Shrine of Stars

Chapter Nine The Lazaret

Pandaras awoke to darkness and a confining pressure across his whole body. His left hand hurt horribly. He thrashed up, thinking that he was still buried, and found that the pressure was only a blanket which slipped to his waist, and that the darkness was not absolute, but punctured here and there by the glow of little lamps which slowly and solemnly swung to and fro like the pendulums of so many clocks. The whole world was rocking like a cradle. From all sides came the sound of men breathing or sighing. Someone was sobbing, a slow hiccoughing like the dripping of a faucet.

Pandaras reached for his left hand with his right… and could not find it. He patted at the coarse blanket that lay over his legs, as if he might discover it lying there like a faithful pet. He was still very sleepy, and did not understand what was wrong.

Something moved on the floor by his bed. He froze, thinking that Prefect Corin must be hiding there. But it was a larger man who reared up from the shadows, pale-skinned and flabby, and wearing only a pair of ragged trousers.

“Little master,” the man said in a soft, hoarse voice. “Be quiet. Lie down. You are wounded and ill. You must rest.”

It was Tibor. Pandaras did not feel any surprise. He said, “What have they done to me?”

Tibor made him lie down, and then told him all he knew. The two soldiers in the trench had not been badly hurt by the stray mortar round. They had dug themselves out and carried Pandaras to the lazaret, but by the time one of the chirurgeons had seen him the cord around his wrist had tightened so much that it had almost disappeared into his flesh. The hand had been too long without blood, and the chirurgeon had had to finish what the cord had begun.

“It was worth it to gain my freedom,” Pandaras whispered. “In any case, many say that we do not have hands, but only the clawed feet of animals. For that reason we have learned to let our tongues do most of the work.”

He must make light of it, he felt, for he seemed to be at the brink of a great black pit. If he fell into it there might never be an end to despair. He struggled to sit up again, and said, “It was worth it, Tibor, but we must not stay here. He will find me and I will not have that. We must leave—”

“Quiet, little master,” the hierodule said. “You are very ill, and so are all those around you. You have been treated, and now you must sleep. The longer you sleep the better chance you have of living.”

Pandaras summoned up all the strength he had. “Fetch my clothes,” he commanded. “If I stay here I will have sacrificed my hand for nothing, and I could not bear that.”

His clothes were tied in a bundle at the foot of the cot. Tibor helped him dress; twice he reached for toggles with his left hand, which was not there. “I have a whole set of new tricks to learn,” he said. And then, with sudden panic, “The fetish! The fetish and the coin! Where are they? Were they thrown away? I must have them!”

Tibor hooked two fingers into the pocket of Pandaras’s ragged shirt and drew out the coin, strung on its loop of leather, and the circlet of coypu hair and seed pearls.

“It is all I have, Tibor,” Pandaras said. He grasped the coin and it blazed so brightly that it hurt his eyes. “He is close!” he cried. He kissed the burning coin, hung it around his neck and, with a thrill of disgust, slipped the fetish over his bandaged stump. “There. I have nothing else, for Prefect Corin took the book, and I have paid for my lodging with my hand. We are ready to go.”

“Where will you go, little master?”

“We will find my master. The coin will lead us. You cannot easily escape me again, Tibor. I had to lose a hand to find you, and it is only fair that you stand at my left side from now on.”

Tibor said gently, “It is my duty to tend to the sick and the wounded, young master.”

“And I am certainly wounded.”

“You are but one of many. Many sick, and many wounded. Many need me, young master.”

“But I am foremost in your affections, I hope.” Pandaras felt a trifle dizzy. The floor seemed to pitch and sway beneath him. He sat down on the edge of the cot, but the sensation did not go away.

“Someone else needs me, little master,” Tibor said, and padded away into the darkness. His naked back and hairless head shone beneath the arc of a swinging lamp and then he was gone. Pandaras lay down, just for a little while, and was woken by Tibor, who was once again squatting beside the cot. It was as if a measure of whiteness had been poured into the darkness all around, not banishing it, but making it a little less absolute.

Tibor was smoking a cigarette. Pandaras twiddled the fingers of his right hand in the air and asked for a puff of it.

“You do not smoke, little master. Besides, although you are ill, you do not need this kind of medicine.”

“If I am as ill as you say then what more harm can it do? And if I’m not ill, as I claim, then it will calm me down. My stepfather, the first one, the one I don’t like to talk about, he was a great smoker. A few more lungfuls of smoke will do no harm.”

Pandaras was very tired, but in a minute, if only the world would stop its slow way, in a minute he would get up and walk out of here. He did not care if Tibor chose to follow him or not. Prefect Corin would surely be looking for him. He had to go. He had to find his master…

Tibor placed the wet tip of the cigarette in Pandaras’s fingers and helped him guide it to his mouth. The smoke was sweet and cloying. Pandaras choked on the first mouthful and coughed it out, but got the second down to the bottom of his lungs and slowly, luxuriously, exhaled.

“You see,” he said, “it makes me much calmer.”

Tibor took the cigarette away and said, “Then our bloodlines are very alike in their chemistries, little master, because that is why my people smoke. It helps us to accept our condition.” He drew on the cigarette; its brightening coal put two sparks in his large, black eyes. “If not for this, I would have killed myself as a pup, as I think would all of my kind. And so my bloodline would have died out long ago, without the chance to purge its sin. The Preservers are both merciful and just, for when they made this world they set upon it the herb from which this tobacco is made, which allows my bloodline to endure its infamy and universal enslavement.”

“I thought it was just a habit,” Pandaras said sleepily. He did not resist when Tibor began to undress him.

“It is a habit of life, young master, like breathing. We need cigarettes as much as you need air.”

“We must escape. We must cross the lines of the enemy.”

“We have already done so, little master. Sleep now. If you can sleep, then it is a sign that you can begin to get well. Those too sick to sleep always die, in my experience. But I do not think you will die.”

“I want—”

But Pandaras was too tired to complete the thought, and he slept.

Day by day Pandaras grew stronger. He had been sicker than most of those around him and at last he was strong enough to realize how sick he had been. When he was at last able to sit up and take notice of his surroundings, in the late afternoon of the sixth or seventh day of his confinement, he saw that this part of the lazaret was empty except for himself and a heavily bandaged man three cots over in the same row. A machine like a cat-sized mosquito squatted over the bandaged barrel of the man’s chest, circulating his blood through loops of clear tubing; his breathing was ragged and loud.

The coin was no brighter, but the dots and dashes of light within it were more active than ever, scurrying to new patterns, freezing for only a heartbeat, and scurrying about again. Pandaras watched for hours, trying to understand their dance.

In the night, the man tended by the mosquito-machine suffered some kind of crisis. He was taken away amidst a flurry of chirurgeons and charge hands. Pandaras lay awake for hours afterward, but the man did not return.

The next morning, Pandaras was taken up on deck by Tibor, and saw at last what the hierodule had been trying to tell him. The lazaret was traveling downriver. It had been taken by the heretics.

At the Marsh of the Lost Waters, the Great River divided into many shallow, sinuous, slow-moving streams. The lazaret was following one of these. It was less than a league across, and stained red-brown with silt. Trees grew densely on either side, half-submerged in the sluggish current, their leaves vivid green in the bright sunlight. The sun burned off the water. It was very hot and very humid. Pandaras broke into a sweat at the slightest exertion and he was content to sit with Tibor under an awning of crimson silk, listening to one or another of the discussion classes which were part of the process the heretics called Reeducation and Enlightenment.

The lazaret was a barge as wide and flat as a field. A flying bridge crowned its blunt bow; gun emplacements nestled like seeds at regular intervals along its sides; a decad of pods which housed reaction motors swelled at its stern. A pentad of machines followed its wide wake as birds might follow a fishing boat. They were as fat as barrels and entirely black, with clusters of mobile spines fore and aft. They made a slow fizzing sound as they moved through the air. Sometimes one would break off and make a wide slow loop above the forest canopy before rejoining its fellows. At night they were each enveloped in a faint red nimbus, like a constellation of halo stars.

There were other machines too. Small silvery teardrops that zipped from one place to another like squeezed watermelon seeds; black angular things like miniature mantids that stalked the white-scrubbed, tar-caulked planks of the deck on long, thin legs. And a thing of jointed cubes and spheres that was slung in a hammock on the bridge, close to the huge wheel that, manned by three sailors, controlled the barge’s rudders. The plastic casings of its components had once been white, but were now stained and chipped. It was a very ancient machine, Pandaras learned, and it had control of the barge; many of the smaller machines were slaved to it. It seemed that these machines were not the servants of the world, as in Ys, but were the equals of or even superiors to the flesh-and-blood heretics.

The soldiers who guarded the prisoners and otherwise manned the barge were of a recently changed bloodline from the lower slopes of the Rim Mountains. They were a tall, muscular people covered in thick white fur. They wore only elaborate harnesses of leather straps and buckles and pouches. Their narrow faces, with long muzzles and small brown eyes that peered from beneath heavy brow-ridges, were as black and wrinkled as old leather, and all were heavily tattooed with silvery swirls and dots. They called themselves the Charn or the Tchai. Although of a single bloodline and a single culture, they were divided into two distinct tribes which, by taboo, never intermarried: one herded llamas and goats in the birch forests; the other hunted in the wilderness of rock and snow above the tree-line. Pandaras, who still believed that he had the right to talk with anyone, discovered that they had a rich store of tragedies concerning star-crossed lovers from the two tribes, and blood feuds which lasted for generations. To their amusement, he elaborated several versions of his own upon these eternal themes.

The white-furred guards did not like the close, fetid heat. When they were not patrolling the deck, they sprawled in front of electric fans, their red tongues lolling. They were a short-tempered people, and the heat made them even more irritable. Those officers captured with the lazaret had already been killed, but the guards would sometimes make the prisoners line up, pluck someone from the ranks at random, and execute him. One night, one of the guards went mad and tried to storm the bridge. There was a brief but furious firefight before he was shot. More than thirty prisoners were killed or wounded in the crossfire; all were unceremoniously tipped over the side for the caymans and the catfish.

Pandaras asked Tibor why he had not been executed when the lazaret had been captured. “You’re something like a priest, right? I think that it would make you more dangerous than any officer.”

Tibor scratched at the long, vertical scars of his chest while he thought about this. At last he said, “I am only a slave, little master. I am not a leader of men. Besides, the heretics believe that to convert one such as me is a great prize.”

“Surely there were other hierodules working in the lazaret when it was captured? But I see no others now.”

“They fled, little master. But I could not leave you.”

“You know that I am not your master, Tibor!”

The hierodule did not reply.

Pandaras tried a new argument. “I am grateful that you are here, Tibor. But as an equal. As a friend.”

“You could not be a friend to one such as I, little master. What am I? Lower than a worm, because my ancestors took the side of the feral machines during the Age of Insurrection.”

“You are a man, Tibor. As much a man as anyone here. Don’t put the burden of your life on my head.”

Again Tibor did not reply. He took out a little plastic pouch from the waistband of his trousers and, with maddening slowness, began to roll a cigarette.

Only the weakest and most seriously wounded prisoners lay in the close heat and stink of the black air below deck. The rest camped under awnings rigged from brightly colored canvas or silk and scattered across the broad deck of the barge like flowers strewn across a field. They took turns to trawl for fish and shrimp, which were shredded and added to the cauldrons of sticky rice or maize porridge, but most of their waking hours were taken up with Reeducation and Enlightenment.

The discussion classes formed just after dawn, and often continued beyond sunset. Although the prisoners were told that the classes were voluntary, everyone knew that those who refused to take part were likely to be chosen by the guards for execution. They reminded Pandaras of the penny school he had occasionally attended as a cub. His education had ended when his father had disappeared, for the man his mother had married after that had refused to waste money on luxuries like learning. It had been no great loss. Pandaras had always hated the stifling atmosphere of the school, and the rote recitations of the Puranas which had taken up much of the time had for him almost killed their beautiful and terrible stories. He did not mind that he was unlettered, for his people had always kept their stories and songs in memory rather than on paper—”written in air rather than on stone,” as their tradition had it, for what was forgotten did not matter, and that which was of value was kept alive in the mouths and instruments of a thousand singers long after the unmourned death of the author.

The classes contained between four and forty prisoners, and each was led by a pedagogue. These were all of the same round-faced, gray-skinned bloodline, from a city several hundred leagues downriver which had achieved enlightenment, as they called it, early in the war. Most—they proudly admitted it—were no more than children, so young that they had yet to determine their sex. They were a small race, smaller even than Pandaras. They dressed in loose black tunics and trousers, and their glossy black hair was tied back in elaborate pigtails with scraps of white silk. They ruled the prisoners with an iron will. Those who walked away from the discussion classes in disgust or anger were immediately chased by the pedagogues, who screamed at them and whipped them around the ankles with sharp bamboo canes; those who did not return or who tried to fight back were taken away by the guards, shot, and kicked over the side.

At first, Pandaras had a great deal of trouble understanding what the pedagogues were trying to teach him. He sat next to Tibor in the sweltering heat in a kind of stupor, his stump throbbing under a slithery, quasi-living dressing which absorbed the discharges of blood and pus, and which Tibor changed twice a day. His head ached from the ever-present odor of burnt fish-oil from the barge’s reaction motors and the sunlight which reflected in splinters from the river and, most of all, from the high, singsong cadences of the pedagogue as it urged, cajoled, corrected and harangued its charges.

Each morning the discussion classes started with a chant of the slogan of the heretics. Seize the day! It echoed out across the river, sometimes lasting no more than a minute, sometimes lasting for an hour, becoming as meaningless as breathing but always ending at the same moment in all the classes scattered across the barge’s broad deck.

After that came the long hours of argument in which the pedagogues set out some trivial truth and used it as a wedge to open a door onto a bewildering landscape. It seemed to Pandaras that everything was allowed except for that which was forbidden, but it was difficult to know which was which because there were no rules. The other prisoners had the same problem, and all their objections and expressions of bafflement were met by the same answer.

“You do not see,” the pedagogue would say in its sweet, high-pitched voice, “because you cannot see. You cannot see because you have not been allowed to see. You have not been taught to see. You are all blind men, and I will open your eyes for the first time.”

At the heart of the heretics’ philosophy, like the black hole at the center of the Eye of the Preservers, was a single negation. It was so simple and so utterly against the self-evident truth of the world that many of the prisoners simply laughed in amazement every time the pedagogues repeated it. It was that the Puranas were not the thoughts of the Preservers, set down to reveal the history of the Universe and to determine the actions of right-thinking men, but were instead a fabrication, a collection of self-justifying lies spewed forth by the victors of a great and ancient war that was not yet over. There would be no resurrection into eternal life at the end of all time and space, because the Preservers had fled from the Universe and could not return. They had created Confluence, but they had abandoned it. The fate of each man did not lie within the purlieu of the infinite mercy and power of the Preservers, but in his own hands. Because the Preservers could not return from the Eye, they no longer existed in the Universe, and so each man must be responsible for his own fate. There was no hope but that which could be imagined; no destiny but that which could be forged.

The pedagogues were more fervent in their unbelief than any of the pillar saints or praise chanters who had devoted their lives to exaltation of the glories of the Preservers.

They would allow no argument. This negation was the central fact that could not be denied; from it, all else followed. From the first, Pandaras was quite clear on what the heretics did not believe, but it took him a long time to understand what they did believe, and once he had it, it was so simple that he was amazed that he had failed to grasp it at once. Like the woman in the pictures in his master’s copy of the Puranas, the heretics wanted to live forever.

Seize the day! It was a plea aimed directly at the base of the brain, where the residue of the animal self was coiled like a snake, insatiable and quite without a conscience. Do anything in your power to survive; bend your entire life toward it. The Universe was an insensate and hostile place; worlds were so few and remote that they counted for nothing; almost anywhere you went would kill you instantly and horribly. Therefore, life was infinitely precious, and every man’s life was more precious still, a subtle and beautiful melody that would never be repeated. The heretics wished to revive the old ways of indefinitely prolonging life, so that everyone could fulfill their destiny as they pleased.

For Pandaras, whose bloodline was short-lived compared to others on Confluence, no more than twenty-five years at most, it was a seductive song. “Written in air,” yes, but suppose it could be stone instead! What sublime songs and stories he could make if all time were at his disposal, and what joy he would have in seeing them spread and change and enrich his fame!

Once this thought took root, Pandaras paid more attention to what the pedagogue told the discussion class. For amusement, he told himself. To pass the time.

The heretics admitted no gods, but believed that each man could become a god—or better than a god—with enough effort. Any God of the First Cause in a universe such as this must surely be counted a failure, the pedagogue argued, because He must be omniscient and yet allow immense suffering. Most of the Universe was uninhabitable. All men died, and most died badly.

“If the Preservers care about their creation,” the pedagogue told Pandaras and his companions, “then either they wish to take away evil and are unable, or they are able but unwilling, or they are neither willing nor able, or they are both willing and able. If they are willing and unable then they are feeble, which is not in accordance with claims made for their nature; if they are able yet unwilling then they are envious of the condition of their creation, which is equally at variance with their nature; if they are both unwilling and unable then they are both envious and feeble, and therefore cannot be what they are claimed to be by their worshippers; and yet if they are both willing and able, which conditions alone would satisfy the claims of those who believe in the omnipotence of the Preservers, then from what source come the evils of the world? From what place flow all the hurts and trials which you have all suffered? Why are we victorious, and why are you defeated? All the evil in the world can be accounted for by one principle, and that is the nature of the Universe of which it is a part. And yet that evil is not absolute. It is well known that a wilderness can be tamed and cultivated and made to yield crops. And so with any wilderness, even to the end of space and time, for there is no limit to the transforming power of human reason and human will. And given these two things, nature and human reason, why, there is no need for the Preservers, or any other gods.”

Several of the prisoners in Pandaras’s discussion class passionately disputed this argument. They said that although the Preservers had given men free will, it did not mean that men had infinite power, and even if they could gain infinite power it did not mean that they would then be unchanged, as the heretics appeared to believe. For surely anyone who could live forever would be changed by the simple fact of becoming immortal, and so would no longer be subject to the fears of ordinary men. The pedagogue listened to their arguments and smiled and said that they had not yet opened their ears, that they were still in the thrall of the propaganda of their priests and civil service, who together conspired to assign every man a place and punish those who tried to change things because change threatened their power.

This seemed to be no more than what many in Ys said behind the backs of the magistrates and priests, Pandaras thought, but he was still disturbed by these new ideas. He knew that Yama would have an answer to them, but even as he thought this he remembered that Yama had also questioned the motives of the Preservers in making Confluence and setting the ten thousand bloodlines upon it in the moment before they had stepped from the Universe. The praise-singers had it that the Preservers had extended their mercy to the races of servants they had raised up from animals; these they had set on this world to achieve what destiny they could for good or ill, in the sight of the Eye into which the Preservers had vanished. But why then was the world so bound in custom and tradition? We are the strength of the city, Pandaras thought, and yet we are regarded by higher bloodlines as no more than vermin. And what of the indigenous races such as the fisherfolk or the mirror people, or the unclean scavengers and ghouls who roamed the cloacae of Ys? These races had been raised up by the Preservers, yet did not contain their breath and so could never achieve the change—enlightenment, in this gray manikin’s argot—by which a bloodline dominated by unchanging habit becomes a nation of individuals. He remembered with a pang of shame the first day with his master, after they had escaped The Crossed Axes, when he had poured scorn upon the unchanged refugees who camped by the widening margin of the river. Was it the intention of the Preservers that some bloodlines should oppress others? Surely the Preservers had set themselves so high that all bloodlines were equal to them, no matter how lowly or how enlightened. The heretics had one thing right: all the world’s peoples should have the chance to rise as high as they could. If the Preservers had created a world so manifestly unfair, then surely they had done so through incompetence or spite. Surely they could not be as powerful as the priests and bureaucrats claimed.

Pandaras forgot in that moment that although his master was more powerful than many men, he did not deny that the Preservers were more powerful still, so powerful that men might never riddle their actions. Instead, the slogans of the heretics burnt like fever in his blood. Seize the day! Live forever! It did not matter if you were changed, for you would still remember what you had been, as a man fondly remembers his childhood. And what man would wish to remain a child forever?

One man in Pandaras’s discussion class was eager to deny the Preservers. Not out of belief or conviction, but out of fear, for he was anxious to save himself. From the first he agreed with everything the pedagogue said, without understanding anything, and mocked his fellow prisoners for stubbornly clinging to their outmoded and foolish beliefs.

He was a skinny fellow with leathery brown skin and a cayman’s untrustworthy grin. He wore only dirty breeches and a mail shirt, and stank like river water kept too long in a barrel. He had been badly seared when his carronade had jammed and exploded: his hand was gloved in a white plastic bag and a bandage was wrapped around his head; the right side of his chest and his face were livid with burn-scars; his right eye was as milk-white as a boiled egg. He was shunned by the other prisoners and was always trying to wheedle favors from the guards, who either ignored him or chased him away with swift, judicious blows. His name was Narashima, but everyone called him the Jackal. Even the pedagogue grew tired of the Jackal’s constant gabble of unthinking agreement, and one day turned on him.

“You do not worship the Preservers?” it said in its sweet, high voice.

“That’s so, your honor,” the Jackal said eagerly. “Men of my kind, we’ve never liked ’em. That’s why we are always hunted down by the authorities, because we refuse to bend our knee to the false idols of their temples. We were delighted when your people finally silenced the last avatars because we saw that it might be an end to the rule of the priests. And now I see it’s true, and my heart lifts on a flood of happiness.”

Pandaras thought that as usual the Jackal dissembled, giving up half the truth in service of a greater lie. It was clear from the arrowhead tattoos on the man’s fingers that he had been a member of one of the galares which operated in the docks of Ys, hijacking cargoes, smuggling cigarettes and other drugs, running protection and kidnapping rackets. The Jackal had probably joined the army to escape justice. Perhaps he had betrayed his own kind—it was clear that he believed in nothing but his own self, and one or two of the prisoners said, out of earshot of any pedagogue or soldier, that the Jackal was an ideal candidate for a heretic, for he would betray the Universe to save his worthless hide.

“What do you worship,” the pedagogue asked the Jackal sweetly, “if you do not worship the Preservers?” A ripple of interest stirred the circle of the discussion class, like a breeze lifting and dropping the leaves of a tree. The Jackal did not notice it.

“Why, your honor, captain… for a long time I did not worship anything. The other things I held dear were my family and my many friends, as any good honest man might tell you, but I saw nothing of worth beyond them. But now, by happy circumstance, I find myself in a position I could not have imagined then. My bloodline is one of the oldest on Confluence, one of the first to have changed. We have always lived in Ys, and those in power hate us because of our ancient and honorable pedigree. But now I feel that I have been changed again, that the change for which we are envied is nothing compared to what I feel now. Why, I’m even happy that I lost my eye and use of my hand, because it is a small enough price to have paid for the riches you shower upon us day by day.”

“Then you worship nothing?”

“Your honor, as I said, my people never worshipped the Preservers. But it does not mean we are not capable of worship.”

“Money, mostly,” someone whispered, loud enough for the rest of the class to hear it. Most laughed.

The Jackal glared around with his one good eye. It was yellow, with a vertically slitted pupil. “You see, your honor,” the Jackal said, “how jealous others are of me. Because I understand what you want of us while these others only pretend it. They are not worthy of your truths. You take me, your honor, and feed these others to the fish in the mud at the bottom of the river.”

“What is it you understand?” the pedagogue asked. “Every day you tell me that you are full of praise for what you hear, and I am glad. But I would like to know what you understand of the hard questions I put to all of you here. I would like to know how high you have been raised.”

The men in the circle nudged each other, seeing that some kind of trap was closing on the hapless Jackal, who glared at them again and hissed through his long jaw. “Higher than these scum, and they know it, your honor. Put that question to them. I’ll wager none of them will be able to answer it.”

“There is no competition here,” the pedagogue said. “We set no man against any other. That is one part of our strength. The other is our certainty. Tell me one thing of which you are certain.”

“Why, your honor, I know that the Preservers are nothing but shit compared to your people. I know that I worshipped nothing because nothing was worthy of my worship, but I know now that I have found something I will worship with all my heart and all my breath. Let me serve your people and I will grace them with such praise that all will know their fame. It is your people that I worship. I love you all more than life itself, and will serve you in any way I can, and hope to gain some small measure of your glory. It is you, you! You and no other!”

And to the disgust of the others, the Jackal threw himself forward and tried to kiss the pedagogue’s feet. But the small creature drew them into the angles of its knees and looked at the man and said, “There is nothing more that I can tell you. Go now. Leave the class. Do not be afraid. If you truly understand what I teach, you must know that you are free to do as you will.”

The Jackal raised his head. The bandage around his head was unraveling, and one end hung down by the milky, cooked eye which stared from the mess of black scabs and raw red skin. He said, “Then there is nothing I want more than to sit at your feet, your honor, and absorb your wisdom.”

“I have nothing more to teach you,” the pedagogue said. “I will not say it again, for I hope I am not mistaken about your ability to understand me. If you do not understand me then your punishment will be swift and terrible.” There had been no signal, but suddenly two guards were walking across the wide white deck toward the discussion class.

The Jackal looked at them, looked at the pedagogue. “Your honor… captain… If I have angered you in any way, then I repent of it at once.”

“You have not angered me. You have filled my heart with joy. Go now. You are free.”

Pandaras thought with a chill that it was a subtle and cruel trick. The pedagogue had trapped the Jackal with his own lies, had punished him by giving him exactly what he wanted.

The Jackal was refused food from the cauldrons because it was for the prisoners and he was a free man, and likewise the guards mocked him when he tried to beg some of their rations, crowning him king of the free men with a wreath of water-lily flowers, and then driving him away with blows from the butts of their carbines and partisans. The Jackal did not dare approach the pedagogues, and besides, it was unlikely that he could digest the fibrous pap which they sucked up. For the next two days he wandered from class to class, followed by several of the small, silvery machines, and sometime on the third night of his freedom he disappeared.

One evening, as the prisoners ate their meager ration of maize porridge salted with scraps of fish, a man of Pandaras’s bloodline, a veteran by the name of Tullus, came over and sat beside Pandaras and struck up a conversation. It seemed that they had once lived within two streets of each other in Ys, and had worked at different times in the same foundry, casting and repairing armor. They talked about people they had known and stories they shared in common, and at last Tullus reached the point of his visit.

“The guards killed the Jackal, brother. They sport with us and eventually they will kill us all.”

“You did not know Narashima, I think. He would have lain with a dog if it would have turned a penny or extended his life by a day.”

“Many join the army,” Tullus said seriously, “and every man has his reason. But all unite in a single cause. Whatever else the Jackal was, he was foremost a soldier. He was one of us and the heretics mocked him and killed him.”

“I saw little help from his fellows,” Pandaras said.

“All feared that if they aided the Jackal, then they would share his fate. The heretics divide us, brother, and one by one they will kill us.”

The two men fell silent as one of the guards went past, his clawed feet scratching the deck, his harness jingling. One of the little angular machines stalked stiff-legged after him. Pandaras thought that if the discipline of the army had been atomized, then the heretics had won. They had made their point. When it came to confronting death, there was no society of men, only individuals.

Tullus watched the guard pace away into the gloom between groups of prisoners. He whispered, “The lazaret goes slowly because the heretics wish to extend our torture as long as possible, but it goes downriver all the same. At last it will reach the end of the Marsh of the Lost Waters. There are millions of heretics in the cities beyond, and we will be given up to them for their sport.”

Pandaras had heard many fantastic stories about the tortures and obscenities which the heretics inflicted on their prisoners: trials by combat; vivisections and other experiments; forced matings between different bloodlines. He told Tullus, “The army makes up many stories about the enemy, brother, so that its soldiers will fight hard to avoid capture.”

Tullus nodded. “Well, that’s true up to a point,” he said. “But the point is that there must be a foundation to any story or song. You know that, brother. All of us know that.”

“The rumors about the heretics are founded in hatred and fear,” Pandaras said. “Much may flow from those sources, but none of it good.”

Tullus looked hard at Pandaras. He was a grizzled man of some fifteen or sixteen years, with white around his muzzle. He said, “You are not a soldier. What are you doing here?”

Pandaras crooked his left arm, thrusting the stump forward. The bandage wrapped around it was gorged on black blood and throbbed gently to Pandaras’s own heartbeat. “I have lost as much as any man here,” he said.

“Not your life,” Tullus said. “Not yet.”

“I’ve lost something as dear to me,” Pandaras said. “My master was taken by the heretics. He is a great warrior, and I am his squire. I’m going to find him and free him.”

“You were hurt when he was captured?”

“No, that was later. A flier took him away, and I have been looking for him ever since.”

“Where was this? He was a cateran, I suppose. What division was he attached to? Or was he a scout?”

“He was on his way to war—”

“And was taken before he could kill a single heretic? An unlucky man rather than a hero, Pandaras. Heroes need luck as much as they need strength. Perhaps you have misplaced your loyalty, neh?”

“He will save the world yet,” Pandaras said stubbornly. “I can say no more, but I know that he will.”

“You have a chance with us. Stay here and you have no chance at all. They will kill you, Pandaras. Have no faith in anything they promise.” Tullus looked around and whispered, “Some of us are planning to escape.”

“We are surrounded by marsh and jungle.”

“Where better place to escape? I fought here when I first joined the army. I know how to find my way. Once we are in the marshes we are safe. But first we must escape.”

“Good luck to you, but I think I will stay here. I’m a city boy. I’ve no love of parks, let alone wilderness. And perhaps you forget, but I have only one hand.”

“We will all help each other. If you love freedom you will help us. If you love the Preservers you will help us.”

“I’m not a soldier, Tullus, as you’ve pointed out. I’m only a servant who is looking for his master. How could I help you?”

“You have the hierodule. And the hierodule can help us. He can talk with the machines, and they are the real guards here. You will command him to make the machines leave this place, and we will kill the hairy ones and the little gray-skinned motherfuckers.”

“He is not mine,” Pandaras said. “Command him yourself, if you can.”

Tullus raised himself into a crouch. His black lips drew back from his teeth. Pandaras stiffened. He could smell the old soldier’s anger, and he rose to match Tullus’s posture. They glared at each other, faces a handspan apart.

Tullus said, “The hierodule refused me. That is why I am asking you, boy.”

“Perhaps you asked him the wrong question. Tell him that he is under no obligation to me. Tell him that he was freed when the ship on which he served was destroyed.”

Tullus stared hard at Pandaras, and Pandaras stared right back at him, his blood beating heavily in his head. He refused to be intimidated because he felt that it would somehow fail his master. Then Tullus smiled and turned and said, “Look! In spite of all the powers they boast of possessing, they cannot hide the truth from us.”

The Rim Mountains had swallowed the last light of the sun, and the Eye of the Preservers had risen a handspan above the trees along the edge of the river: the dull red swirls of its accretion disc; the pinprick black point at the center, the dwelling place of the Preservers.

“The Preservers watch us always,” Tullus said. “Pray with me, brother. Pray for our deliverance.”

No guards or machines were near. Pandaras made the necessary gestures of obeisance and whispered the responses, but his heart was empty. The Preservers had fled the Universe. Light fell faster than they, so that they could still watch their creation but could no longer interfere with it. They had set it in motion and abandoned it, as a child might turn away from a wind-up toy, leaving it to heedlessly march down the street. Praying was an empty gesture, and Pandaras felt as if there was a gulf a thousand leagues wide between himself and the man who prayed raptly and joyfully beside him.

The tragedy is not that we fall in love with that which does not love us, he thought, but that we cease to love. He was shivering. He thrust his good hand between his thighs, but he could not stop shivering.

Tullus said, “What is it, brother? Don’t be afraid. Say the final benison with me.”

“You say it, Tullus.”

“You young fool—You believe them, don’t you?”

“We are the strength of the city, Tullus. But why are we despised?”

“You are less than the Jackal,” Tullus said in disgust. “He only pretended to believe the heretics’ cant, but with you it is no pretense.” His face contorted and he spat on the deck between Pandaras’s feet. He said, “There are many like me. Tell anyone of this, betray me, and one of my friends will kill you.”

Pandaras slept badly that night, although Tibor promised to keep watch. When he woke near dawn he saw with a pang of dread that more than half the prisoners were gone. Tibor was sitting cross-legged in a kind of trance; it was the closest he came to sleep. When Pandaras shook him, the hierodule stirred and said at once that he had seen nothing.

“Perhaps they escaped to the shore,” Pandaras whispered.

Tibor said softly, “I do not think so, little master.” Tears were swelling in the hierodule’s downwardly slanting eyes.

Pandaras said, “You did see something. Tell me.”

“Everyone slept. Even I, who never sleeps, passed from this world for a little while. The machines may have had something to do with it. Then you woke me, and the men were gone.”

A little later, Pandaras said, “You could have helped them, Tibor.”

“My place is with you, little master. You have not yet recovered from your wound.”

“Would you have helped them, if I had ordered it? Could you have told the heretics’ machines to quit the lazaret?”

Tibor considered this, and at last said gently, “I am yours to command, little master, but I do not think I can command the machines of our captors. I was fitted with an induction loop when I entered the service of the temple, but it was designed to interface with shrines. Shrines are machines, it is true, but there are many kinds of machine.”

“You never tried?”

“It did not occur to me, little master.”

“They might still kill you,” Pandaras said. “Your entire life has been spent in the service of the Preservers. Surely that makes you a natural enemy of the heretics.”

“Not at all. As I told you before, I am seen as a great prize. In the first days after the lazaret was captured, little master, before you woke from your coma, the pedagogues spent a great deal of time talking with me. They hope to convert me, as they have already converted the captain of the lazaret.” Tibor pointed toward the flying bridge at the bow, at the big, jointed machine in its hammock. “It still hopes that I will join with it. But I already serve you, little master. I have no one else to serve. If the Weazel was not destroyed, then surely Captain Lorquital would have put in at Ophir with her cargo. But no one had seen her, little master, although I asked many people at the docks while I was waiting to board the ship which took me downriver to the lazaret.”

“They died quickly, Tibor, if that’s a comfort.”

“Except for Phalerus,” Tibor said.

The remaining prisoners were subdued. There were no discussion classes that day. Just before sunset, the barge entered a wide canal, and an hour later drew into the docks of Baucis, the City of Trees.