“Fossil fuels,” concluded Ugo. “We’re leaving—maybe they’ll come back armed.”
The vehicle was burning hydrocarbons! Stupefied by the discovery, he touched the layer of soot at the end of the pipe and deeply smelled his gloved finger. The helmet’s filter carried the sweetly pungent smell of oil to his nostrils, reminding him how hungry he was—the terrible Grammian menu being, of course, the main reason for his starvation. Reflexively, he brought the finger to his mouth to taste the substance, forgetting that the helmet’s visor prevented him from doing such a thing.
“Hey! Leave that! We don’t have time for this,” Ugo said, blocking his other hand, which was about to open the visor.
“Right… easy for you to say—you’re never hungry! You forgot how it feels to be hungry!” he grumbled, enraged by Ugo’s behavior.
“Move to the ship!”
Gill glanced back regretfully before entering the ship, which had reduced its brilliance in the meantime—just as Ugo had told him would happen. He took off slowly toward the nearby hills, where he saw a row of white buildings raised on an artificial plateau. His spikes wrinkled with excitement: the place hadn’t changed much! They had a good chance of finding the destroyer still buried where the Sigians had hidden it!
He turned to the left and flew over an artificial pit dug by the ancient natives—a wide, smooth ditch, perpendicular to two shorter ones at its ends; he suspected that it must have been a place for some religious ritual.
The ship traversed a dense forest of dwarf trees and came across a river, which had carved a deep valley through the tall hills.
Very soon, he spotted a flat area to the right bank of the river that they could land on, very close to the platforms of the ancient city. It was secluded, far from roads or modern buildings. With a bit of luck, they might get a pretty good advance before they were disturbed.
Ugo landed the ship once more, and Gill ran out.
“Move quickly! The savages will raise the alarm!” the jure ordered him.
Even though he was moving quickly, he had to stay alert to the traps of the unfamiliar terrain. In a few jumps, he went around the western side of the plateau.
The dawn arrived, his first dawn on an alien planet. Even though Mapu’s star didn’t rise yet, the first rays heralded its coming at the eastern horizon. Perhaps realizing it had guests, the star prepared a memorable show. Fluffy clouds of all sizes and shapes made their way into the sky in an explosion of color, as if they were on fire. Only their lower part was lit by the invisible star; the rest remained a purple-gray. Right at the horizon, Gill saw several small discoidal clouds. For a brief moment, he had the feeling that they were sparkling ships looking for him, but it was only the play of his excited imagination.
He stopped to admire the view, convinced that he had never witnessed something so beautiful. The purple mist on his home planet, Antyra I, hid the clouds at dawn and dusk—clouds that, anyway, didn’t look like the ones from here. On Antyra, they usually appeared from the ocean as a compact wall and furiously poured a days-long deluge, washing the bacteria from the sky until the whole ground became purple. After that, they disappeared as if they never existed. Of course, the purple bacteria had the ability to sense the approaching storm and quickly divided into spores, going airborne as soon as the ground dried out. Thus, the little seeds were ready to be reborn and feed on the siclides’ pollen lifted into the atmosphere by the dust devils of the vardannes.
Unfortunately, he had no time to admire the scenery—they were quickly losing the advantage of darkness. He jumped the steep slope of a ravine and landed on an alley overlooking the pyramids.
“Xochicalco,” whispered Ugo. “We’re getting close.”
As soon as he came out of the trees, the huge stone terraces that connected the city’s squares appeared in front of him. He climbed them faster than the shadow of a nifle, helped by the distortion grid and by Ugo’s impatience. Right in the middle of the central square was a temple different from the others, a bit higher and covered in well-preserved bas-reliefs. Surely he hadn’t noticed it through the Sigian’s eyes—it was presumably built after their departure.
On seeing the sculptures, he felt a shiver. They were so bizarre that he couldn’t help but wonder what they represented. A deep, straight line framed a couple of allegorical animals dressed in ovoid scales,90 meandering on the walls like the whirls of a raging river. For a split second, it crossed his kyi that they were llandro, but the Mapu monsters lacked the long, poison-spitting fangs and the swarm of ridiculous feet. True, they had a sort of stylized mane. On Antyra, there were no legless creatures; therefore, Gill had no way of knowing if such a thing could live for real or was just a legend. He couldn’t imagine a land critter unable to walk on feet—it would be impossible to avoid predators.
What is this world? he asked himself, troubled by what he was seeing. Could it be that Antyra’s nightmares and legends are coming to life on Mapu? A loud alarm shrilled in his hearing gills, for his archivist training allowed him to spot details carved in stone that would have eluded other, less-experienced nostrils, details that told him that Mapu91 wasn’t entirely foreign to the ritual violence born of religious customs perverted over time. He had no tangible proof of that, but the temple seemed to hide a ghastly secret. He wanted to understand the sculptures, to make the stones talk and shout the horrors witnessed, to learn the reasons of the ancients who built the pyramids on the hilltops, to find out if his archivist premonition was true. Cruelty, unrestrained cruelty…
Ugo also became interested in the bas-reliefs—a surprising thing considering his earlier behavior.
“Look,” he exclaimed, amused.
He turned Gill’s eyes toward a sculpture, in truth, quite a stylized carving, but he could still recognize the image: Kirk’an! An alien, on the pyramid’s bas-relief! He wasn’t mistaken; it had the same outline and beard as the Sigian commander.92 He was holding a strange prisoner on a leash, perhaps another intelligent species of this planet.
“A monkey,” said Ugo. “The Sigians were shocked by the present of the natives; they thought it was sentient, and for a while, they tried to communicate with it. But it’s just another animal.”
Kirk’an’s image repeated on several walls, in different postures. Gill noticed the small, disk-shaped bread cakes with a cross in the middle, offered as food.
Suddenly, Ugo made him turn.
“I heard something!”
An unknown creature took off from a tree in a noisy fluttering of wings. Gill followed its graceful flight until it disappeared, hidden by the dense canopy. Even though it only lasted a few seconds, the chance of witnessing the freedom of movements that only a creature of the skies could experience filled him with awe. The first such animal he saw in his life! On Antyra, the flying lizards had been long ago pushed to extinction by the zeal of the tarjis, for the imaginary guilt of going over the vitrified cities and becoming Arghail’s eyes…
Gill woke up from dreaming when he noticed the hill behind the terraces. Finally, he was looking at the place where the Sigian destroyer had been buried 1,250 years ago! And the richly decorated pyramid was erected on the place where the Sigians had once dined on a stone platform!
Anxious to reach the hill, he followed a dirt trail near another temple, and in a few jumps, he approached the whole square from the northeast. The ancient natives had built some truly monumental structures on the hilltop, an incredible achievement, considering their primitive tools. They reminded him of the ancient Antyrans who also raised temples and huge cities of ice or rock using only the strength of their arms—and the muscles of their moulans, of course.