Echo City (46 page)

But when he turned to Nadielle, he was shocked. It was as if days, not mere moments, had passed since he’d seen her last; she looked older, more tired, and her skin had taken on a pale gray hue he had never noticed before. Her eyes flittered left and right. She had always been strong, superior in her position of greater knowledge—though he wasn’t sure whether he’d placed her on a pedestal or if she’d climbed there herself—but now she looked like a lost soul.

“Nadielle …”

“It’s all too much,” she said. “Gorham, I can’t do it on my own. Some of it, but not all. I need your help.” She frowned and started talking almost to herself again. “There’s so much to do. We’ll need the seed, and then the ingredients, the formulae, and then …” She paused and glanced up at Gorham.

Did she really forgot I’m here?
he thought.
Or did she forget where
she
is?

“I’m here to help you, Nadielle. What do you need? I’ve watered the vats, and I’ll do whatever else you want. They’ll come back with Rufus soon, and—”

“Too late to wait for that,” she said. She looked around at her vats, her chamber, her sharp creations. “Come with me.”

He followed her to her rooms, closing the door behind him, and she went straight to her table. Books and papers were strewn across its surface, and at the mess’s center lay one of the big books she’d brought in from that deeper room. Torn paper bookmarks protruded from it, and he caught sight of a smear of words and numbers where it lay open. It looked as if someone had passed their hand across wet ink, smudging the information across both pages.

“I can’t do both,” she said. “I can’t fight the Vex and plan how to use Rufus, look at him, find out about him. It’s too much for one person. My mother, perhaps … 
her
mother … but not
me, Gorham. I don’t have it in me. Not with this happening. Not with the Vex.”

“So what do you need from me?” he asked, sitting down across the table from her.

“Your seed,” Nadielle said.

Gorham caught his breath. Her eyes glittered in her pale face. He smelled those vats, saw the strange surface sucking water down, heard and felt the gentle impacts against their sides as he climbed the ladder. And he knew what she wanted to do.

“How can another me help us?”

“It can’t. But another me can.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, but in truth he did. He simply did not want to acknowledge what she was thinking.

“I need to go back down
now
,” she said. “I’m the Baker, and I might be able to slow it. There are ways and means.” She waved generally toward the vat hall. “And maybe I can even reason with it.” She ran her hand across the books again. “But I
also
need to be here, and to take
advantage
of the time I make by slowing the Vex to think of Rufus, and how we might escape.”

He nodded slowly, her intentions dawning.
I’ve already lost one woman I love
, he thought, but the selfishness of that hit him hard, and he felt himself blush.

Nadielle must have thought the flush was because of something else.

“It’ll be okay,” she said, smiling wanly. “I’ve done it before. Don’t you remember?”

   He did remember. Before there had been passion and lust, heavy breathing from both of them, a need and a desire, and her stroking of his cock had been a preamble, a tender massage ensuring his hardness before she rode him or he rode her, and sometimes she’d kept going because she could feel how primed he was, how ready and desperate for the release.

This time it was joyless and harsh. Nadielle did not smile but worked at him hard and fast, keen not to waste any time. In her other hand she held the glass beaker, ready to catch his seed. He closed his eyes and tried to remember
more-loving times, but he could not. It was so impersonal and cold that he did not even want to make a noise when he came, and he found it easy to spend himself with little more than a sigh.

She smiled at him when it was over—a sad smile that said so much—but they were both way beyond platitudes. She stood and went for the door, and Gorham stumbled behind her, buttoning his trousers.

“Gorham,” she said, standing with her back to the door, “you can’t watch me doing this.”

“But I’m helping you.” He looked at the beaker, clasped in both of her hands as if to keep it warm.

“You are,” she agreed. “But no Baker has ever revealed her own special secrets. I’ll not be the first.” She opened the door, whispered something that sounded more like a hiss, and several bladed shadows manifested behind her.

“Please don’t try to follow me,” she said. “I’ll tell you when it’s done.” And she closed the door on his bafflement and hurt.

He wandered the room for a while, looking at her papers and books and making sense of none of it. He sat on her bed. And when he heard a long, strident hiss—a vat being initiated, he guessed, or something more arcane that he could never even guess at—he lay back down and closed his eyes.

This time sleep would not come, so he lived his nightmares awake.

   They help him. Give him water—sweet, pure, fresher than any he has ever tasted—but not too much. Fruit he cannot identify. A thick, rich vegetable soup that tastes of the ground and all the wonders within. He’s settled on a gently swinging hammock strung between two tall, lush trees that are taller than any he’s seen before, their tops scratching the sky and almost gathering clouds. The hammock is woven from soft rope. It’s gentle on his sunburned skin. He’s naked, and the woman who found him has tended his burns with a gentle, sour-smelling ointment that moisturizes his skin and eases the pain. There are blisters, and his skin is shedding from his shoulders and back, but he can feel his body fixing itself. All around him the rich green grass is crisscrossed
with shale paths, and low buildings hug the landscape in the shadows of tall trees.

A group of children are playing away from the trees, throwing a ball to one another in a large marked pitch. Sometimes they shout and cheer as one of them scores, other times they argue good-naturedly, and he has spent some time trying to work out the rules of their game. The fact that he is no nearer to understanding than he was when he started watching does not upset him. This is a new place, a
different
place, and he’s glad.

Some of the children glance at him now and then, and as the sun dips toward the valley’s ridgeline, a few come to look. They stare for a while—long-haired and brown-skinned and glowing with health, their eyes filled with wonder and innocence. He sees intelligence in their expressions and the evidence of hard work on their hands. Perhaps soon they will let him play with them.

The woman comes and helps him from the hammock, wrapping him in a blanket and guiding him toward one of the buildings. He becomes aware of many other people watching him, observing with a frank curiosity that does not make him uncomfortable.

They don’t know where I’m from
, he thinks.
I showed her the desert and she was shocked. They must think nothing can live out there. Perhaps they think they’re all there is
.

The building is like others he has seen in the settlement, made from baked mud bricks, strong and dependable. The windows are glazed with extravagant colored glass, the doors hung with strange sigils, and inside there are several rooms, all leading out from the central area. Here there is a roaring fire, and several people are seated on intricately carved wooden chairs. There’s a peace about them, a calmness that puts him at ease.

They speak to him in that strange language, and the woman responds for him. Some of them blink in surprise. A couple look at him with suspicion.

Something strikes his arm, a harsh burning pain. He cries out and looks, but there’s nothing to be seen here in this memory, only the woman’s kindly hand holding him still.

He swam in darkness as his Dragarian captors drugged him quiet once again, and then he was somewhere else
.

Rufus is drawing images from memory, using charcoal on fine white paper. He has been in the village for some time. He has quickly become a part of the settlement, welcomed in by people whose level of trust is great and suspicion low. There are still some who have difficulty believing where he has come from, because, to the Heartlanders, the desert is endless and inimical to life. But they do not hold that disbelief against him. His presence has encouraged a large degree of debate and discussion, and as he slowly learns their language he is beginning to take part in those discussions. It’s amazing that he is there, they keep telling him, but they are a people to whom an amazing thing is a gift, not a terror.

They pay homage to the Heart and Mind and tell him that it keeps the Heartlands safe and peaceful. When he asks if he can see it, they go quiet, and this is when he feels most like an alien.
Perhaps one day
, his savior says, but there is uncertainty in her voice.

His sketches are becoming more elaborate. In the small room in her home where the woman has let him live—he learned early on that her own son and husband were killed several years before by a herd of marauding beasts, whose name he does understand—he is surrounded by his artwork. The early attempts were vague and unsure, smudged by faulty memory. The piece he is working on now is far more clear. It is a city on a flat horizon. Close by are bleached white bones half buried in the sand. There is nothing alive and nothing indicating life other than the city—a place of hills and walls, towers and buildings climbing the heights, all reaching for the sky. There’s a haze in the sky above and around the city, and hints of a river to the west. The more times he draws this same image, the more detail he adds and the larger the city looks. When he blinks, he thinks the city could be the whole world.

The people study his artwork but do not interfere.

He draws a shape in the desert between the strewn bones and the city. And in this new language he is learning, he calls it
himself
.

There’s a pain in his leg and he winces, scratching the
charcoal stick across the paper, grasping his thigh. There’s no blood, no sign of injury, no smudge on the paper.

He swam in darkness again, his captors’ drug in his blood, the pain of its gentle injection into his leg fading as this new memory cuts in
.

Older now, fit and healthy and a full part of the settlement in the valley, he takes a walk with the woman who found him and who has become his guardian. She has been promising this walk for some time. He has been asking more and more, and as adulthood approaches, his need to see, know, and understand has grown. It is a long walk, past neighboring villages in other valleys, across a wide plain where different-looking people live in stilted buildings, tending walking plants that provide balms and medicines for everyone in this land. He has seen these people before on trading trips, and he stops for a while to converse with them. Their language is as alien to him now as his guardian’s was when he first arrived out of the desert. Some of them try, however, and they call him Man from Sand. He is, it seems, something of a legend.

The walk opens his eyes to how vast the Heartlands are. From the top of one hill they can see the next, and the next, rising toward an uncertain horizon, and he understands that this place is much larger than the vague place he came from. Perhaps he could walk another ten days before reaching its far edge, where the desert would enclose it with its fiery landscape. He hopes they do not have to go that far. Man from Sand he may be, but he would happily never set eyes on the desert again.

“Why is everyone so fascinated with me?” he asks his guardian as they continue on their journey.

“Because you came out of the desert, and there is nothing beyond.”

“There’s the city,” he said. “Sometimes I still dream of it.”

A troubled look crosses her eyes. Even with age settling in her skin, she is as beautiful now as when she found him.

“Those dreams are nightmares,” she says. “And those drawings …”

“No one believes them,” he says, because no one ever has. Sometimes even he thinks of them as only a dream—a city
built entirely in his mind, a hundred times larger than their largest village, which will fade over time. But sometimes he can almost taste the dampness of its stone, smell the market streets, and see the towering spires rising toward its center, hear the excited chatter of its many inhabitants echoed between buildings and down alleys. He can see the woman who might have been his mother back then, tutoring him in a language that stays with him now; he can accept the vastness of the place, the imposing concentration of buildings that are so close they seem to be constructed on top of one another. He can see the city and himself in it, and there is a sense of loss that he cannot comprehend, even in dreams.

“Only because they cannot be true,” she says.

“My skin is paler than anyone’s, even in the sun. And that language I can speak—”

“Is not one you should!” she snaps. A thousand times she has told him this, refusing his attempts to explore the language with her. He has been referred to physicians and mythmakers, and all of them have reached the same conclusion: that he was infected by a desert sprite, one of the cruel phantoms that stalk the sands close to the Heartlands, and it has jumbled his mind. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he even believes this himself. These physicians and mythmakers have done their best to cure him of the affliction, but still the words come to him, and with the words are images, and those images carry the weight of memory.

He’s confused, and his guardian says that this journey will help cure his confusion.

They walk for several more days, passing many small settlements and accepting the hospitality of their inhabitants. It’s an exploration of food and drink as well, because everything here is affected by landscape. Wines taste different from valley to valley, and fruits and vegetables pick up diverse tangs from the soils. The land is rich and lush, and Rufus’s strange memories of the city are sour and tainted in comparison.

At the pinnacle of one hill, he looks to the east and sees a stain on the landscape. It is miles distant—such distances that he is still becoming used to—but even from here its scope is
huge. It is many shades of gray, smothering the landscape in that direction, filling valleys, crushing hills. The sky above it is similar in color, as if leached of blue vitality by what lies beneath. He can see the shattered remains of giant towers reaching to the sky with skeletal fingers. Around their feet lie other tumbled ruins, and all his senses seem affected by the sight. He imagines the smell of ash and age, tastes grit on the clear air, and hears mournful whispers of faraway breezes. Around this unknown place, the hillsides are green and the trees proud and tall. Lushness surrounds the ruin.