Declare

“And she’s got her own room, at the quaintly styled Ararat Hotel! I’ve got my jeep here, I can drive us to town at dawn, and the holder of the high hand can sneak right up to her room then, hmm?” His stiff demeanor made the jocularity of his words grotesque.
    Hale’s face chilled as he realized that Philby’s two hole cards might be Aces, giving him three of them. Philby might have a lock on the high hand.
    What have I done, here? thought Hale, trying to will away the fog of alcohol. Will this game have real consequences? Am I giving her to Philby? Her , to Philby? With a sickness in the pit of his stomach he realized that he couldn’t back out of the hand now—he would simply be forfeiting the entire pot. And Philby had said there were witnesses. Hale remembered wondering if Philby was trying more to damn Hale’s soul here than to win; and he realized that Philby had lost his stutter in the last minute or so, as if another entity, a devil, was speaking through his lips.
    “She doesn’t—Elena doesn’t— fancy you,” said Hale thickly.
    Two more cards flipped out: Hale got a nine, giving him three of them now, and Philby got an eight. The rocking lamp flared and dimmed.
    Philby’s voice was an echoing growl: “Do you think that will matter, after this?”
    The bomb shelter shook with a gust of wind, or thunder, or an aftershock—the earth and sky seemed to be agreeing with Philby.
    “Last card,” said Philby in a tone like the hollow crack of artillery; “down and dirty.” He dealt each of them a card face-down, and Hale picked his up from the shaking floor with trembling fingers. The welded seams of the shelter were creaking now as the little structure rocked in the wind like a boat on a turbulent sea.
    Down and dirty. The whole bomb shelter was vibrating now.
    Hale’s last card was another seven, giving him a full boat, nines over sevens. That was a good high hand—but Philby might conceivably have a better high hand, Aces-full, or even four Aces. If Hale declared high and then lost, he would lose the entire pot: Elena’s safety from Philby and the immortality, both. And even if he should choose to abandon Elena to Philby, and try for the immortality—declare low—Philby could easily have a better low hand than Hale’s terrible pair of sevens and could declare that way, and again win the whole pot.
    Philby looked at his last card and then placed it back on the shivering blanket, still face-down. “We need tokens, for the declaration,” he said peevishly, “to hold in our fists until the count of three—one token to declare for the low hand, two for the high, three for both ways. Do you have six… pennies, pebbles, matches?”
    Slowly and thoughtfully, Hale dug his fingers into the canvas pouch that had contained his iron ankh.
    And after a few seconds he tossed out onto the blanket six of the scorched black glass beads he had picked up from the sand by the meteorite, in Wabar.
    And as the beads bounced on the blanket, the whole bomb shelter was abruptly kicked over sideways, and the western wall of it punched Hale in the head as the lantern flew against the opposite wall and shattered—and then the creaking structure had ponderously rolled all the way over, and Hale tumbled to the ceiling on his right shoulder, his knees following in the constricted somersault to thump against some part of Philby; spatters of burning lamp oil had splashed across the blankets and the clothing of the two men, and Hale scrambled up, his feet slipping on the flaming curved ceiling, and wrenched back the bolt of the inverted door. He butted it open with his head.
    Cold rain thrashed against his face and cleared his nose of the smell of burning wool and hair, and he threw himself over the top of the doorway and then jackknifed out onto the puddled grass, rolling over and over in the darkness to extinguish all of the flaming paraffin that had splashed on him.
    He supposed Philby had climbed out too, but Hale could only clutch the wet grass and sob into the mud, for the whole earth was booming and resounding and shaking under him, and he was irrationally sure that God was striding furiously across eastern Turkey, looking for him, to throw him into Hell, as he deserved.
    Hale closed his eyes lest their glitter should give his position away, and he tried to burrow his body into the mud.
    I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.
    After some hundreds of heartbeats, the ground stopped jolting