Hegira (8 page)

“It's the way with all Obelisk countries,” Bar-Woten assured him. “When truth sits in your midst, why search elsewhere?”

“For sheer curiosity,” Kiril muttered. “At least what you learn is interesting and tells you more about the Second-born.”

“The Second-born don't always want to know more about themselves,” Barthel said.

Mur-es-Werd began as a series of vineyards and orchards. Varieties of fruit grew here that they had never seen before. The fields gave way to scattered whitewashed villas and a central stupa topping a gathering place. These in turn gave way to suburban slums with narrow cobbled streets winding every which way like worms trailing through wood. The atmosphere was not one of cleanliness, as in Ubidharm, but of vibrant, rapid life. At times the sanitation was deplorable, but no worse on the whole than in some Mediwevan cities.

Small rocky hills rose in the center of the city, cordoned by the crumbling walls of what must have once been an impressive bastion. A few towers, square and imposing, remained in fair condition. Around these were walled compounds adorned with Lucifan mandalas in stony green and red.

Kiril found his dialect almost useless, since what little he knew was not comparable to the northern patois. They had little trouble, however — tourists were not unknown and not unwelcome either. The shoreline was something of a resort.

By noon they had decided the neighborhoods along the beaches were more suited to them. Curious children crowded around, trying to sell trinkets and stale crullers.

Bar-Woten stopped at a sea wall overlooking the resort beaches. He shaded his eye and looked across the bay, allowing himself a moment of awe. “The ships!” he said. “Look at the ships!”

Barthel followed the Bey's eye and felt his throat catch. They were huge, as graceful as seabirds. He had never seen any larger. He looked at Bar-Woten and knew what the next leg of their journey would be. “I don't even like water, not to swim in,” Barthel said quietly. Kiril smiled, then sobered as he caught the Khemite's meaning.

“Over that?” he asked Bar-Woten, pointing at the unimaginable blue-green. The Ibisian nodded.

Their Mediwevan coins were welcome, but they were fast running out, and as yet they had no way to replace their money. There was also the matter of the sea voyage, which Bar-Woten was talking up more each day. His companions tried to ignore him, but there was no other way to go but across the water. North lay that way, and their way was north.

Their first step was to purchase a number of small, old dictionaries from a bookstore in Mur-es-Werd. Bar-Woten found the decrepit shop fascinating. Kiril was less than charmed. There were dozens of books lying around that he was certain had never come from Obelisk texts — histories of Mundus Lucifa, books of maps, and biographies. It was plainly an unorthodox place.

At night, roomless, they slept on the beach. One always sat guard on a small rock above then: adopted spit of sand. The waves sounded like fighting annuals up and down the coast. Some were as big as two-story buildings, pouring up between offshore channels of rock and howling across the turbulent sand. At night, when the waves glowed like graceful ghosts, Barthel hid his eyes from the sight and concentrated on the light-scattered city.

Their fourth morning in Mur-es-Werd, Bar-Woten woke to the smell of smoke and saw Kiril fixing a breakfast of fish. A long pole strung with line was stuck in the sand beside him. “I bought it an hour ago,” Kiril explained. “More practical than books, no?”

Bar-Woten had been learning the dialect rapidly, much faster than Barthel, and could speak to the Lucifans well enough to be understood. As he ate Kiril's breakfast he wondered out loud why the country was called Mundus Lucifa. Kirl held up his finger to show a pause while he chewed. “Simple enough,” he said. “Lightning comes out of the mountains. Some of the storms are frightful.” But he'd never actually seen one, other than the rainburst they'd passed through before crossing the chasm.

They made inquiries that day in the shipyards about the need for seamen. The response was discouraging — blank stares and shaking heads. There was a glut on the market. Ten men for every berth. Still, foreign ships coming in frequently had room for new men — usually because a few had been lost at sea.

“The foreign ships won't be as picky about taking on strangers,” Bar-Woten said. “We might have a chance with them.”

They did odd jobs around the ports, walking from one duster of docks and yards to another. Kiril had his first taste of heavy physical labor and didn't like it. He resented the Ibisian's stoic indifference to the work.

They lived this way for three weeks. No foreign ships put into port, and no domestic ships put out. The season was difficult for trading. Soon big storms would lash the ocean into strips of wave-wracked lace. Spouts and hurricanes would begin within sight of land and continue unbroken for hundreds of kilometers. No, this was definitely the wrong time of year to think about putting out to sea.

There was one exception, but it was an ominous one. A large Lucifan freighter traveling on methane steam and sails put into Mur-es-Werd in poor condition. It had been at sea for two years but hadn't been damaged by storms. It had been shelled by a ship the likes of which they'd never seen, which raced across the water on huge feet. The strange ship had no sails, gave off no steam, and yet had easily averaged ninety to a hundred kilometers an hour. Some speculated it wasn't a boat but a crustacean from the Pale Seas farther north than anyone had traveled. The trio heard of it in pubs and restaurants. Soon it was a common story much enlarged upon.

The story changed the atmosphere around the ports radically. But Bar-Woten maintained something else was up — a simple tale of strange doings at sea couldn't account for the way Mur-es-Werd was behaving. Kiril sensed it too. “Everyone's jumpy,” he said. The Ibisian nodded.

The next day brought a warm, dry wind from the southwest. The skies were the color of bloody milk. Though the wind on the ground was mild, high above it tortured and twisted the clouds into thin, smooth ribbons and shot them with desert dirt. Mur-es-Werd was covered by a pink pall, and everyone walked warily as in a dangerous dream.

By evening it was clear and the winds died down. But the city was restless that night. The bars stayed open later than was normally allowed by law. Gangs of drunken men were herded home angrily in the early morning by women wielding cane brooms. The women wore dark dresses with strips of white tied around their arms. From a distance doves seemed to flutter around the men, driving them along the street with angry swishes.

Bar-Woten sat on the sand with his legs curled beneath him, watching and listening to the foamy waves. He thought they could tell him something. But they glowed and tossed and fussed incoherently, less powerfully than usual. Suddenly, they slowed to an oily trickle, rushing along the shore with a drawing bead of light. His neck hair prickled, and he sat up on his knees wanting to run. It was near dawn — soon the sky would turn green at the zenith as it always had.

But ten minutes passed and the dark remained. Two fire doves twinkled pink and orange just above the northern horizon. A third, bluish in color, hovered above the western mountains.

They winked out.

Thousands in the city were awake, watching the sky with him. A low moan rose from the city, the sound of distant screams and wailing. Barthel and Kiril awoke abruptly and asked what was happening. Bar-Woten couldn't answer. How could anyone describe something they had never seen before?

The blackness of the sky turned muddy. Not a single fire dove was to be seen. Like the opening of two palms clasped together, the muddiness drew aside, and a vortex of dun purple, barely visible, spread across the sky, leaving another sort of darkness at its center.

This wasn't the warmly immediate, empty black that had always meant night for Hegira. It was a velvety dark strewn with glowing ribbons, and between and around and in these, twinkled points of light so fine no shape could be discerned. Gouds of light filled the sky. For the first time in memory of anyone living, starshine visibly brightened the land.

The city was silent under the frosty gaze of the stars. Barthel made a growling sound deep in his throat, and tears streamed down his cheeks. “Holy Allah,” he said. “Blessed Allah.”

Kiril's hand tightened around his belt. He felt like rolling in the sand and screaming.

The streets were soon crowded with crying, stumbling mobs. They washed onto the beaches and human waves met the water waves, forming a splashing tumult as the citizens of Mur-es-Werd tried to put out the mad fevers that caused them to see such visions.

The stars were crossed by sudden, silky ripples. Kiril's stomach sank. He felt his body crawling this way and that, yet he wasn't moving; his muscles weren't twitching. His head threatened to turn inside out, but painlessly — a dreamy sort of dizziness, disorientation. The ocean waves grew brighter, became almost turquoise. He heard a deep bass note like the buzzing of giant bees. If the whole world had been a tapestry and somebody had started flapping it to shake out the dust, perhaps this was how it would feel — he didn't know. For a time he thought he would be better off dead.

The rippling in the sky stopped, and the stars steadied. The beach was encased in silence. The people around them moved slowly; even falling they drifted like puffs of down.

Looking up, Bar-Woten thought he was going to black out. At the periphery of his eye he could see darkness close in, cutting out the stars. But the dizziness was gone, and his head seemed all right. The stars were being obscured again. At the edge of the closing circle the points of light became lines of purple, twisted, and winked out. The familiar empty black returned. One by one, flickering, the fire doves resumed their glows. The sky at zenith turned green, then purple, then bronze; the dawn was picking up where it had left off.

The display had taken about five minutes. Everyone stood in silence for perhaps five minutes more, then looked at each other, embarrassed, and returned to their homes, trying to act as if everything was normal.

But Bar-Woten knew nothing would ever be normal again. He smiled crookedly. Then he began to laugh.

Barthel left the beach alone before midday and took a twisting road up the city's central hill. For a few hundred meters he walked alongside a crumbling wall centuries old. Grass grew in the chinks between stones. It had become part of the ground now, like the shell of a dead snail. The wall no longer served as armor but as a place for people to walk by and things to grown in. From the top of the Kassarva, the fortress that circled the summit, he could look down across the town and port and think with nothing to bother him. Insects buzzed hypnotically through the dried grass and sparse flowers. A large temple was visible through the trees far below, ceramic domes glinting at each of its five corners. Inside it, too, looked like a fortress. There was a courtyard and small buildings within the courtyard arranged in a tomoye. Birds flew above the temple — gulls, curlews, and others he hadn't learned the names of. Some resembled hawks but caught fish by the sea and had red and white feathers in their crests.

He felt singularly ugly and afraid. The predawn unveiling had struck him deeply. What had it told him, that message for all to see? He didn't know. But it made nun feel as tiny as the ants beneath him, carrying bits of white stuff in a line under his legs into a hole a few yards away. All these creatures — ants, birds, builders of temples — had been put here by the blessed One, Who had unveiled the sky that morning.

“I am Barthel,” he told the sky with tears in his eyes. “I am small. Did you do all these things that I might see them, smell them? I've done nothing in return for you, Allah. I haven't even learned from them.” He asked what it was Allah wanted him to do, and Allah told him this: Survive. He nodded. He would survive. The Bey had taught him how to survive. What else then? Father and mother and family.

That was all the voice said. Be to them what they would have wished you to be.

His lips curled. He stood up from the grass and gravel and brushed his ragged pants off. “I'll also find out where your light comes from,” he said. “You'll be happy to see I'm clever enough to figure that out.”

Bar-Woten wandered through the closed and confused streets. Kiril followed half-heartedly, not wanting to be left alone on the beach. No shops were open, and the people who passed them were solemn and tired. The city was quiet.

“What was it?” Kiril asked after a long silence. “Have you ever seen anything like it where you've been?”

“No,” Bar-Woten answered. 'The sky is the same wherever you go. What we saw last night was seen everywhere, even on the other side of Hegira."

“Then what was it?”

“You tell me.”

“Stars, of course. But the Second-born have no stars over their heads. That's the way it's always been.”

“Do we have stars over our heads now?”

“Not that we see. But something must stop us from seeing them — a lid, a hatch. And God opened that lid last night to show us glory.”

“He showed us stars. Glory is what you feel when looking at them. Myself, I felt the glory perhaps. But more important, I learned that we are not so different from the First-born. We are not cursed. It may be — ” But Bar-Woten stopped and shook his head.

“It was beautiful,” Kiril said reverently, walking beside the Ibisian. He almost felt affection for the older warrior, as if they shared something no others did: their inner thoughts on an unprecedented act of God.

“It made my heart icy. It looked young out there.”

“What do you mean?” Kiril asked.

“It wasn't all stars,” he said. “There were a lot of other things out there. The fog. Maybe we didn't see a starry sky at all. Maybe we saw something else that we haven't read about yet.”