Shrine of Stars

Chapter Eleven The Camp

Pandaras and Tibor spent the rest of the night close by the ruins of the sacred grove, although their sleep was fitful because of the whine and clatter of the mechanical saws wielded by the men who were dismembering the carcasses of the giant sequoias. They wandered the brawling streets of the city for most of the next day in search of some sign of Yama, but found nothing. They had no money for food or lodging, and it seemed that nothing was free in the city. Pandaras tried to earn a few coins by singing at a street corner, but passersby either ignored him or cursed him roundly. One woman riding by stopped her sumpter long enough to explain to Pandaras that everyone must be responsible for their own self, and that by begging he was behaving like an animal. “I have a hierodule, dominie. Is there no work for him?”

“No man is a slave here,” the woman said. “You should try one of the camps at the edge of the city. You’ll find more of your kind there. Go quickly before someone decides to organize a lynch party and get rid of you.” And before Pandaras could ask her another question she flicked the sumpter’s reins and rode on through the swarming crowds.

It was almost midnight when Pandaras and Tibor finally reached one of the camps in the jungle at the edge of Baucis. A guard hailed them a long way from its perimeter and led them down a tangle of winding paths to a neatly arranged compound, with huts and tents on three sides of a square of trampled dirt. The leader of the camp was a giant of a woman who had lost both her legs but went everywhere on crutches, indefatigable and full of energy. Her name—or the short, childhood version of her name, for her bloodline chose names that grew and reflected their experiences—was Calpa. She listened to Pandaras’s story while he and Tibor devoured bowls of starchy, unsalted vegetable curry, and told him that this was a bad place to be.

“The city is full of newly changed bloodlines. They are dangerous because they are burning with holy fire. Mobs sniff out those who do not agree with them and hang or burn or stone them. We try to keep ourselves to ourselves, but we still get a lot of trouble. Can you hunt?”

“I’m a city boy,” Pandaras said, and held up his stump. “Besides, I am still recovering from my wound.”

Calpa made him nervous. She was one of the giant bloodlines, twice as big as Tibor. She was sprawled carelessly in a crude chair. One of her three-fingered hands could have easily wrapped around his skull and crushed it like a grape. The gray hide of her bare torso was heavily scarified with the welts of decorative brandings and oiled with what smelled like rancid butter. Her cropped white hair was raised in spikes over her crested skull, and her flat-nosed face was dominated by muscular jaws like the opposing scoops of one of the mechanical dredgers which were always working along the shore of Ys, struggling to keep old channels open as the river dwindled.

“We’re all crippled and maimed in some way or another here,” Calpa said. “At least you can still walk.”

“My friend is a cook. I’d do better helping him.”

“We’ve plenty of cooks and not enough food.”

“Begging your pardon, and do not think I am not grateful for the charity, but your cooks are a greater danger than any heretic. I ate this poor excuse for food because I have not eaten all day, but boiled river mud would have had more flavor.”

Calpa ignored this. “Your friend will help with those who are too sick or badly hurt to move. You will go with one of the hunting parties. I bet you can run fast. Most of your bloodline can. We mostly dig traps and chase animals into them. You’ll help with that. And if that doesn’t work out you’ll hunt for fruit. I’m sure that with even one hand you can sneak up on a pomegranate tree.” Calpa looked hard at Pandaras and added, “Do you believe them?”

Her gaze compelled him to be honest. He said, “I have not believed in the supremacy of the Preservers for some time. We are the strength of the city, Calpa, but we are despised by most.”

“That’s the fault of men, not of those who created them.”

“Then perhaps we were badly made,” Pandaras said. “But I am not here to become a heretic, much as I’d like to live forever.”

Calpa nodded. “You said that you’re looking for a friend. Well, if he has been here long, then he is either dead or one of them.”

“He is my master. I know that he is alive, and I know that he is somewhere in this city. Are there many camps like this one?”

“There are no masters here,” Calpa said. “The heretics kill every officer they capture; we’re all of us just ordinary grunts. And there are only two other camps. Most of the released prisoners run away and are killed by roving gangs of heretics in the jungles and the marshes upriver. Those that stay here mostly join the heretics or kill themselves. A few try to fight, of course. They don’t last long. There are many thousands of heretics in the city, and many more than that in the wild country about it. This is one of their staging posts for the war.”

“And yet they let us go.”

“They murdered most of the prisoners on the ship that brought me here,” Calpa said. “They started with the officers and carried on from there. Almost all of my comrades—most of a division—are dead. The heretics didn’t trouble with me because they thought I was dying, but I plan to show them that they made a bad mistake. They are arrogant and cruel, which is why they release those prisoners who survive the journey here, but they will suffer for their arrogance because they are letting us build an army in their midst. We’re not ready yet, but soon enough we’ll be able to do much harm here. They have a mage, for instance, who is said to be able to control every kind of machine. I have my eye on him, although he has many soldiers gathered around him.”

“What does he look like, this mage?”

“No one has ever seen him. He does not walk the city. He lives on a floating garden. There.”

Pandaras looked where Calpa pointed. It was a shadow against the Eye of the Preservers, hanging some distance from the archipelagoes of the other floating gardens.

“You and your friend will take guard duty tonight,” Calpa said, and clapped her big hands together. A man came over and she told him, “Give them a rattle and a couple of javelins and take them out to the fern trees. Check on them at sunrise. Kill them if they are asleep.” She looked at Pandaras. “Do you understand why we do this?”

“I can see that you don’t trust newcomers.”

“We’re still at war,” Calpa said. “There are many traps and pitfalls around the camp, and we move them about. You’ll likely be killed if you try and run away, and so we will be rid of you. If you choose to stay, you’ll have made a good start at helping us. Keep a sharp lookout. They come for us most nights.”

Pandaras and Tibor were given javelins tipped with flaked stone points and a gourd that, filled with hard seeds and strung on a leather thong, made a passable noisemaker, and were escorted to a rocky promontory which jutted above a dense belt of fern trees and looked out across the city. The Eye of the Preservers stood high above the river and the floating garden Calpa had pointed out was silhouetted against its dull red swirl. Their escort showed them the positions of the lookouts on either side, and said he would be back at dawn.

When the man had gone, Pandaras hefted his javelin and threw it as hard as he could into the crowns of the fern trees below, and threw the gourd after it. “Get rid of yours, too,” he told Tibor. “This place isn’t for us.”

“They have food and shelter, little master, both of which we failed to find in the city.”

“We are not safe here. Calpa believes that she is still fighting the war, but she can only lose. I’ll bet the armies she thinks are ranged against her are just bravos out for sport. If they catch us with weapons they’ll kill us for sure. If they find us alone and unarmed, they might spare us.”

“Calpa said that there are many traps.”

“That fellow won’t be back for us before dawn, and there will be light in the sky before then to pick a way. I can see well enough in what other bloodlines would consider to be pitch-darkness. This is almost as bright as day to me.” An exaggeration, but Pandaras could clearly see Tibor’s quizzical expression by the dim red light of the Eye. “I’ll spot any traps long before we’re near them, or I’ll sniff them out. Besides, I don’t think they’ll spend much time looking for us. Calpa hinted that many who come here run away, and I doubt that she bothers to chase after them. The way the war is going there will always be more prisoners and she has only to wait for them to come to her.”

After a moment, Tibor nodded and broke the shaft of his javelin over his knee and tossed the two halves over the edge of the promontory. He said, “How will we get to him?”

“I wondered if you’d catch on.”

“I may be slow, little master,” Tibor said, with a touch of his unassailable dignity, “but I am not stupid. The mage Calpa mentioned must surely be your master. But we cannot fly through the air, and Calpa said that there are many soldiers guarding him.”

“Perhaps he’ll find us. I’m certain that he is a prisoner of whoever it was that Eliphas betrayed him to. Calpa said that he was helping the heretics, and I know that my master would not help them unless forced. But although he is a prisoner, he can still call upon machines to help him. He saved me before by using a machine to cut me free from Prefect Corin.”

“You told me about your adventures more than once,” Tibor said. “I do not forget things, little master.”

“The point is that it happened in the battleground far downriver. Now we are in sight of him.”

“But although we have found him, he has not yet found you. And how can we free him, little master, if he, who is so powerful, cannot free himself? And how can you be certain that he is this mage? It seems to me that nothing is certain in this world, except the love of the Preservers.”

Pandaras sat down and massaged the stump of his left wrist. He said, “I suppose you still believe in them.”

“Who does not? Even the heretics cannot deny that the Preservers created the world and all its peoples.”

“I mean that you believe that they still have influence in this world. That it is worth praying to them.”

Tibor reflected on this, and said at last, “These days, most men who pray to the Preservers are in fact praying to their higher selves; prayer has become no more than a simple form of meditation. But I remember how it was when the avatar was still accessible within the shrine of the temple of which I was the hierodule. Ah, little master. You do not know how it was. You cannot imagine. Prayer was no solitary communion then, but a joyful conversation with a sublime and witty friend. But that is all lost now, all quite lost.”

There was a silence. Pandaras turned and saw with embarrassment that the hierodule was crying. He had forgotten that someone could take worship of the Preservers so seriously. The last of the avatars had been destroyed by the heretics long before he had been born; they were no more than a myth to him.

He pretended not to see Tibor’s tears and yawned elaborately and lay down, resting his head in the crook of his right arm and tucking the stump of his left wrist into his lap. He was still ashamed of the amputation and unconsciously tried to hide it whenever he could. “We’ll rest an hour or so,” he said. “I can feel in my muscles every league we walked today.”

After a while, Tibor said softly, as if to himself, “The Preservers created the world, and they created the ten thousand bloodlines. They made the different races of men into their image to a greater and lesser degree, but in their charity and love for their creations left them to find their own ways to enlightenment. For the Preservers knew that their children were capable of saving themselves, of becoming civilized and completing the gesture of creation by becoming like their own selves, as indeed many of the most enlightened bloodlines have since done. We have it in ourselves to be so much more than we are, but the heretics deny that. They want no more than to be what they already are, forever and ever.”

Pandaras thought sleepily of the armory where he had once worked for one of his uncles, of the cauldrons where metals were smelted. One of his tasks had been to skim dross from the surface of the molten metal using a long-handled wooden paddle. The paddle had been carved from a single piece of teak and was badly charred; you had to dip it in a wooden pail of water before each sweep, or else it would catch fire. It seemed to him now that this work had been the reverse of what happened in the world, where the good refined themselves out of existence, leaving only the dross behind.

He woke briefly and heard Tibor praying to the Eye of the Preservers, which had begun to sink back toward the far-side horizon. “Wake me an hour before dawn,” he said sleepily. “I’ll pick out a way for us then.” But he could not have slept long because when Tibor shook him awake the Eye still stood high in the black sky.

“There is fighting on the other side of the city,” Tibor said softly.

As Pandaras sat up there was a flash of intensely blue light, as if, leagues and leagues away, someone in the darkness of the jungle surrounding the city had opened a window into day. Groggy with sleep, he counted off the seconds. Four, five, six… There was a rumble like thunder and the rock trembled like a live animal, and then he was fully awake, for he knew what weapon it was. He jumped to his feet and said, “He’s found me again!”

“Your master? Then he has escaped the floating garden?”

A flock of red and green sparks shot across the city toward the place where the point of blue light had shone, but they tumbled from the sky and winked out before they could strike their target.

“The machines try and destroy him,” Pandaras said, “but he has some kind of magic which shuts them down. I’ve seen it before. He was not killed. Perhaps he cannot be killed. He followed me downriver and now he is looking for me in the other camps. He will be here soon. There! There! Oh mercy! He is coming for me!”

Another point of blue light flared in the jungle that circled the city’s basin, this time only a few leagues away. “Who? Who is it, little master? Is it your master?” The thunder was louder, and came less than two seconds after the flare of blue light.

The rock shuddered again and Pandaras sat down hard, trembling with fear. He knew now how he could reach the floating garden, but he wished with all his heart that it had not come to this. He looked up at Tibor and said, “Yama is close by, but this is not him. No, it is Prefect Corin, and if I want to see my master again I must let him find me.”