rock where only the most drought-hardy grasses took
hold, and an occasional stunted live oak. A hundred years, and still
nature hadn't been able to repair the damage. At first only industry
too unsavory to bring closer to the city ventured into this terrain,
and those had left their own issues to be dealt with. Now new housing
developments and manufacturing facilities had begun to encroach and
bury the evidence. New oaks had been planted; new wetlands
constructed. We were doing better.
Short-term thinking, I thought as we reached the Interstate. That's
what plagued us. Too many of us reached blindly and eagerly into the
future with only the immediate discovery, the next development, the
next million in mind, letting the chips of the future fall where they
might. Our technologies grew faster than our wisdom to deal with
their consequences, putting, some said, our very future existence in
jeopardy.
Yet wasn't it that burning curiosity that made us what we were, that
drove us to new heights of invention - that mortal urgency to change,
achieve in the short time that we each had. That was one thing that
distinguished us from the elves.
We turned north, then south. Once we were convinced that we hadn't
been followed, we turned north again. By the time we stopped at a
motel to rest we had barely driven halfway, a fact that only Jason and
I knew. Under the circumstances, we didn't want to give anyone
information they didn't need to have.
The events at the Soda Works having shocked us all and driven home the
seriousness of our situation, we were all pretty quiet. Dieter turned
on the overhead light for a moment during the drive, examining
Haldir's cloak closely. "I want one of these," he whispered to me
reverently.
"I'll put in a good word for you with the lady in charge," I told him.
Some of us were dozing off when I switched places with Jason to drive
so he could rest. He sat in the front passenger seat next to me, and
we talked quietly.
He said he had arranged to borrow the van from a gentleman at Tom's
church, mentioning Tom's name and telling the man he had a "religious
emergency." The man had given the keys to Jason without question,
instructing him to drop it off at any LDS church and it would
eventually be returned. Jason grabbed the van, driven it a few blocks
to the hotel, and loaded our gear. Had Jason told the man that he was
a member of their church too, I asked him. "Well. . . " Jason hedged.
Of course he had.
"I'll bet Jason could charm the rattles off of a rattlesnake if he
wanted to," Sandy chuckled, and those who weren't asleep laughed too.
"We've been blessed," Roger offered from the next seat back.
"Oh spare me," Yasmin groaned, and told us we were lucky to have
someone objective along for the ride. It was just a coincidence, she
added.
"There are no coincidences," Jason said decisively to her with a look
that was almost as mesmerizing as his brother's. In my rear-view
mirror I saw that Yasmin sat transfixed for a split second, then shook
her head as though to clear it.
Some time later Jason exclaimed softly to me, "We are nine."
Yes, I thought, I could count. I just stared ahead while he patted me
on the knee gleefully as if he had just said something profound.
"There are NINE of us," he repeated. "Don't you see the
significance?"
I shook my head no, keeping my eyes on the dark freeway in front of
me.
"My dear, the Fellowship was made up of NINE companions. Lindir must
have told you the tale."
"What was the Fellowship?" Arianna asked from her seat next to Roger,
leaning forward.
"Yes, I remember," I answered Jason, then I turned to Arianna. "It is
recorded in the history of the people we are going to meet that a
group of nine companions gave up the comforts of home to embark on a
desperate journey through the wilderness to defeat a great evil, and
save the world. There was little hope, and great danger, but they
never gave up. There was, they knew, good in this world that was
worth fighting for. And, I said, looking fondly at Jason, they had
friends along the way. They succeeded. You will be told all about
it, I'm sure."
"Why don't we call ourselves a fellowship, then," Mason said.
"Yes, why not?" Arianna said, and those who roused themselves enough
from their slumber to respond murmured their agreement.
"Since," Roger concluded smartly, "sr. Jason says there are no
coincidences."
Looking around at our sleeping companions, I'm impressed at how easily
these strangers have fallen in together. I'm deeply touched that they
have believed in me and Jason enough to come, and then to stick with
us when things got scary. They are all good people. I'm excited
about what they will do with the things we will show them. They will
learn about them, pick them apart and analyze them, apply them, find
new things to do with them, and inevitably, for better or worse, thing
will change. Who knows what awaits? It will be an exciting journey
for us all.
It's getting light outside. I had better signal Jason now and wake
Dieter. He'll surely be offended if I don't.
From the song and poem "The Road Goes Ever On and On", J.R.R. Tolkien (found in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings).
THE TALE OF MARIAN
CHAPTER 23 – A New Road or a Secret Gate
8 January
It's only a few hours until our people arrive, and I can hardly
contain my excitement, and my anxiety. What if no one comes? What
will we do? It will be too late to start again, too dangerous for the
elves to stay much longer. I will have failed Haldir and the others.
I will have failed Jason.
"Too bad I don't approve of the kind of medication I could use right
now," I told Jason as we finished our final arrangements.
"What you need is a drink," he replied. So we walked from where we
had hidden the car down to Main Street all twinkling with festive
lights and busy with crowds of antique-car admirers, and slushed
across the melting snow that covered the downtown sidewalks to the
Soda Works with Bruno, two hours early.
The drink isn't helping, but Jason's company is. The bartender's
company is helping too. He's been a vague acquaintance of mine, as
bartenders in small towns can be, but I can't remember his name.
Jason and he are talking as if they were brothers. Jason introduced
me to the bartender's grandfather, an elderly Chinese gentleman who is
doing the books at the table next to ours, before the bar fills up.
His name is Lee Tsan-Yuan. His English is good, but his accent is so
strong I can barely make out what he says. Jason understands him. He
says with a meaningful look that they go way back. Knowing Jason,
this could mean back to when the old man was a baby: A person who
would have to have known that there was something strange about Jason
when I didn't, and has kept the secret. I'm not going to drink
anything else or I might get surly and resentful.
Jason is not very happy with me. I told Matt about us yesterday, but
not without talking to Jason about doing so first.
Jason agrees with me in theory, but he thinks it's too dangerous. I
think it's absolutely vital.
I told him that I thought we needed someone on the "outside" to pave
our way - someone who knew politics and had connections, who could lay
the foundations for Methentaurond to be an international treasure -
like a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but much more: A place where
people could come and study, and take their knowledge back with them,
to use everywhere. A place that would remain unchanged.
He would go to the United Nations, international environmental groups,
whoever could accomplish our goal, with a hypothetical situation: How
could a protected, international environmental treasure be set up on
the soil inside one country, who would manage it and how, if it were
to be preserved as a living laboratory? This person would have to
force the international community to look ahead - what they would
think would be far ahead - and pass a resolution or international law
that would include such a plan; a resolution with a way to enforce it.
Only once such a law was in place would we reveal that such a place
already existed. Finally we would explain what it was. Only after
the law was applied to this place would we reveal its location.
Who better to do this than Matt? "I trust Matt completely," I assured
Jason. Finally I had to remind him that it was my decision, though I
hated saying it. I'm not the one in danger, after all. But Jason
finally, reluctantly agreed.
9 January
What a night! I am exhausted with worry and travel, but at least for
now we can rest. I believe we have lost whoever tried to tail us, at
least for now. But I can't sleep, so I've taken first watch. Dieter
said that he should, because of his security roll. I told him what
was the point when I couldn't sleep anyway? He finally agreed that he
was tired from traveling (he still had jet-lag from Switzerland). But
I must wake him in a few hours. Jason is here, too, somewhere outside
the motel. He says elves don't need as much sleep as mortals. It
makes me feel safer to know that he's watching. He has much keener
eyes, and I don't even know what to look for. Dieter seems to know
instinctively that Jason is capable with things like this, so he
probably knows that I may not be. I don't know - I've never done it
before.
Who would have thought we would need to set a watch?
Arianna arrived first last night at the Soda Works, smiling and
stomping the snow off of her boots on the stairs. She looked like she
had been outfitted by Niemann-Marcus, but she was dressed
appropriately.
Yasmin and Dieter followed shortly in turn. Both of them were in well-
worn boots. At least these two wouldn't be getting blisters.
The upstairs bar was beginning to fill up. Jason ordered pitchers of
beer from our bartender, who insisted it was "on the house," and we
moved into the back meeting room.
After a short round of introductions, the door flew open and a short,
plump, older woman dressed in denim overalls and with neatly trimmed,
short red hair turning to gray stepped in and surveyed the room with
lively eyes.
"Sandy!" I exclaimed and got up to give her a hug. Our art historian
had come. I was beginning to feel better. Four of the eight had
already arrived.
"Well, don't be shy with the beer there, gorgeous," Sandy said to
Dieter as she sat down and promptly made everyone around her feel
comfortable. Dieter served her personally, glowing from her praise.
He was fairly young, but rather plain looking. Even Bruno got up and
received a good scratch behind the ears.
The bar was getting livelier. Jason excused himself to go downstairs
and wait for the others. Dieter got up and followed him as far as the
door, shutting it behind Jason and stationing himself next to it. He
was taking his security role seriously, I saw. So did Mason, our
ecologist, who was a bit taken aback when he opened the door to find
Dieter planted in front of him. His hesitation was only fleeting,
however. "Mason Wells," he said briskly, holding out his hand to give
Dieter what I could only imagine was one of those handshakes that
would have crushed my knuckles, but not Dieter's. "I was invited," he
declared, looking Dieter up and down. "And you are. . . ?"
"Dieter Berchtold," Dieter answered. "Security." They held each
other's grip just a little too long. Neither man blinked. Then Mason
smiled and stepped around Dieter, looking around the table like the
man of the hour: blond, fit, confident, and in control of the
situation. "Mason Wells," he announced again unnecessarily, and
offered his hand to each of us in turn. I took his hand first,
telling him how glad I was that he had come. Once the others saw that
I still had the use of my fingers, they offered theirs as well.
That left Tommy, Roger, and Joel. I looked at my watch. It was ten
minutes past seven. I began to get nervous again.
At fifteen after seven I heard Roger approaching the door, even over
the sound of the patrons in the bar outside. "You don't need to
babysit me all the way, I can see where I'm going," we heard him
grumble as the door opened and Jason grinned in at us, escorting Roger
inside and retreating back downstairs.
Finally, Joel showed up fashionably late. Tommy hadn't shown up at
all.
Jason came back upstairs, shrugged and shook his head. Great. What
were we going to do without a botanist? Roger couldn't manage all of
the gardens by himself.
"Maybe Tommy got lost, or he's late," I told everyone. "We'll see,
but let's get started."
I had a welcome speech all prepared, but I never got to give it.
There was a sharp knock, and we all looked around at each other. I
nodded to Dieter, and he cracked open the door.
Tsan poked his head in and said nervously, "Man downstairs, look for
meeting."
"Is his name Tommy Woo?" I asked, hoping our botanist had finally
come.
"No, grandson say two men, not Chinese. You want they should come
up?"
"No, Tsan," Jason said and went to the door. "One moment," he added
and left the room before I could ask him to stop. In a few seconds he
was back, closing and locking the door behind him.
"They're strangers," he said to me quickly. "One is coming up the
stairs. I'm afraid the other might be going around the back.
We can't risk using the alley door," Jason said pointedly to Tsan.
"Who could possibly know about us?" I asked Jason.
"Do you want to wait here and ask them?" Jason asked me reasonably,
then he turned back to Tsan. "Change of plans," he said to the old
man, and Tsan bowed his head decisively in response.
"Go with Tsan," Jason told me. "I'll meet you at the top. Marian, do
you have Haldir's cloak with you?"
I nodded, too alarmed to speak. This couldn't be happening!
"Use it," he ordered me, and disappeared out the door.
I ran after him. What was Jason doing? He'd run right into the man
coming up the stairs!
"No time," Tsan said, and Dieter blocked my way, putting a comforting
hand on my shoulder. "Our friend will be ok," Tsan said. "Follow me.
I take dog first, less noise if bark," he added, and accepted Bruno's
leash from me.
"Follow you where?" Joel said, "We're trapped." The rest of our
group murmured nervous assent.
"Not trapped," Tsan declared and crossed the room quickly with Bruno
to lift an old photograph of a mining cap away from the wall. He
reached behind it. One of the dark wood panels on the wall popped
open. We looked at him in surprise.
"Good barkeep always have back stair. Come quickly."
Fighting my urge to go after Jason, I forced myself to cross the room
and stand next to Tsan. If Jason trusted him, then so did I. I just
wished Jason was here to tell Bruno to keep quiet. "Hurry," I said,
motioning for everyone to follow him. Mason stepped forward and broke
our group paralysis, following Tsan past the panel and into the dimly
lit stairwell beyond. "Arianna, come on," I urged. "Quickly. Go!
Go!"
Sandy, Dieter and I were the last to go through. Dieter closed the
panel quietly behind us just as we heard voices in the room. If Tommy
had been delayed instead of just not coming, we couldn't wait for him
now. We hadn't even had time to hide the beer, only to grab our
things and run. Fortunately, we had instructed everyone to drop off
their hiking gear in a back room of the hotel next to our old office
earlier in the day. I hoped we'd be able to pick it up, but I didn't
know if we could risk it now.
We followed the others silently down the narrow wooden stairs. Jason
had said we were to meet him at the top: The top of what? We were
going down, not up. And what had he meant when he said for me to use
Haldir's cloak? Feverishly I tried to think back to everything I
knew, everything that anyone had ever said to me about the soft,
indispensable elvish garment. It was warm when one was cold; cool
when one was hot, I reminded myself uselessly as we stepped off the
stairs through another door and crowded into a small anteroom that I
recognized on the first floor. Luckily the door between the bar and
the room we were in was closed, though the door to the kitchen was
open. It kept off the rain, I thought to myself. It was made from
one piece of fabric. It was cold and damp in the anteroom. Just
beyond, on the opposite side from the door that led back into the bar,
was a stone arch that opened into a mine shaft hewn out of the
hillside, strung with bare electric bulbs. The shaft had been used by
the original Soda Works during the gold rush, to keep the ice for
their soda from melting and their beer cold. Now it was a curiosity,
shown to visitors who had heard about it and asked to see it. But I
also remembered that it dead-ended about a hundred feet ahead.
Absently I took one of the flashlights that was being passed around
from a drawer in a waitress's station against the wall. The cloak
collapsed into a very small bundle. I had I bundled Vanimë's cloak
into my backpack, back at the hotel. I opened the zipper of my purse
and felt the fabric of Haldir's cloak with my fingers.
"Ok, now we go into tunnel. Don't worry, not far to go," Tsan
whispered. But the shaft was a dead end! I screamed inwardly to
myself. I started to push forward toward the elderly gentleman to
remind him, but he started off around a bend before I could reach him.
We hurriedly followed him past damp and dripping tunnel sections
carved out of the hillside and spaced with darkened hundred and twenty-
year-old timber braces. The timbers, my architect's subconscious told
me as we went along, were in surprisingly good condition for their
age. I hoped they were as strong as they looked. I was beginning to
feel a little closed in.
About sixty feet into the now-stuffy but still chilly tunnel, Tsan
turned a corner and stopped. The tunnel was still wide enough for me
to see him get out a very old, very rusty key. The gate! I thought,
remembering a branch of the tunnel that was closed off with iron bars.
I knew that under the entire town and throughout the gold country was
a spiderweb of interconnecting caves and tunnels that miners had dug.
They had followed veins of quartz to look for gold after the easier
pickings of the gravelly stream channels and creek beds had been
exhausted of loose, or placer, gold. But I had been told that this
passage had been locked off because it was dangerous, partly caved in,
and a dead end as well.
"We go up now," Tsan explained shortly as he turned on his flashlight
and disappeared with a blessedly quiet Bruno into the pitch black.
"Are you sure about this?" Joel called after him softly.
"Yes, leads to street up top. Old, secret way. Map in head;
grandfather teach," I heard Tsan's voice echo urgently, and everyone
began to follow. The Irish were the mining experts, I had read, but
the Chinese had done much of the actual digging. They had been
extremely efficient miners. Tsan's grandfather might very well have
been one of them. I looked into the tunnel. It was much narrower and
lower than the one we were in, with barely room enough for one person
to walk stooped over. I had seen some tunnel entrances that had only
been dug a few feet high and just wide enough for a skinny man to
crawl into. My heart began to pound. I hoped that this didn't lead
to one of them.
At the gate, Sandy stopped abruptly in front of me.
"I can't do it," she declared. I could hear a familiar tightness in
her voice. That kind of barely controlled tightness of someone who
was claustrophobic. I thought I heard a door open, and the sounds of
the bar beyond filtered down the passage.
I thought I heard footsteps scrape on the gritty floor of the tunnel.
"Someone's coming," Dieter hissed behind us.
"Sandy, this is the only way," I urged her, completely sympathetic to
her condition. "I'm claustrophobic, too. We can do this, you and I.
We can do this together. Tsan said it's not far. Please, Sandy, we
have to go in," I whispered urgently as we heard definite footfalls
coming quickly around the corner. I grasped her shaking, sweaty hand
in my own. To my relief, Sandy took a deep breath and ducked into the
low, dark passage in the rock. If she could do it, so could I.
Dieter ducked in quickly behind us and quietly locked the gate. It
swung shut soundlessly, belying its aged appearance. I turned my
flashlight on and pointed it up the tunnel. We could see the others
further ahead. The tunnel went straight for quite a ways, then
gradually sloped up. Dieter reached out and turned off my flashlight,
squeezing my hand to stop. I squeezed Sandy's hand, hoping that the
sudden darkness wouldn't push her into a panic. I wasn't far behind
her in that regard. Vanimë's cloak, I thought wildly. What had
Vanimë said about the cloak she had given me? The footsteps were
coming closer but we had to stop or we would be heard. I could hear
Sandy breathing hard, trying to hold still. If anyone directed a
flashlight down the tunnel, they would see us.
A harsh, metallic clanging echoed down the passage. Someone was
trying the iron gate! I bit my lip, feeling even more trapped than
before. I didn't want to get stuck, underground. If anything was
going to happen to me I wanted it to happen in the air, in the open!
I forced down my rising panic. Now was the time for me to lead, to be
strong, not to fall apart, but I couldn't think! Then Vanimë's voice
echoed back to me, almost as if she was in the old gold rush tunnel
with us: "A cloak of the Galadhrim. It will shield you in need from
unfriendly eyes."
As quietly as I could I pulled Haldir's cloak out of my purse, moving
as far as I could to the side and pulling Dieter alongside me. A
bright beam of light lit up the entrance to the passage and played
along the rock wall. They had a flashlight - a strong one! In a
panic I flung the cloak in front of us, not sure what it would
accomplish but trusting Vanimë at her word when she had told me how
not to endanger Haldir. I would not endanger these people. Dieter
grabbed a corner and held it still with me across the opening. I
thanked God silently that he wasn't asking questions or telling me I
was being foolish, which was how I felt. I wondered if Sandy felt the
low ceiling of the passage closing down on her like I did. Hold on, I
told myself silently. Hold on. Breathe.
The penetrating beam of the flashlight played across the passage, then
came to rest, glowing directly on the cloak in front of us.
"Shit," I heard a man's voice say. "It's caved in, just like the
damned bartender said."
"Nobody could have gotten through here," I heard another impatient
male voice say. "Let's go around back again."
"No, you go now! I have called the police," we heard Tsan's
grandson's voice say forcefully from somewhere behind the men who had
spoken, and the light moved on. There was more speech between the
three that I couldn't understand. Then footsteps retreated down the
tunnel.
"Can we go now?" Sandy said quietly but frantically from just in front
of me. "I can't stay in here much longer."
"Neither can I," I assured her, and we went on down the passage.
"Government men," I heard Dieter growl behind me. Not much farther
ahead we felt the floor begin to rise, and then it turned a sharp
corner. Ahead of us was a set of stairs cut into the dark grey rock,
and Tsan waiting for us. I accepted Bruno's leash from him. "Good
Bruno," I told him and scratched him gratefully under his furry drool-
dampened chin. Yuck.
"How much further?" I asked Tsan tightly, eyeing the stairs. The
tunnel around them was a little higher than the passage we had just
gone through. A little higher was good. I could deal with a little
higher.
"Twenty steps, maybe twenty-five. Almost there," Tsan replied. I
remembered my trip through the cave with Haldir and the other elves,
and I grabbed Sandy's hand again. We counted together all the way up;
twenty-two steps. Then there was a wooden landing that we could stand
up straight in. Ahead of us was another flight of steps, and these
were wood also, lit by a single bare light bulb at the top. One wall
was stone, and one was old, discolored plaster. We were out of the
tunnel, and inside the back of a building. A wave of relief washed
over me, and my irrational sense that the heavy world above had been
pushing down on me instantly disappeared.
"Where are we?" Sandy asked. Her voice had lost its near-hysterical
edge and I concluded that she was feeling the same thing.
"Stone house on hill. Two blocks from my establishment," he said as
he opened the wooden door off of the top landing to reveal a narrow,
richly wallpapered hallway with several doors spaced along both sides.
"Second floor."
Tsan led us down the thickly carpeted front flight of stairs and into
a reception area with a tall stone fireplace that looked like it had
once been a living room. The others were waiting there for us. "Now
offices," he added with a conspiratorial look my way as Jason appeared
at the front door and closed it quickly behind him. "Was brothel,
long time ago."
"You mean," I asked, "men would drink in the bar, and then. . .
Jason! You knew about this," I turned to Jason and said slyly to
conceal how very, very happy I was to see him. I looked at my watch.
Barely thirty minutes had passed since I started my non-existent
speech and Jason had left us. It had seemed like hours.
"Marian, how could you even insinuate that I would ever PAY to favor
the ladies with my skillful and most indulgent attentions," he
objected, glancing at Arianna with a hurt puppy-dog look on his face.
"Besides, that was long before my time." I thought I was going to
gag.
I asked Jason how he had avoided the two men in the bar, and where he
had been. He had walked right past them and out the door, he said.
It was all about attitude. He had not been followed.
"Your chariot awaits," he then announced to me, and opened the front
door with a flourish.
"Hurry," Tsan warned us. "You not out of woods yet."
"Right back in the woods is where I'd rather be right now," I asserted
as the others followed Jason out the door. "Thank you, Mr. Lee."
Lee Tsan-Yuan smiled and bowed to me slightly. He told me that Jason
had chosen well. I wondered how he knew; what he knew. Then I
noticed a silver ring on his finger, vaguely similar to Jason's. No,
impossible, I told myself, he was much, much too old. My eyes flew to
his hair and ears, but he backed into the now-dark room and closed the
door. I turned to follow the others, only to be confronted
unexpectedly by a large white van at the curb.
"The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints?!" I read out
loud in surprise from the big logo on the side of the van. "What the.
. .? Where did. . . ?
"That's what I said," Yasmin commented with distaste as we climbed
aboard.
I looked back down the hill at the tops of the familiar old buildings
on Main Street, wet and glistening in the festive lights strung for
the antique car show: The four-story brick hotel with its solid iron
shutters; the old yellow Chamber of Commerce building whose second
story was said to be haunted by the town hangman; the gallows used to
be at that same level. How old these buildings had seemed to me only
a month or two ago - over a century old. But in the eyes of the
elves, it was only a blink in time. The stately buildings seemed to
me then to be from a simpler time, less harsh on the land than we were
today. But were they? The rivers and creeks had been dredged
indiscriminately in the fever for the shiny yellow metal, gravel and
rocks cast aside to be carried downstream by the swollen, flooded
rivers in the winter storms; storms that deposited tons of rocks and
silt in the valley below, burying farmhouses and their fields, ruining
crops and livelihoods.
We drove almost all night. If it had not been dark, driving west out
of the foothills toward Folsom and Sacramento we would have still seen
mountains of river rock where only the most drought-hardy grasses took
hold, and an occasional stunted live oak. A hundred years, and still
nature hadn't been able to repair the damage. At first only industry
too unsavory to bring closer to the city ventured into this terrain,
and those had left their own issues to be dealt with. Now new housing
developments and manufacturing facilities had begun to encroach and
bury the evidence. New oaks had been planted; new wetlands
constructed. We were doing better.
Short-term thinking, I thought as we reached the Interstate. That's
what plagued us. Too many of us reached blindly and eagerly into the
future with only the immediate discovery, the next development, the
next million in mind, letting the chips of the future fall where they
might. Our technologies grew faster than our wisdom to deal with
their consequences, putting, some said, our very future existence in
jeopardy.
Yet wasn't it that burning curiosity that made us what we were, that
drove us to new heights of invention - that mortal urgency to change,
achieve in the short time that we each had. That was one thing that
distinguished us from the elves.
We turned north, then south. Once we were convinced that we hadn't
been followed, we turned north again. By the time we stopped at a
motel to rest we had barely driven halfway, a fact that only Jason and
I knew. Under the circumstances, we didn't want to give anyone
information they didn't need to have.
The events at the Soda Works having shocked us all and driven home the
seriousness of our situation, we were all pretty quiet. Dieter turned
on the overhead light for a moment during the drive, examining
Haldir's cloak closely. "I want one of these," he whispered to me
reverently.
"I'll put in a good word for you with the lady in charge," I told him.
Some of us were dozing off when I switched places with Jason to drive
so he could rest. He sat in the front passenger seat next to me, and
we talked quietly.
He said he had arranged to borrow the van from a gentleman at Tom's
church, mentioning Tom's name and telling the man he had a "religious
emergency." The man had given the keys to Jason without question,
instructing him to drop it off at any LDS church and it would
eventually be returned. Jason grabbed the van, driven it a few blocks
to the hotel, and loaded our gear. Had Jason told the man that he was
a member of their church too, I asked him. "Well. . . " Jason hedged.
Of course he had.
"I'll bet Jason could charm the rattles off of a rattlesnake if he
wanted to," Sandy chuckled, and those who weren't asleep laughed too.
"We've been blessed," Roger offered from the next seat back.
"Oh spare me," Yasmin groaned, and told us we were lucky to have
someone objective along for the ride. It was just a coincidence, she
added.
"There are no coincidences," Jason said decisively to her with a look
that was almost as mesmerizing as his brother's. In my rear-view
mirror I saw that Yasmin sat transfixed for a split second, then shook
her head as though to clear it.
Some time later Jason exclaimed softly to me, "We are nine."
Yes, I thought, I could count. I just stared ahead while he patted me
on the knee gleefully as if he had just said something profound.
"There are NINE of us," he repeated. "Don't you see the
significance?"
I shook my head no, keeping my eyes on the dark freeway in front of
me.
"My dear, the Fellowship was made up of NINE companions. Lindir must
have told you the tale."
"What was the Fellowship?" Arianna asked from her seat next to Roger,
leaning forward.
"Yes, I remember," I answered Jason, then I turned to Arianna. "It is
recorded in the history of the people we are going to meet that a
group of nine companions gave up the comforts of home to embark on a
desperate journey through the wilderness to defeat a great evil, and
save the world. There was little hope, and great danger, but they
never gave up. There was, they knew, good in this world that was
worth fighting for. And, I said, looking fondly at Jason, they had
friends along the way. They succeeded. You will be told all about
it, I'm sure."
"Why don't we call ourselves a fellowship, then," Mason said.
"Yes, why not?" Arianna said, and those who roused themselves enough
from their slumber to respond murmured their agreement.
"Since," Roger concluded smartly, "sr. Jason says there are no
coincidences."
Looking around at our sleeping companions, I'm impressed at how easily
these strangers have fallen in together. I'm deeply touched that they
have believed in me and Jason enough to come, and then to stick with
us when things got scary. They are all good people. I'm excited
about what they will do with the things we will show them. They will
learn about them, pick them apart and analyze them, apply them, find
new things to do with them, and inevitably, for better or worse, thing
will change. Who knows what awaits? It will be an exciting journey
for us all.
It's getting light outside. I had better signal Jason now and wake
Dieter. He'll surely be offended if I don't.
From the song and poem "The Road Goes Ever On and On", J.R.R. Tolkien (found in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings).