Ancients of Days

Chapter Twelve The Husbandmen

“There, dominie,” the headman of the village said. “You see? The Lords of the Palace quarrel amongst themselves.”

Yama looked up, following the line of the headman’s arm. High above the terraced fields of the little village, a thread of black smoke rose from the upper slope of the mountain.

“The roof trembled hard last night,” the headman said. He was squat and muscular, with a seamed face and lively black eyes, and skin the color of the red earth. His white hair was done up in a braid that fell to the small of his back. He wore much-darned leggings and a ragged but clean homespun tunic with many pockets.

“A bad time,” Yama said.

“Not really. The Lords of the Palace will pay more for our food when they are done fighting—the winners will need to feed those they have captured.”

“They will not take it from you by force?”

The headman touched his lips with the tips of his fingers. It was a gesture characteristic of the husbandmen. It meant no. “All serve the will of the Preservers. And we are their most faithful servants.”

“Yet all of those fighting each other also profess to serve the will of the Preservers.”

“We don’t question how the Preservers order things,” the headman said. “Are you feeling stronger, dominie?”

“A little. Resting here in the sun helps.”

Last night, Yama had been given the headman’s own hammock. An old woman had looked into his eyes and laid her head on his chest to listen to his breathing and heartbeat, and then had given him an infusion of dried leaves to drink. When Yama had woken, most of the husbandmen were already out in the fields, but the headman and his wife had stayed behind to tend their guest. They had given him dried fish and sweet rice cakes to eat, and a homespun tunic to cover his bare chest.

Yama was very weak. He was badly bruised from the beating he had received when he had been ambushed, and, controlling the hell-hound had been as exhausting as riding a high-spirited thoroughbred. He was content to spend the day lying in a hammock under the shade of freshly cut banana leaves by the sun-warmed wall of the headman’s house, listening to the headman’s stories and watching children play in the dust of the village square.

The husbandmen believed that they had been brought to the world to tend the gardens of the Palace. The headman claimed that the terraces spread above and below the village had once held beds of roses and lilies, jasmine and sweet herbs.

“The first masters of the world walked here in the morning and the evening, dominie. There were different gardens for the morning and the evening of every day of the year, and we tended them all. That’s why we look out across the city toward the place where the sun rises and sets.”

“What did they look like, your masters?”

Yama had never seen a picture of the Sirdar, those who had ruled the world when it had been newly made. None of the Sirdar had ever been interred in the City of the Dead, and none of the picture slates there had revealed even a glimpse of them. They had never presented themselves to the ordinary people but had ruled invisibly, implementing their wishes through an extensive civil service of eunuchs and hierodules.

The headman gazed across the dusty village square, as if remembering, then said, “They were small, as small as our children playing there, and their skin shone like polished metal.”

Yama shivered, remembering that the dead woman in the white boat, on whose breast he had been found, had had silver skin. Old Constable Thaw had said nothing about her being no bigger than a child, but to his kind most bloodlines seemed small.

The headman said, “Words are poor things. If I had a picture, I would gladly show it you, dominie. But we have no pictures of those times.”

“It must have been long ago.”

The headman nodded. He sat cross-legged in the white dust by Yama’s hammock. Blades of sunlight fell through the notched banana leaves and striped his lined face. He said, “The world was young then, dominie, but we remember those times. We are not able to change, you see, nor do we wish to, for we would forget how it was, and how it will be again.”

Some believed that the Sirdar had been destroyed by their successors, others that they had achieved enlightenment and passed from the world. There had been many rulers after them, but it was said that, next to the Builders, the Sirdar had been closest to the Preservers. The husbandmen believed that their old masters would come again, opening the sealed core of the Palace and stepping forth as a flower steps forth from a seed. The world would become a garden then, changed and unchanged bloodlines would achieve enlightenment and ascend into the Eye of the Preservers, and the husbandmen would spread across the face of the world they longed to inherit.

“Trees would drop fruit into our hands, and corn and grain will grow on the plains by the river without need of tilling or sowing. Until then,” the headman said, with a smile that creased his clay-red face still further, “we must toil in the fields.”

“Perhaps those days are not far off. Great things happen in the world.”

Yama was thinking of the war against the heretics, but the headman knew nothing of the world beyond the Palace of the Memory of the People. He believed that Yama was talking about the conflict in the mountain heights above them. He said, “These may be the end times, but not because the Lords of the Palace quarrel. There has been war in the Palace before. Long ago, long after our first dear masters stopped walking in the gardens, but while the gardens were still gardens and had not yet been turned into fields, one department took over all the others. It was known as the Head of the People. It ruled for many generations, and its rule was fierce and cruel. It was a great weight on all the bloodlines of the world. But when it had conquered all, the Head of the People found itself without enemies and turned inward. Soon, it was fighting against itself. The Hierarchs arose and ended that war, and in turn they fell after the war against the Insurrectionists, for victory cost them dear. Some of the oldest departments are parts of that greater department, although they have long forgotten that they were once part of a greater whole, much as a lizard’s tail forgets that it was shed by another lizard to escape an enemy, and grows into another lizard exactly like the first. Bloodlines forget much when they change; we cannot change and so we forget nothing, like the lizard that lost the tail in the first place.”

“I recently met someone else who said much the same thing.”

“That would be one of the mirror people. Yes, they remember much, too, but they have not lived in the Palace as long as we have. They are really fisherfolk, dominie. They left their living on the Great River when the city spread along the shore, and found work as fishers of men instead. They know much, but we know more. We understand the signs. We know the significance of the hell-hound. Twice it was seen in the past decad. The first time, it vanished into the Palace after passing along the ridge above this village. The second time, it was seen floating through the air, and there was a ghost inside it.”

“I know.”

The headman touched his forehead. Yes. “Then you saw it too, dominie. Perhaps you do not remember that hell-hounds were used as weapons.”

“So one of the mirror people told me.”

The headman touched his forehead again. “And they learned it from us, for they arrived after the war with the machines.”

He meant the end of the Age of Insurrection, when the Hierarchs had defeated the feral machines and those bloodlines which had risen against the will of the Preservers and had laid waste to half the world.

“We remember how great swaths of the gardens were destroyed by the energies of packs of hell-hounds,” the headman said, “and how shrines were killed so that they no longer spoke to the masters of this Palace. Now the hell-hounds have come again, and one was carrying a ghost or a demon. I had not expected it, but if such wonders are seen in the world, then these may be the end times for which we have waited so long.”

“It was not a ghost,” Yama said, “and it certainly was not a demon. I should know, because I was there.”

The headman nodded. “As you say, dominie. We believe that you might have been hurt by the hell-hound. That is why you are confused. But whatever you believe you saw, it was an illusion. Only ghosts or demons from the space inside the shrines may ride hell-hounds. It is how they visit the world. They bring nothing but destruction.”

“Well, it carried me here,” Yama said.

The headman touched his lips. “You were chasing it, or perhaps it was chasing you, although I understand that hell-hounds take little notice of men, who are no more than ghosts to them. You were chasing it, then, hoping to harm it. We saw it coming toward our village, and we hid from it, but it is clear that you saved us, or tried to save us. You did not know what you were chasing, so I cannot say that you were foolish, but you were certainly brave. Perhaps you thrust a spear at it, and its energies knocked you down the slope, where we found you. That is why your mind is confused and why you are so weak. But the weakness and the confusion will pass. You are a young man, and strong. Lucky for you, dominie. Such an encounter would have killed most men outright.”

“I was not fighting it. I used it, and it used me. I will show you if you let me.”

Yama tried to sit up in the hammock, but his sight washed with red. He fell back, and felt the headman’s dry, hard fingers at his brow.

“Rest,” the headman said. “Rest is the best medicine.”

“I rode it,” Yama said. “I really did. It is only another kind of machine. I rode it all the way down the side of the mountain, and I rescued my friends.”

Or perhaps he only said it to himself, for the headman did not seem to hear him. The headman settled the blanket around Yama’s shoulders and went away. Yama slept for a while, and woke to find the headman’s wife wiping his brow with a wet cloth. He was inside the headman’s house again. Night pressed at the window above his hammock but the little room was full of light, for hundreds of fireflies hung in the air.

“You have a fever,” the old woman said. “In a little while I will bring you some lemon broth.”

Yama clutched the wide sleeve of her embroidered shirt. “I walked inside it,” he said. “It carried me through the air.”

The old woman gently lifted his hand away from her sleeve. “You have been dreaming, dominie. You are very weak, weaker than you believe, and so your dreams seem more real than the world itself. But I do not think that you will die. You will take some broth. You will sleep. We will look after you. It is an honor to us.”

Yama lay in the hammock for two days, drifting between waking and sleeping. Whenever he woke, he dismissed the fireflies that had been drawn to him while he slept. At last, no more came: he had exhausted the local population. The shadows seemed to be thronged with dreams, and dreams mingled with heightened scenes of his recent adventures. Again, he walked with Prefect Corin through the hot dry lands on the road between Aeolis and Ys, but now the Prefect wore a crown of fireflies. Again, he stood at the edge of the deep shaft in the Temple of the Black Well—and this time it was not the feral machine but the hell-hound that rose out of black air. It enveloped him and carried him through the air to the top of the mountain which he now knew was no mountain, but in truth a single vast building older than the world. And at the windy pinnacle, with the city spread below on one side and the Great River on the other, he stood with his sweetheart. Derev. She clasped him to her breast and spread her strong wings and they flew higher still, until the entire world lay beneath them.

When Yama woke, dry-mouthed, weak, aching in every bone but clear-headed, Tamora was there. He was so glad to see her that he started to weep.

She grinned and said, “So the hero isn’t dead. You are such a fool, Yama.”

“I am pleased to see you, too, Tamora.”

She wore a bronze-colored corselet he had not seen before, a short skirt of red leather strips, and a metal cap on her shaven, scarred head. She said, “I thought you were dead. I thought that the weapon you used against them must have killed you. Don’t ever play the hero again, Yama. Or at least let me help you. That’s what I am paid for.”

“I lost my money, Tamora, and my knife. I have my book, though. It is all I have.”

He had carried the copy of the Puranas through all his adventures. And he remembered that although he had lost the coin which the anchorite had given him, he had found a replacement. He reached for it, and Tamora caught his hand and then they were holding each other. Her strong arms; her spicy odor; her heat.

Tamora said, “Well, you’re alive. Oh, Yama, you are such a fool!”

They held each other for a long time, until Pandaras came in.

Eliphas had led Tamora and Pandaras to the home of the mirror people, and Lupe had sheltered them until the search for the escaped prisoners passed into the lower levels of the Palace. The war between the Department of Indigenous Affairs and its lesser rivals was intensifying, and Tamora said that this would make their escape easy.

She said that she had arranged passage downriver.

“I had to use your money to do it, but then again I had to use mine, too.”

Yama said, “I know that I have to leave the city, Tamora. But I should leave you, too, and Pandaras. Simply by being with me you are in great danger.”

“Grah. Your brains have cooked in your head. I will come with you for your own good. I suppose you could try and dismiss the rat-boy, but he will follow you anyway. He is in love.”

From the doorway, where he had taken up position like a guard, Pandaras said, “I merely do my duty as a squire.”

The boy had oiled his hair and brushed it back from his narrow face. He still wore the black trousers and white shirt that was the uniform of the clerks of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. An ivory-handled poniard sheathed in black leather hung from a loop at his waist.

Tamora shrugged. “Then there is the old man.”

“Eliphas.”

“I don’t trust him. Tell me you don’t need him, and make me happy.”

“Eliphas is a friend. He helped me without being asked, and he promised to search the library of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons for records of my bloodline.”

Perhaps the answer had already been found. Perhaps he would at last know where he belonged. And yet there was also the mystery of the dead woman in the white boat, who had had silver skin like the first masters of the world.

“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.