“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” asked Hannah, who’d not left the infirmary even to change her bloody clothes. They’d treated her for slashes to her left shoulder and she’d never taken her eyes off Noman as the stitches and antiseptic were applied to her.
“Yes, I think so,” said Petyr. “He won’t survive.”
“Why is he still unconscious?” asked the young woman.
“I think that’s a result of the concussion he received,” said Harman, “not the claw wounds.” Harman wanted to curse at the simple fact that sigling a hundred volumes on neuroanatomy did not teach one how to actually open a skull and relieve pressure on the brain. If they tried it with their current rough instruments and almost nonexistent level of experience as surgeons, Noman would certainly die sooner than if they left things to nature’s way. Either way, Noman-Odysseus was going to die.
Ferman, who was the usual keeper of the infirmary and who had sigled more books on the subject than Harman, looked up from sharpening a saw and cleaver in case they decided to remove the arm. “We’ll have to decide soon about the arm,” he said softly and returned to working his whetstone.
Hannah turned to Petyr. “I heard him mumble a few times while you were carrying him but couldn’t hear what he said. Did it make any sense?”
“Not really. I couldn’t make most of it out. I think it was in the language the other Odysseus used in the turin drama…”
“Greek,” said Harman.
“Whatever,” said Petyr. “The couple of words I could make out in English weren’t important.”
“What were they?” asked Hannah.
“I’m sure he said something that ended in ‘gate.’ And then ‘crash’… I think. He was mumbling, I was panting loudly, and the guards on the wall were shouting. It was when we were approaching the north gate of the palisade, so he must have been saying ‘crash it’ if they don’t open it.”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” said Hannah.
“He was in pain and lapsing into coma,” said Petyr.
“Maybe,” said Harman. He left the infirmary, Ada still holding his arm, and began to pace through the manor house.
About fifty of Ardis’s population of four hundred were eating in the main dining room.
“You should eat,” said Harman, touching Ada’s stomach.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not yet.” In truth, the pain to Harman’s bad leg from the new slashes was bad enough to make him a little nauseated. Or perhaps it was the mental image of Noman lying there bleeding and dying.
“Hannah will be so upset,” whispered Ada.
Harman nodded distractedly. Something was gnawing at the subconscious and he was trying to let it have its way.
They went through the former grand ballroom where dozens of people were still working at long tables, applying bronze arrowheads to wooden shafts, then adding the prepared feathers, crafting spears, or carving bows. Many looked up and nodded as Ada and Harman went by. Harman led the way out back into the overheated blacksmithing annex where three men and two women were hammering bronze sword and knife blades, adding edges and sharpening on large whetstones. In the morning, Harman knew, this room would be insufferably hot as they carried in the molten metal from the next pour to be molded and hammered into shape. He paused to touch a sword blade and hilt that was finished except for the last of the leather to be wrapped around the hilt.
So crude, he thought. So unspeakably crude compared to the craft and artistry not only of Noman’s Circe sword—wherever that came from—but from the weapons in the old turin drama. And how sad that the first pieces of technology we old-style humans pour and cast and worry into a shape after two millennia or more are these rough weapons, their time come round again at last.
Reman came bursting into the blacksmith annex on the way to the main house.
“What is it?” said Ada.
“Voynix,” said Reman, who’d gone out to guard duty after finishing his chores in the kitchen. He was wet from the rain that had been falling since nightfall and his beard was icy. “A lot of voynix. More than I’ve ever seen at once.”
“Out of the woods yet?” asked Harman.
“Massing under the trees. But scores and scores of them.”
Outside, from the ramparts on all parts of the palisades the bells began to sound the alarm. The horns would blow if and when the voynix actually began their attack.
The dining hall emptied as men and women grabbed their coats and weapons and ran to their fighting stations on the walls, in the yard, and at windows, doorways, gables, porches, and balconies in the house itself.
Harman did not move. He let the running shapes flow around him like a river.
“Harman?” whispered Ada.
Turning against the current, he led her back into the infirmary where Noman lay dying. Hannah had pulled on her coat and found a lance, but seemed unable to leave Noman’s side. Petyr was half out the door but returned when Harman and Ada went in to stand by Noman’s bloodied cot.
“He didn’t say crash the gate,” whispered Harman. “He said Golden Gate. The crèche at Golden Gate.”
Outside, the horns began to blow.
26
Daeman knew that he should fax straight back to the Ardis node to report on what he’d seen, even if he had to make the mile-and-a-quarter-walk from the palisaded faxnode pavilion to Ardis Hall in the dark, but he couldn’t. As important as his news about the hole in the sky was, he wasn’t ready to go back.
He faxed to a previously unknown code he’d discovered when they were doing their node survey six months earlier, mapping out the four hundred and nine known nodes—hunting for survivors of the Fall—and looking for unnumbered destinations. This place was hot and in sunlight. The pavilion was on a knoll among palm trees stirring in soft breezes from the sea. Just down the hill began the beach—a white crescent almost encircling a lagoon so clear he could see the sandy bottom forty feet down out where the reef began. There were no people around, either old-style human or post-human, although Daeman had found the overgrown ruins of what had once been a pre–Final Fax city just inland on the north side of the crescent beach.
He’d seen no voynix in the dozen or so times he’d come here to sit and think. On one trip, some huge, legless, flippered saurian thing had risen out of the surf just beyond the reef, then crashed back into the water with a thirty-foot shark in its mouth, but other than that one disconcerting sighting, he’d seen nothing threatening here.
Now he trudged down to the beach, dropped his heavy crossbow onto the sand, and sat down next to it. The sun was hot. He pulled off his bulky backpack, anorak, and shirt. There was something hanging out of the pocket of his anorak and he pulled it out—the turin cloth from the table of skulls. He tossed it away on the sand. Daeman removed his shoes, trousers, and underwear and staggered naked toward the water’s edge, not even glancing toward the jungle’s edge to make sure he was alone.
My mother is dead. The fact hit him like a physical blow and he thought he might be sick again. Dead.
Daeman walked naked toward the surf. He stood at the edge of the lagoon and let the warm waves lap at his feet, move the sand from under his toes. Dead. He would never see his mother or hear her voice again. Never, never, never, never, never.