Forgotten Suns (2 page)

Neither of them mentioned the other thing, the thing that
made Aisha so determined to go back and look. She might not get another chance.

Not just because of the problem with the expedition. This
was much nearer and more terrifying. She’d been carefully not thinking about it
all year.

Aisha would turn thirteen after the new season started.
Psycorps would test her then. If she passed, the Corps would take her.

Aisha did not want to pass. She wanted to be a
xenoarchaeologist like Mother and Pater, and discover Nevermore’s secrets, and keep
it safe from Goths and Vandals and the bloody Corps.

Aisha didn’t just hear things she wasn’t supposed to be able
to hear. She saw things, too. Once in a while, in the empty squares and the
broken and deserted buildings, she could see people coming and going, and hear
their voices. They walked in her dreams.

She had a good imagination, that was all. She had no psi.
She was nothing that Psycorps would be interested in.

~~~

This close to noon, thunder was brewing over the plain.
That set Jamal off again. “We can’t go out in that,” he said. “What if there’s
lightning?”

“It’s a long ways off,” Aisha said. “We’ll be there and back
again hours before it hits.”

Jamal glowered and muttered and kicked a bit, but when Aisha
finished saddling leopard-spotted Jinni, he was right behind her with bay
Ghazal. The horses were fresh and full of sparks, like the air. They were glad
to get out and run.

Nobody saw them go. Vikram was doing something in the house,
and Aunt Khalida was locked up in her room as usual. Aisha made sure her lunch
was safe in her saddlebag and her water bottle was full, and set off toward the
dead river.

Horses did not like the area around the cliff. They had that
in common with the native tribes. Horses, like tribesmen, thought there was
something bad there—or not so much bad as powerful, and not in a comfortable
way.

It made Aisha’s skin shiver and her head itch deep inside,
but it had never frightened her. Whatever was there had nothing against her.

The cliff felt different now its top was broken off. The
strange feeling was still there, but it was much weaker. The horses barely
shied from the cliff’s shadow, and that was mostly habit. Whatever had been
inside was—not dead. But the pent-up power had blown away, or else sunk so deep
in the earth she could hardly feel it any more.

The storm rolled toward them over the plain, but it was
still klicks away. Aisha and Jamal left the horses in the pen at the cliff’s
foot, slung on their backpacks and started to climb.

The horses had grass, and water that bubbled from a spring
into a stone basin. Aisha carefully shut her saddle and bridle in the shed
outside the pen, well out of reach of inquisitive noses. Jamal was lazy, and
therefore not so careful, but that was his lesson to learn. If his saddle was
still on the fence when he got back, Aisha would be surprised.

It was a long, steep way up. She took a deep breath and went
at it.

The top of the cliff was empty. The sun had scoured it.
The rain that had fallen since Aisha’s mistake had sent the last of the summit
sliding down into the cave. There was nothing left to get into, and nothing to
see, except rocks and rubble and tumbled earth.

Aisha’s whole body sagged. She had been so sure there was
something here. But it was all gone.

It really was dead. The power she’d been feeling was her
imagination again, and hope playing tricks with it.

Jamal very kindly said nothing. He hardly even grumbled when
she turned around without stopping and trudged back down the long, twisting trail.

~~~

Someone was in with the horses. Aisha thought it was
Vikram at first; the horses were all over him, mugging him for cookies. But
Vikram was taller and nowhere near as wild-looking as the person who stood with
one arm over Jinni’s back and the other hand scratching Ghazal’s withers.

He really was wild. He was all hair and nails and bare
blue-black skin—darker than Vikram, even. He wore very little except for a
surprising lot of gold around his neck and arms and waist, hanging from his
ears and braided into the wild mane of his hair. A few tatters of cloth hung
from his belt, but they disintegrated while she stared, blowing away to dust in
the wind off the storm.

He looked like a naked sage from Govinda. Aisha had seen
them under their trees, sitting each in his bubble of silence, communing with
the infinite. But they never wore anything at all, let alone enough gold to
fill a small museum.

They never spoke, either. This one did. He was sweet-talking
the horses. Aisha recognized the tone—any horse person would. The language was
odd, as odd as he was.

She had a gift for languages. She could put words together
and have them make sense, even when they were in a language she barely knew. He
was speaking the old language of the tribes, but his accent was completely
different from any she had heard. “What are you, then?” he was saying to the
horses. “Where do you come from? You like that, do you?
Ah!
No teeth, madam!” That to Jinni, who liked to nip.

“He’s not a girl,” Aisha said. Her accent was fairly
horrible, but not any worse than his.

He whipped around. She stepped back before she thought. He
had a sword and a knife. They were less gaudy than everything else that was
hung on or around him. Aisha did not doubt for a nanosecond that he knew how to
use them.

Jamal was babbling; had been for a while. He pulled at her,
too, but she ignored him.

“Those are our horses,” she said. She had to use the Earth
word, because the closest one in Old Language meant
giant antelope
. Which helped prove the point Mother liked to make about
their use as riding animals, but that was not exactly important now. “They like
you. Do you mind telling us where
you
came
from?”

He frowned. He did look like Vikram, or like someone else
from Govinda. There was no one in the tribes like him, at all. They were all
gold or brown, and their faces were much blunter. He had a nose like one of the
eagles that hunted along the river.

“Horses,” he said. He mimicked her pronunciation exactly. “A
horse is this?”

“A horse is this,” she said.

“Tell me where I am,” he said. “How did I come here? Who are
you? What are you? What are these animals, these
horses
?”

Aisha could not answer half of what he asked. The part that
she could, she did her best with. “You’re on Nevermore. We’re from Earth. We’re
digging here—my parents are. They’re with the Cairo Museum. In Egypt, you know.
In Greater Eurafrica.”

His eyes on her were perfectly blank. Not one of those names
meant a thing to him. He turned his head from side to side without taking his
glare off her. It was hot enough to crisp her skin. “No,” he said. “No, that’s
not—where is this? Who brought me here?
Where
is my city?”

At almost the same instant, Jamal howled at her, too.
“Aisha!”

Him, she could slap some sense into. The wild man, not so
much. His hands were on his weapons, gripping them so hard his knuckles had
gone grey, but he had not drawn them. She noticed that. He was not trying to
hurt her.

“I don’t know,” she said to him. “I’m sorry. I think your
memory must be—”

“My memory,” he said. Maybe his face twisted. It was hard to
see in all the hair. “I remember—I was—I can’t—”

“I’m sorry,” Aisha said again. It was pathetic and useless,
but it was all she could think of. “You can come home with us. We can see if—”

Jamal’s yowl nearly ruptured her eardrums. The wild man’s
face went blank; his eyes rolled up. He dropped like a rock.

She laid Jamal flat, then hauled him up and shook him until
he stopped shrieking. Which he did eventually. Jamal was an idiot, but if she
hit him hard enough, he usually came around.

“
Now
look what you
did,” she said through the ringing in her ears. “You’ve killed him.”

“
Good!
” Jamal
half-yelled, but only half. Her hand was waiting to smack him again if he tried
any more than that.

The wild man was alive. He was breathing fast and shallow.
His heart when she dared to touch his chest was hammering. He shook in spasms,
as if he’d taken a fit.

Lightning walked down the dry riverbed. Wind plucked at
Aisha’s hair. She smelled the electricity in it, and the faint sharpness of
rain.

They would be lucky to make it back to the house before it
hit. Aisha threw Jamal toward his saddle—on the ground and half trampled as she’d
expected—and ran for her own.

Sometimes the horses liked to play at being hard to catch.
Today they knew better. Aisha and a loudly reluctant Jamal pulled and hauled
and heaved and shoved the wild man up onto Ghazal, who was quieter. He was too
far gone to sit upright; they had to tie him face down and plan to apologize if
he woke up on the way.

Jamal had to ride double with Aisha, which he didn’t like,
either, but she was long past paying attention to him. As soon as he was solid
behind her, with his arms around her waist, she got a grip on the bay’s rein
and urged Jinni into a canter.

~~~

The storm chased them all the way to the gate of the
compound. It broke just as they clattered into the barn.

“That’s luck,” Jamal panted.

Aisha had her own theory, but she kept it to herself. Jamal
had stopped yowling and made his peace with the world, or close enough. A hard
ride in rough weather could do that. He hardly complained at all about having
to cool the horses out by walking them around the barn while Aisha fetched the
hay cart and eased the wild man onto it.

He was no lighter now than he had been across the river.
Even with Jamal helping, he was a sturdy weight to move. She had been thinking
to get him up into the loft, but that was not happening. She hauled him down
along the covered porch to the staff quarters instead.

Shenliu wasn’t there to mind that Aisha stole his apartment
for the wild man. It was the closest one to the stable, and she knew the key
for the lock. She also knew where things were, which made it easier to get the
bed made up and the stranger into it.

Then she just stood and breathed. He needed things, but she
could hardly think what.

“We have to tell Aunt Khalida,” Jamal said.

He was wobbling in the doorway, darting glances at the wild
man, like a horse shying and then coming back to the scary thing and then
shying again. “The horses are all cooled off?” Aisha said.

“Pretty much,” he said. “I put them in their stalls and gave
them hay.”

“Water, too?”

“Of course water, too,” he said. “We have to tell Aunt. She’ll
know what to do about him.”

Aisha had been thinking the same thing, but because Jamal
had said it first, she had to say, “No! We’ll figure it out ourselves.”

“What’s to figure out? This is a crazy man. We found him in
the middle of nowhere. He could be an escaped criminal. He was mindwiped, wasn’t
he? He can’t even remember his own language.”

“He knows Old Language,” Aisha said.

“That’s what I mean,” said Jamal. “He’s not from the tribes.
He’s got to be from offworld. Either he went native or he went crazy, or
somebody wiped his mind for him.”

Jamal was an idiot, but he was anything but stupid. All the
while he had been yowling and kicking, his mind had been working. He’d put it
all together even better than Aisha had.

She had to give him credit. Even when he said, “Aunt is MI—Military
Intelligence. If anybody knows what to do about a criminal or a hostage or whatever
he is, it’s Aunt.”

The fact he was right didn’t make Aisha any happier about
it. “So what do we say? That we were where we were told flat out not to go? We’ll
be grounded for the rest of our lives.”

“We don’t have to tell her exactly where we found him. Just
that he was out there, he passed out, the storm came—it’s all the truth. She
can take it from there. Then if he wakes up and tries to kill us all, we won’t
be the ones he goes for.”

“He won’t try to kill anybody,” Aisha said. She was
absolutely sure of that. She had taken the sword and knife off him and hidden
them in Shenliu’s closet, but that was mostly to keep him safe from himself.

“Look,” she said. “Let’s just let him sleep until morning.
Then we’ll decide what to do.”

“What if he wakes up and runs off again?”

“I’ll make sure he’s locked in,” she said. “Just until
morning, all right?”

It was not all right, but the fight had gone out of Jamal.
He gave in.

Aisha should have felt better about it than she did. She
always won; that was the way things were. But this was too odd for anyone’s
comfort.

The Brats were up to something.

They usually were, but this one had an exceptionally odd
feel to it. They were quiet at dinner, kept their eyes down, ate everything
they were fed, and most damning of all, offered no objection when ordered to
bed early.

Khalida would have welcomed the quiet, but the quality of it
raised hackles that should not have been there. The nightmares were back, and
so were the other things, the things that had got her sent away on psych leave.

She had been rationing her computer time, because that was
another symptom: compulsive escape into the mysteries of a planet that had gone
from extensively populated to nearly deserted in the space of days. Rashid
thought months or even years, but Khalida did not think so. What must have
taken years was stripping out every image of humanoid or domestic animal,
everywhere, in every inhabited place. That meant they had had warning of
whatever it was, and time to prepare. But they had left quickly.

Even thinking about it was an evasion. While she sat at the
window, staring into the dark, she avoided sleep and the dreams that waited in
it.