Ancients of Days

Chapter Five The Library

The city and the side of the mountain described a perfect somersault around Yama’s head. Then something flashed toward him out of the blue sky and he hit it hard, knocking his breath away. It was the floating disc he had stolen from under the feet of one of the soldiers.

With one hand Yama held onto the knife and its sheath; with the other the edge of the disc. Its smooth flat shape was hot from its rapid passage through the air and it stung Yama’s skin, but he clung on tightly as it made a breathtaking swoop toward a huddle of roofs far below, halting just above a flat apron of red adobe. Yama landed in a tumble, bruising hip and knee and shoulder and dropping the knife and its sheath.

He got up and dusted his hands on the seat of his trousers. His wounded head ached. When he touched it his fingers came away smudged with sticky blood.

The disc hung in the air like an obedient pet awaiting a command. When he dismissed it, it shot away at once, rising at a steep angle against the sheer mountainside. It caught the light of the sun for a moment, and then it was gone.

Yama picked up his knife and sheathed it. He judged that he had fallen at least five furlongs; the glass tunnel from which he had thrown himself was no more than a gleaming thread, as fine as a hair, laid between two black crags that were themselves only interruptions in the mountain’s ascent into the blue sky.

Somewhere up there was the cavern which contained the Department of Vaticination. Tamora would be hard at work, drilling the sullen thralls for their brief, futile battle.

He could leave her and Pandaras, Yama thought, and continue alone on his quest for the library of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons, the place where Dr. Dismas had claimed to have found records of his bloodline.

But he knew that he would not. He had sworn to help her, as she had sworn to help him. And at the very least he must tell them about Prefect Corin and the attempted kidnapping. It seemed certain that the conversation Pandaras had overheard was nothing but a lure aimed to draw Yama into a trap.

More immediately, he must find a way back into the mountain. Beyond the parapet at the edge of the flat roof was a drop to the slope of terracotta tiles, and then the roofs of a huddle of buildings and the slope of the mountain falling away to the hatched plain of the great city. As Yama contemplated this vista something cracked like a whip past his ear, shattered half a dozen tiles, and went whooping away into the distance. He remembered the ruffians’ slug pistols and immediately jumped over the parapet and ran down the slope of sun-warmed tiles. Another slug split the air and he changed direction and tripped and suddenly was rolling down the slope amidst a small avalanche of loosened tiles. He grabbed at the edge of the roof and for a moment hung there, breathing hard—and then the tiles gave way.

He landed on his back on a cushion of thick moss. Amazingly, he had not let go of his sheathed knife. All around, terracotta, tiles smashed to dust and flinders. Small animals fled, screaming. Monkeys, with silver-gray coats and long tails that ended in tufts of black hair. They jumped onto a shelf of black rock at the far end of the shadowy courtyard, their wrinkled faces both anxious and mournful. Dwarf cedar trees, their roots clutching wet black rocks, made islands in a sweep of raked gravel littered with the hulls of pistachio nuts. On three sides of the courtyard were black wooden walls painted with stylish eyes in interlocked swirls of red and white; on the fourth was a clerestory.

When Yama stood, the largest of the monkeys ran forward and swarmed up a rope and swung from side to side.

A gong started a brazen clamor somewhere beyond the clerestory’s arches.

Yama ran. A broad stair led down from the clerestory to a huge, vaulted hall paneled with carved wood. The plaster ceiling was painted black, with a triple-armed swirl of white that represented the Galaxy at one end and a recurved red swirl that represented the Eye of the Preservers at the other. This was the temple of a latriatic cult, then, one of those which believed that the grace of the Preservers could be restored to the world by contemplation, prayer and invocation.

The gong was louder here, battering the cool air with waves of brassy sound. Suddenly, shaven-headed monks in orange robes rushed into the far end of the hall. They were armed with a motley collection of spears and cutlasses; one carried a hoe. Yama drew his knife, but even as the monks started to advance toward him, light flared in the center of the hall and they fell to their knees and dropped their weapons on the ebony floor.

At first, Yama thought that part of the roof had been opened to admit the light of the sun. Then, shading his eyes against the glare with his forearm, he saw that a shrine stood in the middle of it. It was an upright disc twice his height, and it was filled with restless white light.

Yama drew the coin from his shirt and, raising it as high as the thong looped around his neck would allow, advanced toward the shrine. He thought that the woman in white had found him again, drawn by the coin, but as the blazing light beat around him, he was seized by a deep dread. Not her, which would have been bad enough, but something worse. Something huge and fierce and implacable advancing through the light, very far away in the folded space within the shrine but rapidly growing closer, stooping toward him as a lammergeyer stoops through leagues of air to snatch an oryx grazing on a mountain crag.

Yama’s nerve failed. He dropped the coin into his shirt, and ran past the shrine, dodging between the monks on the far side. They were groveling with their foreheads pressed to the ebony floor, their buttocks higher than their heads. Not one moved to stop him.

He ran out into open air, along a stone terrace and down a long flight of steps dished by the tread of countless feet.

Monks in orange robes turned to watch as he ran past them down narrow stone paths between plots of pumpkin vines, yams and manioc.

The brass gong suddenly fell silent, and there was only the buzz of insects and the distant roar of the city. Yama did not stop. Once again he had accidentally brought something into the world. He ran from it headlong, with nothing in his head but his hammering pulse.

This part of the mountain had been built over with temples and monasteries and sanctuaries. Many stood on the ruins of older structures. Staircases descended sheer rock faces carved with grottoes and shrines. Viaducts and bridges and walkways strung across gorges and looped between crags. One pinnacle had been hollowed out; a hundred small square windows pierced its steep sides. Slopes were intricately terraced into long narrow fields where vines and vegetables grew, irrigated by stone cisterns that collected rainwater from fan-shaped slopes of white stone.

Yama spent the rest of the day descending the mountain. It seemed that there was always a flight of ravens turning in the air beyond the steep mountainside. He hoped this was not a bad omen, for ravens, particularly those of the Palace of the Memory of the People, were said by some to be spies. Far below, the city, immemorial Ys, stretched away into blue distances under a rippling layer of smoggy air. Around noon, as the sun paused at the height of its leap into the sky before falling back toward the Rim Mountains, he arrived at a long terrace thatched in emerald-green stone and grass. An ornate fountain of salt-white stone bubbled in the middle. He drank from one of the fountain’s clam-shell basins until his belly was full, and washed dust and dried blood from his face, but he did not dare stop for long. He was aware of the populous mountain that reared above. Prefect Corin might be watching his flight through a telescope, and the thing that lived in the light of the shrine might be following him.

He had no clear sense of where he was going. Perhaps he could find a way back inside the mountain; perhaps he could reach one of the wide roads which he sometimes glimpsed on the lower slopes. Surely they led to a gate to the interior, for how else could fresh produce be supplied to the day markets?

He was descending a narrow stair, with a vertical rock face on one side and nothing but a slender rail of gleaming metal protecting him from a sheer drop on the other, when it suddenly turned and went under an arch. Something stopped him with implacable force, as if the air around him had congealed, and asked him his business. But it yielded at once to his will, and he went on down the stairs with invisible shawms braying and a stentorian voice gravely announcing the arrival of a Hierarch.

As Yama entered the courtyard at the bottom, a squad of guards in full armor pushed him aside and clattered up the stairs, pistols and falchions drawn. The courtyard was wide and shaded by high stone walls. In the middle of it, a soldier with an officer’s sash over his corselet stood on a table. He was shouting at the people milling around two gates in the high wall at the far end.

“There is nothing wrong! Resume your places! Nothing is wrong!”

Slowly, order was restored. Clerks resumed their seats at tables shaded by large paper parasols. The crowd separated into lines before the tables. Both of the gates were guarded by armed men. One seemed to be an entrance; the other an exit. All who went through the latter were stopped by the guards, who carefully scrutinized the wads of documents which each person had collected at the tables. Yama, too tired to consider retracing his path, joined the end of the line nearest him.

The line moved forward very slowly. The clerk who sat at the table questioned each petitioner closely, pausing now and then to write in various books or to stamp papers handed to him. The man who had come to stand behind Yama told him that there was no hurrying anything here.

“It’s an old department,” he added, as if this explained everything.

“It is?”

The man looked at Yama and said, “Are you lost, brother?”

He was an old man, stoop-shouldered and yet still tall, as tall as the Aedile or Telmon, with smooth black skin and silver eyes. Coarse white hair wound into long corkscrew ringlets framed his broad-browed face; three fireflies nested there. He looked at Yama with a shrewd, kindly gaze.

Yama said, “I believe that I did not come here by the usual route. What is this place?”

“The Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons,” the old man said, and his silver eyes widened when Yama laughed.

“I am sorry,” Yama said. “It is just that I have been searching for this place, and came upon it by accident.”

“Then you were surely guided here by the will of the Preservers, brother,” the old man said, and shook Yama’s hand by way of greeting. He added, “Certainly you are more fortunate than the fool who tried to force entry through the Gate of the Hierarchs. Some poor wretch tries it at least once a year. After the guardian has finished with him, the guards display his body before the main gate as a lesson.”

“Then I am doubly fortunate,” Yama said.

The old man’s name was Eliphas. He was a runner who made his livelihood by researching cases which physicians could not cure by normal means. Eliphas explained that most of the people queuing in the courtyard were runners for physicians or leeches; he assumed that Yama was from a family which could not afford to employ an intermediary. He saw that Yama was hungry, and took one of Yama’s pennies and purchased waybread and water from a stall on the other side of the courtyard.

“A tip if you have to return next time,” Eliphas said, smiling tolerantly as Yama devoured the waybread.

“Bring food with you. It’s cheaper, and will probably be better, too. But I don’t suppose they told you how long it would take.”

“How long does it take?” The black waybread was heavy and very sweet, but it satisfied Yama’s immediate hunger at once.

“Usually a day to get through the preliminary certification,” Eliphas said, “and then a day or two more to have the records searched. It depends on how you phrase your question. That’s part of the art.”

“My question is quite simple. I want to know if the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons can help me find my people.”

Eliphas scratched among his white corkscrew tangles with long, thin fingers. His nails were curved, and filed into points. He said, “If you can pay, I’ll be glad to help. But I’ve never heard of anyone who does not know his own bloodline.”

“If it can be found anywhere, it can be found in Ys,” Yama said. “That is why I came here. When I was a baby, I was found on the river and taken in by a kind man. But now I want to find my real family. I believe that there are records here that will help me, but I am not certain that I know how to find them. If you will help me, I will be glad to pay what I can.”

Eliphas said, “If you pay for my evening meal, and my breakfast, why then, brother, I’ll do my best to put you on the right road.”

“I can pay a fair price,” Yama said, stung by the thought that Eliphas was offering charity.

“It’s fair enough, brother. The way to learn about the system is to see how it responds to questions, and I believe that I may learn a lot by asking yours. The more you learn about the way information is catalogued, the more efficient you become. I can process up to a decad of questions in parallel. There’s not many who can do that, but I’ve been working here all my life. In the days before the heretics, of course, it was simpler, because all records were stored within the purlieu of the avatars. I remember that what we now call librarians were then called hierodules, which means holy slaves. The real librarians were simply subroutines of the avatars. They spoke through the hierodules, and their answers came promptly. But we live in an imperfect age. The shrines are silent, and we must ask clerks to search through written records which are often second- or third-hand transcriptions, and not always stored where they should be.”

“But why is it that you are not allowed to know how the library is set out? It seems to me you must work in the dark when all that is needed is to open a shutter.”

“Why, there are a thousand clerks employed by this library alone, and this is one of the smaller ones. If everyone knew where everything was to be found, the librarians would make no money and could not afford to maintain the records in their care. And if facts were free, why then I wouldn’t make any money either. But that’s the way it is with most professions, brother. If their mysteries were removed, why then there’d be no need for most of the people in them. I’d say nine-tenths of the business of any department is to do with guarding the mysteries, and only one-tenth in applying them. That’s why rituals are so important. I’ve asked thousands of questions in my time, and reckon I know as much about medicine as most leeches, but I could never practice as I’m not inducted into their mysteries. If I’d been born to one of the medical families it might be different, but only the Preservers can choose how to be born into the world.”

Yama learned that Eliphas’s own family had been in the trade of question-running for three generations. Eliphas was the last of the line. His only son had joined the army and was fighting the heretics at the midpoint of the world, while his daughters’ children would be raised in the trades of their fathers.

“That’s the difference between trades and professions,” Eliphas said. “Trades marry out; professions marry among their own kind. It’s how they keep their power.”

When it was at last their turn to speak with the clerk at the table, the sunlight had climbed the wall and left the courtyard in shadow. Lights like drifts of sparks had woken across the darkening slope of the mountain. The fireflies that hung above the heads of clerks and petitioners stirred and brightened as the sunlight faded, casting shifting tangles of light and shadow.

Eliphas leaned over the table, the orbits of his fireflies nearly merging with those of the clerk, and fanned a sheaf of pastel-colored papers, pointing at one and then another with his long forefinger. The two men exchanged a merry banter, and the clerk stamped Eliphas’s papers without reading them.

“This is a friend of mine,” Eliphas said, standing aside for Yama. “You do well by him, Tzu.”

“Picking up strays again, Eliphas?” The clerk looked Yama up and down with a raking gaze and said, “Let’s have your papers, boy. You’ll be the last I process this day.”

“I have no papers,” Yama said, as boldly as he could. “I have only my question.”

The clerk, Tzu, had a long, gloomy face. His brown skin was softly creased, like waterlogged leather. Now more creases appeared above his wide-spaced black eyes. He said, “Hand over your papers, or you can walk back down and start over tomorrow.”

“I have my question, and money to pay the fee. I would not take bread from the mouths of your family by trying to gain the information you guard for nothing.”

Tzu sighed, and shook a little bell. He said, “What have you brought me, Eliphas? And at the end of the day, too. We have procedures here,” he told Yama, “and no time for troublemakers.”

Another clerk appeared, a slight old man with a humped back. He conferred with Tzu, and then stared at Yama through spectacles perched on the end of his long nose. He had a wispy white beard and a bald pate mottled with tubercles.

“Stand straight, boy,” Tzu said. “This is Kun Norbu, the chief of all the clerks.”

“How did you get here, boy?” the chief of clerks, Kun Norbu, said.

“Down those stairs,” Yama said, and pointed across the courtyard.

“Don’t lie,” Tzu said. “There’s a guardian. No one has used the Gate of the Hierarchs for a century. Now and then thieves and vagabonds try, as one tried today, but all are destroyed by the guardian.”

“Longer than that, I believe,” Kun Norbu said. “The last Hierarch to visit us was Gallizur the Joyous. It would have been in the summer of the year when Ys was invested by the armies of the Insurrectionists. That would be, hmm, eleven thousand five hundred and sixty-eight years ago.”

“A long time indeed, brother,” Eliphas said, “but this boy is no thief. I can vouch for him.”

Kun Norbu said, “When did you first see him, Eliphas? Not before today, I would wager. I suppose he bribed a guard, and promised to pay you to help him. He doesn’t even have a single firefly. He’s some indigenous wildman, for all you know.”

Yama had supposed that his firefly had followed him, but he now realized that he must have destroyed it by asking it to give up all its light at once. He stared at the chief of clerks and said, “As for fireflies, if that is your only concern, then my lack of them is easily fixed.”

“Don’t be impudent,” Kun Norbu said. “Fireflies choose a host according to their station. Clearly you have no station to speak of.” He clapped his hands. “Guards! Yes, you two! To me, if you please!”

Tzu gasped and stood up, knocking over his stool. Eliphas stepped back, covering his face with his hands. All around, people turned to stare at Yama. A few knelt, heads bowed. The two guards who had started across the courtyard stopped and raised their partisans as if to strike at an invisible foe. Light gleamed along the crescent edges of their double-bladed weapons; a hundred sparks were caught in the lenses of Kun Norbu’s spectacles. In an extravagant impulse born of exhaustion and impatience, Yama had clothed himself in the light of a thousand fireflies, borrowed from everyone close by or called from the wild population beyond the walls. He felt that he was very close to the end of his quest, and he would not be stopped by the petty restrictions of a moribund bureaucracy.

“My question is quite simple,” Yama said. “I want to find my people. Will you help me?”