Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty The Aedile

The far-side shore was a plain of tall green grasses, winnowed by unceasing wind. It was not wide at that part of the river. During the festival at the beginning of winter, Yama and his stepbrother, Telmon, had often walked from riverbank to world’s edge in a single day. When he had been very young, Yama had often tired himself out by trying to match Telmon’s long, eager strides and had to be carried home asleep in his stepbrother’s arms. On those expeditions, Telmon had always worn a set of bolas around his right arm, for all the world like an indigen from one of the hill tribes. Several times, Yama had seen him bring down one of the moas that roamed the grass plains, breaking the bird’s legs with the bolas and throwing himself on its thrashing body to cut its throat. Telmon had carried a sling, too, and had taught Yama how to use it to hurl stones with killing force at ortolans and marmots.

He had given Yama the bolas and the sling when he had left for the war: remembering all this as the Weazel approached the shore, Yama supposed that they were still in his room in the peel-house.

As the Great River retreated, a wide floodplain of emerald-green bogs and muddy meanders had grown along the margin of the far-side shore. Under gray cloud, swept by quick heavy showers, the Weazel nosed along the belts of mangrove scrub that fringed the new floodplain, guided by Yama to the place where the citizens of Aeolis had made their refuge.

They had arrived only that morning, and were still pitching tents along the low ridge that marked the old shoreline, above a swampy inlet. Men were raising a defensive berm of earth on the landward side of the encampment, and hexes and charms had been fixed to bamboo poles. The Amnan believed that the far-side shore was haunted and never ventured far from their temporary festival camps, unless it was to visit the shrines at the world’s edge.

This camp was a sorry affair. Fires burning here and there sent choking white smoke streaming into the wet air. Piles of possessions were growing soggy under tarpaulins which billowed and cracked in the constant warm, wet wind. Even before the tents had been set up, each family had dug its own wallowing pit and made mud slides down to the inlet. Packs of wives lay in the slides and bickered incessantly, not bothering to brush away the black flies that clustered at their eyes and the corners of their mouths, while pups chased each other and the men looked on disconsolately.

Only the Aedile’s quarters were in good order. A big orange marquee had been raised on a platform of freshly cut logs at the shoreward end of the ridge, and the Aedile’s standard flew at half mast, snapping in the brisk breeze.

Yama saw this omen as the Weazel nosed toward the muddy shore, and his heart sank. Have faith, he told himself. He turned Oncus’s fetish around and around his wrist.

Have faith. But it was hard, with his childhood home put to flame, and all he held dear scattered to the edges of the world.

Tamora came up to him and said, “They will follow us here as soon as they see through your trick. We can’t stay long.”

“It will hold them for a while.”

“They know that you can fool machines.”

“They do not know how much I have learned since they tested me. The machines were strengthened against me, Tamora, yet I broke them as easily as any firefly.”

He felt himself smiling and heard himself saying, “I will be glad if they come here. I will destroy them.”

Tamora said approvingly, “Now you talk like a fighter. About time.”

Flanked by his three surviving sons, the Constable of Aeolis, Unthank, came out to meet Yama when he rowed ashore in the Weazel’s dory with Tamora and Pandaras.

Eliphas had elected to stay aboard, claiming that the chase had tired him out. Yama suspected that the old man was sulking because he had refused to try to destroy the warship and the picketboat.

The Constable did not seem surprised by Yama’s arrival. He was a large, ugly man more than twice Yama’s height, dressed in loose, mud-spattered trousers and a leather waistcoat.

A pair of tusks protruded from his upper lip. One had been broken when he had fought and killed his father for control of the harem, and he had had it capped with silver—the same silver which had capped one of his father’s tusks. The swagger stick that was his mark of office was tucked under one muscular arm. He lumbered up with a rolling gait that reminded Yama of how clumsy the Amnan were on land, and said straightaway that the Aedile was dying. “He’s up there, in the tent with the rest of his household.”

“Is everyone in the city here?”

“Most everyone who escaped. A few went into the City of the Dead, mostly the merchants. We’ll speak later, I reckon.” The Constable spat a string of yellow mucus at Yama’s feet, then turned and walked away. The Constable’s sons stared hard at Yama before following their father.

Pandaras said, “These people have no liking for you, master. Are we safe here?”

“There is bad history between us,” Yama said, as he led Tamora and Pandaras through the refugee camp. “One of his sons died by my hand; another was executed. They were working for someone who tried to kidnap me before I left Aeolis.”

As they passed through the camp, they gathered a tail of naked pups who jeered and whistled, and threw clots of mud. A group of men stood around a smoky bonfire, smoking long-stemmed clay pipes and passing a leather bottle back and forth. Someone said something and the others laughed, a low, mocking, mean laughter.

Yama went up to them and asked if they had seen the chandler and his family. Most looked away, refusing to answer or even acknowledge him, but one, a one-eyed fisherman called Vort, said, “Chasin’ after your sweetheart, young master?”

“Don’t speak,” another man said. Yama knew him, too. Hud, master of the shellfish farms at the mouth of the Breas.

“He deserves a chance like anyone,” Vort said. He wore only a patched linen kilt in the warm rain. His gray skin shone as if greased. There was a livid burn on one massive shoulder. He looked down at Yama and said, “I heard tell they came for the chandler first. Someone came banging on their door in the night. They were gone the next day, and then the ship came.”

“I heard they were informers,” Hud said. “That’s why they got away before the trouble. They got away with their wealth while the rest of us saw our lives burned up.”

“That’s enough,” someone else said. “He don’t deserve to know nothing.” The others standing around the fire mumbled agreement. One took out his penis and urinated with considerable force into the fire. It was a gesture of contempt, and there was another round of mocking laughter.

Yama said to Vort, “Who took them? Where did they go?”

“He don’t deserve it,” Hud told Vort. He glared at Yama through a fringe of lank hair. “I don’t have family; none of us here do. But we lost our lodges all the same, and most of what was in them. They let us take what we could carry and burned the rest to the ground, yet your peel-house still stands.”

“And the temple,” someone else said.

Yama stood his ground and looked at the men. They turned away, mumbling. Only Vort met his gaze. Yama said, “If I had been there, I would have given myself up. But I was not. The city was burned in spite, to hurt me and to draw me into a trap. Well, I was almost caught, but I escaped. And I will not forget what was done.”

“We’re dead men here,” Vort said. “This is the shore of ghosts and spirits, and we’ve come to live here.”

“If you believe that, then you have let them destroy you twice over,” Yama said.

No one replied; even Vort turned away. Tamora got between Yama and the men, and put her hand on the hilt of her sword and glared at their backs as Yama walked away.

Pandaras said, “They are a surly rabble, master. Little wonder you left as soon as you could.”

“They have lost their homes and their livelihoods. Of course they are angry. And I am the cause, walking amongst them with my questions. I shamed them. I should not have spoken.”

She was safe, he thought, and felt a pang of unalloyed joy. She had escaped. Zakiel had said so, and now Vort and Hud had confirmed it.

“It was not you who destroyed their city, but the Department of Indigenous Affairs,” Tamora said. “If they want to lynch someone, they should look for Prefect Corin.”

Yama said, “He might well come here. As you pointed out, my deception will not fool him for long.”

“You are too hard on yourself, master,” Pandaras said.

“Not hard enough, I think.”

A lump of filth tipped Tamora’s shoulder, and she made as if she was about to chase the pup who had thrown it.

He and his friends slithered off through the mud, whistling with laughter. Tamora said, “If we are staying here overnight we should sleep on the ship, and have it anchored a good distance from the shore. These slugs look like they can swim, if nothing else.”

“They are very graceful swimmers,” Yama said. “They mostly hunt in the river.”

“They could eat one of the fisherfolk whole, it seems to me,” Pandaras said. “Indeed, from the size of their bellies, some look as if they have done just that, and are digesting the remains.”

Old Rotwang sat on a stool outside the flap of the marquee, his wooden leg raised on a cushion as he sipped from a half-empty wineskin. A rifle was propped against a stay, close at hand. He sprang up when Yama hailed him, and gimped over and shook Yama’s hand effusively, saying he never thought he would have the pleasure again, never in all the long world, breathing out brandy fumes and all the while staring at Tamora and Pandaras.

“You look well, boy. And you have grown a little, I think. There is new muscle on your arms and shoulders at any rate. Wait there. I will get the Sergeant. He has been expecting you since we first sighted the ship.”

“My father—”

But Rotwang had already pushed through the tent flap.

Before Yama could follow, Sergeant Rhodean emerged, dapper in polished breastplate and a black leather kirtle, his boots gleaming, his gray hair newly cropped. He clapped Yama on the back and said he would hear something of his adventures in Ys.

“You can tell me how you got that scar on your forehead,” he said. “You forgot to keep your sword at point, I would wager. But never mind, a hard lesson is one not quickly forgotten.”

“My father—”

Sergeant Rhodean’s expression did not change, but a softness entered his gaze. He said, “The Aedile sleeps. He sleeps a lot. When he wakens you will be the first to speak with him, but I will not wake him just because his errant son has returned.” His gaze took in Tamora and Pandaras. “We will have tea, and you will introduce me to your companions. Have you become a cateran? That’s a harder life than the army, but you will see more fighting that way.”

Yama smiled. Sergeant Rhodean had always encouraged him in his wish to follow Telmon and fight against the heretics.

They took tea at a low table under the awning of the tent. Outside, bursts of rain spattered the muddy ground.

Sergeant Rhodean was uncharacteristically voluble; he was being kind, trying to keep Yama’s mind from the Aedile’s condition.

“I was a cateran for a year or so,” he said, “when I was only a little older than you. Perhaps I will be one again, although at the moment, of course, I am still in your father’s service. And will be for many years yet, I hope.” The rough skin that crested his prominent cheekbones swelled with tender passion when he said this, and he glared at Yama as if challenging him to deny it.

Yama said, “Did they hurt my father?”

“Not physically, except for a few bruises when he tried to resist arrest. But it is his spirit.” Sergeant Rhodean looked at Tamora and Pandaras and hesitated, clearly uncomfortable about continuing.

“They are not merely my companions in arms,” Yama said. “They are my friends.”

“I am his squire,” Pandaras said boldly, “and Tamora is… well, she was his companion but I’m not quite sure what she is now.”

“I also serve Yama,” Tamora said. “My life is his.”

Yama said to Sergeant Rhodean, “Tell me about my father. I hear that he tried to stop the razing of the city.”

“He was given his orders the day before the warship arrived, and he refused them. Instead, he began the evacuation of the city, which is why so many were saved. It hurt him grievously to do it, but he was right. The Department has changed. There is no longer any room for argument or even discussion, and although the Aedile outranked the Prefect—”

“Prefect Corin.”

“The man who took you to Ys, yes. He was flanked by a pentad of bullyboys with pistols on their hips, and he acted as though he owned the peel-house and everyone in it. But the Aedile stood up to him. And to the traitor, Torin. Oh yes, that one has all these years been scheming against his master, loyal to the villains who drove the Aedile into exile in the first place.”

“Torin will be regretting his treachery if he still lives,” Yama said, and briefly explained how he and Tamora had killed the mage and most of the soldiers who had been guarding the peel-house, and left Torin to the mercy of his fellow servants.

“That is good,” Sergeant Rhodean said. “Very good. The mage is the man who tortured the Aedile.”

“I know.”

“Not by physical hurt, but by a machine that took him into some sort of nightmare. I fear that he has not returned from it whole. I should have killed that worm myself.”

Sergeant Rhodean looked at Yama sharply. “But Prefect Corin is not dead?”

“No, and he still chases me. I cannot stay long.”

“Why is he after you, Yama? Have you given him some cause?”

“He is not a man to take things personally. That is the one fault he does not possess. He is a creature of the Department.”

“You are wrong, I think,” Sergeant Rhodean said with some vigor. “He pretends humility, but excuses his own impulses as the wishes of the Department. He is answerable to no one, having assumed moral superiority which he backs not with reason or right but with violence or the threat of violence. He wants you for some purpose that will help his own ambition, and I fear you will have to kill him before this is done.” Sergeant Rhodean drained his bowl of tea and banged it down on the table. “I am an old man, and I have not fought for a long time, but I would have fought him there and then if I could have believed he would fight as a man. But he would have ordered me shot by one of his flunkies, so I kept my temper.”

Yama said, “He ordered the city put to flame, and the Aedile stood on the dock and said he would burn too. I learned that much from the fisherfolk.”

Sergeant Rhodean nodded grimly. “They arrested the Aedile and tortured him with the foul machine of the mage, and then they locked him in his room in the peel-house. But Zakiel had a key that worked the lock and we made our escape. It sounds more exciting than it was. I do not think they particularly cared if we escaped, for it removed a source of embarrassment. Do you remember what I told you about planning a campaign?”

“That you should think of the worst things that could happen and plan for what would happen if they did.”

“I had already made preparations in case we needed to abandon the peel-house. I fitted a cutter with a big motor, provisioned it, and anchored it below the bluff. We got the Aedile aboard and slipped anchor. No one tried to chase us. The fisherfolk found us mid-river and we left the cutter for Prefect Corin to find and puzzle over. And here we are. Zakiel would not come. He said that he must look after his books.”

“I left him safe and well. Tamora freed him from his chains, but he would not leave.”

“It is only by good luck that this Prefect Corin is not interested in burning books, or Zakiel would have died defending them. The Aedile tells us that we will be able to return to the peel-house once this is over, Yama, but it is the kindliest of lies. It has been taken from him.”

“I am told that he is dying. Do me honor, and tell me the truth, plain as light.”

Sergeant Rhodean poured himself more tea, but after a single sip he threw the bowl out into the mud and rain with sudden violence. “It has gone cold,” he explained.

“Rotwang! Rotwang!”

Yama touched Sergeant Rhodean’s hand. Before he had left the peel-house he would never have dared this intimacy. As a child, the sergeant had seemed to him to be an all-knowing kindly tyrant, but now he saw that he was a loyal old man whose codes of honor had been proven obsolete. Yama said, “I should know how he is before I go to see him.”

“Of course. He has been waiting for your return. I think he has been waiting only for that.”

“Then I should leave here at once, and return in a hundred years.”

“I wish he could wait that long. I wish we all could. Why are they chasing you, Yama? They would not say.”

Rotwang brought more tea, and dry biscuits and a green paste of waterweed flavored with flecks of ginger. Yama tried to tell the story of his adventures in Ys and the Palace of the Memory of the People as briefly as he could, but Pandaras kept interrupting, and his inventions made Yama’s adventures far more daring and exotic than the prosaic truth.

At the end, Tamora told Sergeant Rhodean, “You may not believe half of it, but it is the truth. Even the rat-boy’s embroidery is a kind of truth, because words are a poor measure of what really happened.”

“I fought under the command of someone of your bloodline once,” Sergeant Rhodean told her. “It was before any of you were born, in the first campaigns against the heretics. I remember him still, though. He never told a lie, and we loved him for his honesty. Besides, we always knew how the boy could charm the watchdogs. His power has grown, that is all. As he has grown. He left a child, and has returned a man.”

Yama laughed. “I thought I was so cunning, but I am glad that you saw through my tricks.”

Tamora said, with sudden passion, “He will save the world. It’s been foretold.” She glared around her, as if defying them to deny it.

Behind her, Rotwang opened the flap of the tent and said, “The Aedile is awake.”

The Aedile lay in a bed within a curtained compartment at the heart of the tent. A stove at the foot of the bed gave off a fierce dry heat, but the Aedile was covered by a heap of furs so that only his sleek gray head showed.

When he saw Yama he smiled and held out a hand—it was cold, despite the sweltering heat. His pelt was dry and lusterless, and the contours of his sharp cheekbones and the notches in the bone around his round eye sockets showed clearly beneath it.

“My son,” he said, when he saw Yama. “How glad I am to see you. I thought that I would not see you until we were both resurrected by the grace of the Preservers.”

Yama helped the Aedile sit up, and Rotwang settled a richly embroidered wrap around his master’s shoulders and started to fuss with the coverings before the Aedile dismissed him.

“You will take tea,” Rotwang said, “and a shot of heart of wine.”

“Perhaps later. Let me talk with my son, Rotwang. I am not ill.”

Yama said, “I have failed you, father. More than once. All this is my fault.”

The Aedile said with a touch of his old asperity, “What is this talk of fault and failure? I will not hear it.”

“To begin with, I went as far as Ys with Prefect Corin, and then I ran away.”

“You should not have gone at all. I should not have sent you. No doubt Sergeant Rhodean has told you what happened. He is full of anger, but I am full of shame. I was lied to, Yama, by the highest offices of the Department. I have no doubt that as soon as they learned about you from their spies, they wanted you. Not for who you are, but for what they believed you to be. I told them about you from the first, of course, and sent in reports from time to time, but they were always anodyne. I kept certain things secret, you see. Despite the circumstances of your arrival in Aeolis, and certain events afterward, I always hoped that you were only an ordinary boy.”

“All the trouble began when I had Dr. Dismas search for records of your kind. One of the Department’s spies in my household—there were at least three that I knew of, although it was a shock to discover that Torin was also a spy—one of them must have passed on the details of what Dr. Dismas found, and of why Dismas tried to kidnap you. We got that from the wretched landlord of the tavern where you were taken, but I kept it from the Department. That was why I knew you could not stay, Yama. Believe me when I say that I acted out of love, and forgive me.”

Yama thought of the lies he had told the Aedile. He had not told the truth about how he had escaped Dr. Dismas, or of his adventures afterward. If the Aedile had known about them, he would never have sent him away. He said, “There is nothing to forgive.”

“I was told that you would be given an entry into the Department and entrusted you to them. But they lied. They knew what you were. And that was why so high-ranking a personage as Prefect Corin came to bring you to them. Of course, even then they did not know the whole story.”

“I ran away not because I knew what I was, but because of pride. I wanted only to be like Telmon.”

“We were both foolish, Yama. You were foolish because you wanted to follow your brother without thought or preparation; I was foolish because I would not let you. I am glad that you ran away from Prefect Corin. You did not know it, perhaps, but it was the right thing to do.”

“He caught me again,” Yama said, and for the second time he told his story. Without Pandaras’s fanciful contributions it took less than half the time, although the Aedile fell asleep in the middle of the telling. Yama waited until his father woke, seemingly without noticing that he had fallen asleep, and continued to the end.

When Yama told of Eliphas’s discovery in the records of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons, the Aedile stirred and said, “That is most curious. For Dr. Dismas also looked there, and reported that he had found no records of your bloodline. He said that you were unique.”

Yama remembered the conversation he had overheard when he had spied on the Aedile and Dr. Dismas from the gallery of the Great Hall. He said, “Dismas was lying. He found out about my bloodline. He hid what he found from you, and planned my kidnap.”

The Aedile was too tired to argue. He did not even ask what Yama had learned about his bloodline. He sighed and said, “Perhaps, perhaps. Dr. Dismas is a clever man, but very venal. Beware those who want to help you and ask for no reward.”

“Then I would have to mistrust all my friends.”

The Aedile closed his eyes and Yama thought that he had fallen asleep again. But then he opened them and said, “I do not regret taking you into my house, Yama. You are my son as Telmon was my son, whatever else you are. You were found in a white boat. Do you remember the story?”

“I was a baby, lying on the breast of a dead woman.”

“Quite, quite. I have always wondered if she was your mother, but old Constable Thaw said that she had silver skin, and that one arm was deformed. As you grew, I worried that your skin would turn silver, but it never did. I looked very hard to find your people, Yama. That is why, at last, I asked Dr. Dismas to search the archives of his department. It was the last hope of a foolish old man.”

“I am glad that I grew up where I did.”

“The year after you were found on the river, I took you to one of the shrines on this shore. It lit up as if the avatar had returned, but it was not the avatar. Instead it was a kind of demon disguised as a woman. She tried to bend me to her and I did something shameful. I used my pistol against her, and the energy overloaded the shrine. Do you remember anything of this?”

“I was a baby, father.”

“Quite, quite. Well, I have never told anyone about the shrine before. Not Father Quine, not Dr. Dismas, not even the Department. There were other signs, too. When you were first rescued, the Council for Night and Shrines decided that you were a danger, and they left you exposed on a hillside outside the city. Little machines brought you manna and water. They cared for you until old Constable Thaw’s wives came and took you back. Dr. Dismas said that he came here because so many machines flew in the air around about the city. And then there were the silly tricks you would play with the watchdogs… I wish now that I had told you more about these wonders, but I thought it better to try and give you an ordinary childhood. I have been very foolish.”

“I will always remember you,” Yama said. “Wherever I go, whatever I do.”

They were both saying farewell, he realized, and only then did he begin to weep. The Aedile scolded him and slept a little, and then woke and said, “Do you think that good can come from an evil act?”

Yama misunderstood, and said that he would revenge the burning of Aeolis in any way he could.

“Let the people of Aeolis do that. I wonder at my life. All this time I have been serving something with evil at its heart. I did not know it, but does that still make everything I have done evil?”

“On the road to Ys, Prefect Corin tried to save pilgrims from bandits. He made it into a test which I failed, but I think that he did want to save them, all the same. Whatever else he is, whatever else he has done, he risked his own life for the lives of strangers. The Puranas have it that nothing human is perfect, neither perfectly evil nor perfectly good. We can only hope to be true to the best of what we are.”

But the Aedile was asleep. Yama held his father’s hand until Rotwang came and announced that supper was ready.