Eternity Road

4

In an age that depended on sails and oars for power, the Mississippi was a cranky partner at best. Northbound cargo had to be hauled upriver by a combination of flatboats and draft horses. To complicate matters, the river was prone to change course periodically. It had swallowed but only partially digested many of the concrete and brick cities that had sprouted along its banks in ancient times. These had now become navigational hazards. There were seven major collapsed bridges, three of which, at Argon, at Farroad on the Arkansaw, and at Masandik in the south, effectively blocked any vessel larger than a canoe. This was the factor that made Illyria the crossroads of the League, and its center of power. And which created economic opportunities for Flojian Endine.

His draft animals were raised on two ranches near Cantonfile. He’d been planning for some time to expand the number of horses in his stables, and his conversations with business allies in Masandik convinced him that the traffic would support the investment. On his return to Illyria he met with his groom at the pier to devise a strategy. When the morning-long meeting ended, and the groom had left, he sat back with a cup of tea, feeling satisfied with his life. Business was good, his financial health assured, and the future bright. He was living in the morning of a new age, now that his father was gone. The brooding presence was removed from the house at last. Only the shadow of his ruined name remained.

What had the old man done out there?

Well, no matter. Maybe the speculations would stop now. It was time for people to let go and bury their dead and be done with it. But that was unlikely. The damned book had appeared, as if Karik had been determined to stir everything up again. When he’d seen what it was, Flojian had been tempted to burn it. But he could not bring himself to violate his father’s last wish, even though he’d hated him for it.

He suddenly realized Chaka Milana was standing in his doorway. Her eyes radiated hostility.

“Hello, Chaka,” he said, carefully inserting concern into his voice. “Is something wrong?”

She was clutching an oilskin packet. “I owe you an apology.” Her tone was flat.

“For what?” He got up and came around the desk. “Please come in.”

She held out the packet. He recognized it, and his heart sank.

“I was in your house last night.”

A welter of emotions rolled through him. “So I see. Is your conscience giving you trouble?”

She glanced at the oilskin. “I’d be grateful if you’d explain this to me.”

Flojian made no move to open it.

“You do know what’s in it.”

“Of course I know.”

“Tell me what it means.”

Flojian would have liked to put the same question to his father. “It’s a false alarm. What else could it be? They thought they’d found it, but they hadn’t. Simple as that.”

“Here’s something else that’s been kept quiet. Why?”

“Why did I keep it quiet? What makes you think I knew anything about it? My father didn’t have a very high regard for me, Chaka. I’m the last one he’d confide in. I didn’t even know the sketch existed until we cleaned up the day after the ceremony. Anyway, I suspect he didn’t make it public because it would have led to exactly this kind of reaction.”

Her expression hardened. Flojian hated confrontations. He preferred to be liked, and much of his personal success was predicated on the fact that people willingly threw business his way, and others were anxious to work for him.

“I think you owed me the truth,” said Chaka.

“What is the truth, Chaka? That he might have found what he was looking for? Or that your brother might have jumped to an unjustified conclusion? You know as well as I do that at least one of the sketches is pure fantasy. Remember The Dragon? Who knows where the truth is?

“My father devoted his entire life first to trying to establish that Haven existed, and then to trying to find the place. He dreamed about it, fought for it, and lost his reputation over it. Do you seriously believe that he could have found it but neglected in the face of all that repudiation to mention it to anyone? Does that make any sense to you at all?”

She stood her ground. “No,” she said. “But neither does his failing to mention the Mark Twain to anyone. There’s a pattern here.”

“What pattern? Look, he could have found the book anywhere.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “When he told me about my brother’s death, he said they got careless, that they were preoccupied because they thought they were almost there. In fact, if this is what it appears to be, Arin was alive at the end of the journey.”

“Chaka, it’s all guesswork.” He opened the packet, removed the sketch, and studied it. July 25.

“It’s the last in the series,” she said.

He sighed. “I’m sorry there’re still all these questions. But this is why I didn’t say anything. It’s why I should have destroyed it. I knew it would just start the old trouble up again.” He put the sketch back inside its wrapper and held it out for her. “Keep it if you like.”

She stared at him. “And that’s the end of it?”

Flojian’s anger had drained. He was just tired of it all and wanted it to go away. “Chaka, what do you want from me? You know as much as I do. Tell me what I can do that will satisfy you, and I’ll try to comply.”

Her eyes were wet. “Help me find out what really happened,” she said.

“And how do you propose we do that?” Flojian leaned against the edge of a table. “Chaka, you’re aware that if we make this public, my father’s reputation is going to take another beating. I don’t know, maybe he deserves it. But I can’t see what good will come out of it.”

“I’m interested in the truth,” she said, “and I’m not much worried about anyone’s reputation.” She put the oilskin into her pocket and started for the door.

“I’m sure you are,” he growled. “Incidentally, if you think about any more late night visits, please be careful. I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a prowler.”

“I wish we could be sure.” Silas hunched down on his elbows, studying the thirteenth sketch by candlelight. “But he’s right: It could just be something Arin made up. Or a misunderstanding. They thought they were there, but they weren’t. It could be that simple.”

She shook her head. “Why would he do that? He was along for the specific purpose of recording the expedition.”

One sketch, River Valley, still hung on a wall in Flojian’s villa. The others were arranged sequentially on Silas’s worktable.

Silas looked at Frontier. “1 know this place,” he said.

“I do too. That’s upriver, just south of Argon. It’s the fork. Where the Ohio breaks off.”

They were in Silas’s modest house in the tiny government quarter near the Imperium. A light rain fell against the windows. Chaka glanced out at the winding gravel street, which had been full of people when she’d arrived, but was now deserted. It had grown dark, from both the storm and the sunset.

Silas moved the lamp closer to the sketch titled The City. “Have you ever read Showron?” he asked.

“I never heard of him.”

“Showron Voyager was a Baranji scholar. He’s supposed to have visited Haven near the end of his life. He writes about the scholar-caretakers, still living there generations after the October Patrol era. More to the point, he describes his journey.” Silas dipped a pen into his inkwell and began to write, stopping periodically to gaze at the wall. When he’d finished, he looked critically at the result, changed a word, and handed it to her.

We fled the demon towers.

And came at last to Mamara,

With its restless spirits.

“Demon towers and restless spirits,” she said, smiling. “Sounds ominous.”

He rapped his fingers against the table. “Demons are all in the imagination,” said Silas dismissively. He looked down at the sketch. “But those towers could be what he was talking about.”

“It’s all just too vague,” said Chaka.

“Maybe not.” Silas produced a sketch of his own. “This is from a Baranian edition of The Travels” The Baranians had occupied the Mississippi Valley for a brief period before the rise of the modern cities. “The original’s in Makar.”

The sketch depicted a metal cradle and platform, mounted against the face of a cliff. A curious bullet-shaped object lay in the cradle. Two human figures stood beside it, engaged in conversation. There was a sense of deep sky.

“What is it?” asked Chaka.

“This one’s a vehicle. I don’t draw very well, so it’s hard to tell. In the original, the vehicle is drawn in a way that incorporates motion. But look here.”

She didn’t see what he was driving at until he put the thirteenth sketch, Haven, under her eyes. Slight bulge here. Narrow shelf there. Vertical lines in the rock face. It looked like the same cliff. “They did find it,” she said.

“Maybe. Or maybe Arin had seen this and was reproducing it. Possibly without realizing it. Or maybe it’s a coincidence. But whatever it is, how could we possibly figure out where they went?” He blurted it out, without immediately realizing what he was suggesting, and they stared uncomfortably across the table at each other.

She had not intended to tell anyone else what she’d done, least of all Raney. But somehow, after they’d shared a meal that evening at her villa, she couldn’t resist. He responded predictably by adopting a severe mien and asking whether she’d lost her mind. “What would have happened if you’d been caught?”

“I think he would have booted me out and told me not to come back.”

“It could have been a lot worse,” he said. Raney had a tendency to talk to her sometimes as if they were married. Illyria was a society in transition. It had been puritanical under its emperors, who guarded the sanctity of the family and the honor of the nation’s women with enthusiasm, while maintaining their own harems. But the overthrow of the autocracy and the rise of republican principles had fueled a new sense of liberty. The old institutions and centers of authority were being swept away. And with them, some were saying, the decency and common courtesy that made civilization worthwhile. There seemed to be more roughnecks in the streets, more pushing and shoving in the bazaars, more open sexuality, more abandoned children, more violations of good taste. Many were calling for a return to imperial rule. And almost everyone agreed that the nation was in decline.

Chaka’s age, and the lack of a controlling male hand in her household, rendered her automatically suspect among the older families, who held the balance of political and economic power in the state. Therefore, Raney saw himself as a man on a white horse as well as a suitor. He was not sufficiently sophisticated to disguise this view, which Chaka found increasingly annoying with the passage of time, although she might not have been able to say why. Yet she liked him all the same, and enjoyed spending time with him.

“Raney,” she said, “do you understand what I’m telling you? It looks as if they found what they were looking for.”

“Who cares? Chaka, who cares? It’s over.” He was angry that she had put herself in danger, relieved that she had escaped without harm, frustrated that she clung to this lunatic business. “It was nine years ago. Unless Endine left a map. Did he leave a map?”

“No.”

“Instructions how to get there?”

“Not that we know of.”

“Then I think you should take the Mark Twain, be grateful, and let go.”

They’d moved into the living room. He was standing by the fireplace, his thumbs shoved into his belt, his expression in shadow. She was seated placidly in the wingback chair near the window. “Don’t you even want to see the thirteenth sketch?”

“Sure I do.” His tone softened. “I just don’t want you breaking into people’s houses. I would never have believed you’d do something like that. And you didn’t even tell me.” He closed his eyes and shook his head in dismay. Then his tone softened. “Next time you want to break into someone’s house in the middle of the night, try mine.”

The wind moved against the shutters. Out in the barn, one of the horses snorted. Chaka smiled politely, took out the sketch and showed it to him. He shrugged.

“It’s only a cliff. I suspect we could find a half-dozen like this if we went looking.”

She gazed, with resignation, out the window.

He came and sat beside her. “I’m sorry. I know this thing with Endine bothers you. I wish there were something I could do to put it to rest.”

“Maybe there is,” she said.

He looked at her, and the silence drew out between them. “You need help with another burglary?” he asked.

“I’ve been thinking about trying to retrace the route of the original expedition. I think it might be possible. If it is, would you come?”

“Are you serious? It can’t be done. We both know that.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“How, Chaka? Either we know where it is or we don’t.”

“Would you come?”

He managed an uncomfortable grin. “You find a way to get to Haven,” he said, “and you can count on me.”