Shrine of Stars

Chapter Fifteen Three Sleeps and a Miracle

Pandaras and Yoi Sendar, leading the rest of the forest folk, found Yama soon after dawn. It was already hot. Threads of mist hung between the dense stands of bamboo which grew along the edge of the forest. Pandaras told Yama that he had set fire to the treasures which the Mighty People had kept in their huts, and this diversion had allowed them all to escape.

“But I had to kill someone, master, the man the Captain had shot. It was the only way to make his slaves come with me.”

“I think that the Mighty People will be more concerned about the loss of their treasure and their slaves,” Yama said. “They do not care for each other, only for what they own. But in any case they will not follow us here. The forest is taboo to them.”

“Well, I’m sorry I killed him,” Pandaras said, “even if he would have killed me if I hadn’t done it.”

“I fear that it will not be the last death,” Yama said. He went over to Yoi Sendar and greeted him. The chief of the forest folk bowed his head and said formally, “All we have, master, we give with open hands and open hearts.”

Yama raised his voice so that all the forest folk could hear him. “I want nothing but your friendship, Yoi Sendar.”

The small, ugly man did not look up. He said stubbornly, “We will gladly give all we have, but we cannot give what we do not have.”

“Perhaps I can change your mind,” Yama said. “It has been a long night. We will find a place to rest, and in the evening we will speak again.”

Although they had returned to their home amongst the tall trees of the forest, the bandar yoi inoie were muted and forlorn. They made no attempt to decorate themselves, and still wore their loincloths. They lay down in groups of three or four between the buttress roots of the big trees, talking quietly.

“I will watch you while you sleep, master,” Pandaras said.

“They will not harm us,” Yama said, although he was not really sure what would happen once he had freed the forest folk.

“I have caught the disease of mistrust,” Pandaras said. “Sleep, master. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

It was not exactly sleep, but more like a kind of swooning fall inside his own self. Yama had performed this miracle before, on the baby entrusted to him by the mirror people, although he had not known then exactly how he had done it. He had thought that the aspect of Angel had guided him, but he knew now that she had been drawn there because she had hoped to glimpse the root of his power.

Now he had to discover it for himself.

He fell deeper than any ordinary dream, plunging down as he had so often swum toward the bottom of the river as a child. Away from the sunlit mirror where kelp plants trailed their long green fronds, following the stipes which dwindled away into darkness, the muscles of his throat and chest aching and the need to draw another breath growing and growing until at last he had to turn back to the sunlight. He had never been able to reach the river bottom then, but now he felt that he could fall forever. And as he fell he became aware of finer and finer divisions of the world, of machines smaller than the single-celled plants which were the base of most river life. Those tiny plants were so small that they could only be seen when they stained the water red or brown in their uncountable billions, but the machines were smaller still: ten thousand of them could have been fitted on one of the motes of dust which had swarmed in the beam of sunlight which had illuminated the Aedile’s room when Yama had broken into it, on the morning of the siege of Dr. Dismas’s tower.

He had thought then that his adventures had just been beginning, but he knew now that they had begun long before he had been born.

He turned his attention to one of the minuscule machines, and it opened up around him like the stacks of books in the library of the peel-house. He half-expected to find Zakiel around a corner as he wandered through the serried rows, but it soon became clear that there was no thought here, only information. So much information, in so small a space! Zakiel had taught him that the information which encoded the form of his body could be contained in a speck of matter smaller than the least punctuation mark in a finely printed book. There was less information here than that, but it was still overwhelming. He took down a book at random. Its pages were covered with neat lines of zeroes and ones: a single long number, a single set of instructions. And there were thousands of books.

Yama remembered how Angel’s aspect had seemed to show him certain places inside the brain of the baby of the Mirror People; she had used him to find out where they were, but he had not known it then. Subtly altered, those places had become the nodes where the tiny machines could excyst and begin to amplify complexity into true consciousness, the change which was the miraculous gift of the Preservers, the miracle with which he had been entrusted.

He concentrated on recalling everything about that moment. What Angel’s aspect had said, subtly prompting and probing him. How he had felt, what he had seen, how he had acted without knowing he had acted. Without thought, he took down a book and ran his finger over the rows of zeroes and ones faster than he could see, changing them in a blur. Put the book back, pulled down another. Over and over until it was done.

He sat up inside a green tent, for a moment unsure if he were dreaming or awake. Pandaras had woven a kind of bower of fern leaves around him. He pushed the fronds aside. It was evening, the air hot and still, light deepening between the soaring trunks of the trees. The forest folk were moving about; they had lit several small fires and were roasting meat over them.

“I have found out where the temple is,” Pandaras said. “Yoi Sendar wouldn’t talk at first, but I told him that you would kill all of the Mighty People if he didn’t tell me. I made them go and get food, too. It isn’t like it was before. No singing, no joy. They are very afraid, I think because they do not understand what has happened to them.”

“That will change.”

“Here, master. Drink this.” It was a gourd half-full of foamy, sweet-smelling juice. Pandaras said, “There’s a kind of hollow vine which gushes water when you cut it. It’s good.”

Yama took the gourd, but did not drink. He said, “Give me your bit of stone,” and used it to slice open his palm. The stone was so sharp that the wound scarcely hurt, although it bled quickly and freely. Yama let blood patter from his fingertips into the gourd. Not much blood would be needed, but he counted off a full minute before he let Pandaras bandage the wound.

Then he called the forest folk together and had them each take a single sip from the gourd. There was just enough. Yoi Sendar swallowed the last of it and handed back the gourd without comment.

“Sleep, then do as you will,” Yama told them. “I cannot live your lives for you. You must discover how to do that yourselves. And when you have done that, remember this. You can free others as I have freed you. Let them drink a little of your blood mixed in wine or in water and they will be freed too.”

They did not understand him then, of course, but soon enough they would. He tried to explain it to Pandaras, but he was so very tired that he fell asleep halfway through the telling.

When he woke it was dawn. The forest folk were gone. Pandaras said he had not seen them leave, although he swore that he had stayed up all night, and said that they must have melted into the forest as mist melts into air. He pointed to a pile of rags, and added, “They left behind their loincloths. Maybe they’ll go back to the way they were before all this started.”

“No,” Yama said. “Now they will begin to be something else.”

“Like the baby of the mirror people? I remember how you made the fireflies dance around it.” Pandaras yawned. “There is a little fruit for breakfast. They ate all the meat last night, and I do not think you are the kind of man who can chew hide and hooves.”

“You are becoming too used to miracles,” Yama said, and smiled. The half-healed wounds in his face tugged against each other. For the first time he could allow himself to feel that this might soon be over. He could allow himself the luxury of hope. He told Pandaras chidingly, “Not only do you dismiss the miracle at once, but you do not bother to try and understand what it means.”

“If you changed them all, then it really was a miracle, master. You took a whole night over that baby.”

“I have machines in my blood and so do you. Everyone does. It is the greatest gift of the Preservers. The miracle was simply a matter of persuading them to do the work for me.”

Pandaras touched his throat. He had mended the fresh rents in his shirt, wrapped the stump of his left wrist in a bit of bright red silk, sleeked down his hair and strung a chain of yellow orchids around his neck. The coin hung at his chest like a brooch and he wore the fetish on his left arm. He looked like a jade about to embark on the long and complex wooing of a fair lady.

He said, “We are all filled with the breath of the Preservers, master. It’s well known. All except the indigens, of course, unless someone like you works a miracle.”

“No,” Yama said. “Everything in the world is touched by the breath of the Preservers, for everything comes from them. All I did was help the forest folk recognize what they already possessed. I have changed the machines in my blood so that they can infect all the indigenous peoples of the world. That was why I made the forest folk drink my blood. And in turn their blood will become active, and change any who drink it. I have freed them to be what they will. If they choose, they can free all the other troops of the forest folk which come here to find food for the Mighty People.”

The first rays of the sun had begun to shine through the understory of the high canopy of the forest. Pandaras pointed aslant the light. “I’m not sure if I understood all of that, master, but I would guess that our work here is done. Yoi Sendar said that the temple is a day’s walk in that direction. I’d guess it would take us twice as long, as we’re not used to the forest.”

They walked through the green silence of the forest for most of the day. They spoke very little, each absorbed in his own thoughts. For the first time since he had leaned at the window of the room above the stables of The Crossed Axes, the inn where he had met Pandaras, and looked out across the great city of Ys, Yama felt an immense peace. He was who he was, no more and no less; he gave himself to his fate as a leaf borne on the River may be carried the length of the inhabited world. The day was beautiful, and their walk enlarged and celebrated that beauty.

Toward evening, they stopped at the edge of a bluff which looked across the valley. The thorn-fenced villages of the Mighty People stood here and there amongst the network of ditches, canals and paths that webbed the grassland. Hills rose on the far side of the valley, with more hills behind them. The sun was setting beyond the Rim Mountains. Its light spread out as if it were trying to embrace the world.

Parasol trees grew in this part of the forest, the tapered columns of their trunks ringed by widespread green fronds. As light drained from the sky, the midribs of the fronds collapsed, folding against the trunks with a stealthy rustling and creaking, like so many dowagers arranging the underskirts of their gowns.

Yama and Pandaras lay down to sleep on layers of fern fronds the boy had woven together. He said that he had learned this trick during a stay with one of his uncles, who had been a basketmaker. “A squire must know a little of everything, I reckon,” he said, “so it’s as well I had such a large family.”

He had discovered a clump of water vines that scrambled around the trunk of one of the parasol trees, so that they had been able to quench their thirst, but he had not found anything to eat. “But we’ll reach the temple tomorrow, master. I’m certain of it, unless that gargoyle was lying to us.”

“He could not lie. At least, not then.”

Pandaras rubbed his hand over his face and yawned and said sleepily, “Did you really change them, master?”

“The machines changed them. In time I hope that they will change all the indigenous peoples.”

The mirror people and the husbandmen of the Palace of the Memory of the People. The fisherfolk of the Great River and all the tribes who lived in the wild parts of its shore, the forest folk and all the strange races of indigens the forest folk claimed to know, the horsemen of the high plains and the mountaineers and the rock wights, and many more. Yama tried to remember them all, and fell asleep, counting them still in his dreams.

In the morning, Yama and Pandaras woke to find fruit and fresh, juicy pea vine pods in a string bag hanging from a stick thrust into a cleft in the trunk of one of the parasol trees. They looked for a long time, but found no other sign of the forest folk.

“Remember what I told you!” Yama shouted into the trees. “Let others drink a little of your blood! Then they will be free too!”

The green silence of the forest swallowed his words. Yama and Pandaras walked all day along the edge of the ridge above the valley, at the margin of the forest. And at sunset, just as Pandaras had predicted, they came to the temple.