“They will not report back. Whoever leaves the Kalpa must never return, for reasons good enough and simple.”
“But you keep sending usout there,” Tiadba said.
“Higher minds than mine made these plans, and I suppose we’re all committed, whatever the consequences. You feel your instincts, I do my duty.” He stood. “If any of my outposters are still out there, and still free, they might help—they might not. You have to exercise the same caution you would with anything else in the Chaos.”
Perf looked back at the Tiers, lost in mist beyond the edge of the camp. Macht put his hands together, murmuring a song of calming.
Pahtun’s face smoothed and took on a distant look. “I do believe this, because I must: if any of you succeed, a greatness will be accomplished, something that may make all the long sacrifices of your kind worthwhile.”
“The old pede-kicker is resting.”
Khren, stocky and quiet-footed, approached Tiadba. She turned and looked him over critically. She had been feeling miserable again. Not his fault, of course, but Khren and his friends were no substitute for her warrior, foolish as he might have been at times.
“We have a moment,” he said gently, aware of her mood. Macht and Perf joined him.
“Please read some more from the books,” Perf said. “Teach us.”
Grayne’s shake cloth and the old letterbugs could not guide her now. She had to riddle the words on her own, but she had become better at that. What she read, she tried to convey and explain to the others. She was sure this was what Grayne had intended. Strange that she could no longer remember Grayne’s face or the music of her gentle, insistent voice. Jebrassy she remembered clearly. Others gathered: Denbord, Nico, and Shewel, carrying their mats. They had come to prefer sleeping in the open, under the dark arches, rather than inside the flimsy tents, which flapped in the tweenlight breezes and worried them.
Tiadba sat and opened one of the books. The breeds’ favorite passages tended to be about Sangmer the Pilgrim and Ishanaxade, the Librarian’s daughter, but the stories were seldom the same, a peculiarity that didn’t matter much to her audience.
Of necessity, she skipped or paraphrased parts with which she had difficulty, and many of the words were still obscure, but reading them over and over again was like seeing them with more experienced eyes, and she took away more meaning each time.
Other passages, spread throughout the text like chafe-seeds in a cake, still stumped them. Some were lists of instructions, go here and dothis, thenthat—word-maps, Tiadba called them—and sometimes she read these for their calming effect just before the Tall Ones extinguished the lamps for sleep. This time she chose a more familiar text while the breeds curled at her feet, staring out into the shadows.
“‘The story I tell is simple,’” Tiadba began, and her eyes filled, remembering the times with Jebrassy, just a few wakes past.
Once, half an eternity ago, the glorious new sun—so-named, despite its having burned for ten trillion years—was almost surrounded by the Typhon Chaos. Five worlds remained, and on Earth, twelve cities, homes to those gathered from around the cosmos after a long and wretched decline. Greatest and most ancient of these cities was the Kalpa, and wisest, for this city constantly made preparations against the time when the Chaos would swallow even the new sun. Defeat was imminent, many thought.
The greatest human of the age was a Deva called Polybiblios. He had traveled to the final far end of the aging cosmos, to live and study in the glow of the sixty suns of the Shen, a great civilization about to be absorbed by the Chaos.
The City Princes of Earth promised a rich prize if someone would go to those last far places and persuade Polybiblios to return. For as absorbed as he was in his learning, and almost walled in by regions filled with traps and snares, he could not by himself make the journey back to Earth. The first to volunteer was the young Mender called Sangmer, already renowned and beloved for his many exploits and rare courage.
Sangmer gathered a crew and revived the Earth’s last great galaxy ship. With his crew—selected for strength, courage, and wit—he journeyed along the single open course to that final far corner of the universe.
In all their adventures—and many they were, strange and difficult—only ten survived, including Sangmer, to return with Polybiblios. The Chaos raged and consumed and did its deadly dazzle, and many times nearly took their vessel—for none is so persistent and perverse as the Typhon, some say, and others, none so unlikely and difficult to plan against.
Sangmer also brought to Earth Polybiblios’s mysterious adopted daughter, who most agree was less human than the Shen—though her form was very pleasing.
She had taken the name Ishanaxade—born of all stories—and espoused the Deva gens of her father. Back on Earth, they were welcomed by the City Princes and there was great rejoicing, yet funeral rites occupied many families, who mourned their lost youths.
Polybiblios began his work in the high tower over the First Bion of the Kalpa, and using his Shen knowledge, soon helped design and forge the Suspension that protected the new sun, and kept the Chaos at bay for a time.
Sangmer did not sit idly, but continued with his restless ways, making other voyages and studying, measuring, and defying the Chaos, all of which heightened his fame—though these journeys consumed many more sons and daughters of fine families.
So many youths perished that Sangmer the Pilgrim also became known as Killer of Dreams, a title he did not bear proudly, and so, he promised to go into deep exile within the Sessiles, and not to return until he had studied Silence for an age.
Ishanaxade emerged from among the curious that lined the ribbon road to witness his penitent journey, and stood before him where he bore up under the discs of memory of his thousand lost comrades, which nearly bent him double.
None was so wonderfully fashioned as Ishanaxade, but that is not why to this day her images are forbidden or erased; none so beautiful in her father’s eyes, nor in the eyes of the curious who watched her partake of Sangmer’s burden, and help carry the discs to the door of the Sessiles, where Silence is peace.
Some say that it was in the Sessiles that their lines first twined and grew together. Others say their love began on the journey back from the realm of the Shen. No one objected that a Mender should take to wife Ishanaxade, for few dared displease Polybiblios, who had saved the last of humanity, and who sanctioned this union.
Upon their emerging from Silence, Polybiblios assigned them many great works to do, together and apart.
So it was, so it will be.
Tiadba closed the book and the young breeds curled up tighter. Somehow, the story had changed since the last time she read it—details were different, or their ears had become more sophisticated.
“It’s not a happy story, is it?” Khren said.
“We’re all going to die out there,” Nico asserted gloomily. “I don’t understand, but I still want to go. That’s total frass.”
Suddenly, through her exhaustion, Tiadba felt a sudden urge to speak of Jebrassy, to shout at them—that he was notdead, and would somehow be joining them, and that his presence would make this march different from all the others…But she turned her eyes to one side and fell back a little, doubting her companions would believe or take comfort.
“Let’s sleep,” she suggested.
The young breeds blew out their cheeks and pulled up their sleep mats under the high dark arches.
CHAPTER 60
Wallingford
At first the squat, hard-packed old man in the tweed suit refused to tell Daniel his name. He could act aloof, then turn gruffly assertive, as if he had always lived alone but was used to being in charge. His accent was difficult to place: English, like cockney, but Daniel was no expert. Together, they had built up their courage and abandoned the house, leaving Whitlow on his chair, locked in jerky rigor—and now something like sunrise was spreading all around, a burning pewter light painted over the streets. The neighborhood to the north resembled a pasted-up collage, bands of light and shadow lying over dark, forbidding houses. The people left on the streets seemed intent on getting somewhere but were being given a very brief time to do it—and worse, they were doing it over and over. A few seemed to vaguely recognize their plight—like insects caught in congealing resin, all except Daniel and the squat brute, and how long could their freedom last?