Ancient Fire (Danger Boy Series #1)
Page 8
Chapter Seven
Eli: The Lighthouse
415 C.E.
I’d become unstuck, unglued in time. Tangled in it.
Thanks to my dad’s experiments, and Mr. Howe’s WOMPERs, I wasn’t going to move straight through from the beginning of my life to the end of it, like everybody else. I was going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in a great big cosmic blender.
Strange things happen when you zigzag through time like that. First, you go into the Fifth Dimension, where it’s much harder to tell the difference between time and space, or when and where. Or even who and what — you’re not quite sure, when you’re there, where you end and the rest of everything else begins. In the Fifth Dimension, things kind of flow….
Time gets stretched out. And somehow, in some part of your brain, when you land in a ship next to a talking dinosaur, who turns out to be about your age in dinosaur years, you’re not that surprised.
And when the time-ship journey seems to be taking a while, like a cross-country drive with your father, you get to know the dinosaur boy. After all, you’re not going anywhere else. Yet.
His name is Clyne, and he was doing some kind of science project for his school. Apparently, by landing in his ship, I’d messed up all his careful calculations, and now his trip was ruined, because he didn’t know where he was headed.
As it turned out, he was headed for ancient Alexandria, in the year 415. And so was I.
Judging from the sun, we arrived around noon.
We first appeared hovering over a giant lighthouse in the harbor. Now, arriving in a round, metallic ship in full daylight isn’t exactly the way to slip in somewhere without being noticed. On top of that, there was a beam of rainbow-colored light pouring out of the tower, directly hitting Clyne’s ship.
Making us even more obvious than we already were.
There was a big crowd of people around the lighthouse already, but whatever they were there for, they stopped doing it to stare at us.
Clyne looked through the glass at the people below. I was squinting because the rainbow beam was so bright.
“Mammal dance! Tchkkk-tchkk-kk!” Clyne said excitedly. He’d already taken off his lingo- spot in the ship, because after we’d been talking awhile, he said human speech seemed pretty simple, and if he learned it on his own, he could maybe fulfill some language requirement at his school.
I decided to keep my lingo-spot on. There was little chance I was going to learn to speak Lizard anytime soon. With or without the tongue-clicking.
As for what Clyne described as a “dance” — he was still figuring out which words go with which situations — to me it just looked like people standing still with their jaws open.
They were dressed in robes or tunics and wore sandals with lots of lacing. Their faces looked pretty sunburned, like maybe they spent a lot of time outdoors. This particular group all seemed to be holding rocks or clubs, and I thought I saw a drawn sword or two.
It didn’t look like they’d come to dance. Clyne checked some controls. “Cabin air good. Outside breathable.” He tapped some gauges, then tapped them again. “Chrono-compass still unworking.”
He stared, and tapped one more time. Then he turned to look at me with those big, round lizard eyes and shrugged. “Stuck in this present until fix-up. But where-when are we?” He looked through the glass. “Mammals below, on two legs, somewhat advanced, have streets, buildings, boats, and wagons.” He turned back to me, still fairly cheerful. “Probably your planet! Kkzht! Let’s look.”
The speckled glass of Clyne’s time-vessel slithered open along each side — I didn’t even know there were windows in it.
Clyne stuck his head out.
They weren’t silent anymore; you could hear them shouting. The lingo-spot let me understand them. “Devil!” someone screamed. “Demon!”
I heard a couple thunks against the side of the ship. Someone from down below was hitting us with rocks. They must’ve had a pretty good arm. Too bad for them baseball hadn’t been invented yet.
Then my eye caught something else. We were hovering near the top of the lighthouse, and as the rainbow-colored beam moved away from us, I could see a girl, about my age, also wearing a robe, with dark hair around her shoulders. She was leaning out of one of the archways in the top of the tower, staring at our ship.
And now she was staring at me.
I didn’t know what else to do. Through the open window, I waved.
Instead of waving in reply, she looked startled and stepped back. I guess I couldn’t blame her.
Then she was joined at the railing by an older woman, who looked a little bit like her. Thick brown hair just kind of flowed around her face. Her mother?
The woman was shouting at us. At me. Sometimes, when the lingo-spot was working hard, there’d be a tingle, and the slightest delay, like listening to an announcer in a ballpark.
“Where are you from?” she was asking.
“I’m from New Jersey!” I yelled back. “And the Valley of the Moon!”
I don’t think they understood me.
It didn’t matter, because my part of the conversation ended when a rock hit me on the forehead. It knocked me back into the ship, making me dizzier than even time travel does.
I touched my head and saw I was bleeding a little bit. I crouched and peeked out through another part of Clyne’s ship — it was made from some kind of transparent metal, which we don’t have on Earth — and saw one guy who’d actually climbed a few yards up the side of the tower.
He had a beard and long hair and eyes that seemed to pierce you from a mile away. His robes were brown and kind of scraggly, and he was shaking his fist at us.
I think the rock came from him.
“Maybe mammals aren’t dancing,” Clyne decided. He pulled the ship away from the light- house. “Yet both of us stuck in this ‘now’ until compass is fixed. Need to land — k’ingg! — and rethink studies.”
We floated over the city of Alexandria: There were spires, stone boulevards, pillars, arches, and huge statues of men and warriors along the roadways. Also, a few statues of half-men or half-women. The other half would be animal — like a guy with a bird’s head or something.
I wonder if they thought Clyne was like one of those statues come to life.
He was still looking for a place to land. Up ahead, we saw a wide clearing, mostly grass, with some bushes, in the middle of a huge complex of buildings. Like a palace courtyard turned into a giant park.
Clyne steered the ship toward it, hovered, landed. As we came down, we could see a couple people scurrying away.
The ship hit with a bump, and I stepped out. I reached down to put the Seals cap on my head…and felt my body tingling again. The colors of the Fifth Dimension swirled in front of me and I nearly passed out…
“Boy sick?” It was Clyne, leaning over me, waving the hat in front of my face like a fan. “Time-stretching does that.”
I started to wonder what was up with the cap.
I didn’t wonder long, though. Coming up toward the ship, we had some new, curious visitors: a tiger, a pair of sauntering giraffes, and farther away, a rhino, stomping, head down, taking aim at the ship.
This wasn’t just a courtyard. It was a zoo. And we’d landed in the middle of it.