The officer walked back over to Grandpa and the two had a short, heated exchange, at the end of which the officer reached into a pouch hanging from his belt and withdrew a pair of coins. He handed them to Grandpa, who looked at the offering with the distaste of a man who was hoping for a lot more. Gramps said something short and monosyllabic and waved dismissively in Nate’s direction.
The officer walked back up to Nate, and withdrew a dagger from a sheath that was hidden by the folds of his cape. He said something in his guttural language, pointed at Nate, then at himself, then rested his free hand on the sword at his side.
It was pretty clear. Nate was this guy’s responsibility now, and he wasn’t going to take any shit from him.
Christ, did this fucker just buy me?
The officer grabbed the rope at his neck and cut it free with the dagger. Nate straightened up, and the pole between his back and elbows fell free to clatter on the gravel roadway.
Grandpa was trying to look stoic and unflappable, but the noise made him jump back a bit. The bastard was still scared of him. They really didn’t like foreigners here.
Nate stretched. His neck muscles felt as if they were on fire. He wanted to rub his neck, but his wrists were still bound behind him, and the officer made no move to cut that rope. As Nate rotated his neck, he noticed something that he hadn’t realized until now. He was the tallest one here. He was barely six feet even, but he could stare down on Grandpa’s bald pate, and he could look the officer here straight in the hat. He had six inches on all these guys, even Larry, Curly, and Moe—though that trio made up for it in biceps and necks as thick as their heads.
The officer put away the dagger and picked up the free end of the rope, the end that had been tied around his neck. The other end still bound Nate’s wrists. The officer looked at him with a bemused expression.
Gramps and company boarded the wagon and did a long slow turn around, back the way they had come. It was the first time Nate had gotten a chance to look around at where he was.
They were only a mile or so from the city. If Nate looked toward the ocean, a full two thirds of the horizon was filled by the architecture of the city, piled high on its rock overlooking the mainland. They stood on a road paved with cobbles that, a few hundred yards away, fed downward into a man-made valley toward the narrow peninsula that joined the city to the mainland.
Far away, to the right, the bridge of the aqueduct made its graceful leap from the top of a coastal cliff to the side of the city’s craggy walls. The sky here was filled with the shadows of sea birds orbiting the city.
The officer said something and tugged on the rope.
Nate sighed and followed the man’s lead. “Okay, my man, I’m with you now.”
The officer shook his head and headed him to a narrow dirt track that headed away before the main road made its abrupt descent to the sea.
“Thanks for saving me from Gramps and the Stooges back there.” Nate shook his hands so the rope swung a little between them. “Any chance of you finishing the job and cutting me free?”
The officer turned and said a few incomprehensible words. However, his expression and the way he shook his head made Nate think that the guy understood the gist of his question and that the answer was “No.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“YOU HAVE a problem with me entering the country without a visa, right?”
It was the latest in a long series of unanswered questions. The officer ignored Nate as he led him over another wrinkled hill. When they crested the hill, Nate saw a trio of men, all dressed similarly to the first officer, with black doublets and shorts that belonged in some art book on fifteenth century Germany. Unlike the officer, these guys didn’t wear cloaks, or have gold cords on their breasts.
The three new officers stood up to greet them, shouting questions at the officer, who shouted back at them. For a few moments he was surrounded by curious eyes and hands.
“None of you guys ever see an American before?”
Nate was beginning to worry about these guys. They seemed fascinated by his clothing. That wasn’t right. There shouldn’t be anyone on the planet outside some Stone Age tribes in the rain forest that wasn’t familiar with T-shirts or denim.
“Come on, you guys must know some English, right? I mean the United States dominates the world. Any of you understand, George Bush? CNN? Baseball? Michael Jackson? Levis?”
They didn’t give him a single sign that they understood.
The first officer held Nate still while one of his men searched him. Nate was still trying vainly to spark some sign of recognition. “Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Manson, David Hasselhoff, Baywatch, Dallas, X-Files, CIA, hamburger, blue jeans . . .” He kept rattling stream of consciousness at them. He found it hard to believe that there was anyone on the planet who didn’t know a single English word.
While he babbled, they took his keys, his dead PDA and wristwatch, his wallet, and all his change. Everything went into a little sack. The guy emptying Nate’s pockets gave everything barely a passing glance, but he seemed fascinated by the photos in Nate’s wallet. He flipped through them until the officer said something sharp, reprimanding him. After that, everything went straight into the bag.
When it was over, the officer grabbed the black bag and walked Nate briskly to the top of the hill, where the others had been. The guy seemed pissed now, and Nate wondered why.
The officer tied the end of Nate’s rope to a stout tree about fifteen yards away from the remains of a campfire. He checked Nate’s hands, then turned to face the others. His crew looked disgruntled as the officer laid into them with what had to be one hell of a dressing-down. He gestured with the little bag and pointed at Nate a few times.
Nate began to worry about what was going to happen to him.
After the outburst, the quartet finally sat down. After a while they started chatting quietly among themselves, passing a wineskin shaped like one of the squash, ignoring Nate.
“Any of you figure on just letting me go with a warning?” Only the officer looked in his direction, and his expression wasn’t pleasant. “Like you’ve had a worse day than I’m having?” Nate asked.
The officer shook his head and turned back to the others.
“Great,” Nate tugged at the rope, but beyond a foot or so of slack, it wouldn’t budge. “What are you bastards planning to do with me?”
Nate tugged, but only managed to get his hands to fall asleep. He leaned back on the tree.
Fortunately, the officer had tied the rope close to the ground, so Nate wasn’t forced to stand. Nate bent his knees and half sat, half fell, onto a flat white rock near the base of the tree.
Nate sighed with relief, even though a concavity in the rock had gathered enough stagnant water to soak through the left cheek of his jeans. It didn’t matter. His leg muscles were so tight that they were vibrating and his body ached from the exertion and abuse he had suffered over the past few hours. It was a godsend just to sit and rest.
“At least tell me where the hell I am.”
Even if they had been able to understand him, they were making a point of ignoring him now.
What the hell am I going to do? None of this is making any sense.
Nate stopped trying to get their attention and started looking around, trying to fit this place in his personal catalog of the known.
It didn’t work.
He now had time to think about what was happening, and that wasn’t really a good thing. He couldn’t come up with an explanation for anything that had happened. Not a sane, reasonable one, anyway. And, as someone who lived a good part of his life in his head, he did not want to blame everything on hallucination.
But what the hell else was @? Did he really think that thing in the darkness might exist outside his own skull? He might just buy that the traveling Renaissance faire in front of him was really there, but @?
Someone was sending those messages. . . .
You just remember that someone sent you those message
s. . . .
“That line of thought isn’t going to get me anywhere.”
Nate shook his head and looked around the camp-site. The officer and his men had chosen to camp out on a hillside overlooking the road to the city. The hillside was littered with white stones like the one Nate was sitting on. The site was some sort of ruin.
The white stones were uncharacteristic of the terrain, and formed a near circular pattern on top of the hill. Beyond the innermost circle, the stones were more randomly distributed, as if a tower had fallen long ago.
Nate looked at the stone he rested on. Might be limestone. Water had pooled within the depressions of a bas-relief so worn that Nate hadn’t recognized it as a carving at first. He slid aside so he could look at it.
Any fine detail was long gone. Nate could discern smooth humanoid forms striking flat, two-dimensional poses reminiscent of ancient Egyptian carvings. However, to Nate’s eye, there was something wrong with the people carved here, the proportions seemed elongated and misshapen, the heads stretched and flattened, and the joints knobby and swollen.
The figures in the carving seemed to be facing—worshiping? fighting? making offerings to? Nate couldn’t tell from the weathered stone—some central object. The object at the carving’s focus was where most of the water had collected. Nate wished his hands were free so he could brush some of the algae and leaves away and get a better look.
The central carving had fared worse than the people. Not only had it suffered weathering, to Nate it looked as if it had, at one time, been purposely defaced.
Even with large parts of it obscured or broken away, Nate could tell that it had been something constructed with organic curves, almost plantlike. Unlike the people, it had been carved with an eye for depth. Part of it might even have risen above the surface of the stone before it had been defaced. The outline reminded Nate, from various angles, of a complex knot, an insect, a flower, and an octopus. Stone tendrils and leaflike objects fed into a central area where damage had rendered the whole as little more than a broken lump of stone.
The carving retained some of its original impact simply in the contrast between the flattened people, and the three-dimensional focus. It was as if someone had dropped a photo-realistic Renaissance etching in the middle of a tenth century woodcut. A sphere visiting flatland.
It was another thing that didn’t coincide with any place he knew about. He had never seen anything like this in a museum. Though, from the remains of the building this stone had been a part of, the people who’d carved it had probably long since stopped being relevant.
It was late in the afternoon before anyone deigned to take notice of him again. The shadows of the great city had just overtaken the small camp, when the officer and his men stood up, looking down toward the road. Nate followed their gaze and saw four men leave the road to start up the hillside.
Changing of the guard, Nate thought. He wondered what they were guarding against, and why there wasn’t a permanent structure here for them. Perhaps a recent conflict, or a rise in the crime rate? Maybe they haven’t had time to build a guardhouse. Though, as far as defending the city went, there was little anyone could see here on the hillside that wasn’t visible from one of the towers that rose from the plateau.
There was a lot of handshaking between the two groups of guardsmen. They were all dressed similarly, but with slight variations to each outfit that suggested that the clothes were all handmade at different times by different people. The leader of the new group sported the double cord of Nate’s own officer, though his were both silver.
The two leaders met by grasping each other’s forearms, pulling together and quickly breaking away, almost a macho hug. Then Nate’s officer faced the remaining three newcomers and slapped his left shoulder. It seemed to be a salute. The three men repeated the gesture.
Then the new guy looked toward Nate’s tree and started asking questions. The conversation lasted quite a while.
At the end of it, the new officer took a good look at Nate, but didn’t approach. He waved his hand, seeming to take in all the scattered white stones on the hillside, saying something that made everyone nod sagely, as if great wisdom had been spoken.
Nate’s officer came toward him with dagger drawn while his men picked up various pieces of gear. It took a lot of effort for Nate not to cringe as the blade approached, and he still closed his eyes as the officer bent over him. Intellectually, Nate knew that if this guy was out to slit his throat, he could have done it any time within the last four or five hours, but he still—in his gut—expected to feel the steel bite his neck.
What it bit was the rope binding him to the tree.
The officer said something to him and gestured upward with the dagger. Nate got unsteadily to his feet, staggering somewhat without his arms to help him. The officer didn’t move to assist him.
“Couldn’t you at least tie my hands in front—”
The officer had turned around and shouted something back at his men. There was some laughter. The officer had to repeat himself, and the man who had looked in Nate’s wallet stepped forward wearing a sullen expression.
The man approached and slapped his shoulder in a salute. Then the officer handed the man the severed end of the rope that still bound Nate’s hands. Nate’s new escort gave him a look of pure disgust.
Nate looked him in the eye and said, “So what did I do to you?”
The man actually stepped back and put a hand on his sword.
Okay, maybe it’s time to shut up.
The quartet marched down the path that their relief crew had walked up. Nate took up the rear with his unenthusiastic escort. They came down to the cobbled main road, and started heading in toward the plateau city.
Nate couldn’t help but stare at their destination. It loomed over them, blocking out more and more of the sky as they approached. The details were endless. Even on the patches of rock that at first looked like unworked stone, a second look revealed details that had to have been carved, and weathered by wind and surf. A lump of stone suddenly made itself appear as a column. A crack in the rock became a weathered alcove, a boulder resting in the surf actually was a gigantic stone block fallen from some ancient wall.
Nate looked down at his feet and saw that the cobbles that made up the road they walked upon contained fragments of old carving. The stone under his feet matched the ruins up on the hill.
They walked across the peninsula joining the rock to the mainland. The air was a constant salt mist down here, and the surf crashed so loudly that Nate’s guards couldn’t talk to each other over the sound.
A wooden cart drawn by a pair of ratty-looking mules slowly passed them. Another farmer, who could have been Grandpa’s long lost twin brother, was slowly drawing a load of chickens up toward the city.
Nate looked up at the man.
Grandpa’s twin saw Nate, and his eyes widened. The man quickly looked away and muttered something to himself.
“What the . . .”
A gloved hand backhanded the side of Nate’s face. He turned, spitting blood, to see his new escort staring at him. He shouted something incomprehensible at Nate and looked pissed.
Okay, we don’t spook the locals. I get it.
Nate wished his hands were free to probe his jaw to see if anything was loose. The FBI or the Secret Service would definitely have been the better alternative.
The wide road they were on started on an upward slope, edging toward the right side of the massive rock. They were now too close for Nate to see the whole city. Most of it was too high up to see anything from this steep an angle.
They walked on, starting the spiral that circled the rock. On the left wall, where the rock face shot almost straight up, some long-ago sculptor had carved statuary into the rock. They passed every type of scene imaginable, romantic to violent, single people to massive crowds of activity. All had details worn away by ages of surf spray. And all seemed to have the same distorted proportions as the figures Nate had seen in the sto
ne up on the hillside.
Many had been likewise defaced.
It wasn’t until nearly the end of the forty-five-minute hike up the spiral road that Nate realized that the distortions of the sculpture were not simply artistic license.
As they walked up, they passed the occasional wagon heading downward. Many seemed to be farmers returning home, wagons empty, goods sold. But there were a few that seemed to be taking trade in the other direction. Those wagons were towed by teams of fresh looking animals, driven by men with finer dress and thicker guts than the farmers Nate had seen. These vehicles were covered and richly painted.
Near their ultimate destination, Nate saw a wagon that didn’t fit into either of the two categories. The wagon was black, covered by a few silver highlights. The single gray mare drawing it was driven by a cadaverous man wearing a brown-hooded cloak. The only details Nate saw of the driver were long-fingered hands bearing several rings on each finger. As it passed, Nate looked backward, and saw into the rear of the open cart.
“Holy shit,” Nate whispered. He stood frozen, staring, until his escort backhanded him again. He stumbled on, not seeing much of anything anymore.
He could no longer put this place anywhere on the Earth he knew. The passengers in the back of that wagon were not human.
Even if Nate could ignore the elongated skulls with their fixed expressions, the oversized joints, their purplish skin . . . he couldn’t ignore the fact that their arms and fingers had extraneous joints.
What rode in the back of the black wagon was alien. Were aliens. Aliens with the same body type illustrated in the defaced carvings.
CHAPTER SIX
AFTER CIRCLING the rock twice, the great road fed into the plateau city on the side opposite the shore. The road widened until it reached a huge flat area that jutted out from the side of the rock.
Two large towers flanked the road where it fed into this plateau. A bridge connected the towers, high above the road, and Nate could see signs of some sort of mechanism that was designed to fall across the road blocking any passage.
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