Ancients of Days, page 16
“Take me there,” Yama said to Tamora. “Take me to the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons. It is only a few hours’ walk. All I want to know is there. It must be.”
“Eliphas told me all about it. He’s gone there now, and will meet us at the docks.”
“I want to go there now.”
“I think you’re still too weak. You have been lying in bed too long. Time to get up! Time to be about your business in the world! Small steps first, and then the beginning of a great adventure!”
Pandaras clapped his misshapen hands and said, “We are going to war, master. I have brought you a spare set of clothes, even if you did not care to keep hold of your knife and your armor. Ask me, and I will find them for you, even if I have to search the entire Palace. Or perhaps I will bring you an energy pistol.”
“Those are for officers,” Tamora said, “and we will be no more than ordinary caterans.”
“My clothes? Then you went back—”
Tamora grinned, showing her rack of sharp white teeth. “Oh, I went back, all right. I told you that I had spent our money—how do you think I got it? There was a pentad of soldiers waiting at the Gate of Double Glory, but I killed them all in a fair fight.” She patted the heavy saber sheathed at her side. “That’s where I got this poor substitute for my own sword. I got the rat-boy a knife, too, and a rapier for you. Anyway, I killed them and found where Syle was hiding. I had to bend the back of that featherheaded fool over my thigh until he would agree, but I have what we left behind, and the fee, too. Rega didn’t want him to give it up, but he feared death more than he feared her, although I don’t think you could put a knife blade between the difference. She was sitting where Luria used to sit, in a white dress for mourning. I hope she enjoys her rule of the Department of Vaticination in the brief time before the fighting spreads and she is assassinated.”
Yama said, “I feel sorry for Syle. Despite all he did, at heart he is not a bad man.”
“Grah. He tried to serve his department and his wife’s ambitions, and will end up losing both, and his own life. His scheming saved the Department of Vaticination for a short while, but it is seen as an ally of Indigenous Affairs now. And Indigenous Affairs is too busy defending itself to save Syle.”
Pandaras said, “He betrayed you, master. No one trusts a traitor, least of all those who employ him. Whoever wins the war up there will get rid of him.”
The fighting had spread through the upper tiers of the Palace. The Department of Indigenous Affairs had fought off its rivals and secured its borders, but now there were bitter skirmishes in the corridors, and mines and countermines were being dug through the fabric of the Palace as the warring departments tried to break out behind each other’s lines.
“Our enemy has won the first stage of the war,” Tamora said, “but it will have a hard time of it for a while. And even if it wins it will be weakened, and another department or alliance of departments might finish it off.”
“I did not mean to destroy it,” Yama said, “but it had made many enemies, and they were waiting for the slightest weakness. And yet we go to fight in the army it has raised. Do you not think that strange, Tamora?”
“We will fight the heretics, who are the real enemy of us all. At the midpoint of the world, the doings of the Palace of the Memory of the People is of no importance. It does not matter who has charge of the army there—you will see. You must get ready, Yama. You have been lying in luxury too long. The muscles in your legs will shrink and you won’t be able to walk, much less fight. We’ll have to carry you everywhere, like a houri. You will begin to exercise now, and you will exercise once we are on the ship. It will be a long voyage.”
Yama thought of the great map he had so often unrolled, at first to dream of finding where his people lived, and in the past year to follow the progress of Telmon, his stepbrother, toward the war. Yama had wanted to follow Telmon and become his squire, but Telmon was dead. And now he stood at the beginning of the voyage he had dreamed of, with a squire of his own, and it seemed that all of his adventures since he had left Aeolis were no more than a preparation for this, the true adventure.
“There is something you must do before you leave,” Pandaras said.
“The mirror people are set on it,” Tamora added. “More foolishness. But I thought perhaps it will put an end to your delusions, so I sent one of these husbandmen up to tell Lupe where you are.”
She and Pandaras would say no more, except that all would be explained tomorrow. With a premonition of black dread, Yama suspected that he knew what it was, and knew that he would fail in it. Whatever else he was, he could not be the savior of the mirror people.
Tamora and Pandaras helped him walk around the square of the little village, but he was quickly exhausted, and could not contemplate going any further.
“But I must leave,” he said. “I cannot do what they want.”
“You can do anything at all, master,” Pandaras said. “You just need to rest a little.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Tamora said. “Whatever those fuckers up there thought you were, you’re going to war as a cateran. That’s all you are. You’ll see.”
Yama laughed. “O Tamora. You believe in nothing you cannot touch or taste or smell.”
“Of course. Only fools believe in magic.”
“Well, it is certain that my enemies believe that I am more than I seem to be.”
And so did Lupe, who wanted a miracle of him.
“You are greater than anything they can imagine, master,” Pandaras said, and touched fingers to his throat in the odd gesture so many of the lesser citizens of Ys used, like a salute, or a blessing.
Chapter Thirteen: The Miracle
The next morning, the whole village busied itself with preparations for a feast. In the dusty central square, long red cloths were unrolled and strewn with flowers. Men and women set to cooking a hundred different dishes over trenches filled with white-hot charcoal. Their children stacked pyramids of sweet melons like the skulls of vanquished enemies, and built mounds of breadapples and small black and red bananas.
“We will honor our friends the mirror people,” the headman told Yama, “and we will honor you, brave dominie, who is the friend of our friends, and who saved our village from the hell-hound.”
Like the rest of the villagers, the headman wore a garland of freshly cut white flowers. With comical solemnity he lowered similar necklaces over the heads of Yama, Tamora and Pandaras, and kissed each of them on the forehead. Yama was still weak, and despite his growing dread he was now resigned to undergoing this ordeal. Besides, the villagers had saved his life and believed that he was a hero. And who would not like to be treated as a hero, even if only for a day?
And so he gave up all idea of escape, and while the villagers bustled to and fro he sat in the sunshine with Pandaras at his feet like a loyal puppy. Pandaras had tried to persuade Yama to put on his second-best shirt, but he preferred the homespun tunic the headman had given him.
Tamora sat cross-legged beside him with her new saber across her lap, sharpening it with a bit of whetstone and complaining about Eliphas.
“He has run off with the money I gave him,” she said. “Or gone straight to our enemies. I was a fool to trust him.”
“If he was going to betray me, then surely he would have done it already. Besides, he does not know where I am.”
“He went off before we started to look for you,” Tamora admitted. “But he could have doubled back and followed us.”
“And you would not have noticed an old man trailing behind you.”
“Well, that’s true. But these husbandmen have told the mirror people about you, and they could have told Eliphas. I do not trust him, Yama.”
Pandaras stirred and said, “When we were up in the balcony, above the pythonesses’ ceremony, he told me stories about how he used to search for old books when he was young. I think Yama has reawakened his spirit of adventure.”
Yama said, “You trust no one and nothing, Tamora. Eliphas was a good friend to me at the library, and he did not abandon me when I was pursued by the hell-hound.”
The mirror people arrived when the sun reached the highest point in the sky. They came up the steps beside the tiers of rice paddies in a long, colorful procession.
Men and women waved red and gold flags, beat drums and tambours, and blew discordant blasts on trumpets that coiled like golden serpents around the players’ shoulders.
There were fire-eaters exhaling gouts of red and blue flame, boys and girls who walked on their hands or on stilts, tumblers and jugglers. Lupe walked in the middle of this circus, wearing an emerald-green gown with a long train held by two stunningly beautiful girls. The tangled mane of the old man’s hair was dressed with glass beads and brightly colored ribbons. His hands, with their long twisted nails, rested on the bare shoulders of two more girls who guided him to the center of the village where the headman waited, clad only in his darned leggings and his homespun tunic, and his dignity.
After the two men had ceremoniously kissed, Lupe turned to where Yama stood with Tamora and Pandaras.
“Well met, dominie,” he said. His hands sought and clasped Yama’s. “I am pleased that you have returned to us, but I always knew that you would.”
Yama began to thank the old man for helping his friends, but Lupe put his long fingernails to his lips. His face was painted white, with black eyebrows drawn above his frost-capped eyes. His lips were dyed a deep purple.
“What you will do for us can never be repaid,” he said, “but we must not speak of that now. Our brothers have prepared food and drink, and we must dance to earn their hospitality.”
The feast lasted all afternoon. As the sun sank behind the shoulder of the slope above the village, cressets, were lit and hung on high poles, filling the air with scented smoke and sending fierce red light beating across the crowded square. Children served a stream of dishes, and husbandmen and mirror people ate and drank with gusto.
Pandaras fell asleep, curled in his place with his nose in the crook of his knees. Tamora drank sweet yellow wine steadily and soon was as drunk as anyone else.
Yama sat in the place of honor, between Lupe and the headman of the village. The Aedile had taught him the trick of appearing to eat and drink much while in fact consuming little, but even the small amount of wine he drank went straight to his head, and there were times when he believed that he was in the middle of a hectic dream, where animals dressed as men frolicked and bayed at the black sky.
As the air darkened, it became possible to make out the sparkle of gunfire around one high crag of the Palace.
Once, a low rumble passed like a wave through the ground beneath the feasting husbandmen and mirror people, and everyone laughed and clapped, as if it was a trick done for their benefit.
Yama asked Lupe if he was worried by the war between departments, but Lupe smiled and merely said that it was good to be in the fresh air once more. “It has been a long time since I felt sunlight on my face, dominie.”
“The war is nothing to us,” the headman said. “We do not have the ambitions of the changed. How much it costs them! And when the war is over, everything will be as it was before. No one can change the order of things, for that was set by the Preservers at the beginning of the world.”
He raised a beaker of wine and drank, and the husbandmen around him knuckled their foreheads and drank too.
Lupe had been sucking the marrow from a chicken bone. Now he bit it in half and chewed and swallowed the splinters and said, “At the far end of time all those who are changed will be resurrected after death by the charity and grace of the Preservers. Isn’t that right, dominie?”
And so it had begun. Yama said, as steadily as he could, “That is what it says in the Puranas.”
“All men,” the headman said. “But not all who are born and die on Confluence are men. Changed bloodlines become more and more holy, and at last pass away into story and song. Many have passed away since the world was made, and many more will do so in ages to come. But we are less than men, and can never change. And so we will inherit the world when all others have transcended their base selves.”
“These people have no ambition, dominie,” Lupe told Yama. “They swear never to leave their gardens. They will never wear a crown of fireflies.” Lupe waved a hand above his head, as if to swat the two dim fireflies which circled him. “I do not mean these. They are nothing. I know. Rats have brighter attendants. I mean ones such as those you wore when you first visited us. I am sorry that you no longer have them.”
“They were taken away,” Yama said.
“We do not need fireflies,” the headman said, “for we work in the sun and sleep when the Rim Mountains take away the light. We are a humble people.”
“They have no ambition, but they are not humble,” Lupe told Yama. “They are proudest of all the peoples of the Palace. They cleave to their work in the old gardens and claim to be the best of all the servants of the Preservers, but surely the best way to serve the Preservers is to aspire to become more than you already are.”
Lupe leaned toward Yama. The glass beads in his tangled hair clicked and rattled. Each held a point of reflected torchlight. His green dress was of the finest watered silk, but Yama could smell the must of the long years it had spent in a press. Were the blind old man’s cheekbones higher and sharper, was his voice softer?
Lupe said, “Who is right, dominie? They say we wish to rise above what we are destined to be; we believe that they are worse sinners, for they refuse the challenge.”
On Yama’s left hand, the headman said, “If knowing what you are is a sin, then I admit it. But isn’t it a worse sin to dream of gaining what you can never have?”
On the other side of the flower-strewn strip of cloth, Tamora suddenly looked up, as if startled awake. “That’s right,” she said. “Dreams bring heartache.”
“Without dreams,” Lupe said, “we are only animals. Without dreams, we are no more than we are.”
Yama looked from one old man to the other. Although he had drunk little, his head felt as if it was filled with fireflies. He said, “You ask me to judge between you? Then I say that both of you are at fault, for you refuse to look into your own hearts and discover why you wish for elevation or why you refuse the chance. Each of you clearly sees the fault of the other, but neither sees his own fault. We are all raised up by the Preservers, but they do not set limits on what we can be. That is up to us.”
The headman touched his forehead, but Lupe tipped back his head and laughed.
The headman glared at Lupe and said, “Then this foolishness should not take place, as I have argued. Brother Lupe, this man is a hero, but he is also a man. We are not the ones to test him. Only he can do that.”
“You show him,” Tamora said. “Show him what he is. What he isn’t.”
“It is not a test of him,” Lupe said, “but of my people.”
The headman said, “And as the dominie pointed out, you have thought too long on why we will not copy your foolishness, instead of thinking why you wish to attempt it.”
“Then I stand for my people alone,” Lupe said, and held out his hands.
Two girls stepped forward and helped him up. Gradually, the feast fell silent, silence spreading through the noise of laughter and drinking and eating and singing as black ink spreads through water. The people who sat cross-legged around the strips of cloth and the islands of food turned to watch Lupe. The faces of the mirror people were tinted red by the crackling flames of the torches; those of the husbandmen were tinted black. Two giants which had been trading blows with clubs in the center of the square stepped back from each other and their upper halves threw off their tinsel helmets and jumped down from their lower halves, who shucked the wide belts which had concealed where their partners had stood on their shoulders.
Lupe raised a hand, and someone stepped out of the darkness into the flaring light of the torches. It was a beautiful young woman in a simple white shift. She stepped forward lightly and gravely, treading the dust of the square like a dancer, the cynosure of every eye.
She carried a basket of white flowers. When she reached the center of the square she knelt gracefully and offered the basket to Yama. Yama jumped up and backed away, horrified. Tamora began to laugh.
They left Yama alone with the baby in the dark night in a ruined temple below the village. Perhaps it had once had gardens and a courtyard before its entrance, but now it was little more than a small square cave cut into the cliff at the edge of a stony field of vines. The lintel of its entrance was cracked. The caryatids which had for an age shouldered their burden uncomplainingly on either side of the door had fallen. One had broken in two and was missing her head; the other lay on her back, her blank eyes gazing at the black sky. Torches had been set on poles thrust into the dry earth on either side of the entrance.
Their smoky red light sent long shadows weaving across the flaking frescoes of the naos and put red sparks in the glossy black circle of the shrine.
For a long time, Yama paced back and forth between the two torches, stopping now and then to look at the baby, which slept innocently on the blanket of white blossoms. It was a boy, fat and dusky with health. What tormented Yama was the thought of the miracle he was expected to perform.
To raise this poor wight. To change him from innocence to one of those fallen into full self-awareness.
It was impossible.
The innocence of the indigens was different from that of the unchanged bloodlines because it was absolute.
While most bloodlines of Confluence could evolve toward union with the Preservers, the indigens were as fixed in their habits as the beasts of field and flood and air. Certain coarse bloodlines, such as the Amnan, excused their persecution of indigens by saying that their victims were merely animals with human appearance and speech, a kind of amalgam of monkey and parrot. Most, though, agreed that the indigenous races resembled unchanged bloodlines in all but potential. Their only sin was that they could never become other than what they were. They could not fall from the grace to which they had been raised by the Preservers, but neither could they transcend it.
