Collected short fiction, p.849
Collected Short Fiction, page 849
29.
On the night of Crail’s final dinner, Krel came late, brushed past the butler, and handed him a scrap of yellow paper. Crail rose to scan it, lost color, and sank back into his chair. An uneasy hush filled the room until he stood again.
“Intelligence report.” He read broken phrases as he squinted at them, the paper quivering in his fingers. “Delayed for confirmation. . . . Now verified. . . . Blood rot. . . . Deadly contagion. . . . Cause unknown.”
The room was dazed. I heard gasps, whispers, curses. Anxious voices lifted and jangled. Crail’s wife rushed out of the room, her napkin over her face. Another woman shrieked and fell to the floor. A constabulary captain tossed a glass of liquor into his throat and gagged on it. Most of the meal was left uneaten. Guests pushed their plate away, made quick farewells, scattered to their fates. The guards hustled me back to our room.
Shut up there with Kenleth, I listened and watched from the windows as Periclaw died. The maids still brought our meals and told us what they knew. The infection began on a delta island. Krel believed the rebels had brought it out of the jungle as a weapon of war. More likely, the admiral thought, death had drifted down Black River on the vulture-picked skeletons in a native dugout the tides left on a delta beach.
The house grew strangely silent. The Crails had left the city for refuge in their summer home in the hills, taking most of their servants and a small army of licensed guards. My own guards were still on duty, never speaking to us but watching me as warily as if I had the infection.
The contagion struck hard and fast. Retreating from the delta, constabulary forces brought it back to Blood Hill. It spread from there into the city, panic with it. People fled when they could. We saw craft of every sort carrying refugees upstream. The infection went with them.
We heard an ocean liner whistle and watched tugs pull it out from the commercial docks. It steamed down the channel almost to the Sheko tower, listed, and went down. Refugees had bid fortunes for places aboard, the maids told us. The council ordered it scuttled, hoping to save Norlan from the plague.
With city water cut off, the fire set at the military docks had never been controlled. The smoke of it gave the air a biting taint even in the room, and became so thick outside that it hid the river. One night a high wind carried glowing embers past our windows. Kenleth crouched against me, quivering.
“Will it burn the house?” he whispered. “And us inside?”
“We can hope for luck,” I told him. “Back on Earth we used to play a game called poker. We always trusted luck.”
He knelt by the bed to murmur a prayer to Anak.
“My mother believed,” he told me. “She said he has no color. He can be black or white. He loves us all, when we love each other.” He made a grimace. “Ty Hake laughed at her. If he had a god, he said, he wouldn’t be black.”
Our luck came with the monsoon rains. They began that night with blinding lightning and crashing hail. That sudden downpour quenched the flames and washed the city clean. Half of it had escaped destruction. The smoke was gone, roof tiles clean and bright, the streets and the river empty, no traffic anywhere.
That day the maids never came. No wagons or rickshaws moved on the streets, no craft on the water. The stillness chilled me. I’d sensed the pulse of the city in the murmur of mingled far-off voices, the muffled rumble of toil, all the echoes of unseen life. Now the breathless silence became its dying scream.
Late that night the lock clicked on the inside door. Nobody entered. The room was pitch-black. We had a snuffed-out candle, but no way to light it. I lay there in the dark, listening to Kenleth’s quiet breathing, till daylight came at last and I got up to try the door.
It opened. The guards were gone. We dressed and went down the stair and through the silent house. An aged, crippled cook was still at his duty in the kitchen, perhaps out of loyalty to the Crails, perhaps merely unable to leave. Limping about the stove, he was making breakfast for Ram and Celya Crail.
We found them sitting at the table, eating a ripe papaya. Ram was in mud-stained constabulary fatigues, blood dried black around a bruise on the side of his chin. Even by day, the crown of worlds still shone with a golden glow. Celya wore the same yellow fatigues, tattered and stained with blood, a red band around her close-cut hair. Her face looked thin and pale but lovelier, I thought, than ever.
Ram shouted when he saw us, and came grinning to meet us.
“Will?” He scanned my face. “Are you okay?”
“So far,” I told him. “We’ve been shut up alone. I’m not sure I’ve been exposed.”
“You will be,” he said. “It’s everywhere. Lethal to whites, but I think you have a chance. If Lupe was right, it’s a geologic age since our own forefathers got back to Earth. We re all the same race, but our immunities may be different.”
“I hope.”
I gripped his hand and looked at Celya. She was still at the table, staring as if we were strangers. I moved to greet her. She drew back, shaking her head.
“Keep away.” Her voice was a raspy whisper. “If you’re afraid.”
I turned to Ram. He nodded silently. I found nothing good to say. She was white, and the pathogen was striking everywhere. I went on to offer her my hand. She rose to put her arms around me. I felt her slender body trembling, felt a silent sob. Yet she managed a wan little smile and kissed my cheek. Ram nodded at the table and she called the cook to take our orders.
The papayas were fresh and delicious. The bacon and eggs might almost have come from the Wagon Wheel, back in Portales. The meal was half over before we felt ready for talk of anything else.
“While it lasted, we had a golden time.” Ram spoke slowly, with a bitter little smile for Celya. “We were in love. The crown of worlds was magic, and triumph in sight. The constabulary blacks were burning off their tattoo numbers, ready to follow us out of hell. We dreamed of freedom, peace, even the chance to start rebuilding something like the Grand Dominion must have been. But then—”
He gulped and slid his arm around her.
The cook had brought us huge mugs of bitter black corath tea. They smiled into each other’s eyes and clicked the mugs together before Ram turned back to me.
“An old friend brought us back. White Water, the river pilot. Remember his complexion? All his life he managed to pass without a license, but the genes from his black grandma saved him. He has a neat little steam launch. The owners hired him to take them upriver. The boat fell to him when they died.”
When we had finished eating, Celya showed us the house. Her own room was almost as museum, the high walls hung with collected artifacts. Mats and hats and baskets, knives and pots and fishing spears, prayer sticks and divining rods, counting cords and funeral masks, tiny images of Anak and Sheko carved from jet and alabaster.
“The black culture.” She gestured at the walls. “It’s richer than you’d think. Ritualistic and well diversified. There are scores of cults to the divinities and mythic human heroes. I was trying to understand them, preserve what I could.”
For a moment she seemed forlorn, but she smiled at Ram when he put his arm around her.
He nodded at a library table. “We’ve something to show you.”
I saw the ancient laptop he had brought back from the place of the Elders.
“From Derek and Lupe?”
He shook his head. “Something else.”
Celya lifted the screen and turned it to let us see.
“Krel seized it,” he said. “He gave it to the museum when it baffled his experts. Celya had it here at home when I got to know her.”
She tapped keys to open pages of hieroglyphs.
“The text is still a riddle, but she’s found an interesting map.”
She touched the keys again, to show the prelude we had seen before: black space and new constellations, the rocket pioneers and a strangely tipped Milky Way, the fine green lines I thought must have been spaceways, the solar system and its planets. He stopped her on Africa.
“Notice the coastlines. That’s the way they were when Homo sapiens got back from the Grand Dominion, two hundred thousand years ago. The oceans are lower. It must have been an ice age. A lot of water frozen on land, and the Sahara region wet enough for the trilithon builders.” He grinned at me. “That’s your chance to beat the odds.”
He turned to Celya.
“Let’s see this world.”
She was gazing at him, her face fixed and grave. She seemed not to hear until he asked again. She started, and showed us an image of the planet, slowly rotating in dark space.
“The two continents.” He pointed. “Norlan, spread over the pole. Here’s Icecape, Southpoint, Glacier Bay. And Hotlan, the equator across it. Iron River. The Blood. Periclaw, here on the delta.”
He asked Celya for a flat projection.
“Here’s what I wanted to show you.”
Hotlan spread wide. The legends across it were riddles, but I found the rivers, the delta, a brown mountain ridge down the west coast. “Mount Anak.” He pointed at a tiny black trilithon symbol north of the Blood. “And look at this.”
He jabbed his finger at another like it, in the mountain chain that curved down the west coast.
“A way out?” It took my breath. “Home to Earth?”
“Maybe.” Ram shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “If you could get there. Celya says the site’s unknown, though explorers have reported stories. It’s in high mountains, far beyond the head of navigation on the Blood.” He frowned. “If you want to gamble on where it will take you, go.”
He looked at Celya and I saw his lips twist.
“We have other plans.”
“I want to see my parents.” Her face drawn with pain, she took a long breath. “If they’re alive.”
“The railway isn’t working,” Ram said. “The rebels burned a bridge. White Water can take us up the river.”
She clutched at his arm as if she needed support.
“They couldn’t—wouldn’t understand how I love Ram. They were bitter. It hurt me to hurt them. And now—” Her shrug was almost apologetic. “I have to see them if I can.”
Kenleth had been staring at a display of native weapons, but now he turned eagerly to Ram.
“Can we come up the river with you?”
“I wish you could.” He shook his head and turned to me. “They wouldn’t want you.”
30.
That day was almost happy for Kenleth and me. The sun was warm and bright, the fresh air sweet, songbirds aloft. Rejoicing in freedom, we walked in the orchard at the back of Crail’s walled compound. Cherry trees were loaded with golden fruit. We filled ourselves and went on down to the riverside dock where White Water was overhauling the launch, replacing a broken paddle and melting metal to pour a new bearing.
I saw no change in his worn leather garb or his weather-beaten face. He was chewing cinnamon sticks. They left an amber stain on his tuft of chin whiskers, but he said they cleared his head. Kenleth embraced him happily, glad to find him was still alive.
“The fall of the bones.” He shrugged. “Bad times come and bad times go. I’ve been up and I’ve been down. I live as I can, but we aren’t here forever.”
He stopped to gnaw at his stick.
“The bones fell wrong for all the world.” He made a hard grimace. “Wrong for Celya Crail and your friend Ram. With a better break, they might have been rulers of a great new kingdom. Might have been, if General Zorn had hadn’t been so hungry for glory.
Might have been.”
He shrugged and grinned at Kenleth.
“You and I are still alive, and we’ve got a great little boat.”
He showed us over the launch and explained the engine to Kenleth. The bow was open, with a folding awning to cover it. The engine had two cylinders, with drive shafts that turned two paddle wheels at the stem, the rudder hinged to the keel between them. Delighted, Kenleth sat at the wheel and hissed though his teeth with the sound of steam.
I asked White Water what sort of future he saw for Hotlan.
“I’ve known black seers with their divining rods and white scientists with their statistics. They had one thing in common. Their forecasts very seldom hit the mark.”
Reflecting, he chewed his cinnamon.
“Any good to come is hard for me to see. Periclaw spat in Ram’s eye when he brought them an offer of peace. They’ve paid a bitter price. Sheko’s deadly breath on all the simon-pure whites. Admiral Koch scuttled every seagoing ship to save the whites of Norlan. They may survive, but they’ll have lean times with no imports.”
“As for you, Ty Will—” He squinted at me, shrewdly. “If you got here by magic, you might do well to try your spells again.”
Ram and Celya were going on the next day to look for her parents.
“An idiot mission,” White Water called it. “The Crails were royalty. I know the type. They did live high, but owning men gives the mind an ugly set. They could try to forgive their daughter, but you—” He looked at Ram. “You’re pure poison. It’s you and your shining sign that killed their world. They’d kill you if they could.”
Ram shrugged and said Celya had to go.
They spent the day preparing for the trip. With so few left to use it, water was running again. They showered and found clean clothes. White Water finished his work on the launch. The cook packed them a basket of food and served a farewell dinner at the kitchen table.
The dishes were simpler than those I’d had at Crail’s formal dinners, but for Kenleth and me they were a banquet. A platter piled with something like fried chicken, maybe related to the chickens of Earth. Another platter of crisp brown pones, rather like the corn-bread my grandmother used to bake. Crail had an icehouse, stocked with ice shipped from Norlan glaciers, and there were bowls of iced fruit.
We toasted Ram and Celya with a bottle of chilled wine from Crail’s cellar. She sat close to him, smiling fondly at him but ignoring the rest of us. Toying with her food, she barely tasted it. Her face was pale and she seemed unsteady when she walked. I wondered if she would live to see her parents.
I’d enjoyed the day, but that night I had a dreadful dream. After a long search, we’d reached that trilithon in the high mountains west. The great square uprights of something like black granite rose out of a frozen lake rimmed with towering, snow-capped peaks. Ram and Kenleth were somewhere behind me. I started through the gateway, holding Ram’s green pendant before me, and stopped when I saw a naked body.
It lay sprawled on the ice between the pillars. Blue with cold, the limbs jerked suddenly, twitched, stiffened, turned red. Thick dark blood oozed out of them. Swiftly, the whole body melted into a wide red puddle, spreading slowly toward my feet. In terror of it, I tried to back away.
I couldn’t move, because I knew the body had been my own.
“Ty Will?” A hollow voice boomed out of the dark beyond the trilithon. “Ty Will, are you okay?”
Kenleth caught my arm and dragged me out of the nightmare.
The cook had an early breakfast ready, and a basket of food packed for Ram and Celya. Kenleth and I went to watch them board the launch. White Water had it ready, with fire in the boiler and a head of steam. He cast off the mooring lines. The paddle wheels spun. Ram waved goodbye as they swung into the current. Celya sat staring blindly at us, without expression.
Kenleth turned to me and whispered, “Will Ty Ram come back?”
“I hope,” I said.
Waiting to know, we stayed inside the walls. From the upper windows, the river looked empty. The streets were deserted, except for now and then a furtive figure risking Sheko’s wrath in search of salvage. Kenleth found a hook and line in the boathouse and fished off the dock. Cheerfully, the cook fried or grilled his catch.
At last the launch came back. Ram and White Water were aboard, Celya wasn’t. Ram looked bleak and sleepless. He didn’t want to talk. White Water did, after Ram walked out to see what was left of Periclaw, and Kenleth and I were alone with him.
“Upriver, we had to fight the current. It took us all day to reach the canal. Celya was already too sick to travel, really, but she had to see her folks before they died and Ram was her slave. We had food enough, and a case of wine, but she couldn’t eat or drink. I thought we’d never get her there.”
We were in the boathouse, with the launch tied up at the dock below it. White Water had been grinding a leaky steam valve, but he bit the end off a cinnamon stick and sat down on the workbench to talk.
“The infection made her crazy. Ram got half drunk with old Crail’s wine. Reason enough for that. All she wanted was him. They made love on the boat. Why not? He tilted the awning to screen them and told me not to look. With the whole world gone, who was left to care?”
He shook his head and stared out across the empty river.
“I care,” Kenleth said.
“Matter of fact, so do I.” He shrugged and resumed his story. “Forty miles upriver, we reached the first lock. It looked abandoned, but we found the lockkeepers still at the gates. Still proud of their licenses, proud of their posts, proud of the locks. Seemed not to know the world had ended. They let us though. We tied up for the night.
“Next morning Celya was out. Wet with sweat. Stiff and hardy breathing. So fast asleep I thought she was already done for. Ram finally roused her. A few swallows of wine revived her a little. She sat up and talked to him about a honeymoon cruise to Icecape. At noon she drank another glass of wine and tried to sing him a song. Her voice was too weak. He took her in his arms. She cried herself back to sleep.
“That day the canal took us through what had been great plantations. Grain. Sugarcane. Abandoned now. Never harvested. Blown flat by monsoon storms. Two more locks got us up to the edge of the foothills and the Crail landing. His country place was another mansion. Not quite so fancy as the city house, but grand enough.
