Paul McAuley: Child of the River

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.”

“Well,” Derev said, “so he should. We saved his life.”

The anchorite dug inside his robe and pulled out a ceramic disc. It was attached to a thong looped around his neck, and he lifted the thong over his head and thrust the disc toward Yama, then made more shapes.

“You are the one who is to come,” Ananda translated.

The anchorite shook his head and signed furiously, slamming his fingers against his palm.

“You will come here again. Yama, do you know what he means?”

And Derev said, “Listen!”

Far off, whistles sounded, calling and answering in the darkness.

The anchorite thrust the ceramic disc into Yama’s hand. He stared into Yama’s eyes and then he was gone, running out along the footpath between the flooded fields, a shadow dwindling against cold blue light reflected from the water, gone.

The whistles sounded again. “The militia,” Ananda said, and turned and ran off down the old road.

Derev and Yama chased after him, but he soon outpaced them, and Yama had to stop to catch his breath before they reached the city wall.

Derev said, “Ananda won’t stop running until he’s thrown himself into his bed. And even then he’ll run in his dreams until morning.”

Yama was bent over, clasping his knees. He had a cramp in his side. He said, “We will have to watch out for each other. Lob and Lud will not forgive this easily. How can you run so fast and so far without getting out of breath?”

Derev’s pale face glimmered in the Galaxy’s light. She gave him a sly look. “Flying is harder work than running.”

“If you can fly, I would love to see it. But you are teasing me again.”

“This is the wrong place for flying. One day, perhaps, I’ll show you the right place, but it’s a long way from here.”

“Do you mean the edge of the world? I used to dream that my people lived on the floating islands. I saw one—”

Derev suddenly grabbed Yama and pulled him into the long grass beside the track. He fell on top of her, laughing, but she put her hand over his mouth. “Listen!” she said.

Yama raised his head, but heard only the ordinary noises of the night. He was aware of the heat of Derev’s slim body pressing against his. He said, “I think the militia have given up their search.”

“No. They’re coming this way.”

Yama rolled over and parted the long dry grass so that he could watch the track. Presently a pentad of men went past in single file. None of them were of the bloodline of the citizens of Aeolis. They were armed with rifles and arbalests.

“Sailors,” Yama said, when he was sure that they were gone.

Derev pressed the length of her body against his. “How do you know?”

“They were strangers, and all strangers come to Aeolis by the river, either as sailors or passengers. But there have been no passenger ships since the war began.”

“They are gone now, whoever they are.”

“Perhaps they were looking for the anchorite.”

“He was crazy, that holy man, but we did the right thing. Or you did. I could not have stepped out and challenged those two.”

“I did it knowing you were at my back.”

“I’d be nowhere else.” Derev added thoughtfully, “He looked like you.”

Yama laughed.

“In the proportion of his limbs, and the shape of his head. And his eyes were halved by folds of skin, just like yours.”

Derev kissed Yama’s eyes. He kissed her back. They kissed for a long time, and then Derev broke away.

“You aren’t alone in the world, Yama, no matter what you believe. It shouldn’t surprise you to find one of your own bloodline.”

But Yama had been looking for too long to believe it would be that easy. “I think he was crazy. I wonder why he gave me this.”

Yama pulled the ceramic disc from the pocket of his tunic. It seemed no different from the discs the Aedile’s workmen turned up by the hundred during their excavations: slick, white, slightly too large to fit comfortably in his palm. He held it up so that it faintly reflected the light of the Galaxy, and saw a distant light in the crooked tower that stood without the old, half-ruined city wall.

Dr. Dismas had returned from Ys.

Dr. Dismas’s bent-backed, black-clad figure came up the dry, stony hillside with a bustling, crabbed gait. The sun was at the height of its daily leap into the sky, and, like an aspect, he cast no shadow.

The Aedile, standing at the top of the slope by the spoilheap of his latest excavation site, watched with swelling expectation as the apothecary drew near. The Aedile was tall and stooped and graying, with a diplomat’s air of courteous reticence which many mistook for absentmindedness. He was dressed after the fashion of the citizens of Aeolis, in a loose-fitting white tunic and a linen kilt. His knees were swollen and stiff from the hours he had spent kneeling on a leather pad brushing away dirt, hairline layer after hairline layer, from a ceramic disc, freeing it from the cerements of a hundred thousand years of burial. The excavation was not going well and the Aedile had grown bored with it before it was halfway done. Despite the insistence of his geomancer, he was convinced that nothing of interest would be found. The crew of trained diggers, convicts reprieved from army service, had caught their master’s mood and worked at a desultory pace amongst the neatly dug trenches and pits, dragging their chains through dry white dust as they carried baskets of soil and limestone chippings to the conical spoil heap. A drill rig taking a core through the reef of land coral which had overgrown the hilltop raised a plume of white dust that feathered off into the blue sky.

So far, the excavation had uncovered only a few potsherds, the corroded traces of what might have been the footings of a watchtower, and the inevitable hoard of ceramic discs. Although the Aedile had no idea what the discs had actually been used for (most scholars of Confluence’s early history believed that they were some form of currency, but the Aedile thought that this was too obvious an explanation), he assiduously catalogued every one, and spent hours measuring the faint grooves and pits with which they were decorated. The Aedile believed in measurement. In small things were the gauge of the larger world which contained them, and of worlds without end. He believed that all measurements and constants might be arithmetically derived from a single number, the cipher of the Preservers which could unlock the secrets of the world they had made, and much else.

But here was Dr. Dismas, with news that would determine the fate of the Aedile’s foundling son. The pinnace on which the apothecary had returned from Ys had anchored beyond the mouth of the bay two days before (and was anchored there still), and Dr. Dismas had been rowed ashore last night, but the Aedile had chosen to spend the day at his excavation site rather than wait at the peel-house for Dr. Dismas’s call.

Better that he heard the news, whatever it was, before Yama.

It was the Aedile’s hope that Dr. Dismas had discovered the truth about the bloodline of his adopted son, but he did not trust the man, and was troubled by speculations about the ways in which Dr. Dismas might misuse his findings. It was Dr. Dismas, after all, who had proposed that he take the opportunity offered by his summons to Ys to undertake research into the matter of Yama’s lineage. That this trip had been forced upon Dr. Dismas by his department, and had been entirely funded from the Aedile’s purse, would not reduce by one iota the obligation which Dr. Dismas would surely expect the Aedile to express.