Shrine of Stars

Chapter One The Pyre

The two ill-matched men were working in a small clearing in the trees that grew along the edge of the shallow reach of water. The larger of the two was chopping steadily at the base of a young blue pine. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope and was quite hairless, with flabby, pinkish-gray skin and an ugly, vacant face as round as a cheese. The head of his axe had been blackened by fire; its handle was a length of stout pine branch shucked of its bark and held in the socket of the axe head with a ring of carefully whittled wedges. His companion was unhandily trimming branches from a pine bole, using an ivory-handled poniard. He was slender and sleek-headed, like a shipwrecked dandy in scuffed and muddy boots, black trousers and a ragged white shirt with an embroidered collar. A ceramic coin hung from his long supple neck by a doubled leather thong, and a circlet woven from coypu hair and studded with tiny black seed pearls was loose on his upper arm. Now and again he would stop his work and stare anxiously at the blue sky beyond the tree-clad shore.

The two men had already built a raft, which lay near the edge of the water. It was no more than a pentad of blue pine logs lashed together by a few pegged crosspieces and strips of marsh antelope hide, and topped by bundles of reeds. Now they were constructing a pyre, which stood half-completed in the center of the clearing. Each layer of cut and trimmed pine and sweetgum logs was set crosswise to the layer below, and dry reeds and caches of resinous pine cones were stuffed in every chink. The body of a third man lay nearby. It was covered with fresh pine boughs, and had attracted the attention of a great number of black and bronze flies. A fire of small branches and wood chips burned beyond, sending up white, aromatic smoke; strings of meat cut in long strips dangled in the smoke, curling as they dried.

All around was devastation. Swamp cedars, sweetgum trees and blue pines all leaned in the same direction. A few of the biggest trees had fallen and their upturned roots had pulled up wedges of the clayey soil. Nothing remained of the blue pines which had cloaked the ridge above but ash and smoldering stumps. Some way beyond the clearing where the two men worked was a wide, shallow basin of vitrified mud filled with ash-covered steaming water.

Except for the ringing of the axe, the land was silent, as if still shocked by the violence recently done there. On one side, beyond the island’s central ridge and a marshy creek, were the low black cliffs of the old river shore and a narrow plain of dry scrub that ran along the edge of the world; in the other, beyond the reach of shallow, still water, a marsh of yellow reeds stretched toward the edge of the Great River. It was noon, and very hot.

The slender man cut the last branch from the pine bole and straightened and looked up at the sky again. “I don’t see the need to trim logs which are only for burning,” he said. “Do you love work so much, Tibor, that you must always make more?”

“The pyre must go together neatly, little master,” Tibor said, fitting his words to the rhythmic blows of his axe. “It must not fall apart when it burns, and so the logs must be trimmed.”

“We should leave it and go,” the slender man said. “The flier might return at any moment. And call me Pandaras. I’m not anyone’s master.”

“Phalerus deserves a proper funeral. He was a good man. He always bought me cigarette makings wherever the Weazel put into port.”

“Tamora was a good friend,” Pandaras said sharply, “and I buried her burnt bones and the hilt of her sword under a stone. There’s no time for niceties. The flier might come back, and the sooner we start to search for my master, the better.”

“He might be dead too,” Tibor said, and stood back and gave the pine a hard kick above the gash he had cut around its trunk. The little tree leaned and Tibor kicked it again and it fell with a threshing of boughs and a crackling as the last measure of wood in the cut broke free.

“He’s alive,” Pandaras said, and touched the circlet on his arm. “He left the fetish behind so that I would know. He was led into an ambush by Eliphas, but he is alive. I think he entrusted me with his coin and his copy of the Puranas because he suspected that Eliphas might betray him, as Tamora so often said that he would. I swore when I found the fetish and I swear now that I will find him, even if I must follow him to the end of the river.”

Tibor took papers cut from corn husks and a few strands of coarse tobacco from a plastic pouch tucked into the waist of his trousers, and began to roll a cigarette. He said, “We should not have climbed down to the shrine, little master. I know about shrines, and that one had been warped to evil ends.”

“Eliphas lured my master there, if that’s what you mean. If we had not followed them, we would not have learned what happened. Fortunately, I was able to read the clues as any other man might read a story in a book. There was a fight in the shrine, and someone was hurt and ran away. Perhaps Eliphas tried to surprise Tamora from behind, and she managed to defend herself. She wounded him and chased him outside, and that was when she was killed, most likely by someone from the flier. Eliphas didn’t have an energy pistol, or he would have used it much earlier—there would have been no need to lead my master away from the ship into an ambush. But it was an energy pistol that killed poor Tamora, and melted the keelrock of the stair, and no doubt the same energy pistol was used to subdue Yama.”

While Pandaras talked, Tibor crossed to the fire and lit his cigarette with the burning end of a branch. He dropped the branch back into the fire and drew on his cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke. “We will find the Weazel,” he said, “and the Captain will help us find your master.”

“They are all dead, Tibor. You have to understand that.”

“We found no bodies except poor Phalerus’s,” Tibor said stubbornly. “And nothing at all of the ship, except the axe head.”

“A fire fierce enough to transmute mud to something like glass would have vaporized the ship like a grain of rice in a furnace. Phalerus was hunting in the marsh near the island, and he was caught in steam flash-heated by the blast of the flier’s light cannon. The others died at once and their bodies were burned up with the ship.”

Pandaras and Tibor had found Phalerus’s scalded body lying near an antelope he had shot. It was clear that the old sailor had not died immediately; he had put the shaft of an arbalest bolt between his teeth and nearly bitten it through in his agony. Pandaras remembered a story that one of his uncles had told him about an accident in a foundry. A man had slipped and fallen waist-deep in a vat of molten iron. The man’s workmates had been paralyzed by his terrible screams, but his father had grabbed a long-handled ladle and had pushed his son’s head beneath the glowing surface. Phalerus had died almost as badly, and he had died alone, with no one to ease his passing.

Tibor started to trim the larger branches from the pine he had felled. After a little while, he stopped and said, “The Captain is clever. She’s escaped pirates before, and that’s what happened here. The flier’s light cannon missed the Weazel, and she made a run for it. Maybe Phalerus was left behind, but the rest will be with the ship. The Captain won’t know your master has been taken, and maybe she’ll come back for him.” He ran a hand over the parallel scars that seamed his broad chest. He said, “I belong with the ship, little master.”

Pandaras swiped away the little black bees that had clustered at the corners of his eyes to drink his sweat. “I’m not your master,” he said. “We are traveling together, as free men. Eliphas betrayed my master and killed your shipmates, and I will kill him for that. I swear it. Eliphas claimed to know of a city hidden in the Glass Desert where others of my master’s bloodline lived, and so lured him all this way from Ys. Eliphas is a liar and a traitor, but all lies have some truth in them, and I think we’ll find the place where he has taken my master if we continue downriver. You will help me, and then you can set out on your own road.”

Pandaras did not want the responsibility of looking after Tibor, but he needed him because the hierodule knew how to survive in the wilderness. Pandaras had lived all his short life in Ys. He knew the city’s stone streets and its people; he knew words which, if whispered in the right place, could kill a man; he knew the rituals and meeting places of hundreds of cults, the monastery where anyone could beg waybread and beer at noon, the places where the magistrates and their machines never went, the places where they could always be found, the rhythm of the docks, the histories of a thousand temples, the secrets of a decad of trades. But the randomness of this wild shore confused and frightened him. It was tangled, impenetrable, alien to thought.

“I am a slave of all the world, little master.” Tibor drew on the stub of his cigarette, held his breath, and exhaled. “Nothing can change that. Ten thousand years ago my bloodline fought on the side of the feral machines, against the will of the Preservers. In the shame of our defeat we must serve the Preservers and their peoples for all our lives, and hope only that we will be redeemed at the end of time.”

“All men are servants of the Preservers,” Pandaras said. “They raised us up from animals, remember all who have ever lived, and will raise them from the dead in the last moment at the end of time and space. If you must be a servant, then serve my master, Yama. He is of the ancient race of the Builders, who made this world according to the will of the Preservers. In all the world, he is closer to them than any other man—the emissary from the holy city of Gond admitted as much. He is their avatar. I have seen him bend countless machines to his will. In Ys, on the roof of the Palace of the Memory of the People, he brought a baby of one of the indigenous people to self-awareness, and you saw how he drew up monstrous polyps from the bottom of the Great River to save us from Prefect Corin. He is a wise and holy man. He alone can end the war begun by the heretics; he alone can return the world to the path which will lead to redemption of all its peoples. So by helping me find him, you will serve all the world.”

“We will search for your master, and for my ship,” Tibor said. He drew a last puff from the stub of his cigarette and pinched it out and swallowed it. His long red tongue passed over his black lips. “But a ship is easier to find than a man. How will we find him, in all the long world?”

Pandaras showed Tibor the ceramic coin Yama had given him before following the traitor Eliphas into ambush. It held a faint spark in its center. Pandaras hoped that it meant that Yama was still alive, but no matter which way he turned the coin, the spark did not grow brighter or dimmer.

Tibor nodded. “I have heard of such things, young master, but never thought to see one.”

“It’s real,” Pandaras said. “Now work harder and talk less. I want to be gone from here as soon as possible.”

At last the pyre was finished. Pandaras and Tibor laid Phalerus’s body on top and covered it with a blanket of orange mallows and yellow irises. Tibor knew the funeral rituals by heart, and Pandaras followed his instructions, becoming for that short time the servant of a holy slave. They asperged the body with water and Tibor said prayers for the memory of the dead sailor before lighting the dry reeds he had woven through the lower layers of the pyre.

When it was burning well, with Phalerus’s body a shadow in the center of leaping yellow flames and white smoke bending like a banner toward the blackened ridge of the little island, Pandaras and Tibor clambered on to their raft and poled away from the devastated island with unseemly haste. It took them the rest of the day to thread a way through the stands of tall yellow reeds to the mudbanks and pioneer mangroves that lay beyond, along the margin of the shrinking river. When the water became too deep to use the pole, Tibor took up a leaf-shaped paddle he had carved from a scrap of wood.

Pandaras squatted at the raft’s blunt prow, Phalerus’s arbalest in his lap and his master’s pack between his feet. He was more afraid than he could let the hierodule know. Tibor said that the raft was stronger than it looked, that the strips of hide would shrink in the water and bind the logs ever tighter, but Pandaras thought it a flimsy craft. The idea of traveling the length of the Great River on it, like an emmet clinging to a flake of bark, filled him with dread, but he was certain that Yama had been carried away on the flier, and he loved his master so fiercely that he would follow him beyond the edge of the world. He had smeared every bit of his exposed pelt with black mud to protect himself from the biting flies and midges which danced in dense clouds over stumps and breather roots. He was a savage in a savage land. He would go naked, cover his body with strange swirling tattoos, drink blood from freshly killed animals until he was as strong as a storm, and then he would pull down the walls of the citadel where his master was held, rescue him, and kill the traitor who had taken him. His people would make songs about it until the end of time.

Such dreams sustained his small hope. Those, and the faint but unwavering spark trapped within the ceramic coin.

At last the raft rounded the point of a long arm of mangroves, and the wide river suddenly stretched before them, gleaming like a plain of gold in the light of the setting sun. There was so much light glittering up from the water that Pandaras could not see if it had an ending. He stood, suddenly filled with elation, and flung out an arm and pointed downriver, toward the war.