“Yes, I’ve sailed a bit on a lake we have up north.”
“Wasn’t asking,” Eata told him.
“I don’t think I ever gave you my name. It’s Simulatio.”
“And a good one too, I’ve no doubt.”
The stranger turned away for a moment, tinkering with the jibsheet winch to keep Eata from seeing the blood rising in his cheeks. “When will we reach the deserted parts of the city?”
“About nones, if this wind holds.”
“I didn’t know it would take so long.”
“You should have hired me farther down.” Eata chuckled. “And that’ll be just the beginning of the dead parts. You might want to go farther yet.”
The stranger turned back to look at him. “It’s very large, isn’t it?”
“Bigger than you can imagine. This part—where people live—is just a sort of border on it.”
“Do you know a place where three broad streets come together?”
“Half a dozen, maybe more.”
“The southernmost, I would think.”
“I can take you to the farthest south I know,” Eata said. “I’m not saying that’s the farthest south there is.”
“We’ll start there then.”
“Be night by the time we get there,” Eata told him. “The next day will be another asimi.”
The stranger nodded. “We’re not even to the ruined part yet?”
Eata gestured. “See those clothes? Washing on a line. People here have enough to eat, so they can have two or three shirts, maybe. Farther south you won’t see that—a person with only one shirt or one shift doesn’t wash it much, but you’ll see cooksmoke. Farther still, and you won’t even see that. That’s the dead city, and people there don’t light any fires because of what the smoke might bring down on them. Omophagists is what my old teacher called them. It means those that have their meat raw.”
The stranger stared across the water at the lines and their rags. The wind ruffled his hair, and the tattered shirts and skirts waved at him like crowds of poor, shy children who feared he would not wave back. At last he said, “Even if the Autarch won’t protect them, they could band together and protect each other.”
“It’s each other they’re afraid of. They live—such as they do live—by sieving the old city, a finer screen every year. Every man steals from his neighbor when he can and kills him if he makes a good find. It doesn’t have to be much. A knife with a silver handle—that would be a good find.”
After a moment, the stranger looked down at the silver mountings of his dagger.
“I believe we might take a bit of a closer reach here,” Eata told him. “There’s a meander coming up.” The stranger heaved at the windlass, and the boom crept back.
To starboard, a high-pooped thalamegus made its way up the river, glittering in the sunlight like a scarab, all gilding and lapis lazuli. The wind was fair for it now, and as they watched (Eata with one eye to their own sail) the lateen yards dipped on its stubby masts, then lifted again trailing wide triangles of roseate silk. The long sweeps shrunk and vanished.
“They’ve been down seeing the sights,” Eata told the stranger. “It’s safe enough by day, if you’ve got a couple of young fellows with swords aboard and rowers you can trust.”
“What is that up there?” The stranger pointed beyond the thalamegus to a hill crowned with spires. “It looks out of place.”
“They call it the Old Citadel,” Eata said. “I don’t know much about it.”
“Is that where the Autarch comes from?”
“So some say.”
Urth was looking the sun nearly full in the face now, and the wind had died to a mere whisper. The patched brown mainsail flapped, then filled, then flapped again.
The stranger sat on the gunnel for a moment, his booted feet hanging over the side and almost touching the smooth water, then swung them back onto the deck again as though he were fearful of falling overboard. “You can almost imagine them going up, can’t you?” he said. “Just taking off with a silver shout and leaving this world behind.”
“No,” Eata told him. “I can’t.”
“That’s what they’re supposed to do, at the end of time. I read about it someplace.”
“Paper’s dangerous,” Eata said. “It’s killed a lot more men than steel.”
Their boat was moving hardly faster than the sluggish current. A flyer passed overhead as swiftly and silently as a dart from the hand of a giant and vanished into a white summer cloud, only to reappear shrunk nearly to invisibility, one additional spark among the day-dimmed stars. The brown sail crept across the stranger’s view of the Old Citadel to the northeast. Despite the shade it gave him, he was sweating. He unlaced his cordwain jerkin.
That night on deck, he laced it again as tightly as he could. It was cold already, and he knew without being told that it would soon be colder still. “Perhaps I should have a blanket,” he said.
Eata shook his head. “You’d only fall asleep. Walk up and down and wave your arms. That’ll keep you warm and awake too. I’ll come up and relieve you at the next watch.”
The stranger nodded absently and looked up at the orangish lantern Eata had hoisted to the masthead. “They’ll know we’re out here.”
“If they didn’t, I wouldn’t bother to set a watch. But if we didn’t have that, some big carrack would run us under for sure and never feel the difference. Don’t you go putting it out—believe me, we’re a lot safer with it high and bright. If it should go out of itself, you let it down and get it lit again as handsomely as ever you can. If you can’t get it lit, call me. If you see another vessel, particularly a big one, blow the conch.” Eata waved toward the spiraled shell beside the binnacle.
The stranger nodded again. “Their boats won’t have lights, of course.”
“No, nor masts neither. Besides, it could happen that two or three swim out. If you see a face in the water that stares at the light and disappears, it’s a manatee. Don’t worry about it. But if you see anything that swims like a man, call me.”
“I will,” the stranger said. He watched as Eata opened the hatch and descended to the tiny cabin.
Two boarding pikes lay in the bow, their grounding irons lost in the inky shadow beneath the overhang of the half-deck, their heads thrusting past the jib-boom mountings. He climbed down and got one, then scrambled onto the deck again. The pike was three ells long, with an ugly spike head and a sharp hook intended to cut rigging. He flourished it as he walked the circle of the little deck, up, down, right, left, his movements the awkward ones of a man recalling a skill learned in youth.
The curve of Lune lay just visible in the east, sending streamers of virescence toward him in a silent flood, spumed and uncanny. Silhouetted against that moss-green light, the city on the eastern bank seemed less dead than sleeping. Its towers were black, but their sightless windows, thus illuminated from behind, appeared to betray a faint radiance, as though hecatonchires roved the gloomy corridors and deserted rooms, their thousand fingers smeared with noctoluscence to light their way.
He looked to the west just in time to see a pair of gleaming eyes sink into the water with a scarcely perceptible splash. For the space of a dozen breaths he stared at the spot, but there was nothing more to see. He dashed to starboard again, to what was now the eastern side of the anchored boat, imagining that some devious adversary had swum under or around it to take him by surprise; Gyoll slipped past unruffled.
To port, the shadow of the hull lay long across the glassy river, though he could easily have touched the water with his hands. No skiff or shallop launched from the silent shore.
Downriver, the ruined city appeared to stretch away to infinity, as though Urth were a level plain occupying the whole of space, and the whole of Urth were filled with crumbling walls and tilted pillars. A night bird circled overhead, swooped at the water, and did not rise.
Upriver, the cookfires and grease lamps of living Nessus lent no glow to the sky. The river seem
ed the only living thing in a city of death; and for an instant the stranger was seized by the conviction that cold Gyoll itself was dead, that the sodden sticks and bits of excrement it carried were somehow swimming, that they were outward bound on some unending voyage to dissolution.
He was about to turn away when he noticed what appeared to be a human form drifting toward him with a scarcely discernible motion. He watched it fascinated and unbelieving, as sparrows are said to watch the golden snake called soporor.
It came nearer. In the green moonlight, its hair looked colorless, its skin berylline. He saw that it was in fact human, and that it floated face downward.
One outstretched hand touched the floating anchor cable as if it wished to climb aboard. Momentarily, the hemp retarded the stiff fingers, and the corpse performed a slow pirouette, like the half turn of a thrown knife seen by an ephemerid, or the tumbling of a derelict through the abyss that separates the worlds. Clambering down into the bow, he tried to grapple it with his pike; it was just out of reach.
He waited, horrified and impatient. At last he was able to draw it nearer and slide the hook under one arm. The corpse rolled over easily, far more easily than he had anticipated, its face pressed below the dark surface by the weight of the lifted arm, then bobbing up when that arm lay in the water once more.
It was a woman, naked and not long dead. Her staring eyes still showed traces of kohl; her teeth gleamed faintly through half-parted lips. He tried to judge her as he had judged the women whose compliance he had secured for coins, to weigh her breasts with his eyes and applaud or condemn the roundness of her belly; he discovered that he could not do so, that in the way he sought to see her she was beyond his sight, unreachable as the unborn, unreachable as his mother had been when he had once, as a boy, happened upon her bathing.
Eata’s touch on his shoulder make him spin around.
“My watch.”
“This—” he began, and could say nothing more. He pointed.
“I’ll fend it off,” Eata told him. “You get some sleep. Take the other bunk. No one’s using it.”
He handed Eata the pike and went below, hardly knowing what he did and nearly crushing his fingers beneath the hatch.
A candle guttered in a dish on the broken chest, and he realized that Eata had not slept. One of the narrow bunks was rumpled. He took the other, tying triple knots in the thong that held his burse to his belt, loosening his jerkin, swinging his booted feet onto the hard, thin mattress, and pulling up a blanket of surprisingly soft merino. A puff of his breath extinguished the yellow candle flame, and he closed his eyes.
The dead woman floated in the dark. He pushed her away, turning his thoughts to pleasant things: the room where he had slept as a boy, the hawk and the harrier he had left behind. The mountain meads of his father’s estate rose before him, dotted with poppies and wild indigo, with fern and purple-flowered clover. When had he ridden across them last? He could not remember. Lilacs nodded their honey-charged panicles.
Sniffing, he sat up, nearly braining himself on the deck beams. A faint perfume languished between the mingled stinks of bilge and candle. When he buried his face in the blanket, he was certain of it. Just before sleep came, he heard a man’s faint, hoarse sobbing overhead.
He had the last watch, when the ruins dropped from the angry face of the sun like a frayed mask. By night he had seen towers; now he saw that those towers were half fallen and leprous with saplings and rank green vines. As he had been told, there was no smoke. He would have been willing to stake all he had that there were no people either.
Eata came on deck carrying bread, dried meat, and steaming mate. “You owe me another asimi,” Eata said.
He untied the knots and took it out. “The last one you’ll be getting. Or will you charge me for another day, if you can’t return me to the place where I boarded your boat by tomorrow morning?”
Eata shook his head.
“The last, then. This spot where three streets meet—is it on the eastern side? Over there?”
Eata nodded. “See that jetty? Straight in from there for half a league. We’ll be at the jetty before primesong.”
Together they turned the little capstan that drew up the anchor. The stranger broke out the jib while Eata heaved at the mainsail halyards.
The sea breeze had arrived, raucously announced by a flock of black-and-white gulls riding it inland in hope of offal. Close hauled, the boat showed such heels that the stranger feared they would ram the disintegrating jetty. He picked up a pike to use as a boat hook.
At what seemed the last possible moment, Eata swung the rudder abeam and shot her bow into the wind. “That was well done,” the stranger said.
“Oh, I can sail. I can fight too, if I have to.” Eata paused. “I’ll go with you, if you want me.”
The stranger shook his head.
“I didn’t think you would, but it was worth a try. You understand that you may be killed in there?”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, I don’t. Take that pike—you may need it. I’ll wait for you till nones, understand? No later. When your shadow’s around your feet, I’ll be gone. If you’re still alive walk north, sticking as near the water as you can. If you see a vessel, wave. Hail them.” For a moment Eata hesitated, seemingly lost in thought. “Hold up a coin, the biggest you’ve got. That works sometimes.”
“I’ll be back before you go,” the stranger said. “But this pike must have cost you nearly an asimi. You’ll have to replace it if I don’t bring it back.”
“Not that much,” Eata said.
“When I come back, I’ll give you an asimi. We’ll call it rent for the pike.”
“And maybe I’ll stay a bit longer in the hope of getting it, eh?”
The stranger nodded. “And perhaps you will. But I’ll be back before nones.”
When he had vaulted ashore, he watched Eata put out, then turned to study the city before him.
Two score strides brought him to the first ruined building. The streets were narrow here, and made more narrow still by the debris that half choked them. Blue cornflowers and pale bindweed grew from this rubbish and from the great, cracked blocks of gritty pavement. There was no sound but the distant keening of the gulls, and the air seemed purer than it had on the river. When he felt certain Eata had not followed him and that no one was watching him, he sat on a fallen stone and took out the map. He had wrapped it in oiled vellum, and the slight wetting the packet had received had not penetrated.
For most of the time he had possessed the map, he had not dared to look at it. Now as he studied it at leisure in the brilliant sunlight, his excitement was embittered by an irrational guilt.
Those spidery streets might—or might not—be the very streets that stretched before him. That wandering line of blue might be a stream or canal, or Gyoll itself. The map presented an accumulation of detail, and yet it was detail of a sort that did nothing to confirm or deny location. He committed as much of it to memory as he could, all the while wondering what feature or turning might prove of value, what name of street or structure might have survived where there was no one left to recall it, what thing of masonry or metal might yet retain its former shape, if any did. For an instant it seemed to him that it was not the treasure that was lost, but he himself.
As he refolded the cracked paper and wrapped it again, he speculated (as he had so many times) about the precious thing that had been thus laboriously hidden by the men to whom the stars had been as so many isles. Left to its own devices, his imagination ran to childish coffers crammed with gold. His intellect recognized these fancies for what they were and rejected them, but could propose in their stead only a dozen dim improbabilities, rumors of the secret knowledge and frightful weapons of ancient times. Life and mastery without limit.
He stood and studied the deserted buildings to make certain he had not been seen. A fox sat atop the highest heap of rubble, its red coat fiery in the sunshine, its eyes bright as jet beads. Suddenly afr
aid of any eyes, he threw the pike at it. It vanished, and the pike rattled down the farther side out of sight. He climbed over the mound and searched among the flourishing beggar ticks and lion’s teeth, but the pike had vanished too.
It took him a long time to reach the area where three streets met, and longer still to find their intersection. He had somehow veered south, and he wasted a watch in the search. Another was spent amid buzzing insects in convincing himself that it was not the intersection on his map, which showed avenues of equal width running southwest, southeast, and north. At last he took out the map again, comparing its faded inks to the desolate reality. Here were indeed three streets, but one was wider than the others and ran due east. This was not the place.
He was returning to the boat when the omophagists rushed him—men the color of dust, wild eyed and clothed in rags. In thac first moment they seemed innumerable. When he had grappled with one and killed him, he realized that only four remained.
Four were still far too many. He fled, one hand pressed to his bleeding side. He had always been a good runner, but he ran now as never before, leaping every obstacle, seeming almost to fly. The ruins raced and reeled around him. Missiles whizzed past his head.
He had nearly reached the river before they caught him. Mud slid from under his boot, he fell to one knee, and they were all around him. One must have torn his silver-mounted dagger from the dead man’s ribs. He watched it slash at his own throat now with the stunned incredulity of a householder who finds himself savaged by his own bandog, and he threw up his arms as much to shut out the sight as to counter the blow.
His forearm turned to ice as the steel bit in. Desperately, he rolled away, and saw the gray figure who wielded his dagger felled by the cudgel of another. A third dove for the dagger, and the two struggled.
Someone screamed; he looked to one side to see the fourth, who had his pike, impaled upon Eata’s.
The inn where he had stayed was near the river. Because he had walked some distance south searching for Eata’s boat, he had forgotten that. The inn was the Cygnet; he had forgotten that, too.
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 29
