Yama and Telmon were supposed to be taught the Summalae Logicales, the Puranas and the Protocols of the Department, but mostly they listened to Zakiel read passages from selected works of natural philosophy before engaging in long, formal discussions. Yama first learned to read upside-down by watching Zakiel’s long, ink-stained forefinger tracking glyphs from right to left while listening to the librarian recite in a singsong voice, and later had to learn to read all over again, this time the right away up, to be able to recite in his turn. Yama and Telmon had most of the major verses of the Puranas by heart, and were guided by Zakiel to read extensively in chrestomathies and incunabulae, but while Telmon dutifully followed the program Zakiel set out, Yama preferred to idle time away dreaming over bestiaries, prosopographies and maps—most especially maps.
Yama stole many books from the library. Taking them was a way of possessing the ideas and wonders they contained, as if he might, piece by piece, seize the whole world. Zakiel retrieved most of the books from various hiding places in the house or the ruins in its grounds, using a craft more subtle than the tracking skills of either Telmon or Sergeant Rhodean, but one thing Yama managed to retain was a map of the inhabited half of the world. The map’s scroll was the width of his hand and almost twice the length of his body, wound on a resin spindle decorated with tiny figures of a thousand bloodlines frozen in representative poses. The map was printed on a material finer than silk and stronger than steel. At one edge were the purple and brown and white ridges of the Rim Mountains; at the other was the blue ribbon of the Great River, with a narrow unmarked margin at its far shore. Yama knew that there were many shrines and monuments to pillar saints on the far-side shore—he visited some of them each year, when the whole city crossed the Great River to celebrate with fireworks and feasting the rise of the Galaxy at the beginning of winter—and he wondered why the map did not show them. For there was so much detail crammed into the map elsewhere. Between the Great River and the Rim Mountains was the long strip of inhabited land, marked with green plains and lesser mountain ranges and chains of lakes and ochre deserts. Most cities were scattered along the Great River’s nearside shore, a thousand or more which lit up with their names when Yama touched them. The greatest of them all stood below the head of the Great River: Ys, a vast blot spread beyond the braided delta where the river gathered its strength from the glaciers and ice-fields which buried all but the peaks of the Terminal Mountains.
When the map had been made, Ys had been at the height of its glory, and its intricate grids of streets and parks and temples stretched from the shore of the Great River to the foothills and canyons at the edge of the Rim Mountains. A disc of plain glass, attached to the spindle of the map by a reel of wire, revealed details of these streets. By squeezing the edges of the disc, the magnification could be adjusted to show individual buildings, and Yama spent long hours gazing at the crowded rooftops, imagining himself smaller than a speck of dust and able to wander the ancient streets of a more innocent age.
More and more, as he came into manhood, Yama was growing restless. He dreamed of searching for his bloodline.
Perhaps they were a high-born and fabulously wealthy clan, or a crew of fierce adventurers who had sailed their ships downstream to the midpoint of the world and the end of the Great River, and fallen from the edge and gone adventuring amongst the floating islands; or perhaps they belonged to a coven of wizards with magic powers, and those same powers lay slumbering within him, waiting to be awakened. Yama elaborated enormously complicated stories around his imagined bloodline, some of which Telmon listened to patiently in the watches of the night, when they were camped amongst the tombs of the City of the Dead.
“Never lose your imagination, Yama,” Telmon told him. “Whatever you are, wherever you come from, that is your most important gift. But you must observe the world, too, learn how to read and remember its every detail, celebrate its hills and forests and deserts and mountains, the Great River and the thousands of rivers that run into it, the thousand cities and the ten thousand bloodlines. I know how much you love that old map, but you must live in the world as it is to really know it. Do that, and think how rich and wild and strange your stories will become. They will make you famous, I know it.”
This was at the end of the last winter Telmon had spent at home, a few days before he took his muster to war. He and Yama were on the high moors three days’ ride inland, chasing the rumor of a dragon. Low clouds raced toward the Great River ahead of a cold wind, and a freezing rain, gritty with flecks of ice, blew in their faces as they walked at point with a straggling line of beaters on either side. The moors stretched away under the racing clouds, hummocky and drenched, grown over with dense stands of waist-high bracken and purple islands of springy heather, slashed with fast-running peaty streams and dotted with stands of wind-blasted juniper and cypress and bright green domes of bog moss. Yama and Telmon were walking because horses were driven mad by the mere scent of a dragon. They wore canvas trousers and long oilcloth slickers over down-lined jackets, and carried heavy carbon-fiber bows which stuck up behind their heads, and quivers of long arrows with sharply tapered ceramic heads. They were soaked and wind-blasted and utterly exhilarated.
“I will go with you,” Yama said. “I will go to war, and fight by your side and write an epic about our adventures that will ring down the ages!”
Telmon laughed. “I doubt that I will see any fighting at all!”
“Your muster will do the town honor, Tel, I know it.”
“At least they can drill well enough, but I hope that is all they will need to do.”
After the Aedile had received the order to supply a muster of a hundred troops to contribute to the war effort, Telmon had chosen the men himself, mostly younger sons who had little chance of establishing a harem. With the help of Sergeant Rhodean, Telmon had drilled them for sixty days; in three more, the ship would arrive to take them downriver to the war.
Telmon said, “I want to bring them back safely, Yama. I will lead them into the fighting if I am ordered, but they are set down for working on the supply lines, and I will be content with that. For every man or woman fighting the heretics face to face, there are ten who bring up supplies, and build defenses, or tend the wounded or bury the dead. That is why the muster has been raised in every village and town and city. The war needs support troops as desperately as it needs fighting men.”
“I will go as an irregular. We can fight together, Tel.”
“You will look after our father, first of all. And then there is Derev.”
“She would not mind. And it is not as if—”
Telmon understood. He said, “There are plenty of metic marriages, if it does become that serious.”
“I think it might be, Tel. But I will not get married before you return, and I will not get married before I have had my chance to fight in the war.”
“I’m sure you will get your chance, if that is what you want. But be sure that you really want it.”
“Do you think the heretics really fight with magic?”
“They probably have technology given to them by the Ancients of Days. It might seem like magic, but that is only because we do not understand it. But we have right on our side, Yama. We are fighting with the will of the Preservers in our hearts. It is better than any magic.”