Yama said, “If my father told you to give me this book, then how is it that he does not know he owns it?”
“I asked if I could give you a volume of the Puranas, and so I have. But this edition is very old, and differs in some details from that which I have taught you. It is an edition that has long been suppressed, and perhaps this is the only copy of that edition which now exists.”
“It is different?”
“In some parts. You must read it all to find out, and remember what I have taught you. So perhaps my teachings will continue, in some fashion. Or you could simply look at the pictures. Modern editions do not, of course, have pictures.”
Yama, who had been tilting the pages of the book to the light as he turned them, suddenly felt a shock of recognition.
There in the margin of one of the last pages was the view he had glimpsed behind the face of his ancestor, of stars streaming inwards toward a dull glow.
He said, “I will read it, Zakiel. I promise.”
For a moment Zakiel stared at Yama in silence, his black eyes inscrutable beneath the bony shelf of his brow. Then the librarian smiled and clapped dust from his big, bony hands. “Very good, master. Very good. Now we will drink some tea, and talk on the history of the department of which, when you reach Ys, you will be the newest and youngest member.”
“With respect, Zakiel, I am sure that the history of the department will be the first thing I will be taught when I arrive in Ys, and no doubt the clerk will have some words on it during our journey.”
“I do not think that Prefect Corin is a man who wastes words,” Zakiel said. “And he does not see himself as a teacher.”
“My father would have you occupy my mind. I understand. Well then, I would like to hear something—of the history of another department. One that was broken up a long time ago. Is that possible?”
Chapter Twelve
The Execution
After sunset, Yama climbed to the heliograph platform that circled the top of the tallest of the peel-house’s towers. He uncapped the observation telescope and, turning it on the heavy steel gimbals which floated in sealed oil baths, lined up its declinational and equatorial axes in a combination he knew as well as his own name.
Beyond the darkening vanishing point, the tops of the towers that rose up from the heart of Ys shone in the last light of the sun like a cluster of fiery needles floating high above the world, higher than the naked peaks of the Rim Mountains. Ys! In his room, Yama had spent a little time gazing at his old map before reluctantly rolling it up and putting it away. He had traced the roads that crossed the barrens of the coastal plains, the passes through the mountains that embraced the city. He vowed now that in a handful of days he would stand at the base of the towers as a free man.
When he put up the telescope and leaned at the rail, with warm air gusting around him, he saw prickles of light flickering in the middle distance. Messages. The air was full of messages, talking of war, of faraway battles and sieges at the midpoint of the world.
Yama walked to the other side of the tower and stared out across the wide shallow valley of the Breas toward Aeolis, and saw with a little shock that the execution pyre had already been kindled. The point of light flickered like a baleful star fallen to the ground outside the wall of the little city.
“They would have killed me,” he said, trying out the words, “if there was money in it.”
Yama watched for a long time, until the distant fire began to dim and was outshone by the ordinary lights of the city.
Lob and the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns were dead. The Aedile and the colorless man, the clerk, Prefect Corin, would be in grave procession toward the temple, led by Father Quine and flanked by Sergeant Rhodean’s men in polished black armor.
His supper had been set out in his room, but he left it and went down to the kitchen and, armored by his new authority, hacked a wedge from a wheel of cheese and took a melon, a bottle of yellow wine, and one of the heavy date loaves that had been baked that morning. He cut through the kitchen gardens, fooled the watchdogs for the last time, and walked along the high road before plunging down the steep slope of the bluff and following the paths along the tops of the dikes which divided the flooded paeonin fields.
The clear, shallow Breas made a rushing noise in the darkness as it ran swiftly over the flat rocks of its bed. At the waterlift, two oxen plodded side by side around their circle, harnessed to the trimmed trunk of a young pine. This spar turned the shaft that, groaning as if in protest at its eternal torment, lifted a chain of buckets from the river and tipped them in a never-ending cascade into the channels which fed the irrigation system of the paeonin fields. The oxen walked in their circle under a roof of palm fronds, their tails rhythmically slapping their dung-spattered flanks. Now and then they snatched a mouthful of the fodder scattered around the perimeter of their circular path, but mostly they walked with their heads down, from nowhere to nowhere.
No, Yama thought, I will not serve.
He sat on an upturned stone a little distance off the path and ate meltingly sweet slices of melon while he waited. The oxen plodded around and around, turning the groaning shaft. Frogs peeped in the paeonin fields. Beyond the city, at the mouth of the Breas, the misty light of the Arm of the Warrior was lifting above the far-side horizon. It would rise a little later each night, a little farther downriver. Soon it would not rise at all, and the Eye of the Preservers would appear above the upriver vanishing point, and it would be summer. But before then Yama would be in Ys.
Two people were coming along the path, shadows moving through the Galaxy’s blue twilight. Yama waited until they had gone past before he whistled sharply.
“We thought you might not be here,” Ananda said as he walked up to where Yama sat.
“Well met,” Derev said, at Ananda’s shoulder. The Galaxy put blue shadows in the unbound mass of her white hair and a spark in each of her large, dark eyes. “Oh, well met, Yama!”
She rushed forward and hugged him. Her light-boned body, her long slim arms and legs, her heat, her scent. Yama was always surprised to discover that Derev was taller than himself. Despite the cold certainty he had nursed ever since Ananda’s remark about Lob’s drunken spree, his love rekindled in her embrace. It was an effort not to respond, and he hated himself because it seemed a worse betrayal than anything she might have done.
Derev drew back a little and said, “What’s wrong?”
Yama said, “I am glad you came. There is something I want to ask you.”
Derev smiled and moved her arms in a graceful circle, making the wide sleeves of her white dress floatingly glimmer in the half-dark. “Anything! As long, of course, as I can hear your story. All of it, not just the highlights.”
Ananda found the wedge of cheese and began to pare slices from it. “I’ve been fasting,” he explained. “Water for breakfast, water for lunch.”
“And pistachios,” Yama said.
“I never said I would make a good priest. I am supposed to be cleaning out the narthex while Father Quine dines with the Aedile and Prefect Corin. This is a strange place to meet, Yama.”
“There was something Dr. Dismas once said to me, about the habits we fall into. I wanted to be reminded of it.”
Derev said, “But you are all right. You have recovered from your adventures.”
“I learned much from them.”
“And you will tell all,” Ananda said. He handed around slices of bread and cheese, and pried the cork out of the wine bottle with his little knife. “I think,” he said, “that you should start at the beginning.”