Hegira (20 page)

“Through the Wall?”

“Any way they can. Perhaps the English-speakers are building them another rocket.”

“Then I pity them. They'll be double-crossed.”

Bar-Woten shrugged. “I don't understand much of anything now.”

Barthel jerked and pulled away from his corner. He nibbed his eyes, then looked over Kiril's shoulder and seemed relieved.

The door opened an hour after they were all awake. Another officer, paunchy and florid, ordered them out of the cell and took them down the hall in the direction opposite the laboratory. Two young, wan-faced guards followed with holstered pistols.

A hovercraft waited on the concrete airstrip. Craters ten and twenty meters across had been punched into the pavement and the surrounding rocky hills. Fragments of metal littered the area.

The fat officer rapped the butt of his gun on the port of the hovercraft. The port swung open, and a ladder came down. “Climb in,” he told them. They went up the ladder into the ship. The guards followed, and the officer managed to squeeze through with some straining. A low, round metal tube led them around the circumference to the main cabin. A small barred cell had been welded to the floor and ceiling of the adjacent passenger cubicle. The guards put them in and locked the door behind.

The hovercraft coughed and roared. Somewhere metal screeched across concrete. Then she lurched and rose. The pilot, hidden behind a thick steel shield, took them across the apron and over the lake.

They could get glimpses of their flight only through the edges of the clear canopy that extended beyond the shield. Gray, cragged mountains came toward them as they skirted the perimeter of the lake. The rocks passed away abruptly as the hovercraft made a long, slow turn to the right toward the middle of the lake. Rock walls flashed by on both sides as they passed through a narrow sound.

Barthel stared with determination through the bars at the shield. Bar-Woten sat relaxed with his back wedged into one corner of the cell, studying the slender view of their travel. Kiril alternated between his two companions and the view, trying to puzzle what had happened to all of them.

The trip took an hour. The hovercraft slowed and pulled into a narrow harbor ringed with walls of slate-black stone. It vaulted with a rumble and a slight bump up a ramp of wooden pilings. The guards came alert suddenly and opened the cell on orders from the fat officer. They were led outside.

“We have a special treat,” the officer said, slipping the words conspiratorially from the side of his mouth as they walked beside him. “A parade. You should enjoy tomorrow.”

Ahead of them lay a solid mass of grayness, as though concentrated storms had packed so thickly they merged without feature. Nearer, clouds broke from the monotony and asserted their own turmoil. Rain fell in wind-blown draperies onto the green, jungle-covered hills and valleys that butted up against the ascending curve of the Wall. Nearer still, obscured by plummets and feathers of mist pouring over the hills, were masses of buildings, angular, like scattered blocks of lead. The sight made Kiril's heart sink. A land of no cheer, no variety ... it choked the eyes. Yet it had an unmistakable, grave grandeur.

The officer was obviously proud of his city. But he was also a little cowed, as though the solemnity and monotony were not exactly what he'd expected. Thunder pranced near the gray end of the world. The Wall flashed sheet-white with an eyelike wink — roof of clouds the upper lid, gray-green jungled hills and peaks the lower. The gaze was cold and expectant, like the eye of an untersay draken.

“Faster,” the officer said. The wind picked up and ruffled their matted hair.

A long, sleek silver train waited for them at the end of the wood ramp. Steam hissed from the engine. The rails made plaintive squeaks. The air smelled of lightning and storm. It tickled Bar-Woten's nose, and he wriggled his face, making his patch bob. He threw a side look at Kiril as he rubbed his nose. Clearer than anything, it told Kiril the Ibisian was worried.

“This car,” the officer directed. They climbed into the stepwell, then waited as the inner door opened. More guards waited within, and two of them hooded thin ones. The interior of the car was dark brown suede and chrome steel with a cleanliness that showed rigid care. Two olive-colored tanks of translucent glass were bolted to the floor at the opposite end of the car. The older, tougher guards around these were fully armed. They carried pistols, daggers on their belts, and heavy, brutal rifles stubby as toadstools.

The three were forced to sit in a single seat with prods of elbows and hands on shoulders. The thin aliens stood immobile and silent a few steps from their tanks. Thick fluid lapped in the cylinders. An array of pipes curved from each tank and disappeared into the floor.

The train began to move.

The greater part of the ten-minute ride was spent on a long, fragile-looking trestle that crossed labyrinthine ridges of jungle-covered rock. Rivers crept through the gorges and poured into the lakes farther south, eventually falling into the Pale Seas. The ridges began to look artificially flattened, though still verdant; then buildings occupied them, and finally the land rose in one triumphant, humorless surge to a series of plateaus. The city of the English-speakers sprawled across the tablelands. Closer, the buildings glittered with walls of glass and polished metal. Counterpoints of coppery red and rust lanced up the sides of the taller structures. Monumental cubes were rolled on edge and supported by concrete pillars, faced with glass and steel and something the color of pewter. There were towers, prisms, all sharply sketched, all flat planes and daggers. Every mesa's cluster was tuned to emphasize the highest, central plateau, which met the Wall. Here the buildings resembled crystals of chrysolite and spar, featureless at this distance, divided by walls of deep jade green. The train worked steadily over and between the mesas, rising slowly, crossing trestles when valleys intervened, surrounded by walled throughways on the tablelands. It was an armored, protected millipede crawling laboriously to meet the cloud-worshipped Wall.

Kiril was too dazed to be impressed. The scene rolled by with a featureless, chaotic irregularity. It was meaningless because it was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. Later, perhaps, he might have nightmares about it, but now he could not assimilate. He could only stiffly wait.

Barthel saw nothing but an empty seat on the opposite side of the car. His lips worked.

The highest plateau was breached. The millipede slowed and chuffed, then coasted smoothly into a ceramic-lined tunnel. Daylight flashed as it left the tunnel and slid against a slant-walled building.

They were taken from the car. The entourage of guards and officers in the car surrounded the three foreigners and two nonhumans as if they were some treasure to be protected.

Again, in the interior of the dull, gold ziggurat, they were fed into a cell more spacious and comfortable, but still with the door locked and the walls padded. They were not searched. They'd been closely watched.

Barthel, however, had kept himself immobile throughout the journey. He had been ignored for long moments. No one noticed his hand reaching down to break off a strip of metal edging the seat. Not even Bar-Woten saw.

Only the woman in the seat opposite. She smiled.

Hours passed in the darkened cell. Kiril, Bar-Woten and Barthel lay on their cots, waiting. Kiril heard Bar-Woten snore. He squeezed his eyes shut, taking refuge in the even deeper darkness. He tried to remember Mediweva. Somehow, he found his way there, and his body relaxed.

Barthel was wide awake. He reached under his shirt and felt for the sharp strip he had pried loose on the train.

His mother moved in the dark, glowing, her true mouth and the mouth in her throat urging him on silently. He hardly understood who or what he was any more. All his world had been shattered, and yet he felt stupid that he had been surprised. The Bey — the Ibisian who had been his master for all his adult life — was after all a murderer and a pillager of Khem, his homeland.

Bar-Woten had said startling things under the influence of the demon's needles. Fifteen years of travel together had not revealed such things. Bar-Woten's drugged ramblings had raised the past to hideous life, bringing back the phantom of his mother — long lost in his thoughts, part of a warm, frightening blankness — haunting Barthel with all the memories and suspicions he had always known would be best left forgotten, dropped like plum stones in a pond.

Bar-Woten stirred in the dark and murmured.

You are no longer Barthel, servant to the Ibisian who killed me, the ghost told her son. You are Amma bin Akka, and you are free. Prove you are free.

Barthel stood over the Bey, the Ibisian. He lifted the sharp strip, tears filling his eyes and streaming down his cheeks. He thought, I have served you, worshipped you, followed you across land and sea. I have loved you. Why must I be the one to kill you?

He beseeched the ghost, but she would not relent.

You belong with us, she said. Your sisters are with us. We kept them from the conqueror's hands, as we would have kept you. All of our family, together. Carried in the Bey's strong arms, rushed from a house full of corpses, Barthel had caught a glimpse of his sisters, their throats cut, lying on their pallet in the two-room mastaba-house, blood dark red in the dusty sunlight from the smoke-hole in the straw roof. Barthel had been little more than a baby; the drugs had opened his earliest memories now, and they were eating him alive. Before the Bey had come to pick him up, he had heard his sisters' shrieks, his father's prayers to Allah, his mother's weeping. Had seen the dull flash of the sheep-knife lifted above the mud-brick partition.

With a strangled shout, Barthel drove the makeshift blade down toward the Ibisian.

Kiril heard a shout and the tearing of fabric. He sat up half awake and grunted a question.

Bar-Woten felt the resistance of flesh and the warmth of spilling blood but by then it was too late. He had reacted with the automatism of a scorpion's tail, had rolled from the point's arc and, not thinking who might be attacking, had thrown up the bedclothes, entangling the assailant. Drops of moisture — Barthel's tears — stung against his cheek. The shadow struck again and again, shrieking and kicking like an enraged child. Knowing with twenty years of combat experience where the weapon was, even in the dark, Bar-Woten grabbed the hand and turned the point inward, driving it home with a kick of his foot against the shattered wrist. The attacker had no chance and perhaps he had known that. With a quiet gasp he went down and whether there had been blood first, or the resistance of the flesh, the snap of bone or the tearing of cloth, there was no knowing. For Bar-Woten, still half-asleep, it was all muddled.

A light came on. Two guards stood sleepy-eyed in the cell's open doorway.

Bar-Woten looked down on his servant from where he lay on the cot. Barthel, tangled in bed-clothes, writhed on the floor, saliva and tears shining on his face and chin. He stared at Bar-Woten.

“Bey!” he said, his voice like a lamb's bleat. Bar-Woten got down on his knees beside the boy and hugged him, his one good eye still dry, but closed.

“They would have killed you,” he whispered in Ibisian. Barthel had pulled the point from his stomach and was trying ineffectually to shove it through the Ibisian's thick sailor's coat. Bar-Woten did not block the stabs; they didn't even draw blood. “I was mad from the carnage, and they were slaughtering infants. I could not stand by. I did not know they were your parents.”

The guards raised their rifles.

“No!” Kiril shouted. He leaped from his cot and stood before the two. Bar-Woten glanced up at his back, face impassive and white in the sudden glare.

One guard stepped forward and knocked Kiril aside, reaching down to remove the strip of metal from Barthel's grasp. He raised the butt of his rifle to drive back Bar-Woten, but the thin cloaked shadow of the demon hissed in the doorway. The guard stepped aside abruptly, as if stung, bloody point held up as evidence and excuse.

“You should never have left home, Bey,” Barthel said, his voice soft and quiet.

“Your pilgrim is still alive, Guest Excellency,” the guard said, pointing to Kiril. “By our quick action.”

Barthel's face wrinkled in final pain and ail the remaining tension left his body, Bar-Woten did not move until the guards pried the corpse from his arms.

Two of the thin, cloaked demons walked behind Kiril and Bar-Woten. On all sides, armed guards formed walls as the procession moved through a high-walled canyon of steel, glass and concrete. Hundreds of thousands of people watched from tiers of seats on each side of the boulevard. Paper streamers sizzled through the air and confetti fell in thick clouds, getting into their clothes, itching. Kiril vaguely heard the carnival cheers and the cries of “Pilgrim! Pilgrim! Find your way!”

Amplifiers mounted on light standards along the boulevard echoed a tinny refrain:

"Find your own way, make love to the Wall,

Be the clown who will learn,

The fool who might return ..."

Kiril couldn't make out the rest. It was a mummer's farce, and he was the central caricature, an unspectacular man accompanied by a silent soldier, both of them having come tens of thousands of kilometers to be paraded up this street of the sophisticated English-speakers, met with ridicule and ceremony, sent to the Wall like belled goats.

The demons were taking no chances. Both Bar-Woten and Kiril were accompanying them to the Wall. Kiril was the likely candidate, but who could completely riddle fairy tales, especially those of another species?

Kiril hated them all fiercely. He saw in the English-speakers all the concentrated disease and decay of the Second-born, their science and knowledge contributing little or nothing to remedy their lack of dignity and respect for their fellows.