Ian MacLeod - The Golden Keeper

But here, my grandmother begins to tell of things of which my waking mind knows she had no knowledge. A Great Year, she tells me, lasts for twenty-six thousand of our earth years. And she speaks of how, before the Greeks, the Pharaohs also studied the stars. They, too, marked the slow progress of the Great Year, and little doubted that their dynasties would live through it. Indeed, such was the certainty of the Pharaohs that when their astronomers discovered a small miscalculation in the earth’s own short year, it was decreed that they wait some fifteen hundred years to make their amendment until the seasons had returned to their rightful place.

Yet even before the Pharaohs and their eventual fading, there were other powers, and even creatures that bore no resemblance to men. My grandmother speaks of bearded Assyrians who rode their chariots and built temples toward the skies. And yet before them there were lost kingdoms, now long-forgotten, who carried the last wisdom of another distant age when the Old Ones came down from the stars on incredible wings, fleeing some impossible darkness. The Old Ones, too, built cities gaudy and vast that are now lost beneath the oceans, although they thrived and prospered for many ages before man. But the darkness they finally fled was inescapable, for it lay outside even the vastest turnings of the universe and time. Mind-wrenching beasts that the Old Ones themselves had once tamed broke loose from their bounds, and for a numberless age, all space was riven by the incomprehensible horror of Azathoth and her minions…

Although by now I have little comprehension of what the buzzing voice of my dream-grandmother means, those last words seem to strike some special nerve, and I look up at her, pleading that she end this tale. At this point, my eyes did seem to open, and I was returned to Cul Holman, the distant howling of dogs and the screeching wind that caused the hangings of the room to sway. But my grandmother leaned closer over me and opened her mouth once again, as if to resume her tale. Nothing came out but a foul rushing blackness, and I saw, as it gaped wide above me like the maw of a great snake, that the mouth of the thing my grandmother had become had filled with stars.

I could not sleep the rest of the night. My throat was dry from the dust of those hidden graves, and from the screaming horror of my dreams. I summoned the slave girl Alya to bring me wine and keep me company, and I commanded as I drank that she tell me whatever tales she knew of daylight and some better place and age.

Alya’s tribe, it seems, are traders, people such as those who follow the salt road to Tripoli. They are proud and loyal, and move with horses and creatures named camels that in all my time here I have only glimpsed from afar. To them, the desert is like some ocean upon which they drift and fight and trade, in the way a mariner plies the seas. Like mariners, they love their chosen element, and know its dangers and moods as few who ever lived.

She spoke of frost in the desert at midnight, of the pure white blindness of midday, and the slow-turning roof of the stars. Sand can be hard and harsh, or smooth as silk, soft as water. The dunes may move overnight—drown you as you sleep like the rising of a storm-wave, or remain unchanged for centuries. Each wind carries a different taste, each day a different shade and substance to the horizon. There are deserts of sand, deserts of bare rock, deserts of smooth or jagged stones, deserts of ancient forests where dead trees stand in leafless perfection, sand-smoothed and polished to a different beauty, rising on their roots as if ready to walk in search of water. There are mountains and lowlands. Dream cities of spires, temples, colonnades and glorious fountains shimmering above the plains.

Alya and her people have always known of the Nile. There was once even a time when they were the true dwellers beside her shores, and when the desert was still a green wilderness of cedar and pine, and meadows and waterfalls scented even these hills. It was her people, Alya claims, who built the first great works that the Pharaohs were later to claim as their own. Amongst these, and although she can never have glimpsed them, she numbers the pyramids at Giza, some sand-buried work she calls the Great Sphinx, and the temples of Seti at Abydos. They were made, she says, with magics that are now lost to mankind.

By the time of the reign of the Thirty-One Dynasties many centuries after, her people had long been nomads. They traded and learned the new languages, and watched through the slow ages as other great civilizations rose and fell. They saw the coming of the Assyrians and the Minoans and the Greeks and the Phoenicians and the Romans, they wandered amid the ploughed and salted ruins of Carthage. When they learned that their own great relics had been appropriated and restored as tombs of the Pharaohs, they wondered how anyone could credit them as simply the works of man. But all of this her people accepted without regret—even the reworking into new forms of their treasures of gold…

I was half-sleepy by then, and the fears of the night had departed me now that Cul Holman’s few scrawny cocks were crowing. But at the last words Alya spoke, I was fully awake in a moment, although I did my best to hide my eagerness.

“These ruins that you speak of,” I said to her. “Surely they must exist in other places than the Lower Nile if the civilization you speak of was as great as you claim?”

She nodded at that, although there was suspicion in her eyes. It was as if, sensing that I was near to sleeping, she had been spinning her words to herself more than to me, and now regretted what she had spoken.

“In my own small way, I am something of a scholar,” I said. “I would be interested if you could tell me where you think such ruins might still be, or perhaps even show…

She stiffened again, and stared long at the ground.

“Of course,” I prompted, “someone in a position such as mine would have ways of expressing their gratitude.”

“You must give me freedom,” she said, looking back up at me with a sudden boldness that was not of a slave. “Freedom to myself and to Dahib, and also to my people who still suffer in Kaliphus’s stinking hive.”

I was taken aback; that someone of her kind should attempt to negotiate with me! Yet there was something about her talk of ancient gold and magic that rang true. Almost as if she had spoken not of the past, but of that which my dreams were already striving to foretell.

“If you do what you offer,” I said, “On my honor as a man of Rome, I agree to give you what you ask.”

“Then,” she said, blinking the light from her eyes as the first flash of the sun rising through these shutters cast the rest of her into deeper gloom, “I will show you.”

A day of wonders and disappointments.

Yes, there are tombs and ruins beyond the age of the Pharaohs within the far reaches of these hills—Alya has shown them to me—but they are wind-riddled, empty, almost unimaginably desolate. Yet there are other, deeper twists within this whole story.

On the assumption that Alya could ride, I had arranged for two sturdy ponies, but she assured me that they would be of little use on the route that we would be taking, to where these hills make their final rampart against the desert. Normally, I would never have set out on such a journey on foot, least of all in the dubious company of a single female slave— but you, my dear and honored reader, will understand by now my need for discretion and secrecy. And Alya was in no doubt about the instructions I had left with Taracus as to what should be done to Dahib and the rest of her people should I fail to return.

The heat was already rising, forming a haze over Cul Holman like some evil storm cloud. Following Alya’s quick heels into the shadow of the cliff and then along a hidden vale, I was glad to be away.