The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  By the time I’d finished stuffing my face it was getting dark. I tried to retrace my steps, got completely lost, gave up, looked around for somewhere to sleep and caught sight of a man’s feet sticking out from behind a tree. It turned out I’d been going in circles, or a freak storm had blown me off course, or something like that. Anyway, I was back at the camp. I went to look at the duke.

  Ninety-six men died from eating the poison mushrooms. The duke survived. By the time I got back he was sitting up straight, the map on his knees, though it was already too dark to read. He looked up at me as I trudged towards him and said, “If I’m right, those hills over there are CataAno.”

  I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

  “CataAno. Where Aeneas changed horses on the post road to Eano. In which case, Eano is twelve miles dead ahead.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I might head back to the ship.”

  He smiled at me. “What, and miss all the fun? I don’t think so.”

  “I think I’ll go back,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You’ll sail the ship all by yourself back to the Republic,” he said. “What an exceptional fellow you are. And on an empty stomach, too.”

  I didn’t tell him about the Chicken-in-the-woods. I said; “I don’t think Eano’s there anymore. If it’s the capital, and it’s only twelve miles away—”

  He raised a hand, and I shut up. “I think I’d like to be proved right before I die,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”

  I thought; he’s going to die, and he’s talked himself into believing, so why not let him die happy? But, if we all turned round and went back, maybe we could catch fish or something. If he said go back, they’d go back, wouldn’t they? “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” And I told him.

  I shall never forget the look on his face. Hard to describe. The nearest I can get is, he didn’t believe me, and he was deeply puzzled at why I should choose to make up such an improbable story. When I eventually ground to a halt, he gazed at me for a while, then looked down at the map. “From Eano,” he said, “we should be able to row down the Pelanaima, assuming we can hire boats, and follow the coast back to Aos. That’ll save us having to walk back the way we came.”

  I shook my head. “You’re forgetting,” I said. “There’s a waterfall at Deudo. Aeneas said it was as high as the steeple of the New Year Temple.”

  “There’ll be a portage,” the duke replied.

  “Aeneas never mentioned one.”

  “There’ll be one by now,” the duke said. “After all, that was three hundred years ago.”

  So I went looking for someone else in authority. That proved to be difficult. The captains and first mates of both the Lion and the Heron were dead; three from mushrooms, one from fever. The helmsman of the Heron was still alive, but delirious and shouting at people who weren’t there. At least that explained why there’d been no mutiny; nobody left to lead it.

  I wandered round the camp, counting heads. By now I was feeling considerably better, thanks to the chicken-fungus. I counted sixty-one, of whom probably fifty-eight would still be alive in the morning. Then I sat down under a tree with my head in my hands and burst into tears. Nobody objected, commented or seemed to notice.

  While I was bawling my eyes out, it occurred to me that there was still one high-ranking officer still alive; me. I was, after all, the Gorgias professor of humanities at the Studium, which made me an ex officio member of the Lower Conclave and standing delegate to the College of Deacons. I wasn’t sure if my jurisdiction extended to the ends of the earth, however. Also, I didn’t want to be a leader. It’s bad enough dying; dying when it’s your fault must be so much worse.

  Twice during the night I got up, with the intention of walking away, back down the trail we’d blundered through the forest. I didn’t, of course. Too scared. It had all happened so fast—the deaths, the disaster, the sudden falling-apart of everything. I tried to put my finger on the moment when we’d lurched from in control to doomed, but I couldn’t. The obvious truth, which I found I couldn’t hide from no matter what I did, was that by this point there really wasn’t anything I or anyone else could do. There was definitely no hope if I went back. We’d come too far. If we went on—well, who knows? We might just stumble to the edge of the forest, or meet with friendly savages, or kill a very large, stupid, slow-moving, half-witted animal.

  In the morning, nobody was in any hurry to move on, not even the duke. We spent a while looking at the dead—we didn’t have the energy or the tools to bury them, so we left them where they lay, but we looked at them, as being the only sign of respect we could still afford. Gradually, in twos and threes, we hauled ourselves to our feet, hesitated; then, without orders or words of command, we silently turned to face due north and began picking our way.

  I don’t know how long we’d been going—the canopy was high and dense, so we rarely saw the sun—when the man next to me, I never did find out his name, grabbed my shoulder and pointed. He wasn’t the only one to have noticed. On the skyline, in a fortuitous gap between the trees, was a human outline, standing straight and perfectly still.

  Someone yelled out; we all joined in. The human outline didn’t move. We surged forward, howling, pleading. Actually, I’d sort of figured it out before anyone got close enough to see. Accordingly, I slowed down and walked while the others broke into a run.

  Aeneas had liked most things he saw in Essecuivo, but he was mildly scathing about their works of art. Their paintings, he said, were simplistic and garishly colored, and their sculptures were stiff and unnaturalistic. But, he added, you can’t help but be impressed by the sheer size of some of them. There was one, he said, a mile outside Eano on the main road to Aos, an advancing draped female in basalt, that had to be fifteen feet high—

  Well, it was too badly weathered and worn to be sure what it was supposed to be, other than a human being, walking forward. We gathered under it, staring up. There was no face. But on the pedestal—too low to catch the wind and sheltered from the rain—was an inscription, in an alphabet I’d never seen before.

  The duke crouched down to peer at it, then got up slowly and painfully. “Nearly there,” he said.

  History demands absolutes. History would like to say that, at three minutes past the tenth hour of the seventeenth day of the sixth month, twelve hundred and seventy-one years after the foundation of the Republic, the duke entered Eano by the west gate. History, of course, is written by people like me.

  As a historian, however, I’m at an overwhelming disadvantage. I was there. Accordingly, if I want to cling on to the few tattered scraps of intellectual honesty I have left, I’m forced to say, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what time it was, because the forest canopy was so high and dense I couldn’t see the sun. I can guess at the date, but I suspect I’ve lost a day somewhere in my recollections; other survivors I’ve talked to remember another day before we reached the statue, which I have no memory of whatsoever. I can be reasonably sure of the year (but bear in mind Suavonius’ recent and highly persuasive paper arguing that the Republic wasn’t founded in Year One, but two years earlier) As to where we made our entrance, who knows? We walked between what looked like two ivy-smothered dead trees, which turned out to be the broken stubs of stone columns. The duke reckoned they were the remains of a gate, but for all I know they were the back door of a very large tannery. And as for the name of that city; well, ask someone else. Thanks to my lifetime of exhaustive study, I’m the least qualified man in the world to offer an opinion.

  We spent the rest of that day and most of the next wandering round in a sort of daze, like country people on their first trip to town. We tripped over the fallen remains of walls, fell into gutters, cisterns, fountains and what may just possibly have been Aeneas’ great central open-air bath (but it was filled with a tangle of vines, briars and creepers, so there was no way of knowing how
deep it once was). At one point, we definitely walked across the flat roof of a large building. My guess is that something like twelve feet of leaf-mould had built up over what used to be ground level, so we were at least two stories high; in which case, we most likely marched straight over the suburbs without knowing they were there. We found about two dozen inscriptions in the same unknown script; the duke was desperate to copy them down, but nobody had a pen or a pencil; someone tried lighting a fire and charring the end of a stick, but it didn’t work.

  I forget the name of the man who found the window. He was one of the soldiers, a short, cheerful man with the unusual ability to sleep standing up; I’d exchanged a few words with him from time to time, until his optimism got on my nerves. He was poking about in the undergrowth when he came up against what looked like a huge anthill, except that under all the forest-floor garbage there was stone. He poked some more, and was mildly shocked when his questing boot shattered a pane of glass. The noise brought the rest of us, and we crowded round; there was just a chance, after all, that a relatively intact building might have been used as a food store by people coming this way.

  The window proved to be big and round, and when we looked inside, there was just enough light to see that what we’d stumbled across was a rose window in a tower. Someone found a stone and pitched it through. We listened for the sound of it hitting the floor, but there was nothing. Then, just as we’d given up, we heard a faint, distant plink. The soldier stuck his head through as far as it would go, then wriggled back out in a hurry. The stink, he explained, was unbearable. What was down there? No idea. But the window was a very, very long way off the ground, and it was a sheer drop all the way down. If we had a lot of strong rope—But we didn’t, and even if we had, we’d have lacked the strength to hold a man’s weight, all of us put together.

  How much of the city we explored I really couldn’t say, because mid-afternoon on the second day we made a discovery that put everything else out of our minds, and accounts for me being here to tell you this story.

  It was just as well we had a couple of farm boys with us. They recognized the yellowy-green turd-shaped things dangling from the trees as plantains; a cheap, low-grade animal fodder that we import by the flyboat-load from Scheria. You can eat plantains.

  Later, we decided that they must have been the fifth- or sixth-generation descendants of a grove of ornamental plantains (the tree’s quite nice to look at, apparently) planted to decorate some public space or building. Mercifully, they’d bred more or less true, which most cultivated fruits don’t. What we ate was unripe and decidedly bitter, but somehow or other we rose above that and gorged ourselves till we could barely stand. Then, having learned at least a small part of our lesson in commissariat management, we crammed every pocket and aperture in our clothing with plantains, strung bunches of plantains together on creepers and slung them over our backs. There were still a few desolate survivors hanging from the trees when we left, but only because they were too high to reach.

  Next morning, after we’d slept off the effects of the plantain orgy, we got up and started walking back the way we’d come. Nobody gave an order or made a decision; nobody objected. The feeling was a bit like a theatre at the end of a rather boring play; everybody stands up and slowly files out, not saying much. I’d expected the duke to make a scene; I imagined he’d want to stay and carry on exploring. Maybe he had more sense than I credit him for; if he’d tried to stop us from going back at that point, I don’t imagine he’d have lived very long. I don’t think so, though. I believe that he found still being alive after his apotheosis moment of entering the lost city came as such an anticlimax that he simply gave up and couldn’t be bothered anymore. True, the next day he was showing signs of coming back to life. He put himself at the head of our pathetic little column and made a point of leading (which meant we got lost twice). He went round asking everybody who they were, an unfortunate thing to do in the circumstances, since it emerged that of the fifty-four of us still alive, only seven were sailors; and later, two of them died of a resurgence of the unknown fever, along with three others. That only seemed to energize the poor fellow. He started making plans for the five remaining sailors to train the rest of us in the maritime arts, so we’d be able to sail the Heron back home. Nobody paid him much attention.

  We still had masses of plantains left over when we emerged from the forest into the light, to find ourselves on a shingle beach we’d never seen before. We weren’t unduly upset about that. Getting out from under those horrible trees more than made up for being somewhat lost. We spent a night on the beach in more or less total silence; then, at dawn, the duke pointed left up the beach and said, Follow me. We didn’t move. He said it again. We stayed put. Then he shrugged and walked right, down the beach, and we followed. We reached the bay a couple of hours later.

  For some reason, I’d spent most of the walk back through the forest trying to prepare myself in advance for the shock of finding that the ship wasn’t there anymore; that something had happened, it’d sunk or been burnt or carried off by passing buccaneers. Nice, just for once, to be wrong; because as we rounded a headland and saw the bay, there was the Heron, drawn up on the beach, exactly where we’d left it. More remarkable still, it wasn’t alone.

  The crew of the Squirrel had had, they told us, a pretty miserable time. The storm that sank the Whelp and the Attempt and effectively did for the Lion had blown them past rather than into the bay, and shoved them into the path of a strong current that swept them two days’ sail down the coast. They’d lost their masts, so there wasn’t much they could do, until the current eventually petered out, leaving them stuck on a sand bar. The next tide floated them free, and they’d sent the longboat ashore to cut two tall trees to make into new masts. No sooner had these been shaped and fitted than another sudden wind picked them up and threw them back out to sea. They weathered the storm, just about, and slowly picked their way back to shore, only to find the Heron beached and deserted, and no sign of life to be seen anywhere. They spent the next day fishing, being fortunate enough to hit a monster shoal of a sort of dark blue sardine; and then we showed up, looking like death; and where the hell was everybody else?

  The captain of the Squirrel was the son of one of the duke’s tenants in Rhiopa; he’d been in the duke’s service since he was twelve, and regarded him as a sort of middle-order god. When the duke put him in charge of the expedition and said he wanted no further part in it, the poor man was temporarily stunned. Once he’d come round, however, he set about sorting out the mess, and by and large he did a pretty good job.

  On closer examination, the damage to the Squirrel from the various storms proved to be worse than originally thought. Given time and a shipyard, she’d have been fixable. As it was, our new leader decided to abandon her and transfer the lot of us onto the Heron. We were short of pretty much everything—sailors, food and, worst of all, barrels for storing water—but there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it with the resources available. He therefore decided to make a run for home as quickly as possible. Accordingly, at first light the next day, we sailed out of the bay and almost immediately picked up a very useful wind blowing north-west, precisely the direction we wanted. I can’t remember seeing anybody look back as we left the coast behind us. The feeling was more one of sneaking away before the bastard woke up and had another go at killing us.

  A word about plantains. Don’t let the frost get on them, or they spoil and start to rot. Therefore, don’t store them in nets on the deck of a ship.

  We didn’t know that. Accordingly, we ran out of food with at least six days still to go. I remember thinking, how perfectly ridiculous, to have survived so much, only to be killed by a cold snap. The Squirrel people tried casting their net, but it kept coming up empty; we were in a sea with no fish, which struck me as entirely in keeping. I’m not sure what we’d have done if we hadn’t spotted a sail, far away on the horizon.

  Odd, isn’t it, how things turn out. If we had
n’t lost the Lion and the rest of the fleet and all ended up squeezed together into the Heron, we wouldn’t have been able to sail up to within boarding distance of an Imperial carrack, bristling with heavy guns and loaded down with nutmeg, mace, pepper, walrus ivory and lapis lazulae. Reasonably enough, they assumed we were the relief escort they’d been told would be meeting them at precisely those co-ordinates to make sure they got home safe without being attacked by privateers from the Republic.

  I have a note somewhere of how much the cargo of the Fortitude and Mercy made at auction when we got home. To give you a rough idea, the twenty per cent claimed by the Treasury in payment for a retrospective privateering license amounted to slightly more than the government’s entire annual revenue from other sources. The remaining eighty per cent was topsliced to pay off the mortgages the duke had taken out, reimburse him for the entire cost of the expedition and pay the death-in-service benefits of everyone who didn’t make it back. The balance was divided pro rata between all the rest of us, the duke taking fifty per cent. I got four hundred and seven angels, which at that time was more money than I’d ever had at one time in my whole life.

  I wondered about that. The ocean, after all, is a very big place, and the Fortitude and Mercy had made a point of staying well clear of the usual shipping lanes, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, what were the odds against us turning up, in an Imperial ship, at the exact place in all that sea where the carrack was expecting to rendezvous with an Imperial warship? I’m no mathematician, but they can’t be very much greater than the odds against finding a new continent or large island at a set of co-ordinates randomly generated by adding a bunch of letter-values together. The fact remains, however, that the Fortitude and Mercy was only the fourth largest prize ever taken by Republican privateers; consider the Roebuck, the Flawless Rays of Orthodoxy, the White Swan, all chance encounters, and the biggest haul of all time, the King of Beasts, which Orlaeus stumbled into after both ships, following courses over two hundred miles apart, had been caught in a freak storm and carried to within a few hundred yards of each other in the exact centre of nowhere.