“The living bury the dead and move on, and forget. We remember. Above all, that is our duty. There are record keepers in Ys who claim to be able to trace the bloodlines of Confluence back to their first members. My family preserves the tombs of those ancestors, their bodies and their artifacts. The record keepers would claim that words are stronger than the phenomena they describe, and that only words endure while all else fails, but we know that even words change. Stories are mutable, and in any story each generation finds a different lesson, and with each telling a story changes slightly until it is no longer the thing it was. The king who prevails against the hero who would have brought redeeming light to the world becomes after many tellings of the story a hero saving the world from fire, and the light-bringer becomes a fiend. Only things remain what they are. They are themselves. Words are merely representations of things; but we have the things themselves. How much more powerful they are than their representations!”
Yama thought of the Aedile, who put so much trust in the objects that the soil preserved. He said, “My father seeks to understand the past by the wreckage it leaves behind. Perhaps it is not the stories that change but the past itself, for all that lives of the past is the meaning we invest in what remains.”
Behind him, Osric said, “You have been taught by a record keeper. That is just what one of those beetle-browed nearsighted bookworms would say, bless them all, each and every one. Well, there is more of the past than can be found in books. That is a lesson I had to learn over and over, young man. All that is ordinary and human passes away without record, and all that remains are stories of priests and philosophers, heroes and kings. Much is made of the altar stones and sacraria of temples, but nothing of the cloisters where lovers rendezvoused and friends gossiped, and the courtyards where children played. That is the false lesson of history. Still, we can peer into random scenes of the past and wonder at their import. That is what I have brought you.”
Osric carried something square and flat under his arm, covered with a white cloth. He removed the cloth with a flourish, revealing a thin rectangle of milky stone which he laid in a pool of sunlight on the tiled floor of the balcony.
Yama said, “My father collects these picture slates, but this one appears blank.”
“He collected them for important research, perhaps,” Osric said, “but I am sorry to hear of, it. Their proper resting place is not in a collection, but in the tomb in which they were installed.”
“I have always wondered why they need to drink sunlight to work, when they were buried away in darkness.”
“The tombs drink sunlight, too,” Osric said, “and distribute it amongst their components according to need. The pictures respond to the heat given off by a living body, and in the darkness of the tomb would waken in the presence of any watcher. Outside the tomb, without their usual power source, the pictures also require sunlight.”
“Be quiet, husband,” Beatrice said. “It wakens. Watch it, Yama, and learn. This is all we can show you.”
Colors mingled and ran in the slate, seeming to swirl just beneath its surface. At first they were faint and amorphous, little more than pastel flows within the slate’s milky depths, but gradually they brightened, running together in a sudden silvery flash.
For a moment, Yama thought that the slate had turned into a mirror, reflecting his own eager face. But when he leaned closer, the face within the slate turned as if to speak to someone beyond the frame of the picture, and he saw that it was the face of someone older than he was, a man with lines at the corners of his eyes and grooves at either side of his mouth. But the shape of the eyes and their round blue irises, and the shape of the face, the pale skin and the mop of wiry black hair: all these were so very like his own that he cried out in astonishment.
The man in the picture was talking now, and suddenly smiled at someone beyond the picture’s frame, a frank, eager smile that turned Yama’s heart. The man turned away and the view slid from his face to show the night sky. It was not the sky of Confluence, for it was full of stars, scattered like diamond chips carelessly thrown across black velvet. There was a frozen swirl of dull red light in the center of the picture, and Yama saw that the stars around it seemed to be drawn into lines that curved in toward the red swirl. Stars streaked as the viewpoint of the picture moved, and for a moment it steadied on a flock of splinters of light hung against pure black, and then it faded.
Osric wrapped the white cloth around the slate. Immediately Yama wanted to strip the cloth away and see the picture blossom within the slate again, wanted to feast on the stranger’s face, the stranger who was of his bloodline, wanted to understand the strange skies under which his long-dead ancestor had stood. His blood sang in his ears.
Beatrice handed him a square of lace-trimmed cloth. A handkerchief. Yama realized then that he was weeping.
Osric said, “This is the place where the oldest tombs on Confluence can be found, but the picture is older than anything on Confluence, for it is older than Confluence itself. It shows the first stage in the construction of the Eye of the Preservers, and it shows the lands which the Preservers walked before they fell into the Eye and vanished into the deep past or the deep future, or perhaps into another universe entirely.”
“I would like to see the tomb. I want to see where you found this picture.”
Osric said, “The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead has kept the picture a long time, and if it once rested in a tomb, then it was so long ago that all records of that tomb are lost. Your bloodline walked Confluence at its beginning, and now it walks it again.”
Yama said, “This is the second time that someone has hinted that I have a mysterious destiny, but no one will explain why or what it is.”
Beatrice told her husband, “He’ll discover it soon enough. We should not tell him more.”
Osric tugged at his beard. “I do not know everything. What the hollow man said, for instance, or what lies beyond the end of the river. I have tried to remember it all over again, and I cannot!”
Beatrice took her husband’s hands in her own and told Yama, “He was hurt, and sometimes gets confused about what might happen and what has happened. Remember the slate. It’s important.”
Yama said, “I know less than you. Let me see the slate again. Perhaps there is something—”
Beatrice said, “Perhaps it is your destiny to discover your past, dear. Only by knowing the past can you know yourself.”
Yama smiled, because that was precisely the motto which Zakiel used to justify his long lessons. It seemed to him that the curators of the dead and the librarians and archivists were so similar that they amplified slight differences into a deadly rivalry, just as brothers feuded over nothing at all simply to assert their individuality.
“You have seen all we can show you, Yama,” Osric said. “We preserve the past as best we can, but we do not pretend to understand everything we preserve.”
Yama said formally, “I thank you for showing me this wonder.” But he thought that it proved only that others like him had lived long ago—he was more concerned with discovering if they still lived now. Surely they must—he was proof of that—but where? What had Dr. Dismas discovered in the archives of his department?
Beatrice stood with a graceful flowing motion. “You cannot stay, Yama. You are a catalyst, and change is most dangerous here.”
Yama said, “If you would show me the way, I would go home at once.”