Eternity Road

by Jack McDevitt

  “We can’t cross that,” said Silas.

  All that remained of the middle of the bridge were a few connecting beams and a walkway. The walkway just stuck up there in the sky.

  “We should quit here for the day,” said Shannon. “Give the horses a rest. Tomorrow we can figure out the next step.”

  Nobody argued. There were no convenient buildings this time so they put up a couple of lean-to’s and crawled in. Avila checked her various patients and pronounced them fit, but insisted they take advantage of the early halt to sleep. “You especially,” she told Chaka, who had thrown off her fever. “In this weather it wouldn’t take much for you to go another round.”

  They broke out one of the wineskins, and draped blankets over their shoulders. Shannon brought back some trout, to which they added biscuit, berries, and beans. Afterward Chaka complied with her doctor’s orders and closed her eyes. Silas was arguing that gods were necessary to the peace and order of society. “On the whole,” he said, “I don’t think I’d want them over for dinner. But they’re convenient for requiring people to perform their social duties.”

  Avila sipped her wine thoughtfully and looked out across the river into the fogbanks. “And you, Quait? In what do you believe?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I know you do not believe in the Goddess.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Your tone says it. Your opinions in other matters say it. So what being greater than Quait do you speak with when the lights go out?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. He glanced at Chaka, who must have looked asleep. And he lowered his voice. “I see people like her,” he said, “and I think it’s unreasonable to demand anything more.”

  Chaka did not hear Avila’s reply.

  She was awakened by a hand on her shoulder and the smell of rabbit stew. “Hungry?” asked Quait.

  The rain had stopped, and it was dark. The fire burned cheerfully several feet outside the lean-to.

  “Yes. Save some for me?”

  Quait passed her a bowl. “Big debate going on.”

  Chaka heard animated voices. “Don’t tell me. The gods again.”

  “Not this time. They’re trying to decide whether they want to try crossing the bridge or looking for a ford. Jon doesn’t think there is a ford within several days’ travel.”

  “Why not build a raft and let the horses swim over?”

  “Have you looked at the current?” He pressed a hand to her forehead. The hand was cool. “How do you feel?”

  “Okay.”

  He sat down beside her. “They keep changing their minds. But Silas is scared somebody’ll fall off the bridge.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Karik used the bridge. I guess we can. How about you?”

  “It doesn’t look like a problem to me either. Of course, maybe that’ll change when we get on top of it.”

  He bent toward her and pressed his lips against her cheek. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you,” he said.

  She did not pull away until his lips sought hers. Damn. “You’ll get what I have,” she said, feeling childish. He smiled and kissed her. It was a very gentle kiss, his lips only brushing hers, but it left her tingling.

  “Eat,” he said, looking smug.

  The stew was good. It warmed her and she felt her strength returning.

  “I think I’m in love with you, Chaka Milana,” Quait whispered.

  There was a sudden flurry of activity around the campfire that Chaka momentarily thought was caused by the declaration. But it was something else, because the others were standing up one by one and looking north across the river. They were pointing, and their jaws had gone slack.

  Quait pulled away and looked back over his shoulder.

  “Something’s happening,” she said.

  It was easy enough to see: A ribbon of white light moved through the night on the far side.

  “Coming this way, I think,” said Flojian.

  Out of the northwest. It was traveling in a straight line. And coming quickly. Not like something passing through woods. More like a spirit gliding above the trees.

  “The thing’s airborne,” said Silas.

  The river wouldn’t be a barrier. Shannon put out the campfire.

  Avila bowed her head and whispered a prayer.

  “Ever see anything like this before?” Quait asked Shannon.

  “No.” He collected his rifle and loaded a shell into the breech.

  “It’s Arin’s dragon,” said Chaka. She scrambled to her feet and went after her own weapon, though she did not believe that bullets would have any effect on this thing.

  It broke apart, separated into distinct glowing segments. Four. One behind the other.

  It was curving eastward now, moving as if it were going to pass across their front, parallel to the river. They held their breath.

  It began to slow down.

  She watched it approach, watched its lights move along the surface of the water, watched them disappear behind patches of forest and individual trees, and then re-emerge.

  There was no sound, save the wind on the river, and the insects and the horses.

  “It’s stopping,” said Silas in a hushed voice.

  Each of the four illuminated segments had now become rows of individual lights. Eyes, thought Chaka. It had a thousand eyes.

  The forest tried to swallow it, but they could still see the glow of its passing through the trees. It was almost directly opposite them.

  She heard Quait’s voice. “What do you think, Silas?”

  “Voices travel across water,” whispered Shannon. “Let’s talk about it later.”

  It came out of the trees and stopped. Its lights floated on the river.

  “You don’t think it knows we’re here, do you?” Chaka asked Quait.

  Quait shook his head. “No.”

  “Then what’s it waiting for?”

  His only answer was to move close to her.

  A cloud drifted across the moon.

  The dragon remained quite still.

  It seemed to Chaka that a substantial piece of an hour passed before the lights across the river blinked, and the thing began to move again. Back in the direction from which it had come.

  They watched it cruise through the forest and curve back out into the night. It picked up speed and rose again above the trees. Its lights flowed together. After a while they began to dim. And within a few minutes, it was gone.

  13

  Jon Shannon had come to recognize a kindred spirit in Avila. The former priest was a solitary creature who enjoyed but never required the company of others. She was the only one of his five charges who did not seem like a transient in the deep forest. This was not attributable, he decided, to extraordinary wilderness skills. Flojian was better with horses, Chaka was a more skilled hunter, Quait a more accurate marksman. But Avila might almost have been a creature of the forest. She loved the leafy glades and the green silences and she never reminisced about Illyria. Although she was usually the one to point out that a break was prudent to rest the animals or the people, or to restock the larder, she grew impatient with delays. She was always anxious to move on, to see where the road went.

  Jon Shannon, like the majority of Illyrians, had never learned to read, so he did not share the general enthusiasm for the voice of Mark Twain, or for the other treasures to be found at Haven. He was with the company because he knew they needed him.

  He felt a special sense of responsibility to the women. And he was not surprised that it was they, rather than their male counterparts, who argued for crossing the river in the face of what could only be an inkala, a woodland demon.

  Their motives were different. Chaka had no intention of returning home without some answers, nor was she interested in facing Raney, who would point out that he’d told her so. Avila had no home to return to, and when she’d recognized the effect the nocturnal vision was having on the others, she made up
her mind to continue alone, if necessary.

  Among the men, even Silas was reluctant to continue in the face of a display that could only be explained by falling back on the supernatural. His old convictions that there were neither gods nor demons in the world sounded hollow away from the comfortable enclosures of the Imperium. Nevertheless, he would have been ashamed to show less courage than the women. Quait shared a similar view, and so it developed that only Flojian was left arguing, as he put it, for common sense.

  Shannon heard him tossing fitfully during the night and knew he was choosing between crossing the river into haunted country and trying to turn back alone. He also knew what the decision would be.

  They were up and moving at dawn, hoping to get across the river and be well away from the area by sundown. Everyone spent time staring at the opposite bank, where a wooded ridge overlooked the shoreline. A portion of it leveled off into a shelf, an esplanade, roughly midway between the crest and the water. Here, the trees thinned out; and here, everyone agreed, the dragon, the vision, the inkala, had come to rest.

  They could even see its track: a long, well-defined corridor of sparse growth, almost like a highway, running parallel to the river and then arcing out to the northwest.

  But Chaka wasn’t sure. “When it was approaching, it was above the trees. Above the trail.”

  “Still,” said Shannon, “It’s connected. That’s the way it came.”

  Silas grunted and pushed his hands into his pockets. “I’m more interested in what kind of beast it is.”

  Avila shielded her eyes. “We should keep clear of it,” she said. “Nothing from this world could move like that—”

  They followed Shay’s trail to the bridge.

  It was not an extraordinarily large structure, as these things went. The roadway itself was about a hundred feet wide, bordered by thick metal rails which were, curiously, only knee-high. It was supported by two massive concrete towers. But the far tower had sunk well into the riverbed, dragging trusses, girders, and roadway with it until the bridge had broken. A substantial piece had dropped out of the center and now lay submerged and visible in the crystal water. So there were now two bridges, one fifty feet higher than the other, connected only by a few pieces of metal, some cables, and a walkway.

  The walkway lifted gradually from either side, supported by a series of struts, rising above and outside the main bridge. It had at one time been enclosed by beams and steel mesh, probably to provide a sense of security, and possibly to deter accidents and jumpers. Now it was twisted and broken, and in some places the mesh dangled toward the water and in others it was simply gone.

  The paving was narrow; three people could not have stood comfortably side by side. But the walkway was intact. Even where the main bridge itself no longer existed, it had survived the general collapse, and swayed gently in the wind.

  “I can’t say I’m looking forward to it,” said Silas.

  Chaka blinked in the sunlight. “It’s a long way up.”

  Shannon shook his head. The river looked wide and deep as far as they could see in both directions. “I still think we should look for a ford,” he said.

  “We made the decision last night,” said Quait. “The bridge probably looks worse than it is.”

  “I agree,” said Silas. They were standing at the foot of the approach, where the walkway was only a corridor a few inches higher than the main roadbed. “Do we have anybody who’s bothered by heights?”

  “Probably everybody,” Chaka said.

  “You change your mind?” asked Silas.

  “I don’t care how we cross,” she said. “Let’s just get to it.”

  “The horses’ll be jittery.” Flojian made no effort to hide his conviction that they should turn back. “They aren’t going to like all that air.”

  “Look,” Quait said, “it’s four feet wide. It goes up and down a little bit, but nothing we can’t handle. If it were on the ground, nobody’d think anything about it.”

  They crossed the roadway, mounted a curb on the far side, climbed onto the corridor, and arranged themselves singly. Each took a group of three or four horses, using reins of different lengths so that the animals could walk single file. Quait led the way, and Shannon dropped back to bring up the rear.

  As the corridor lifted away from the road, a handrail appeared, and iron mesh rose around them. The floor was concrete, but it had fallen away in places, revealing a metal crosshatch.

  A wide green strip ran parallel to the walkway, about fifteen feet below it, also connected to the bridge. It too was intact, save for one or two breaks.

  Below them, forest and rolling hills gave way to clay banks and then to the river. The wind picked up. The sky was streaked with wisps of cloud; the sun was bright. It was cold on the walkway, and Chaka looped the reins of the three animals she had in tow around her wrist and pushed her hands into her pockets.

  She wondered who had traveled the walkway during its glory days. From this vantage point, she could make out massive ruins everywhere. Had people lined the bridge, safely sheltered behind the mesh, to admire the great cities on both shores?

  She concentrated her attention on the esplanade. Silas was going to want to go there when they got down on the other side. And nothing would satisfy him until they’d examined the spot. She would prefer to get across and keep going.

  The area looked harmless enough. It was flat, and a couple of downed posts lay on the ground. There was an opening in the woods on the west side. That was the corridor through which the thing had come.

  Above the esplanade, gray metal flashed in the sunlight.

  Another disk.

  It looked remarkably like the one at the Devil’s Eye, except that this one was secured to a mount instead of lying on its side. It was pointed almost in her direction. Like that other one, it was concave, a shallow bowl; and also like that other one, it was on a rooftop. It was, she thought, an exquisite piece of statuary. Her gaze passed on.

  The corridor creaked and rocked and the horses watched her with frightened eyes, and one or another of them occasionally pulled back. They were, she judged, less frightened by the sheer altitude than by the sense of unstable ground. Behind her, Silas was having trouble with a piebald. The animal kept trying to get loose, and Silas was constantly stopping to reassure it and stroke its muzzle.

  It took all her courage to continue walking when she reached the point where the mesh had fallen away and nothing lay between her and the void. Her stomach curled into a knot and she concentrated on thinking about Quait, looking out toward the horizon (but never down), and wondering what Raney was doing. Enjoy the rolling hills and tangled forest, she told herself. You’ll never get a better view, an interior voice cackled maliciously. The far side of the broken bridge dangled cable and I-beams and crushed struts. Beyond, the roadway descended to the riverbank, took on its ground cover of earth and shrubbery, and dived into the forest. She could follow it green and straight to the limits of vision.

  A cloud drifted across the face of the sun. Upstream, the river was dotted with small islands. She could make out the remnants of old harbor works, piles marching side by side into the water, broken buildings, an engine of monumental proportions that might have been used to lift bulky objects. She could not relax, and when a sudden burst of wind hit her and pushed her toward the edge, she dropped to her knees in near panic.

  “You okay, Chaka?” asked Silas, behind her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  Then the mesh was back and it felt like a tunnel. She relaxed a little until the security fell away again. This time she needed stronger medicine, and imagined herself swimming naked with Quait. Or with that young Oriki who had danced for her. The latter image, despite her situation, brought a smile. Was there anything more ridiculous than a nude male on a tabletop? Still—

  It helped.

  Below, the river flowed to the horizon.

  No real effort was made at conversation. They were too far from e
ach other, and even people walking side by side would have been hard-pressed to talk against the wind. Nevertheless, Silas called to her to stop until he could catch up. “Look at that,” he said. He was pointing at the disk.

  “I saw it.” She had to shout.

  “There’s one of those at the Devil’s Eye.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you think they are?”

  She would have shrugged except that they were out in the open again and she didn’t want to perform any unnecessary movements. “Don’t know.” She edged forward, eager to keep moving.

  “I wonder if it’s strictly artistic. Or if there is some other kind of significance?”

  “I don’t know, Silas.”

  “Hey!” called Flojian. “What’s the hold-up?”

  “Hold your horses,” shouted Silas. He turned and grinned at Chaka, then opened his journal. The wind riffled the pages. “I’m going to make a sketch,” he told her. And, to Flojian, “It’ll only take a minute.” He was trying to hold the book open and find a pencil when the pieblad yanked him off his feet. He bounced off a strip of mesh, which was all that kept him from going over the side.

  “Damn,” squealed Chaka. “Look out.”

  He hung on to the journal, which threatened to blow off the walkway, tightened his grip on the horses, and got back up. He looked embarrassed rather than frightened.

  “You okay?” asked Chaka.

  “I’m fine.” He shook his head at the piebald. “Tonight, I think we should have this one for dinner.” But his attention went right back to the disk. “When we get down there,” he added, “we ought to make a detour and take a closer look at that thing.”

  And there it was. Let’s go see the dragon. Maybe if we’re lucky it’ll come back.

  “Meantime,” she urged, “let’s keep moving.”

  She passed the last of the protective mesh as she approached the south tower. It was polished and gray and soared hundreds of feet over her head. A massive fracture divided it from top to bottom. Directly ahead, Avila moved cautiously along the open walkway. She wore her hood up against the wind. Once, she turned and waved.