“Glass hasn’t been invented yet, let alone mirrors. It would startle ’em,” he whispers. “But I was gonna leave it here, as the first offerin’ on the altar.”
“I think you already have left it.”
“What do you mean, son?”
“Someone in the future finds the mirror here, when they’re digging around. They even find traces of you.”
“Me?”
“In new versions of the Bible that start cropping up. You’re called ‘the Rebuilder’.”
“Really? The name sticks even in the holy writ? That just seems wrong, boy, if they’re talkin’ about me. I just said a few words, is all, about not givin’ up the ship. Talked about the need to rebuild. Pretty humble helpin’ hand, in the scheme of things.”
“Are you both magic?” Naftali asks us. He’s been watching us the whole time and noticed the firelight the mirror bounced on my face. “Where did you really come from?”
But before A.J. or I can answer the question, there’s a huge explosion — the kind that comes from time-traveling.
People scream and scatter.
I hear one voice I recognize: “A good time to meet?”
See several faces I don’t.
And at least one — straight out of the picture A.J. showed me — that I’d hoped never to see again.
Chapter Fourteen
Thea: Wakenings
583 B.C.E.
This time, I know I’m not dreaming. I see the face of a woman, who introduces herself as Huldah, leaning over me. I’m in a cave, lit by torches. From the sounds I hear, and what I can see when I lift my head, this is an infirmary.
Have I been sick?
I know I’ve had vivid dreams — all the way back to when I was with Sally Hemings, the Ethiopian princess, in the time of Jefferson President. So many strange things have happened since then — I spoke with a horse; we discovered the bones of a slave girl named Brassy, who was important in ways no on knew about; Eli and I discovered we’d each had birth anniversaries while time-voyaging, and we even kissed each—
Kissed?
All of this occurred after it first seemed the lingo-spot was speaking in a voice of its own. I know we came back to Eli’s time, then were taken captive by his government, though that feels dreamy, too, especially memories of a birthday party that Eli and his father and Mr. Howe held in my room.
“You aren’t dreaming.”
It’s the woman who just introduced herself as Huldah. She’s the healer here, I believe. She reacts to the look on my face. I don’t even need the lingo-spot to understand her. She speaks in one of the local tongues, the language of the Hebrews.
“When you were feverish, you spoke out loud about dreams, about your friend Eli.”
My face must be showing even more surprise.
“Most people with the fever you had imagine visions, phantoms, people who aren’t there. Eli was here. But he has left with Naftali. It is often easier for people to let us tend their loved ones when they don’t have to watch their agony. In any event, you aren’t dreaming.”
Loved ones? “I…had it then? The slow pox?”
“Seraphic plague. Many people don’t come back from it. However, we discovered the waters down here can be beneficial. At first you didn’t seem to respond to our cure. Then finally, your fever broke.”
How strange that I never came down with the pox during any of the outbreaks in Alexandria — that I had to move centuries away from home to become its victim. Perhaps it is a different form of the illness that I became vulnerable to. Whatever form, words seem to come with some difficulty when I try to speak.
“You can…cure the pox? Mother was only able to reduce the s-s— the symptoms — she never could treat it…compl—”
My tongue suddenly seems stuck in my mouth, and I am aware of how much larger than normal it feels. I motion to my mouth.
Huldah nods, and picks up a cup from the ground. “Yes, pox sufferers need to keep wet inside. The body must stay supple.”
“A cure?” I ask again after I’ve sipped.
“The waters here in the pond — from the wadi” — wadi, the old familiar word for river — “it brings some of the sufferers back to themselves after a few days.”
“How did you learn this?”
“I discovered it when I first came down here myself. I was also suffering from the fever. This was shortly after the Babylonians burned our city. Wanderers and strangers came to pick through the ruins. And shortly after, the one called the Rebuilder came. Not to loot the rubble, but to tell us Jeremiah was still right. A new city could rise in this place, if we wanted it. But it has been hard for so many broken hearts to place much faith in such an idea.
“At first, it was hard to know if I was ill; when you are a ‘prophet,’ you already suffer a number of unwelcome voices in your head, so sometimes it is hard to tell if you are ailing in the usual way.”
I knew of prophets in Alexandria. “Voices from the gods?” I ask.
“Not only God. To be a prophet is to hear everyone’s voice. Everyone’s suffering. That’s what makes the task so difficult.” Huldah turns away. “And the fever made it unbearable, especially with all the suffering Jerusalem has seen. When I took ill, I came down here to remove myself from the world above…and let the seraphim take me. It seems the heavens had something else in mind for me, however, in this world below the city.”
“What happens when you go back above?” I look around the large cavern and try to remember my own fever dreams of arriving in Jerusalem with Eli, to remember what the world looked like above us.
“That’s the one thing the waters couldn’t cure,” Huldah tells me. “I still haven’t been able to go back above to our city of David. I still cannot bear to see it, or see the conditions of those who can barely be called survivors.”
“But don’t they need you up there, as well?”
“My work now is to stay down here and do what I can.”
I sip water for a few moments before speaking again.
“I can see that being a prophet isn’t such an easy task. Especially now in…Yerushalayim.” I sound out the name slowly, as more of my fever dreams come back to me.
“Yes. Or what’s left of it. There’s no place left to send you, now that you’ve healed.”
“You remind me of my mother,” I tell her, using the Hebrew tongue as best I can.
“Your mother? I suspect I am old enough to be your grandmother. At least.”
I try to rise up from my sleeping mound, but my body is stiff — my back, my legs.
“That’s usually what happens when the fever leaves — the limbs are fatigued. You’ll have a hard time moving, for a while. But still, you are lucky. Better to rest.”
One of the men sleeping near me begins screaming, “No, I did not! No I did not go to Gehenna!” Yelling to no one in particular, he then just as suddenly lapses into a wide-eyed, shivering silence.
Gehenna.
“I was…Gehenna-marked?” I ask. I’m not sure what it means, but I recall that someone accused me of that recently.
“I don’t let them use that phrase here. Gehenna is one of the valleys where the dead are said to dwell. To be ‘Gehenna-marked’ is to have no hope of recovery. But you, and others, have proven them wrong.” That way she talks, she seems deeply sad, the way Mother did, in those last weeks before Alexandria burned, when the civil war had broken out, and people were attacking one another on the streets.
The shivering man starts yelling again.
“Excuse me.” Huldah, with her Mother-like smile that isn’t quite a smile, turns to walk over to him.
“Wait,” I say, but she doesn’t hear; she’s given her attention to the man.
One of the women who is helping her — it is hard to tell the difference between those who are well and those who are ailing in a place like this, as both are underfed, dressed in rags, with scars and wounds— goes over to the man after scooping out some hot broth from a bubbling kettle n
earby.
I swing my legs off the straw pad and though they hurt, I set them down on the floor.
I can’t quite sense the ground under my feet — my legs feel like sword tips are jabbing them, over and over, while my feet feel as though they’ve spent too much time in cold water and have a kind of numbness about them.
I try to stand but instead fall down.
Huldah turns from the shivering man to help me. “Really, you should rest, young friend,” she says, as she lifts me back up.
She doesn’t even know my name. “Thea. My name is Thea.”
“Thee-ah?” It is good, a comfort, to hear her pronounce it. “Thea, if I may say, while plague-sufferers are known to hear different voices and have visions while in the grip of fever, I have never known any of them to use as many different voices as you did, while you were in its throes. So many voices, Thea. Has anybody ever suggested that you, too, might be a —”
She doesn’t get to finish. From the opening of the tunnel, on top of the rough stairs carved out of these rocks, comes the sudden, though distant boom of an explosion.
That explosion is followed by shouting, and terrified screams, as explosions usually are.
Whatever color is left in Huldah’s face drains away. “No. Not more Babylonians,” she whispers. “There is nothing in Jerusalem left to destroy.”
Eli. Where is Eli?
“Did you say my friend was up there?” I ask.
“Yes —”
I try to jump off the sleeping mound but still meet difficulty as my legs buckle underneath me. I pull myself up and start to move toward the stairs, wobbly as I am.
With the sound of the explosion, more people in the room have been groaning, yelling about their fever dreams.
“I can’t lose…my friend,” I tell her. “We are…all we have left.”
“But you can’t…”
But I do, even though I fall to one knee — twice, each time a different knee, and each time it hurts — while trying to walk with prickly, numb legs.
“Go with her.” Huldah motions to the woman who’s been helping her with the screaming man, and she comes over and puts my arm around her shoulder, and we move forward—haltingly, but forward. She’s emaciated, and looks haunted, too. Seeing her face in the torchlight makes me wonder which one of us should be supporting the other up the stairs.
On our slow, steady way up — I only slip once, and bang my shin instead of a knee — I learn her name is Yehudit and that she’s not that much older than I am but already has a husband and a child, both of whom were taken by the Babylonians.
“They want slaves and workers,” she says, “everybody working to make their empire bigger.”
She tells me the invasions came about when Israel’s king, Zedekiah, refused to keep paying ransom money to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. “As we were once warned,” Yehudit says, “kings get to decide, and we suffer.”
“Maybe you’ll get to see your family again,” I tell her, to be helpful. At least they weren’t murdered, like my mother was. And they are all still living in the same time, which makes a reunion somewhat possible.
“That’s what keeps me alive,” she replies. “That’s my hope.”
But then it also strikes me how no one is really left alone by history, it swallows us up when all we want to do is share a meal with someone we love or sit about on a warm afternoon with a friend.
We’re at the top of the stairway. It’s dark outside, but we can see the shadows moving about.
“I’m not going out there,” Yehudit tells me. “If it’s more Babylonians, I don’t want to know. I can’t.”
“You’ll be all right,” I tell her.
What makes me suddenly reassure her? It’s almost like a lingo-spot voice were telling me, a voice from outside — and yet, from inside at the same time. As if my own thoughts and the voices heard by the lingo-spot are merging together, becoming one.
A great quantity of voices and thoughts, all channeled through me.
I’m not sure I like the idea. But perhaps I’m wrong. I should ask Huldah about this. About how you protect yourself when it seems your eyes and ears are open to the whole wide world. “The people outside aren’t Babylonians,” I reassure Yehudit.
And I know exactly where that knowledge comes from: one of the voices is carrying in the night air.
“A good time to meet?”
It’s K’lion. Yerushalayim has been invaded again, but not by soldiers. By time travelers.
Chapter Fifteen
Clyne: Nerve Tissue
583 B.C.E.
Uncontrolled time reactions always lead to uncontrolled results, a spacetime flow as gerk-skizzy as the faultiest ship’s drive. Couple such unstructured time-roaming with the innate unpredictability and hot-bloodedness of mammals themselves, and you have a grid of random probabilities to challenge the wiliest mathematician.
You may try to calculate, but in fact, you never know where you’ll wind up or who you’ll be with. As a result of Eli’s earlier extemporaneous time leap, he became a passenger in my ship, and cause and effect being the quantum, often unknowable things they are, I have, ever since, found myself stranded here on Earth Orange.
Not that I regret the experience. The mere idea that mammals are capable of advanced evolution is worth several Saurian life cycles of study. And never mind what one learns being an outlaw.
However, Rolf’s uncontrolled time reaction, undertaken in his trailer with a WOMPER he had secreted from the government agencies on Eli’s planet, did not turn out so happily.
Several of us who should’ve made the trip are missing: The Weeping Bat, Strong Bess — and Silver Eye. I have arrived here in the company of Rocket Royd, who appears to be passed out, along with the Bearded Boy, who doesn’t…and Rolf, who is wide awake and trying to make his own kind of sense about what just happened.
But happily, wherever we are, and whatever has just happened, I believe I see Eli by one of the campfires.
“A good time to meet?” I venture.
The only answer I get is a projectile thrown past my ear, and the words “Goat-demon!” shouted in my direction. Goat?
“The demon gods are here!”
“You did this, Jeremiah! You brought this on us, with all your doom and gloom!”
Most of the people are running away. A couple run toward us.
“Eli! Watch out!” Thea’s voice. She’s here, too! The ruined rock buildings make me think we are in her time. Good. She can explain, perhaps, that I am not a demon god. Or a goat. If we get the chance.
“A good time to meet? Or not?” I say in Thea’s tongue.
“Clyne!” Eli’s voice. He is definitely here. But he’s in a small group being surrounded, near the fire.
“This isn’t Jeremiah’s doin’.” It’s the distinct mammalian dialect of the one named A.J. We’re all here. At this place. At this time.
Perhaps one result of all these time reactions and chronological leaps is becoming predictable — at least enough for me to refine a hypothesis: time travel disrupts the flow of “history” enough that a new prime nexus is created wherever a time voyager lands. If Eli or A.J. were here first, their very presence would be enough to draw, to attract, other chronological explorers, like waves circling a whirlpool. At least, here on Earth Orange, the interconnections created by the plasmechanical material that’s been loosed upon this planet only exacerbates the effects.
“No, no, no!” A mammal boy, younger than Eli, begins kicking me.
“No more, no more, no more! Go back!” It doesn’t even occur to me to try a slaversaur roar with one so young. “No more! There’s no one left to take! There’s no one left to hurt! Go back, go back! We don’t want you Babylonians!”
“But I am a Saurian,” I tell the hatchling.
“Then go back to Saronia!” the boy yells.
“It would be Saurius Prime, and I believe for now I am str —” But the boy is too upset, and instead picks up a projectile,
some bit of discarded mineral material, and throws it at me.
I move my head and the object misses, but it grazes Rocket, who is just waking up and now yells “Ow!” very loudly, and starts rubbing his head. Then he starts to look around, and then his mouth starts to move, but it’s awhile before anything audible comes out. And when it does, they syllables sound a small and squeaky klnny, and all he manages is, “Uh-oh.” He’s never time-voyaged before. “What has Grandfather done now? Grandfather!” He is wobbly getting to his feet. “What have you done!?”
But Rolf doesn’t answer. True to character, he has used all the mammalian skirmishing to slip away.
But it wasn’t Rolf that brought us here. Not really. True, he initiated the reaction. But I believe what brought us here, as the evidence supporting my hypothesis grows stronger, was the sentient plasmechanical material from Saurius Prime, which is steadily mutating here in this mammalian dimension. I believe it has been fusing with the properties of the slow pox DNA to make a neural network, a kind of nerve tissue not just connecting separate human beings — but separate times, as well.
“Ow, hatchling!” The young mammal has given up throwing objects and returned to the more reliable closed-quarter fighting method of kicking.
“Stop! Stop it!” It’s the Bearded Boy, James, who comes over and puts himself between the hatchling and me. “He’s not going to hurt you.” But I’m not sure which one of us he’s talking to, since this angry young mammal can’t understand James’s words. Though his hand gestures should be eminently readable.
“No,” James says to the other boy. James’s resiliency surprises me. In what little light there is — besides the nearby fires, the sun is just now breaking over the horizon — I believe he sees the surprise in my face.
City of Ruins Page 13
