Ancient Fire

by Mark London Williams

  Thea looks grim. “You heard him. They just broke through the walls. We need to leave.”

  Clyne is a bit frantic. “My ship is going to stay gra-bakked and never get fixed! The school’s going to kill me!”

  “What’s ‘gra-bakked’?” I ask.

  “You don’t have a good word for it,” he explains.

  We can hear shouting in the distance but can’t see anyone yet. In a few moments, Tiberius and his followers will be inside the library.

  “We need to leave,” Thea says slowly, “or it will not be the school that kills you.”

  She slashes at the wall and with a grunt, finally pulls the tile free. She tosses it in her bag and takes off in the dark. She’s familiar enough with the layout of the library grounds, and Clyne, apparently, can see pretty well without light. But I keep bumping into things. I hit my right shin twice.

  We get out of the courtyard, and by the time we’re inside the main building we’re almost running. Smoke trickles in behind us and keeps us moving along.

  There’s a little light now — some of the halls have torches in wall holders, and the ones that are still lit are casting long shadows. It would be fun to play with the weird shapes we’re making if there was any time. But we’re surrounded on both sides by stacked rows of cubbyholes — thousands of them, stretching all the way to the ceiling, holding scroll after scroll after scroll.

  Thea hands me her satchel. “Hold this.”

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer me directly but keeps moving down the halls, plucking scrolls out of the shelves almost randomly. She glances at them and shouts out the subject matter, almost angrily, as she gives them to me to stuff into the bag.

  “Planetary motion!” she shouts. “Healing with plants! …A History of Atlantis! ...Maps of the world!”

  She keeps going, taking what she can, practically tossing them to me, as the bag gets heavier and heavier.

  “Jewish history! …Roman history! …Egyptian history! …Secret history!” More scrolls.

  “The Frogs and The Birds,” she yells.

  “Do you study nature?” I ask, panting a little as I try to keep up with her.

  “Those are the names of plays!”

  Clyne has taken a cue from her and jumped up to the top of the shelves, running above us, grabbing scrolls from the top shelves and flinging them down, even carrying one in his mouth like a pirate holding a knife.

  I guess he thinks he’s helping, but there’s hardly any room left in the bag.

  “This is getting pretty heavy,” I tell Thea.

  She turns to face me with more scrolls in her arms. “The Proper Care of Chimaeras and Other Rare Beasts,” she says, sticking another one into the satchel, “and How to Build a Pyramid.”

  She stands, looking right into my eyes. “I have to save what little I can.”

  What can I tell her? I’m about to offer to put one in my back pocket, but then we hear voices. Not ours. They’re coming from behind us.

  “But I suppose I have to save all of us, too. Come on.” She’s running again, but this time there aren’t any more stops to save scrolls.

  “Where are we going?” I ask. “Underneath.”

  Clyne jumps down and follows behind us.

  A few more twists and turns, and the walls of cubbyholes open up into what looks like a kind of ancient apartment, or maybe a fancy Las Vegas hotel room: a couple of low beds, a table with parchment and more scrolls piled on it, bowls of fruit set out everywhere, a couple of chin-high statues, and piles of clothes draped over the carved marble chairs. Large pillows and cushions are scattered everywhere.

  “What’s this?”

  “Our living quarters,” Thea tells me. “There’s an entrance here that goes down to the catacombs.”

  “What’s a catacomb?”

  “Tunnels under the city. We can head away from here, out past the necropolis, past the city gates, and try to get away.”

  “What’s a necropolis?”

  She stares at me a moment. “Do you not go to gymnasium?”

  “I get my exercise.”

  “Gymnasium! A school!” She throws up her hands. “Necropolis is a city of the dead! The tunnel out of Alexandria goes through it.”

  “Yum!”

  That was Clyne. Both Thea and I turn to see him eating an orange from one of the bowls. “Orrranngge! Brkkk! No thing like it at home! Snacked one previous from an outside tree!”

  Thea shakes her head. “He has been eating them all afternoon. He’s never seen them before. Tell me, what world do the two of you come from? I realize this isn’t the only planet in the universe.”

  Clyne answers her. “Not just! Cmmk! This isn’t the only universe in the universe, either!”

  “Mother always said the same thing. I should write that down. But there isn’t time.” Thea goes over to the marble desk and tries to move it with her shoulder. It doesn’t budge. She knocks a couple of half-finished scrolls off the top and picks one up to look at it. “This is Mother’s work. This one is about slow pox.” She throws it down. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  I pick it up and stuff it in the satchel. If it can help Mr. Howe, it can help get my mom back. “It matters to some of us, Thea.”

  “At the moment, moving this desk matters even more. The entrance to the tunnel is underneath.”

  Clyne and I help her push. As we huff and puff, I ask her about slow pox. I don’t want to seem too eager.

  “You don’t want to know. Uhhh…” The desk is starting to budge. “It saps the life out of you—and the spirit. And leaves a wrinkled shell of a body afterward. According to my mother, it jumped from goats and sheep to people. No one believes her.”

  But I might. Or someone else in the future. We’ve moved the desk a couple feet; there’s a large hole in the floor, like a sewer opening with the cover taken away. Which, in a way, I guess it is.

  “If we go through the necropolis, there’ll be fresh bodies in there. From the pox. If it’s any comfort, by the time someone’s dead, they can’t spread the contagion. Still, we will have to make our way past them very carefully in the dark.”

  I don’t say okay to that, but I don’t say no either. The air is getting smokier, and I know we have to get out. We push the desk another foot over when we hear them:

  “DEMON!”

  I think they mean Clyne. There are two of them, from Tiberius’s group, standing at the entrance to the room. One holds a sword. One is enough.

  “Come on!” Thea grabs my arm and pulls me down into the hole. We roll down a muddy slope into pitch blackness. I stand up, relieved not to bump my head. We’re definitely in a tunnel, and I can’t see a thing.

  “We need a torch,” Thea says. We’re also missing a dinosaur. I hear more shouting from above, followed by a brkkk! and an akkk! or two.

  “What about Clyne?”

  “The lizard god’s on his own right now.”

  “But I can’t just—”

  “They already took my mother. Who knows what they did to her. But they will do it to us. And we won’t be able to help anyone. Come on!”

  Then more commotion at the tunnel entrance, and with a loud screeching sound, Clyne catapults himself down in the darkness. We hear him tumble, then in the next moment he jumps past us. “Go! Angry mammals above!”

  Someone who does have a torch pops his head down under the floor and peers after us. I think I can make out a scraggly kind of beard in the shadows. “They’re down here!”

  Tiberius has joined the party.

  Thea and I break into another run. I feel around in my pockets for a match, anything, but all I touch are the other two baseball cards. I take one out… The faint, dim glow from the holographic image — in the dark, I can just make out Barry Bonds — lights up a square inch in front of my face. Better than nothing.

  It smells pretty damp and sour, but I don’t care. I just hope I have enough light to keep us from crashing into a pilla
r or running off the embankment into the slow, gurgling stream below.

  “Just follow the water!” Thea pants.

  “How…how are you going so fast…?” I can hardly see her ahead of me in the dark.

  “I’m holding on to K’lion’s tail!”

  We open a lead on Tiberius, because his men seem a little scared to come after us in the dark. In case Thea really is a witch. Or I’m a wizard. Or Clyne is whatever they think he is.

  All those thoughts are knocked out of my head when the three of us go crashing down as we all trip over loose…

  …bodies that have been dragged into the catacombs and left there.

  I crash down right next to one as Barry Bonds pops out of my hand and falls next to Thea, who’s landed near me. As my eyes adjust, I can still barely make her out. “Slow pox,” she whispers. “They don’t even have time to bury them anymore.”

  I can see her reaching out in the dark and, like a blind person, touching the faces of the bodies that have been dumped there, trying to figure out what they look like with her fingers.

  Maybe in case one of them is her mother.

  I sit there for a second, trying to watch her in the dark.

  What do you say to someone in that situation?

  I won’t find out. Torches flicker in the distance — some of the mob has gotten over whatever spooked them, and they’re back on our heels.

  And where is…“Clyne? Buddy? Are you out there?”

  “No talk.” It turns out dinosaurs can whisper. “This is a move in Cacklaw. Play dead. Fake out.” I can’t see him, but he must be lying perfectly still, pretending to be a dead human body so that Tiberius won’t notice him in the dark.

  I’m not sure that will work. For one thing, water has begun to steadily drip down on us, and it’s hard not to move.

  “Get away from here, Clyne! Run. We’ll come after you.” I hiss-whisper back, and hope the sound doesn’t carry too far in the tunnel.

  “Can’t go, kk-kk-kk,” Clyne answers. “You and Thea still here. I hide, too.” I hear a loud splash as Clyne dives into the stream.

  “Up ahead!” The torches are getting closer. Thea is still carefully touching the faces of the bodies around her.

  “Don’t move,” I hiss again.

  From the footsteps, I can tell they’re nearly on us. I shut up and roll over, lying still, but I bump the decaying body next to me, and part of it gives way with a squish, like a Jell-O mold collapsing. The whole thing is really gross, but there isn’t much time to be scared. The men are too close.

  “We’ll never find them down here, Tiberius.”

  “We will. Heaven commands us to.”

  “This place, Tiberius, has little to do with heaven.”

  “You are a nervous fool, Praetorius.”

  “Only a fool would not be nervous. It is dark. Our clothes are heavy with water, and these pillars are groaning. And I can smell smoke even down here. You should not have let this grow out of control.”

  “The fire started at the harbor. There was a ship…bringing in more scrolls for that witch-woman’s library. Foreign scrolls. The crowd wanted to put a stop…to strange ideas. The flames are a sign of their righteous passion.”

  “All this death down here…it’s evil.”

  “Listen. Shh.”

  “What?”

  “Hear that? Like a faint echo.”

  I peek and see Tiberius peering in our direction. The water is coming in more heavily. Some gets on my face, and I try not to sputter.

  “Death is natural, Praetorius. But life, spinning out of control—that is evil.” There’s a constant rumble now as water comes in. But that’s not our only problem: Tiberius is staring right where Thea has wedged herself between a couple of bodies.

  “Tiberius? What do you see?”

  “I believe I see a strange twist of fate, Praetorius — or a witch’s trick.”

  He steps toward Thea just as the rumble turns into a low, steady roar, and then it feels like I’m back in the Fifth Dimension, because several things happen at once:

  Tiberius touches Thea, who stops pretending to be dead long enough to scream.

  Tiberius screams back, “Sorceress! I have you!”

  As he grabs for her, I reach out and yank his ankle. I guess he thinks Thea is bringing the dead to life, because his scream changes from rage to terror…

  …just as water sprays down on his torch, snuffing it out and surrounding all of us with total darkness…

  …just as whatever was controlling the flow of water into the harbor gives way, and half the Mediterranean comes roaring into the catacombs and sweeps us up. I reach out for Thea, for someone or something to hold on to, but grab only water, which fills my ears, my eyes, my nose…

  …and then I go black. And this time, there are no colors to wake up to.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thea: Survivor’s Tale

  415 C.E.

  After seeing so much, it would have been far easier to tell myself I had gone mad. I was soaking wet and trapped in the lighthouse, where a mob had assembled—for the second time that day—calling for me to be burned. Mother was gone, taken by the same crowd, and I was left with a talking reptile and a boy trying to be a wizard as friends. And my city was burning. How much easier to tell myself it was all some kind of insane vision. But the vision wasn’t insane. The city and its people were.

  I had been with my mother, Hypatia, in that very lighthouse the day before as she con- ducted an experiment on the nature of time. That had been at noon.

  By then, Mother already stood accused of being a witch. Me too, not only for being her daughter, but also for knowing stars the way I do and for suggesting once that our Earth is not the center of divine creation, but a piece of it.

  Just for surviving the flood in the catacombs, they would suspect me of black magic. Eli the boy wizard, K’lion the lizard man, and I were all in the tunnels, trying to escape from the great library, which had been put to flame.

  I am glad, at least, that Mother did not see the fire. It would have broken her heart and her spirit at last.

  “Sorceress!” they were yelling from outside. Me, sorceress. Here I was, a thirteen-year-old girl, shivering and cold. Where was my magic now?

  In the catacombs, the docks and channel locks had collapsed above us, destroyed by flames.

  I was covered with water and swept away. I had been pretending to be dead and now found myself clutching one of the many real dead bodies rushing by, using it as a raft. That body, that person whose life had been given to slow pox, saved mine in the flood. Eventually, I floated out past the shattered Gate of the Moon at city’s edge. I shook myself off and staggered to shore.

  I gazed back where the docks had been. Fire seemed to be everywhere.

  I remember once looking at a statue of Serapis—the serpent god, the healer, the city’s protector—on Mother’s desk. I asked her if there really was a Serapis. I argued with her that if a god, or gods, exist, how could their greatness and mystery be contained in a mere statue?

  “What there is really,” she said, “what exists, is people’s hope that there’s a way to balance things, heal them and make them better. ‘Serapis’ is one of the names we put to that hope.”

  “Then Serapis is not real?”

  “Hope is a very real, very living thing. But it needs to be taken care of and nourished, or it dies.”

  Brother Tiberius’s view was that if you even mention Serapis, you should have your tongue cut out.

  That seemed neither helpful nor hopeful. And now our city was burning. There were screams in the distance, panic. Everyone going through their own sorrow, their own grief.

  Walking along the ruined shoreline, I heard the flapping of wings. I expected an owl hunting in the night, but saw instead the escaped griffin vulture from the zoo circling overhead. These loose bodies would be a feast for him.

  Eventually, heading in the direction of the lighthouse, I was surprised to see the long
wooden footbridge leading out to Pharos Island still intact. Once again, that bridge provided the promise of escape.

  I thought that perhaps nobody would think to look for me in the lighthouse a second time, but I had only just arrived inside and bolted the door when I heard a loud thump and the first cry of “Witch!”

  Tiberius had eyes all over the city, and the fire had not managed to blind them to my whereabouts. It seemed his whole mob was after a final reckoning with their perceived enemies that night.

  An hour or two went by, and from the yelling, I could tell the crowd below had grown in size.

  I had no idea if my new friends were still alive. Or if Mother was. In a lighthouse, surrounded by people, I had never felt more alone.

  I thought of letting the mob in. Perhaps, in the end, that would be less painful.

  Then, suddenly, came a new and distinct pounding on the door below. I froze, listening to the loud booms. And realized they had a battering ram. Now it didn’t matter what I did. They would get in anyway.

  The battering ram crashed into the door again, and instinctively, at the top of the tower, I stepped back away from the noise. I stumbled over the remains from Mother’s experiment.

  Because of the chaos in Alexandria, no one had come here to spark the lighthouse bonfire, which is why the signal was dark for the first time in memory. But the mirrors were there, and the fuel lines from the ground floor were still intact, drawing up oil from below to keep the giant wick lit...

  I realized I could make the lighthouse shine again if there were a way to start the fire. And perhaps, seeing the signal, someone would come. Someone not connected to the mob below.

  The crystals were sharp in my hands, almost cutting my skin, but I hardly noticed. I began to wonder if those two stones could be used…like flints.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eli: Tiberius

  415 C.E.

  My mom is waking me up, and I’m home in New Jersey, and it’s all been a dream, and I’m still a regular kid who thinks clocks and time only move forward. It’s sunny out, and I’m getting ready to go out to the woods and set up a Barnstormer game with Andy. Later, we’ll get a ride home, with some warm cookies—