The Lost Cities

by Dale Peck

  Another clang. An oof. Charles turned to see Iacob on his back a few feet away, Nimrod standing above him with both swords raised.

  “Where is the demon?” Nimrod screamed. “As you value your life, tell me now!”

  Without thinking, Charles grabbed a handful of gritty dust with his free hand and threw it at Nimrod’s one good eye. Charles’s aim was true. Nimrod’s face exploded in a cloud of dust and he dropped one of his swords (narrowly missing Iacob, who rolled out of the way just in time). Charles’s fingers had already closed around a chunk of brick the size of a large dictionary, and he hurled it at Nimrod’s chest. The priest stumbled backward but managed to stay on his feet. He was blinking his eye rapidly, and Charles couldn’t tell if he could see or not.

  Charles looked around for something else to throw, but before he could grab something there was a sound. Later on, Charles would say it sounded like a light saber in Star Wars, but at the time Charles only knew he had to duck. He hurled himself on top of Iacob, who was struggling to stand.

  The beam of light emitted by the one remaining mirror book sliced through the air—the air, and Nimrod as well, cleaving arms, chest, and head from legs and stomach, which fell to the ground like birds shot from the sky. With a terrible muteness, the priest’s mouth opened and closed, but there was no air to give voice to his last words. With a final twitch, he was still.

  Charles dropped the amulet in his pocket and grabbed a sword. “Let’s go.”

  Iacob blinked the dust from his eyes. “Now? I was just starting to like it here.”

  The Greenland boy was cut off by another explosion of dust. Yet another pillar had shattered under the book’s rays. A moment later, one more pillar went, and then a chunk of ceiling fell to the floor.

  “Well, if you put it that way,” Iacob said, “let’s go.”

  Crouching, the two boys half ran, half crawled their way toward the dais and the exit behind it, only to discover that the doorway that led to the hall—and the flying carpet—had collapsed.

  “We’ll have to go for the front door,” Charles said.

  “But your carpet,” Iacob said. “How will we—” “We’ll figure that out later,” Charles said, as still another pillar exploded.

  The boys ran the length of the room. Twice they had to throw themselves to the floor to avoid getting lasered by the beam of light. One time Charles landed right on top of a soldier, who turned his burned face toward Charles and looked at him blindly.

  “We have done wrong!” the soldier croaked. “We have brought the wrath of God upon us!”

  Iacob grabbed Charles and pulled him up. They ran the rest of the way to the door and staggered through it, only to find themselves plunged into sudden darkness.

  “Ch-Charles?”

  Charles turned to Iacob, whose face was barely visible in the dim light emanating from the dust-clogged room behind them.

  “It’s okay, Iacob. I think I know the way.”

  And he did know the way, now. The darkness almost made it easier for him to see the images he’d encountered in the mirror book in the tree above Drift House. Taking Iacob’s hand, he led him up the ramped hallway without tripping or faltering. It was a long walk, and Charles could feel Iacob’s fear in the darkness, but Charles knew he wouldn’t get lost now.

  And then they were there. They turned a corner, and a twinkling yellow portal lay at the far end of one last corridor.

  Iacob turned to Charles. “The things of your world are miraculous. Miraculous and terrifying.”

  Charles shook his head. “They’re not of my world.”

  Iacob’s teeth caught the distant light, but Charles couldn’t see if he was smiling or frowning.

  “No, Charles, they’re of both our worlds. This”—Iacob waved his hand in the direction of the destruction they’d just escaped—“this is where we come from, isn’t it? My father, and Father Poulsen for that matter, sound very much like Nimrod to me, no matter how many centuries separate them.” Iacob shook his head. “Your brother said something about the river. Do you know the way there as well?”

  Charles shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Charles to wonder why there was light at the end of the corridor. As a boy of the twenty-first century, he took illuminated nights for granted; but as they drew closer to the exit he saw that the light was unsteady and shifting about. Not merely flickering like a flame, but dancing, jumping, surging in great waves. Either there was an enormous number of people with torches running around outside the exit, or the city of Babylon was on fire.

  “Charles?” Iacob’s voice indicated he, too, had guessed at the scale and confusion of the fire outside.

  “I don’t know,” Charles said to Iacob’s unasked question. “But we’d better be careful.”

  He held his sword in one hand, Handa’s knife in the other, and Iacob brandished his sword in return. There were grim smiles on the boys’ faces, suggesting both their determination and their sense of the slight ridiculousness of two and a half small blades against an entire burning city.

  They crept the rest of the way out. The tunnel opened into a narrow courtyard that ringed the tower, whose enormous bulk hung like a weight on their backs. The courtyard contained only palm trees and flowerbeds bisected by narrow stone channels filled with slow-moving water, but on the far side of the wall a great orange light pushed up into the night sky. A low blanket of smoke stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction, eerily luminescent from the light of the burning city. The smoke shrouded the tower, making it impossible to see its apex, or—if it still existed—the vortex of the time jetty. As Charles looked up at the sky, he prayed that the jetty was closed. But if they had succeeded, how would he and Iacob get home?

  Iacob took hold of Charles’s arms to start them moving. “We should hurry, before whatever is out there”—he gestured at the fiery glow beyond the courtyard’s walls—“comes in here.”

  Charles nodded, and lifted his dragging feet. He could hear angry shouts, terrified screams, clangs and clashing and the general ruckus of mayhem.

  “It sounds like… like a war,” Charles said, hesitating because he didn’t really know what war sounded like.

  “It feels like war,” Iacob said. “It is a strange time,” he continued as they picked their way from shadow to shadow. “The people possess so little, and yet they build structures as miraculous as this one.”

  They came, finally, to the corner of the tower. Iacob had poked his head around the edge, and a look of dumbfounded awe took him over.

  Cautiously, Charles looked around the corner. And now he wondered what had so shocked Iacob, for there were two choices: the immense and incredibly steep staircase on the side of the tower, that did in fact seem to ascend to heaven, or the wide open gates of the courtyard, through which could be seen the spectacle of the burning city.

  It was the second scene that held Charles’s attention, for even as he looked at the dancing flames and the figures running back and forth—some in terror, some in pursuit—he suddenly realized he and Iacob had to get through them to make it to the river.

  “It is war,” Iacob whispered. “But how did it break out so suddenly? The city was peaceful when we arrived.”

  Charles didn’t answer. He was studying the expanse of courtyard and the wide gateway and the tangle of smoke and flame-filled streets beyond. Something closer caught his eye: a sparkle of reflected firelight off the water sloughing through a nearby stone trough. He pointed to it excitedly.

  “These channels must run to the river,” he told Iacob. “We just have to follow them.”

  “But they lead to the wall,” Iacob said.

  “We can pick up the trail outside. We just have to get through that.” Charles pointed to the chaos beyond the gates.

  “Quick then,” Iacob said. “Before it gets any worse.”

  Crouching behind a raised flowerbed, the boys made their way toward the gateway. The running figures
—some carrying infants, or baskets piled with food, or lances—shielded their faces when they ran past the opening, as if they were afraid of looking directly at the building that loomed over their city, or what was left of it.

  “They’re terrified of the tower,” Charles said. “The Bible says God punished the people of Babel for building it. Do you think that’s what’s happening now?”

  “I think we do not have the luxury of contemplating such questions right now,” Iacob said. “Let us first save ourselves, and worry about answers later.”

  Charles nodded. “There.” He pointed at a line of squat buildings crowding the temple walls. He surveyed the wide, empty space between the gates. “We can use those shacks for cover, but we’re going to have to run for it.”

  “Okay,” Iacob said. “On three. One—”

  “Two—”

  “Three!”

  The boys dashed from the cover of the flowerbed and onto the wide road that led through the gates. Charles felt the temperature go up as they neared the entrance, but even more palpably he felt the shadow of the enormous tower at his back, and so he raced toward the flames. For what seemed like an eternity the boys were running across the wide open avenue, just like all the other people running through the streets beyond the gate. Every second Charles expected to hear a soldier shout, or feel the blade of a lance pierce his body. And then, with a dive, he was behind the row of buildings, Iacob tumbling on him a moment later.

  The boys looked at each other with mutual grins on their faces.

  “Wow,” Charles said. And then, parroting Charles, Iacob said:

  “I know. Wow.”

  The boys trotted swiftly behind the row of buildings, which were little more than stalls. Judging from the sacks of things—grain and beads and clay jars—they were on the edge of a market square. Charles contemplated taking something as an artifact back to the twenty-first century (assuming he made it back, of course), but as his fingers trailed over a tiny clay bottle stoppered with wax, he felt the foreignness of it, and rejected the plan even before he’d acted on it. These things would have to make it to his time the old-fashioned way: minute by minute, year by year, over the next twenty-five centuries. Even if all that was left by then was dust.

  They came to the end of the stalls and faced the next open space. Charles spotted a low palm whose fronds offered thick shadow at its base.

  “There,” he said.

  They didn’t count this time, just glanced to either side and ran.

  To either side—but not directly in front of them. Charles hadn’t taken two steps when he collided with a man who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He wasn’t much taller than Charles, though he was thick in the shoulders and waist, and Charles bounced backward, nearly tripping over Iacob coming up behind.

  The Babylonian man stared at the two boys wildly. His beard and hair had bits of hay and dust stuck in them, and there was a gash on his left cheek dripping blood. More blood welling from that arm, which hung limply at his side. And then his mouth opened and a few garbled words came out, and he ran off.

  Charles and Iacob dashed for the cover of the palm. When they were safely shielded, Charles said, “The translation charm didn’t work on him. Why?”

  Iacob knew nothing of the translation charm, but he remembered something else. “According to Father Poulsen, when God destroyed the tower—”

  “All the languages changed!” Charles finished. “Is this… are we really at the destruction of the Tower of Babel?”

  For one moment, Iacob’s face went far away, as if he were listening to something Charles couldn’t hear. And then he turned to Charles.

  “I think—I think we caused it.”

  “You mean… the mirror books? But they were just supposed to close the jetty.”

  “I think the tower and the jetty are—were—the same thing.”

  Of course! The symbol on the amulet, and the fact that the books had drawn them to the very bottom of the tower. It all made sense. What didn’t make sense was the idea that Charles and Iacob had brought about the tower’s destruction—that they had done what the Bible said was God’s work. It—it was just too much to contemplate.

  He pulled a palm frond down and looked at the city. Men and women, soldiers and civilians ran through the burning maze of streets. To Charles’s modern eyes, they seemed like players in a video game, some of them guessing correctly and escaping, others guessing wrong and running into swords, or flames. Behind and above all this was the tower, and Charles could see the first enemy soldiers scaling the immense staircase now, pushing over statues and urns filled with flowers and burning oil as they made their way to the smoke-shrouded top of the building, where Charles knew they would tear it apart, brick by brick if they had to.

  He turned back to Iacob. “This is going to get worse before it gets better. We’ve got to get to the river.”

  Iacob nodded, pointed. “There’s the canal. Let’s go for that house, there.”

  The boys dashed, half crouched, from bush to house, house to hole, hole to ruined wall. Charles didn’t look at any of the faces they passed, nor did they look at him. He noted that everyone seemed to be alone, each man, woman, and child fending for himself or herself, each against his neighbor or enemy, and he was grateful for Iacob’s companionship. For his part, the Greenland boy was even more single-minded, pointing out this or that bit of cover without speaking, looking at Charles only to see if they were headed in the right direction.

  The canal they were following disappeared underground at some point. But by then the ground had a distinct downhill slant to it, and Charles simply piloted them down the slope. After what seemed like a thousand fifty- and hundred-yard dashes from one skimpy bit of shelter to the next, the boys rounded a long row of connected buildings whose roofs burned in a single blaze and saw that the maze of streets more or less stopped. Palm trees grew thick here, and in between them were shacks and tents, many trampled or smoldering. But over the tang of smoke Charles could smell the cool wetness of a large body of water.

  The boys picked their way carefully through the shanties. Every corner was blind, and even on the straightaways it was impossible to see more than five or ten feet ahead. Once they rounded a corner and sent an enormous pig squealing, and Iacob flung out his arm in a protective gesture, like a father slamming on the brakes and reaching reflexively to protect his child in the passenger seat. The two boys stood panting, their hearts racing, as the fat pink creature disappeared into the shadows, and almost as soon as they started again they jumped a second time, because a piglet went squealing after its mother, followed a moment later by its twin.

  Iacob fell against a trunk, a small laugh escaping his mouth. “If that is the worst thing that happens to us, I will consider myself truly fortunate.”

  But Charles wasn’t paying attention. He cocked his head. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear…?”

  “Music,” Charles said.

  “Music. Charles, there is a war being fought. I do not think anyone is playing—” But then Iacob broke off, for it was clear he heard it too.

  It was a jazzy sort of number, dominated by brass horns and strings that were thousands of years away from being invented, and these were joined by a woman’s staticky voice, half speaking, half singing.

  All of me…

  Why not take all of me?

  Charles grabbed Iacob’s hand. “It’s the radio!”

  “You mean… the box… with Susan!”

  “It has to be!” And, without waiting to see if Iacob followed, Charles dashed toward the sound. Now the tents and shacks seemed to spring up just to get in his way, and Charles jumped and flailed and ran with all his might.

  “Susan! Susan, we’re here!”

  “Charles!” Iacob hissed behind him. “Be quiet. You don’t know—”

  “Susan!” Charles screamed over his friend’s warnings. “Susan, wait! We’re coming!”

  Then the shanties were gone and Charle
s crashed down a steep slope toward a wide, flat bar of water. The river was dark and light at the same time, reflective and hollow and, as far as Charles could see, empty of everything save for the mirrored flames of the burning city at his back.

  All of me…

  Why not take all of me?

  He raced down the pebbly, scrubby slope, Iacob hard at his heels.

  “Susan! Susan, where are you?”

  All of me…

  “Susan!” Iacob was calling now. “Susan, are you there?”

  Why not take take all of me…

  The boys skidded to a halt in the mud at the river’s edge. The empty river lapped at Charles’s moccasins, Iacob’s bare feet.

  Baby, take all of me!

  Charles looked upriver, Iacob looked down. They looked back at each other. Charles felt a growing fear building in his stomach.

  “Charles!” Iacob pointed over his shoulder.

  Charles whirled around. A shadow lay on the water, so small it could have been a whiff of smoke or a reflected cloud. But it kept its shape as slowly, patiently, it inched toward them, and now Charles heard a man’s voice—a living man’s voice—join the woman’s recorded tones:

  All of me…

  Why not take all of me?

  Charles could see the shape of the boat now, a man’s back, the delicate spiderlines of oars dipping into the water on left and right. Moonlight bounced off a bald head. A few strands of hair flitted in the lightest of breezes. Charles wanted to run then, but he felt as if roots had grown from the bottoms of his feet and held him in place.

  “Charles!” Iacob’s voice came from just a few feet away, but Charles couldn’t turn his head away from the approaching rower. He thought of the myths he had read in school about the man who rowed people from the land of the living to the land of the dead. Of all the people. Him? Here? How?

  Iacob took hold of Charles’s forearm. “Charles, who is this?”

  “It—” Charles didn’t know how to answer. “It’s not Susan.”