by Sarah Rayne
You almost thought that something had torn through the fabric of the skies, and left only an immense black abyss …
Fenella frowned and although she did not know very much about stars or maps, she said, ‘Couldn’t the stars have changed by themselves?’
‘I don’t think they could,’ said Floy, thoughtfully. ‘It isn’t so very long since our ancestors came here.’ He looked back at the Charts. ‘The stars can't have changed so much in that short time. Something’s disturbing them. It’s as if something’s warping them.’
There was something extremely sinister about the idea of a something disrupting the stars and creating great black voids in the skies. There was something implacable and merciless about it. It would have been better to ignore it altogether. But since it was there, and since neither of them had been brought up to pretend that unpleasant things did not exist, it would have to be discussed and an answer to it all would have to be found. Floy would tell the Council that there was something very strange happening and although he might have to fight to make them listen, in the end they would do so, because he was his father’s son and Renascia’s leader.
It was not very long at all since Floy and Fenella’s ancestors, the Earth-people, had fled from their dying world, probably no more than six generations. They had managed to reach the small, friendly planet, which it was thought they had been observing for some time through their marvellous, powerful machines. It was not known what it had been called then, because the great fire that had raged through the Old Settlement in Floy and Fenella’s grandparents’ time had destroyed nearly all records. Whatever the fleeing Earth-people had managed to bring with them had been lost. Fragments and remnants of the Earth-people’s ways of life were uncovered in the Settlement from time to time and studied carefully by the two brothers, Snizort and Snodgrass, who were Renascia’s chroniclers, and who ran the Mnemosyne. But what there was was pitiably little.
There was the great shell of the Earth-people’s craft, which had been carefully preserved in the exact place it had come to rest, constructed of some strange substance nobody had ever been able to fathom. But it did not really tell the Renascians very much about Earth. Quilp and the Council thought it was very important to give proper reverence to this craft, which Quilp said the Earth-people would have called an Ark. They had the annual Earth Feast, when tables were set up in the Ark's shadow and people dressed as they thought Earth-people had dressed. Snizort and his people from the Mnemosyne enacted scenes from Earth-life and Snodgrass served them all with a supper of Earth-food. It was all very interesting and something to plan for all year.
But for the rest of the year, to most people, the Ark was simply a rather ugly shape that spoiled the view across to the Twilight Mountains.
The story of Earth’s last days was interesting, because you did not mind hearing about immense disasters and holocausts when they had happened three or four hundred years ago, and you had not known the people or the world they had happened to. It was only a pity that there was not more information about those last terrible days, or about whether there had been any kind of warning and, if so, what it had been.
There were a few legends, of course; frail, frayed threads that had come down to them after the fire in the Settlement, and which told a little about Earth and about how people had lived. These carefully preserved accounts of Earth’s last days told, in tantalisingly sparse detail, of immense walls of flame and of huge, onrushing sheets of fire that had consumed Earth and destroyed civilisation. Some of the stories told of prancing fire-beasts deep within the flames, but this was only embellishment, of course. You had to discount the prancing beasts, said people, but you could not discount the fire itself.
There was another story as well, which told of a great plague that had swept the cities and the towns towards the end, and which had been so virulent and so dreadfully contagious that hardly anyone had escaped, so that, finally, the handful of survivors had known that to preserve the race, Earth must be abandoned.
The origin of this tale was not known, and it was not so widely believed, although the Renascians were not unacquainted with plague. It was not very many years since they had suffered a very virulent one which had killed a great many people and forced a great many more to leave the Centre and go up into the mountains for a time to escape infection. The seeds were still in Renascia’s core, said the gloomier members of the community, although nobody paid this much heed, because nobody really believed it, any more than they believed in the fire-beasts, but it gave the sober-minded ones something to be gloomy about.
Floy and Fenella’s parents had died in the Plague, which was why Floy was governing now, and trying to rule the Council and for ever fighting Quilp to get laws altered. It was a hereditary thing, to govern Renascia, just as it seemed to have been on Earth. You grew up knowing you would one day step into your father’s shoes. As Floy had done.
‘He’s too young,’ said Quilp, who had sat on the Council of Nine ever since anyone could remember and who did not approve of reckless young men who tumbled Renascian laws upside-down and tried to allow ladies in to Council Meetings. ‘Too young and too flippant. There’s riots and dissension, if not civil war ahead,’ said Quilp, and did not know what things were coming to.
Fenella, who shared Floy’s ideas and ideals, and was trying to get together a small band of Renascian ladies to storm the Council Chamber and change the only-men-to-govern rule, thought that Quilp was secretly jealous of Floy and concerned for his, Quilp’s, position on the Council. This was entirely understandable, but did not help Floy who was attempting to get voted in some very good new laws, partly based on what he and Fenella thought their ancestors had done, but partly based on Floy’s own ideas.
Floy had so far been patient with Quilp and the Council, all of whom were much older than he was, because this was only polite, but it was possible that he would not be patient for much longer. He was exactly how Fenella remembered their father being and he might very easily tip up the long oak Council table in angry disgust one day so that all the papers would fall in disarray on to the floor, and then sweep grandly out of the room. Their father had done this more than once, usually because of Quilp. Floy would end up doing the same before long, especially if they could not get Quilp to give proper attention to what was happening to Renascia’s star patterns and the creeping up on them of longer nights.
‘None of it means anything at all,’ said Quilp, glaring at Floy when he faced the Council of Nine at their next gathering.
‘I think it means something very serious,’ said Floy, who had brought back the Star Maps and had spread them out on the long table, so that everyone could see them. He looked round. ‘I think we are facing exactly what our Earth-ancestors faced before their world ended. I think Renascia is moving into perpetual night.’
Perpetual night. It was an eerily descriptive expression. Quilp and the rest of the Council denied it, of course, but then everyone on Renascia knew that Quilp had long since peopled the Council with his cronies, and that they were only interested in thinking up new taxes and finding better ways of making money for themselves. A great many people had rather welcomed the succession of Floy as the Council’s head, because it was high time that somebody opposed Quilp’s laws, properly and strongly.
Perpetual night. To Floy’s annoyance, his words were quickly repeated outside of Council and people began to look worried.
‘But they have to know,’ said Fenella. ‘If something’s happening, the people have to know.’
‘Not until we can tell them what’s behind it,’ said Floy, who was furious with Quilp for repeating his words. ‘You don’t give people half a tale if it’s a sinister tale. We need to know more before we start telling people to worry,’ said Floy. ‘There might not be anything for them to worry about in the end.’
Fenella saw the sense of this and told her little band of Council-storming ladies that, whatever was happening to Renascia, it was not necessarily threatening but, on the c
ontrary, rather interesting.
And heard herself voicing the words and wished she could stop thinking about the gaping abyss and the yawning tear where the stars had once been …
‘I’m afraid it’s too late to give people platitudes,’ she said to Floy. ‘The fiery sunsets were rather fun. But now »
‘But now,’ finished Floy, ‘it isn’t just fiery sunsets.’
‘No.’ Fenella looked at him and, after a moment, Floy said, ‘The days are eroding.’
‘Yes.’ Fenella heard the words with sick fear.
The days are eroding …
Little groups of people were already beginning to forgather in the Wine Shop on Renascia’s outskirts every evening and measure the decreasing daylight and the days’ lengths. Floy had asked Snizort and Snodgrass to do this officially, and they were doing it properly and sensibly, using clocks and using the sextants left by the Settlers, which they were finding very interesting machines. Snizort was keeping a full record of everything in his diaries. They would not disclose their findings yet, they said, because it was important to be sure what was happening, or even if anything was happening at all. There was no sense in worrying people unnecessarily. Floy was quite right about that.
But it did not need Snizort’s complex diagrams, or Snodgrass’s involved timetables to measure it any more. All that it needed was the growing group of Renascians seated at the Wine Shop’s scrubbed tables and a keen eye.
At the end of the following ten days, there was no question about any of it.
The days were shrinking at an alarming rate, and the light was somehow being leeched from Renascia.
It was at this point that Snizort and Snodgrass discovered the Casket in the Old Settlement.
* * *
They had been exploring a new section at the time; Snizort said, earnestly, that they had thought they might find something previously overlooked that might tell them about Earth’s last days, and whether the Earth-people had experienced the draining of the light and the rather sinister sunsets.
They were always discovering buried pots and books and utensils, or bits of machinery, they said; it was all very useful, because quite often it was possible to work out what the machines had done, and re-construct them.
The Casket had been beneath one of the buildings to the north of the Old Settlement. It was the farthest north they had ever explored, they said seriously. Previously, they had confined their expeditions to the ruins of the smaller buildings, which would have been the Settlers’ homes. You found out far more about a community by looking at its homes, they said. Cooking pots and machines and sometimes even writings. Books and diaries. They had not found many books, but there had been a few. It had given them a remarkable picture of Earth-life. Snizort had formed the History of the Earth Society, which met in their tiny, cluttered sitting room, and which was composed of earnest bespectacled people who talked about Earth and read scholarly papers and essays, and drank Snodgrass’s elderberry wine in alarming quantities.
The shell of the large white building had not, to begin with, seemed to hold anything of any great interest. They thought it had been a meeting place, which had been a great tradition on Earth, they explained solemnly.
The Earth-people had built large, sometimes ornate houses, in which they gathered to discuss the governing of the land and the imposing of laws. Snizort said there were a number of names for these buildings: they were Parliaments or Senates or Synods or simply Councils. That was where they had got the name for their own governing body.
The large white building had been at the centre of the Old Settlement and they had taken a party of their best students along with them to explore it.
‘We might never have found it, otherwise,’ said Snodgrass, as they led Floy and Fenella to the spot.
‘They’re all very enthusiastic,’ agreed Snizort. ‘And they’re very useful for the actual digging, you know, because, of course, Snodgrass and I can’t do the bending we used to.’
Snodgrass had a very old Earth-recipe, called a simple, which contained some remarkable ingredients, not all of them obtainable on Renascia, which you rubbed into your joints when you found them a bit creaky and unwilling. He had had great hopes and had given the recipe in the Renascian Journal, but the simple had not done very much good. His joints were still a bit creaky, but it could not be helped.
Fenella, who was, in fact, getting a bit out of breath keeping up with them, asked about the discovery.
‘Very serious,’ said Snizort, at once assuming the solemn expression he wore when he was asking the Council for more money to run the Mnemosyne, or when he was presiding over a meeting of the Earth History Society. He re-settled his spectacles firmly on the bridge of his nose. ‘That’s why we came straight to Floy.’
Snodgrass said he did not know where else they would go with the information, other than to Floy and Fenella.
They rounded the curve in the road and came to the edge of the grasslands, which bordered the old part of Renascia. Fenella felt the familiar shiver of apprehension as they neared the Old Settlement, which many people said was haunted by the ghosts of their ancestors. Fenella did not think it was haunted, although it was impossible not to feel the desolation and the sharp loneliness and the engulfing despair. Probably it was only because the Old Settlement was still blackened and charred from the fire. There was bound to be something a bit desolate and a bit eerie about a place where people had lived and worked, and which now lay in rubble.
But Fenella always had the feeling that it was a bit more than that. She always had the feeling that once, long, long ago, somebody had stood here and stared out over a dark and barren landscape. And felt only an emptiness, and such a complete sense of loss and helplessness, that it had hardly been possible to bear it.
They picked their way over the remains of some small houses, which had piles of bricks tumbled all anyhow, and parts of walls and sections of floor, and beams and joists exposed. It was sad to see these ruined houses, but it was rather interesting to note that their own builders still used what had, presumably, been an Earth-pattern; foursquare houses with doors at the front and square or oblong apertures for light, with divisions inside for different rooms and a pointy roof which was supported by thick wooden frames.
Floy was moving ahead of them, his eyes shining, the dark hair falling over his brow. He would be eager to see whatever Snodgrass and Snizort had uncovered, and he would already be thinking of how they could make use of the discovery.
The once-white building was on the outskirts of the Old Settlement. It was larger than either Fenella or Floy had expected, although Floy knew that the population of Renascia, small to begin with and decimated even further by the plague, would have been minuscule compared with Earth before its last days. Even so, he thought, staring at the centre of the great, ruined structure, it must have been possible for several hundred people to be seated in here, an inordinately large number.
There were ornate carvings which might originally have been over the main door and lying close to a raised area at the far end was a massive stone pillar, inset with strips of more of the cool, smooth stone. Floy recognised it as the parti-coloured stone which was to be found at the foothills of the Twilight Mountains, and which could be hewn out and polished to a glasslike surface. They had used it for building and it made marvellous floors and ceilings, cool and attractive and easily cleaned — until Quilp had managed to put a tax on it, so that not many people could afford to use it. This was only one of the many greedy laws that Quilp had sneaked into their Charter during the chaos of the plague months, that Floy was now fighting to get repealed.
The Earth-building had floors of the mottled stone, and walls with panels of it as well. They walked cautiously across the rubble and the heaps of fallen bricks, their steps echoing sadly in the quiet. Through the gaps in the walls, Fenella could see the towering Twilight Mountains, with the pouring colours of the sunset already behind them. There was a flurrying wind out here that she had
never before noticed, with an odd coppery scent in it. This was so unusual as to be worth calling attention to, and Fenella had turned round and drawn breath to speak, when Snizort said, ‘It’s over here.’
The Casket was lying at the far end of the ruined house, beneath the raised area, half covered by debris and dirt and stones. It looked dark and rather forbidding, and extremely old.
Snodgrass said, ‘We think it must have been left by the first Settlers,’ and Floy, his eyes shining, his dark hair tumbled about his brow, said, ‘No it wasn’t. Look at it more closely.’
The Casket bore none of the imprints of Renascian workmanship. The tools and the implements of the first Renascians had, perforce, been plain and unadorned and austere. There was no time for embellishments, had said the Settlers, hewing a new world out of the strange, bare planet; there was no time and there was no need. Things must be serviceable and, where possible, adaptable, and that was all. There was no room for ornamentation.
And, although the need for austerity had long since passed, embellishments and ornamentations had developed in the Renascians’ own ways. ‘Because,’ said the artisans and the craftsmen and the journeymen, ‘because we make things which are of our world, of Renascia, and not of Earth. We have developed our own patterns and our own designs. They are no better and no worse than those of our Earth-ancestors; it is just that they are different. But they are our own.’
But the Casket that sat squarely on the floor now was certainly not of their own Renascian design. When Floy said, ‘It wasn’t left by the first Settlers,’ the others understood at once.
