Ancients of Days

Chapter Seven The Gambler

Yama and Eliphas reached the long lawn and its fountain just as dawn began to define the mountain ranges at the edge of the city’s wide plain. The library was far below, its towers ablaze with lights, but there was no sign of the hell-hound.

Eliphas sat heavily on the wet grass. “Perhaps it has lost us,” he said.

“I do not think so. It followed me down to the library. There is no reason why it cannot follow me in the reverse direction. You are tired, Eliphas.”

“I am old, brother.”

“And my head aches. But we cannot stay here.”

Eliphas slowly clambered to his feet, unfolding his lanky body in stages. He said, “I’m sure we can spare a few minutes before we go on. I am thirsty as well as tired.”

As Yama and Eliphas approached the ornate fountain in the center of the lawn, two deer ran from it, white scuts bobbing as they disappeared into the darkness. Eliphas thrust his head into a spout of water that gushed from the gaping mouth of a fish; Yama drank from a basin shaped like an oyster shell and splashed cold water on the back of his neck. His head wound had begun to bleed again.

While Eliphas sat on the edge of the fountain’s main basin and lit his pipe, Yama walked back to the edge of the lawn. He was anxious and tired and afraid.

There was now enough light in the sky to make out the various clusters of buildings which were scattered across the long slope below. Yama could see that the library’s curtain wall had been breached—the adamantine stone slumped like melted candle wax—and that its slim white towers were licked with black soot. The path which climbed through the tiers of fields seemed empty, and for a moment his heart lifted. Perhaps Eliphas was right. But then he saw a glimmer of cold blue light emerge from a distant stand of sago palms; the hell-hound came on in an erratic dance like a scrap of fabric caught in a breeze, flitting from side to side, but always moving upward.

Yama ran back to Eliphas, but the old man shrugged phlegmatically when he heard the news and was maddeningly slow to begin to move. Exhaustion had overcome his fear. He knocked out his pipe on his bootheel and said that there were roads still in use, and all led to gates to the interior.

“And where there is a gate,” Eliphas said, “there will be guards.”

“The guards of the library could not stop it. We must go, Eliphas.”

“Some guards are better armed than others,” Eliphas said. He pressed the palms of his hands over his silver eyes for a moment. “The main part of the Palace has always been better defended than the outlying offices. We cannot run forever, brother. If we lead it to them, the soldiers of Internal Harmony will know what to do.”

Yama did not share Eliphas’s faith in this plan, but a small hope was better than no hope at all. He said, “If we are to try and find some way back into the mountain, then we should turn aside. The monastery where I wakened it is not far above. I do not want to confront the shrine again, especially with that thing at my back. I might waken something worse. As it is, I fear that the library is destroyed.”

Eliphas smiled. “Not at all. What stands aboveground is only a tenth part of the whole. The stacks and carrels of the archives run far back into the Palace. Kun Norbu may be somewhat distracted by repair work, but he will remember your request.”

“That is suddenly the least of my concerns,” Yama said.

They found a narrow path at the far end of the long lawn. It wound along the foot of a bluff from which a cluster of square, white, windowless buildings hung, like the cells of a wasp nest. Far below, the hell-hound stopped for a full minute, burning in the midst of a steep field of red corn, and then suddenly moved forward at a steady pace, cutting across the field in a straight line toward them.

They hurried on, passing between the legs of a skeletal metal tower clad in a living cloak of green vines. The path angled through a thicket of bamboo, and then a little village was below, flat-roofed houses of wicker and daub crowded around a central square. Threads of smoke rose into the gray sky from several of the houses. A cock crowed in anticipation of the rising sun.

Eliphas stopped and bent over and clasped his knees.

For a while all he could do was breathe hard. Yama went back to the beginning of the bamboo thicket to look for the hell-hound, then returned to Eliphas, who slowly unbent and said, “We must go through the village. If the hell-hound follows, the villagers will try and stop it.”

“Will they be better armed than the library guards?”

Eliphas shook his head. Sweat beaded his smooth black skin. He dabbed at his brow with the back of his hand and said wearily, “They are husbandmen who till the fields on this part of the Palace roof. They will have axes and scythes, perhaps a few muskets. They will not be able to stop it, but they might slow it down so we can make our escape.”

“No, I will not risk their lives. We cannot wait here, Eliphas. Remember that the hell-hound does not rest.”

Eliphas waved a hand in front of his face, as if Yama’s words were flies that could be brushed away. “A moment, a moment more, and I will be able to go on. Listen, brother. The quickest way to the nearest gate will take us through the village. The husbandmen take their produce to the gates. That’s where they sell it to merchants from the day markets. Don’t spare a thought for them. They are indigens whose ancestors colonized the ruined parts of the Palace ten thousand years ago. They are animals, brother, of no more importance than the sacred monkeys of the outer temples. Less so, in fact, since priests and sacerdotes care for the monkeys that live in their monasteries and temples, but no one cares for the husbandmen. They are tolerated only because they supply the day markets with fresh produce. We’ll go through their village, eh? It will delay the hell-hound a little.”

Yama remembered the fisherman, Caphis, who had saved his life after he had escaped from Dr. Dismas and the young warlord, Enobarbus. He said, “Even if the indigenous peoples cannot transcend their animal origins, still they are something more than animals, I think. I will not risk their lives to save mine.” He pointed to the terraced rice paddies that stepped away below the next bluff.

“There is a path that descends beside those fields. We can follow it. Eliphas, if you wish to, leave me now. Go through the village. The hell-hound will not follow you.”

“I made a bargain,” the old man said. “Maybe a bad one, but it might still pay off. Lead on, brother, although I fear your scruples will help the villagers more than they will help us.”

The sun had begun to rise above the distant mountains when Yama and Eliphas reached the steep ladder of steps beside the terraced rice fields. The narrow steps were worn by the tread of a thousand generations of husbandmen, and slippery with seepage from the flooded paddies. Ferns grew in cracks between the steps, and bright green mosses made the way more slippery still.

Despite their fearful haste, Yama paused at a wayside shrine. Take this burden from me, he prayed, as he had prayed so often before, meaning, make me ordinary, make me no more than other men. Save me from myself.

The rice paddies were narrow and long, curved to follow the contour of the hillside and dammed with stout ramparts of compacted earth wide enough for two water buffalo to walk abreast. Freshly planted seedlings made a haze of green over the calm brown water that flooded them; the ripe smell of ordure reminded Yama of the flooded fields around Aeolis; at another time it would have eased his heart.

When he suggested that the rice paddies might have been here before the Palace had been built, Eliphas laughed and said that it was impossible. “Even now, we step on the roof of the Palace itself. The indigens who tend the fields or hunt the wild animals here are like the birds or mice which colonize the older habitations of man. It would have meant nothing to have gone through the village, brother.”

“It would have meant something to me.”

After they had descended a while in silence, Eliphas said, “This part of the Palace was ruined in the last war of the Age of Insurrection, and has never been properly rebuilt. If you were to dig deep enough, you would find rock fused like glass, and then rubble, and then rooms and corridors wrecked and abandoned ten thousand years ago. Because this side of the Palace faces the Rim Mountains, and is in sunlight for most of the day, it is favored for cultivation.”

Eliphas laid one hand on the small of his back. “I am sorry, brother, but I must rest again. Only for a moment.”

Each time Eliphas stopped to catch his breath, Yama anxiously looked back at the path they had taken, but by good fortune they managed to reach the bottom of the long ladder of steps before the hell-hound finally appeared.

White cockatoos rose into the blue sky, screeching in alarm. A moment later the hell-hound burst out of the thicket of bamboo above the terraced rice paddies. Like a whirlwind or dust devil, it threw clouds of dust and scraps of foliage into the air as it moved forward. It seemed just as bright in daylight as at night, like a bit of sky fallen to earth and roughly shaped into a tall, skeletal man. It started toward the village, but quickly returned to the path, and came on steadily.

Yama and Eliphas ran down a dusty track between the steep bank of the bottommost rice paddy and the margin of a sloping field of melon vines. They splashed across a stream and ran through a belt of eucalyptus trees, scattering a herd of small black pigs, and ran on until Eliphas tripped and fell headlong in the dust.

At first Eliphas could not get up, and when Yama finally hauled him to his feet he said that he could not run anymore. They were on a long downward slope with tall grass on either side of the path. A chorus of crickets was beginning to whistle, woken by the early-morning warmth.

“Leave me,” Eliphas said. He was trembling and his silver eyes were half-closed. He could not get his breath.

“Leave me, brother, and save yourself. I will find you again, if we both live.”

The slender eucalyptus trees at the top of the slope stirred and shook as if caught in a localized gale. A horrible squealing went up and black pigs pelted out of the trees. The hell-hound appeared behind them, blazing like a piece of the sun caught in blue glass. It seemed to have grown taller and thinner, as if the glass, melting, was being pulled apart by its own weight. Veils of dust and leaves whirled up around it. At first it seemed confused by the pigs and made short, swift dashes after one or another of them. Most of the pigs scattered into the tall grass, but a few ran in circles, dazed by the brilliant light, and finally the hell-hound pounced on the smallest. The hapless pig flew up as if it weighed no more than a dead leaf, was dashed to the ground, and lay still. As if excited by this, the hell-hound whirled in wider circles. It swept through the tall dry grasses, which immediately caught fire with a sullen crackling, then steadied and came on down the path toward Yama and Eliphas.

Yama got a shoulder under Eliphas’s arm and they staggered down the path to the edge of a steep embankment.

Directly below was a broad road crowded with carts drawn by bullocks or water buffaloes, camels laden with hessiany-wrapped packs, and women and men walking with bundles or clay pots balanced on their heads. Carts and camels and people were all moving downhill toward the high, square entrance of a tunnel in the side of the slope.

As Yama and Eliphas staggered down the embankment, people shrieked and shrank away. Yama glanced over his shoulder. The hell-hound had appeared behind them, burning brightly against a reef of white smoke. Yama shouted in despair and pulled Eliphas behind a cart piled high with watermelons. All around, men and women screamed as the hell-hound swept down the embankment. A bullock bolted, bawling with fear, and its cart overturned, spilling hands of red bananas. A flock of moas ran in circles, screeching wildly and kicking up dust. The hell-hound plunged amongst the birds, rearing back and forth as if maddened.

Yama and Eliphas were swept along in the midst of the panicking crowd into the darkness of the tunnel, brick walls doubling and redoubling the shouts and screams of men and women and the bawling of animals, then into a huge underground chamber. Like a breaking wave, the crowd washed against loading bays where laborers were unloading and weighing produce and clerks were handing out tallies to husbandmen.

Yama and Eliphas were halfway across the wide chamber when the flock of moas stampeded out of the tunnel, the hell-hound burning in their midst. People screamed and dropped baskets and packages and ran in every direction, and a pentad of guards came out of a tall narrow gate. The guards wore half armor and carried slug rifles which they began to fire as they ran toward the hell-hound. Wounded moas fell to the ground, kicking with their strong, scaly legs. Ricocheting slugs whooped and rang, knocking dust and brick fragments from the ground all around the hell-hound as it stretched and bent this way and that, and finally fixed on Yama and Eliphas.

Eliphas wailed and sank to his knees, his arms wrapped over his head. Yama held up the ceramic coin in one hand and his long knife in the other, and slowly backed away from the hell-hound. It had elongated to four or five times the height of a man and shone so brightly that he could only squint at it through half-closed eyes. It made a horrible high-pitched hiss as it sinuously advanced toward him, gouging a smoking trench in the brick floor. Its heat parched his skin. The guards kept up a steady rate of fire, but the fusillade merely kicked up shards of brick around the hell-hound or passed through it as if it was no more than light—and perhaps it was no more than light, light bent into itself. Yama backed into a stack of baskets of live chickens.

He slashed the baskets open and kicked them toward the hell-hound. The thing stopped and bent in a half circle as panicked chickens scattered around it, but then it straightened and fixed on Yama again. He tried again to command it to halt, but he might as well have tried to snuff a furnace by pure will. He was aware of a number of small machines in the chamber, but he could no more hurl them at the hell-hound than he could have endangered the village.

People were fighting to get through the gate; no escape there. Yama stepped backward as the hell-hound swayed toward him, watched by laborers and husbandmen hiding amongst wagons and carts. Eliphas called out. Yama risked glancing around and saw that the old man was standing on top of an overturned cart. A man jumped up beside Eliphas; Yama recognized the gambler who had been playing the shell game outside the bawdy house.

“This way, brother,” Eliphas called, and the gambler shouted, “Come with me if you want to live!”

Yama turned and ran, and knew by the screams of the people all around that the hell-hound had started after him.

He dodged around the cart and for a moment thought that Eliphas and the gambler had vanished. No, they had ducked through a little round hole in the wall. Yama’s shadow was thrown ahead of him, and he ran to meet its dwindling apex. Fierce heat and light beat at his back as he scrambled through the low opening, and then something fell with a clang behind him and he was in darkness.