Yama guessed that this was from the Puranas, but Beatrice said that it was far older. “There are too few of us to remember everything left by the dead,” she said, “but we do what we can, and we are a long-lived race.”
There was much more to the tasks of the curators than preparation of their clients, and in the next two days Yama learned something about care of tombs and the preservation of the artifacts with which clients had been interred, each according to the customs of their bloodline. Osric and Beatrice fed him vegetable broths, baked roots and succulent young okra, corn and green beans fried in airy batter.
He was getting better, and was beginning to feel a restless curiosity.
He had not broken any bones, but his ribs were badly bruised and muscles in his back and arms had been torn. There were numerous half-healed cuts on his limbs and torso, too, and the fever had left him very weak, as if most of his blood had been drained.
Beatrice cleaned out the worst of his wounds; she explained that the stone dust embedded in them would otherwise leave scars. As soon as he could, Yama started to exercise, using the drills taught him by Sergeant Rhodean.
He practiced with the knife, too, mastering his instinctive revulsion. He handled it each day, as Osric had suggested, and otherwise left it on the ledge beneath the narrow window, where it would catch the midday sun. To begin with, he had to rest for an hour or more between each set of exercises, but he ate large amounts of the curators’ plain food and felt his strength return. At last, he was able to climb the winding stairs to the top of the hollow crag.
He had to stop and rest frequently, but finally stepped out of the door of a little hut into the open air under an achingly blue sky. The air was clean and cold, as heady as wine after the stuffy room in which he had lain for so long.
The hut was set at one end of the top of the crag, which was so flat that it might have been sheared off by someone wielding a gigantic blade. Possibly this was more or less what had been done, for during the construction of Confluence, long before the Preservers had abandoned the ten thousand bloodlines, energies had been deployed to move whole mountains and shape entire landscapes as easily as a gardener might set out a bed of flowers.
The flat top of the crag was no bigger than the Great Hall of the peel-house, and divided into tiny fields by low drystone walls. There were plots of squash and yams, corn and kale and cane fruits. Little paths wandered between these plots, and there was a complicated system of cisterns and gutters to provide a constant supply of water to the crops. At the far end, Beatrice and Osric were feeding doves which fluttered around a round-topped dovecote built of unmortared stone.
The crag stood at the edge of a winding ridge above a gorge so deep that its bottom was lost in shadow. Other flat-topped crags stood along the ridge, their smooth sides fretted with windows and balconies. There was a scattering of tombs on broad ledges cut into the white rock of the gorge’s steep sides, huge buildings with blind, whitewashed walls under pitched roofs of red tile that stood amidst manicured lawns and groves of tall trees. Beyond the far side of the gorge, other ridges stepped up toward the sky, and beyond the farthest ridge the peaks of the Rim Mountains seemed to float free above indistinct blue and purple masses, shining in the light of the sun.
Yama threaded the winding paths to the little patch of grass where Beatrice and Osric were scattering grain. Doves rose up in a whir of white wings as he approached. Osric raised a hand in greeting and said, “This is the valley of the kings of the first days. Some maintain that Preservers are buried here, but if that is true, the location is hidden from us.”
“It must be a lot of work, looking after these tombs.”
The mirror lenses of Osric’s spectacles flashed light at Yama. “They maintain themselves,” the old man said, “and there are mechanisms which prevent people from approaching too closely. It was once our job to keep people away for their own good, but only those who know this place come here now.”
“Few know of it,” Beatrice added, “and fewer come.”
She held out a long, skinny arm. A dove immediately perched on her hand, and she drew it to her breast and stroked its head with a bony forefinger until it began to coo.
Yama said, “I was brought a long way.”
Osric nodded. His wispy beard blew sideways in the wind. “The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead once maintained a city that stretched from these mountains to the river, a day’s hard ride distant. Whoever brought you here had a good reason.”
Beatrice suddenly flung out her hands. The dove rose into the wind and circled high above the patchwork of tiny fields.
She watched it for a minute and then said, “I think it’s time we showed Yama why he was brought here.”
“I would like to know who brought me here, to begin with.”
“As long as you do not know who saved you,” Osric said, “there is no obligation.”
Yama nodded, remembering that after he had saved Caphis from the trap, the fisherman had said that his life was forever in Yama’s care. He said, “Perhaps I could at least know the circumstances.”
“Something had taken one of our goats,” Beatrice said. “It was in a field far below. We went to look for her, and found you. It is better if you see for yourself why you have been brought here. Then you’ll understand. Having climbed so high, you must descend. I think that you are strong enough.”
Descending the long spiral of stairs was easier than climbing up, but Yama felt that if not for him, Osric and Beatrice would have bounded away eagerly, although he was so much younger than they. The stairs ended at a balcony that girdled the crag halfway between its flat top and its base. A series of arched doorways opened off the balcony, and Osric immediately disappeared through one. Yama would have followed, but Beatrice took his arm and guided him to a stone bench by the low wall of the balcony. Sunlight drenched the ancient stone; Yama was grateful for its warmth.
“There were a hundred thousand of us, once,” Beatrice said, “but we are greatly reduced. This is the oldest part of all that still lies within our care, and it will be the last to fall. It will fall eventually, of course. All of Confluence will fall.”
Yama said, “You sound like those who say that the war at the midpoint of the world may be the war at the end of all things.”
Sergeant Rhodean had taught Yama and Telmon the major battles, scratching the lines of the armies and the routes of their long marches in the red clay floor of the gymnasium.
Beatrice said, “When there is a war, everyone believes that it will end in a victory that will bring an end to all conflict, but in a series of events there is no way of determining which is to be the last.”
Yama said stoutly, “The heretics will be defeated because they challenge the word of the Preservers. The Ancients of Days revived much old technology which their followers use against us, but they were lesser creatures than the Preservers because they were the distant ancestors of the Preservers. How can a lesser idea prevail against a greater one?”
“I forget that you are young,” Beatrice said, smiling. “You still have hope. But Osric has hope, too, and he is a wise man. Not that the world will not end, for that is certain, but that it will end well. The Great River fails day by day, and at last all that my people care for will fall away.”
“With respect, perhaps you and your husband live for the past, yet I live for the future.”
Beatrice smiled. “Ah, but which future, I wonder? Osric suspects that there might be more than one. As for us, it is our duty to preserve the past to inform the future, and this place is where the past is strongest. There are wonders interred here which could end the war in an instant if wielded by one side, or destroy Confluence, if used by both against each other.”