Ancients of Days

Chapter Fifteen The Weazel

The ship they had hired, the Weazel, was a small lugger which, before the war, had spent her days ferrying cargo and a few passengers from one side of the Great River to the other. She was single-masted and lateen-rigged, and in calm weather could supplement her triangular mainsail with square staysails rigged from spars spread either side of her mast. She pulled a shallow draft, and with wind and current behind her could make twice the speed of the huge galliots and levanters which were scattered across the Great River in pods of three or four, heading downriver toward the war. She could not outrun the machines which tried to follow her, but Yama, exhausted though he was, told them to disperse even before the drag anchors had been collapsed.

Pandaras said that it was likely that the Weazel had been used as much for smuggling as for plying regular trade, but he was careful to say this out of earshot of the ship’s captain, Ixchel Lorquital. Captain Lorquital was a cautious, shrewd widow who dominated all on board with a natural authority. Like all the women of her bloodline, she had added her husband’s name to her own when she had married.

“But that don’t mean I was anything less than him,” she told Yama. “You might say that since I carry his name and his memory I’m rather more than he ever was, the Preservers keep his memory safe.”

Ixchel Lorquital was a big woman, with mahogany-colored skin that shone as if oiled and an abundance of coarse black hair she habitually tied back from her creased, round face with a variety of colored strings. Her forehead was ridged with keratin, her nostrils no more than slits in the middle of her face. She wore a silver lip-plug which weighed down her lower lip, exposing yellow, spade-shaped teeth. The day-to-day running of the ship was left to her daughter, Aguilar, who combined the offices of bosun and purser, and Captain Lorquital habitually sat in a sling chair by the helm, puffing a corncob pipe, stately in a billowing long skirt and leather tabard, her well-muscled arms bare, a red handkerchief knotted under her pendulous jowls. Eliphas soon struck up a friendship with her, and they spent hours talking together.

Ixchel Lorquital asked no questions about Yama and his friends. She offered her cabin to the four passengers, but Yama politely refused this generous gesture. Instead, he and his companions camped on the deck, sleeping on raffia mats under a canvas awning that slanted steeply from the rail of the quarterdeck to a cleat by the cargo well.

Yama slept easily and deeply on the Great River. It reminded him of the happy days of the annual pilgrimages made by the whole population of Aeolis to the far-side shore. And he could sleep safe in the knowledge that he had left his enemies behind him, and that now he had a destination, a place to voyage toward, the place where his bloodline might still live.

Eliphas had told Yama all about his discovery as soon as the Weazel had raised her rust-red sail and begun to outpace the flotilla of small boats which had tried to follow her. The old man was tremendously pleased with himself, and even more voluble than usual.

“It was your mention of Dr. Dismas that aided the search,” he said. “It was a simple matter to check the records and find out which he had accessed. He had been careful to cover his tracks, but he was not subtle. For one as experienced as my friend Kun Norbu, the chief of clerks, it was a relatively simple matter to see through the deception.”

“You say that they were living downriver,” Yama said quickly, before Eliphas could launch into a technical account of the false trails left by Dr. Dismas and the skills the chief of clerks had employed to untangle them.

“If they still live, brother, then that is where they will be found,” Eliphas said.

“Well, I am alive,” Yama said.

“That’s true,” Eliphas said. “However, I feel I should point out that while your being alive here and now means that at least two of your bloodline were alive in the recent past, it does not mean that our hypothetical pair are alive now, or that any others like them are alive. The documents, you see, are quite old. At least five thousand years old, for they had formed part of the original binding of a book which had been made then. They could well be much older, of course.”

“How much older?”

“Well, that’s difficult to say, brother. With more time, Kun Norbu and I could have analyzed the inks, for degradation of certain elements used to manufacture inks occurs at a fairly constant rate. But they are not more than ten thousand years old, for before that time the region in which the city of your bloodline is located was not yet formed.”

“A city!”

Yama had never imagined more than a small keep, or perhaps a small town, hidden in the icy fastness upriver of Ys. Perhaps a citadel tunneled into the rock of the mountains, a fine and secret place full of ancient wonders. But a city…

Eliphas drew a little leather satchel from inside his loose shirt, unfastened its clasps, and took out a cardboard folder tied with a green ribbon.

“Neither are the originals, of course,” he said. “My friend the chief of clerks could not allow such precious documents to leave the precincts of the library. However, they are fair copies, made by the best of the copyists in the library. The first faithfully reproduces the appalling script of the man who wrote the original, and even mimics the stains and tatters which the original accumulated before it was used as a stiffener in the binding of a common pharmacopium.”

It took him a minute more to unpick the knot in the ribbon. He opened the folder and withdrew a piece of paper which had been folded into quarters and sealed with a blob of black wax. It fluttered in the warm wind which poured past the rail of the ship’s waist, and it took all of Yama’s will to resist snatching it from Eliphas’s hand.

“Sealed with the imprint of the chief of clerks,” Eliphas said, and snapped the wax and handed the folded paper to Yama.

After he had opened it, Yama thought at first that the paper was upside down, but when he turned it around he still could not read the irregular lines of squiggles and dashes.

Eliphas smiled. “It is a long-dead language, brother, and the man who wrote this account used a much-debased version. However, I have some small skill in it. It is a brief account written by a scavenger of wrecked war machines in the Glass Desert beyond the midpoint of the world. That is why I would guess that it is more than five thousand years old. The remains of war machines were almost entirely removed from the accessible areas of the Glass Desert long before the making of the book in which this was found.”

“Where is it then? Where is this place?”

“Several hundred leagues beyond the end of the Great River, in a series of caverns. The scavenger believed that it was once a huge city, but only a small part of it was still inhabited when he stumbled upon it.”

Yama remembered the places beneath the world where Beatrice had taken him, and the capsule which had transported them from the edge of the Rim Mountains to the shore of the river. With growing excitement, he realized that, as a baby, he might have been carried from one end of the river to the other in a similar device. He did not know if his people still lived there, but at last he had a goal, even if it lay beyond the armies of the heretics.

But Tamora still did not trust Eliphas, and said so bluntly. “You are a fool if you believe him,” she said, later that evening.

“Eliphas thinks he will find treasures there. That is why he is so eager to help. He is quite honest about his intentions.”

“He wants to be young again,” Pandaras said. “It’s a futile wish most men share. And so he plunges into an adventure like those of his youth, hoping that it will revive his waning powers.”

They sat on rolled raffia mats under the awning, their faces lit by a single candle which flickered in a resin holder. Eliphas was on the quarterdeck, talking with Captain Ixchel Lorquital. To port, Ys made a web of lights that stretched as far as the eye could see; to starboard, the Eye of the Preservers was rising above the black sweep of the river.

Tamora had taken several of the small fish the cook had caught on trotlines trailing from the ship’s stern. She picked up one and tore a bite from it and swallowed without chewing. “Grah. That scrawl could be anything or nothing. He could have made it this morning. You have only his word that this is a record of your bloodline.”

“Not a record,” Yama said, “simply an account of what happened to a scavenger when his camels died after drinking poisoned water. He was wandering half-mad from thirst and heat exhaustion, and was found and taken in by a tribe of people who looked like me. He says that they called themselves the Builders. They had fireflies, and other machines. He was there for more than a decad, until he had recovered from his ordeal. Then he woke one morning and found himself hundreds of leagues away, near the fall of the Great River.”

“It is a pretty story,” Tamora said, “but where’s the proof?”

“He remembered the path he had taken up to the point when his rescuers found him. Here.”

Yama drew out the other piece of paper Eliphas had brought. Tamora held it to the light of the candle and Pandaras craned his sleek head to look.

It was a map.

At dawn the next day the Weazel was sailing past the lower reaches of Ys ahead of a brisk breeze, dragging a creamy wake through the river’s tawny water. The ship kept to the outermost of the coastal currents, where the water was stained by silt and sewage from thousands of drains, all of which had once been clear streams fed by the snowcaps of the foothills of the Rim Mountains. On the port side, across a wide stretch of calm water broken here and there by small islands crowded with buildings, or by long picket lines which marked the boundaries of fish farms, was an endless unraveling panorama of close-packed houses which stretched away beneath a dun haze created by millions of cooking fires. A horde of tiny craft went about their business close to the shore: coracles and skiffs; little fishing boats and puttering reaction motors; slow sampans carrying whole families and menageries of chickens and rabbits and dwarf goats; crowded water buses; luggers like the Weazel, their big triangular sails often painted with a stylized swirl representing the Eye of the Preservers. Occasionally, a merchant’s carvel moved at a deliberate pace amongst the smaller craft, or a pinnace with a double bank of oars and a beaked prow sped swiftly by, scattering the local traffic, the beat of the drum which set the rhythm of the rowers sounding clear and small across the water.

Yama’s chest tightened each time one of the pinnaces went by, partly in memory of the time when Dr. Dismas had tried to kidnap him, partly because he was still not sure that he had escaped Prefect Corin. This might be no more than a reprieve until the Prefect or some other officer of the Department of Indigenous Affairs tried to snatch him back. When he had woken, he had sent away more than a decad of machines which had been following the Weazel, and he expected to have to send away many more.

He did not want to think of the baby of the mirror people, of the dream in which the woman had spoken to him, of how badly the procession had ended. He wanted to put all of it behind him, and in the night had prayed that it would pass away, another one-day wonder in a city where wonder was commonplace.

To starboard was nothing but the wide river, stretching a hundred leagues to its own flat horizon, where tall white clouds were stacked above the merest glimpse of the far-side shore. Day by day the clouds would grow taller and nearer, until at last they would break on the land and bring about the brief rainy season. Apart from an occasional fishing boat, trawling for deep-water delicacies in the company of a swirling flock of white birds, the outer reaches of the Great River were the preserve of the big ships. At any hour at least a hundred could be counted, scattered far and wide across the gleaming surface of the river.

Going downriver.

Going to war.

Of the five members of the crew of the Weazel, two, including the fat cook, were slaves who had been purchased at judicial auctions. The oldest of the sailors, the ship’s carpenter, Phalerus, a bald-headed fellow with a sharp jutting lizard’s face and a ruff of skin that rose above his mottled scalp, had once been a slave too—he had bought his freedom years ago but had stayed on anyway, for he knew no other home. Of the other two freemen, one was a cheerful, simpleminded man named Anchaile; skinny and long-limbed, he swung amongst the rigging with astonishing agility. The other, a shy, quiet boy, was said to have killed five men in pit fights and was on the run from his handler because he had refused to fight a woman. This boy, Pantin, and the second slave, a grizzled little man with terrible scars on his back, were of Pandaras’s bloodline. Whenever there was slack time the three sat together telling stories or singing long ballads in their own language, one dropping out as another took over in rounds that sometimes went on for hours.

None of the crew were allowed to cross the brass line set aft of the cargo well in the whitewood deck (scoured each day by coconut matting weighted by the cook and dragged back and forth by two others) without the permission of either Captain Lorquital or her daughter, Aguilar.

The cargo well was covered with a tarpaulin cover as tight as a drum head, and loaded with replacement parts for artillery pieces. Each part was sprayed with polymer foam; they were stacked under the tarpaulin like so many huge, soft eggs. By the forecastle bulwark were pens where hens and guineafowl strutted and a single shoat rooted in a litter of straw, and on the triangular bit of decking that roofed the forecastle, under the lines which tethered the leading point of the sail to the long bowsprit, was a light cannon under a tarpaulin shroud.

It was here that Tamora chose to perch the second day, watching the city shore move past hour upon hour. She was in a kind of sulk, and even Aguilar, a jolly unselfconscious woman who claimed to have at least three men lusting after her in every city along the Great River, could not cajole more than three or four words from her at any one time.

Yama worried about Tamora’s mood, but bided his time. He reflected that he still did not know her well, and knew even less about her bloodline. Perhaps she was still recovering from their adventures, and in particular from her long incarceration in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, of which she would not speak. Worse had happened to her, Yama suspected, than the shaving of her head. And no doubt she was worried, and perhaps angry, that Eliphas had usurped her position as Yama’s advisor, that he and not she had found clues to Yama’s origin. It did not occur to him that there was a simpler answer, and that it lay within himself. At the end of the second day, the Weazel finally passed beyond the downriver edge of the city. Red sandstone cliffs, fretted with the square mouths of old tombs, stood above mudbanks and shoals exposed by the river’s retreat.

The only signs of habitation were the occasional fishing hamlets stranded beyond new fields made where the river had once flowed.

Early the next morning, the wind died and the Weazel’s triangular mainsail flapped idly. The ship drifted on the slow river current. The sun beat down from the deep indigo sky; the distant cliffs glowed through a haze of heat like a bar of molten iron; the big ships scattered across the gleaming sweep of the river did not change position from hour to hour.

At last, Captain Lorquital had the sail hauled down. Drag anchors were thrown over the sides. The ship’s crew took turns to swim and even Captain Lorquital went overboard, dressed in a white shift as big as a tent, hauling herself down the ladder at the stern a step at a time. Pandaras spouted water like a grampus, splashing with his two friends; Eliphas swam with a dignified breaststroke, keeping his white-haired head above the water at all times.

Tamora sat cross-legged on the forecastle decking, studiously not looking at the frolics in the water around the ship.

Yama swam a long way out. He found a patch of oarweed and wound himself in cool, slippery fronds, a trick he had learned as a child; the gas-filled bladders of the oarweed would keep him afloat without any effort. The ship was a small black shape printed on the burning water.

He could cover it with his thumb.

Soon, he would pass his childhood home, and he idly thought that he could jump ship then, and return to the peel-house and take up his life once more. He could marry Derev. It would be a metic marriage, but they would be happy. He would not mind if she took a concubine of her own bloodline. He would raise the children as if they were his own.

But this was no more than a pretty fantasy. He could not go home again. He could not pretend that things had not changed. That he had not changed, in ways that frightened and amazed him.

He could feel the tug of the feral machine far beyond the end of the world. And even as he floated on his back amidst the oarweed, machines gathered beneath him.

Through a fathom of clear deep water he could see things with dull silvery carapaces and long articulated tails moving over each other on the red sand of the riverbed. He ducked his head underwater to study this aimless congregation, then floated on his back and watched the distant ship, and thought again of Derev and everything else he had left behind in Aeolis, and at last swam slowly back to the ship.

Tamora did not turn her head when Yama came up the ladder behind her. The whitewood of the forecastle deck was hot under his bare feet; water dripping from his body darkened it for only a few moments before drying.

After a while, Tamora said, “I went up to the crow’s nest. There’s a little smudge on the horizon. As if something very big has been set on fire. I’ve been wondering what it could be.”

Yama remembered the ship Lud and Lob had fired as a diversion on the night he had been kidnapped by Dr. Dismas. He said, “Perhaps it is a galliot or a carrack, attacked by pirates.”

“The war goes worse than I knew if there are raiding parties this far upriver.”

“There have always been pirates. They live amongst the floating islands in the midstream.”

Tamora shook her head. She said, “The pirates have all gone downriver to the war. There are richer and easier pickings there.”

Yama reached out toward her scarred, naked scalp, but halted just short of touching it. Tamora said, “I didn’t believe you. I didn’t want to believe.”

Yama understood. “I am no different, Tamora. I still want nothing more than I did when I first met you. Once I have found my people I want to join the war and fight as best I can.”

“As best you can!” She turned and looked up at him. “I thought you were a monster. They told me that, in my cell. They told me that I might be pregnant by you, and be carrying your spawn. They examined me—”

“Tamora. I did not know. I am sorry.”

“No! I am sorry. I was weak. I allowed the fuckers to get inside my head. It wasn’t you that put a monster inside me, but them. It’s been whispering inside my skull ever since. I always knew what you were, see, but I wouldn’t admit it. That’s why those fuckers could get inside me. I won’t let it happen again.”

With a sudden, violent heave, she twisted around and threw herself full length on the decking. She moved so quickly that Yama did not have time to react. She kissed his feet and looked up and said, “I did not believe in you. But I do now. I know that you are capable of miracles. I will serve you with all my life if you will let me.”

Yama helped her up, feeling a mixture of embarrassment and confusion and fright. He said, “We will fight side by side, as we said we would.”

Tamora finally met his gaze. She said, “Isn’t that what I said? But in what cause?”

“Against the heretics, of course.”

But he said it so quickly that both of them knew that it was said out of habit, not belief.

Tamora saved him. “Well, yes,” she said. “There’s always that.”