Child of the River

Chapter Twenty-Three The Temple of the Black Well

When Yama woke, the first thing he saw was Pandaras sitting cross-legged by the foot of the bed, sewing up a rip in his second-best shirt. Yama was naked under the scratchy starched sheet, and clammy with old sweat. His head ached, and some time ago a small animal seemed to have crept into the dry cavern of his mouth and died there. Perhaps it was a cousin of the bright green gecko which clung upside-down in a patch of sunlight on the far wall, its scarlet throat pulsing. This was a small room, with ochre plaster walls painted with twining patterns of blue vines, and dusty rafters under a slanted ceiling. Afternoon light fell through the two tall windows, and with it the noise and dust and smells of a busy street.

Pandaras helped him up, fussing with the bolster, and brought him a beaker of water. “It has salt and sugar in it, master. Drink. It will make you stronger.”

Yama obeyed the boy. It seemed that he had been asleep for a night and most of the day that followed. Pandaras and Tamora had brought him here from the docks.

“She has gone out to talk with the man we should have met yesterday. And we didn’t get paid by the star-sailor, so she’s angry with you.”

“I remember that you tried to help me.” Yama discovered that at some time he had bitten his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. He said, “You killed the guard with that kidney puncher she gave you.”

“That was before, master. At the gate of the merchant’s estate. After that there was the voidship lighter, when you snatched the circlet from the guard and put it on your head.”

“The merchant was wearing the circlet. It was how he controlled his household. But I broke it when I took it away from him.”

“This was in the voidship lighter. Please try and remember, master! You put the circlet on your head and straightaway you collapsed with foam on your lips and your eyes rolled right back. One of my half-sisters has the falling sickness, and that’s what it looked like.”

“A woman. I saw a woman. But she fled from me.”

Pandaras pressed on with his story. “I snatched the circlet from your head, but you didn’t wake. More guards came, and they marched us off the lighter. The first guard, the one you took the circlet from, he and Tamora had an argument about the fee. I thought she might kill him, but he and his fellows drew their pistols, and there was no argument after that. We took some of your money to pay for the room, and for the palanquin that carried you here. I hope we did right.”

“Tamora must be angry with you, too.”

“She doesn’t take any account of me, which is just as well. I bit her pretty badly when she tried to stop you taking the circlet, but she bandaged up her legs and said nothing of it. Wouldn’t admit I could hurt her, neh? And now I’m not frightened of her because I know I can hurt her, and I’ll do it again if I have to. I didn’t want to fight with her, master, but she shouldn’t have tried to stop you. She didn’t have the right.”

Yama closed his eyes. Clusters of lights hanging from the ceiling of the round room at the top of the voidship lighter.

The thing in the bottle, with rose-red gills and a lily-white mantle folded around a thick braid of naked nerve tissue. “I remember,” he said. “I tried to find out about my bloodline. The country of the mind—”

Pandaras nodded eagerly. “You took the circlet from the guard and put it on your own head.”

“Perhaps it would have been better if Tamora had stopped me. She was worried that I would no longer have any need of her.”

Pandaras took the empty beaker from Yama and said, “Well, and do you need her, master? You stood face to face with that thing and talked to it direct. Did it tell you what you wanted to know?”

It seemed like a dream, fading even as Yama tried to remember its details. The woman fleeing, the faint stars of other minds. Yama said, “I saw something wonderful, but I did not learn anything about myself, except that the people who crew the voidships are scared of me.”

“You scared me too, master. I thought you had gone into the place where they live and left your body behind. I’ll have some food sent up. You haven’t eaten in two days.”

“You have been good to me, Pandaras.”

“Why, it’s a fine novelty to order people about in a place like this. A while ago it was me running at any cock’s shout, and I haven’t forgotten what it was like.”

“It was not that long ago. A few days.”

“Longer for me than for you. Rest, master. I’ll be back soon.”

But Pandaras was gone a long time. The room was hot and close, and Yama wrapped the sheet around himself and sat at one of the windows, where there was a little breeze. He felt weak, but rested and alert. The bandage was gone from the wound on his forearm and the flesh had knitted about the puckers made by the black crosses of the stitches; the self-inflicted wound on his palm was no more than a faint silvery line. All the bruises and small cuts from his recent adventures were healed, too, and someone, presumably Pandaras, had shaved him while he had been sleeping.

The inn stood on a broad avenue divided down the center by a line of palm trees. The crowds which jostled along the dusty white thoroughfare contained more people than Yama had ever seen in his life, thousands of people of a hundred different bloodlines. There were hawkers and sky-clad mendicants, parties of palmers, priests, officials hurrying along in groups of two or three, scribes, musicians, tumblers, whores and mountebanks. An acrobat walked above the heads of the crowd on a wire strung from one side of the avenue to the other. Vendors fried plantains and yams on heated iron plates, or roasted nuts in huge copper basins set over oil burners.

Ragged boys ran amongst the people, selling flavored ice, twists of licorice, boiled sweets, roast nuts, cigarettes, plastic trinkets representing one or another of the long-lost aspects of the Preservers, and medals stamped with the likenesses of official heroes of the war against the heretics. Beggars exhibited a hundred different kinds of mutilation and deformity.

Messengers on nimble genets or black-plumaged ratites rode at full tilt through the crowds. A few important personages walked under silk canopies held up by dragomen, or were carried on litters or palanquins. A party of solemn giants walked waist-high amidst the throng as if wading in a stream.

Directly across the avenue, people gathered at a stone altar, burning incense cones bought from a priest, muttering prayers and wafting the smoke toward themselves. A procession of ordinands in red robes, their freshly shaven heads gleaming with oil, wound in a long straggling line behind men banging tambours.

In the distance, the sound of braying, discordant trumpets rang above the noise of the crowded avenue, and presently the procession heralded by the trumpeters hove into view. It was a huge cart pulled by a team of a hundred sweating, half-naked men, with priests swinging fuming censers on either side. It was painted scarlet and gold and bedecked with garlands of flowers, and amidst the heaps of flowers stood a screen, its black oval framed by ornate golden scrollwork.

The cart stopped almost directly opposite Yama’s window, and people gathered on the rooftops and threw down bucketfuls of water on the men who pulled it, and dropped more garlands of flowers onto the cart and around the men and the attendant priests in a soft, multicolored snowstorm. Yama leaned out farther to get a better view, and at that moment heard a noise in the room behind him and turned, thinking it was Pandaras.

A patch of ocher plaster on the wall opposite the window was cracked in a spiderweb pattern, and in the center of the web stood an arbalest bolt.

The bolt was as long as Yama’s forearm, with a shaft of dense, hard wood and red flight feathers. From the downward-pointing angle at which the bolt had embedded itself in the plaster, it must have been fired from one of the flat roofs on the other side of the avenue, for all of them were higher than the window. Yama crouched down and scanned the rooftops, but there were hundreds of people crowded along their edges, scattering flowers and pitching silvery twists of water at the cart. He tried to find a machine which might have been watching, but it seemed that there were no magistrates here.

Still crouching, Yama closed and bolted the heavy slatted shutters of both windows, then pulled the arbalest bolt from the wall.

A few minutes later, Pandaras returned ahead of a pot boy who set a tray covered in a white cloth on the low, round table which, apart from the bed and the chair in which Yama sat, were the only pieces of furniture in the room. Pandaras dismissed the pot boy and whipped away the tray’s cover like a conjuror, revealing a platter of fruit and cold meat, and a sweating earthenware pitcher of white wine. He poured wine into two cups, and handed one to Yama. “I’m sorry it took so long, master. There’s a festival. We had to pay double rates just to get the room.”

The wine was cold, and as thickly sweet as syrup. Yama said, “I saw the procession go by.”

“There’s always some procession here. It’s in the nature of the place. Eat, master. You must break your fast before you go anywhere.”

Yama took the slice of green melon Pandaras held out.

“Where are we?”

Pandaras bit into his own melon slice. “Why, it’s the quarter that runs between the river and the Palace of the Memory of the People.”

“I think we should go and find Tamora. Where are my clothes?”

“Your trousers are under the mattress, to keep them pressed. I am mending one of your shirts; the other is in your pack. Master, you should eat, and then rest.”

“I do not think so,” Yama said, and showed Pandaras the arbalest bolt.

The landlady called to Yama and Pandaras as they pushed through the hot, crowded taproom of the inn. She was a plump, broad-beamed, brown-skinned woman, her long black hair shiny with grease and braided into a thick rope. She was sweating heavily into her purple-and-gold sarong, and she waved a fretted palm leaf to and fro as she explained that a message had been left for them.

“I have it here,” she said, rummaging through the drawer of her desk. “Please be patient, sirs. It is a very busy day today. Is this it? No. Wait, here it is.”

Yama took the scrap of stiff paper. It had been folded four times and tucked into itself, and sealed with a splash of wax.

Yama turned it over and over, and asked Pandaras, “Can Tamora read and write?”

“She put her thumb to the contract, master, so I’d guess she has as much reading as I have, which is to say none.”

The landlady said helpfully, “There are scribes on every corner. The seal is one of theirs.”

“Do you know which one?”

“There are very many. I suppose I could have one of my boys…” The landlady patted her brow with a square of yellow cloth that reeked of peppermint oil. Her eyes were made up with blue paint and gold leaf and her eyebrows had been twisted, and stiffened with wax to form long tapering points, giving the effect of a butterfly perched on her face.

She added, “That is, when we are less busy. It is a festival day, you see.”

Yama said, “I saw the cart go by.”

“The cart? Oh, the shrine. No, no, that is nothing to do with the festival. It passes up and down the street every day, except on its feast day, of course, when it is presented at the Great River. But that is a hundred days off, and just a local affair. People have come here from all over Ys for the festival, and from downriver, too. A very busy time, although of course there are not so many people as there once were. Fewer travel, you see, because of the war. That is why I was able to find you a room at short notice.”

“She moved two palmers into the stables, and charges us twice what they paid,” Pandaras remarked.

“And now they are paying less than they would have,” the landlady said, “so it all evens out. I hope that the message is not bad news, sirs. The room is yours as long as you want it.” Despite her claim to be busy, it seemed that she had plenty of time to stick her nose in other people’s business.

Yama held up the folded paper and said, “Who brought this?”

“I didn’t see. One of my boys gave it to me. I could find him, I suppose, although it’s all a muddle today—”

“Because of the festival.” Yama snapped the wax seal and unfolded the paper.

The message was brief, and written in neatly aligned glyphs with firm and decisive downstrokes and fine feathering on the upstrokes. Most likely it had been set down by a scribe, unless Tamora had spent as long as Yama learning the finer nuances of penmanship.

I have gone on. The man you want is at the Temple of the Black Well.

Pandaras said, “What does it say?”

Yama read the message to Pandaras, and the landlady said, “That’s not too far from here. Go down the passage at the left side of the inn and strike toward the Palace. I could get you a link boy if you’d like to wait.”

But Yama and Pandaras were already pushing their way through the crowded room toward the open door and the sunlit avenue beyond.

The narrow streets that tangled behind the inn were cooler and less crowded than the avenue. They were paved with ancient, uneven brick courses, and naked children played in the streams of dirty water that ran down the central gutters.

The houses were flat-roofed and none were more than two stories high, with small shuttered windows and walls covered in thick yellow or orange plaster, walls that were crumbling and much-patched. Many had workshops on the ground floor, open to the street, and Yama and Pandaras passed a hundred tableaus of industry, most to do with the manufacture of the religious mementoes which were displayed in shops which stood at every corner of every street, although none of the shops seemed to be open.

It was a secretive, suspicious place, Yama thought, noting that people stopped what they were doing and openly stared as he and Pandaras went past. But he liked the serendipitous geography, so that a narrow street might suddenly open onto a beautiful square with a white fountain splashing in its center, and liked the small neighborhood shrines set into the walls of the houses, with browning wreaths of flowers and pyramids of ash before a fly-spotted circle of black glass that poorly mimicked the dark transparency of true shrines.

The domes and pinnacles and towers of temples and shrines reared up amongst the crowded flat roofs of the ordinary houses like ships foundering in the scruffy pack ice of the frozen wilderness at the head of the Great River hundreds of leagues upstream. And beyond all these houses and temples and shrines, the black mountain of the Palace of the Memory of the People climbed terrace by terrace toward its distant peak, with the setting sun making the sky red behind it.

Pandaras explained that this part of the city was given over to the business of worship of the Preservers and of the governance of Ys. Civil service departments displaced from the interior of the Palace of the Memory of the People occupied lesser buildings on its outskirts, and a thousand cults flourished openly or skulked in secret underground chambers.

“At night it can be a dangerous place for strangers,” Pandaras said.

“I have my knife. And you have yours.”

“You should have worn your armor. We collected it from the Water Market, cut down neatly and polished up as good as new.”

Yama had found it when he had taken his shirt from the satchel. He said, “It would attract attention. Someone might take a fancy to it. Already I feel as if I am a procession, the way people turn to stare.”

“They might want our blood. Or want to scoop out our brains and put them in tanks, all alive—like the star-sailors.”

Yama laughed at these fantasies.

Pandaras said darkly, “This is a place of good and evil, master. It is the New Quarter, built on a bloody battleground. You are a singular person. Don’t forget it. You would be a great prize for a blood sacrifice.”

“New? It seems to me very old.”

“That’s because nothing here has been rebuilt since the Age of Insurrection. The rest of the city is far older, but people are always knocking down old buildings and putting up new ones. The Hierarchs ordered clearance of the ruined buildings where the last battle between machines was fought, and the bones and casings of all the dead were tipped into great pits and the ground around about was flattened and these houses were built.”

“I know there was a battle fought near Ys, but I thought it was much farther upriver.” Yama remembered now that the Temple of the Black Well had something to do with that last battle, although he could not quite remember what it was.

Pandaras said, “They built the houses over the battleground, and nothing’s changed since, except for the building of shrines and temples.”

“I had thought the houses were built around them.”

“Houses have to be knocked down each time a new temple is built. It’s a dangerous business. There are old poisons in the ground, and old weapons too, and sometimes the weapons discharge when they are uncovered. There’s a department which does nothing but search by divination for old weapons, and make them safe when they’re found. And some parts of the quarter are haunted, too. It’s why the people are so strange hereabouts, neh? The ghosts get inside their heads, and infect them with ideas from ages past.”

Yama said, “I have never seen a ghost.” The aspects which haunted the City of the Dead did not count, for they were merely semi-intelligent projections. And while the Amnan claimed that the blue lights sometimes seen floating amongst the ruins below the peel-house were wights, the eidolons of the restless dead, Zakiel said that they were no more than wisps of burning marsh gas.

Pandaras said, “These are machine ghosts mostly, but human, once, and they say that those are somewhere worse. That’s why they make so many icons hereabouts, master. If you were to look inside one of these houses, you’d find layer upon layer of them on the walls.”

“To, keep out the ghosts.”

“They don’t usually work. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“Look there. Is that our temple?”

It reared up a few streets ahead, a giant cube built of huge roughly hewn stone blocks stained black with soot, and topped by an onion dome lapped in scuffed gilt tiles.

Pandaras squinted at it, then said, “No, ours has a rounder roof, with a hole in the top of it.”

“Of course! Where the machine fell!”

The Temple of the Black Well had been built long after the feral machine’s fiery fall, but its dome had been left symbolically uncompleted, with the aperture at its apex directly above the deep hole made when the machine had struck the surface of the world and melted a passage in the rock all the way down to the keel. Yama had been told the story by the aspect of a leather merchant who had had his tannery near the site of the temple’s construction. Mysyme, that had been the merchant’s name. He had had two wives and six beautiful daughters, and had done much charitable work amongst the orphaned river-rats of the docks. Mysyme was dead an age past, and Yama had lost interest in the limited responses of his aspect years ago, but now he remembered them all over again. Mysyme’s father had seen the fall of the machine, and had told his son that when it hit, a plume of melted rock had been thrown higher than the atmosphere, while the smoke of secondary fires had darkened the sky above Ys for a decad.

“It’s a little to the left,” Pandaras said, “and maybe ten minutes’ walk. That place with the gold roof is a tomb of a warrior-saint. It’s solid all the way through except for a secret chamber.”

“You are a walking education, Pandaras.”

“I have an uncle who used to live here, and one time I stayed with him. He was on my mother’s side, and this was when my father ran off and my mother went looking for him. She was a year at it, and never found him. And a year is a long time for my people. So she came back and married another man, and when that didn’t work out she married my stepfather. I don’t get on with him, and that’s why I took the job of pot boy, because it came with a room. And then you came along, and here we are.” Pandaras grinned. “For a long time after I left this part of the city, I thought maybe I was haunted. I’d wake up and think I’d been hearing voices, voices that had been telling me things in my sleep. But I haven’t heard them since I met up with you, master. Maybe your bloodline is a cure for ghosts.”

“All my bloodline are ghosts, from the little I have learned,” Yama said.

The Temple of the Black Well stood at the center of a wide, quiet plaza of mossy cobbles. It had been built in the shape of a cross, with a long atrium and short apses; its dome, covered in gold leaf that shone with the last light of the sun, capped the point where the apses intersected the atrium. The temple was clad in lustrous black stone, although here and there parts of the cladding had fallen away to reveal the grayish limestone beneath. Yama and Pandaras walked all the way around the temple and saw no one, and then climbed the long flight of shallow steps and went through the tall narthex.

It was dark inside, but a thick slanted column of reddish light fell through the open apex of the dome at the far end of a long atrium flanked by colonnades. Yama walked toward the light. There was no sign of Tamora or her mysterious contact; the whole temple seemed deserted. The pillars of the colonnades were intricately carved and the ruined mosaics of the floor sketched the outlines of heroic figures. The temple had been splendid once, Yama thought, but now it had the air of a place that was no longer cared for. He thought it an odd choice for a rendezvous—far better for an ambush.

Pandaras clearly felt the same thing, for his sleek head continually turned this way and that as they went down the atrium. The reddish light, alive with swirling motes of dust, fell on a waist-high wall of undressed stone which ringed a wide hole that plunged down into darkness. It was the well, the shaft the fallen machine had melted. The wide coping on top of the wall was covered in the ashy remnants of incense cones, and here and there were offerings of fruit and flowers.

A few joss sticks jammed into cracks in the wall sent up curls of sweet-smelling smoke, but the flowers were shriveled and brown, and the little piles of fruit were spotted with decay.

“Not many come here,” Pandaras said. “The ghost of the machine is powerful, and quick to anger.”

Yama gripped the edge of the coping and looked into the depths of the well. A faint draught of cold, stale air blew up around him from the lightless depths. The walls of the shaft were long glassy flows of once-melted rock, veined with impurities, dwindling away to a vanishing point small as the end of his thumb. It was impossible to tell how deep the well really was, and in a spirit of inquiry Yama dropped a softening pomegranate into the black air.

“That isn’t a good idea,” Pandaras said uneasily.

“I do not think a piece of fruit would wake this particular machine. It fell a long way as I recall—at least, it was two days in falling, and appeared in the sky as a star clothed in burning hair. When it struck the ground, the blow knocked down thousands of houses and caused a wave in the river that washed away much of the city on the far-side shore. And then the sky turned black with smoke from all the fires.”

“There might be other things down there,” Pandaras said. “Bats, for instance. I have a particular loathing of bats.”

Yama said, “I should have thrown a coin. I might have heard it hit.”

But a small part of his mind insisted that the fruit was still falling through black air toward the bottom, two leagues or more to the keel. He and Pandaras walked around the well, but apart from the smoking joss sticks there was no sign that Tamora or anyone else had been there recently, and the hushed air was beginning to feel oppressive, as if it held a note endlessly drawn out just beyond the range of hearing.

Pandaras said, “We should go on, master. She isn’t here.” He added hopefully, “Perhaps she has run off and left us.”

“She made a contract with me. I should think that is a serious thing for someone who lives from one job to the next. We will wait a little longer.” He took out the paper and read it again. “’The man you want—’ I wonder what she meant.”

“It’ll be dark soon.”

Yama smiled, and said, “I believe that you are scared of this place.”

“You might not believe in ghosts, master, but there are many who do—most of the people in the city, I reckon.”

“I might have more cause to believe in ghosts, because I was brought up in the middle of the City of the Dead, but I do not. Just because a lot of people believe in ghosts does not make them real. I might believe that the Preservers have incarnated themselves in river turtles, and I might persuade a million people to believe it, too, but that does not make it true.”

“You shouldn’t make jokes like that,” Pandaras said. “Especially not here.”

“Surely the Preservers will forgive a small joke.”

“There’s many who would take offense on their account,” Pandaras said stubbornly. He had a deep streak of superstition, despite his worldly-wise air. Yama had seen the care with which he washed himself in a ritual pattern after eating and upon waking, the way he crossed his fingers when walking past a shrine—a superstition he shared with the citizens of Aeolis, who believed that it disguised the fact that you had come to a shrine without an offering—and his devotion at prayer. Like the Amnan, who could not or would not read the Puranas and so only knew them secondhand through the preaching of priests and iconoclasts. Pandaras and the countless millions of ordinary folk of Ys believed that the Preservers had undergone a transubstantiation, disappearing not into the Eye but dispersing themselves into every particle of the world which they had made, so that they were everywhere at once, immortal, invisible and, despite their limitless power, quick to judge and requiring constant placation. It was not surprising, then, that Pandaras believed in ghosts and other revenants.

Pandaras said, “Ghosts are more like ideas than you might think. The more people believe in them, the more powerful they become. Listen! What was that?”

“I heard nothing,” Yama said, but even as he said it there was a faint brief rumble, as if the temple, with all its massy stones, had briefly stirred and then settled again. It seemed to come from the well, and Yama leaned over and peered into its depths. The wind which blew out of the darkness seemed to be blowing a little more strongly, and it held a faint tang, like heated metal.

“Come away,” Pandaras pleaded uneasily. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, as if ready to run.

“We will look in the apses. If anything was going to happen, Pandaras, it would have happened by now.”

“If it does happen, it’ll be all the worse for waiting.”

“You go left and I will go right, and if we find nothing I promise we will go straight out of this place.”

“I’ll come with you, master, if you don’t mind. I’ve no liking for being left alone in this hecatomb.”

The archway which led into the apse to the right of the well was curtained by falls of fine black plastic mesh. Beyond was a high square space lit by shafts of dim light striking through knotholes that pierced the thick walls just beneath the vaulted roof. There was a shrine set in the center of the space, a glossy black circle like a giant’s coin or eyeglass stood on its side.

Statues three times the height of a man stood in recesses all around the four walls, although they were not statues of men, and nor were they carved from stone, but were made of the same slick, translucent stuff as ancient armor. Yama could dimly see shapes and catenaries inside their chests and limbs.

Pandaras went up to a statue and knocked his knuckles against its shin: it rang with a dull note. “There’s a story that these things fought against the Insurrectionists.”

“More likely they were made in the likeness of great generals,” Yama said, looking up at their grim visages.

“Don’t worry,” a woman’s voice said. “They’ve been asleep so long they’ve forgotten how to wake.”