The dais in the center of the floor suddenly dropped out of sight, leaving a black hole. The floor of the desal distorted, lowered to form a funnel. There was nothing to hang onto. First she with a despairing cry, then I slid down and into that dark opening.
§
I opened my eyes on a strange vision. I was at the bottom of a well that was three meters across, its top invisible in darkness. The bottom was curved, of the same slick white substance as above, but soft. Around me on the walls of the tube strange images were appearing and vanishing, like moving frescoes.
I cried and tried not to watch, hiding my face in my hands, but I was afraid of I knew not what. I felt compelled to look around myself, at least to look up in case something came down that well at me. I imagined all kinds of terrors from above—giant pistons, water, or monstrous arms lowering to retrieve me. Nothing occurred, except the ongoing panoply unfolding on the walls around me. I could not for long avoid looking at the moving pictures.
Hypnotized, I watched a pictographic catalogue of the world unfold. Sketchy images of thousands of things rolled forward and back. The images were whirling towards some apocalyptic conclusion. The dizzying motion and flickering lights became too much for me. I thrust out my hand and cried, "Stop!"
My open palm slammed against the wall. Miraculously, the pictographs I had struck froze in place, as if painted. The rest continued to move around this sudden little island.
I snatched my hand back. The pictographs remained motionless.
Had the priestess seen what I was seeing? Perhaps this was how the desal had chosen its ministers in the past. I could well imagine those other women cowering as I did, watching in incomprehension as the pictures flew by—maybe to be ejected later by the desal into the arms of waiting awestruck people. The villagers would have demanded to know what the pictures meant. It would be as if you were given a book in an unknown language, and threatened with death unless you explained its meaning.
Maybe none of those other women had the courage or anger to try to touch the pictures. Then they would never have learned that they could stop them, or as I learned in the next minutes, move them.
First I reached out to tap hesitantly at another pictograph. It stopped instantly. Emboldened, I tried a few more. Soon I had a little set of rocks in a moving stream of imagery. Each one seemed significant—a tree, a cloud, a castle, a house. Most were pictures from nature, but there were men and women too, though these were oddly dressed. How? Well, chiefly as though their clothes had been painted on. Some had sunburst halos around their heads, and packs on their backs. Most such pictographs had a backdrop of blackness and stars.
One image that I tapped seemed to stagger as it stopped. I tapped it again and it jittered in place. I touched my finger to the wall and slowly drew it along. To my amazement the pictograph followed.
It probably wouldn't be possible for someone in such a position to avoid organizing the pictographs. Even just on the aesthetic level it made sense to group them, so that I could see them all without having to turn around. Soon I had ten or so of the things lined up in front of me. The rest were still whirling around, but they were less fearful now that I knew I could control them.
I immediately made another discovery. If two or more images overlapped they would both flash for a few seconds, then disappear, replaced by new ones.
These new images were the reply of the desal.
You see, when I moved the pictograph fish on top of a snaking river, row after row of fish shapes sprang into being on the wall above me. I recognized a few I had eaten or seen drawn in picture books. When I drew the pictograph of a carp onto that of an eye, I found myself looking at a very detailed drawing of a carp's eye, complete with little lines of text over and under it, written using our alphabet but in a language I did not recognize.
I became very excited. Quite possibly I would never emerge from this place, but it almost didn't matter. For long hours, until thirst and exhaustion overwhelmed me, I arranged images and watched as the desal replied.
I awoke half-delirious with thirst. The desire for water consumed me, and for a while I shouted and banged the walls, half-convinced that some human agency waited beyond them. There was no reply.
There were a number of representations of water on the walls. I dragged animal and raindrop together. The pictographs vanished, then reappeared without change. This happened, I had come to believe, when the desal did not understand the question.
I put a skull, a human shape and an image of the sun together. Again, nothing. This went on for quite a while, but I was doggedly determined, since thirst is not a need you can ignore. I can't remember the exact combination that worked, but suddenly I heard a clanking sound overhead and when I looked up, received a faceful of ice water.
When the downpour stopped I was up to my knees in it. Still, I was grateful. More, I felt a triumphal glow. After all, I had spoken to a Wind, asked a favor of it, and been given it.
The other women were probably ejected after they failed to grasp that the desal wanted to talk. Myself it kept, as several days passed and I became fluent in its strange visual speech. There did not seem to be anything it would not tell me—provided I knew how to ask. That was the most frustrating part, because I wanted to know its history, and that of my people; I wanted to know where the world had come from, and where it was going. My imagination failed utterly when it came to phrasing such questions in stick-figures and glyphs.
But I could make the desal act for me. I insisted on sun until the top of the shaft vanished, and daylight poured down on me. I demanded that my wastes be carried away, and the floor swallowed them as I slept. I requested food, and received fruit and berries.
Two things I learned, that made me the queen of Iapysia. The first was that I could paint my own images and freeze them on the wall. The second thing I discovered was a trove of information about the desals themselves.
This I came upon when I slapped a little whirling globe and it flattened out into a map of the world. The continents were clear, and I soon had my own nation spread before me, with intricate colors and shapes showing landforms and vegetation. I have never since seen anything like it. It was dotted with tiny dome-glyphs, which I at first took to be cities. They were in all the wrong places, though, and eventually I realized they were desals.
They were joined by fine lines, in a kind of spiderweb. The desals are joined by a subterranean highway system, something tradition says is true, but for which we had no proof. Now I could see it. And I could see the road that linked my desal to others on the mainland.
I had painted a portrait of myself, and now an inspiration struck me. I dragged that portrait to the island on the map where I thought I was. The portrait vanished and reappeared in miniature next to the little dome figure there. The desal had told me I was correct. That was the island I was on.
Next I dragged the little portrait of myself onto the line of the highway running under the sea between the island and the mainland. Instantly the portrait slid out from under my fingers, and zipped along the highway to wait flashing at the dome of a mainland desal.
I touched the portrait. It stopped flashing.
And something overhead blocked the sun as a deep rumbling sound began to build around me.
I had time to issue one more detailed command before the floor gave way under my feet and I fell into the dark cyclonic stream of the highway.
§
I awoke with sunlight heating my face. I heard murmurs of wonder and fear. Opening my eyes, I saw the faces of my own countrymen. They spoke in the accents of the province of Santel, whose city has a desal on the hill above it.
I sat up. I was in a cubic chamber, three meters on a side. A square door opened out on the sunlight; four peasants stared in at me.
They had seen a door open the previous night. The next morning they mustered courage to approach, and the townspeople, alerted, were not far behind. A crowd gathered as I climbed out of this desal, four hundred kilometer
s from the one I had entered days before, and faced my silent people.
On the walls of the chamber I came from were visions I had crafted with the desal's help. These indelible frescoes were arranged around the portrait of myself, the state crown of Iapysia afloat above my head. To these the desal had added its own panorama, a kind of procession that led around the entire chamber.
From that moment, when the people saw that the Winds had blessed me as queen, my succession to the throne was guaranteed.
The panorama authored by the desal, however, has a different meaning for me than it does for my people. The people believe it is a chronology of my lineage. To me it shows all the stages of humanity's development on this planet, for each scene in the panorama shows something from our history, some major turning point: the founding of religions, of dynasties, of laws and philosophies.
To me the silent figures speak of the invention of humanity: of our own creation of the faculties we take as divinely ordered, our reason, our morality, our science, even our world's purpose. They are all, I believe, of our own generation.
If there is anything I wonder now, it is this: if we are our own creation, whence the Winds? I do not understand them, and they frighten me.
Of all things, they alone frighten me.
§
Galas was sipping a glass of chilled wine, a bowl of fruit before her on the highest parapet of the palace, when general Mattias stormed in. The leader of her defenses was normally in a foul humour—but just now he was positively livid. A small group of men and maids trailed behind him like wind-whipped smoke. "Why didn't you tell me?" he roared at the queen as he towered over her.
Galas had eaten breakfast with Maut after telling her tale, and although she had not slept, had been feeling strangely at peace. She blinked at Mattias muzzily. "Tell you what?"
"Who he was!"
Carefully, she reached for a raisin, and chewed it for a while before saying, "Really, Mattias, I don't know who you are talking about."
"Oh no? You've been closeted with the bastard for two days now. Am I so old and feeble I can no longer be trusted with strategic information? Or were you going to present it all to me as a done thing?"
He really was angry. At her. Galas sat up straight. "Wait, wait, something is really wrong here. Mattias, I would never do anything to question your command. What is it that you think I have done?"
"General Armiger is your guest! I just had it from the maids. And you never told me!"
For a moment Galas stared at him, open-mouthed. Then she realized, and remembered last night, when she had asked Maut what he could do for her, and he had smiled and said she would know by noon.
She looked at the sundial built into her table. It was noon.
Galas began to laugh. It started as a chuckle, but as she saw Mattias' eyes widen in outrage, she could no longer contain herself. Carelessly tossing her wine glass aside, she leaned back in her chair and let the sound of her delight rise above the siege, above the air itself, to the very heavens.
21
In the morning, Jordan awoke to hear Suneil leaving the wagon. Probably gone for a piss, he thought at first; but the man did not return.
This was just the sort of thing that kept one from falling back asleep. The sun wasn't up yet, and it was frosty out there. Jordan had already been awake half the night, listening to Queen Galas tell Armiger her tale. When she finished he had fallen into a dreamless but apparently brief sleep. Now he tried several different positions—lying on his side, on his back with an arm over his face, even curled up—but he couldn't get back to sleep and Suneil still didn't return.
Finally he rose, shivering, and crept to the back flap to look out. The horizon was polished silver, as cold a color as Jordan had ever seen.
Suneil was standing very still, staring at nothing in particular. His hands were stuffed deep in the pockets of a long woolen coat. Every now and then he looked down and kicked a clod of earth at his feet.
Jordan eased the flap back and went to lie down again. The sight had disturbed him although at first he couldn't decide why. By the time the sun peeked above the horizon and Suneil came back to salvage a last half hour of rest, Jordan had realized that he seldom seen so perfect a picture of a man struggling with an important decision; and it was significant that Suneil had said nothing in the past days to his niece or Jordan about any such worries.
§
In the middle of nowhere, with scattered fields to the left and right, Suneil said, "This is the city of Rhiene."
"Huh?" Jordan stared at a slovenly peasant's cottage mired in its own pigsty near the road. "That?" He had heard of Rhiene all his life. It was one of the great cities of Iapysia, fabled for its gardens and university. There was supposed to be a desal at Rhiene too, and great religious colleges devoted to its study.
Suneil laughed. They were seated together at the front of the wagon. Tamsin had decided to walk for a while, and at present she was a few meters ahead, tilting her head back and forth to some internal rhyme, her hands fluttering at her sides in time.
Suneil pointed to a tumble of low hills ahead. "There."
The hills made an odd arc on the otherwise flat plain, dwindling in either direction. None was more than twenty meters high, and now that he looked more closely Jordan could see numerous buildings dotting the farther ones, and thin trails of smoke rising beyond them. A stone tower stood near the road ahead. Traffic on the road had increased during the past day until now they were part of a steady stream of wagons, horses and walking people, all headed towards the hills. Far off to the south, he could see another such road, converging on what he was beginning to realize was a long rampart of wavelike hills.
There was no city, however. Just those scattered buildings.
"I don't understand. It's underground?"
Again Suneil laughed. "No. Well, yes, parts of it. You'll see." He smiled mysteriously.
They followed the road around several bends. The land here looked as though it had become liquid at some time in the ancient past, and flown in waves that had then frozen in place. Giant boulders stuck up from the earth here and there; they seemed barely weathered.
Several side roads joined with theirs, until the stream of traffic was thick and loud. Vendors appeared walking up the road, offering sweet meats and fresh fish. Still there was no city in sight—but now Jordan heard seagulls, and saw several lift above the next rise.
The builders of Rhiene had wisely widened the road after that rise, because a good half of all the travellers who came here must have stopped dead in their tracks when they got there. Tamsin did, and Jordan stood up and shouted in disbelief. Suneil merely smiled.
First he saw the blue-hazed arc of a distant shoreline, and above that sun-whitened cliffs rising almost straight out of the glittering water. Then his eye took in the whole sweep of the place: those distant cliffs were kin to the crest their wagon had come to. In fact, the cliffs swept in a vast circle to encompass a deep flat-bottomed bowl in the earth. A lake filled most of the bowl; from here Jordan could see sailboats like tiny scraps of white feather dotting it. At the very center of the bowl, a spire of green-patched rock towered out of the water. Coral-colored buildings adorned the spire. He could see docks at its base.
"Rhiene," said Suneil, pointing down.
The road wound down a set of switchbacks into what at first looked like an overgrown ruin. Rhiene was green with ivy, forest and lichen, and Jordan couldn't make out the buildings until he realized the gardens he saw were all on the roofs of houses and towers. Rhiene sprawled along the arc of the cliff for kilometers in either direction, and tongues of jetty and wharf made the nearer shore of the lake into a tangle of geometry.
Seeing this made everything that had happened to him worthwhile. Jordan knew he was grinning like an idiot, but he didn't care. He decided in that instant that Rhiene was where he wanted to live.
"It's the most beautiful place in the world!" shouted Tamsin.
"Perhaps you would li
ke a guided tour?" said a nattily dressed young man who had appeared as if by magic at her elbow.
Tamsin looked him up and down. "Begone, you trotting swine," she said.
The youth shrugged and walked away. Astonished, Jordan leapt down and went over to Tamsin.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
"Everybody wants to make some coin," she said. "Everywhere we go there's people trying to sell you this or that." She sighed heavily. "They hang around places like this, spoiling the moment for people like us." The young man had approached another wagon, and appeared to be haggling with its oafish driver.
Suneil had clucked the horses into motion, so they began to walk. "'Trotting swine'?" asked Jordan.
She blushed. "I read it in a book."
They walked for a while, taking in the gradually expanding view. Tamsin said little more, but she didn't seem to mind Jordan's company either. After a while Jordan dropped back to the wagon and asked Suneil, "What will you do here?".
The old man nodded to the city, which now spread around and above them. "I've got some old business associates here," he said. "I want to see if I can call in some favours, and make a new start. The war's over, after all."
"Is this where you used to live?"
"No. That's one of the advantages of the place," said Suneil ruefully.
Jordan had a vivid idea of what a city at war would look like, based on what he had seen at the queen's summer palace. Clear as that notion might be, he couldn't picture soldiers in the streets of Rhiene. For all that it was a big city, it appeared sleepy and its citizens unconcerned. It took Tamsin to point out the placards here and there that were signed with a royal insignia. Jordan couldn't read the script, so she translated. "It's a decree from Parliament ending curfew and random searches. I guess the war really is over."
"It's not," he said. "The queen is still fighting back. She's trapped in the summer palace, but she's got plenty of supplies and her people are still loyal."
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