Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-Nine The Black Tower

The business of grounding the Weazel took a whole day. Captain Lorquital used the reaction motor to pick a way between banks of stinking mud and stands of pioneer mangroves, and to cross a plain of tall yellow reeds cut by a hundred meandering channels. Phalerus was in the crow’s nest, scrying a path through the reed beds, and the grizzled slave of Pandaras’s bloodline stood at the bow, using a weighted line to sound the depth.

At last, Captain Lorquital ran her foundering ship aground by one of the islands at the far side of the reed beds. Ropes, pivoting on belts of leather greased with palm oil, were slung around several of the blue pine trees which had colonized the island, and crew and passengers labored at the ship’s windlass to haul her out of the shallows until the hole bitten through her hull was visible.

Because the ship was lying at a steep angle, everyone camped on the island.

Smoky fires were lit to keep off clouds of black flies and tiny sweat bees. Yama sat a little way from the others, sifting through his father’s papers by the light of an electric lamp, once again tracing and checking the threads of logic that bound the complicated computations.

The Aedile had been obsessed with measurements, ciphers and calculations. He had been convinced that there was a golden rule by which everything could be divided into everything else, leaving as an irreducible kernel the prime which harmonized the world and perhaps the Universe, the secret signature of the Preservers. His research had never led to anything but a maze in which he had lost himself, but these calculations were different.

Every decad for almost fifteen years, the Aedile had taken measurements of the Great River’s slow retreat from the old shoreline around Aeolis. From these, with elaborate allowances for seasonal variation and for the buffering effect of the ice fields of the Terminal Mountains, he had worked out when the river had begun to fail. The answer was not exact, and hedged with cautious interpolations, but Yama believed that the conclusion was inescapable, and laden with appalling implications.

The Great River had begun its inexorable decline at about the time he had been found by the old Constable of Aeolis in a white boat, a baby lying on the breast of a dead woman.

Now Yama once more fumbled his way through the tables of measurements and staggered rows of calculations, trying and failing to guess what they might mean, by turns frightened and full of wonder. Most people blamed the fall of the river on the heretics; was he then their creature? Or was the fall of the river in some way linked with his birth?

When at last he looked up from the papers, he discovered that someone—probably Pandaras—had settled a blanket around his shoulders. The fire had burned down. Apart from the man on watch at the edge of the clearing, a black shadow against the black water, marked only by the fitful red spark of a cigarette, everyone in the camp was sleeping. Yama switched off the little lantern. He lay down on the lumpy ground and rolled himself up in the blanket and fell asleep almost at once.

He was woken early the next morning by Tamora. Eliphas had disappeared, she said. No one had seen him go, not even the old slave who had taken the night watch.

“He will be back,” Captain Lorquital said. “He has a great curiosity, and he has gone to explore.”

But Tamora said with some satisfaction this was surely proof that Eliphas was the traitor who had betrayed their course to Prefect Corin. She was all for tracking him down and giving him a summary trial and immediate execution, but Yama persuaded her to be patient, and was relieved when Eliphas came back in the middle of the morning, casually walking into the camp as a man might walk into his own house.

He told Yama he had been to the far end of the island. “I know this part of the shore,” he said. “We are very close to the edge of the world, brother, and a marvelous shrine that stands beyond it.”

Yama was sitting on the mossy bole of a fallen tree in a patch of sunlight. Pandaras was cutting his hair. Aguilar and Anchiale were trimming branches from the trunk of a felled pine; the steady sound of their axes rang across the clearing. There was a smell of fresh sawdust and pine resin. A cauldron of pitch sat on white-hot embers in the center of the cleared area, sending up reeking fumes in the sultry heat. In the bright sunlight beyond the shade of the trees, the Weazel lay canted in shallow water. Watched by Captain Lorquital, Phalerus and the two slaves were working up to their waists in water, cutting and prying away damaged planks.

“The shore must have changed very much,” Yama said to Eliphas. “How can you be certain?”

“You will see, brother, if you come with me. The water is very shallow on the other side of the island. We can wade across to the old shoreline, reach the shrine beyond the edge of the world and return, all in a day.”

Pandaras combed cuttings from Yama’s hair with his claws. After a moment, he said, “You have hard places under your scalp, master. Here and here.”

They were smooth and flat, and had straight edges. One was twice the size of the other. They moved slightly beneath Yama’s fingertips. He did not know what they were—or rather, he still could not quite put a name on them—but he was not alarmed.

“I noticed one a few days ago,” he said. “They do not hurt. It is nothing.”

“My master is ill,” Pandaras told Eliphas. “He needs to rest.”

“I am quite well,” Yama said. “Where is this place?”

“It is not much more than a stroll,” Eliphas said, “even for an old man like me. It is a very unusual place, brother. I believe you will learn much from it.”

In the end, they made an expedition of it. Captain Lorquital sent along the cook to collect fresh roots and greens. Tamora insisted on coming; so did Pandaras, although he was still much weakened by his bout of river sickness.

Crossing the island was easy enough, for little flourished in the dense shade of the blue pines which grew along its central ridge. Eliphas led the others down a path he had cut through a belt of tamarisk and swamp grape, and then they were out in sunlight at the edge of a shallow creek that spread between the island and the low cliffs of the old shore.

The tower was black and slender, standing half a league off like a beckoning finger against the deep blue sky. Eliphas said that once upon a time it had been decorated with prayer flags and banners, and mankites had been flown from its top to keep watch for floating islands.

“There was a camp of soldier monks here each summer. The currents of the air are much like those of water, and this is a place where the islands sometimes gather in shoals and archipelagoes that stretch far away into the sky.”

Floating islands!

As a boy, Yama had visited the far-side shore every year, when the Amnan had crossed the river for the festival at the beginning of winter, but he had only ever seen one floating island at close quarters. Although a few could always be glimpsed beyond the edge of the world, scattered across the vast blue depths of the sky which wrapped around the world, they were usually so distant that even when Yama looked at them through his stepfather’s spyglass they remained little more than dots. It was said that rebel machines lived on the islands, and that tribes of heretics, cannibals and pirates traveled from island to island on the backs of eagles feathered in metal vanes, or on mankites or in balloons. Yama had dreamed that his people might live there too.

Yama had finally seen an island at close quarters two years ago. It had been the last festival that Telmon had attended; at the end of that winter he had set off downriver toward the war, and news of his death had reached the peel-house at midsummer, just after the turning of the year.

That day, Telmon and Yama had gone hunting for cassowaries, leaving the smoke and noise and mud of the festival encampment of the citizens of Aeolis far behind. Winter had come early. Telmon and Yama were mantled in woolen ponchos. Their ponies sent up plumes of steam with every breath. It was almost dark. They had found no cassowaries, but just as they were about to turn back, they flushed out a basilisk.

The size of a small dog, the creature stood foursquare in front of the burrow it had scraped out beneath a briar patch. It raised its frilled mane, yawned to show the triple rows of teeth within its black mouth, and arched its naked, segmented tail over its back. A single drop of venom hung from the hooked spine of its stinger.

Although Telmon and Yama kept a safe distance, Yama’s pony stepped about so much that he had to dismount and hold the animal’s head and breathe into its nostrils to calm it. He threw stones at the basilisk, but the creature snatched them out of the air and swallowed them, much to Telmon’s amusement.

“He swallows stones as birds do, so that he can grind food in his crop. The Amnan say that one will sting itself to death rather than be captured. Unlike snakes, they are not immune to their own poison.”

“Dr. Dismas says that the diluted poison can be used to stop the growth of cankers and fistulas. I expect he would pay well for this one. We could easily kill it, Tel. It cannot guard both flanks at once.”

“Dr. Dismas is a fantasist,” Telmon said. “He tells so many tales that he has long ago forgotten which are true and which are not. You should not talk to him, Yama. There is something odd about his interest in you.”

Telmon sat straight in his saddle and kept a careful watch on the basilisk, one gloved hand holding the reins, the other resting behind him, close to the socket in which his javelin was set. He had recently had Sergeant Rhodean shave his hair, leaving only a central topknot. It was the style fashionable among cavalrymen; the topknot, shaped like a square loaf, formed a cushion between skull and helmet. His red poncho was neatly folded back to free his arms, showing the silvery padded jacket he wore beneath.

His tight knee-length boots had been spit-shined so that they gleamed even in the twilight. He was all that Yama yearned to be: elegant, fastidious, kindly and knowledgeable.

Telmon said, “We will leave this brave fellow to his home. There is still a little light, and we might get lucky.”

As they rode on, Yama said, “Dr. Dismas says that he might be able to find out about my bloodline. That is why he wants to make a study of me.”

“Dr. Dismas is easy with his promises, Yama. It is a cheap and quick way of winning people’s gratitude, and I expect he will move on before he has to make good any of them.”

“You will look for my people, Tel. That is, when you are not fighting heretics or charming women.”

“I will keep watch every step of the way, but I cannot promise anything. You know that father has made many enquiries, but never with any success. It is not likely that I will come across anyone of your bloodline by chance.”

They rode up the shallow slope to the top of the rise. There were narrow tracks worn through the tall grasses which Telmon said were certainly made by cassowaries, but all they found were two peahens, which whirred up under their ponies’ hooves and flew off into the dusk.

Yama was still calming his pony when Telmon spied the floating island.

It was like a small round barrow or cairn, but it stood where no barrow or cairn should be, atop the long flat horizon of the edge of the world. When Yama and Telmon rode closer, they saw that the island had grounded on a wide apron of eroded keelrock. It was a dense tangle of violet and red vines and tubes and bladders, as wide as a paeonin field and twice as tall as a house. It was full of noises, stealthy rustles and squeaks and crepitations, as if its vines and bladders were continually jostling and creeping over one another, and little blue lights came and went in its tangled thickets. Yama feared that these might be the lanterns of pirates or heretics, but Telmon laughed and said that they were only burning hydrogen vented from collapsed lift pods.

“Heretics are men like you and me. They have no use for floating islands, either in the air or on the river. Birds roost in the islands, though, and they are inhabited by species of crab found nowhere else, which feed on dead vegetation and fiercely protect their home, and barnacles which sieve the air for floating spores. The whole thing is really one organism, for although it appears to be made of many different species, they have all lost their autonomy so that they might function better within the whole. Each is a servant with a different task, and by specializing in their tasks they have lost the ability to live separately. Rather like the peel-house, eh? This one must be diseased. Usually, they don’t come so close to the world. Out in the air, Yama, is another nature entirely different from the one we inhabit. You should ask Derev about it. It is said that her people once flew there, but gave that up to live here with us.”

Yama, stung by the last remark, said, “That is just a story the Mud People put about. Derev would have told me if it was true.”

Telmon smiled. “You are in love with her. O, do not deny it! I am your brother, Yama, as truly a brother as if you were of my own blood. I have watched you grow up, and it seems to me that you mature quickly. You must give some thought to the shape of your life, for it might not be as long as you wish.”

“It might be longer,” Yama said.

“It might at that. We do not know, do we? It is a terrible thing, not to know who you really are or why you are here, but you cannot fill your life with dreams. I would like to see you give up your wild ideas, and perhaps Derev can help you. There is nothing wrong with metic marriages, and it would certainly make her father pleased.”

Yama said stoutly, “I am going to war, Tel. Like you, I want to fight the heretics and help redeem the world. Besides, I might find my bloodline on my way to the midpoint of the world.”

“Perhaps.” Telmon looked around. “It grows dark, and the ponies are tired. We can come back and look at this in daylight.”

But when they returned the next morning, the island had departed, leaving only a fret of shallow channels eaten into the sloping apron of keelrock on which it had rested. Perhaps the island had not been diseased after all, Telmon said, or perhaps it had cured itself by leaching minerals from the keelrock. He was intensely interested in how the world and its creatures worked. Although Yama spent more time in the library than his stepbrother, it was mostly to dream among the books and maps of finding his bloodline and his true parents. Telmon ransacked it in sporadic bursts to learn about what he had observed, and would as soon dissect the animals and birds he brought back from hunting expeditions as eat them. Like his father, he was interested in things for their intrinsic worth; if he had become Aedile, no doubt he would have filled the peel-house with a menagerie, and its gardens with exotic plants from the length of the world.

But the war had taken him away, and then he was dead.

Yama did not know if he remembered the floating island because of the basilisk, or the basilisk because of the floating island, but he had never forgotten either. Sometimes, he still dreamed that his people were living among the floating islands; once, while shut in the cell in the hive of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he had dreamed that Derev had taken him to his people, carrying him in her arms while she rowed the air with strong white wings she had somehow grown.

And now he was eager to see for himself the archipelagoes that Eliphas promised would be floating in the sky beyond the edge of the world. He led the way across the stream, pushing through a strong current that swirled around his thighs, his waist, his chest, then throwing himself forward and swimming strongly toward the reed banks that stood along the far bank. He was filled with a sudden inexpressible joy, for it seemed that with Prefect Corin dead his life was his own, to do with it as he would in a world filled with wonders.

Yama hauled himself onto an unstable platform of reeds and rolled over onto his back and lay there in hot sunlight with water steaming from his wet clothes, watching as the others floundered through the stream toward him. Tamora held her sword above her head; Pandaras rode on the cook’s broad shoulders; Eliphas half-walked, half-swam, his hands parting the water in front of his narrow chest with a curiously formal paddling motion, his straw hat perched squarely on top of his head.

Yama shook water from the slick pages of the Puranas and glanced at the picture of Angel’s final, fatal ascension before putting the volume away. A dragonfly perched on a reed and with clawed forelegs preened veined wings as long as his arms while watching him sidelong with prismatic eyes. It flew off with a crisp whir as the others climbed up beside him. He wanted to go on at once, but the cook said that first he must set traps for crayfish.

“The Captain will bear down hard on me if I don’t, master. She does love crayfish fried in a bit of salt butter, and it will stop her fretting about the hurt done to the ship.”

The cook was a large, hairless man with pinkish-gray skin and a round, dolorous face. His name was Tibor. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope, and chain-smoked cigarettes he rolled from scraps of paper and strands of coarse black tobacco he kept in a plastic pouch. He absentmindedly snapped at passing insects, and when he spoke he passed his long red tongue over his black lips at the end of every sentence, as if relishing the taste of his words.

Yama, who had learned the trick as a child, helped Tibor weave crayfish traps from strips of reed. The traps were simple things, little baskets of close-woven reed stems with spines at the mouth which pointed inward; when the crayfish entered, they could not back through the spines to get out. Tibor’s big hands, each with his long fingers set around a sensitive pad, worked quickly and deftly, making two traps for every one of Yama’s. The cook baited the traps with scraps of smelly fat, and tied them at intervals along the margin of the stream.

They soon fell to talking. The cook was from a bloodline which had been enslaved for hundreds of generations; his distant ancestors had fought on the side of the fallen machines in the Age of Insurrection. Having sinned against the Preservers, they were now their slaves, and so the slaves of all free men on Confluence. Most were hierodules, but Tibor had been sold on the open market after the shrine of his temple had failed at the beginning of the war against the heretics. Tibor was not bitter about his fate, even when he explained that the long vertical scars on his chest marked where his nipples had been seared away. “It is so I cannot feed children, which is what the men of my people do. Our owners do not like us to keep families; our babies are taken at birth and fed on an artificial milk. If they fed from me, they could feed only from me and no other, and I would have to feed them for three years. No owner would want that! You do not believe me, because in most peoples it is the women who care for babies, but it is true. So instead of my babies I feed all of you!”

Tibor laughed loudly at this joke. Despite his down-turned mouth and downwardly slanting eyes, he was by nature a cheerful man, “I am not smart,” he said, “but that is good for me, because a smart slave is always unhappy.”

Yama thought of the librarian of the peel-house. Zakiel had been born a free man; unlike Tibor, he had known another life. And yet he was happy, for although he possessed nothing, not even his own life, he still had the work he loved. Yama had not thought about this before, and asked the cook many questions. They talked together until Tibor said that they had enough traps to feed the whole ship for two days if only half caught anything, adding that for a little while Yama had been the servant, and he the master.

“Some say you are the slave of all of the peoples of Confluence,” Tibor said. Yama asked him to explain, but he only laughed and changed the subject. “This is a bad land, the sailors say. They do not stray far from the ship because of it. They told me I was a fool to come with you, but they’ll be glad of fresh food.”

Pandaras had fallen asleep in the sun, and woke to find that leeches were feeding on his ankles, which he had dangled in the stream to keep cool. Tibor burned off the leeches with the glowing coal of a cigarette, and Pandaras fussed at the blood that streamed down his ankles from the little round punctures, and complained that he had soaked his second-best pair of trousers and would never get them back into shape, and only shut up when Tamora pointed out that if he wanted to go back now he would have to go back alone.

It did not take long to walk to the base of the tower.

The low cliffs were easy to climb, for their black, pebbly clay was deeply gullied by erosion. Beyond was a plain less than a league wide but of seemingly infinite length, thin red laterite and dry grasses punctuated by stands of saw-toothed yucca and palmetto, and sprawling clumps of gumbo-limbo. There were many outcrops of keelrock, smooth spurs or folded layers just as they had been cast a hundred thousand years before. Not even lichens had gained a hold on the slick keelrock, and all across the narrow plain a thousand facets shone and winked in the strong sunlight.

The tower seemed to be fused into the keelrock ridge at the edge of the world, or perhaps it had been grown from it by an art that had been lost since the Preservers had seeded Confluence with the ten thousand races of the Shaped. The tower was smooth and round, and several hundred chains high. Its black surface was slickly reflective and like the keelrock quite unscarred by time. Tumbled remains of wooden scaffolding and bent hoops which had once been the frames of tents were scattered around it. Ravens rose into the air as the party approached, calling loudly to each other in hoarse, indignant voices before circling away into the vast volumes of air.

Beyond the tower, the edge of the world dropped vertically into clouds that seemed to stretch away forever, as if the world swam not in the void but in a sea of absolute whiteness. Chains of islands floated above their own shadows, lying at different levels in the clear air above the clouds. Hundreds of islands, thousands. Yama marveled at their number.

The shadow of the black tower lay on the white cloud deck like a road, and sunlight broke in splintered rainbows around its top. Beside it, the shadows of the five people were like giants aping their every movement, and around the head of each was a circular rainbow. Yama moved his arms and grinned when his shadow gestured back across leagues of cloud. Pandaras and the cook danced and capered there at the edge of the world, and even Tamora, who had been nervously alert since leaving the ship, smiled at the sight.

“It is a rare wonder,” Eliphas said proudly, as if he had led them here just to see this. “A blessing of the Preservers.”

Tamora turned and squinted into the level sunlight at their backs. “Grah. I’d say it is a matter of the angle of light and properties of the clouds.” She would not agree with Eliphas about anything, but she added grudgingly, “It is some kind of wonder, I suppose.”

“It is beautiful,” Pandaras said. “It is a miracle of light and air and mist. I will make a song of it.”

“Out of my hearing, I hope,” Tamora said. “Yama, as soon as we are rested, we should turn back.”

Eliphas said to Yama, “The blessings of the Preservers will be upon you, doubled and redoubled, when you visit the shrine, brother. We will leave the others to rest here, and go down together.”

Yama said, “Where is the shrine?”

Eliphas smiled, and pointed straight down.