Bones of the Past (Arhel)

by Holly Lisle

  But she’d find a way.

  Chapter 10

  THE camp came to life at daybreak the next morning. After a hurried breakfast of grains and dried vegetables from the meager remaining supplies, everyone went in separate directions.

  Most of the sharsha children took off exploring. The two older Wen kids were once again—well, Medwind decided, “exploring” would be a good word for what they were doing, too. Runs Slow and Kirtha and Choufa tagged along with the scholars as they descended into the main part of the ruins and headed for the library.

  From above, the library was shaped like the Arissonese letter “entreg”—a staff with two horns that jutted out and upward to either side. In the midst of fallen and shattered buildings and piles of rubble that marked sites where buildings had once stood, the library was remarkably intact. As they descended into the lower city, Medwind could see that it was built to follow the contours of the cliff—it sloped downward as steeply as the side of the mountain on which it was built.

  The stone road that meandered down the cliffside and through the city was harder to walk on than the grass-covered cliffs to either side. The scholars and the children abandoned it quickly, and struggled down the steep hill, hanging on to tufts of grass to keep from falling to the bottom. Medwind stayed with Nokar and helped him down the rugged incline. He was excited as a child—and his limited stamina seemed only to frustrate him.

  The city was oddly laid out—the roads led near things, but not actually to them. Instead, they terminated in large stone circles. And even down the steepest of inclines, there were no steps. Medwind shook her head, bemused. The First Folk must have had a reason for such odd design, but for the life of her, she couldn’t see it.

  As they neared the front of the library, even the limited and slightly breathy conversation among the scholars faltered and finally stopped. Enormous obsidian-eyed saurids, bone-white and alert-looking, perched on either side of the broad walkway that led up and into the library, watching. Medwind counted over forty of them before she gave up counting entirely and just looked. The craftsmanship of the statues was extraordinary. Their wings were semi-furled, their bodies crouched in attitudes of readiness, their long, narrow faces displayed toothy, hungry grins.

  Medwind had to give the Wen kids credit for getting into the library. Those uncannily lifelike statues gave her second thoughts.

  Medwind Song walked between the twin rows of saurids that towered over her and felt their eyes follow her. Hair rose on the back of her neck. All the scholars stayed together, moving in awed silence through the ruins. None of them could find the right words for the place they had reached at such cost.

  The First Folk were supposed to have been a backward, primitive culture, but these buildings and artworks rivaled the finest current civilization had to offer—and as Medwind stared at the graceful, decidedly eccentric curves of the arches and domed roofs, she wondered if current civilization had not even been surpassed.

  She stopped at a particularly fine statue of a lean, graceful beast perched on the body of a beheaded kellink. The stonework was magnificent—the beast seemed almost to breathe. The saurid’s wings were partially unfurled, and the underparts, in the deep crevasses, still bore faint traces of color. Paint flakes of red and black reminded her of hovie colors.

  Impossible that paint has survived out here, she thought. Rain, cold, freezing, and thawing; all the elements should have scoured paint off this stone ages ago. Either this site was occupied recently—or some other force is involved. She closed her eyes and felt for the touch of magic.

  Somewhere nearby, a wellspring of energy waited. So—that would serve as a satisfactory explanation for the paint chips, and the remarkable preservation of the library.

  “Nokar, look!” she said, and pointed to the paint chips.

  The rest of the scholars looked, too. With enthusiastic murmurs, her colleagues ran from statue to statue, checking for paint traces on the other saurids. Most were bare—still they found a few traces of brown, copper, bright yellow, tan, gray—and more of that vivid scarlet.

  Nokar laughed. “These must have been incredibly gaudy when the First Folk still lived here. Can you imagine these statues, painted all over like giant flocks of hovies?”

  Medwind studied the long line of gleaming white statues, and colored them in her mind’s eye. “Yes,” she murmured at last. “It would have been lovely—like a festival.”

  “Typical barbarian approach to art,” Thirk commented, and sniffed. “Slather anything that doesn’t move or can’t fight back with eight colors of clashing paint, hang it all over with bells and tassels and trinkets until you can’t even see what’s underneath—and call the resulting mess beautiful. Ornamentation is the death of true art.”

  Medwind muttered, “I’ll give you the death of true art, you hruning little d’leffja…” Haven’t even thanked me for saving your obnoxious carcass, and you have the keaddaba to look down your nose at the Hoos.

  Nokar rested his hand on her arm and said, in a soft voice that was meant to carry, “Ignore him, dear. He’s a Delmuirie scholar. Don’t expect words of wisdom from him.”

  Everyone laughed—everyone except Thirk.

  “True.” Medwind grinned and enjoyed the expression of fury on Thirk’s face, and amused herself briefly with headhunter thoughts. Then she walked up the broad ramp and under the huge, arching doorway into the library.

  A flock of little brown birds scattered, screeching, in front of her, flying up through the light-ports carved in the upper reaches of the walls and out in a steady stream.

  Behind her, she heard Thirk mutter, “You’ll regret mocking Delmuirie.”

  She was tempted to turn and laugh at him—silly little man with his ludicrous dedication to fringe scholarship and his dark and toothless threats. But she decided she would not deprive the man of his last shred of dignity, no matter how tattered it might be.

  There were, in any case, other things to think about.

  The library spread before them all—a vast wonderland of unread works, endless rows of luminous white tablets waiting on shelves that reached to the ceiling, probably four stories above near the front, and much higher the further back she looked. The floor stayed level while the ceiling rose, reminding Medwind of a mammoth man-made cavern.

  Shelves curved around out of sight to either side of her, doorless arches beckoned from both sides of a corridor that stretched a daunting distance in front of her, promising more rooms of books. Forests of central pillars became arches that rose and met, and amusing painted monsters peeked out from the interstices, wearing bird-nest hats and long stripes of white droppings; or did vaguely obscene things inside of stonework niches high overhead. Light streamed in from huge circular openings just beneath the domed roof of the structure—they were similar in form to openings in the smaller domed buildings Medwind had seen throughout the ruins. The shelves in front of her were carved from pale green trevistone, engraved on the ends with pictures of plants that twined and flowered, with hovies and sea-monsters—inscriptions along the edges told undeciphered secrets, and First Folk numbers marked each set of shelves.

  Nothing was broken. Nothing was falling in. Aside from a general coating of dirt and the obvious signs of habitation by generations of small animals, the building could have been new.

  Wonderful, she thought. A gift of the gods.

  She pointed out the angled slashes and dots that were the First Folk numbers. “They’ve evidently got these divided into categories of some sort.” Her whisper echoed through the massive structure.

  Behind her, Roba whispered, “Gods, wouldn’t you love to find the directory?”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Kirgen said, “What a terrific idea. I bet we could find one if we looked.”

  Nokar rubbed his hands together. “Oh, I concur. With an index, we could, perhaps, decipher categories, determine First Folk logic and values, learn a few words—by all means, let’s go after the directory.”
<
br />   Thirk kept back and looked vaguely superior and amused by the rest of the scholars’ enthusiasm. No doubt he would have been bounding about in wild abandon if they had been on the trail of the nonexistent Delmuirie, Medwind thought. But a library directory wasn’t important enough for him.

  The rest of them discussed what form such a directory might take, then split up. Faia and all three kids took off toward the back, Roba and Kirgen went left, and Thirk, after a moment’s hesitation, followed Faia down the corridor. That left Nokar and Medwind to take the right branch. They went past more of the beautiful, carved green shelves, past a huge circular pit carved into the bedrock floor, and through a massive arched doorway.

  On the other side of the arch, the character of the library changed completely. The shelves inside the next chamber were of palest blue seraphine, polished to a high gloss. No carvings decorated their sides, and even the indexing numbers were discrete and placed unobtrusively on shelf corners. The rows of pillars and arches were of the same glossy seraphine. No funny gargoyles adorned the high places. Medwind found the room serene and ethereal—but lacking the charming personality of the green room.

  Nokar, however, wandered along the rows of shelves, touching the cool stone and smiling like a saje who discovered he had escaped all the saje hells and found himself, improbably and unexpectedly, in his own idea of heaven. From time to time he would pull out one of the glossy white tablets and run his fingers along the indented text.

  “Oh, Med,” he whispered finally. “This is better than I could have imagined in my finest dream.”

  She gave him her brightest smile—her pain she hid inside.

  She had managed to hide from him the price she had paid for this dream of his—and she would not see an instant of his happiness spoiled. Whenever his death came, it would take him by surprise, and quickly—and when it was over, she would consider vha’atta, and Nokar’s wishes, and weigh one against the other. She thought by the time he’d looked around the library, he might be amenable to something that would buy him time in any form.

  Roba and Kirgen appeared in the dividing doorway, laughing.

  “Medwind, Nokar, you just have to see this,” Kirgen said.

  Roba was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “Really, you do,” she agreed. “Come see.” She glanced around the pale blue spaces. “This is really different,” she said. “Built by somebody with the opposite opinion of proper library design.”

  She and Kirgen burst into laughter again.

  “I take it you haven’t found the directory,” Medwind said dryly.

  “Not yet,” Kirgen agreed. “Though it doesn’t look like you two have, either. But this is better. By Wilmer, this is better. These lizard-worshipers had some really twisted ideas.”

  Medwind and Nokar exchanged glances, and Nokar’s eyebrows rose. “By all means, Medwind, dear. Let’s go take a look at this jewel of strangeness.”

  They followed Roba and Kirgen across the lovely green chamber and into the other side arm of the building. Through the arched doorways, the mood changed again. This time, every finger’s breadth of wall space was covered by brilliantly colored mosaics. The room’s pillars were carved bloodstone, the arches black marble inset with obsidian and semiprecious stones.

  The mix of colors was breathtaking—gaudy beyond belief; vibrant; joyous. It was only when Medwind could pull her attention away from the overall impart of the room to take in the details that she discovered the cause of Roba’s and Kirgen’s amusement. The subjects of all those murals ranged from the erotic to the graphic to the downright pornographic—except that the artists had chosen to portray all their fanciful positions with various saurids, hovies, kellinks, and other “survival” fauna as the models. The results, from romantic two-beast encounters to some really bizarre multispecies orgies, became simply hilarious. The beasts’ facial expressions were delightful. Medwind, looking from scene to scene, found herself laughing along with her colleagues.

  “We can probably guess the subject matter of the books in this room,” she said.

  “Truly,” Nokar agreed. “Such a pity there are no beds here. I think we would find—ah—sleeping here an inspiring and perhaps even educational experience.”

  “You, love, are a dirty old man,” Medwind whispered.

  “You spend over two hundred years in celibate study, analysis, and work and see how you turn out,” he retorted. “Especially when a lovely young headhunter proposes marriage to you after you are well into your dotage.”

  Medwind forced herself to keep on smiling. But his words only reminded her that time was wasting—and she wanted him to see and do everything that could possibly be done in the First Folk ruins.

  “Well, this is remarkable,” she said finally, “but it isn’t finding the directory. And there doesn’t appear to be anything in here that comes close to resembling one of those.”

  “Point well taken,” Roba said. “With deep regret, I suggest we move onward.”

  They met Faia coming back. “Incredible rooms,” she said in greeting, and all of them laughed.

  “What did I say?” she asked, her voice plaintive.

  “We’re beginning to suspect all the rooms are incredible,” Medwind said. “So what did you find?”

  “The next section is a series of six smaller rooms, each in a different kind of stone, with metal decorations. I could not make any sense of the artwork in that section—there was nothing recognizable. The section following has buildings and diagrams and things of that sort carved on the walls. It is all in plain whitestone. Compared to the rest of what I have seen, it seems dull. But the last section is wonderful. It has no books in it. Instead, it is full of statues like the ones at the front of the library—except all of these still have their paint on. The kids are playing back there now.” She turned to Medwind. “You will love it,” she said. “It is simply beautiful.”

  Medwind discovered Faia was right. The statues were stunning. They stood in long rows in four different rooms at the back of the library, seeming to have stopped, for just an instant, to pose for the absent artist. The First Folk had brilliant artists among them. Medwind ran her fingers along one statue, and the coldness of the rough stone startled her. The statues should have been warm, she thought.

  “What are they?” she asked. “The styles vary from statue to statue, but the structural details of all the beasts are the same.”

  Nokar shrugged. “Gods, perhaps. Guardians. Personifications of various religious or philosophical ideals. We never have gotten a good grasp of First Folk theology—we’ve never had enough data.” The old man smiled and looked around him. “We do now, of course. Though this library alone will take at least a hundred years to catalog and translate.” He sighed. “I wish I were going to be here to do the work.”

  Medwind nodded with satisfaction. You can be, she thought, but she said nothing. She would let him grow hungrier for the idea of continuing scholarship before she broached the topic of vha’atta again.

  Thirk joined them, a smug smile on his face.

  “I found the directory,” he said.

  “Really!”

  “You jest!”

  “—Oh, that’s wonderful!”

  Nokar asked, “Where?”

  “Considering the general rudeness I’ve had to put up with, I don’t know that I ought to tell you—but I’m a better man than that. I’ll tell. You all walked right past it to get here.”

  Medwind frowned, trying to remember anything that had even vaguely resembled a directory. They’d seen the green room… the seraphine room… the bawdy room… the metal-sculpture rooms and the whitestone ones with the buildings and roads—and then this place with its beautiful painted sculptures.

  Nothing, she thought. There was nothing that held lists of numbers in order with writing around them. Nothing like that at all.

  “Can’t figure it out, can you?” Thirk asked and laughed.

  “No,” Nokar said. “I saw nothing that might be a d
irectory.”

  “Then the despised Delmuirie scholar makes the first major find, hey?” He chuckled. “Look at the designs on all those buildings on the central room—the one you can see from everywhere in the library. The designs are rows of numbers, with writing beside each number. There’s your directory.”

  The scholars went back to look. Sure enough, the carvings of buildings were covered with rows of First Folk script.

  “That certainly appears to be a directory,” Medwind said. “Now we only have to figure out what in the hells it all means.”

  * * *

  Choufa and Kirtha and Runs Slow stayed in the largest of the four statue rooms after the adults left. All three girls clambered over the stone monsters and sat on their backs and pretended to ride them. Kirtha tired of the game quickly and got down and walked from monster to monster and began talking to them. Choufa, however, imagined that the beasts were like airboxes that could carry her back into the sky and take her wherever she wanted to go. She had been very impressed by the airbox.

  Runs Slow, on the back of her beast, played out a scene of bloody revenge. “My monster flies down on the people of Blue Circle Silk! I throw my hurlstick and hit them all! They fall down dead!” she shouted.

  This seemed a very good idea to Choufa. She elaborated on it. “Yes!” she yelled. “My monster takes me to every Keyi in the world! They cannot hurt me because I have magic! I burn them with magic fire and they burn and die! There are no more Keyu in the whole world!” She remembered the look and the smell of the burning Keyu, and she smiled.

  “Good!” Runs Slow pretended to fly her beast, kicking its sides the way she’d seen peknu riders kicking their groundbeasts. “I am going to the peknu town. The peknu will give me much food and many pretty things because I have killed all the Silk People.”

  That seemed like a good idea. Choufa liked food, and she certainly liked pretty things. “I’m going to the peknu town, too. They will give me even more food and more pretty things because I have killed all the Keyu,” she bragged. “It is more important to kill the Keyu than to kill the Silk People.”