Ancients of Days

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.

More than once, Yama was seized with the strong urge to pick up the baby and carry him back to the village high above, where, to judge from the sounds of laughter and music which occasionally drifted to him on the night breeze, the feast was proceeding as heartily as when he had been led away from it. And more than once, he was seized with the impulse simply to walk away into the night. To become what he briefly had been when he had first arrived in Ys, a solitary seeker after the truth of his own life.

He did neither. The baby was in his care, and he could not return until the night was over. A refusal to act would be worse than failure, for it would imply that he was not grateful to the mirror people for saving his life. No, better to wait out the night, and be found to have failed. Tamora would be pleased, for it would prove to her that his powers were no more than figments of his imagination. And perhaps the heavy weight of the mirror people’s hope might pass from him.

It was not a burden that Yama had ever sought. That was what was so unfair. Zakiel had told him that, because of the great age of Confluence and the multiplicity of its bloodlines, there were so many stories and tales that anyone could find in them a mirror to their own life. And so the mirror people had seen in Yama a reflection of some long-dead hero or half-forgotten promise.

Yama could forgive them that—in these troubled times people looked to the past for heroes to save them, for that was simpler than trying to save themselves. But although, like so many heroes of the Apocrypha, he possessed mysterious origins, strange powers, and what might be mistaken for a magical weapon (but he had lost the knife, and the coin he carried was not the coin he had been given), Yama knew that he was no hero. As a child, he had dreamed of finding others of his bloodline, that they would be powerful and rich and strong. But he knew now that those dreams could not be true. Every orphan must have similar dreams, but very few orphans are of notable birth.

Now, older and chastened by the rub of the world, he wished to find his people because he hoped that they would shelter him from the expectations of others. Even if they were no more than mendicants and anchorites, he would join them gladly, for surely they would accept him simply for what he was. He had not asked for what little power that he had, and he wanted it gone.

Let it pass.

More than once, gripped by a mixture of self-loathing and self-pity, he shouted this prayer into the night. But there was never any reply, nothing more than the wind walking amongst the dry leaves of the vines, and the faint sounds of revelry high above. Presently, he remembered that this place was very old, and grew fearful that he might wake something, and was quiet.

“You are better off without it,” he whispered to the baby. His throat ached from shouting. “The husbandmen are right.”

Yama did not expect to sleep, but at last he tired himself out by pacing to and fro, like the great spotted cat he had once seen in a cage on the deck of a ship that had put in at Aeolis on its way back to Ys from the jungles near the midpoint of the world. The cat had prowled restlessly from one corner of its cage to the other, anger blazing in its green eyes, its mad thoughts unguessable. Perhaps it had believed that if it paced long enough it might find a hidden door to the jungle from which it had been taken.

Yama sat with his back against the pedestal of one of the caryatids (her feet, shod in strap sandals, stood there still, broken off at the ankles), and, tired but sleepless, watched the lights of the city spread beyond the dark slopes of the Palace roof.

After some time, he realized that the fallen caryatid had opened her blank eyes and was watching him. He felt neither fear nor amazement; not even when she spoke.

“You have a knack of finding windows that still work,” she said. “I see you lost your key but found another.”

Yama knew at once who was speaking to him. The woman he had seen in the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well. The aspect of the author of the heresies which threatened to consume the world.

He was seized with a bottomless dread, as if confronted with a poisonous serpent. His mouth was dry, but he managed to say, “The keys are everywhere, but people have forgotten what they were.”

“They have forgotten much,” the woman said lightly. “When I walked in your world, I tried to tell them a little of what they had forgotten. Some remembered, but many resisted. Knowledge is a bitter thing, after all, and many hesitate to sip from that cup. You, for instance, are not one step further on your journey. Why are you sitting here, and who is it you are sitting with? A very unformed mind… Ah, it is a baby from one of the true alien races. Another orphan, Yama?”

“I will not serve you,” Yama said. It was a great effort to speak, as if he, too, had been turned to stone. He said, “I refuse to serve. I refused Prefect Corin, and I refuse you. I especially refuse you, because I know that you deny the mercy and charity of the Preservers. You would overthrow them and rule in their place if you could. It is the world’s good fortune that you are nothing but a ghost.”

“Do you refuse the mirror people, too?”

“You cannot know about that!”

“I am in your dreams, Yama, so for this little time I share some of your memories. The mirror people want only to share the fate of the other bloodlines of this strange world. They want nothing more than to take charge of their own destiny, to become infected with the machines that will record their memories, so that they might live again. They want to remember their own story, not have it remembered for them. I had long arguments with Mr. Naryan on that point. He was particularly enthusiastic about innocence, I remember, but no parent should keep a child from growing.”

“Mr. Naryan… is he another ghost?”

“He was the Archivist of the town of Sensch, As far as I know, he’s still alive. It was a great many years ago, but his kind live long, longer than most of the long-lived races of Confluence. He changed his mind, of course. He understands my ideas now.”

“But Sensch was where the war—”

The caryatid smiled, cracking the lichens which had grown like cankers on her stony cheeks. “I set them free, Yama. Free from the burden of this world’s mindless theocracy. Free to be themselves.”

“The Preservers will give us all that freedom.”

“Yes, and they promise to do so at the very instant of the end of the Universe. It is an easy promise to make, for no one will be alive to call them to account when they fail. The Preservers promise everything and give nothing. I promise no more than freedom, and that is what I gave the citizens of Sensch. What is so wrong with that?

“Now, pay attention. I will show you the trick. When I was in the world, I had to call on the shrines to help me change the people of Sensch. Now I live in the space inside the shrines, and the process is much simpler.”

“No! I will not serve!”

But in his dream, Yama seemed to be swimming beneath the surface of the river, as he had swum so often when he was still a child, innocently playing with the pups of the Amnan. The pups had liked to dive from the end of the new quay and swim out to the kelp beds, where long green fronds trailed just beneath the surface. They swam deeper and faster than Yama ever could, searching for abalone and oysters that clustered around the holdfasts of the kelp on the muddy river bottom. Yama was happy enough to splash above them, but sometimes he struck downward through sunlight toward the ghost of the river bottom far below, toward the other children. He could never reach them. His lungs began to ache and burn, and the weight of the water compressed his chest and he had to double back and swim strongly for the surface, where he sputtered and coughed in the sunlight. The cool depths of the river were, for him, forever unreachable. But now, as he struck through a hectic flux that was much like the play of light and water, it came to him that his wish had finally come true. The caryatid hung beside him, and he told her that she should sink, for she was stone, and stone could not float.

“Watch,” she said, and he saw the knots within the baby’s brain, saw how they could be made stronger here and here so that the swarming machines, smaller than the single-celled plants on which the largest fish of the river grazed, which hung invisibly in every breath of air just as the tiny plants hung in every drop of water, would exist in those places, and begin their work of building and amplifying the initial trace of self-consciousness.

The caryatid sank away, slowly dissolving into the flux of light. “Self-ordering complexity,” she murmured. “It only needs a seed…”

Yama knew now, or remembered, that this was a dream, and remembered the nature of the creature that had visited him. Yet still something in him yearned toward her, as a starving man will reach toward any kind of food, no matter how foul. He struck out with fierce desperation toward the place where she had disappeared, and woke to find Tamora kneeling beside him. He was lying on the broken tiles of the naos, before the black disc of the shrine. Was there light fading within it? Or was it simply a reflection of the dawn light which was framed by the square entrance of the little temple?

Tamora was watching Yama with an intent, troubled expression. She snatched back her hand when he reached for it, and he asked her what was wrong. Instead of answering, she turned and pointed to the temple’s entrance, where people clustered around something on the ground.

Immediately, Yama felt a sharp pang of guilt. He had forgotten the baby. He had fallen asleep. It could be dead.

It could have been snatched by wild animals.

He staggered outside, every muscle stiff. It was already warm, and light flooded the slopes of the Palace and filled the sky, so bright after the temple’s cool shadows that he had to squint. A great cry went up from the people and Yama started back in alarm before he understood that they were smiling. Lupe stood in the center of the little crowd, his blind face bent to a girl who whispered in his ear.

Another girl took Yama’s hand and led him to the basket of white flowers.

There was so much light that Yama did not at first understand why the baby’s eyes kept crossing, and why it batted at the air before its face with its chubby hands. And then he saw.

Hung above its forehead, burning with fierce white radiance, was a crown of fireflies.