A, B, C: Three Short Novels Read online

  Then Snake handed the metal chain with the pendant jewel back to Iimmi. The black youth hung it on his chest once more. They started up the river.

  —

  By twelve, the sun had parched the sky. They stopped to swim and cool themselves. Chill water gave before reaching arms and lowered faces. They even dove for their aquatic helpers, but grubbed the pebbly bottom of the river with their fingers, coming up with dripping twigs and wet stones. Soon they were in a splashing match, of which it is fair to say, Snake won—hands down.

  Later they lay on the mossy rocks to dry, slapping at small bugs, the sun like gold coins warm on their eyelids. “I’m hungry,” said Urson, rolling over.

  “We just ate,” Iimmi said, sitting up. “But I’m hungry too.”

  “We ate five hours ago,” Geo said. The sun curved loops of liquid metal in the ripples. “And we can’t lie around here all day. Do you think we can find one of those things we got from the…wolf, yesterday?”

  “Or some nice friendly necrophage?” suggested Iimmi.

  “Ugh.” Urson shivered.

  “Hey,” Iimmi asked Geo, “does not asking Snake questions mean not asking him where the Temple is?”

  Geo shrugged. “We’ll either get there or we won’t. If we were going wrong and he knew about it, he’d have told us by now if he wanted us to know.”

  “Goddamn all this running around in circles,” Urson exclaimed. “Hey, you little four-armed bastard, have you ever seen where we’re going?”

  Snake shook his head.

  “Do you know how to get there?”

  Snake shook his head.

  “Fine!” Urson snapped his fingers. “Forward, friends, we’re off for the unknown once more.” He grinned, doubled his pace, and they started once more behind him.

  A mile on, hunger again thrust its sharp finger into their abdomens. “Maybe we should have saved some of that stuff from breakfast,” muttered Urson. “With no blood in it, you said it wouldn’t have spoiled.”

  Geo suddenly broke away from the bank toward the forest. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some food.”

  The vines were even thicker here, and they had to hack through with swords. Where the dead vines had stiffened in the sun, it was easier going. The air had been hot at the river; here it was cool, damp, and wet leaves brushed their arms and shoulders. The ground gave spongily under them.

  The building they came upon: tongues of moss licked twenty and fifty feet up the loosely mortared stones. A hundred yards from the water, the jungle came right to its base. The edifice had sunk a bit to one side in the boggy soil. It was a far more stolid and primitive structure than the barracks. They scraped and hacked to the entrance, where two columns of stone, six feet at the base, rose fifty feet to support an arch. The stones were rough and unfinished.

  “It’s a temple!” Geo said suddenly.

  The steps were strewn with rubbish, and what spots of light spilled from the twisted jungle stopped at the total shadow below the great arch. A line of blackness up one side of the basalt door showed that it was ajar. Now they climbed the steps, moving aside a fallen branch. Leaves chattered at them. They kicked small stones from the cracks in the rock. Geo, Iimmi, then Snake, and at last Urson squeezed through the door.

  Ceiling blocks had fallen from the high vault so that shafts of sun struck through the slow shift of dust to the littered floor.

  “Do you think it’s Hama’s Temple?” Urson asked. His voice boomed in the stone room, magnified and hollow.

  “I doubt it,” whispered Geo. “At least not the one we’re supposed to find.”

  “Maybe it’s an abandoned one,” said Iimmi, “and we can find out something useful from it.”

  Something large and dark flapped through a far shaft of sun. With raised swords they stepped back. After a moment of silence, Geo handed his jewel to Snake. “Make some light in here. Now!”

  The blue-green glow flowed from the upraised jewel in Snake’s hand. Columns supported the broken ceiling along the sides of the temple. As the light flared, then flared brighter, they saw that the flapping had come from a bird perched harmlessly on an architrave between two columns. It ducked its head at them, cawed harshly, then flew out one of the apertures in the ceiling. The sound of its wings still thrummed seconds after it had gone.

  They could not see the altar, but there were doors between the columns, and as their eyes grew sensitive, they saw that one section of wall had not withstood time’s sledge. A great rent was nearly blocked with vines. A green shimmer broke here and there through the foliage.

  They started forward now, chips and pebbles rolling before their toes, down the great chapel toward the altar.

  Behind a twisted railing, and raised on steps of stone, sat the ruins of a huge statue. Carved from black rock, a man sat cross-legged on a dais. One arm and shoulder had broken off and lay in pieces on the altar steps. The hand, fingers as thick as Urson’s thigh, lay just behind the altar rail. The idol’s head was missing. Both the hand still connected and the one on the steps looked as though they had once held something, but whatever it was had been removed.

  Geo walked along the rail to where a set of stone boxes were placed like footstones along the side of the altar. “Here, Snake,” he called. “Bring a light over here.” Snake obeyed, and with Iimmi’s and Urson’s help, he loosened one of the lids.

  “What’s in there?” Urson asked.

  “Books,” said Geo, lifting out one dusty volume. Iimmi reached over his shoulder and with dark fingers turned the pages. “Old rituals,” Geo said. “Look here.” He stopped Iimmi’s hand. “You can still read them.”

  “Let me see,” Iimmi said. “I studied with Eadnu at the University of Olcse Ohlwn.”

  Geo looked up and laughed. “I thought some of your ideas sounded familiar. I was a pupil of Welis. Our teachers would never speak to each other! This is a surprise. So you were at Olcse Ohlwn too?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Iimmi, turning pages again. “I signed aboard this ship as a summer job. If I’d known where we’d end up, I don’t think I’d have gone, though.”

  Stomach pangs were forgotten momentarily as the two looked at the rituals of Hama.

  “They’re not at all like those of the Goddess,” Iimmi observed.

  “Apparently not,” agreed Geo. “Wait!” Iimmi had been turning pages at random. “Look there!” Geo pointed.

  “What is it?” Iimmi asked.

  “The lines,” Geo said. “The ones Argo recited…”

  He read out loud:

  “Forked in the heart of the dark oak

  the circlet of his sash

  rimmed where the eye of Hama broke

  with fire, smoke, and ash.

  Freeze the drop in the hand,

  break the earth with singing.

  Hail the height of a man,

  also the height of a woman.

  Take from the tip of the sea

  salt and sea kelp and gold,

  fixed with a shaft in the brain

  as the terror of time is old.

  Salt on the walls of the heart.

  Salt in each rut of the brain.

  Sea kelp ground in the earth,

  Returning with gold again.

  The eyes have imprisoned a vision.

  The ash tree dribbles with blood.

  Thrust from the gates of the prison

  smear the yew tree with mud.

  “It’s the other version of the poem I found in the pre-purge rituals of Argo. I wonder if there were any more poems in the old rituals of Leptar that parallel those of Aptor and Hama?”

  “Probably,” Iimmi said. “Especially if the first invasion from Aptor took place just before, and probably caused, the purges.”

  “What about food?” Urson suddenly asked. He was sitting on the altar steps. “You two scholars have the rest of time to argue. But we may starve before you come to some conclusion.”

  “He’s right,” said Iimmi. “Besides, we have to
get going.”

  “Would you two consider it an imposition to set your minds to procuring us some food?” Urson asked.

  “Wait a minute,” Geo said. “Here’s a section on the burial of the dead. Yes, I thought so.” He read out loud now:

  “Sink the bright dead with misgiving

  from the half-light of the living…”

  “What does that mean?” asked Urson.

  “It means that the dead are buried with all the accoutrements of the living. I was pretty sure of it, but I wanted to check. That means that they put food in the graves.”

  “First, where are we going to find any graves; and second, I’ve had enough dead and half-dead food.” Urson stood up.

  “Over here!” cried Geo. With Snake following, they came to the row of sealed doors behind the columns along the wall. Geo looked at the inscription. “Tombs,” he reported. He tried to turn the handles, a double set of rings that twisted in opposite directions. “In an old, uncared-for temple like this, the lock mechanisms must have rusted by now if they’re at all like the ancient tombs of Leptar.”

  “Have you studied the ancient tombs?” asked Iimmi excitedly. “Professor Eadnu always considered them a waste of time.”

  “That’s all Welis ever talked about,” laughed Geo. “Here, Urson, you set your back to this a moment.”

  Grumbling, Urson came forward, took the rings, and twisted. One snapped off in his hand. The other gave with a crumbling sound inside the door.

  “I think that does it,” Geo said.

  They all helped pull now, and suddenly the door gave an inch, and then, on the next tug, swung free.

  Snake preceded them into the stone cell.

  On a rock table, lying on its side, was a bald, shriveled body. Tendons ridged the brown skin, along the arms, along the calves; bits of cloth still stuck here and there. On the floor stood sealed jars, heaps of parchment, piles of ornaments.

  Geo moved among the jars. “This one has grain,” he said. “Give me a hand.”

  Iimmi helped him lug the big pottery vessel to the door.

  Then a thin shriek scarred the dusty air, and both students stumbled. The jar hit the ground, split, and grain heaped over the floor. The shriek came again.

  Geo saw, there on the broken wall across the temple, five of the apelike figures crouched before the shingled leaves, silhouetted on the dappled green. One leaped down and ran, wailing, across the littered floor, straight for the tomb door. Two others followed, then two more. And more had mounted the broken ridge.

  The loping forms burst into the cell, one, and then its two companions. Claws and teeth closed on the shriveled skin. Others screamed around the entrance. The body rolled beneath hands and mouths. One arm swept into the air above the lowered heads and humped backs. It fell on the edge of the rock table, broke at midforearm, and the skeletal hand fell to the floor, shattering.

  They backed to the temple door, eyes fixed on the desecration. Then they turned and ran down the temple steps. Not till they reached the river and the sunlight on the broad rocks touched them did they slow or breathe deeply. They walked quietly. Hunger returned, and occasionally one would look aside into the faces of the others in an attempt to identify the vanishing horror that still pulsed behind their eyes.

  chapter seven

  A small animal crossed their path, and in a blink, one of Snake’s hands scooped up a sharp rock, flung it and sunk it into the beast’s head. They quartered it on Iimmi’s blade and had almost enough to fill them from the roast made with fire from the jewels. Following their own shadows into the afternoon, they continued silently up the river.

  It was Urson who first pointed it out. “Look at the far bank,” he said.

  The river had become slower, broader here. Across from them, even with the added width, they could make out a man-made embankment.

  A few hundred meters farther on, Iimmi sighted spires above the trees, still across the river. They could figure no explanations till the trees ceased on the opposite bank and the buildings and towers of the great city broke the sky. Many of the towers were ruined or cracked. Nets of girders were silhouetted against the yellow clouds, where the skin of buildings had stripped away. Elevated highways looped tower after tower, many of them broken also, their ends dangling colossally to the streets. The docks of the city across the water were deserted.

  It was Geo who suggested: “Perhaps Hama’s Temple is in there. After all, Argo’s largest temple is in Leptar’s biggest city.”

  “And what city in Leptar is that big?” asked Urson in an awe-filled voice.

  “How do we get across?” asked Iimmi.

  But Snake had already started down to the water.

  “I guess we follow him,” Geo said, climbing down the rocks.

  Snake dove into the water. Iimmi, Geo, and Urson followed. Before he had taken two strokes, Geo felt familiar hands grasp his body from below. This time he did not fight; there was a sudden sense of speed, of sinking through consciousness.

  Then he was bobbing up in chill water. The stone embankment rose to one side and the broad river spread to the other. He shook dark hair from his eyes and sculled toward the stones. Snake and Urson bobbed at his right, and a second later, Iimmi at his left. He switched from sculling into a crawl, wondering how to scale the stones; then he saw the rusted metal ladder leading into the water. He caught hold of the sides and pulled himself up.

  The first rung broke with his full weight, dropping him half into the water again, and his hands scraped painfully along the rust. But he pulled himself up once more, planting his instep on the nub of the broken rung; it held. Reaching the top, he turned back to call instructions: “Keep your feet to the side.” Snake came up now, then Urson. Another rung gave under the big man’s bare foot when he was halfway up. As he sagged backward, then caught himself, the rivets of the ladder tugged another inch out from the stone. But they held. Iimmi joined them on the broad ridge of concrete that walled the river. Together now on the wharf, they turned to the city.

  Ruin stretched before them. The buildings on the waterfront looked as though they had been flung from the sky and broken on the street, rather than built there. Girders twisted through plaster, needling to rusted points.

  They stepped down into the street and walked a narrow avenue between piles of debris from two taller buildings. After a few blocks, the building walls were canyon height. “How are you going to go about looking for the Temple?” Urson asked.

  “Maybe we can climb up and take a look from the top of one of these buildings,” Geo suggested. They raised their eyes and saw that the sky was thick with yellow clouds. Where it broke, twilight seeped.

  They turned toward a random building. A slab of metal had torn away from the wall. They stepped through into a high, hollow room. Dim light came from white tubes about the wall. Only a quarter of them were lit; one was flickering. In the center of the room hung a metal sign:

  NEW EDISON ELECTRIC COMPANY

  Beneath it, in smaller letters:

  “LIGHT DOWN THE AGES”

  Great cylinders, four or five times the height of a man, humped over the floor under pipes, wires, and catwalks. The four made their way along one walk toward a spiral staircase that wound up to the next floor.

  “Listen!” Urson suddenly said.

  “What is it?” Geo asked.

  One of the huge cylinders was buzzing.

  “That one.” Urson pointed. They listened, then continued. As they mounted the staircase, the great room turned about them, sinking. At last they stepped up into a dark corridor. A red light glowed at the end:

  EXIT

  Doors outlined themselves along the hall in the red haze. Geo picked one and opened it. Natural light fell on them. They entered a room in which the outer wall had been torn away. The floor broke off irregularly over thrusting girders.

  “What happened here?” Urson asked.

  “See,” Iimmi explained. “That highway must have crashed into the wall an
d knocked it away.”

  A twenty-foot ribbon of road veered into the room at an insane angle. The railing was twisted but the stalks of streetlights were still intact along the edge.

  “Do you think we could climb that?” asked Geo. “It doesn’t look too steep.”

  “For what?” Urson wanted to know.

  “To get someplace high enough to see if there’s anything around that looks like a temple.”

  “Oh,” said Urson in a reconciled voice.

  As they started across the floor toward the highway, Geo suddenly called, “Run!” As they leaped onto the slanted sheet of concrete, a crack opened in the flooring over which they had just walked. Cement and tile broke away and crashed to the street, three stories down. The section of road on which they perched now wavered up and down a good three feet. As it came to rest, Geo breathed again and glanced down to the street. A cloud of plaster settled.

  “That way is up,” Urson reminded him, and they started. In general the walk was in good shape. Occasional sections of railing had twisted away, but the road itself mounted surely between the buildings on either side of them through advancing sunset.

  It branched before them and they went left. It branched again, and again they avoided the right-hand road. A sign half the length of a three-masted ship hung lopsidedly above them on a building to one side:

  WMTH

  THE HUB OF

  WORLD NEWS,

  COMMUNICATION,

  & ENTERTAINMENT

  As they rounded the corner of the building, Snake suddenly stopped and put his hand to his head.

  “What is it?” asked Geo.

  Snake took a step backward. Then he pointed to WMTH.

  It…hurts…

  “What hurts?” asked Geo.

  Snake pointed to the building again.

  “Is there someone in there thinking too loud?”

  Thinking…machine…Snake said. Radio…

  “A radio is a thinking machine, and there’s one in there that’s hurting your head?” interpreted Geo tentatively, and with a question mark.

  Snake nodded.