Chaka didn’t miss the obvious: A large group would pass without seeing the toll collector.
They received an invitation to stay to dinner. “Always like to have company,” the woman said. But it seemed safer to move on, and so Chaka explained they were on a tight schedule. Flojian almost fell off his horse trying not to laugh.
As they rode away, Jeryk warned them once more to be on the lookout for brigands. “Can’t be too careful these days,” he said.
The countryside broke up into granite ridges. They passed a pair of structures, hundreds of feet high, that resembled tapered urns, narrow in the center and wide at top and bottom. There were no windows and no indication what their function had been. Quait commented that the Roadmakers had left behind a lot of geometry and a lot of stone, but very little else. “It’d be a pity,” he said, “if whoever comes after us doesn’t know anything about us except the shape of our buildings. And that we made roads. Even good, all-weather ones.”
Their spirits flagged as they continued east on a trail that seemed endless. Another canal appeared, on their north, running parallel. This one was of much more modest dimensions than the great ditch, but it contained water. It went on, day after day, while Flojian visualized legions of men wielding spades. “Our assumption has always been that they had a representative government of some sort. But I can’t see how these engineering feats could have been accomplished without slaves.”
“You really think that’s true?” asked Quait. The Baranjis had owned slaves, but the little that survived of Roadmaker literature suggested a race of free people.
“How else could they have done these things? It’s not so obvious on the highways, where you just think of a lot of people pouring concrete. But this canal, and the other one—?”
They were riding now, moving at a steady pace. They passed a downed bridge that blocked the canal. The day was bright and sunny, flowers were blooming, and the air was clean and ceol. Chaka glanced at a turtle sunning itself on the wreckage.
At the end of their fourth day on the canal, it intersected with a wide, quiet river. There was a blackened city on the north. They forded the river and camped.
During the night, a band of Tuks, numbering eight or nine, rode confidently in on them, with the clear intention of shooting everyone. Flojian, who’d been on watch, put the would-be raiders to sleep. (One fell into the fire and was badly burned.) But during the momentary confusion Chaka woke up, tried to use her wedge, and afterward insisted that it had had no effect. The lamp, which had once glowed a bright green when she squeezed, now produced a somber red. In the morning, when their prisoners had begun to come around, she tried it again. There was no visible result.
She armed herself with one of the extra units. The man who’d been burned died. They bound the others, appropriated a couple of their horses, and debated taking their rifles. But they were a different caliber from the smaller Illyrian weapons. So ultimately they simply pitched everything into the canal and drove off the spare animals. They followed their custom by leaving a dull knife for the captives.
Shay’s trail had been running parallel, not only to the canal, but also to a giant double highway. Eventually the two connected, and they climbed onto the road in time to cross another north-south river. They were still headed east. The canal curved north and vanished into the wilderness.
The great roads were subject to earth movements, flood, severe weather, and the passage of time. Flojian recalled his father’s predictions that they were fast disappearing, sinking into the wilderness, and that eventually they would disappear altogether and become the stuff of legend. When they cannot be seen, Karik had said, who will believe they were ever there?
The new highway was covered with a thick coat of soil, and in many places it was difficult to distinguish the roadbed from the forest. In others it soared across ravines and lakes, its concrete base gleaming in the sun. In one of these places, it simply went into a long slow descent and plunged directly into a hillside. It did not reappear.
There was a spring nearby, and it seemed a good time to quit for the day. Chaka spotted some Quait and went off to hunt down dinner while the others unloaded the horses and made camp.
The forest was a conglomeration of sycamore and birch, pine and maple. Clusters of daffodils and mayflowers had bloomed, and marvelous white-leafed flowers with white and orchid-colored blossoms grew in moist shady soil, usually near trees. She was looking for a good place to set up when she came face to face with a turkey.
The bird squawked and tried to clear out, but Chaka had her rifle at the ready.
As she recovered the animal, a break in the trees revealed a disk, very much like the ones they’d seen at the Devil’s Eye and the maglev station. It was about a half-mile away, and she stood watching it change colors in the setting sun.
They baked bread and added some carrots and berries to the turkey, and washed everything down with Jeryk’s wine. The wine might have been exceptionally good, or it might have been too long since their last round. In any case, they enjoyed dinner thoroughly. After they’d washed up, Quait suggested they take a closer look at the disk. Flojian reluctantly agreed to stay with the horses. “Be careful,” he said. “I don’t want to be left alone out here.”
The sun was down and the forest had grown dark and restless. It smelled of pine and fresh clay and old wood. Occasionally, the gleam of their lamps caught eyes which blinked and were gone. The ground was matted with dead leaves and straw. The wind moved above them, through the night.
It took almost an hour to find it in the dark. When they did, Quait said that it was bigger than the other disks. Certainly the design was different, but it was quite obviously of the same family of objects, although this one was on the ground rather than on a roof. It was seated in a huge metal mount, several times Chaka’s height, and angled toward the sky. The lower sections were encrusted with vines and vegetation. If it had been designed to move, it clearly had not done so for a long time.
They saw another reflection in the treetops directly ahead, which turned out to be a second disk. It was identical to the first, roughly six minutes away. Another lay six minutes beyond that. And a fourth stretched out to the flank. All separated by the same approximate distance.
Chaka and Quait kept close together. Although they believed that they held enlightened views, and would have indignantly rejected any charge they were superstitious, they nevertheless found the combination of dark forest and alien symmetry disquieting. The pattern of the objects, and the fact that they seemed pointed toward the heavens, suggested that the area had been used for religious services.
They were about to concede there was little more they could do in the forest at night when they saw a brick building among the trees. It was a bleak, worn structure, three stories high, ugly, squat, unadorned. Most of the windows were out. A small disk, different in design as well as size from the ones in the woods, was mounted on the roof. It rose just above tree level, and had a clear view of the moon. In front, a fountain had gone to dust.
There was a set of double doors in the rear. Someone had painted MOLE LOVES TUSHU across them. The words were faded, and very old.
The doors in front were made of heavy glass set in pseudo-metal frames. One of them was on the ground, the glass still whole.
Inside, a plaque read:
They passed through a set of inner doors. Stairs mounted to the upper floors; a desk was situated on the left; and a long corridor ran to the back of the building. Several rooms opened off the passageway.
They looked into the first. The lamplight fell across several chairs and a desk. Windows were missing. An old carpet had turned to dust. The place smelled of the centuries.