Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-One The Pyre

Supper was boiled beans, samphire and a little salt fish, served with beer sent over by Constable Unthank. Tamora wanted to return to the Weazel, but Yama refused. He knew that the Aedile might not last the night, and wanted to be with him.

He lay down just outside the partitioned space where the Aedile rested. His arms and legs tingled and felt heavy; he was very tired. The heat of the stove beat through the curtains. On the other side of the big orange marquee, Tamora and Pandaras talked in low, sleepy voices with Sergeant Rhodean. All of them sounded a little drunk; perhaps they had finished the beer. Yama tried to read a little in the Puranas, beginning with the sura about good and evil he had quoted to the Aedile, but the columns of glyphs blurred into his drowsy, not unpleasant headache, and he fell asleep almost at once.

He dreamed that he was riding a moa across the grass plains amongst drifting constellations of tiny lights and felt a tremendous sense of exhilaration as the bird’s long powerful legs ate up the distance—but then the bird stumbled or he fell and he woke with a horrible start.

He was lying on the ground. Vague shapes moved around him in near darkness. His head ached and his mouth was dry. When he tried to get up something smashed into his chest and knocked him on to his back.

“Enough of that,” a man said. “We decided what we’d do and we’ll stick to it.”

Yama was lifted up then, but his legs were unstrung and he fell to his knees. His gorge rose and he vomited a sour mess of half-digested beans and beer.

Constable Unthank squatted so that his fat, round face was level with Yama’s. “That’ll pass,” he said. “We laced the beer with liquor from boiled pufferfish livers. It knocked you out nicely.”

Behind the Constable, men were moving to and fro, piling branches on top of a conical heap already twice their height. The Eye of the Preservers stood above the flat horizon, peering through a rent in the clouds. The grass plain was black in the Eye’s sullen red light, and studded with tall slabs like the markers of the graves of giants-termite castles, Yama realized. Each housed a mind shattered in a million fragments, through which strange slow thoughts rolled like the waves that rolled from one side of the river to the other, and each fragmented mind was linked to its neighbors, a network stretching along the straight edge of the world…

Constable Unthank slapped Yama’s face to get his attention, grabbed his wrists and hauled him to his feet. This time, Yama found that he could stand. His copy of the Puranas had fallen to the ground, and with an oddly tender gesture Unthank picked it up and placed it in one of the pockets of Yama’s homespun tunic.

“You’d been reading in that before the beer got to you,” he said, “and you’ll need it where you’re going. See to him, lads. Remember that he can play tricks, so do it properly.”

One of Unthank’s sons seized Yama’s hands, wrenched them behind his back and tied them at the wrists. He was breathing heavily, and stank of beer. “He has one of those charms the greenies wear. Much good it’ll do him,” he said, and spat in Yama’s face and would have hit him, but Unthank caught his arm.

“Leave that off,” Unthank said. “This will be done properly.”

“For Lud and Lob,” Unthank’s son hissed in Yama’s ear.

Unthank spat on the ground between his feet. “They were no sons of mine. They were too stupid to live. I reckon my first-wife had been lying with a grampus when she got them. They brought shame on our family, and anyone who defends them can fight me here and now. But none of you are ready, you little scum, and Lud and Lob never would have been ready. I’d have ripped their throats the moment they tried. This isn’t for them. This is for all our people. A burning for a burning.”

With a clean shock, Yama suddenly understood what they intended to do. He tried to pull from the grip of Unthank’s son, but the man held steady. Yama had faced worse danger than this, but he had never before felt such fear as he felt now. The Puranas counseled that no one need fear death, for the breath of the Preservers lived in the brain of each and every changed citizen. When the Preservers returned at the end of time, everyone on the world, including all the dead, would rise into their grace and live forever. But although the Puranas taught that death was nothing more than a moment of unbeing between last breath and rebirth into eternal life at the everlasting final moment of the Universe, they did not counsel how to face dying. Yama had been close to death before, but in every case he had not realized it until after the event. When he and Tamora had been ambushed at the Gate of Double Glory, or when he and Eliphas had been chased by the hell-hound, he had been too busy trying to save his life to feel real fear. But now, in the implacable grip of his enemies, confronted with the manner of death which they wished upon him, he felt fear beating inside him with such force that he thought it might burst his chest.

Unthank’s son said, “He’s trembling like a wife on her first night.”

“Little you know about that,” Unthank said. “Little you’ll ever know about it, you worm. Bring him on before he faints. We’ll get this done and get back before he’s missed, and before the rain comes too. I don’t much like the look of those clouds.”

Yama felt a measure of anger then. He would not be thought a coward. He could not stop his limbs shaking, but he drew himself up and marched as best he could, so that Unthank’s son had to double his pace to keep up. He felt as if a door had closed behind him, and with it all of his life had been shut away. There was only the pyre and the warm damp wind and the hiss of bending grasses, the ceaselessly winnowed grasses all around them, black in the dull red light of the Eye of the Preservers.

Yama was led into the trampled circle around the pyre. The men crowded around, pushing and shoving to get to the first rank. Almost all of the male citizens of Aeolis were there. They were mostly naked, their loose gray or brown skins glistening in the light of the burning brands they held, their little eyes glinting. Their sibilant breath whistled at a hundred different keys. Yama recognized some of them as his childhood companions and he called to them by name, but they turned away and would not answer.

Unthank made a long speech. Yama paid little attention to it. He had a sudden great urge to shout or burst into wild laughter to break the remorseless unfolding of Unthank’s spell, but he suppressed the impulse. There was no spell to break. Unthank talked of honor, of home and hearth, of revenge and return and rebuilding, of justice for all, not merely for those in power. It was the cry of all men who feel that they have less power than they deserve.

Yama allowed it to become mere noise. He let his mind range outward, seeking any trace of a machine that might help him. Nothing, nothing but the fragmented minds housed within the slabs of the termite castles, unified by slow waves of thought. Yama began to follow the connections from castle to castle—they spread all around, further than he could see—but the man who held him cuffed his head and told him to wake up and pay attention.

Clouds had pulled across the Eye of the Preservers. The men held their torches high; flames guttered and flared in the wind. Something drummed far off—thunder, rolling amongst the thickening clouds. Unthank, standing before two men holding up torches, was pointing at Yama with his swagger stick. He had worked himself up to a fever of righteous anger. His nostrils flared wide; white showed at the edges of his eyes. His flabby crest had risen on top of his tuberculate scalp. His finger, his hand, his arm quivered. His voice rose in pitch as it grew louder, as if squeezed through a narrowing gap in his throat.

“There is the cause,” Unthank said. “There is the stranger who hid amongst us. I was there when he was taken from the river, and it shames me that I did not fight and kill my weak and foolish father then, and kill this one too. We have been punished because of him and he has delivered himself into our hands. We’ll have our revenge, and clean our house. We’ll make our own justice, because none will make it for us. He’s our bad luck, and we’ll burn it and start again. Burn him!”

The men took up the cry. Yama was lifted up and set on a chair, and lashed to it with a rope that went three times around his chest. A sudden strong cold wind gusted straight down out of the black sky, flattening grass all around the pyre and snuffing more than half the torches of the watching men. Every hair stood up on Yama’s head; his whole skin tingled. Four men hauled him backward up the uneven slope and set him at its summit and scampered away, while others shook brandy and paraffin over the lower part of the pyre.

Unthank stepped forward and with an almost careless gesture threw a torch on to the base of the pyre. At once brandy ignited with a dull thump and blue flames licked up. The others threw their torches, too—they flew out of the darkness like falling stars, shedding tails of yellow fire as they tumbled end for end. One struck Yama on the chest and showered him with sparks as it spun away. Heat beat at his feet and legs. White smoke rolled around him as wet wood smoldered before bursting into flame. He coughed and coughed, but could not get his breath. Perhaps he would suffocate before he burned, a small mercy.

Then the smoke was parted by a sudden gust of cold wind, and Yama glimpsed the men below. They seemed to be dancing. More smoke rolled up, dense and choking.

Yama lifted his head as an animal part of him, blindly seeking survival, struggled to draw breath. And cold hard hail struck his upturned face, pouring down everywhere from the sky, blowing in great drenching billows.

Yama was soaked to the skin in an instant. The smoke blew out in a circle all around him. Yama shouted into the wind and hail. He could not remember afterward what he had shouted, only knew that he laughed and sang as he struggled to get free. He was mad with life. His sight pulsed red and black. Below, lit by intermittent strobes of lightning, the men were sinking into the ground. It was as if it had turned to water beneath them. They thrashed waist-deep in muck which glinted and shimmered as it boiled around them.

Yama fell over, rolling with the chair at his back down a collapsing slope of charred branches. When he came to a stop at the bottom of the pyre, the men had vanished. The raging thing still possessed him. He thrust his face into the mud and chewed and gobbled and swallowed.

Then he was on his knees, still tied to the chair, sick and frightened. He spat out a mouthful of mud in which silvery things squirmed; his stomach clenched.

As he struggled to free himself, he thought wildly that the men had run, that they would soon recover their courage and come back and finish what they had begun. But then lightning flashed again, so close that thunder boomed in the same moment. In that instant Yama saw, just in front of his face, a hand reaching up from the mud. Silvery insects swarmed over the fingers. When lightning flashed again, the hand was gone, and the hail softened and became merely rain.

At last, Yama managed to free his hands. He pulled at the rope that bound him to the chair until the loops, loosened by the tumble down the pyre, finally unraveled. He staggered to his feet. Rain beat all around him. Lightning defined from moment to moment the termite castles in one direction, the edge of the world in the other. He was quite alone.