Shrine of Stars

Chapter Twenty-Four The White Boat

And emerged at a high place amidst blowing water spray turning to snow, so that at first Yama did not realize that the transition had been made. But then the ship moved out of the snow cloud and Yama saw a great tongue of ice stretching away, dazzling white beneath dense white clouds and a constant snowfall that blurred and softened the edges of everything. The ice filled the steep chute of a valley of adamantine keelrock a hundred leagues across, a frozen river moving with majestic slowness, throwing up broken chunks as big as cities along its edges.

The ship rose through the clouds, revealing a landscape of mountains islanded by cloud, mountains rimming the wide valley and spreading away on either side, sharp peaks of bare black keelrock rising out of clouds and snow and ice, whiteness everywhere touched with blue shadows, the sun a brilliant diamond set in a clear blue above a distant range of even taller peaks that must be the Rim Mountains. Directly below the ship, a waterfall fell from nothing, leagues wide and hung with a decad of rainbows, falling slowly and softly into clouds torn from its own self.

It was the end of the Great River, and its beginning.

The regulator came through the occasional door, cradling the baby in her mismatched arms. “Someone approaches,” the ship said.

A streak of white slanted down through the achingly blue sky above. As a boy, Yama had often seen these contrails in the sky above Aeolis, and had yearned after the machines which had created them, wondering about the strange missions on which they had been bound. Now he barely had time to brace himself before, arriving ahead of the thunderclap of its passage through the atmosphere, a feral machine came to a crash stop beyond the prow of the ship. It was black, no bigger than his head, and covered in spines of varying lengths which quested this way and that as if possessed of independent life. Yama knew it. Knew too the menace it radiated, pricking into his head through the bits of machine left there.

The ship said nervously, “It sees through me.”

Yama reassured it, and told the machine that it must leave now. It would not come to him until it was asked again, and meanwhile it would tell its fellows not to interfere.

There are several of us stranded across the world, the thing said sulkily. I cannot intercede with them.

“I will deal with those when the time comes.”

I will help you now. The world can be yours, with my help. Leave this poor vessel. Let me show you.

“Be still! The world is already mine. You will do what I ask, and no more.”

Then, I do nothing, the machine said, and gladly. But tell me first why my mark is on you.

“You will help me twice more, and then you will be free. I promise.”

The feral machine fell away into the sky, even as other machines accelerated toward the disturbance it had created. But these, the keepers of the world, still loyal to the Preservers, found nothing. The feral machine had already returned to its station far beyond the world, and the ship was falling downriver toward the nearest shrine.

The Gatekeeper had said that there were two kinds of shortcut; Yama had guessed where the entrances to those which spanned only space were hidden.

The glacier ended at a small, mountain-rimmed sea continually crossed and re-crossed by waves caused by falls of ice from cliffs two leagues high. Bergs and bergy bits churned and crashed amongst the waves. Melt-water spilled from the sea and meandered away in a thousand rivers and a million streams, through chains of lakes and raised bogs and drumlins, feeding the marshes which drained at last into the head of the Great River.

The shrine stood on a long, low island in the middle of one of the lakes, its black circle set on a shelf of bare rock raised above dwarf birches that were just coming into leaf; their thin black branches, laden with golden buds, swayed stiffly in the clean cold air. Gnarled junipers hugged the ground, red berries brilliant as drops of blood against the dark green of their needles, growing around boulders splattered with orange and black and gray stoneworts. Although it was summer, a cold wind blew from the edge of the glacier, and pockets of snow still clung in shady places on the island. Clear, ice-cold water tentatively fingered the pebbles of the shore, over and over. The sun was setting beyond range after range of mountains, touching every peak with a dab of light, painting long shadows amongst the fir trees that marched down to the shore of the lake, gilding its slow ripples. A skein of geese flew across red stripes of cloud that stretched on either side of the sun, honking each to each.

The world! So wonderful in its variety, so beautiful in every particular detail.

The ship had changed shape, spreading wide flat wings which delicately manipulated the world’s gravity fields. It floated down to the island’s shore, and Yama stepped from one of the wings onto the little gravel beach beneath the shrine. He leaned on Prefect Corin’s staff, which the regulator had saved. He was still very weak. Freezing water lapped his bare feet; wind tangled in his long hair and beard. The clean, cold air was as bracing as good wine. The regulator followed with the baby, which was bundled in silvery cloth so that only the tip of its nose showed.

The regulator had unstitched the badly ripped and bloodstained silvery garment Bryn had given Yama, and made it into a kind of cloak to wear over the black tunic and leggings the ship had provided. She had reserved a small piece to swaddle the baby. She did not need any kind of clothing, she claimed, and seemed unaffected by the icy wind. She had refused to stay with the ship, saying that Yama did not know how to look after the baby.

“Males of your bloodline cannot give suck. I have started a flow of milk, master, and he feeds happily. Do not take that from him.”

Yama made sure that the ship knew what it had to do. He felt that every step might break the world, change it into something other than that which it must become. He told it, “Take the cloned mouth of the shortcut and make a loop at light-speed forty years long. Make sure that you arrive back at the point in space from which you started, a few days before we first arrived. The Great River will flow through the shortcut into the future and we will be able to travel through it into the past. Are you sure that you can do this?”

“Of course,” the ship said primly. “Shortcuts were brought here in the first place by my kind.”

“Forty years, no more, no less. That is important.”

“It will happen, or you will not be here. I know.”

“There may be many time-lines where it may not have happened, because you carelessly misunderstood my instructions.”

“You can trust me,” the ship said. “You should trust me to take you to Ys also. I know that the mooring towers still stand, and I can have you there in a minute.”

“I do not want you to be seen. This way will suffice. You remember where we will meet?”

“Downriver, ten days—what you call a decad—from now. At the far edge of the City of the Dead. As if no one will see us there.”

“There are things in Ys I do not wish to awaken. Or at least, not yet.”

“The river will not cease to flow here once I have diverted it into the future. Not at once. There is much ice above us.”

“I know. But the glaciers will flow more and more slowly because there will no longer be new snow and ice pushing them forward. I already know how long it will take, and when it should begin. Go now.”

The ship rose, turning and dipping as it rose. It swept quickly across the lake, setting a flock of wildfowl to flight, then angled straight up. A moment later a boom echoed across the wide sky, and Yama saw the white streak which marked where the ship was accelerating toward the mouth of the shortcut at the end of the Terminal Mountains, where the river fell back into the world.

Yama felt a mixture of apprehension and a kind of existential dizziness. Nothing was fixed. This was not the world from which he had begun: the Universe would not end, as he had been taught all his life, in a single infinite moment, when all the dead would be reborn into the perpetual grace of the Preservers. All was change, a constant flux. Even the Preservers sought to change, in universe after universe without end.

He said, “Perhaps I should do nothing. Perhaps it should end here, for else I condemn myself to becoming no more than a machine toiling away at the same endless task. I have set the Great River free from its unending cycle, but how can I set myself free from the circle of my own history?”

The regulator was a practical person. She said, “You have already begun, master, by sending the ship on its mission. Who can say how it will end?”

“You are right, of course.” Yama smiled. “You remind me of a dear lost friend. Perhaps I might see him again. Yes, it has begun, and I must go on as I must. And Derev, too…”

As he climbed up to the shrine, it began to flow with banners of light. He stepped into the light, and the regulator followed him.

Ys was suddenly spread below him. On one side the sun was falling behind the Rim Mountains; on the other, the Great River was painted with golden light on which the black motes of thousands of boats and ships were sharply drawn, as if by the most exquisite calligraphy. The river was fuller than Yama remembered it, lapping at the margin of the city, covering the shore where in the near future there would be wide mud flats and a scurf of shanty towns. And between mountains and river was the immemorial city. Ys: the endless grid of her streets and avenues sprawled wantonly beneath a brown haze of air pollution, sending up a shuddering roar in which the brazen clash of the gongs of one of her many temples and the shrill song of a ship’s siren emerged as sharply as points of light.

Wind plucked at Yama’s silvery cloak; a warm wind, redolent of smoke and decay.

The shrine was set on a high peak of the roof of the Palace of the Memory of the People. A sheer cliff dropped to a long slope of patchwork fields studded with temples and sanctuaries. A raven floated half a league below, black wings widespread, primaries fingering the air. A bell was tolling somewhere. In the distance, the slim, silvery mooring towers rose up from cluttered streets, soaring toward their vanishing points high above the atmosphere. The towers were the ancient port of Ys, from which, in the Golden Age when the Sirdar had ruled Confluence, ships had departed for other worlds. Although abandoned an age past, they had served one last task, for Yama had dreamed of standing in their shadow when he had been a child in the little city of Aeolis, and so they had drawn him to Ys and to the beginning of his adventures. And would do so again.

A narrow flight of steps, small and close-set, wound down the steep side of the peak toward a distant courtyard which was enclosed on three sides by high rock walls. There was a scree slope beneath the open side of the courtyard, and a wind-bent tree not quite dead stood amongst the loose stones, a few scraps of green showing at the very ends of its warped branches.

Down there was the cell in which Yama had been—would be—imprisoned after the assassination attempt in the corridors of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, and from which he would escape, cloaked in the hell-hound. Down there, buried in the dirt floor of the cell by the round window, was the coin first he and then Pandaras had carried half the length of the world. He would need a working coin soon enough—what if he took that one? His future self would not find it, would not be able to call upon the hell-hound, would not be able to escape. In how many time-lines had that happened? In how many others had he failed to arrive here?

“We must not linger, master,” the regulator said. “You must stop dreaming. You are in the world again.”

She led the way down the stairs, brisk and matter-of-fact, clutching the baby tight to her flat breasts. Yama followed, dizzy with visions of forking paths. What if this world did not contain his own history after all?

The bell was still tolling steadily in the distance, and now another answered it close by, ringing out with brisk urgency. A moment later, the regulator turned to Yama. She pressed the baby into his arms and bounded away down the steps, her swollen claw crooked above her head for balance.

There was only a pentad of guards, four inexperienced youngsters led by a one-armed veteran who had been drinking steadily all day. It was a rotten, dull assignment. The old shrine, known as the Shrine of Stars, had been unused for ten thousand years, and its only visitor was an old priest who, once a year, muttered a brief prayer and placed an offering of ivy and delicate white arching sprays of starbright at its base. With nothing else to do, the guards spent their time gambling, drinking and taking potshots at the crows and ravens which occasionally floated past the unglazed slit windows of the guardhouse. They were unprepared for trouble, half-unbuttoned, weapons slung on their backs. The regulator killed the first two easily, disemboweling one with her claw, grabbing the other and shaking him until his neck snapped. Two others ran, but the veteran stood his ground. His first shot struck the regulator in the chest; as she fell forward, his second took off the back of her head.

A moment later, a burning figure appeared on the steps above, clothed in a thousand fireflies. The veteran fled from this spectral figure even as it bent to the dead, silver-skinned woman. It called down two flying discs, laid the dead woman on one and stepped onto the other. By the time reinforcements arrived, it was gone.

Yama came to the chamber of the mirror people by the secret ways of the palace within the Palace of the Memory of the People. He had dismissed the fireflies. The mirror people gathered around him, curious and excited, plucking at his cloak, at the baby (who laughed at their painted faces), asking who he was and how he knew about this place. He told them that he was a friend, and that he had come here with a message for their king.

“There is a dead woman at the entrance to this place,” he added. “Bring her here.”

Three clowns scurried off. Yama sat down to wait for them to return. He refused offers of water and raw fungus. The baby fretted, pissed into the pad the regulator had bound between its legs, fell asleep.

Lupe came through the tall oval frame an hour later. Perhaps the skin was not as loose on his mottled arms; perhaps the wrinkles which mazed his face were fewer and less deep, but otherwise he was much as Yama remembered him. He was supported on either side by two beautiful girls, and clad in a long black dress whose train was held up by a third. As before, his lips were stained bright red, and the sockets of his blind eyes were painted with broad swipes of blue. His gray hair was piled up on his head, woven through with golden threads and fake pearls.

He was at once absurd and hierophantic, a burlesque of monarchy in his ruined finery, yet commanding in his bearing.

“Who is it,” he demanded. “Who is it that disturbs us?”

There was an excited babble as a hundred mirror people tried to explain, but everyone fell silent when Lupe held up his hand. The baby had begun to cry, alarmed by the noise. As Yama tried to hush it, Lupe turned to him and said, “Why, here he is. Let him speak.”

Lupe listened carefully as Yama explained that he had come with a prophecy about someone who would change and raise up the mirror people, so that they would become the very thing that they imitated: they would become fully human.

“Come here,” Lupe commanded, and Yama endured the spidery touch of his long fingernails on his face, his hair, his beard.

A fakir with skewers pushed bloodily through his painted cheeks mumbled that this man had come by the secret ways. Lupe nodded gravely, and said to Yama, “You know our corridors and you know the hope we have harbored since we left the river and crept into the Palace. Who are you?”

“A friend. One who speaks truly of what you have yearned for in your secret songs.”

Lupe nodded again. “We sing many songs, but some we sing only for ourselves. And yet you know of them.”

An acrobat swung upside down on a wire overhead and said, “He brings a baby and a dead woman, and we’ve never seen his like before. He brings trouble, Lupe.”

A murmur spread through the crowd of mirror people, dying away when Lupe held up a hand. He said to Yama, “You bring a message, but do we know it is true?”

“In seventeen years, someone of my bloodline will come here. Watch out for him. He will need help, and when you help him he will change a baby no older than the baby I carry. As for me, I need a boat. I must travel downriver.”

Lupe said, “It is well known that we have many things. Gifts from patrons. Siftings from the leavings of enlightened races. So many things that we do not know what we have.”

“I think you will find amongst your treasures a white boat not much bigger than the coffins in which the dead are launched upon the flood of the Great River. I claim it as mine.”

Lupe laughed. “We understand! As we sing for our living, so you sing for yours. Be welcome, and eat. If there is a white boat, why then you shall have it as payment for the hope you have brought us. We keep all we are given, but we do not need any of it because we can always get more.”

It took two days to find the boat amongst the piles of forgotten gifts. The news of its discovery was borne ahead of a swelling crowd that cluttered around the entrance to Lupe’s suite. They cheered Yama when he emerged with Lupe, and made a carnival procession as the boat was carried down secret ways to the ancient wharves in one of the crypts that undercut the mountain of the Palace of the Memory of the People.

The regulator’s undecaying body had already been placed in the white boat, which rode high on the black water in the crypt, glimmering in the torch-lit dark. It seemed very small and fragile, but scarcely rocked as Yama climbed into it. He took the baby from one of Lupe’s attendants and held him to his chest. Fireflies flitted overhead, a restless cloud of light. The baby fretted, made uneasy by the fife and drums of the procession and the flaring torches and the gorgeous motley crowd along the wharf.

“Remember what I told you,” Yama told Lupe. “When the boy comes here he will need your help, but you must tell him as little as possible. If he asks about me, tell him nothing. Say that I came secretly at night, that no one saw me but you, who cannot see.”

“My people make stories for a living,” Lupe said. “We will cloak you in as deep a mystery as you could wish.” The mirror people fell silent as Lupe made a formal farewell, then burst into song and loud cheers as the white boat, with Yama standing in its sharp, raised prow, glided away into the darkness, toward the channel that led to the Great River.

Yama left the white boat three days later. He landed a league upriver of the little city of Aeolis, amongst the abandoned tombs of the City of the Dead. It was midnight. The huge black sky above the Great River was punctuated only by a scattering of dim halo stars and the dull red swirl, no bigger than a man’s hand, of the Eye of the Preservers. The heaped lights of the little city of Aeolis and the lights of the carracks riding at anchor outside the harbor entrance were brighter by far than anything in the sky.

Yama watched as the white boat, attended by a little galaxy of fireflies, dwindled away across the black flood of the river, heading downriver toward his destiny. Then he turned and started along the bone-white paths that threaded between the tombs. He had a long way to go before he made rendezvous with the ship: across the City of the Dead to the tower deep in the foothills of the Rim Mountains, where the last of the curators of the City of the Dead lived, where he knew of a way into the keel of the world.

He did not fear the dead who called to him from their tombs; this was where he had played as a child. But he had brought his own ghosts with him, and he faltered and turned aside before the final descent to the keelways.