Shrine of Stars

Chapter Twenty-Five Derev

The ship found him five days later, filthy and half-starved, his hair and beard wild, his silvery cloak tattered. He was living in a tomb which had been stripped of its bronze doors and furniture by robbers a thousand years ago, spending most of his time in conversation with the aspect of the long-dead tax official whose body had been interred there.

The ship took him in, but he would not allow it to bathe him or heal his superficial wounds. His rage was spent. He was exhausted, but possessed by a grim, hopeless resolve.

“I cannot believe in anything,” Yama told the ship. “Not in the world, not in myself.”

“The world is as it is,” the ship said.

“But is it the world I know? Why should I set on the same path again if it is not? I knew what I had to do, but I turned aside.”

“Perhaps you were meant to turn aside.”

Yama hardly heard the ship. He was still engaged in the same bitter monologue for which the bewildered aspect had been an unwilling audience. He said, “I will never know what I could do. What I could be, what the world could be. I was not brave or strong enough and I turned aside. I failed. No matter, no matter. I know what I must do. It is the only thing left to do. If I cannot save the world, then I must save those I love.”

“When you have rested, master, perhaps you will allow me to take you there.”

“No. You must take me forward in time. You must take me into the future. I will save what I can. I do not mind that the heretics take the world if I can save those I love. The Aedile need not die for me, and I should not have to sacrifice my life with Derev—she has no part in this. Take me into the future, ship. I have decided.”

Fifteen days passed aboard the ship as it made its second loop at close to the speed of light, When it arrived at Aeolis, seventeen years in the future, Yama left it at once, before his resolve could falter.

It was spring, a warm spring night. Frogs peeped each to each with froggy ardor. The triple-armed wheel of the Galaxy stood waist-deep at the far-side horizon, salting the patchwork of flooded fields with its blue-white light.

Yama walked through the overgrown ruins of the ancient mortuaries beyond the walls of the little city of Aeolis, leaning on the staff at every other step. Spring, but was it the right spring? Was it still the same history, or had it turned down some other path? Who lived in the peel-house which lifted its turrets and towers against the Galaxy?

Every pass through the time-rifted shortcuts had caused the time-line of the Universe to branch. This was not the world he had come from, but an echo of an echo. Perhaps it was an almost exact echo, but it did not matter. It did not matter because the original still existed. He could do anything here and it would not matter because what had happened had already happened in the time-line from which he had come. By failing, he had freed himself from the wheel. He was free to rewrite history.

He had come here because he was going home. Thoughts whirled in his head like fireflies. Nothing was solid anymore. Anything could happen. Anything at all. This revelation filled him with a sudden great calm. No longer did he have to strive at the toiling wheel of history, like the oxen which plodded around and around at the wheel which lifted water from the Breas to irrigate the paeonin fields. He remembered the one true thing Dr. Dismas had said, that men were so closely bound to their fate that they could not see the world around them. As he had been, until now.

He had failed to set in motion the vast engines in the keelways. He had not even tried, but had turned away in sight of the curators’ tower. By his failure he had saved the world; saved it from himself. He could pass the burden to the boy. Tell him all. Let him go this time fully armed into the world, into his future. Let him restore the river. Let him imprison Angel in the space inside the shrines before she could interfere. Let him call down and enslave the feral machines, and then destroy the heretics.

He could defy the tremendous inertia of history. He could tell the boy where he came from and put an end to his foolish search for his parents. For he had no parents but his own self; he was a closed loop in time, with no beginning and no end, like Caphis’s tattoo of the snake which swallowed its own self, like the Great River which fell over the edge of the world and passed through the shortcut to its own beginning. Child of the River—how truly the wives of old Constable Thaw had named him! They had known the truth even then. It had taken him far longer to learn it. It had taken him all his life.

He hurried on, passing Dr. Dismas’s tower, which stood just outside the gate of the little city. Its windows were dark, but that signified nothing.

“What must be will be,” he muttered.

He walked along the embankments between flooded paeonin fields, crossed the Breas, and climbed a path which wound up a long, dusty slope between scattered tombs. The excavation was just where he remembered it, at the top of a rise of dead land coral at the edge of the City of the Dead. The guards and the workers were asleep; the lone watchdog was easily placated. Yama wept, embracing its armored shoulders and breathing its familiar odor of dog and warm plastic, remembering how often he had fooled its brothers and sisters into allowing him to pass, remembering his lost childhood.

He told the watchdog to return to its patrol and clambered down bamboo scaffolding into one of the trenches. He ran his hands up and down the exposed layers of land coral until what he was looking for woke under his fingers: a ceramic coin with dots and dashes of greenish light suddenly flickering within it. It took only a few minutes to free it from the crumbling matrix. He unwound the length of leather thong from a scaffold joint, made a loop around the coin, and hung it around his neck.

The boy would need it. He would show him how to use it.

“If I cannot save the world,” he said out loud, “at least I can save myself.”

Go directly to the peel-house? No. The guards would turn him away or kill him. He stole a package of pressed dates, a loaf of unleavened bread and a flask of sweet yellow wine, and retreated to one of the empty tombs nearby. He slept badly and was woken in the middle of the night by voices. He crept to the entrance of the tomb and peered through the canes of the roses which tangled across it.

Just offshore, a little way upriver of Aeolis, a dash of flame flickered; nearby, two men were talking about sabotage, about heretics.

“I’d kill ’em,” one said. “Kill ’em all and let the Preservers sort ’em out.”

“I would rather be here than hunting through the tombs,” the other said.

“The dead can’t do any harm. Haven’t you learned that yet? It’s the living you’ve got to watch for. The heretics might think to sneak up on the peel-house this way, while most of the lads are off looking for them amongst the tombs. That’s a worse danger than any aspect.”

Yama knew them by their voices. They were both boys not much older than he was; they had arrived at the peel-house late last year. He could tell them that the burning ship was Dr. Dismas’s first failed attempt at a diversion… but no, they would not believe him. They would drive him off, or worse. He clamped his hands over his mouth, shaking with suppressed laughter. The most powerful man in the world was afraid of two raw recruits.

The guards walked on, their boots crunching on dry shale; the distant fire died down. Yama went back to sleep, and woke to find sunlight spangling the green arbor of roses at the entrance of the tomb. The steam engine which powered the drill rig was working noisily, and Yama heard the plaintive worksong of the prisoners as they labored to widen the trenches.

How right they were, Yama thought. It was often said that uneducated men knew things about the world that could never be taught in seminaries or colleges, but in fact this naive wisdom could be learned by anyone who had eyes to see. The educated men who made such patronizing remarks had long ago stopped seeing the world as it was, saw it only as they had been taught it must be.

Yama hid in the tomb for most of the morning, horribly aware that the Aedile, his stepfather, must be somewhere close by, supervising the work. The urge to run up the slope and embrace him came and went like a fever. At its strongest, Yama clasped his knees to his chest and rocked to and fro, biting his lips until blood ran, smothering wild laughter.

“What must be will be. What must be.”

At last he could bear it no longer. He placated the watchdog and slipped away, scurrying downslope with a dread that the Aedile’s voice would ring out, commanding him to stop. If it did he would surely go mad.

He spent the rest of the day downriver of the little city and its silted bay, searching along the shore for the boy. He remembered that he had gone there to watch the picket boat which had brought Dr. Dismas back from Ys. The picket boat was standing off banyan shoals several leagues downriver of the bay (Enobarbus and Dr. Dismas would be on board—he could call upon machines and kill them both, but if he bent machines to his will he would reveal himself to Dr. Dismas’s paramour), but although he searched long and hard, he could not find the boy, and at last remembered that he would go and look at the boat the next day, after his adventure in the ruins.

It was night, now. He was walking through sword grass and scrubby creosote bushes beside the road to the mill at the point of the bay. The sun had set behind the Rim Mountains; the cold splendor of the Galaxy was rising above the river. Perhaps it was already too late. He howled in rage at the world, at the conspiracy against him, the relentless, implacable momentum of events. What must be will be…

He circled the city as quickly as he could, sweating through his filthy tunic and leggings as he gimped along, leaning on his staff at every other step, the tattered silvery cloak flapping around him. The ceramic coin burned at his chest.

“What must be will be. No. What will be.”

He felt like a puppet tugged here and there by invisible forces. Or a leaf, a poor dead husk of a leaf swept along on the river. Everything from now until his death bent toward fulfillment of what had already happened.

“What must be will be. What must be.”

He was on a path at the top of an embankment. Beyond the flooded fields, the peel-house stood atop the skull-shaped bluff which overlooked the Great River. Its towers pricked the blue-white curve of the Galaxy. He could go there and reconcile himself with the Aedile. He could go back in time and rescue Telmon. He could not save the world after all, but perhaps he could save all he loved. But first he must find the boy. That was the key.

He flung out his arms, raised his face to the black, empty sky, and screamed in defiance. “I will not serve!”

Hurrying now. He was late, but surely not too late. Not too late to save himself from himself. If this was still the same story, the boy would be with Derev and Ananda. But he had not gone back in time to tell Beatrice and Osric his story, so they would not have set Derev’s parents on the road to Aeolis, and so she would not be here… He had forgotten about Lud and Lob.

The twins ambushed him by a wayside shrine, where the embankment sloped down to the old road. They rose from their hiding place in a thicket of chayote vine, crashing through curtains of scarlet, hand-shaped leaves with hoarse whoops. They were just as he remembered them, big and flabbily muscular, wearing only simple white kilts.

Lud grinned, showing his tusks. “Ho, and who are you, stranger?”

“Maybe he’s with Dr. Dismas,” Lob said.

“This culler? He’s just a crazy.”

“Let me pass,” Yama said. He held the staff on guard, ready to brain them if they came too close.

Lud crossed his meaty arms over his bare chest. “You don’t go anywhere without paying. This is our town.”

Lob said uneasily, “Leave it. If he’s just a crazy he won’t have any gelt. We don’t have time.”

“This won’t take long.”

“Dismas will skin us alive if we fuck up again.”

“I’m not frightened of him.” Lud pointed at Yama. “What’s that around your neck, eh? You give it as a toll and maybe we let you pass.”

“It is not for you,” Yama said, half-angry, half-amused by their foolish presumption. “Let me pass!”

“We’ll need a toll,” Lud said. He advanced, grinning horribly, but danced back when Yama screamed and jabbed the metal-shod tip of the staff at his face.

Lob stooped and picked up a stone and said, “Ho, that’s how it is, eh?”

Yama was able to dodge the first stones they threw. He screamed and capered angrily, swinging his staff with careless abandon. They could not kill him. History was on his side. Then a stone smashed into his forehead. There was a moment of stunning pain, a white flash like the beginning of the Universe, and he realized that he might die here. If history was changed, then anything could happen.

He wiped blood from his eyes with his forearm and whirled his staff, driving the twins backward, but it was only a temporary victory. A stone struck his elbow and he nearly dropped the staff. Before he could recover, Lob and Lud roared, rushed at him from either side, and knocked him down. He surged up and struck Lob about the head, but Lud grabbed him from behind. He fell beneath Lud’s weight, and Lob snatched up the staff and made to break it.

And then the boy stepped onto the road, brandishing a slim trident. The sizar of Aeolis’s temple was behind him, his yellow robe glimmering in the half-light. Both looked very young and very scared.

“What is this, Lob?” the boy asked, and then Yama heard little more because Lud thrust his face into the dirt and cuffed him when he tried to struggle. Voices raised in anger, a howl that had to be Lob’s, for the weight left his back as Lud jumped up. He rolled over. Lob was on his knees, gasping for breath, and Lud was advancing on the boy, holding a crooked knife up by his face. The boy had the staff and was watching Lud carefully, and was taken by surprise when Lob grabbed at his legs from behind. He staggered and hammered at Lob’s back, but Lob dragged him down.

Yama tried to get to his feet. There were no machines near enough to help. No. This could not happen. He could not let them kill the boy.

And then the tree burst into flame and he thought his heart might explode with joy.

Derev was alive. She was here.

After Lud and Lob had been driven off, Yama had eyes only for Derev as she followed her shadow out of the brilliant light of the burning tree. She said something to the boy, her arms rising and falling gracefully. How beautiful she was!

The tree burned with fierce ardor, its trunk a shadow inside a roaring pillar of blue flame. Oceans of sparks swept high into the night, like stars playfully seized by the Preservers.

The yellow-robed sizar, Ananda, helped Yama sit up. He dabbed at his wounds, which were only superficial, and managed to stand. The boy held out the staff and Yama took it and bowed. It was a solemn, thrilling moment.

The boy did not recognize him, of course. He did not even see that Yama was of his bloodline. But Yama was suddenly frightened by the boy’s searching stare and he could not, dared not, speak. Once again he felt that he was at the cusp of a delicate balance—the slightest movement in any direction could cause disaster. Everything had changed in the moment the tree had caught fire. The tumble of crazy ideas about altering the course of history had fallen away. He had nothing left now but the truth.

Fearing that his voice might betray him, Yama used the sign language which the old guard, Coronetes, had taught him when he had been imprisoned in the stacks of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. Ananda caught the gist of it, even if he mangled the meaning.

I went crazy when I was searching for you, but now I know, he signed.

Ananda said, “He wants you to know that he has been searching for you,” and suggested that he might be a priest.

Yama shook his head, suppressing the urge to laugh, and signed again. How happy I am that all is as I remembered.

Ananda said uncertainly, “He says that he is glad that he remembered all this. I think he must mean that he will always remember this.”

Yama pulled the leather thong over his head and dangled the coin from his left hand while he signed with his right. Use this if you are to come here again, which Ananda badly scrambled on the first attempt, but got right on the second.

The whistles of the militia sounded, far off in the night. Yama thrust the coin into the boy’s hand, cast a last longing look at Derev, and turned and ran up the embankment, toward the mazed tombs of the City of the Dead.

He had not run very far when the ship overtook him. It had hidden itself in the deeps of the Great River, far from shore; now it dropped out of the night and hung just above the surface of a flooded paeonin field, tilted so that one wingtip touched the top of the embankment. Yama climbed aboard, and at once it rose high above the world.

“I saw her,” he told the ship, “and I will see her again. I must. What must be will be, despite ourselves.”

The ship’s aspect, the solemn little girl, clasped her hands beneath her chin as Yama explained what he wanted. Behind her, the glassy plain with its freight of statues receded into the starless dark. She said, “You are still not well, master.”

“No. Of course I am not well. I will never be well. I have seen too much. I have done too much. I think that I have been mad for a long time, but did not know it.” Yama felt the craziness again, his thoughts dividing and dividing, impossible to stop.

“The loop will be very short, master. I cannot guarantee its accuracy.”

Yama began to laugh and the laughter went on and on until he clamped his hands over his mouth because the laughter scared him. It bubbled through him. It might never stop. He choked it back and said, “Just do it.”

“I will do my best, master.” The ship was wounded. It had been built to take a pride in what it did.

“Take me there, ship. I know you will do it. What must be will be.”

Night, summer, the Eye of the Preservers a smudged bloody thumbprint high in the black sky. Dr. Dismas’s tower was a burnt-out ruin. Fragments of charred furniture were scattered outside its broken door. It was almost midnight, but the lights of the city of Aeolis burned brightly within its high wall.

Because of the summer heat, the citizens of Aeolis, the Amnan, slept in their cool seeps and wallows by day and began work at sunset. Sodium-vapor lights blazed in the streets and lamps shone in every window. The doors of workshops, chandlers and taverns were flung open. Crowds swirled up and down the long road at the top of the old waterfront, where tribesmen from the dry hills downriver of the city had set up their blanket stalls and vendors of fried waterweed and nuts cried their wares. A mountebank stood halfway up a folding ladder, declaiming the wonders of a patent elixir; an auction of bacts was under way by the gate where Yama entered, clad in his tattered silvery cloak and leaning on his staff.

Hardly anyone marked his passing. He was almost certainly a mendicant; although Aeolis was a poor city, it was often visited by mendicants because it had once been one of the most holy cities on Confluence. Yama made his way through the crowds of large, ill-made, blubbery men with hardly a comment or a glance.

The steel door of the godown owned by Derev’s father was open, guarded by a man with a carbine who gave Yama a hard look as he went past and walked around the corner to the family entrance.

The words which opened the door’s lock had not been changed—even if they had, Yama could have forced it to open in an instant. Calling Derev’s name, he went through the archway into a little courtyard where a fountain tiled with blue mosaic splashed. She would not be there. He knew that she would not be there, but there she was, floating down the spiral stair, her feathery white hair lifting around her pale face.

She stopped at a turn of the stair a little way above him. She wore a silk tabard the color of old ivory, and a long skirt of many layers of fine white gauzy stuff. She said, “Who let you in, dominie? I do not think my father has business with anyone this night.”

“You do not recognize me?”

Her large dark eyes searched his face. Then she said, “You are the anchorite whose life Yama saved. Why have you come back? How did you get in? Do you know something about Yama? Is he—”

“He is here, Derev.”

“Where? Is he hurt? Did something happen to him in Ys? Your face is so grave, dominie. O, do not tell me he is dead!”

Yama laughed. “My love, I am twice as alive as any other man in the world.”

Derev’s expression suddenly changed. She vaulted the rail of the stair and floated down into his arms. Her height, her heat, her fierce gaze searching his. The staff fell with a clatter, unnoticed, as they took each other into their arms.

“You,” she said, leaning down into Yama’s embrace. “I knew it was you, but I did not let myself believe it.”

“You must believe it now, Derev. We have only a little time here.”

She drew away from him, still holding his hands. “But you are hurt.”

For a moment, Yama did not know what she meant; he had let the ship tend to the small cuts and bruises inflicted during the fight with Lud and Lob. Then he touched the ridges of scarred skin on the left side of his face and said, “These are old wounds.”

“I did not mean those,” she said. And then, “Yama. Yama!”

At first, she tried to hold him up. Then she eased him to the ground, and went to fetch her father.

It was almost dawn by the time Yama had recovered enough to be able to tell something of his story. He was bathed and perfumed, his hair and beard combed and trimmed. He was dressed in a clean shirt and trews, and had been fed with a salty beef broth and sweet fried shrimp. He sat with Derev and her mother and father, Calev and Carenon, in the roof garden of the godown. He told them of how he had escaped Prefect Corin at Ys and boarded a ship which had taken him downriver toward the war, of how he had been infected by Dr. Dismas and forced to fight on the side of the heretics, of how he had fallen beyond the edge of the world and traveled back in time through a shortcut.

He left much out. The friendship of Pandaras and brave, foolish Tamora, and all their adventures in Ys and the Palace of the Memory of the People; the miracle he had been allowed to perform; the destruction of Dr. Dismas’s paramour in the Glass Desert; his adventures on the great ship with the last of his people. There was not enough time for that now.

“There is not enough time,” he said, “because Aeolis will soon be attacked. I do not know exactly when, but certainly by tomorrow night.”

Derev’s father, Carenon, said, “We are still a long way from the heretics, I think. If an army or fleet is bent upon us, there would have been warnings, surely.”

“It will not be attacked by heretics, but by a warship out of Ys, a warship commanded by someone who wishes to do me harm.”

“Then we must prevent it. We will warn the Aedile, to begin with.” Carenon stood, very tall and very thin in his black jacket and leggings. For a moment it seemed that he would raise his arms and leap into the sky. He said, “I will take you to the peel-house at once, Yamamanama.”

“No,” Yama said. “No, you will not.”

Calev said, “How many will die, Yamamanama, when this warship comes?”

“The city will be destroyed. Many will escape and flee to the far side. I do not know how many will not.”

Carenon said, “And you will allow no warning of this?”

Yama bowed his head. All his dead. The thousands he had killed while under the spell of Dr. Dismas. Dr. Dismas himself, and Prefect Corin. The crew of the Weazel. The soldiers who had captured him in the City of the Dead, and their mage. The regulator, and the last of his bloodline in the deep past. Tamora. And in only a few days his stepfather would die of shame and exhaustion on the far side of the river, after he failed to prevent the sacking of Aeolis.

Derev took his hand in hers and said, “Don’t you see that he would save them if he could?”

Yama said, “I thought so long on this that it drove me mad. If I could I would save them all, friends and enemies alike. But then who else might die? And all those I tried to save might still die…”

The silence that followed was punctuated by the distant ringing of signal bells; fishing boats were turning into the channel toward the end of the New Quay, where they would tie up and unload their catches. It was almost dawn. The city was shutting down, getting ready for the long, hot, lazy day.

At last, Carenon said, “I will warn my workers, at least. If I know, then they deserve to know too.”

“No,” Yama said. “They have families here. They will want to take them, and the news will spread until all the city will know. It does not end. Do one thing and it branches and branches until you are far from where you began. No. What will happen must happen.”

Carenon gave him a sharp, troubled look. “Where did you hear that?”

“He knows about Beatrice and Osric,” Derev said.

“I can take you away from here,” Yama told Carenon. “You can come with me into the past, for that is where I must go.”

Derev said, “Where we must go, I think.”

His love for her returned in all its fierce wildness, and for a moment he thought that he might faint again. Calev said with grave astonishment , “Then you are—”

“We did not know,” her husband said. “I suppose it was for the best that we did not know, but it would have helped us. I hoped that you and Derev might make a match, Yamamanama, and perhaps things would not be as hard as has been foretold.” He laughed and said, “What a fool I have been!”

“You always knew it would be a hard road when we came here,” Calev said. “But you came here anyway.”

Yama had never paid much attention to Derev’s parents. They had always been formal and reserved, for all that they had encouraged Derev in her trysts with him. He had thought that it was because of his position. He had been the son of a high official of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, even if he had been an adopted son. Derev’s father had been mocked in the city for being ambitious and grasping, for pushing his daughter into a relationship that would bring him greater profit and power. Yama saw now that Carenon and Calev were no more than ordinary people who had taken up an extraordinary burden; that they were willing to sacrifice their daughter to help save the world.

He said again, “I can save you. I know that you will flee the city before the attack. I can take you to the safest place of all, into the past.”

Carenon ran his fingers over the leaves of one of the geraniums that grew along the edge of the roof garden, releasing a sweet dusky scent into the air. His fine white hair lifted in the breeze that had sprung up from the river. It was growing warmer. Light touched the rim of the sky.

Carenon said, “No, we will stay. I mean, we will flee the city, but we stay in this time. We built up one fortune, and we can take a little of that with us. Perhaps we can build another before the world ends. How long, before that happens?”

Yama lowered his head. He was ashamed and frightened. He had still to face that failure. He said, “I do not know.”

Carenon said, “But surely the end of the world is already set in motion. The Great River fails steadily, although the Aedile has calculated that it will not run dry for many years. If the end comes before then, we might live to see the new worlds we were promised.”

“Don’t you see?” Derev said. “Everything must happen so that he can come here again.”

Yama said quietly, “Besides, I have not yet done it.”

Derev said, “But the river is failing. And Beatrice said—”

“The first part, diverting the end of the river into the future, was easy. But I failed at the second part. I thought instead that I could change things, and find a new way…”

Derev smiled. “And destroy the heretics? You always wanted to fight them, Yama, never more so than after Telmon died. Yet if you destroy the heretics, then you would only promote the cause of the Committee for Public Safety, and I know that you could not allow that.”

Yama nodded. “They destroyed my father.”

Carenon nodded. “A disgrace, the way they exiled so many loyal to the Department.”

“I mean that they will. It is one of the Committee for Public Safety who will set fire to the city, and it will be the end of my father.”

“They would be worse than the heretics,” Derev said.

“It has happened before,” Yama said. “A tyranny may conquer every one of its enemies, but will ultimately destroy itself from the inside. The wheel turns, and all is renewed.”

Derev said, “And is that what you want? That the world can go on forever and ever without change?”

“No. That is not possible. I was allowed to perform a miracle, Derev. The indigenous peoples will become like us. They will gain self-awareness and at last achieve enlightenment. That is no small thing. If that was all I could do, then I could be content.”

“But it is not.”

“No. No, it is not. I was going to tell the boy, my younger self. Tell him everything and let him decide what to do. But that would do no more than pass the burden to another. And so I turned aside, and came here.”

Derev said, “I cannot decide for you.”

“I would not ask you to. Besides, I have already decided.”

Carenon said, “I suppose that if we tried to stop you, or if I tried to tell my poor workers their fate, you would have the power to prevent it.” Behind him, far beyond the shadowy hills of the vast necropolis, the first rays of the sun touched the peaks of the Rim Mountains.

Yama said, “I will not force any of you, but I hope that you will help me.”

Early one winter one of the goats was taken by a leopard. It was the piebald nanny which in her short life had given birth to six fine healthy kids, and only one of them a billy. The winter looked to be a hard one. It had been raining for more than a decad, which was why Beatrice had not yet moved the goats from the thorn scrub pasture to their winter quarters, and perhaps the rain had driven the leopard from its usual range in the spruce forests in the mountains. Beatrice found its pugmarks by the swift stream at the edge of the pasture, but no trace of the goat, not so much as a drop of blood. She told Osric the news and said there was no helping it, and then added, “Why are you weeping, husband? It was only a goat.”

“It is the sign.”

Beatrice took off her wet oilskin and hung it on the hook by the kitchen door. The end of her long, feathery white hair had got wet. She wrapped it around her strong, capable hands and squeezed water from it onto the stone floor. She said, “It is a sign that means more winter fodder for the other goats, and less milk for us next spring.”

“It will begin soon. He will come to us…”

Beatrice gave him a sharp look. “The boy.”

“Next spring.”

“We won’t see Derev until then, that’s certain. She won’t want to make her way from Aeolis to the keelroad head in weather like this. And I will not risk sending out any doves in this weather, either. But never mind, there’s plenty of time to tell her what she must do. Husband, what is it now?”

Osric was troubled, teary and weak. So often these days his mind seemed to catch on unimportant things. He would find himself in the middle of one of the little stone-walled gardens on top of the tower and not know whether he had come to harvest or water or weed. He said, “What will I tell him, wife?”

“I’m sure you’ll remember when the time comes. That’s how it is, isn’t it? What must be will be.”

Osric watched his wife putter about the kitchen. She built up the fire which he had forgotten to tend while she was out in the cold rain rounding up the surviving goats. Wind hunted at the slit windows. A loose shutter banged. The left side of his face ached, as it always did in cold wet weather. But they were snug here, with plenty of canned and pickled vegetables, and sacks of dry beans and wild rice for which they had traded goat’s-milk cheese with the local tribe of mountaineers. They would sleep in the niches on either side of the stone fireplace. And in spring…

Osric began to weep again, choking with frustration. He was too weak, too old, and too confused. He was older than Bryn, and Bryn had considered himself very old. He slept more than half the day, and could not work for more than an hour without having to rest for twice as long. He could not remember exactly what would happen, but he knew that it was so very important that he must try and recall every detail. He must tell the boy enough, but not too much.

Beatrice noticed her husband’s distress and made him a beaker of chamomile tea. “Well,” she said, “as the fox said when he first saw the grapes, what are we going to do about it?”

“I suppose I must try and remember everything. I will tell the story again. I will tell it and you will write it down, wife.”

“And I suppose that is more important than the half hundred things I must do before winter really comes.”

“It is more important than anything in the world.”

Beatrice warmed her hands at the fire, thinking about it. At last, she said, “We will do it a little at a time. An hour or two a day. We’re old, husband, and we don’t want to tire ourselves out.”

Osric stroked her long white hair. She leaned into his attention, like a cat. He said, “I have to live until spring, at least.”

“Longer than that, I hope. Well, where should we begin?”

Osric thought hard. He said, “I suppose the proper place might be when Dr. Dismas came back to Aeolis from Ys. That is how it really began. But any place is as good as any other. It is all a circle, like the river.”

“As the river was, but is no more. Not for… ach, I always get confused over the ins and outs of it all.”

“The point is that it does not matter where it begins, or where it ends.”

“Of course it matters. Beginnings are as important as endings, and it’s just the same the other way around. I think we had better write it all down, or we will begin at the end or somewhere in the middle, and never get ourselves straight.”

“Perhaps that is the place to begin. The middle, I mean. Most people would start with the child and the dead woman in the white boat on the Great River. But I think it should begin with the goat, and how the boy will be brought here.”

“I can see that I will have to find pen and paper straightaway,” Beatrice said. “Think about what you want to say while I go and look.”

It took most of the winter to tell the tale, until at last they reached the point where Yama had returned home for the last time, and where their own story, the story of the two of them, husband and wife, had really begun.

“Do you remember,” Beatrice said fondly, “do you remember how shocked Father Quine was, when we burst in like that at dawn, waking him and Ananda and demanding that we be married at once?”

Osric smiled. “Ananda knew. He knew right away who I was.”

Carenon told Father Quine that the marriage would take place at gunpoint if it had to, but Father Quine assured him that his threats were not necessary. All the while, the young sizar, Ananda, stared at Yama until he could contain his amazement no longer, and plunged into a breathless series of questions.

“Why have you returned? Did you go to Ys? What happened there? Did you run away from Prefect Corin? Did he do that to your face?”

And so on, until Yama burst into laughter. “I came back because something both wonderful and terrible happened,” he said. “You will understood soon enough, Ananda. I wish I could tell you everything, but there is no time.”

“But you did go to Ys.”

“Yes. Yes, I did. And after many adventures I am back, but only for a little while, and in secret. The Aedile must not know. No one must know but the people in this room.”

Ananda smiled. “Well, I am glad to see you again.”

Father Quine cleared his throat, and Ananda bit back his next question. “I think you should fetch the oil,” the priest told his sizar.

It did not take long; it was, after all, a metic marriage, the ceremony more in the nature of a blessing than a service. Afterward, Father Quine broke open a cruse of wine, and as they all sat around the kitchen table in the priest’s house, Ananda dug out a little more of Yama’s story. He was convinced that Yama had come straight back from Ys, and Yama did not disabuse him. There was not enough time.

“I will not see you again,” Ananda said at last, ending an uncomfortable pause.

“I do not think so. You will stay in the temple.” Yama meant that Father Quine and Ananda would be placed under house arrest when Prefect Corin came. The temple would be left standing when Aeolis was razed because it belonged to the Department. But he could not tell Ananda any of that.

“O yes,” Ananda said quietly. “And become priest after Quine.” He looked sideways at the priest, who was talking with Derev and her parents. He bent closer to Yama and added in a whisper, “Not that the dry old stick looks like withering away in my lifetime. I’ll be a hundred years sweeping out the naos and polishing the shrine while you and Derev are off adventuring. At least, that’s what you will be doing, I suppose.”

“We will make a home together,” Yama said, “with a little garden, and goats and doves. But not quite yet, I think. I am glad we met again, Ananda. I did not like the way we parted.”

“I had not attended an execution before,” Ananda said. “I was sick afterward. Quine was furious. Because I was sick, and because he knew then that I had broken the fast.”

“Pistachios,” Yama said, remembering that day.

Ananda grinned. “I have not eaten them since. Now, have some more wine.”

“It is time we said a prayer, I think,” Yama said. He drew Derev aside and told her to make her farewells to her parents.

They went together as man and wife before the shrine where so often as a child Yama had helped the Aedile perform the long and meaningless rituals which were part of the duties of his office, and where the aspect of Angel had first found him, so badly frightening the Aedile that he had damaged the shrine’s mechanism.

But it still functioned as a shortcut mouth. Yama and Derev stepped through to a place far away, a bubble hung above a vast chamber deep in the keelways. The chamber was hundreds of leagues long. Machines as big as cities crouched on its floor. Lights came on around the rim of the bubble; lighted windows opened in the air. Some showed views of similar chambers, one for each section of the world.

A voice spoke out of the air and welcomed Yama, and asked him what he wished to do.

And so the end of the world was set in motion.

Afterward, Yama called down the ship and it took them out in a loop that compressed forty years into a few days, so that they could glimpse the end of the world before plunging down a shortcut into the deep past. They emerged around one of the stars mentioned by the Gatekeeper when Yama had first returned to Confluence, a star which had moved closer to the star of Confluence after the Preservers had quit the Galaxy.

One of the worlds which orbited the star had been reshaped into something like the world which had been the cradle of the race which had, over millions of years, changed the orbit of every star of the Galaxy and become at last the Preservers. There were many such worlds, the ship told them; it was possible that one of them might even be the true, ancient Earth which Angel’s crewmates had left Confluence to search for. But Yama and Derev were content to explore the world they had, and afterward returned to Confluence, arriving fifty years before Yama cast his own self upon the waters of the Great River.

They found the tower at the far edge of the City of the Dead, in the foothills of the Rim Mountains. It was abandoned and open to the weather, and they spent some time restoring it before tracking Derev’s grandparents to a small town several hundred leagues downriver of Aeolis. They took new names from an ancient poem Derev loved. Her grandparents refused to take up the burdens of the Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead; their parents had given up their family’s traditional service because there was no longer any need for it, and they would not be persuaded to see a need for it now. But they had a son, ambitious and restless, and he remembered the story Beatrice and Osric told his parents. After they died, more than twenty years later, he sent a message to the new curators of the City of the Dead, saying that he would move to Aeolis if they could help him establish his business there.

“And a few years later he married, and a few years after that I was born,” Beatrice said. “Unless you want to put in the business about the goat, I think you are done, for nothing has happened to us since.”

“Perhaps I should say more about the end of the world,” Osric said.

“It will happen soon enough, and there will be enough stories about it, too. At least one for every world the great ships will settle.” Beatrice set aside the sheaf of paper and went to the window and opened the shutter a little and looked out. “It is still raining, but it looks like it might end soon. A long, cold, wet winter it has been, but at least we found something to fill it, eh, husband?”

“It is not very satisfactory as a tale. There are too many repetitions, and too many words wasted on adventures anyone could have had, or on diversions which led to nothing in particular.”

“Well, that’s how it always is with life. Cut short too soon, with too many loose ends.”

“I wonder about the Ancients of Days. Will they ever find Old Earth? And what about poor Dreen, the Commissioner of Sensch, who went with them?”

“There are many Earths,” Beatrice said. “No doubt they will find one to their liking, but people might already be living there. The Ancients of Days went the long way, remember. They are still traveling on it, and will not arrive anywhere for at least a hundred and fifty thousand years. Everyone else will fall through the shortcuts. Their descendants will be scattered across the Galaxy long before the Ancients of Days arrive.”

“Yes,” Osric said. “The Preservers abandoned the Galaxy and then the Universe, but the ten thousand bloodlines will inherit it. There will be room for everyone, even the heretics. There might be wars more terrible than the war I thought to end, but I do not think the heretics will survive for long. Their philosophy has been defeated before; it will be defeated again.”

“And the indigenous peoples. Do not forget them, husband. You always said that they were the hope that things would be different.”

“They are different. They are not marked by the Preservers. I wonder if that is what the Preservers wanted. We are the servants of the Preservers, but perhaps the indigenous peoples are their true heirs. Perhaps they will triumph over those from whom the Preservers fled. Or perhaps, by the working of some strange plan, they will become the Preservers’ nemesis.”

“We cannot know what the Preservers wanted,” Beatrice said. “But we can wonder about them. I wonder about the bloodlines who became enlightened too. About all those so holy that they vanished from the world. Perhaps they found a way through the event horizon of the Eye, and followed the Preservers to their new universe. We did not explore everything the shrines could do.”

“Most likely they became so holy that they simply died out, like the people of Gond. But what is the use of speculating on things we cannot know? We cannot know about the fate of the Preservers because they fled the Universe so completely that nothing can return from them, not even light. You will waste your life, husband, thinking on questions which have no answers because they could have any answer.”

“And there is the ghost ship,” Osric said stubbornly. “I had thought that it would be me who would help save the boy when he escaped Enobarbus and Dr. Dismas. That I would invoke the vision of the ghost ship which stopped them from chasing the boy after he jumped overboard. But I forgot. I went directly to you. Perhaps the boy will not escape Dr. Dismas and Enobarbus, wife, and so will not come here. This may be a different time-line.”

Beatrice was putting on her yellow oilskin. She said, “Every story must have a mystery, husband. No one likes a story in which everything is explained. How could you explain why people do the things they do, for instance? Now, I am going to see to the goats. Will you be all right while I am gone? Will you watch the fire?”

“Yes, of course,” Osric said, as she went out.

But he was thinking of the ghost ship, and the way it had dissolved into a bank of fog which had hid him from the pinnace commanded by Enobarbus after he had escaped from it. The ghost ship had surely been an illusion conjured by a machine, for he had seen a machine rising out of the fog. But who had commanded the machine? Perhaps it had been his first miracle, and he had not known it. Or perhaps the machines he believed to be his to command had been working for some other power’s subtle plan, of which he was but a part. But it did not do to think of these things. If anything was possible, then everything was possible. No. What will be must be. He had made that the core of his life when he had chosen to find Derev, and had closed his part of the tale by beginning the end of the world.

He remembered seeing how it would end. They had gone there after he had woken the great engines in the keelways. The ship had hung high above the long plane of the world and they had watched as it broke apart. At the beginning of his adventures, he had seen a picture slate which had shown one of his bloodline at the time of the construction of Confluence (he would have to find that slate, Osric thought). Behind the man had been a hundred shining splinters hung against a starry sky, but he had not realized then what they were: the elements of the world, the great ships which the Builders had joined together in the first act of the creation of the world.

He had reversed the process. He had saved the world and its people by destroying it. The Great River had failed; the engines in the keelways had been woken from their long slumber and had slowly resumed their functions. It took forty years. And then the shrines woke and warned the peoples of the world, telling them what would happen, and where they could find shelter. And less than a year later the world broke apart into its original sections, and those sections fell in different directions across the sky toward the expanding throats of the shortcuts: a field of blue rings flowering in the empty blackness of space and a cloud of splinters shining in the light of the lonely star.

How many had died, in the last days of Confluence? There had been terrible famines when the river had finally run dry, and earthquakes had thrown all of the cities into ruin. Certainly almost all of the heretics had died, for they had silenced most of the shrines in the cities they had captured, and so had no warning of the world’s end. But many others had died, too, and many more would die when the great ships reached their destinations, and the reoccupation of the Galaxy began.

But many more would live, and prosper, and multiply. He dozed a little, and woke, and remembered that after the boy came they would have to think of Pandaras. The boy would find Pandaras in Ys (or had it been the other way around?) and take him on his adventures, and Pandaras’s own story would begin when the boy’s ended. Although he had been charged with changing all the indigenous peoples of Confluence, Pandaras would not stop searching for his master. He would return at last to Ys, the place he loved most and knew best. They would track him down by the coin he carried, and explain how his master’s story had ended. He must remember to tell Beatrice, Osric thought, and fell asleep again.

The door banged open and Beatrice came in, shaking water from her long hair. Osric stirred. “Look,” she said. “See what I found.”

It was a bunch of violets. She found a bowl and set them in it. Their sweet scent slowly filled the kitchen, promising the end of winter and the beginning of spring.

Soon the story would be over, and they could leave. They would find Pandaras, and call down the ship. They would embark for the last time. Where would they go? To the deep past, or to the deep future? All of history stood before him like a book. He could open it at any page.

He would have to think hard about it. Spring had only just begun, but soon Derev would find the boy in the ancient tomb in the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead, and bring him here. And the story would begin again, and in its beginning would be its end.