The Books of the Wars (25 page)

He was standing where he had been, before the sea-dragons and dead captain; but it was almost sunset now and the Square was utterly deserted. Long shadows from deserted buildings and ruins formed a tracery across the stones and around the monument.

Far away the shining towers of the cathedral could be seen, the crosses and stars at their peaks gouging the bloated sun. VanRoark wondered how long he had been standing there; if, indeed, this was the same day or year that he last remembered. There was nothing inside him now that he could articulate; not a single concept had remained in any recognizable form. But the ideas had passed through him brutally, and the small waves from their dying wake stirred inside him, much more in his heart and stomach than in his mind.

So it was with no small wonderment at his own behavior that he wandered through the dead streets, trying to dig down through their tumbling masses and recapture them for rational examination. Back up to Bergman Street, past the shuttered cartography shop, and under the wooden compasses and globes that marked the other shops along the street; most of them had closed down years ago and the weathered signs, decayed and falling to pieces, described the measurements of the street and its new ruins with their shadows.

VanRoark stopped and tried to restore a hanging basket-work globe to its mount; but the iron thorns that had once held metal continents to the framework, now probably melted down for the cathedral, cut his fingers.

The sun was down; a brilliantly moonless welkin recast the weathered wood and ulcerated paint into a vague parody of steel or silver. VanRoark moved on across the Avenue of Victories; dry fountains spouted stars and hideous new constellations. Then the feelings he had been attempting to grasp began to rise to his mind; he was instantly terrified. Echoes of his wailing and sorrow came piling back upon him, the things Timonias had told following behind. He ran from the Avenue of Victories and the cathedral, leaving the night sky twisting with the quiet agony of a dumb animal.

Amon VanRoark found a distant amusement with himself in the day immediately following the appearance of Timonias. Somewhere, still miraculously untouched, a bit of himself which cared nothing for matters of such great import as the end of time hung back to watch the curious activities of the rest of him. It was not, in any way, irritation or resistance to the new course of VanRoark's life. But as he blundered about his room—absurdly trying to decide just what he should take with him to the Meadows and the presumed presence of God—the small bit asked why the streets were not awash with men desperate to get out of the city and join the armies of their true nature.

Indeed, the city seemed completely normal, perhaps even intensely normal, as if it were trying to ignore the extraordinary happenings of the previous day. The usual apathy of most people seemed to suddenly require more effort than usual. The pack of drifters and derelicts who were always sleeping in the ruins around the Artillery Gate squirmed uneasily, with their eyes screwed shut as if a brilliant light had been thrust in front of them. Everywhere the failure and futility which had served to carry so many of the city's generations safely through life no longer appeared to be so natural a thing.

Clearly the city had been touched, but as VanRoark walked about on the day before he planned to leave for New Svald he heard not a word of the two ships or the prophet or anything being the slightest bit uncommon.
Perhaps,
he thought for a moment,
each man is now fighting his own battle, trying to decide whether to throw his lot in with Good or Evil; in a day or two the city will erupt into activity. Companies will be raised, final alliances formed, the promises fulfilled.

Because of this, VanRoark delayed his departure for a few more days, then a week. Instead of exploding, the city merely closed itself up tighter, driving whatever thoughts that had briefly stirred it deeper and deeper into its routine until they were finally lost. Two weeks after Timonias had visited the city, VanRoark could almost feel the pressure being released. They had entirely defeated the thing that now so possessed the young man, beaten and smothered it until it became just one more of the small, vague irritations that had come to make up what passed for a heritage in those days.

While the city met and easily dealt with the Word, VanRoark only surrendered to it. He began to fear that the Meadow Wars might somehow begin without him. He had tried to talk to his father about Timonias but was met with such determined inattention that he soon gave up. This bothered him intensely. Hostility, anger: at least they were positive and would mean that the elder Van-Roark, too, was taking sides. But this nothingness: "Did you see him, Father, or have your men told you about him and what he said? Did you see the ships? The small, fast one and the big, tired one anchored offshore?" Somehow the conversation always managed to return to such subjects as the impending Feast of St. Mathiason, or the eternal plans of the City Council to begin deepening the harbor, now little more than a marsh.

A small, cold rage began to build up within VanRoark, which made him want to scream what he had heard to every citizen he could reach. But the rage never grew to be very large, simply because he was much too caught up in his own personal adventure to really care much for the trials or failings of others. Besides, he knew perfectly well that it was impossible for him to ever tell another person what he knew; only Timonias could do that and he had gone.

Although the prophet had never stated such, Van-Roark anticipated a brave, grimly happy air on the day he would leave, for he expected, on that day, to have the rest of the city marching with him.
Lord,
he thought,
this should be a time for grand farewells and beau gestes of impossible charm; flags should be flown; people who were enemies to the very centers of their souls should be making one last wish for luck and good fortune to each other.

Instead, he stood alone by the Artillery Gate, damp from the early morning mists and uncomfortable from the suspicious stares of a couple of derelicts. Behind him was the great cathedral, soft and shadowy in the fog, small rays of colored light hovering around the stained glass windows; the lamps had not swayed for more than ten years. Ahead of him, the Avenue of Victories, its ruins and civic tombstones gradually vanishing in the mist; he could see nothing of the harbor.

He had thought briefly of saying goodbye to some people, especially a woman he knew in the Thurber District—a place of moldering buildings that had once housed the various legations and embassies to the city, when nations still thought contact with the rest of the world to be, if not necessary, then at least gentlemanly. The quarter was known for its eccentrics and odd characters; certainly she was one of the strangest, and one of the most enchanting, of all who lived there. But he knew if he went, it would only be with the secret hope that he might impress her with his plans, and that she, in turn, would somehow dispel the knowledge that was driving him away. He remembered his absolute inability to communicate what he knew to anyone, even to her; and if she already knew, then she had most probably left anyway.

He had not said goodbye to either his mother or father, St. Mathiason having laid a momentary claim to their attentions, and he cared little for the other people he knew in the city. But the girl, that was a real hurt. Small and distant, like the part of him that was so amazed by his actions, she could not change his course, but he wondered if she might have been at Admiralty Square and if she, too, was going to the Meadows; he wondered which side she would be on.

He stood looking at his city until the mists had burned off, hoping that it might suddenly break out of itself and join him. Nothing happened, nothing unusual stirred the warm, damp air. At least he would be leaving in a proper spring instead of the odd winter that had stayed with the land into the middle of May.

In other times—when the Avenue of Victories had not stopped at the steps of the cathedral but had run straight west for more than a thousand miles, through the Great Plains and to the nation of Timmerion—there had been an exceptionally fertile strip of land which had roughly paralleled the coast from the Republics south to the Tal-bight Estuary. It had been called the Greenbelt, and upon its soil the Republics had raised their most beautiful flowers, grown their greatest crops, bred their finest horses. But the endless wars and catastrophes had crushed and poisoned the Greenbelt into a near-desert, even more barren now than the land which surrounded it. In winter it was frozen to the hardness of metal; in the summer, if the season chose to ever arrive, it would be dust; nothing but ironbush and saltgrasses could grow there.

Now it was spring and the Greenbelt was muck; it clung and stuck to VanRoark's boots and made him feel filthy. But his only alternative was the endless lands to the west, where it was only a matter of chance if he would be murdered before or after he got lost.

VanRoark's luck improved momentarily; four days out from his city, he fell in with a caravan of adventurers from the lands of Raud. They were going south also, but to the vast Enstrich Marshes to hunt for bird-of-paradise feathers and the hides of the water reptiles that lived there; a curious sort of crystal grew in pockets along the reptiles' bodies that was highly prized among certain rulers and noblemen, especially those of the mountain kingdoms of Mountjoy and ancient Mourne. None of them had ever heard of any Timonias, and it was absolutely impossible to draw them into conversation about anything other than women, feats of drinking, or the vast sums they planned to make from their enterprise.

VanRoark was quite aware that he should be getting more dispirited over the absence of fellow travelers to the Wars; on several occasions, when the dubious security and small comforts of home grew large through comparison to the caravan's meager offerings or, at night, when he thought of the woman he had never said goodbye to, a purely pitiful human crying took hold of him. He felt so very old and tired for his age, and the part of him that remained cynically amused observed that even the possessed must still remain essentially human.

That thought pained him: that he should still feel hunger and loneliness and longing. But most of the time, and always in the daylight, the words of Timonias stayed with him, pushing him on.

Gradually the landscape became flatter and the low hills bordering the western horizon leveled off. At times, when the air was exceptionally clear, a gray-green edging of far highlands could be seen. The coastline remained quite rugged, cliffs dropping vertically a hundred feet or more to the Sea.

The Trextel River, which began among the same lake system as the wilder Shirka, emptied into the Sea through an impressive fjord that ran almost a hundred miles eastward. At its real mouth, far inland, there had once been a great trading city, whose ruins were still something of a marvel to those who visited them. Its name is not remembered, but the fortress town of Charhampton, which had guarded the seaward mouth of the gorge, remained. The city and its attendant forts had been carved into therocksides of thenorthern cliffs.It had long been a strong point and its scars, everything from the chips made by steel axes to the shadow-impressions of people caught by a bomb that had once exploded in the gorge, attested to its importance.

The trade that had made the city important had vanished centuries ago, or else shifted to Enador, but a few people still managed to extract a living from the Sea or from selling the scrap metal and armaments from the dead forts. The caravan stopped to rest at Charhampton and to wait for the ferry that would take them to the southern bank of the Trextel. The lizard hunters retired to the bars and single whorehouse of the city for the evening; VanRoark might have joined them, but puritan tinges of his upbringing held him back. Overshadowing that was the prospect of exploring the ruined forts, whose galleries and quays ran for nearly a mile downstream from the city until they curved north along with the coastline as it opened to the Sea.

Most of the smaller structures and miscellaneous junk had been carted away and probably remounted in castles from North Cape to Enom. The forts of Charhampton, though, like the fabled Armories of which little remained except for a few caves and a crater on the Tyne River, had been built by a mighty nation of men who could bend almost anything but their own minds to their will. Thus, great and incomprehensible machines remained, rooted to their concrete bases, still pointing across the river or seaward through slits in the rock.

He had been wandering through some ancient submarine pens about a quarter of a mile east from the city itself, when he met Tapp. Tapp was, of course, fairly drunk, a state which he successfully maintained for almost the whole time VanRoark knew him. The young man was quite startled, lost as he was in the dreams and nightmares that the rusting hulks inevitably conjured.

"Good evening, young sir. In search of your new command?" Tapp's deep voice bellowed through the huge pens. VanRoark quickly picked out the little man sitting atop the conning tower of one of the near boats. Tapp gestured grandly at the ragged patchwork of ribs and hull plating.

"And are you to be my crew?" VanRoark responded after a moment.

"Aye, sir, if it pleases you. But I fear that our ships will need a bit of work before we sail." Tapp burst into sudden, explosive laughter at his own wit. Fascinated, VanRoark drew closer, more than a little amazed at his own fearlessness, for he had long been taught of the creatures that were said to lurk in the remains of the dead world.

"And for where shall we be sailing, crew? For Black-woods Bay, Duncarin or the Isle of Oromund?" Van-Roark knew perfectly well the place he hoped the man would name.

A pause while the laughing echoed out to Sea through the ruined blast doors and torpedo booms. "Why, to the Meadow Wars, young sir!" Then, even lower and more sadly, "To the Meadows . . . " But again the quiet pens detonated to his laughter; he reached behind him and drew out a short, curved saber that caught moonlight reflected from the water outside and from the shell holes in the roof. "Right, young sir, to the bleeding Meadows, you know. Like my great-grandfather, like my granddad, and my own dad. The other two came back, but old Dad pulled it off and managed to die when he was supposed to." He lowered the saber, bent over and lifted a wine sack from inside of the old conning tower. "Juice?" he asked with momentary politeness; and then back up with the sword and his voice filling the pens. A colony of bats stirred into the air and then nested again in another corner. VanRoark said no, but was this a joke or was he really going to the Meadows?