"Petrel-tzin!" Hadeishi was alarmed. "Shouldn't part of the regiment be held in reserve at Sobipurй? What if there is a general uprising?"
But the Legate and Yacatolli heard only, shouldn't the regiment be held at Sobipurй against a general uprising?
"Such an event is quite unlikely, Chu-sa Hadeishi," Petrel started to say, but Yacatolli's response drowned his out.
"We needn't hide! A single arrow of my men could smash an entire division of slick cavalry – riding lizards, lances and all – much less these mobs of spearmen in quilted armor. We'll hold a proper reserve in case they spring something surprising on us – but otherwise, I can have ready-reaction teams in every provincial center within the week."
But the Chu-sa heard nothing of a reserve, only ready-reaction teams in every provincial center within the week. Yacatolli's intransigence was clear and easy to read in his face.
Hadeishi hid a grimace and raised his hands in acceptance. "Very well."
"Good." Petrel made a quiet, personal decision not to talk to both military commanders at the same time again. "It's settled. Good day, gentlemen."
The three v-panes flickered dark. Itzpalicue felt something like a physical shock, coming out of the elevated state of awareness induced by carefully applied pain and the oliohuiqui coursing through her system. A trembling hand brushed across the displays and the whole system began to shut down.
Beneath the bed, her two comps returned their attention to scanning and filtering the wireless voice traffic flooding the air over Parus. The old Mйxica woman had set them to winnowing the chatter for hints and signs of her hidden enemy.
She slumped back on the bed, staring at the shadowy ceiling, exhausted and spent.
Her back teeth were humming.
For a moment, she felt young again.
Up-River The Parus-Takshila Rail Line
A jarring bump woke Gretchen from a heat-induced doze and she looked around, momentarily disoriented, feeling the usual swaying motion of the train replaced by a clattering roar. The compartment shook, grit spilling from the lacquered ceiling, and across from her, Maggie hissed in annoyance. The Hesht shook her latest paperback in the air, shedding a cloud of dust to sparkle in the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the passageway door. Parker, his shoulder jammed in between the window-frame and the leather-backed seat, continued to snore.
Yawning, Anderssen stretched and peered out through a grimy, soot-stained pane of glass. The daily express train from Parus to the northern cities was rattling across a wooden trestle bridge under a placid cerulean sky. A vast brown flood rolled past under the girders and ceramic rails – at this point, the Yellow Phison was nearly a mile wide – curling around ancient stone buttresses. She could see debris caught in the current below; brush, something like a dead cow with six horns – a molk according to the flora and fauna booklet – cellophane bags, drifts of river weed.
The train passed unexpectedly into shadow and Gretchen looked up. For a moment, her eyes had trouble focusing on the size of the edifice blocking out the sky and then she gasped aloud.
"Hunt-sister?" Magdalena put down her malinche and leaned across Parker. A glossy black paw swiped at the window, clearing away a decade's accumulation of sweat-oil and scale-shell. "What…hssst! Builders of the Ark of the Fathers!"
An enormous gleaming arch supporting a flat 'crossbar' rose from the middle of the river. Brown water surged around leviathan pillars. Blue-green moss clung tenaciously to a surface shimmering like abalone shell. The railway bridge ran straight as an arrow under the vault, passing slightly closer to the eastern buttress. Gretchen craned her neck, staring up, and guessed the flat top of the arch was nearly four hundred meters high and six hundred from end to end. The 'crossbar' flared out in a jagged lip. The obviously shattered edges were in striking contrast to the smooth, elegant proportions of the rest of the mammoth structure.
What could have broken off? Everything else seems so sturdy…
The part of her mind which could puzzle out the surviving fragments of a broken Tcho-Tcho pot from the midden debris of a late Khmer burial site stirred. She looked east and then west, staring at the banks of the river. A cold chill washed over her and she flinched away from the window. Far in the distance, on the northern horizon, a long blue smudge marked the rampart of the low hills ringing the city of Takshila.
"Hrrrr…" Magdalena paged through her guidebook. "Ah! The 'Arch of the Risen Dawn,' " she rumbled in her deep voice, "the largest standing remnant of the Haraphan civilization which once ruled all of Jagan, nearly a million years ago. Huh – doesn't say what it was…"
Gretchen swallowed, staring at the lumpy hills in the distance. All the land they'd passed through since leaving Parus was depressingly flat farmland, lined with tiny roads and hedges of dusty blue-gray brush. Every few kilometers, the whitewashed buildings of a village – each sitting atop a substantial hill – broke the monotony. The fields spiraled out from the villages, following shallow canals cut through brick-red soil.
"It was a bridge." Her voice sounded strange, as if it rang from a great distance.
Magdalena's ears twitched back and she made a disbelieving sound.
"Once," Anderssen said, rubbing her thumb against the dirty glass, "it vaulted a swift white river plunging through a rocky gorge or steep hills. The Haraphan builders drove the pillars into the sides of the canyon and laid their road atop…" She peered outside, but the train had rattled on, leaving the slow muddy river behind. "The roadway is gone, shattered as the land wore away, carried down to the sea by the waters of the Phison, or torn up for building material. Only the bridge itself remains – the Haraphan engineers built to last."
Maggie closed her guidebook, nostrils flared. Her hackles were stiffening. "Eeee… can…can the land change so much, in this million years?"
Gretchen nodded, still cold, and she shrank into her seat, tugging the field jacket around her. The dusty, hot compartment now seemed small and sad and terribly fragile. A queer sensation of weight – building in her thoughts since they'd climbed the endless flights of stairs up to that first horrible little hotel room in Parus – now settled fully on her.
Everything is ground down here by age, even the land. Everything. Leaving nothing but finely ground dust. What I'll be, soon enough… Anderssen felt terribly sad – not for the Haraphans, so obviously wiped away by the inexorable progress of history – but for herself, knowing Duncan, Tristan and Isabelle would be unrecognizable when she saw them again. And how much longer will my mother live? She's not young, not anymore… Is this artifact worth anything?
Parker continued to snore, his mouth slightly open. Gretchen hugged the jacket tighter. She had a sinking feeling the kalpataru would be nothing more than a can full of rust.
"Here isss room." The Jehanan rental agent inserted a cross-shaped key into a lock at the center of a hexagonal portal. Gretchen stepped through the opened door, duffel bag dragging from her shoulder, and stared around at a long, empty chamber. Soot-stained windows lined the northern wall, looking out over the jumble of Takshila and its seventeen hills. The floors had once been lacquered wooden parquet, but years of wear had left some sections black and others an eroded white.
"There isss cleaning deposit," hissed the rental agent's voice through Magdalena's translator. The slick showed a mouth full of pinlike teeth. "For asuchau. Very dirty."