Paul Mcauley: Shrine of Stars

He wiped blood from his eyes with his forearm and whirled his staff, driving the twins backward, but it was only a temporary victory. A stone struck his elbow and he nearly dropped the staff. Before he could recover, Lob and Lud roared, rushed at him from either side, and knocked him down. He surged up and struck Lob about the head, but Lud grabbed him from behind. He fell beneath Lud’s weight, and Lob snatched up the staff and made to break it.

And then the boy stepped onto the road, brandishing a slim trident. The sizar of Aeolis’s temple was behind him, his yellow robe glimmering in the half-light. Both looked very young and very scared.

“What is this, Lob?” the boy asked, and then Yama heard little more because Lud thrust his face into the dirt and cuffed him when he tried to struggle. Voices raised in anger, a howl that had to be Lob’s, for the weight left his back as Lud jumped up. He rolled over. Lob was on his knees, gasping for breath, and Lud was advancing on the boy, holding a crooked knife up by his face. The boy had the staff and was watching Lud carefully, and was taken by surprise when Lob grabbed at his legs from behind. He staggered and hammered at Lob’s back, but Lob dragged him down.

Yama tried to get to his feet. There were no machines near enough to help. No. This could not happen. He could not let them kill the boy.

And then the tree burst into flame and he thought his heart might explode with joy.

Derev was alive. She was here.

After Lud and Lob had been driven off, Yama had eyes only for Derev as she followed her shadow out of the brilliant light of the burning tree. She said something to the boy, her arms rising and falling gracefully. How beautiful she was!

The tree burned with fierce ardor, its trunk a shadow inside a roaring pillar of blue flame. Oceans of sparks swept high into the night, like stars playfully seized by the Preservers.

The yellow-robed sizar, Ananda, helped Yama sit up. He dabbed at his wounds, which were only superficial, and managed to stand. The boy held out the staff and Yama took it and bowed. It was a solemn, thrilling moment.

The boy did not recognize him, of course. He did not even see that Yama was of his bloodline. But Yama was suddenly frightened by the boy’s searching stare and he could not, dared not, speak. Once again he felt that he was at the cusp of a delicate balance—the slightest movement in any direction could cause disaster. Everything had changed in the moment the tree had caught fire. The tumble of crazy ideas about altering the course of history had fallen away. He had nothing left now but the truth.

Fearing that his voice might betray him, Yama used the sign language which the old guard, Coronetes, had taught him when he had been imprisoned in the stacks of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. Ananda caught the gist of it, even if he mangled the meaning.

I went crazy when I was searching for you, but now I know , he signed.

Ananda said, “He wants you to know that he has been searching for you,” and suggested that he might be a priest.

Yama shook his head, suppressing the urge to laugh, and signed again. How happy I am that all is as I remembered.

Ananda said uncertainly, “He says that he is glad that he remembered all this. I think he must mean that he will always remember this.”

Yama pulled the leather thong over his head and dangled the coin from his left hand while he signed with his right. Use this if you are to come here again , which Ananda badly scrambled on the first attempt, but got right on the second.

The whistles of the militia sounded, far off in the night. Yama thrust the coin into the boy’s hand, cast a last longing look at Derev, and turned and ran up the embankment, toward the mazed tombs of the City of the Dead.

He had not run very far when the ship overtook him. It had hidden itself in the deeps of the Great River, far from shore; now it dropped out of the night and hung just above the surface of a flooded paeonin field, tilted so that one wingtip touched the top of the embankment. Yama climbed aboard, and at once it rose high above the world.

“I saw her,” he told the ship, “and I will see her again. I must. What must be will be, despite ourselves.”

The ship’s aspect, the solemn little girl, clasped her hands beneath her chin as Yama explained what he wanted. Behind her, the glassy plain with its freight of statues receded into the starless dark. She said, “You are still not well, master.”

“No. Of course I am not well. I will never be well. I have seen too much. I have done too much. I think that I have been mad for a long time, but did not know it.” Yama felt the craziness again, his thoughts dividing and dividing, impossible to stop.

“The loop will be very short, master. I cannot guarantee its accuracy.”

Yama began to laugh and the laughter went on and on until he clamped his hands over his mouth because the laughter scared him. It bubbled through him. It might never stop. He choked it back and said, “Just do it.”

“I will do my best, master.” The ship was wounded. It had been built to take a pride in what it did.

“Take me there, ship. I know you will do it. What must be will be.”

Night, summer, the Eye of the Preservers a smudged bloody thumbprint high in the black sky. Dr. Dismas’s tower was a burnt-out ruin. Fragments of charred furniture were scattered outside its broken door. It was almost midnight, but the lights of the city of Aeolis burned brightly within its high wall.

Because of the summer heat, the citizens of Aeolis, the Amnan, slept in their cool seeps and wallows by day and began work at sunset. Sodium-vapor lights blazed in the streets and lamps shone in every window. The doors of workshops, chandlers and taverns were flung open. Crowds swirled up and down the long road at the top of the old waterfront, where tribesmen from the dry hills downriver of the city had set up their blanket stalls and vendors of fried waterweed and nuts cried their wares. A mountebank stood halfway up a folding ladder, declaiming the wonders of a patent elixir; an auction of bacts was under way by the gate where Yama entered, clad in his tattered silvery cloak and leaning on his staff.

Hardly anyone marked his passing. He was almost certainly a mendicant; although Aeolis was a poor city, it was often visited by mendicants because it had once been one of the most holy cities on Confluence. Yama made his way through the crowds of large, ill-made, blubbery men with hardly a comment or a glance.

The steel door of the godown owned by Derev’s father was open, guarded by a man with a carbine who gave Yama a hard look as he went past and walked around the corner to the family entrance.

The words which opened the door’s lock had not been changed—even if they had, Yama could have forced it to open in an instant. Calling Derev’s name, he went through the archway into a little courtyard where a fountain tiled with blue mosaic splashed. She would not be there. He knew that she would not be there, but there she was, floating down the spiral stair, her feathery white hair lifting around her pale face.

She stopped at a turn of the stair a little way above him. She wore a silk tabard the color of old ivory, and a long skirt of many layers of fine white gauzy stuff. She said, “Who let you in, dominie? I do not think my father has business with anyone this night.”

“You do not recognize me?”

Her large dark eyes searched his face. Then she said, “You are the anchorite whose life Yama saved. Why have you come back? How did you get in? Do you know something about Yama? Is he—”

“He is here, Derev.”

“Where? Is he hurt? Did something happen to him in Ys? Your face is so grave, dominie. O, do not tell me he is dead!”