Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

Roniah was built on a rise adjacent to the water. Twisting around the hill’s base was an earthern rampart crowned by a thick fortified wall. All along the top of this, glittering like lavish strings of orange beads, were closely spaced little fires. High, square watchtowers jutted out from the wall every hundred meters or so, and these, too, were outlined in pricks of fire all along their crenellated battlements, around the windows, and even up and down the corners and angles of the walls. A mauve city gate had almost every detail of its architecture picked out in small lamps. Leading to the gate was a colonnaded avenue half a kilometer long, every column of which was capped with a huge flaming torch. The midway was flanked with spangled geometrical patterns that might have been lamp-bordered lawns or flowerbeds planted in parterre designs.

From the caravan’s vantage point above the town, Bryan could see that Roniah was uncrowded, its mostly small houses laid out along wide curving streets. Since it was well past midnight, most of the dwellings showed no window lights, but along the edges of the roofs were little dots of fire; and the parapets that fronted the houses were also illuminated by thousands of the evenly spaced lamps. Closer to the riverside were a number of larger structures bearing slender towers of varying heights. The walls and major features of these buildings were outlined in light as elaborately as the city gate was, but instead of oil-lamp orange, the facades glowed with blue, bright green, aquamarine, and amber. Many of the towers had their windows ablaze.

“It’s like fairyland,” breathed Sukey. “All those little sparkling lights!”

“Each inhabitant is obligated to contribute to urban illumination by maintaining the lamps of his own house,” Creyn said. “The common fuel is olive oil, which is extremely plentiful. The taller Tanu dwellings are lit by more sophisticated lamps energized by accumulations of surplus metapsychic emanations.”

They rode down, following the track until it merged with a road paved in granite setts that widened to nearly eighty meters as it approached the avenue of fire-topped columns. Between the great pillars stood neat frameworks of bamboo arranged in aisles, separated by dark shrubbery and clusters of palm trees. Creyn explained that booths for a market were set up in this exterior garden every month, featuring the goods of local artisans as well as luxury products of all kinds brought in by caravans. Once a year there was also a Great Fair, which attracted people from all over western Europe.

“You have no daily market for foods, then?” Bryan asked.

“Meat is the great diet staple,” Creyn replied. “Professional hunters, all human, bring in large quantities of game to the plantations in the more northerly reaches of both the Saône and Rhône. It is sent downstream daily to the town provisioners on barges, together with grain, fruit, and other produce from the farms, such as olive oil and wine. Most of the food processing is done at the plantations by rama workers. In years gone by, our own people supervised the plantations. Now almost all of them are overseen by humans.”

“And you see no potential hazard in such an arrangement?” Bryan asked.

Creyn smiled, the flickering lights striking sparks from his deep-set eyes. “No hazard at all. The humans engaged in critical occupations all wear the torc. But try to understand that coercion is seldom necessary. For all but the most deeply disturbed of your people, the world of Exile is a happy one.”

“Even for the women?” Elizabeth inquired.

The unperturbed Tanu said, “Even the lowliest non-meta women of the commonalty are completely free from drudgery. They may engage in the occupations of their choice or live in indolence. They may even pleasure themselves as they will with human lovers. The only restriction is that their children must be by us. The more fortunate humans possessing genetic codons for metafunction enjoy a privileged position. They are welcomed into our society as probationary equals. In the fullness of time, those who have proved their loyalty to the Tanu may exchange their silver torcs for gold.”

“Both men and women?” Aiken asked, his lips twitching.

“Both men and women. I’m sure you can appreciate our reproductive strategy. We not only strengthen our line against the effects of the local radiation but also incorporate your genes for latent and operant metability. Ultimately, we may hope to evolve fully operant metapsychics”, he nodded at Elizabeth, “even as you will have done six million years from now. We will then be freed from the limitation of the golden torcs.”

Elizabeth said, “Quite a grand design. How do you reconcile it with the reality of this planet’s future… with no Tanu?”

Creyn smiled. “The Goddess wreaks as she wills. Six million years is a long time. I think we Tanu will be grateful to settle for a small portion of it to call our own.”

They approached closer to the great gate, which was twelve or thirteen meters wide and almost twice as high, fashioned of titanic balks of timber heavily reinforced with bronze plates.

“Not much action outside here at night, is there?” Aiken commented.

“There are wild animals and other dangers,” Creyn said. “The night is not a time for humans to be abroad unless they are going about the business of the Tanu.”

“Interesting,” Bryan said. “These city walls and the rampart must be effective against almost any kind of night prowlers. They’re certainly over-elaborate as a protection from animal menaces. Or even aggression from outlaw humans, and I understand there are some here and there.”

“Oh, yes,” Creyn admitted, with a dismissing wave of his hand. “Little more than a minor nuisance.”

“Then what purpose do the fortifications really serve?”

“There are always,” Creyn said, “the Firvulag.”

They came to a halt immediately in front of the gate. Above its arch was the same golden mask emblem that had adorned the entrance to Castle Gateway. Captal Zdenek, accompanied by one torch-bearing soldier, rode to a shadowed niche and detached a stout chain that dangled from the soffit of the overhanging archway. The chain had a ball of metal-caged stone on the end that measured a good half-meter in diameter. Zdenek rode out a short distance holding the ball and then turned, took aim, and let it swing back toward the gate in a pendulum arc. It struck a blackened bronze lens set into the timbered valve and there was a deep-throated boom, as from a huge Old World church bell. Even as the soldier caught the returning ball and put it back into its niche, the ponderous gate began to swing open.

Creyn rode forward alone, rising above the saddle to his full height so that his scarlet and white robes streamed back in the breeze rushing from the widening aperture. He cried out three words in an exotic tongue, simultaneously transmitting a complex mental image that the torc-wearing humans and Elizabeth were unable to decipher.

Two squads of human soldiers with crested helmets stood at attention on either side of the open entrance. The engraved plates and scales of their ceremonial bronze armor gleamed like gold in the light of countless flaming lamps. Beyond the gate, lining the otherwise deserted street for almost an entire block on both sides, were the ramas. Each small ape wore a metal collar and a blue and gold tabard. Each held a wand of some glassy material tipped with a blue or an amber light.

Creyn and his retinue passed between the ranks of ramapithecines, and the little animals turned and pattered alongside the chalikos, escorting the riders through the streets of the sleeping town. At one plaza, where the waters of a large fountain splashed onto floating lanterns, Captal Zdenek saluted Creyn and rode off toward a dim barracks with the soldiers Billy and Seung Kyu, their night’s work at an end. The timefarers gaped at the houses, dark except for the myriad twinkling oil lamps along every roof gutter, garden wall, and balustrade. Exile architecture in the human quarter was a melange of mortared stonework, half-timbering, and quasi-biblical mudplaster, with thick walls for coolness, tiled roofs, vine-hung loggias deep in shadow, and small patios planted with palms, laurels, and aromatic cinnamon trees.