Authors: Jack McDevitt
Eternity Road (4 page)
Within seconds, it was engulfed in flames. Chaka looked away.
Goodbye, Arin
, she said, as if the final link to her brother were being cut.
Afterward, they retreated into the house, exchanged toasts through the afternoon, and talked a lot about how they would miss the deceased. Chaka had a light tolerance for wine, and she was getting ready to call it a day when a short, stout man with a neatly clipped gray beard put a drink in her hand. “You said exactly the right things, young lady,” he said.
“Thank you.”
She understood immediately from his formal bearing and precise speech that he was an academic. He was about sixty, probably one of Endine’s colleagues. “The rest of us babbled like damned fools,” he continued.
She smiled at him, pleased.
“We’re going to miss him.” He tasted his wine. “My name’s Silas Glote. I teach at the Imperium.”
The name sounded familiar. “Pleased to meet you, Master Glote.” She smiled. “I’m Chaka Milana.”
“I knew Arin,” said Silas.
She recalled where she had heard the name. “He was in one of your seminars.”
“A long time ago. He was a fine young man.”
“Thank you.”
Flojian came up behind them, nodded to Silas, and thanked them both for their comments. “I’m sure,” he told Chaka, “he was delighted.” This was, of course, a reference to Karik’s spirit.
“It was true,” she said.
Flojian managed a smile. “Silas was invited to go on the expedition.”
“Really?”
“I have no taste for the wilderness,” said Silas. “I like my comforts.” He turned to Flojian. “How far did they actually get? Did he ever tell you?”
Flojian saw three empty chairs around a table and steered his guests toward them. Toko, his ancient servant, brought more drinks. “No,” he said, passing a cushion to Chaka. “He didn’t talk about it. Not a word.”
“How about the map?”
“I never saw a map. I don’t know that there was one.” He took a deep breath. “The tradition has always been that it was to the north. On the sea. But what sea?” He rolled his eyes. “Well, it hardly matters.” He looked toward Chaka. “Silas blames himself for not going.”
“I never said that.”
“I know. But I can hear it in your voice. And you do yourself an injustice. Nothing would have been different. Except one more would have died. I suspect you refused him for the same reason I did.”
“He asked
you
to go?” Silas blurted the question, and then realized the implied insult and tried to regroup by suggesting that Karik would not have expected Flojian to be interested.
“It’s all right, Silas. He was relieved when I passed on the idea.” Flojian’s voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “But it was abject nonsense from the start and you and I both knew it. We told him so and challenged him to show his evidence. Show the map. But he refused.”
Flojian finished his drink and sighed. “He walked out of here with a group of
children
. I apologize for that, Chaka, but it’s so. He took advantage of people who believed in him. And he led them to their graves. Nothing changes that, no matter what anyone says here.”
Chaka was about to leave when Flojian appeared again and asked whether he could speak with her privately. The request was put so earnestly that she was at a loss to guess his purpose.
He led her to a sitting room in the back of the house, and drew aside a set of heavy curtains. Sunlight fell on a collection of four books.
The room was comfortably furnished with leather chairs, a desk, a cabinet, a side table, and a reading stand. “This was my father’s sanctum,” he said, “before he retreated into the north wing.” All four volumes were bound and, of course, hand-written. Two were inside the cabinet, a third was on the desk, and a fourth lay open on the reading stand. They were Kessler’s
The Poetic Rationale;
Karik’s own history of Illyria,
Empire and Sunset;
Molka’s
Foundations of the League;
and a fragment copy of
The Travels of Abraham Polk
.
“They’re lovely,” she said.
“Thank you.”
The Molka book, on the stand, was most accessible. The craftsmanship was marvelous: leather binding, vellum of the highest order, exquisite calligraphy, fine inks, golden flourishes in strategic locations, brilliant illustrations.
“They must be quite valuable.”
“They are.” His brown eyes focused on her. “I’m going to sell them.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Oh, yes. I have no way to protect them. When Father was here, it was one thing. But now, I’d have to hire a guard. No, they don’t really mean much to me, Chaka. I’d rather have the money.”
“I see.” She ran her fingers lightly over the binding.
“A pleasant sensation, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you must be wondering why I wanted to see you.” He opened a cabinet drawer and removed a package. She guessed by its dimensions and weight it contained a fifth book. He set it down on a table and stood aside. “I don’t know whether you’re aware of it or not, but you made a considerable impression on my father.”
“That’s hard to believe, Flojian. He never really knew me.”
“He remembered. He left instructions that this was to be given to you.” The package was wrapped in black leather and held shut by a pair of straps. Chaka released the buckles, and caught her breath.
Gold leaf, red leather binding, fine parchment, although somewhat yellowed with age. “This is for
me
?”
“It’s Mark Twain,” said Flojian. “
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
.”
She lifted the cover and stared at the title page. “Mark Twain’s books are lost,” she said.
“Well.” He laughed. “Not all of them. Not anymore.”
There were illustrations of knights on horseback and castle walls and beautiful women in flowing gowns. And a picture of a man fashioning a pistol.
The language was antiquated.
“Where did it come from?”
“That’s a question I wish I could answer. It was as much a surprise to me as it is to you.” He pursed his lips. “It’s somewhat worn, as you can see. But this is the way it was put into my hands.”
Chaka was overwhelmed. “I can’t take this,” she said.
“I think you have to,” said Flojian. “It’s in his will. Be careful of it, though. I suspect it will command a substantial price.”
“I would think so.”
“I can make some suggestions with regard to getting full value for it, Chaka.”
She closed the book and refastened the case. “Oh, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t sell it. But thank you anyway.”
Raney was waiting for her on Sundown Road. He was tall, congenial, with dark eyes and a gentleness that one seldom found in younger men. He was occasionally dull, but that was not necessarily a bad thing in a man. She wore his bracelet on her ankle.
“How did it go?” he asked as she rode up.
The Mark Twain was secured in her saddlebag. Raney didn’t seem to have noticed it. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said, accepting his kiss and returning an embrace that surprised him and almost knocked him off his horse.
Raney was a garment maker. He was skilled, well paid, and enjoyed the affection and respect of his customers and the owner of the shop in which he worked. The shop was prosperous, the owner feeble, and, as nature took its course, Raney could expect to have few concerns about his future.
He nodded toward the pillar of smoke rising into the sky. “I was surprised that you’d go.”
“Why?”
“The man’s responsible for Arin’s death.”
“That’s nonsense,” she said. “Arin took his chances when he went. There aren’t any guarantees upcountry.
You
should know that.”
It was a fine sunny day, unseasonably warm. They rode slowly toward River Road, where they would turn north. “He came back,” said Raney. “The man in charge of the expedition is the only survivor.” He shook his head. “If it were me, I’d have stayed out there.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But what would be the point?”
The river sparkled below them. They talked about trivialities and after a while turned off the road and cantered upslope to Chaka’s villa, which stood atop the ridge. Her grandfather had built it, and it had passed to her remaining brother, Sauk, who’d granted it to her in exchange for her agreement to rear her two sisters. Now, Lyra was grown and gone, and Carin expected to marry in the spring.
Raney was staring at her. “You okay?” he asked. “You look kind of funny.”
“I’m fine.” She smiled as they rode through a hedge onto the grounds. “I have something to show you.”
He carried the bag into the house and she opened it. When he saw the book, he frowned. “What is it?”
“Mark Twain. One of the lost books.”
“He’s a Roadmaker writer.”
“Yes.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“It’s an inheritance, Raney. Karik left it to me.”
“Funny thing to do for a stranger. Why?”
She thought she caught a suspicious note in his voice. “I don’t know.”
“How much do you think it’s worth?”
“A lot. But it doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to sell it.”
“You’re not?” He gazed at an open page. “What do
you
want with it?”
What was
that
supposed to mean? “Raney, this is
Mark Twain
.”
He shook his head. “It’s your book, love. But
I’d
unload it at the first opportunity.”
The Illyrians knew the world was round, though some
among the lower classes were skeptical. They knew that infections were caused by tiny creatures they could not see, that the pattern of days and nights resulted from the movement of the world and not of the sun, that the Mississippi rose in a land of gigantic ruins and emptied into a gulf whose waters ran untroubled to the horizon. They were aware that thunderstorms were caused by natural processes and not by supernatural beings, although, since no one could explain how this was so, that view was becoming progressively tenuous with each generation.
They knew that a civilization of major dimensions had occupied the land before them. How extensive those dimensions had been was a matter for speculation: The Illyrians and their fellow dwellers in the Mississippi Valley did not travel far beyond League outposts. They were still few in number; population pressures would not, for many years, drive them into a dangerous and hard wilderness. Furthermore, river navigation was limited: They could not move upstream easily without powered vessels; and travel downstream was hampered in some places and blocked altogether in others by collapsed bridges and other debris.
A metropolis had once existed at the river’s mouth, where the Mississippi drained into the Southern Sea. How this had been possible, given the fact that the entire area was swampland, no one knew. Silas and a few others suspected that the swamp was a relatively recent phenomenon and had not existed in Roadmaker times. But the ruin was there nonetheless. And, like Memphis, it had burned.
Six years after Karik’s unhappy expedition, the Illyrians had joined the other four river valley cities to form the Mississippi League, one of whose express purposes was to gain direct access to the sea. It was an enterprise still in its planning phases.
The League’s acknowledged center of learning was the Imperium, a onetime royal academy located in Illyria. It derived its name from its imperial founders and patrons and from its location in the west wing of the old palace. (The “empire” had consisted of Illyria, a half-dozen outlying settlements, and a lot of optimism.) It was one of the few institutions to survive intact the seven years of civil war and revolution that separated the murder of the last emperor, Benikat V (“Bloody Beni”), from the Declaration of Rights and the founding of the Republic.
The palace had been restored, but it no longer served an official function. The Senate had made a point of their republican roots: Their first order of business under the constitution had been to move out of the imperial grounds and to take up temporary residence in a military barracks until a new capitol could be built. Much of the palace itself was converted into a museum.
Daily visitors could now see the bedroom in which Benikat had been surprised by his guards; the Great Hall of the Moon, where Hethra had invoked the power of heaven to frighten Lorimar VII into submission; and the balcony on which Paxton the Far-Seer had composed his immortal ballads.
In the west wing, men of science, literature, and philosophy served the sons of the wealthy and a specially selected few from the poorer classes. It was a position that carried respect and satisfied the spirit. Silas envied no one. He could imagine no finer calling than spending the winter afternoons speculating on man’s place in the cosmos and the reality of divine purpose. (Here, of course, he had to be a little careful: The religious authorities and their pious allies in the Senate did not respond favorably to any opinion that might undermine the faith.)
He had never married.
There were times now that he regretted being alone. The years were beginning to crowd him, and the coldness of the farewell to Karik had depressed his spirits. He arrived home wondering what sort of send-off
he
would be accorded when his time came.
The palace straddled the crest of Calagua Hill, the highest point in Illyria. It was, in fact, a network of connected buildings clustered around a series of courtyards. Springs and hydraulic systems carried water into and waste out of baths and washrooms; interior courtyards and enormous banks of windows provided illumination. There was a web of stairways and corridors, apartments, workshops, sanctuaries, armories, and banquet halls. The royal apartments were still maintained on the south side, where they overlooked the busy commercial center.
Rows of houses, separated by winding unpaved streets, sprawled out from the foot of Calagua Hill. The houses were, for the most part, wooden or brick. They lacked indoor plumbing, as did most residences in Illyria, but they were comfortable and well kept. After the formation of the League, when security ceased to be a major concern, the more prosperous inhabitants had moved outside the city walls. The area had then been given over to a teeming marketplace, full of haggling and bargaining, which sold corn, grains, and meat from local farms; pottery and handicrafts from Argon; wines from downriver; soaps and scents from Masandik; leather goods from Farroad; furniture, firearms, and jewelry from local artisans.
For all its dark associations, the palace embodied the pride of the nation and remained a monument to the magnificence of the imperial imagination. Glittering spires and granite turrets, broad galleries and elevated courtyards, cupolas and vaulted staircases collaborated to infuse in visitors a sense of past greatness and future promise.
From his study, Silas could see the entire southern face of the structure, its arches and mezzanines and guard posts. “Forget the politics,” he told his students. “Concentrate on the architecture. If we can create such beauty from stone, what can we not do?”
And yet….
Anyone digging more than a few feet into the soil could expect to collide with ancient walls and foundations. They were everywhere. The Roadmakers had far exceeded his own people in their architectural skills, yet they had gone to dust. It was a grim reminder against hubris. The palace, which had once been alive, was now only a vast mausoleum with a school at one end and a museum at the other. Every year, students wondered whether the Illyrians had already taken the first step downhill. Among the masters there were several, not least of all Silas, who were convinced that the democratic system now in place was little better than mob rule. Ordinary people, they suspected, inevitably vote their own interests. To survive, a nation needs authority and wisdom at the top. The strategy, he believed, should be to find a mechanism to maintain a balance of power among a small number of families. These families would be educated to the throne, and would select the best among them to act for all. As to a practical design for such a mechanism, Silas confessed he had none.
After Karik’s body had been consigned to the flames, he had fallen into a contemplative, and indeed almost bleak, mood. If a people could achieve the capability to erect the monumental structures that existed in all the forests of the known world, and yet could not save themselves from extinction, what was one to conclude? It was difficult for Silas to discard his conviction that history should reflect moral and technological progress. It was a battle he’d fought many times with Karik, who argued that history was chaotic and wondered how anybody living among the ruins could think otherwise.
That Silas thought of himself as a history teacher should not suggest that the instructors at the Imperium were specialized. In fact, the body of knowledge was so limited that specialization beyond certain very broad categories would have been absurd. The categories, other than history, were ethics, philosophy, theology, medicine, rhetoric, law, and mathematics.
Several of his students had attended the ceremonies for Karik. Next day, in a seminar, they wondered how so erudite a man could have been so foolish, and they engaged in a long discussion about the ability of even the best minds to delude themselves.
At the end of the class, one of his students lingered. His name was Brandel Tess, and he had been among those who’d attended the funeral rites. He looked troubled. “Master Glote,” he said, “one of my friends is Toko’s grandson.”
“Who?”
“Toko. Master Endine’s servant.”
“Oh, yes. And—?”
“He says that his grandfather claims there was a copy of
A Connecticut Yankee
in Master Endine’s quarters.”
“He must be mistaken.”
“He says no. Toko swears it was there. He says Karik had it open on a reading table for years, and made him promise not to tell anybody. But now it’s missing.”
“Did he ask Flojian about it?”
“Flojian told him it was given away.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t think he thought it proper to ask.”
Silas shook his head. “This can’t be right,” he said, with smooth self-assurance. “There
is
no extant copy of
Connecticut Yankee
.” Only six books from the age of the Roadmakers were known to exist:
The Odyssey; Brave New World; The Brothers Karamazov; The Collected Short Stories of Washington Irving;
Eliot Klein’s book of puzzles and logic,
Beats Me;
and Goethe’s
Faust
. They also had substantial sections of
The Oxford Companion to World Literature
and several plays by Bernard Shaw. There were bits and pieces of other material. Of Mark Twain, two fragments remained, the first half of “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,” and chapter sixteen from
Life on the Mississippi
, which describes piloting and racing steamboats, although the precise nature of the steamboat tantalizingly eluded Illyria’s best scholars.
Brandel shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “I just thought you’d be interested.”
The tables and benches that had been set out for the funeral rite were still in place. Silas tied his horse to the hitching rail. The ground where the pyre had stood was charred. The ashes of his old friend, in accordance with tradition, had been given to the river by Flojian at sunrise.
He knocked on the front door. Toko answered. He was tall and thin, white-haired, ancient, the soul of dignity. “I expect my master shortly, sir,” he said. “If you care to wait.” He showed Silas into a side parlor, and placed a glass of wine before him.
Brandel was wrong, of course. There was simply no question about that. Karik would have judged his life spectacularly successful had he been able to find a copy of
Connecticut Yankee
. If he’d owned one, he would have given it to the world. Still, Silas needed to pin down the reason for the misunderstanding.
Dusk had set in. From the window he could watch the first lamps being lit across the river. It was a curiously restful sight and he was enjoying it when he heard the sound of an approaching horse. Flojian rode into the front yard on a dusky mare. Several minutes later Toko opened a door and Flojian strode into the sitting room carrying a glass of wine and a candle.
“Good to see you again, Silas,” he said, falling into a chair. “I thought the ceremony went well yesterday. Thank you for your help.”
“I thought so, too. We’ll miss him.” Actually, no one would miss him, and they both knew it. “I wanted to be sure you were all right.”
“I’m okay,” said Flojian. He tried to smile, but there was an element of pain in the expression. “My father and I weren’t really that close. I don’t find myself regretting what I’ve lost so much as what I never had.” He used the candle to light the lamps in the room, and then set it in a holder. “But I don’t guess there’s much help for that now.”
“I heard an odd story today,” said Silas, rearranging himself in his chair. “One of my students thought your father owned a Mark Twain.”
Flojian sipped his wine. “I’m surprised you know about that,” he said. “But yes, it’s true.”
The room chilled. Silas stared at the younger man. It was a moment before he found his voice again. “How long did he have it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” Whatever his drawbacks, Flojian was not stupid. “How could you not know?”
“It’s easy. He didn’t tell me. Refused to talk about it. You know how he was.”
“May I ask where he got it?”
“I don’t know that either. I asked my father that question and he said it was of no moment, and that’s all he would say. Listen, Silas, I only found out about this a couple of days before he died. I didn’t know there was anything like that around the house.”
“It’s
Connecticut Yankee
, I understand.”
“That’s right.”
Silas was essentially a patient man and had never been given to violence. But on that occasion he wanted to seize his host and shake the answers from him. “Where is it now?” he demanded.
Flojian stiffened. “Your tone almost suggests that you have a proprietary interest.”
“Damn it, Flojian.
Everybody
has a proprietary interest in something like that. You can’t keep it to yourself.”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t.” The comment hammered down on the still evening air. “Father bequeathed it to Chaka Milana. The young woman you were talking with yesterday.”
“Why on earth would he do that?”
“I’m sure I do not know. She was Arin’s sister. You remember, Arin was the artist who was lost on the expedition.”
“I remember.”
Flojian’s features clouded. “So he gave her the book. I don’t know why. Guilt, probably, or something like that.”
“Did he know her well?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. In fact, he hardly knew her at all.”
“What did she do with it?”
“Took it home, I guess.”
“I don’t believe this. I hope she knows enough to take care of it.” Silas glared at Flojian. “At least, he should have given it to us. Did she know about it in advance?”
“No. In fact, she couldn’t have been more surprised.”
Silas wanted to flee the room, to begin tracking the book down before the poor woman used it to light her fire. But the story didn’t make sense. “Karik had a Mark Twain novel and he didn’t tell anybody? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he expect that Chaka was just going to take it home and throw it into her hope chest?”
“He really didn’t tell me what he thought, Silas.”
