Academic Exercises (26 page)

The duke had drawn a map while we’d been becalmed, before the storm. It was one of a handful of things he’d managed to take with him, stuffed down the side of his boot. It was based on Aeneas and the rest of the available material, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have believed in it.

He stood on the beach with this thing in his hands, looking up at the mountains. They took me to him; I was, apparently, necessary. I’d come in on the
Lion
, which very nearly made it all the way, close enough that we were able to get nine-tenths of the passengers and crew off in longboats. The rest were picked up by boats from the
Heron
, which was shallow-bottomed enough to ride in close.

“That,” the duke was saying, looking up from his extrapolated map, “must be the Ieria bluffs.”

I knew all about them; the foothills of the Aoidus mountains, to which (in Aeneas’ day) the suburbs of Aos were just starting to extend. He was measuring distances with a pair of dividers, doing calculations; his lips were moving. I looked for myself, and felt obliged to point something out.

“If that’s the Ieria,” I said, “where’s the city?”

I maintain that it was a valid point. Aos was visible from the ocean; Aeneas saw it on his way in, sailed right up to the splendid granite quay, which stuck out a quarter of a mile into the bay. We’d landed on a sandy beach, and there was nothing man-made to be seen anywhere.

He ignored me. “In that case,” he went on, “the mouth of the river should be no more than six hundred yards to our left.” He lowered the map and turned his head. I looked with him, and saw, on the surface of the sea, the score-marks and ripples of an undertow. Exactly where he’d said it would be. But; no city.

“Follow me,” he said, and we all set off up the beach, the wet sand sucking at our heels. A few minutes later, we were standing beside a fast-flowing river at the point where it emptied out into the sea. The duke looked as though he’d just been personally awarded the Order of Merit by the Invincible Sun, in a gold-and-pearl tiara. “The river,” he said. “This is where the piazza used to be.”

Used to be
—I stared at him. That thought hadn’t occurred to me.

“I imagine what happened,” the duke said, “is that over time the bay silted up and became useless, which is why it was abandoned.” He smiled gently. “The circumstances of our own arrival would tend to support that view, don’t you think?” He turned aside and poked at the ground with the tip of his sword. “I assume that the piazza is somewhere under the sand here. A pity. I was looking forward to seeing the great bronze statue of the Founder.” He shrugged. “Presumably they moved it when they left here, so we’ll see it in due course.”

I think, as a scholar, that the text of Holy Scripture has been corrupted during the course of manuscript tradition, in some places. For example, I think the famous line should read; Blessed are those that have seen, and still believe.

One of the others started whacking the undergrowth with his sword. I looked at him, and heard the clinking noise of steel on stone. He knelt down, yanking out handfuls of weed and stuff. The duke came and stood behind him. “There,” the man said. “Look.”

It was worked, finished stone, peeping out between the stubble of hacked-off green shoots.

We searched for an hour or so, but didn’t find anything else. Then the captains of the
Lion
and the
Heron
came looking for the duke and led him gently but firmly away. They had to talk, they insisted, about what was to be done.

Basically, we had nearly three hundred people on the beach, the crews of both ships plus the duke’s party and the soldiers. There was enough food left on the
Heron
to feed them all once, maybe twice if we all went a little hungry. A hundred and fifty people could probably crowd on board the
Heron
without sinking her, but it’d be a tight squeeze, and obviously she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere like that. Something had to be done about food and shelter. Instructions, please.

The duke wasn’t particularly interested. He told them to do whatever they thought fit. Then he left them to it and walked away up the beach, his nose in the map. I wanted to stay and eavesdrop on the captains, but they made it fairly clear that I wasn’t needed, so I left them and trotted back to the duke.

He’d found what he reckoned was the point where the main street—so wide, according to Aeneas, that four grand coaches could run side by side without scraping wheels—came down to the harbour. Follow it up—he pointed at the dense forest that swept down off the hills—and we’d come to the Great North Road, which ran from Aos to the capital, Eano, through a narrow pass in the mountains. If we set off straight away, he said, we could be in Eano by noon next day. At Eano, they’d give us all the food and shelter we could ask for, and we could open negotiations for shipping to take us home, or, at the very least, materials to build a ship to carry the rest of our people. I was the leading authority, he said, lifting his head from the map and looking straight at me. What did I think?

(What did I think? Let’s see. I thought; this isn’t Essecuivo, it can’t be. Through a combination of uncanny coincidence and extreme wishful thinking, we’ve all perceived a resemblance; but, please note, the map the duke is holding was drawn
after we got here
; after he’d spent a long time peering fixatedly at the coast through his monster telescope. The map is therefore not evidence. Discount the map, and we’re back to interpretations of the text. For all I know, there may be a thousand bays and natural harbours with rivers running down to them all over the world. Maybe it’s an abundant form in nature, something you always get wherever there’s a confluence of certain factors—estuary plus mountains plus prevailing winds and certain sorts of tides equals something more or less like this. Therefore, the professor regrets to inform you that your hypothesis has not been adequately proved and your paper cannot be accepted for publication.

And whether or not it’s Essecuivo, unless we find some food and somewhere to shelter, we’re going to
die
. If we go plunging into the forest, instead of digging for turtles’ eggs or whatever the hell it is people do, we’ll lose our little snippet of time, and we’ll starve.

If I explain, perhaps he’ll listen.

If—)

We followed the road. To be fair, there was a distinct line through the undergrowth and rubbish; a straight line, of the sort that rarely occurs in nature. And that man had found worked stone. It could once have been a road, at that.

Three hundred yards or so on, the straight line vanished into the trees. The duke had a compass, a beautifully dainty little thing in a silver gilt case, that hung around his neck on a blue silk cord. Eano, according to Aeneas, was thirty-two miles due north of Aos. I salved my conscience by telling myself that we were more likely to find edible animals and birds in the woods than on the beach. I had no basis for such an assertion. I’m not a true scholar.

I’m in no mood to tell you about that walk in the woods. On the first day, someone took a shot at something that could have been some kind of pig. He missed. The noise put up about a million small black birds, which flew off screaming. After that, the only living thing in the woods was us.

We spent the night in a bramble thicket. We chose it as a camp ground because it was too dense to hack a way through with what little energy we had left. I fell asleep as soon as my back hit its unsatisfactory mattress of crushed brambles, and didn’t wake up till somebody kicked me. I’d have let them leave me there, because I ached so much I’d rather have died than try to move, but they wouldn’t allow it. Tempers were getting short, and fools weren’t being suffered gladly. I did as I was told.

It’s usually cooler inside woods than outside them; in which case, I shudder to think what the temperature must’ve been outside, if there was an outside—for all I know, the forest covered the entire country. In any event, it was savagely hot, and we hadn’t brought any water, for the excellent reason that we didn’t have anything to carry it in. Around mid-afternoon we stumbled across, nearly fell into a river, of sorts. The duke immediately claimed it was the Aloura. I agreed. I was past caring.

That night was bitter cold. We lit fires, which didn’t really do anything. In the morning, about twenty of the men had fevers, stomach cramps, various symptoms. There was no food. We told the sick men we’d come back for them. By nightfall, another thirty-odd were reporting the same symptoms; we left them, too. A part of me, the part that wasn’t triple-checking my body temperature every minute or so for the slightest sign of incipient fever, was doing mental arithmetic; fifty from three hundred leaves two-fifty; the
Heron
could carry seventy of us, at a pinch, and still get home. By the next evening, we were down to one-eighty and I was still all right. Now (that little part of me said) if only the duke were to catch this unknown disease and die, we could all—

The duke took ill on the afternoon of the fourth day. We’d stopped because we’d found a huge spread of flat-topped green fungi, which none of us definitely knew to be poisonous. There was a bit of a free-for-all. I’m not big, strong and assertive. I didn’t get any. Some people have all the luck.

Over half the fungus-poisoning victims died during the night. By daylight, none of the survivors could move. They were sweating, twitching, bleeding from the nose. The duke somehow managed to haul himself up against the trunk of a tree, presumably so he wouldn’t die sprawled in the leaf-mould. I sat and watched him for about three hours. His breathing was slow and shallow, but he kept on and on doing it. After that I’d had enough. I got up and stumbled off, crashed around in the holly, brambles and brash until my foot caught in something and I fell over. When I opened my eyes, I found I’d landed on top of a big, fat creamy-white fungus, the sort they call Chicken-in-the-woods. You’re supposed to cook it first. The hell with that.

By the time I’d finished stuffing my face it was getting dark. I tried to retrace my steps, got completely lost, gave up, looked around for somewhere to sleep and caught sight of a man’s feet sticking out from behind a tree. It turned out I’d been going in circles, or a freak storm had blown me off course, or something like that. Anyway, I was back at the camp. I went to look at the duke.