Ancients of Days

Chapter Fouteen The Procession of Yama

“They will soon go away,” Yama whispered into Pandaras’s ear. “I must have drawn them here, but they will go away once I have left. Before this is over I should explain to Lupe’s people that it is not how they think it is.”

“You are too modest, master! You could live as a Hierarch here, and instead you go to war!”

The produce wagon on which they rode swayed as it negotiated a pothole in the old road; Pandaras staggered and then sat down hard by Yama’s high chair. The boy was drunk. From the noise and music and cheering of the procession, from plentiful libations of sweet yellow palm wine. A wreath of ivy and the long white flowers of trumpet vine was tipped on his brow. There was a large wet wine stain on the front of his white shirt.

“They’d kill him,” Tamora said. “Not these fools, but the people in power. He’s a threat to them.”

She stood behind Yama, gripping her saber and constantly turning from left to right to watch the crowd, becoming especially alert whenever someone let off a firecracker. People were running alongside the wagon and its attendant procession of mirror people, or stood on terraces overlooking the road, cheering and waving palm fronds or brightly colored cloths, offering up flowers or fruit. One group had launched kites into the air; painted with fierce faces, the red and black and yellow diamonds zoomed and swooped around each other in the bright air.

Lupe sat at Yama’s feet, arrayed in a dress of cloth-of-gold sewn with fake pearls and sequins. He held the baby with its crown of brilliant fireflies in his lap. He said, “We mean no harm to anyone. We simply set forth from our immemorial home to claim our place in the world.”

“You’d do better to stay here,” Tamora said. She had to raise her voice to a shrill pitch to be heard above the crowd. “Innocents like you are prey for every bandit, crimp and reaver in the city.”

“When I was a young man,” Lupe said, “I used the shell game to take money from your people at the Water Market. Before that, I played the part of the monkey in the illusion of the snake and rope, and helped in a puppet theater. Marks always think that they can fool us, but they forget that they play our games by our rules. Ah, but we must not quarrel, young cateran, for we are both set on the same path. Hear how the people cheer the procession of your master!”

The news of the miracle had spread fast and far. By the time the procession had left the village of the husbandmen, people were already lining the old road as far as they could see. Gangs of men were clearing the road of brush and fallen rock, or patching gaps with timbers. The road had not been used, Lupe said, since the Hierarchs had fallen silent, ten thousand years ago.

The procession wound three times around the slopes of the Palace as it descended toward the city. No guards or troops came forward to stop it, but now and then Tamora would point out a speck in the air beyond the Palace’s slopes, where, she said, an officer stood on a disc, watching through a glass. Once, where the road rounded the bulging side of a steep cliff with sheer rock above and only air below, a flyer paced the procession. It hung just beyond the edge of the road, so close that one of the acrobats could have easily jumped from the road to the wide black triangle of its wing. The mirror people pelted it with flowers and libations, and then the road turned into a short tunnel through the side of a bluff, and when it came out into the sunlight the flyer was gone, and more people were running down steeply tilted fields toward the procession, waving and cheering.

Yama waved back, although he was sick at heart. The miracle which these innocent people were celebrating was no miracle at all, but a trick of the shadow of the creature who had started the war. She had used him as a tool to change the baby, either to show him what she was capable of, or to show him that she knew his powers better than he did. The miracle which Lupe had desired so much was a perversion, a crude and cruel joke mocking the will of the Preservers.

Yama’s only hope was that good might come from this after all. For no matter how it had been done, the baby was changed. Lupe’s people had the proof that they could be raised up.

There was nothing he could do but make the best of it, which was why he had agreed to ride with Lupe. Tamora had said that taking part in the procession was perilously foolish, but Yama had asked her plainly what was better—sneaking out of Ys under cover of darkness, like escaping thieves, or riding in the place of honor in a long, happy procession amidst tumblers and musicians and clowns, with the population cheering them along? At least Pandaras was caught up in the fever of it all. He waved too, and drank the libations which people handed up, and laughed and waved some more.

Yama turned to Tamora and said, “Most of them think it is some kind of performance.”

She shook her head. “Just look at who has come to watch. They are all of them indigens or the poorest of the poor, sweepers and nightsoil collectors like the rat-boy here. If the soldiers or the magistrates decide to arrest you, or worse, if those fuckers from Indigenous Affairs come for you, this trash would melt away. And tomorrow they’d choose another King of Fools.”

“My bloodline helped build the world, Tamora, and at one time I believed they might be Lords of infinite time and space. I know now that they were no such thing. They were laborers such as these.”

The miracle was not that he had performed a miracle, for he knew that he had not, but that Lupe and the mirror people believed that he had. Perhaps the good of it was this: that these people believed that miracles were possible, that the Preservers could still intercede in the world. And how could he deny it? For was not his own existence as much a miracle as the crown of fireflies around that innocent baby’s head? If the woman in the shrine had used him, then perhaps she in turn had been used by some higher power.

“I think you’re better than them,” Tamora said, and went back to watching the crowd.

Yama was searching the faces in the crowd, too. He was looking for Eliphas, for now the procession was descending through the cramped squares and narrow streets that threaded between the tumultuous jumble of buildings at the hem of the Palace, and still there was no sign of the old man.

The procession moved toward a great gate. People lined the rooftops on either side, pelting the wagon with flowers and paper strings in a blizzard so dense that at first Yama did not see why the procession suddenly stopped. Tamora hissed, but Yama held up his hand, hoping that she would not strike. For now he saw, through falling drifts of flowers, a line of troopers strung across the road before the gate, some mounted on black-plumaged ratites, some on foot.

An officer on a floating disc, clad in metal armor so polished that it shone like a mirror broken into the shape of a man, swooped down and hung in the air above the two oxen that drew the wagon. He was bareheaded, his skull heavily ridged. A thick black mustache framed the puckered cone of his mouth. He stared directly at Yama and said, “Who is in charge?”

“No one was compelled to be here,” Yama said. “They came of their own free will.”

The officer said, “None of these animals know anything about free will.”

Lupe said, “We set forth toward a new life, dominie. And this is the one who sets us upon it.”

Tamora stepped forward, glaring up at the officer. “Get out of the way, little man. And take your toy soldiers with you.”

“Stand down,” Yama told her gently, as he might try and calm a highly strung mount. He said to the officer, “What authority stops us?”

“The Department of Internal Harmony. You are Yamamanama? I am here to escort you from the Palace. We are under considerable pressure to return you to a certain place, but the Department of Internal Harmony does not take sides. We still have full control of the lower floors and the outer defenses, and we do as we see fit to ensure the security of the Palace. Accordingly, I am here to make sure that you leave the Palace, and to ask you to disperse your followers.”

“They are not mine to command.” Yama gestured, meaning the crowd which clogged the street behind the wagon, the people on the rooftops who were still tossing flowers into the air. He said, “If they were, I would not have allowed this. I am as embarrassed by it as you, but I believe that they mean no harm by what they do.” He could take the disc from beneath the officer’s feet and use it as a scythe against the troopers who blocked the way. He could call down machines and riddle them through and through. It would be so easy… but there would be other soldiers, and beyond the gates was the city, and the hundred thousand magistrates who kept civil order. He was not here to start a war. What was he thinking? The woman in the shrine had put something in his head that twisted his thoughts to fantasies of violence and domination. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and remembered that the Aedile had taught him that when negotiating it was better to allow your opponent to think that he had come to a decision than to force him to make a choice, for when forced a man will usually choose badly.

He said, “I understand why you must keep order amongst the petitioners and palmers who seek to gain entrance, for else the Palace would be overwhelmed. But the people who celebrate here are of the Palace itself, and wish to leave. They are the simple people who work the fields and entertain the clerks.”

Lupe said, “We have always come and gone freely. Why are we stopped now?”

“I know your kind,” the officer said. “They come and go by rat-holes and sewer pipes, along with the other vermin.”

Yama said, “If they are vermin, why then, you would well be rid of them. In any case surely you should not waste a moment on them. Would you stop birds flying from the fields above us to the banks of the Great River?”

The officer thought for a moment, then said, “We serve the ideal of the Preservers. We always have. In the black days when the Head of the People swallowed all other departments, we alone maintained our independence. We allow people to come and go as we see fit.”

“And even the mirror people were raised up by the Preservers. Their kind have lived in the Palace for longer than almost every other bloodline. Perhaps you would know if they have some rights in this matter.”

The officer’s puckered mouth drew back to show the strong, yellow-ridged grinding plates he had instead of teeth. “Frankly, I’ll be glad to see the last of them. They are parasites upon the bodies of the departments. Only a decad past there was a riot in one of the day markets because one of them was caught cheating at some gambling game. Several clerks were blinded when a fool fired an energy pistol.”

Yama believed that he knew something of the truth of that incident, but he did not correct the officer. He said, “Then perhaps all will benefit if they pass with me.”

The officer nodded. “They’ll be the magistrates’ problem once they’re outside the Palace, and I have my orders to get you to a place of safety. The Department of Indigenous Affairs pushed too hard for your return. We’ll not be at the command of them, or anyone else.”

“There is a ship waiting for us at the docks,” Yama said. “If you took me there, it would be an end to your duty, and of my obligation to you.”

The mounted troopers of the Department of Internal Harmony fell in as an escort ahead and behind the wagon.

Their ratites, the officer confided to Yama, were not as swift or fearsome as horses, but were less prone to panic and more maneuverable in the press of a crowd. The procession passed beneath the arch of the great gate (all the fireflies, from Lupe’s to those of the baby in his lap, flew up and vanished; Yama was glad to see them go) and began to make its way through the ordinary streets of Ys. Yama turned back and saw the Palace rearing against the sky above close-packed roofs, and fancied he glimpsed the flash of some weapon’s discharge near the peak, where the war between departments was still being fought. Or perhaps it was no more than the sun glinting on some metal surface high up in the Palace’s great bulk—perhaps the metal which clad the House of the Twelve Front Rooms of the Department of Vaticination.

The procession was still followed by cheering crowds, but now there were just as many people on the streets who merely glanced at it as they went about their normal business. Yama remembered the procession he had seen from the window of the inn where he had woken after plunging into the Country of the Mind where the crews of the voidships met each other, and laughed to think that now he was the center of a similar spectacle, simultaneously the center of everyone’s gaze and something commonplace.

Tamora cursed Pandaras for getting drunk and said that Yama should watch the rooftops instead of waving like the King of Fools. “They should have put a canopy over your head. It wouldn’t block a quarrel, but it would hinder the aim.”

“We are quite safe,” Yama said. “We have the protection of the Department of Internal Harmony. No one will dare try and take me by force now.”

“Prefect Corin might try and put a quarrel through your head, and mine too. He won’t have forgiven us for escaping. I know the type. And those magistrates are watching us too closely for my liking.”

Red-robed magistrates stood on floating discs high above the heads of the crowd which thronged the streets, their machines a dizzy twinkle in the air about them. Yama waved at them as the wagon trundled past, and suppressed the impulse to twist the orbits of their machines into mocking configurations.

As the wagon moved toward the docks, the crowd began to grow denser, swollen by refugees come to beg for help from the man who had raised up one of the indigenous races. Women held up children so that they could see Yama and the baby, or perhaps to be blessed, for many were ill or deformed. People shouted and prayed and pleaded, but their words were lost in the general tumult and the braying of the trumpets and shawms of the mirror people.

At last, the crowds were so dense that the procession could no longer move forward. Even the mounted soldiers were trapped in the press. The officer swooped down and told Yama that he would arrange for him to be carried away to wherever he wished.

Yama shook his head. “I will walk if I must!”

“You must come with me!”

They were both shouting at the tops of their voices, but could hardly hear themselves over the noise of the crowd.

A man jumped on to the wagon and tried to asperge Yama with scented oil. Tamora kicked him in the throat and he folded over and fell backward. The mob closed around him before he had a chance to scream.

Yama climbed onto the bench and raised his arms.

Gradually, the crowd which packed the street ahead and behind the wagon grew quiet, except for a scattering of individual voices crying out with hysteria or hurt or fright.

“I cannot help you,” Yama said. He was trembling violently, and a sharp pain pressed between his eyes. “Only you can help yourselves.”

Most did not hear him, but the crowd cheered anyway. Yama remembered the magistrate who had stopped him and Prefect Corin when they had first arrived in Ys, and borrowed a machine from one of the magistrates who stood on a rooftop overlooking the street. When he spoke to it, it amplified his voice so that it echoed from the walls of the buildings. He meant to tell the crowd again that he could not help them, but something seized him, and then he hardly knew what he said. The crowd cheered and he felt lifted up by their cheers. The pain between his eyes intensified and red and black light flashed in his sight. He tried to reach out and change everyone in the crowd and failed because there were too many, and cried out in rage. A myriad tiny machines burned and fell from the air. People screamed and tried to flee as magistrates, believing themselves to be under attack, laid into those nearest them with their quirts, But there was nowhere to flee to, and suddenly the crowd was fighting against itself, its unity lost.

Yama did not see any of this. Red and black lightning tore away all thought and he fell backward into Tamora’s arms.

A great wind blew around him. The sun burned down out of the cloudless sky, but the rush of air was so cold that he shivered in its icy blast as if plunged into a stream fed by the glaciers at the end of the world. He lay on a ridged metal deck that vibrated beneath him. When he struggled to sit up, Pandaras helped him and said, “A flying machine, master. You fainted and the officer caught you up and carried you off.”

“There were too many—”

Pandaras misunderstood; he was still drunk. His wreath was tipped over one ear. He said, “They would have torn you apart if this hadn’t rescued us. Isn’t it wondrous?”

The flying machine was sleek and boat-shaped, with short, down-curved wings. Its silver skin shone like a mirror in the bright sunlight. Lupe sat behind Yama and Pandaras, with the baby in his lap and a girl on either side.

Four troopers stood behind him. Near the beaked prow, Tamora was talking with a man clad in broken mirrors.

She glanced around, grinning fiercely, and said, “We go directly to the docks.”

The mirror-clad man turned—it was the officer in his polished armor—and said, “This is only a dory, not a true flyer. Unfortunately its range is limited, or I would take you as far from the city as possible.”

Yama said stupidly, “Who commands it?”

“It flies itself,” the officer said. “It is from the early days of the world. There. You see what we have left behind.”

The little dory tilted in the air. Because its local gravity compensated for the motion, the world seemed to pitch beneath it. The grid of the city, punctuated here and there by the domes and spires of temples, stretched away toward the vast bulk of the Palace of the Memory of the People. The Palace’s peak was obscured by smoke. A long way beyond it were the shining towers Yama had seen so often using the signal telescope on the roof of the peel-house at Aeolis, white needles that rose higher than the Rim Mountains, their tops lost in a glare of sunlight beyond the envelope of air that shrouded the world.

Yama pointed at the Palace and said, “They are still fighting.”

“It is the rioting in the streets that I meant,” the officer said. “Well, I suppose we are too high to see it.”

As if it understood him, the dory swooped down. The city rushed at them. The crowded roofs of the refugees’ shantytown, built over the mudbanks left by the Great River’s slow retreat, raveled away on either side. The river was directly ahead, a broad plain flashing in the sunlight as the dory swerved toward one of the floating docks.

The pontoon quays of the dock were lined with sightseers, and a flotilla of small boats stood off on either side.

As the dory gently sank through the air, coming to rest just above the edge of the outermost quay, Yama saw a familiar face in the crowd and immediately jumped down. Tamora got in front of Yama and helped keep off the press of people who crowded round, shouting and singing and praying and making obeisance. Some clutched at Yama’s homespun tunic and he realized his mistake and would have climbed back on the dory, but there was no room to move. Tamora held her saber above her head, in case someone was pushed onto it by those pressing from behind, and there was an uncomfortable minute before the troopers managed to clear a space.

Lupe was helped down by his attendants, using one of the wings of the dory as a pont. The blind old man ignored those who crowded around him. He cradled the baby in one arm and touched Yama’s face with the long fingernails of his free hand. “You should not have left us the first time, dominie,” he said. “You will forgive me if I mention that you caused much trouble. But all’s well that ends well.”

Yama smiled, and then remembered that the old man could not see. He said, “You have been a generous friend, Lupe.”

“We are your servants, dominie. We are no longer the servants of the pleasure of all in the Palace, but for you we will always give our lives.”

“It will not be necessary.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But these are strange times, dominie. The end of the world is at hand. Why else would you have kindled the change in our bloodline?”

Lupe embraced Yama tremulously, and Yama kissed the old man on both cheeks. The baby smiled up at them, quite undisturbed by the commotion of the crowd. Someone was trying to push between the troopers who guarded Yama and Lupe. Tamora’s saber point flicked in that direction—but it was Eliphas, smiling broadly and shouting wildly, his silver eyes flashing in the bright sunlight.

“I have found them,” Eliphas shouted. “I have found them, brother! Downriver!”