Ruins

CHAPTER 3 Night Watch

From the moment Vadesh walked up to them on this side of the Wall, Umbo had felt a sick dread. Now it was clear to him that passing through the Wall had been a very bad idea. At the time it seemed they had no choice. But that was because back when they had choices, they had chosen to come so near to the Wall there was nowhere else to go. They had pinned themselves there.

Only now did it occur to Umbo that it was Rigg who had decided that going through the Wall was something they needed to try. Maybe it was because of the way Rigg’s real father, Knosso, had died trying to get through the Wall by sea.

Whatever Rigg’s reason, when they escaped the city of Aressa Sessamo, knowing that General Citizen and Rigg’s and Param’s mother, Hagia Sessamin, would pursue them, Rigg made sure they headed for the Wall and then had no choice but to get through it, somehow.

But had that been the only way to evade General Citizen’s army? Couldn’t they have split up, hidden among the people? Rigg was the only person who could follow all the paths that humans and animals took through the world—no one else could have traced their movements. Yet whenever someone spoke of another course, Rigg dismissed it. In the long run, they’d get caught; inside the wallfold they couldn’t hide for long. Yet people did hide. So why didn’t anyone argue with Rigg? Why didn’t I?

Not that Rigg bossed people around or even argued much. He just kept bringing up the Wall again and again, making it all seem so rational. And eventually everyone just took it for granted they were heading for the Wall.

Even at the last minute, the very methods they used to get through the Wall might have taken them away from it just as easily. But they went through because Rigg wanted to.

Who put him in charge? Why did everybody listen to him?

Like Vadesh. He made it clear that Rigg was the person he would obey. But they had all passed through the Wall. In fact, Umbo and Param had passed through it first. And Umbo had done all the time-shifting. First Umbo had pushed Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko into the past—to the time that Rigg determined by finding and following the barbfeather. Then, when they were nearly across, Param had grabbed Umbo by the hand, leapt off the high rock they had been perched on, and then vivisected time the way she did, slowing them down. And once again, Umbo had pushed back in time, dragging himself and Param to a point a couple of weeks before they had arrived at the Wall. That’s how Umbo and Param ended up on the far side of the Wall even before the other three set out.

Ultimately it all depended on Umbo. Yes, Rigg could carry the time-jump much farther into the past than Umbo could; yes, Rigg made it precise, by linking with some ancient path. And Param could section the flow of time—they were both talented. But the actual time travel, that was Umbo alone.

So why didn’t Vadesh defer to him? Why did Vadesh say Rigg was the “actual time traveler,” when Rigg had never learned to time-shift on his own, as Umbo had? Why was Umbo nothing, when he could do things no one else could do?

Right from the start, Umbo had come to Rigg as a supplicant. Please let me travel with you, please! Remembering his own groveling begging attitude now made Umbo feel humiliated and angry. They both had compelling reasons to leave the village of Fall Ford; why did Umbo put himself in a subordinate position?

It couldn’t be because Rigg was a Sessamid, born to be a prince; none of them knew it until he was arrested in O. Besides, Sessamids had been out of power ever since the People’s Revolutionary Council took over, and if they had been in power, they would have killed Rigg as a baby because Queen Hagia’s grandmother had decreed that no male could inherit and that all male Sessamids must be killed upon birth.

So how did Rigg end up making all the important decisions and getting them into this terrible place on the wrong side of the Wall?

Be rational, Umbo told himself. Rigg is in charge because that’s how Ram, the Golden Man, the Wandering Man, our copy of Vadesh, raised him.

Ram had given Umbo some training in the way to control his power over time, and by disguising himself as a gardener had helped train Param, all the way downriver in Aressa Sessamo. But Ram had taken Rigg from babyhood and raised him as his son, teaching him constantly. Ram trained Rigg to be a ruler. Ram decided everything, and Rigg and all the rest of them were just following his script.

And now here they were with Ram’s identical twin, Vadesh, lying to them and controlling them. They couldn’t even get water without Vadesh’s help or some terrible parasite would get them. They were completely at the mercy of this machine shaped like a human. A machine created in such a form as to deceive everyone about its very nature. Ancient humans made these immortal machines and now they rule over us because they know everything and we know nothing.

Now Umbo lay there in a grove of trees not far from the empty ruins of a city, staring up at the bright Ring overhead in the sky, boiling with the same resentment that had been building up inside him since they passed through the Wall. Umbo was honest enough to recognize that while the feeling was the same, it was no longer directed against Rigg. Now it was directed against Ram and Vadesh. But was it them that he really resented? Was it anybody, really, that was making him feel this way? Or did he simply have these feelings and searched for someone outside himself to blame them on?

I’m angry and bitter and despairing but Rigg doesn’t deserve it, and Ram and Vadesh are nothing but machines and . . .

Umbo rolled up onto his arm and looked at the others where they lay sleeping. Loaf—there was no reason to resent him. He had been nothing but generous and protective, and he, at least, had cared about Umbo and remembered him when no one else did.

Olivenko? Umbo barely knew him. Only Rigg knew him, and Rigg seemed to value him because Olivenko had watched Knosso die. Yet Olivenko had worked hard and abided by the group’s decisions—which meant Rigg’s decisions—and there was no reason for Umbo to resent him, either.

And there was Rigg. Umbo knew that Rigg was his true friend, and if people deferred to him it was only natural, because Ram had trained him to be ready for anything, to know something about practically everything.

Param was almost the opposite. Same bloodline as Rigg—you could see it in how much they looked like each other—but she had spent so many hours of her life invisible in her sliced-up slowed-down timeflow that as she lay there sleeping in the lee of Loaf’s large body, she seemed almost younger than Rigg. Which made sense, though she was his older sister by two years; she hadn’t actually lived through all the years since she was born, for when she was in her sectioned-up timeflow, she lived through only one second for every three or four or more seconds that passed for everyone else.

She’s younger than me, thought Umbo.

And with that thought, he felt himself filled with such rage and despair and . . . and longing that he wanted to cry out from the power of it; it could not be contained, yet he had to contain it . . .

By all the Saints, thought Umbo, the first princess I meet, and I fall in love with her.

So this is love, he said to himself, trying to examine his own overwhelming feelings with the rational fragment of his mind. This is the powerful, horrible longing that made Mother marry that miserable tyrant I had to call Father. How many unbelievably stupid heroes in stories did insanely dangerous things because they were in love?

More to the point, how many insane things am I going to do because of it?

Now all of Umbo’s feelings made sense to him. Yes, Rigg had made too many decisions, but the main reason Umbo resented him was the easy, comfortable way Param behaved with him. They had been together in the same house for months, and they were brother and sister and they had planned their escape together and had saved each other’s lives and . . .

I saved her life too! And she mine!

But only the once, only this morning as they leapt from the rock. She had taken Umbo by the hand and pulled him to his feet and then jumped off the rock with him. Then, holding his hand, she had taken him across the Wall.

He could still feel her hand in his. Or, rather, the tingle of the memory of her hand. She isn’t two years older than me and Rigg, not really. She’s my age, more or less, and who cares if she was born a princess? Her mother the queen tried to kill her over and over—if that doesn’t constitute getting fired as princess, what does? She’s a commoner like me, now. It’s not impossible.

A commoner by law, but still royal by breeding. She must think I’m a filthy ignorant unmannered low-speaking vulgar privick, while Rigg knows how to talk just like her, with all that high, fine language. Rigg has lived in her house, has eaten at table with her, he knows all the right manners. While I have journeyed with her, lit fires for her at night, but mostly I’ve behaved like a menial. As if I were Rigg’s manservant. And not some lofty valet who knows all the correct manners—no, I’m like a boy Rigg hired for the afternoon, to help do the work of their journey from the city to the Wall.

No, thought Umbo. I can’t let myself go back to resenting everybody. I’m in love, and so, as the Wandering Man—no, Ram—once explained, I have the instinct to fight any potential rivals for the woman I covet. Not that Rigg is a rival, exactly—he’s her brother, not her lover—but he has her trust, her affection. She talks to him, little secrets and asides, all the things I want her to have with me. Only with me.

What made Umbo so angry was the knowledge that she must despise him, that she was out of his reach no matter what he did. And yet he knew that he didn’t know that, couldn’t know it. They were both so young, what did he expect?

This is insane, he told himself. I’ve got to get my mind off her, now that I know that she’s what’s been on my mind.

He reached into his pocket and took out the thing he had picked up when he came into the grove of trees.

It was a stone. Specifically, a jewel. Even more specifically, a jewel that looked exactly like the one that Rigg had tried to sell in O, and which was now in the possession of a bank in Aressa Sessamo. The stone that Umbo and Loaf had tried repeatedly to steal back, so that Rigg’s collection of nineteen stones would be complete.

That was what he had seen at a glance, when he was picking it up from among the fallen leaves. But since it could not possibly be that stone, Umbo tried to make sense of it another way. He drew it from where he had tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and tried to study it by ringlight.

It wasn’t the sight of it that mattered anyway, except to confirm that it was indeed the right size and color to be the missing jewel, which he’d realized the moment he saw it. Now he examined it by heft and texture. It was as hard as any of the jewels, as smoothly polished, and its weight felt right.

He tucked it into his trousers and rolled over onto his back. He recalled the moment of finding it. The jewel was not so much amid last year’s fallen leaves as atop them. Resting right on the surface, as if it had been left in order to be noticed and found.

But who could have left it? Rigg sounded absolutely certain when he said no human had come near this grove in a long, long time. The jewel could not have been sitting there so long—it would have been buried under leaves and probably deep within the soil.

The lack of paths suggested that the jewel must have been left by an expendable like Vadesh and Ram. They left no path that Rigg could see. But why would Vadesh leave it lying there, when he could just as easily have handed it to Rigg?

Maybe it was some kind of test, to see what Umbo would do with it. But no one could have known in advance which of them, if any, would enter the grove exactly where Umbo did. And when could Vadesh have done it? Wouldn’t they have seen him? There was no place to conceal himself between the empty city and this grove. There were no footprints or other woodsy signs of his passing—the leaves on which the jewel rested looked completely undisturbed, exactly like all the leaves surrounding them.

And why this jewel? Even though it could hardly be the very one that Rigg had once carried and tried to sell, it was certainly just like it in appearance. Suppose Vadesh had an identical set of nineteen here in this wallfold? How did he know to pick the one jewel that was missing from their set? Rigg had laid out the eighteen for him to see, but when had Vadesh had a single moment in which to fetch his own jewels to replace the missing one?

“You awake?”

The whisper came from just above his head. Umbo didn’t flinch or startle, but his heart raced. Olivenko’s voice. How had he gotten from his watch position to here without Umbo hearing?

“Your watch,” said Olivenko.

Of course it was Umbo’s watch. And the reason he didn’t hear Olivenko coming was because Umbo must have fallen asleep. And the reason he didn’t feel as if he had slept at all was because he took so long with his thoughts before falling asleep that all he got was a nap at best.

Bleary, Umbo got up. Loaf stirred—he slept lightly and woke at every change of watch. Rigg and Param remained oblivious. The sleep of royalty.

What an unfair thing even to think of, Umbo told himself. If there’s anyone in the world who can’t sleep peacefully, it’s royalty. When rebels aren’t trying to kill them, or warlords who think they should be king, then royal families are always killing each other.

Just how stupid are my resentments and jealousies going to make me?

“Speak to me,” said Olivenko. “If you’re sleepwalking, you won’t keep much of a watch.”

Umbo opened his eyes fully and stretched. “I’m awake,” he whispered.

“Keep moving until you’re really awake,” said Olivenko. “You only fell asleep a few minutes ago. I felt bad waking you, but . . . your turn.”

And we can’t change turns around if it might mean waking one of the royals.

No, Umbo told himself. Stop thinking that way.

He got up and walked briskly out of the center of the grove, not caring how much noise he made among last year’s fallen leaves. Then he was on the closely grazed meadow, where his steps made almost no noise at all, and where the breeze was unimpeded by the trunks and leaves of the trees.

What animals keep this grass so close-cropped? Why aren’t they all here now, with their faces covered by facemasks? Maybe Vadesh comes out and mows it himself. Or grazes it. Who knows what these machines can do, if they put their minds to it?

Umbo circled the grove, which was quite a wide circuit, though the grove did not seem large or thick. He stayed well beyond its verge, which took him down a slope on the side beyond the city. Only when Umbo heard the gurgling of water did he realize how foolish he was to have strayed so far from camp. From here he couldn’t even see the sleepers, though he could see the tops of the trees under which they lay. But to go near the water—what if he stumbled in and got his own facemask?

As if on cue, his left foot sloshed into a boggy spot in the grass. Umbo leapt back as if dodging a harvester’s scythe. But maybe there was no point in dodging. Maybe a larval facemask had already fastened itself to him.

He scampered up the hill till he reached the edge of the copse and could see Loaf. Then Umbo sat down and ran his hands over his legs and feet. Nothing was attached, though he got a start when he found some wet leaves clinging to the top of his right foot and then to his hands when he tried to brush them away. There were no clouds tonight, so the ringlight was enough to show him that he had no parasite inching up his body. Unless the parasite was very small. Or it was creeping along under his skin.

Umbo shuddered, then rose to his feet and walked again, continuing his circuit of the grove, though much closer to the edge of it now.

Along the north side, he had to give up the plan. He couldn’t continue to circle the outside of the grove because it wasn’t a grove at all—it was a peninsula of a much larger forest that extended away to the north. It had only seemed like a grove from the city side because its link with the greater forest was hidden behind the brow of the hill.

You think you know where you are, you think you know what’s what, and suddenly nothing is the way you thought, and it should have been obvious all along, and you feel stupid for having made assumptions, and you were stupid, but . . . Umbo could hear Wandering Man say, “It isn’t stupid when you assume things; that’s how the human brain is supposed to work. We assume things so we can act much more quickly than animals that only see what they see.”

Act quickly, yes, but wrongly if you assume wrong, Umbo thought both then and now. But he had said nothing, because he was so awed to be spending a few moments with Rigg’s strange and wonderful father. The machine.

Umbo moved across the narrow part of the wood, wading through leaves rather noisily, as if they were another kind of stream. Finally he got to lawn again, and now the city loomed on his left, farther away than the trees on his right, but much taller. Umbo stood looking at the buildings, wondering where the people went, and whether Vadesh stood in one of the towers, looking out and down at him.

Umbo wondered if Vadesh wondered about anything. Neither Vadesh nor Ram ever seemed uncertain. Even when they said they were uncertain, they sounded certain about it. Umbo didn’t even know when he didn’t know what he needed to know.

Vadesh had said that he couldn’t predict the future with any certainty. He had known a billion things that the humans from Earth might do when and if they arrived here on the planet Garden, but he did not know what they would do, he said. Well, didn’t that imply that he didn’t know what Umbo and the others would do, either? That was something for Vadesh to wonder about.

We are unpredictable to him, thought Umbo. The thought made him vaguely happy. He is manipulating us, deceiving us, withholding information from us, precisely because he doesn’t know what we’ll do and he wants us to do some particular thing.

That’s the key to this whole thing. He needs us, and so he has to manipulate us into doing a thing that is so important that it’s more important than telling us the truth. Why doesn’t he just tell us what he wants? Because he doesn’t know if we’ll do it knowingly. Or maybe he’s quite sure we won’t do it knowingly, and so he has to trick us or lead us into a situation where we have no choice but to do what he wants.

The way Rigg got us right up against the Wall.

Only Rigg is a good guy and didn’t think he was manipulating us to do his will.

Or maybe he did manipulate us on purpose, and I don’t really know him at all.

Umbo rocked his head forward and touched his fingers to his forehead. I keep coming back to not liking or trusting Rigg. Maybe that’s what Vadesh wants.

He heard Param coming. He knew it was her from the lightness of her step. “It’s not your watch yet,” he said. “I only just started.”

She kept coming. “You’ve been walking around for an hour or so,” she said. “If I’m any judge of time.”

“In this group,” said Umbo, “who can trust time to be the same from minute to minute?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Param. And then, incredibly, she put her arm through Umbo’s and stood close to him. She was warm. Umbo shivered.

“You’re cold,” she said.

“Not now,” said Umbo. Then he realized that his words might sound like he was being flirty and so he corrected himself. “I mean, I was really cold a while ago when I stepped in a wet place down by the brook—”

“You went down to the water?” she asked, incredulous.

“Not on purpose,” said Umbo. “It was a boggy place—”

“You could have—”

“I wiped down my legs and feet and there was nothing.”

“But he said they were really small in the water—”

How could he argue with her? Why should he try? “If I stepped into a boggy spot and picked up a facemask parasite then it’s done, and I can tell you what it feels like.”

“As it takes over your brain,” said Param.

“Nobody’s been using it anyway,” said Umbo. He meant it to sound jocular. Instead it sounded self-pitying.

But Param didn’t rush to reassure him, which would have made him seem even more pathetic to himself. “Maybe you and Barbfeather can talk to each other.”

“Maybe we’ll look really pretty to each other,” said Umbo. “Just my luck to find a best chum who has four legs and can’t talk.”

“Four-legged untalking people make the most reliable friends,” said Param. Was there bitterness in her voice?

“I can see you’ve never tried to befriend a cat.”

“I was forgetting cats.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I can understand why Rigg helped me, back in the capital. He’s my brother. But you—you sat there with me on that rock, holding the others back in that ancient time until Mother’s soldiers were almost on us. And Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko aren’t your kin or anything.”

“Rigg is more my friend than any of my kin,” said Umbo.

“If Rigg hadn’t signaled you to bring him back to the present . . .”

“Then I would have kept him in the past until he did.”

“You weren’t worried that they’d kill you?”

“Of course I was. If they killed me, then I couldn’t have brought them back,” said Umbo.

“What about me?” asked Param.

Umbo shook his head. “See how gallant I’m not? I knew you could take care of yourself.”

“I knew you were in danger. I kept wanting to grab you and make you disappear. But if I did, that might have been the same as killing the others.”

“But you took me away the moment I brought them back to the present,” said Umbo.

“All I could think was, get him off this rock,” she said.

“You saved my life.”

“I almost got us both killed,” she said, shuddering. “I let Mother and the soldiers see which way we jumped. They’d know we couldn’t change direction in midair. So if you hadn’t pushed us back a week—”

“But I did.”

“I jumped without thinking.”

“You had no other choice. You kept us alive in that moment.”

“And then you kept us alive in the next.”

“So on the whole, I think we saved each other,” said Umbo. Then, on a whim, he pulled away far enough that he could turn to face her and make a joke. “My hero,” he said.

Only she must have had the same idea for the same joke, because at the exact same moment she said, “My hero.”

But she wasn’t sarcastic. Or maybe her sarcasm was so thick that it sounded like sincerity.

Well, either she was joking or not. All Umbo could do was react the way he would to either. “Don’t count on its happening again,” he said. “I’m not really the hero type.”

She playfully slapped his face—just a tap with a few fingers. “Can’t let somebody thank you, is that it?”

At the moment, all Umbo could think was—well, nothing, really, because he was beyond thinking. She had taken his arm and leaned close against him, she had bantered with him, thanked him, praised him. Called him her hero, even if it was kind of a joke. And now she was teasing him. He was in heaven. And yet he was also totally focused on everything she said and did so that he could respond.

“Thank me all you want,” he said. “As long as I can thank you back.”

“One of the best things about finding out I have a brother,” said Param, “is that I inherit all his friends.”

Friends. That’s what they were. She was teasing him like a friend.

“Which is a lot more than I’ll ever inherit from my mother,” said Param ruefully. She turned back to look at the city. “I think that place is so sad. So glorious, and yet they left it behind. All that work, all that marvel, and they walked away.”

“Maybe they ran,” said Umbo. “Maybe they died.”

“Well, they’re all dead by now,” said Param. “I remember being so distraught when Papa died. I wasn’t there to watch, the way Olivenko was, but I loved him more than anybody. And Mother took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Everybody dies, and since we don’t all die at once, somebody’s always left behind. Just be glad it wasn’t you who died.’ I should have realized then what Mother was. Or maybe I did. She was perfect—perfectly selfish. Well, no. Perfectly devoted to the Tent of Light. She had seemed so devoted to me. But I knew then that if I died she’d feel exactly what she felt about Father’s death.”

“Nothing.”

“Annoyed,” she said. “She was irritated that Father’s hobby had gotten him killed.”

“Well, just think how irritated she is right now that you’re alive,” said Umbo.

Param giggled. “She’s still there. Remember? As we were falling, all I could do was slow us down more and more, so a whole night passed, and the whole time those soldiers were there, swinging those heavy metal bars. They’re doing that right now.”

“And we’re still falling toward them,” said Umbo. Instinctively he reached out and took her hand. “Let’s do it again.”

She took his hand and looked at him, laughing. Then her face darkened and she took her hand back. “No,” she said. “Let’s never do that again.”

She turned away and ran lightly back into the grove.

Never do what! he wanted to shout after her. Never jump from the rock with enemies beneath? Or never let me hold your hand again? Or never talk to me. Or never time-jump. Or . . .

Anything he asked would show just how desperate he was. For a few moments it was as if she actually liked him. And then suddenly she snatched her hand away and was gone and he had no idea why. No idea what she actually felt about him.

This is agony. I didn’t ask to fall in love with Rigg’s sister.

She called me her hero.

Umbo stalked off through the grass toward the city until he reached the path. Or road. It was grassy, but in the cold grey light of the Ring, it was as if Umbo could see the road that lay under the grass. It was wide, and while a thatch of grass roots lay over it thickly, no tree grew where the road had been. If we peeled up all this grass, it would still be there, like the roads in the city, changed not a whit by the passing of ten thousand years.

Umbo walked back to the camp. Param had already resumed her place and was either asleep or wasn’t, but wanted to seem so. Umbo didn’t walk anymore. He was wide awake now—she had wakened him even more than stepping in water had. He kept his watch and even after the position of the stars told him that his watch was over, he waited another half-watch before waking Rigg to take his turn. I won’t sleep anyway, Umbo thought. But he also knew that he was letting Rigg sleep to make up for all the terrible things that Umbo had thought about him that day. Not that Rigg had any idea. But punishing himself a little, serving Rigg a little, that made Umbo feel better. A little less ashamed.

Naturally, Rigg noticed that Umbo had wakened him late. “I couldn’t sleep anyway,” Umbo whispered. “No reason for both of us to lose sleep.”

Rigg moved off a few paces. Umbo lay down and, even though he thought he wasn’t sleepy at all, he was unconscious within moments, and then it was morning, and it was as if no time had passed. He thought: Param touched me. Of course I could sleep. I wanted to get to my dreams as quickly as possible.

Except that if he had any dreams, he didn’t remember them.

Being awake at dawn felt perfectly normal to them all—they went about their normal chores, except for boiling water. There’d be no hot gruel this morning. Nor was there any shaving or washing. They needed to hold on to every bit of water for drinking.

“So,” said Loaf, when they had all gnawed their jerky and cheese and had their sips. “You time travelers, are you going to go back and see what happened here?”

“I’d like to,” said Rigg, “if Umbo’s willing.”

Rigg seemed so deferent. Umbo blushed with embarrassment at how he had blamed Rigg for always deciding everything.

Then again, was Rigg really leaving it up to him? How could Umbo possibly say no?

I can say no, if I want to, thought Umbo. “No,” he said.

Everyone except Rigg seemed surprised. “Umbo?” asked Param.

Now that he had refused, he had to come up with a reason. “Are we going to change it?” asked Umbo. “And what if it changes us? What if I send Rigg back and he gets killed? We don’t know how violent these people were. Or what diseases they had. What if Rigg catches the plague that wiped them out? What’s the point?”

“Don’t send him back alone,” said Olivenko. “Send me and Loaf along to protect him.”

“From disease?” asked Umbo.

“Whatever happened here to empty the city,” said Rigg, “I think it has everything to do with what Vadesh wants us to do here.”

“He hasn’t asked us to do anything,” said Param.

“But he wants it all the same,” said Rigg. “Didn’t you see how attentive he was to us? We matter to him. Father was that way—Ram was. If you mattered to him, he homed on you like a bat after a fly. You filled his whole gaze. But if you didn’t matter, it was like you didn’t exist.”

“True,” said Umbo. “Sometimes I mattered to him, but mostly not.”

“Vadesh couldn’t take his eyes off us,” said Rigg.

“Off you,” said Olivenko, chuckling.

“And Param, and Umbo,” said Rigg. “The time travelers.”

“We all traveled in time,” said Loaf, with a slight smile. “He just has a thing for children.”

“Someday, Loaf, I’m going to be big enough to smack you around,” Rigg answered him.

“I’ve seen both your parents,” said Olivenko, “and no, Rigg, you’ll never be that big. I’ll never be that big.”

“Good to keep that in mind,” said Loaf.

Olivenko rolled his eyes. “I’m trying to show you proper respect here, Loaf. You don’t have to put me in my place. I know my place.”

“I was just joking,” said Loaf uncomfortably.

But he had not been joking—nobody in this group knew Loaf as well as Umbo did, and he knew Loaf had spoken his mind.

“What I think,” said Rigg, “is that I should walk around out here and see what the paths can tell me. There’s no purpose to going back in time if we arrive at some point where nothing decisive is happening, right? And if I can’t find anything that looks promising, then we won’t do it. Agreed?”

Umbo wanted to laugh. Rigg sounded so conciliatory, as if he was giving in. But in fact what he was really getting them all to agree to was that if, in Rigg’s sole judgment, there was some point in the past where they could learn something, then they would go back. Rigg hadn’t argued with anybody, but he was getting his way.

Nobody else seemed to notice, and nobody else seemed to mind. And what bothered Umbo most was the fact that he knew Rigg was right, they had to find something out before trusting Vadesh another moment, and Umbo had only disagreed because he couldn’t stand having Rigg decide everything. But what could he do when Rigg was right?

Umbo and the others tagged along, watching Rigg as he got lost in thought, seeing whatever it was that he called “paths.” For an hour they watched him move around through the lawns and meadows surrounding the city. Finally he sat down and Loaf immediately led the others closer to him. Only Umbo hung back and looked, not at Rigg, but at the city. It was more magnificent than anything Umbo had seen in O or Aressa Sessamo. Every building was a separate work of art, and yet they were all pieces of something much larger and more beautiful. It’s as if each building were part of a tapestry, some parts raised, some parts kept low. Perhaps if we could stand inside the tallest tower, we could see what the tapestry depicted. Maybe a map, like the globe inside the Tower of O. Maybe a portrait of a person. Maybe some message spelled out in towers, or the shadows of towers at sunset.

Umbo became aware of voices coming closer.

“The last thing we want to do is go back into the middle of a battle,” said Loaf. So apparently Rigg had learned something about what had happened here.

“Not in the middle,” said Rigg. “At the edge. Far back from the edge. Out of danger. Nobody was dying right here, for instance.”

“You can see death?” asked Umbo.

“No,” said Param. “Rigg already explained—if you had come with us you’d know. He just sees where paths end.”

“There were people watching the battle,” said Rigg. “Just a few. Umbo can send me back to their time—”

“Send us,” said Loaf.

“You’ll scare them,” said Param.

“I’ll smile very nicely,” said Loaf, demonstrating his best battlefield grimace.

“Oh, don’t do that,” said Olivenko. “You’d scare your own mother.”

“I need to ask them what’s happening,” said Rigg. “That’s all. I hope Vadesh was right when he said the Wall contains all languages.”

“If you can’t understand them,” said Umbo, “just signal me and I’ll bring you all back.”

“All who?” asked Param.

Loaf and Olivenko looked at her stupidly. “Us,” they said in unison.

“I’m going too,” said Param.

“Too dangerous,” said Loaf.

“As if anything we’re doing is safe,” said Param. “One of you needs to stay here with Umbo, somebody who can protect him.”

Loaf turned to Param. “You really want to see a battle? War is messy.”

“And you’re afraid I can’t deal with bodies torn apart and people screaming in agony?” asked Param.

“If you can avoid it, you should,” said Loaf.

“My mother nearly protected me to death,” said Param. “I’m done with that. I’m not strong enough to wield a sword or cut down a tree or lift a corner of a coach, like some of you. But I have eyes and ears and I want to be part of this. Directly.”

It never occurred to any of them that maybe Umbo himself would like to see the past. No, he was the anchor, he was the one who couldn’t go. “I’ll send you all,” said Umbo. “Stop arguing and hang on to each other. Rigg, tell me when you’ve picked your path.”

Olivenko rounded on Umbo. “Don’t you even care what happens to Param?”

Umbo tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “Wanting to get on with it is not the same thing as not caring. She wants to go. Why shouldn’t she?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” said Olivenko. “Because members of the royal family get no special protection against death.”

“Special protection is exactly what you’re trying to give me,” said Param.

Umbo pointed out the obvious. “If anybody can take care of herself, it’s Param.”

Then Rigg spoke, much more softly than any of the others, and yet somehow his voice made them all fall silent. How does he do that? thought Umbo.

“The thing that worries me,” said Rigg, “is that if Param starts slicing time, back there ten thousand years in the past, and disappears, how can you bring her back?”

Rigg must think we’re all stupid. “I have a really special plan to keep that from happening,” said Umbo. “Watch this.” He turned to Param and spoke very solemnly. “Param, when you’re back in the past: Don’t. Slice. Time.”

She answered in the same spirit of mock soberness. “What an excellent idea. But what if it gets really dangerous, Umbo? What if I can’t help it and I just start chopping time into little bits?”

“Well, you simply mustn’t,” said Umbo. “If things get scary, you just signal me the way Rigg does. Do you think you can do that same hand motion he does? Do your hands work like that, or do you need Rigg to show you?”

Rigg flushed with embarrassment; he wasn’t used to people mocking him.

“Stop that,” said Loaf angrily.

“Why is Umbo the only one who sees that I have as much ordinary common sense as anybody?” said Param. “Come on, Rigg, pick your path and let’s get cracking.”

“What’s the rush?” murmured Olivenko. “It’s not as if the past is going anywhere.”

“The present is,” said Umbo. What if Vadesh came out and stopped them?

Rigg still looked embarrassed—or was he angry? But he made no complaint. “I’ve got the path I want,” said Rigg. “Push us back, Umbo.”

They were all holding on to each other, the way Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko had held on to Barbfeather when they went through the Wall. And, just like that time, Umbo felt a great lurch as his push into the past swept out quickly like the current of a river, carrying them much farther into the past than Umbo could have sent them on his own. It was Rigg’s ability to hook on to someone in the past that drew them, as much as Umbo’s pushing. And it was so far that they went, ten thousand years, almost as far as the whole history of the human race on Garden.

They did not disappear, of course—Umbo could see them as well as ever. But they all stumbled because the ground must have been lower then; perhaps the thatch of the grass had not built up so high. They fell a bit, then rose up and their eyes were riveted on the grassy field in front of the city, where apparently there was a war going on. As usual, Umbo saw none of it. But when Rigg reached out and touched someone there in the past, Umbo saw a glimpse of clothing, a brief outline of a person. Rigg let go almost at once and the image disappeared.