David Gilman - Ice Claw

Max saw the ticket seller go back into the office, thanked the German for his explanation and pointed the couple towards another room as he eased Sayid away.

“Come on, Sayid. We need to get around faster than a tourist.”

Sayid was well practiced on the crutches and quickly developed a swinging momentum as they moved towards the next room.

“Blimey, hang on. I can’t keep up!” Max laughed.

It wasn’t true, of course, but it made Sayid feel less of a hindrance than he thought he was. “Where do we start?” he said.

“Dunno yet. We’ll check down here first. There’s a load of stuff about Ethiopia,” Max said as they walked beneath richly painted scenes of ancient Abyssinia, as it was then known. “If Zabala spent who knows how many years working here, then maybe it means something.”

They stepped into a bedroom. The decor was overpowering. The four-poster bed seemed small compared to the lavish surroundings. Arabic letters flitted across large canvas panels.

“What does that say, Sayid?”

Sayid looked at the delicate calligraphy. “Er, not sure. Something about … Oh, hang on, it’s an old Arab proverb. My granddad was always saying things like that: ‘Never throw stones in your own drinking well’s water.’”

Max looked blank.

Sayid shrugged. “I think that’s what it says. Whatever that might mean.”

“Well, ‘Don’t do anything stupid close to home, as it’ll come back on you!’ Or ‘Make sure you’re connected to water.’ How would I know?” Max said.

“You’re the one looking for clues!”

“That’s not one of them, I’m sure. Come on.” Max moved quickly to another room, keeping an eye out for the ticket seller, but there was no sign of him, and he couldn’t hear the Germans anywhere either. He could see the edge of the parking lot through a window. Their car was still there. Good, that meant he didn’t have to do what he’d planned just yet. He entered the chateau’s dining room. Wood-paneled to shoulder height, buffalo skins on the wall and Antoine d’Abbadie’s family motto boxed next to his coat of arms. It was a Latin inscription.

“What’s that say?”

“Erm … it’s Latin….”

Sayid groaned. He knew Max’s ability on the subject.

Max hesitated. “I think it says ‘Life is but smoke.’” The phrase immediately reminded him of his African Bushman friend, whose people believed that life was a dream and one day we would all wake up in the real world.

“Do you think it might be a clue? Life is smoke. I mean, we’ve got Latin sayings, Arab verses, it could be any of these things,” Sayid said.

“Like that, you mean?” Max pointed at the backs of the dining-room chairs surrounding the marquetry inlaid table. They were covered in green velvet, but on each one was an Arabic letter. Max stood back, walked around the table. “What do they mean?” he asked Sayid.

“I’m not sure, Max.”

“What? Suddenly you can’t spell?”

“It’s Amharic. Ethiopian.”

The German spoke in English. He was in the doorway, smiling as Max spun round, instincts suddenly wary. When he had left the tourist couple at the chapel, it would have been natural for them to carry on their tour on that side of the chateau. And Max believed he would have heard even the softest of footfalls across the hall and down the passageway.

Why so silent? Perhaps Max had been distracted by Sayid and all the different languages on display.

“I thought you were English, though your German accent is good,” the rotund man said, smiling at Max. He gestured with the tour pamphlet for the chateau. “If you get the letters on the chairs in order, they spell out a warning: ‘May traitors never be seated at this table.’” He gave Max and Sayid another smile and handed Max the pamphlet. “We have another one. Enjoy the tour, boys,” he said, ushering his wife into the corridor.

Sayid slumped onto one of the dining-room chairs and rubbed his aching leg. “Well, traitors not being welcomed to nosh might be something.”

Max shook his head. “This is all window dressing. None of it concerns us. If Zabala worked here for all those years, he would have been involved in the science bit. There’s a library and observatory upstairs.”

He checked the corridor. The Germans were just going into one of the other rooms, so he and Sayid turned into the main hallway, where the carved, wooden-banistered stairs began.

“Come on,” Max said. “Piggyback time.”

As he pumped his legs up the stairs, the extra weight stretched his tendons and muscles, but it was effortless; the knowledge that he was getting closer to where Zabala had spent his working life boosted his strength.

On the upper landing there were huge paintings of tribal chiefs from Ethiopia dressed in white robes, with spear-carrying warriors protecting them, the whole tableau set against a deep blue sky. The vibrancy of the chateau’s decoration seemed so out of place when compared to the rough simplicity of how Zabala had lived on the mountain. Max reminded himself that Zabala became a monk after he stopped working here, because of his failure to convince everyone that something terrible was going to happen. The Academy of Sciences ran the chateau after Antoine d’Abbadie’s death, so Zabala would have had the full weight of the French scientific community against him when he failed to prove that Lucifer-whoever that was-would cause some kind of mass destruction. A Basque outsider, a man consumed by his failure, but eventually murdered because his prediction must finally have some validity. Who would benefit from stopping Zabala’s theory becoming known?

Distorted shadows lengthened across the walls. The dark wood sucked in what natural light was left to the day. Arabian shields and swords, once held by warriors, adorned the walls. Antelope trophy heads stared in dumb fear, gazing sightless over the flamboyant neo-Gothic castle they would never have seen in their natural lives.

Max suddenly found all the paintings and decorations overpowering. The weight of color on the walls and ceilings oppressive, like a clown’s face overladen with makeup, concealing misery beneath a false smile. They turned a corner into another room.

“Wow!” Sayid said in amazement.

Bare floorboards; a long, solid-looking table sat square in the middle of the room, bearing a few relics of scientific machinery and an old manual typewriter. Charts, files and folders were neatly stacked in custom-built bookshelves from floor to ceiling. An explorer-scientist’s lifetime’s work. The darkness, from the almost black timber of the ceiling, swallowed the very top shelves of books. This was getting close to where a scientist or researcher could stay in splendid isolation and concentrate on the complexities of his or her project. No overkill on decoration here. It was as if Max and Sayid had stepped behind a facade and found the true heart of the chateau. Was this where Zabala’s secret lay?

Curved, cast-iron supports bore the weight of the gallery that went round the whole room halfway up the wall. The ceiling must have been about six meters high and not a space was to be seen between the soldier-rigid volumes. Dulled gold on black lettering spread across the top of the far wall. It was in Basque; Max had no idea what it meant.

Max knew his dad could spend years in this room, examining every paper written by d’Abbadie. He ran his fingers along book spines. A gentle hum drew his eyes to a humidifier in the corner. Yes, that made sense. They were barely a kilometer from the page-rotting dampness of the Basque coast. These books could be either packed away and held in some philistine of a building in a city, or allowed to remain here where they belonged. A tribute to the achievements of one man and his desire to explore the world and its people, the stars and planets, and his dream of living in a pretend castle.