Ancient Fire

by Mark London Williams

  I decided to keep my lingo-spot on. There was little chance I was going to learn to speak Lizard anytime soon. With or without the tongue-clicking.

  As for what Clyne described as a “dance” — he was still figuring out which words go with which situations — to me it just looked like people standing still with their jaws open.

  They were dressed in robes or tunics and wore sandals with lots of lacing. Their faces looked pretty sunburned, like maybe they spent a lot of time outdoors. This particular group all seemed to be holding rocks or clubs, and I thought I saw a drawn sword or two.

  It didn’t look like they’d come to dance. Clyne checked some controls. “Cabin air good. Outside breathable.” He tapped some gauges, then tapped them again. “Chrono-compass still unworking.”

  He stared, and tapped one more time. Then he turned to look at me with those big, round lizard eyes and shrugged. “Stuck in this present until fix-up. But where-when are we?” He looked through the glass. “Mammals below, on two legs, somewhat advanced, have streets, buildings, boats, and wagons.” He turned back to me, still fairly cheerful. “Probably your planet! Kkzht! Let’s look.”

  The speckled glass of Clyne’s time-vessel slithered open along each side — I didn’t even know there were windows in it.

  Clyne stuck his head out.

  They weren’t silent anymore; you could hear them shouting. The lingo-spot let me understand them. “Devil!” someone screamed. “Demon!”

  I heard a couple thunks against the side of the ship. Someone from down below was hitting us with rocks. They must’ve had a pretty good arm. Too bad for them baseball hadn’t been invented yet.

  Then my eye caught something else. We were hovering near the top of the lighthouse, and as the rainbow-colored beam moved away from us, I could see a girl, about my age, also wearing a robe, with dark hair around her shoulders. She was leaning out of one of the archways in the top of the tower, staring at our ship.

  And now she was staring at me.

  I didn’t know what else to do. Through the open window, I waved.

  Instead of waving in reply, she looked startled and stepped back. I guess I couldn’t blame her.

  Then she was joined at the railing by an older woman, who looked a little bit like her. Thick brown hair just kind of flowed around her face. Her mother?

  The woman was shouting at us. At me. Sometimes, when the lingo-spot was working hard, there’d be a tingle, and the slightest delay, like listening to an announcer in a ballpark.

  “Where are you from?” she was asking.

  “I’m from New Jersey!” I yelled back. “And the Valley of the Moon!”

  I don’t think they understood me.

  It didn’t matter, because my part of the conversation ended when a rock hit me on the forehead. It knocked me back into the ship, making me dizzier than even time travel does.

  I touched my head and saw I was bleeding a little bit. I crouched and peeked out through another part of Clyne’s ship — it was made from some kind of transparent metal, which we don’t have on Earth — and saw one guy who’d actually climbed a few yards up the side of the tower.

  He had a beard and long hair and eyes that seemed to pierce you from a mile away. His robes were brown and kind of scraggly, and he was shaking his fist at us.

  I think the rock came from him.

  “Maybe mammals aren’t dancing,” Clyne decided. He pulled the ship away from the light- house. “Yet both of us stuck in this ‘now’ until compass is fixed. Need to land — k’ingg! — and rethink studies.”

  We floated over the city of Alexandria: There were spires, stone boulevards, pillars, arches, and huge statues of men and warriors along the roadways. Also, a few statues of half-men or half-women. The other half would be animal — like a guy with a bird’s head or something.

  I wonder if they thought Clyne was like one of those statues come to life.

  He was still looking for a place to land. Up ahead, we saw a wide clearing, mostly grass, with some bushes, in the middle of a huge complex of buildings. Like a palace courtyard turned into a giant park.

  Clyne steered the ship toward it, hovered, landed. As we came down, we could see a couple people scurrying away.

  The ship hit with a bump, and I stepped out. I reached down to put the Seals cap on my head…and felt my body tingling again. The colors of the Fifth Dimension swirled in front of me and I nearly passed out…

  “Boy sick?” It was Clyne, leaning over me, waving the hat in front of my face like a fan. “Time-stretching does that.”

  I started to wonder what was up with the cap.

  I didn’t wonder long, though. Coming up toward the ship, we had some new, curious visitors: a tiger, a pair of sauntering giraffes, and farther away, a rhino, stomping, head down, taking aim at the ship.

  This wasn’t just a courtyard. It was a zoo. And we’d landed in the middle of it.

  Chapter Eight

  Thea: Bazaar

  415 C.E.

  My name is Thea, daughter of Hypatia, last librarian in the city of Alexandria, keeper of archives and records, seeker of truth. This is my record, and whoever reads this, know that I would not lie. A lizard man and a boy wizard really did come to my city, fly around the lighthouse, and escape from a rhinoceros.

  And that was before we’d been properly introduced. But proper is the wrong word for this story.

  Their ship came at the stroke of noon. I’d climbed the tower with my mother, who was preparing a demonstration for her lecture on “The Bending of Light and the Movement of Time.”

  With the sun at its zenith, she revealed a carefully placed row of crystal prisms she’d set up in front of the lighthouse mirror. Normally, that mirror is used at night, or during dense fog, when the flame of Pharos burns and is reflected and thrown far out to sea.

  But now, the lighthouse threw instead a blazing rainbow, and within moments, the airship appeared.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Mother. There had always been whispered stories about ancient flying ships from distant lands, but I had never seen one before.

  “The lighthouse signal seems to have drawn another kind of ship here. I wonder where it’s from? Or, perhaps, when it’s from? And if it’s friendly.” My mother looked at the rows of crystals. She’d spent months shaping them and calculating how to line them up. “I wonder if this was such a good idea.”

  I leaned out over the railing to get a closer look at the ship, and that’s when I first saw the boy.

  He was staring at me, too.

  “Where are you from?” I shouted, but I’m not sure he understood me. He said something that sounded like “Neujarzii,” but it made no sense.

  Still, we might have shouted more questions, marveling at each other’s strangeness, if “Brother” Tiberius hadn’t hit him in the head with a rock.

  Tiberius is friends with Cyril, the head of the church in our city. It used to be the Romans who ran the place were always mad at the Christians. Then the Christians began taking over, especially Cyril, and it was their turn to get mad at the Romans.

  So the Christians began doing to everybody else what had been done to them.

  Mother said, “People have long memories here in Alexandria. And in a place with so many different names for God and heaven, that can be dangerous.”

  Perhaps the city is not so advanced after all. Tiberius had been saying in public that Mother was a witch, because she lived alone—without a husband — and because she played music, knew both elemental and advanced science, and believed in Serapis.

  Serapis is a god who dwells mostly in the underworld. They say he brings light and dark together and can heal both human and animal.

  I don’t know if he’s real.

  Nor, at that moment, did I care. The ship disappeared, heading off in the general direction of the Royal Quarter with its museum, zoo grounds, and library. And it didn’t seem as though Serapis, or anybody, human or god, could get us safely out of that tower.
r />   I wished that we were on the airship, too. Between the appearance of the boy wizard and his strange, lizard-like companion, Tiberius and his dozens of followers were convinced, utterly and forever, that Mother and I were witches of the most terrible sort. It didn’t help that the lizard man resembled the snake-like parts of Serapis.

  “If you leave now, we won’t harm you!”

  There was just one thing they did to witches.

  Letting them go without harm was not it. But Tiberius was shouting from below, suddenly claiming he was going to give us secure passage out of the lighthouse.

  “Is it a trick, Mother?”

  “It has to be,” she replied. “But I don’t know how else we’re going to get out.”

  “Then we’ll stay.”

  “Then we’ll starve. Or they will get in eventually.” Mother lifted my chin and smiled right into my eyes. “Don’t worry. For all his ravings, Tiberius is right about one thing. Sometimes there is magic in the world. Maybe we can trick them, too.”

  She and I went down the seemingly endless stairs to the bottom and flung open the doors.

  Tiberius and his mob were waiting. He smiled. “Witches. We only want you out of our midst. We’ve seen your trickery. It’s too strong for us. Please. Just…go.”

  He gestured with his hand, and the crowd parted like a gate being swung open. We stepped through.

  There was a long, narrow bridge running along the top of the seawall that controlled the flow of water into the harbor and connected Pharos to the mainland. The way across seemed clear. “We mean no harm to anyone,” Mother said, looking directly at Tiberius. “We’re interested in truth. And in what light can teach us.”

  “You’re lecturing again, Hypatia. Leave here. Walk away, go back to your library, and be out of Alexandria by sunrise. Let the light teach you that.”

  Mother’s shoulders sagged a little, and she turned away, putting an arm around my shoulder. “Come, sweet Thea.”

  “‘Sweet Thea.’” That was Tiberius repeating the phrase, mocking us.

  “Does sweet Thea have slow pox, too?” he went on. “Or is she protected by one of your charms?”

  The slow pox epidemic was something else that was blamed on us. We were suspect because no one at the library had come down with it. In truth, I think the only “magic” we used was that we bathed regularly.

  “We don’t use charms.” Mother still had her back to him.

  “It’s said witches never suffer from their own spells. If you caused the sickness, and we let you leave, perhaps you’d take the cure with you. We can’t have that.”

  Suddenly a hand shoved me off the bridge, and I was engulfed by the warm green-blue of the Mediterranean. I recovered and swam back to the top. When I broke the surface, I could see my mother’s face. “Swim!” she yelled at me. It was her hand that had pushed me. They were hauling her away.

  “Swim!”

  Her last words to her child.

  But she also knew swimming would give me a better chance than running. I am a good swimmer — Mother used to call me Mermaid as a nickname — but, more important, I could now see Tiberius had the other end of the bridge blocked off by two fierce-looking men. He had never had any intention of letting us go.

  I could swim back toward the necropolis. There was an underground tunnel there with an entryway near the harbor. It led back toward the library.

  It might have been safer to travel underground, but speed was more important to me. I decided to swim for the docks and return to the library on foot, and, once there, I would get help. Besides, since the slow pox had broken out, there were a lot of unburied dead down in the catacombs. And I was in no mood to make my way past them in the dark.

  As I swam away, an arrow whizzed past my nose, disappearing in the water.

  An arrow!

  Normally only palace guards carry bows and quivers. Who among Tiberius’s men was shooting at me?

  Tiberius’s influence—and Cyril’s — must have been growing among the guards themselves. I knew then there would be fewer and fewer safe places for me.

  Another arrow skimmed by me. Swim, Mermaid!

  A few minutes later, I pulled myself out of the water, up on the wooden pilings of the harbor, shivering and soaked. But I had very little time before Tiberius and his mob would catch up with me.

  I hurried to the Gate of the Moon, the main entrance to the city from the harbor side, staying close to the city wall instead of the main boulevard. The fewer people who saw me, the better.

  As I approached the Royal Quarter, I was surprised to see a few vendors still lined up by their stalls or selling trinkets from blankets.

  Normally, you could buy everything and anything here — fruits, nuts, olives, smoked meats, fabric, and spices from far-off lands. You could find the services of a medic or a midwife, or get your fortune told.

  Since the pox had come, however, the open-air bazaar was supposed to have been closed down. But people still have to eat. And to eat, some people still had to sell.

  “Child, child . . .”

  I recognized her. Her name was Sarai, one of the fortunetellers. She saw me shivering and took the shawl from around her shoulders to wrap around me.

  “Thank you…,” I gasped.

  Sarai handed me a piece of smoked fish. And then, looking around so as not to be seen, she slipped a small statue of Serapis into my hand. “For protection,” she whispered.

  But I hardly noticed. I was watching a griffin vulture fly by overhead. The only griffin vulture I knew about lived in a cage in the zoo.

  How could he have gotten out?

  In answer to my question, the animals roared; elephants were trumpeting, and you could hear human screams from the groundskeepers. As this terrible music grew louder, the lizard man leaped over the mighty wall from the garden side and landed in front of me!

  In his arms, he was holding the boy wizard. Everyone in the bazaar was shouting, too, falling all over themselves to get away. Everyone except Sarai.

  “Who are you?” I asked them.

  The boy wizard spoke again in some strange tongue.

  At that moment, Tiberius’s mob rounded the corner. They stopped and pointed at the lizard man.

  “Look at the creatures she commands! Can there be any doubt she’s a sorceress?” It wasn’t Tiberius who spoke, but someone stockier and beardless. Where was their brave leader now? “And that this sorceress should not be allowed to live?”

  Somehow, the boy wizard and lizard man knew what was being said. They looked at each other, then at me.

  The boy nodded, and the lizard man put him down. Then picked me up.

  I was still shivering.

  The small Serapis talisman fell out of my hand. The boy bent down, perhaps to give it back to me.

  But by now the lizard was holding me tight and began bounding away on powerful legs.

  Tiberius’s followers tried to give chase but could not keep up. Angry and exhausted, they turned their attention to the boy.

  The last glimpse I had was of the boy hopelessly surrounded.

  Until he put on some kind of soft helmet—and disappeared.

  Chapter Nine

  Eli: DARPA

  August 2, 2019 C.E.

  The van is making that vibrating sound, like we’re going over a bridge. I bet we’re heading back toward San Francisco. But with blacked-out windows, it’s hard to tell for sure.

  Mr. Howe is sitting on the seat next to me, along with a couple of his uniformed goons. I guess they’re trying to figure out what to do with me, now that they know I’m unstuck in time.

  I’ve been back awhile. I’ve told them a little about Alexandria, what I remember. I described the lighthouse. And the zoo. I haven’t told them about Clyne, though. Or his ship. They’d probably just think I’m crazy, which might make the situation worse. Besides, I don’t know if I want them to know about Clyne. That might be dangerous for him.

  Anyway, why should I trust them? They still h
aven’t told me where my dad is. I nearly made it all the way to Wolf House yesterday, but no sign of Dad anywhere. “I guess you’ll just have to voluntarily stay inside from now on,” was Mr. Howe’s only comment when they brought me back.

  But I don’t get to “voluntarily” use a vidpad, or a roam box here in the van. So I can’t do any Barnstorming. So many free choices and all for my own good.

  “Devices like that can be tracked electronically. We can’t take any chances.” That’s Mr. Howe again, explaining for about the twenty-hundredth time why I have to be bored out of my skull.

  Don’t they know I need something to distract me? When you’ve been time-traveling…you’re left kind of…haunted by things. Like the colors and eerie quiet of the Fifth Dimension. Or the fact that I left a couple people behind in Alexandria who were in big trouble…a week ago. And who knows what shape they’re in now?

  “Here. Use these to pass the time. On us.” Mr. Howe hands me a pack of baseball cards. I don’t know why they still call them cards. Tradition, I guess. They’re more like small circuit boards, with moving holograms on the front.

  Howe’s given me a “Hall Heroes” pack—in other words, ’grams of players recently drafted into the Hall of Fame. I got a Barry Bonds, a Ken Griffey Jr., and a Mark McGwire. Not bad. There’s Bonds, hitting number 700 by the same bay I’m probably being driven over right now. There’s McGwire, breaking the single-season home run record, which Bonds would break again.

  I’ve seen old cards in collectors’ shops, of course. They don’t move at all. With the ’grams, you get to watch a bunch of career highlights over and over again, so you don’t get bored quite as fast.

  Now if I can just imagine Barry Bonds as a werewolf, I’ll have a Barnstormer game.

  They woke me up this morning to come here. I’d been dreaming again. I keep seeing the colors spilling out from the lighthouse. And the rhino charging the time-ship. That seems to be another problem with time travel—you get less and less sure where your dreams leave off and your actual life begins.