Linda Nagata - Memory

Twilight was falling over the forest, but within the temple night had already come. Liam used a flashlight to chase back the shadows, revealing a modest hall bare of any furnishing. The massive trunks of two trees grew up through the floor, disappearing past neat collars set into the ceiling. Water—presumably from the rain—trickled down their rough bark and out of sight. The floor was a slick of black algae, except where that one resolute path made its way straight across the room, vanishing into a hallway beyond. Moki sniffed at the floor, his tail wagging furiously.

“Nobody home?” Liam wondered.

Udondi addressed the question to the house. “Hello? Anyone here?” Her voice reverberated from hard surfaces. There was no response.

I shrugged, too tired to feel much fear. “If there’s any comfort to be found here, it’ll be at the end of this path. Come on.”

The floor was slick. I almost went down before I figured out how to walk flat-footed. “Hold on, Jubilee,” Liam said. “Let me go first, I’ve got the light.”

The path took us through a hallway, then into a round chamber crowded with four massive tree trunks. Rain was drumming on the roof now, and little freshets of water raced down the trunks, trickling into drains in the floor. Everything was damp, and the chamber smelled the way chronically damp things do: of mildew and moldering. Still, it was warmer in here than it had been in the hall and when we stepped past the first great tree trunk it was clear why: four huge gold coils spiraled up from battery pots set into the floor. They gave off a cheerful heat so that in the center of the room the air seemed light to breathe, though its smell reminded me of burnt mulch.

This, apparently, was where the resident had chosen to live, for between the heating coils was a bed with a sagging mattress, a bench, a battered table, a tiny stove, and an ill-designed sink served by a pipe laid right across the floor.

I collapsed onto the bench. Udondi leaned past me to touch a quartz-paned lamp that sat on the table. It blushed to life, reducing Liam’s flashlight to an inconsequential role.

I looked about at the pathetic furnishings, and at last a healthy doubt began to assert itself. If this truly was a temple, why was it on no map? Why was it so empty of everything except an abject poverty? “Maybe Liam was right,” I said softly. “Maybe this is only the ruin of a failed temple.”

Liam answered from the darkness beyond the heaters. “A nice theory, but there’s a thriving kobold well here that disputes it.”

“You found a well?” I was on my feet in a moment, despite my fatigue, hobbling into the shadows where Liam was crouched beside a waist-high ring of sour-smelling soil as coarse as worm castings. The mound shivered and trembled as kobolds by the hundreds crawled aimlessly through the surface layers. Inside the ring the well was a dark, unfathomable circle. The air above it was cold.

“Listen,” Udondi said softly. She stood at the doorway, Moki beside her, his ears pricked as he stared down the hall.

After a second I heard it too: a sound of low, mournful singing, just at the threshold of hearing.

Udondi said, “I think the keeper returns.”

We put the light out, and returned to the front door to wait.

The mist-shrouded twilight had given way to true darkness in the few minutes we had been inside. Neither the light of any star nor the gleam of Heaven could reach down through the clouds that shrouded the Kalang Crescent that night. Neither was there any stir of wind, nor whisper of leaf against leaf, but everywhere the endless soft pattering of rain on yielding moss.

I crouched on the stoop, too tired to stand, holding Moki gently by the scruff so he would not charge. The singer’s voice drifted through the trees. It was a man’s voice, and the song he sang was soft and sad, and full of loneliness, though the words were of a language I did not know, and that did not move any memory in me. A light appeared through the mist, a blurred golden spot jostling along the mud path, revealing nothing of the one who held it.

We waited in silence while the light advanced to the gate, where it stopped. Had the singer seen the tracks our bikes had left on the mud path? Or had he sensed our presence some other way? A scent, or a strange warmth in the air of bodies passing…

How long had he been alone? How long, with his world never changing?

Udondi stepped forward then, deliberately scuffing her boots against the slick stair. “Greetings, Keeper,” she called in a voice that was clear but soft.

The light rose higher in the air, as if the keeper had lifted it to extend its reach, and for the first time I could see a large, looming shadow behind it.

Udondi said, “We are three strangers on your doorstep at twilight, seeking shelter from the silver.”

Those are the traditional words used in stories of old to gain entrance to a temple. I couldn’t remember any visitor to Temple Huacho ever being so formal, but of course our hospitality was never in question.

“Mari?” the singer asked, his voice oddly hoarse as with some wretched hope. Then, speaking in the language we all knew, “Mari, is it you? Did you find your youth? Have you come home at last?”

Udondi answered him, “Alas, Keeper, none of us are your Mari.” Then she turned to Liam and murmured, “Hand me the flashlight.” He passed it to her. She turned it on, and held it high so its light shone down on us. “I am Udondi Halal, this is Liam Panandi, and this, Jubilee Huacho.”

“Are you wayfarers?”

“It’s only that we have business in the desert to the east.”

He came forward then, into the gleam of the light, and I could see he was a player big enough to fill the boots whose tracks we had seen—taller than me and Liam by a head and shoulders, and almost wider than the three of us put together. He wore a hat with a great, flat brim, and a long green raincoat that whispered as he moved.

But despite his size, and despite a neatly trimmed black beard that furred the lower half of his face, he looked a boy, his features youthful and rounded and smooth. If not for that beard, I would have guessed him even younger than me, a husky adolescent just reaching his full growth. The beard looked like stage costuming.

He examined us in turn, and his confusion was that of a child. “She said she would come back.” His worried eyes looked first at Udondi, and then Liam. Next he turned to me, and hope touched him. “I never saw her when she was young. Are you sure…?”

“She is not Mari,” Udondi said quickly. “She is Jubilee Huacho.”

“And she is no wayfarer,” Liam added. “She is mated.”

“I am not,” I snapped. “Not yet.”

The boy-man chuckled at this, showing an elusive maturity, though he still did not seem convinced. He studied me, as if hoping I would reveal some habit or gesture to prove I was his lost Mari after all. This annoyed me. I was exhausted and still sick, and I didn’t want to defend myself against the ghost of a woman long gone.

So I let Moki go, and rising to my feet, I said, “You don’t look old enough to have ever known a lover.”

“Oh, but I am.” He rubbed at his damp forehead with the tips of pale white fingers, as if trying to rouse some memory. “I’m older than I look. My name, it’s… Nuanez Li. And… and…” He frowned. “I am the temple keeper. I have been, since she went away. A long time, now. There are words I’m supposed to say when players come. I know there are, but… what were they? What?” He shook his head in utter mystification. “Anyway, all of you are welcome here. Not that there’s any silver to hide from. I’ve never seen it here. Not once. But you’re welcome…” He snapped his fingers, looking at us in sudden triumph. “ All travelers are welcome! Those are the words. ‘All travelers are welcome at Temple Li!’ Well. It has been a very long time since any have come.”