City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “But what can we do?” asks Ivanya. “Where can we send her? Saypur’s in a state of disarray, but I don’t think she could last there, not with the Ministry trying to make lists of everyone miraculous.”

  Sigrud coughs. The movement sends daggers shooting into his chest. “The Dreyling Shores,” he says. “We never had gods, never had the Divine. I can take her there.”

  “What! You? You’re not in a state to sit up, let alone take a voyage by boat!”

  “I must speak to my wife. To Hild. She can make arrangements for me.”

  “Your…Your wife?” Ivanya’s sidelong glance speaks volumes.

  “She was my wife the last I saw her. That was thirteen years ago. I believe she has remarried since.”

  “This is the only way to save Taty?”

  “I think so.” He coughs. “Shara asked me to protect Taty. I will do so until I am certain she is safe. Even from a bed.”

  “I’ll make the arrangements,” she says. She tries to smile again, but it doesn’t quite meet her eyes.

  “There is something you’re not telling me,” says Sigrud.

  “What?”

  “When you look at me. You see something. What is it?”

  She hesitates.

  “Is it my injury?” he asks.

  “No. Not just that.”

  “Then what?”

  She looks at him, cringing, then goes to her vanity and fetches a mirror. She holds it up to his face for him to see.

  The face of an old Dreyling man looks back at him. It takes him a moment to realize it’s his own. His face is lined with wrinkles, he has faint brown spots at his temples, and veins riddle the edges of his nose. His hair and beard are silver-gray. His eye is faded, no longer the bright, glacial blue he’s used to seeing.

  “She said she pulled the miracle out of you,” says Ivanya, “and all the time it had stored up. But it seems it had…stored up quite a bit of time. And when she put it back into you…”

  Sigrud chuckles weakly. “Oh, goodness me. Goodness me.”

  “You seem to be taking this well.”

  “It would be foolish of me,” says Sigrud, “to dance with time itself and expect to come away unscathed. I thought I would be dead now. But I live on to help deliver Taty from danger. I hold no grudge against this.”

  “I do,” says Ivanya sadly. “A little.”

  He looks at her and smiles. “It was good while we had it,” he says.

  “One evening,” says Ivanya, “does not seem to be enough, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson.”

  “Yet it was what we got,” says Sigrud. “Will you help me, Ivanya? Will you help bring Taty to my homeland?”

  She bends down and kisses him on the forehead. “Of course. Of course, of course, of course.”

  Ivanya hires an ambulance for their procession to the Solda River the next day. Between Sigrud, who still looks ravaged, and Tatyana, who leans up against Ivanya with her face pale and sweating, they look like a bunch of plague victims being shipped off to quarantine.

  Sigrud is only half-conscious, but no one bothers to glance at any of them. Mostly, it seems, because Bulikov has gone insane.

  A woman builds a staircase out of a low cloud in the sky. A man passes by riding what appears to be a deer made of vines, laughing delightedly. A child sitting on a staircase draws something on the wall with his finger. A small, round door appears. The child opens it, steps inside, and shuts the door, which promptly vanishes.

  This is the world we have made? This is what Shara and Taty and Malwina and I made with all our striving?

  They finally make their way down to the Solda. Their vessel proves to be a dingy old yacht, and their captain a shifty-looking Saypuri man who quickly states his desire to get the living hells out of Bulikov at full haste, since it’s gone mad. “But the whole world’s mad now,” he says hollowly. “The whole world’s gone mad.”

  “Get us to the Dreyling Shores quickly,” says Ivanya, “no questions asked, and you can buy a little piece of the world that hasn’t gone mad.”

  They help Sigrud and Taty get stowed away in the passenger cabin. Ivanya quickly sets up shop beside their beds, unpacking boxes and boxes of medical equipment. Sigrud can tell already that it will be a difficult journey for him: this is much, much less comfortable than Ivanya’s beds.

  He stares up at the ceiling, trying to remain conscious. He fails, and falls asleep again.

  One day passes, then another. It’s a drifting world for Sigrud. Each time he sleeps it feels like an eternity. Sometimes it’s a handful of minutes. Other times it’s more than a day. His breath is shallow and quick now, always wheezing. He’s not sure if he’ll ever regain full use of both lungs.

  Once he awakes to hear someone weeping in the night. He turns his head and finds Taty lying on her berth, eyes wet with tears.

  “What is wrong?” he asks.

  “I miss her,” she says. “I just miss her. That’s all.”

  He isn’t sure if she means Shara or Tavaan. Perhaps it’s both. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

  He looks out the porthole. They’re well north of Bulikov now, passing through the western arm of the Tarsils. Snowflakes twirl down from the moonlit skies.

  “Does it get any better?” asks Taty. “Does it?”

  “Eventually,” he says. “Yes.”

  She looks at him, her eyes burning. “Don’t you leave me too. Not you. Not after all this.”

  He tries to smile at her. “Close your eyes. I’ll be here in the morning.”

  She frowns at him, suspicious.

  “I’ll be here for a while,” he says.

  She rolls over and falls back to sleep.

  As Sigrud, Ivanya, and Tatyana continue their long, slow journey northwest along the Solda, the greater world begins its own journey into strange new lands.

  In Taalvashtan, all those with the ability to produce or manipulate raw materials—iron, wood, stone, sand—begin to gather and meet every other night. They’re crafters, they’ve decided, workers and laborers, so perhaps it’d be wise for them to join forces. Create a guild or association of some kind. Make what they like, for a fee.

  The next morning they start on their work, just to see if they can do it.

  By evening, they’ve built a third of a skyscraper.

  By the next day, word will spread of what they can do, and others will carry on the idea.

  By the week after that, global real-estate markets will begin to collapse.

  And by the end of the month, the finance markets will begin to do the same—just after the newly formed Alchemists Guild of Ahanashtan officially opens for business.

  In Jukoshtan, a man who can sing songs that send listeners into a delirious, joyous daze travels through the outskirts of the city, sending audiences into rapturous, joyful trances—for a fee, of course. It won’t be until just after he’s gone that people begin to notice the sharp uptick in teenage pregnancies—pregnancies originating in sex that the girls cannot remember, and certainly didn’t consent to.

  Within days, a bounty will be put on the musician’s head. But this will do little to stem the outrage, the shame, or the grief over the eventual suicides.

  In Bulikov, a woman opens a sidewalk business: she sits in a chair beside a nondescript door, and over the door hangs a sign reading, ANYWHERE—FIFTY DREKELS. Curious people ask exactly what this means, and she simply says, “Anywhere. I can take you anywhere.” They soon find out she’s right: for fifty drekels, the woman will open the door on a desert island, the top of a mountain, or someone’s mansion.

  By evening the queue for her business stretches all the way through Bulikov.

  By morning a railroad company puts a price on her head. But any would-be assassins will find it’s very difficult to catch a woman who can open doors to anywhere.

  More and more. More and more miracles.

  More and more changes, more and more and more.

  In Tohmay, in Saypur, there is talk and mutterings of a militia
, or even an army. Some of these talents, it’s clear, are more aggressive and harmful than others. “Round them up,” one belligerent minister says, “start drilling them, and prepare for what’s coming. It’s going to be war now, got to be, war between us and whoever gets their troops ready first. If men can do anything, anything in the world, they’ll do war first, and we’d be fools not to strike hard and fast.”

  In Ghaladesh, Minister Turyin Mulaghesh ignores these mutterings of war, and instead stays awake for four straight days, barking orders, answering messages, and planning with her own personal cabinet. “They may be miraculous,” she says to her employees, “but they are still citizens, and we will treat them justly.” She notices one skeptical glance, and snaps, “This changes nothing. They will still act like people, for better or for worse. And we shall be there to watch them.” Her employees and representatives salute her and scurry to work, making phone calls, running off to police stations.

  On the dawn of the fifth day she stares out her office window at the Ghaladeshi skyscape, chewing an unlit cigarillo. They haven’t figured out a name for her yet, not who she is or what department she’s running, but she has to admit—it feels damned nice to be back in charge.

  And on the outskirts of Ghaladesh, a curious procession is taking place: Saypuris slowly gather at the Saypuri National Memorial Grounds, where the remains of Saypur’s most honored heroes are interred. The dozens of people wind through the paths until they come to the Komayd section, where one monument is still fresh and new—a recent addition.

  The Saypuris stare at the memorial to Ashara Komayd, the benevolent but defamed prime minister who suffered in silence, died tragically, and yet was somehow resurrected to fight for her nation one last time.

  They place candles and flowers at the foot of her monument, solemn and silent. In a few years they will begin calling her a name that will grow in popularity until it becomes the common way to speak of Komayd; and though they could not possibly have known it, the name they will choose is curiously fitting for her last days.

  They will call her Mother of the Future.

  Sigrud awakes and smells the cold winds drifting through the cabin. “Are we in Voortyashtan?” he croaks.

  Ivanya, tending to his bandages, looks taken aback. “We’re quite close. How did you guess?”

  “Take me on deck when we pass through,” he says. “Once we’re free and through.”

  “That’s not happening, my dear. You can’t sit up, let alone stand and walk upstairs.”

  “I will do it,” says Sigrud grimly. “I welcome your help, if you can give it. But if not, I will still do it.”

  Ivanya and Taty exchange a glance, but remain silent.

  Their shifty captain has to do some quick talking and perhaps even quicker bribing to get them through the port of Voortyashtan, but after a few tense moments, the dingy old yacht continues on. Ivanya, grimacing and reluctant, helps Sigrud sit up in his bed. The pain is tremendous. The world spins about him, and he feels nauseous. He sweats and quakes, and is not at all sure he can get his legs to do what he needs them to do.

  Yet he succeeds. With Ivanya and Taty’s help, he comes to the deck, stands underneath the dark night skies, and looks east as they leave Voortyashtan behind.

  He smells the cold north breezes and the salty air. How long has it been, he thinks, since the winds of this place have passed through my lungs?

  The shore is alight with construction, with industry, with life and commerce and movement. It is no longer the miserable, brutal hovel he remembers, not the crude, lethal place it once was. It is a place people travel miles to come to, not one they avoid.

  “My daughter did that,” says Sigrud weakly, nodding at the lights on the shore. “She did that. She made all that happen.”

  The two women support and embrace him as he watches as Voortyashtan fades into the distance.

  “She did that,” he whispers, as if wishing that the world would hear, and notice. “And I am very proud of her.”

  It won’t last forever, he knows. Not even that will last forever.

  But it will last a while.

  Sigrud awakes to the sound of clinking pots and pans, someone humming cheerfully, and the smell of smoke.

  Where am I?

  He opens his eyes and sees a gray stone ceiling above him. He smells pine in the distance, and he can hear something—the hush of waves, not far away.

  It takes him a long, long while to remember. He’s in the Dreyling Shores, he realizes, back in the homeland he left so, so many years before. It was hard for him to follow, to understand everything that happened when he was feverish aboard the boat….

  “You’ve got that confused look again,” says a voice from the door.

  He looks over and sees Taty standing there, smiling uncertainly at him.

  “Do I?” he says. His voice is terribly hoarse.

  “Yes. Are you going to ask me where we are again? Ask me where the boat is? What day it is?”

  “I don’t know what day it is,” he says. “But I remember—we are in the Dreyling Shores. Yes?”

  “Yes. In the house your…ah, your wife got for us.”

  He frowns. This memory is a little hazier for him. He remembers Ivanya going ashore somewhere, coming back with news of some kind—apparently the two of them must have arranged it all. A memory of this house calcifies in his mind—spacious, even palatial, and secluded in the hills. A safe place for three refugees to hide while the world sorts itself out. “Where is Ivanya?” he asks.

  “She’s cooking. She’s very enthusiastic about it. But not yet, ah, very good at it.”

  “Yes. I remember the broths she makes for me now….” He pulls a face. “It is very taxing, trying to be polite about them.”

  Taty sits beside him on the bed and smiles. “You’re getting better, though. You remember more. You must be stronger. Aren’t you?”

  Sigrud smiles weakly at her. “I remember this now.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. Now is when you come in and tell me what you’ve seen in the woods outside.”

  Taty laughs. “I do! Very good. And this time I won’t tell you the same story again and again. I’ll tell you something new.” She tells him about her explorations in the forest, in the hills, along the shore, and especially about her new acquaintances. “There’re all kinds of kids from the village down the road,” she says, excited. “They come to the shore every day and fish, and they showed me a cave, Sigrud, a real cave!”

  Sigrud smiles as he watches her. I forget so easily, he thinks, that she is still but a child.

  “I would like to see that,” he says.

  “What, a cave?”

  “No. To see you on the shore.” He thinks about it. “I will do that tomorrow, I think. Yes. I will come with you tomorrow.”

  She looks at him, uncertain. “Are…Are you sure about that?”

  “You said I was getting better.”

  “But…Can you really get out of bed?”

  “I have never been surer of anything. Find me a cane, and you and I will stroll together tomorrow.” He smiles. “I’ll be here in the morning, waiting for you. Do not let me down.”

  Taty grips his arm as Sigrud, wheezing and wobbling, limps down the garden path to the forest edge. “Auntie is going to skin me alive for this,” she says. “She’s absolutely going to skin me alive.”

  “Let her skin me instead,” he says. “I will be easier to catch.” He coughs, swallows, sniffs, and focuses on his next step.

  “Are you sure you want to do this? Really?”

  “I grew up with the sea. It is my right. And it is my right to see my friend enjoy it. Do not deny an old man his wishes. That is rudeness.”

  Taty helps him slowly, slowly mount the hill before the shore, each step taking nearly a minute at times.

  “Are you sure you can make it?” Taty asks.

  “I have climbed higher heights,” he says. “After all. You were there.”

&nb
sp; “I wasn’t paying much attention then.”

  “Nor was I, really.”

  They continue up the hillside.

  “Did I do the right thing, Sigrud?” asks Taty suddenly, troubled. “In the tower, when I was someone…else. I worry about it. I could have, I could have…”

  He remembers Shara saying: Few have any choice in how they live. Few have the power to decide their own realities. Even if we win—will that change?

  “You did something few could have ever done, Taty,” says Sigrud. “You walked away from power, and gave people choices where they’d never had any before.”

  “But now what will they do with them?”

  “I think,” says Sigrud, “that they will be people. As they have always been. For better or worse.”

  His cane sinks deep into the earth, it’s so rich and moist. The air is cold and splendid. The trees tower above them.

  “I used to cut these things down, you know,” he says, gesturing at them. “A foolish way to make a living, isn’t it?”

  “We’re almost there,” says Taty. “Almost.”

  “I know. I can hear it.”

  They crest the small hill, and Sigrud sees.

  The sea is the same. The sea is always the same, as is the wandering, white shore before it. His heart is glad to see this, yet also saddened.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” says Taty, awed.

  “Yes, it is,” he says. “Perhaps the most beautiful thing. But it could be more beautiful yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He waves at the shore. “Go and play. That is just what this scene needs.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Sigrud, grunting and wheezing, slowly sits to lean against the tree, facing out to sea. “I will be here for a while. Go on. Do not waste your seconds on me.”

  “They aren’t a waste, Sigrud,” she says reproachfully.

  He smiles at her. “I know. Go.”

  “You won’t be cold?”

  “I won’t be cold. Go and have fun.”