Ancients of Days by Paul J. McAuley

Author:Paul J. McAuley [McAuley, Paul J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0575601698
Publisher: Eos
Published: 1999-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen: The City of the Dead

Tamora’s keen eyes had already glimpsed the first intimation of smoke far downriver, but it was not until the beginning of the afternoon watch of the following day that one of the sailors, perched on a ratline high above the deck, sang out that there was a fire to port, a fire on the shore. Everyone crowded to the rail. A little dark cloud hung at the edge of the land, a smudge that was, Pandaras said, no bigger than a baby’s claw. Captain Lorquital examined it through her spectacles before declaring that it was trouble they would do best to steer clear of.

“There are fast currents we can use further out, and there’s a floating harbor we’d have had to cut around in any case.”

Yama had been staring at the shore with growing realization. Suddenly anxious, he asked to borrow the Captain’s spectacles. He squinted through one of the lenses and the distant shore leapt forward, horribly familiar. For two days they had been sailing past barren hills populated with the ruined houses of the dead, but only now did he see that they were within sight of the heart of the City of the Dead.

There was the wide valley of the Breas, with its quilt of fields and channels; there was the skull-swell of the bluff, and the peel-house perched atop it like a coronet; the dusty hills with their necklaces of white tombs and stands of dark green cedars and black cypresses saddling away into the far distance, where the snowy peaks of the foothills of the Rim Mountains made a hazy line against the blue sky. And there was the shallow bay, with the long stone finger of the new quay running across the mudflats to the water’s edge, and then the old waterfront of Aeolis.

And Aeolis was burning.

A triple-decked warship stood at the wide mouth of the bay, raking the little city with green and red needles of light that splashed molten stone where they struck. The bombardment seemed pointless, for every stone building was already smashed flat, and everything that could burn was afire. Black reefs of smoke rolled up, feeding the pall which hung above the city like a crow’s wing. Dr. Dismas’s tower was reduced to a melted stub; light raked the ancient ruins beyond it and stabbed into the flooded paeonin fields, sending up boiling gouts of mud and clouds of steam. Only the temple still stood, its white façade smudged by smoke, the tall lycophytes lining the long avenue which led to it withered or aflame.

Yama cried out, and Pandaras said, “What is it, master?”

Yama shook his head, heartsick. He climbed up to the quarterdeck, where Captain Lorquital and her daughter were already plotting a new course at the chart table, and heard himself asking them to turn the Weazel toward the shore, not away from it.

“It is my home,” he said. “Most of the people I hold dear live there. My family. My friends.

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