“That’s a gun,” he said, nodding in the direction the dancer had gone. “I have seen them.”
She considered this. “Not around here you haven’t. Not for a long time.” She looked at him. “Where are you from then?”
“A land many days travel away,” he began. Lies. Glib lies. Such lies he could tell easily. The same lies he had told before, to other people in other places.
She hissed, and he trailed off. She pointed a long straight finger at him. “Do not lie,” she said. “I am not a simpleton like these.” She indicated the others in the hall, the men, the singers, and others, who hung back in the shadows of the hall. Tarl could not count them but he sensed them. A few dozen, he thought, no more. “I know you did not travel this desert in those clothes, without water, without a mount, or a party of escorts. I know this, so do not lie to me.”
He winced. “Ah, yes…” he mumbled, temporizing. “I am from far away. That part is true.”
“Good,” she said, leaning forward. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Chapter Eleven
Mexico City, The Visitation of the Cave
Approximately AD 3000
He spent three days among the brigands. Long enough to learn a bit of their story. They were many more than he had thought at first, numbering nearly five hundred. They lived spread throughout several warren buildings, some buried completely in sand and reachable only by tunnels. Others lived and farmed to the south in what sounded like an oasis fed by an underground spring. He never saw that place as they grew wary when he asked about it, so he avoided the topic.
She avoided him after their first audience. She had questioned him, but grew frustrated with his answers. She claimed to know him, but that was madness. She had asked about a woman, suddenly, and then grew angry when he professed ignorance. She had stalked out, flanked by her retinue.
He slept in the central hall, though he had the freedom of the main building’s top floor, the others being lower chambers further underground. There was a latrine, reasonably clean, and several banks of cells crowded with men, women, and children. The older people he saw avoided his eyes. The women eyed him sullenly and kept the children away from him.
They fed him, but she left him alone for almost two full days. Then she came to him, flanked again by her guards.
Her title was, he suspected, best translated as the Golden One, or Gold Queen. She loved gold, it seemed. He asked her about it, this penchant for gold.
She screwed up her face then, into a tight, pinched mask. Then she relaxed and regarded him.
“I love it,” she said, shrugging. She wore leggings sewn from long strips of thin, pliable leather, and a tunic of some silvery thread that looked very fine. She shrugged. “It is like the sun, and I like the way it shines.” She paused, picking at her tooth with a long fingernail. “I think I have always loved it. Gold has a long memory.”
“You have lived here long,” he asked, “with these people?”
“My people,” she chided him, pointing her finger at him. “Not these people. My people.” She nodded to herself, pleased at having set this straight. “I have lived here a long time, yes. I remember when we built this place, and that was a long time ago. I remember.” She laughed then. “I remember many things, so many memories.” She looked at him. “I remember you,” she said, leering at him. “Oh yes,” she said, almost to herself. “I do I do I do. I remember you.”
“I hate to disagree with my host…” he began.
“Then do not,” she hissed, “spread your lies here. I remember you. You…and there was another. A woman. You say you don’t remember her either.” She stopped, eyes distant. Her face was a mask of raw emotion then, fear, anger, loathing all passing over it like shadows. “We had a quest, a task, a mission. I remember. Something set upon us. Upon me. And her.” She looked at him and shrugged. “I forget things. It happens. But I remember eventually. It will come to me. My mind, it’s like a forest. Full of paths. Some of them…” She eyed him closely.
“I cannot stay long with you, Lady,” he said, though it seemed she was not listening. “My people will expect me to return,” he finished lamely, but then she stood, and wandered off. She is a madwoman, he decided, her brain broken by living in this place, among these people. Trauma, he knew, could break minds. Could make people insane and erratic. Such people were dangerous.
He waited then, but she did not return until the third day at mealtime, which was a communal stew of corn and onions and some unidentifiable meat. Tarl ate a little of it, enough to be polite, but no more. He avoided the meat. They did not seem to notice. She did not sit near him, entering late with a group of women, chatting merrily with them. They were drinking something from a large glass flask, passing it from one to the other.
Alcohol, he surmised. Probably fermented corn. It could be powerful, and he resolved to refuse it, if offered. They did not offer it to him. He watched as they ate, and drank, and drank more, laughing and telling stories. They ignored him mostly, but sometimes he noticed that the men or women would look his way, and he felt himself the subject of discussions he could not understand. He nodded at them, and smiled friendly smiles when he noticed them looking at him.
One man rose and approached the woman, the queen, and spoke. He pointed to a young woman. This drew a hooting round of laughter from the assembly, both from men and women. The queen nodded, smiling, and he took the girl by the arm and they left together. They passed the flask around more, the contents drained substantially. Another man approached and left with another woman. Then two men at once, and after a short discussion, left together with an older woman, who draped her arms around their shoulders and left with them.
Drunk, he thought, all of them, as eventually they paired off, or left in small groups, until there was just the queen, himself, and three of her entourage left. She took the flask and, taking a deep pull off of it, set it down. She looked at him, and he thought at first she was about to speak.
“Yes, Lady?” he called to her, from his thin pallet they had provided him. He hoped to speak with her.
Another of the men and a woman paired off. Then two men locked arms and staggered off into the darkness. She watched them go, then turned back to him.
“You want a woman, Smoke?” she asked, tilting the flask to her lips. “Or a drink? Maybe a boy?”
He shook his head. “This is not my custom, Lady.”
She snorted, drinking again. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and then approached him. “I let them play. They like it, and like me for it.” She stopped in front of him. “I can’t get drunk unless I drink a lot very quickly. And then it fades faster than it does for these.” She gestured at her people. “Why is that?” She looked down on him. She wore only a thin gown of silver fabric. It was sheer and clung to every curve of her body. Old, he thought. Some advanced fabric from a lost age.
He lowered his eyes. “I do not know,” he said.
“There were gods in the earth, once,” she said. She pointed down. “Deep in the earth, deeper than men ever drilled. Safe, I think. Safe from…” she gestured. Her eyes were unfocused, he saw, looking beyond him into the distance. “Whatever is out there.”
Gods under the earth? She was mad, but the other woman, from the festival of the golden fruit, had said something similar. He shivered and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Who are these gods? Do you worship them?”
“Do not mock me,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Do not condescend. I am queen here.” She looked at him, annoyance plain on her face, mouth tight. Then she smiled. “I’m not sure who they were. I don’t even think they were human. Gone, all gone. Silent for many years. I would dream. Dreams of…their will. I was their…slave? Servant? Tool?” She shrugged, squatting down before him on her heels.
The gown slid up her thighs. They were brown, firm, and curved with muscle. He could see fine black hairs on her inner thighs and felt a hot rush of lust flow into his groin. He looked
down, averting his eyes. “And then you came,” she said. “That was when the gods died, and I was alone, alone after that.” She glared at him. “Why have you returned?”
“I am new to this land, Lady.” He swallowed, feeling that he walked a knife’s edge here. A wrong word, and this madwoman would add his skull to her chair. He looked up at her, his gaze sliding up her legs, the curve of her belly. The thin gown clung to her, and the image burned into his eyes. She was lovely, he thought. Firm and supple. He tried to blank his mind of her. He shook his head. “I do not understand.”
She saw him, he felt, saw right through him. She smiled, watching him with her shocking blue eyes. She laughed a little, to herself. He was sure she noticed him, saw his desire. She nodded to herself and stood in one fluid motion. Then she turned and wandered off into the darkness, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
He had betrayed himself, he knew. He wanted her, despite himself. His training was useless. She is a razor, he thought. Handle her wrong, and he would bleed.
He lay on his side, listening to the carousing around the little fire, and the sounds of pleasure from the darkened alcoves. Was she there? With one of them? His mind formed images of hands roaming over her silvered gown. He strained his ears, trying to pick out her voice from the moans and gasps of pleasure he occasionally heard. He couldn’t tell. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Let it go. She is comely, but put it aside, and focus on your task. She is not the aim. She is not the Work. He told himself this, and more besides.
But he listened instead, straining, to the moans and voices beyond, just out of his sight. He listened and hated himself for it.
The next morning he woke, prodded awake with a foot in his back. He looked up and saw her smiling down at him. “Wakey wakey,” she said. “Eggs and bakey.”
He sat up and looked at her. “Bakey?” Then, “You speak Germanic?”
She shrugged. “English. Sort of German. Bacon,” she said. “But there hasn’t been a pig around here for a long, long time. Or an England.” She giggled then. “Today I will take you to the ruins.”
He nodded, thinking to himself that the Center would recall him soon. They would snatch him, in an instant, back to the sprawling, parklike campus of the Center. He would be safe there. Murn would be there, waiting for him. He would report that this was a dead world, a failed world. That if a Mind had ever been born here, it was long dead. That this was a doomed world, and this madwoman’s little fiefdom doomed with it. She was mad, that was all. It happened, with crazy people. Crazy people did and said crazy things. This woman was crazy.
But he did not say any of this to her. It would be foolish to provoke the insane. Instead, he joined her and her band at their meal, which was several dozen eggs cooked in a large, pitted cauldron. He eased his way into their circle around the fire. The fire was in a shallow pit of smashed tiles, under a hole in the ceiling which must have vented the smoke outside somewhere. There were also strips of long, tough-looking meat which they passed around, and ripped strips off of, chewing them slowly. They ate the eggs with their fingers.
He passed, as politely as possible, the meat to his neighbor. The woman noticed him avoiding it. “It is a deer, from the forests to the south,” she said, her eyes laughing at him. “They live there still. It is a deer. That is all.”
“I do not prefer flesh,” he said, which was true. She looked at him and snorted, saying something to her crew in their guttural slang which he could not follow. They chuckled, and some men looked at him with open disgust and loathing. He ate his eggs quickly, thanked them, and backed away.
After the meal he watched her as she nodded and gave orders to her crew. She indicated three of the men, which seemed surprised at something she said. One of them glanced at Tarl, then back at her. He objected, clearly agitated. It was one of her retinue from the previous evening. She spoke more firmly, and he nodded, cowed.
Satisfied, she stood. Tarl watched as she rummaged in a pile of discarded clothes from the previous night’s orgy. She pulled on leggings of some black synthetic material and a short leather vest. She pulled on soft leather boots, well-worn with age. And finally, from a hook on the wall, a harness-like affair bristling with pockets and pouches, which she fastened about her middle with a loud click. She tied her hair with a cord into a loose ponytail, scooped up a water bag from an alcove, and came towards him. He stood as she approached.
She handed him the bag. “Let’s go,” she said, in Spanish. “Vamanos.”
“Where are we going?” He asked stupidly. She carried no weapons that he saw, but he suspected that this didn’t matter. This woman was dangerous, he felt, in a way he hadn’t known danger before. He’d dealt with thugs and killers on previous ventures, when the Center sent him into places where worlds had gone awry, or were in the middle of doing so. He’d been in fights. He had training, though Shona would still beat him regularly. He found his hand trembling as he held the bag, sloshing with water.
She glanced at him, as he didn’t move. A quick appraisal. Then she turned back to him. “Come on,” she said slowly. “We are leaving. It will be all right. I won’t hurt you.” She had sensed his fear, then. Fear of her.
“Where?” he asked again. Behind her he saw the three men lingering, watching them. She glanced at them, back to him, and snorted. “Men.” She sighed. “To the ruins. You know, the ones we caught you trying to sneak into? You wanted to see them, right? Let’s go. The sun won’t last forever.” She turned on her heel and headed towards the passage in the room's rear.
He set his mouth in a hard line as he followed, under the gaze of the three men squatting around the fire. Their eyes were hard and tracked him as he passed. They would kill him, he knew, on a word from her. But she had not given it, and apparently had deemed him no threat, telling them to stay behind, and leave him alone with her.
He was, he knew, not a threat to her. He was to learn what had happened here, find what he was looking for, and then, on the Center’s whim, be recalled to report what he had found. If she got in his way, he mused, that was when there might be conflict. But he avoided such situations as best he could. The Work was paramount, not fighting with petty chieftains or local authorities. One of them hissed at his back, a menace-laden threat crossing language barriers. He hurried to catch up with her.
She led him through a warren of cells and passages. This had been a building of some sort, he realized, or the underground part of it. A large building, supported by massive pillars of concrete. One such support still bore traces of its original yellow paint, and he recognized a numeral he knew, the glyph for “two.” She led him up a wide ramp and into a shaft that led to a metal stairway, pitted with rust. At the top of four short flights of twisting stairs, she came to a metal door.
At the door waited the man who’d searched him the previous night. A massive hill of a man, bristling with a beard and calculating eyes. She spoke to him, rapid-fire, and he stepped aside. She reached into a pouch at her waist and pulled out a wad of thin cloth. She knotted it around her mouth and nose and nodded at him to do the same with his scarf, the red one from Murn. Another pouch held goggles she placed carefully over her eyes, insect-like bulges of green plastic. She noticed he had none such, and he shrugged. She pulled on a set of gloves, fingerless. They looked strong, of the same black cloth as her leggings.
“You would be blind in days without these,” she said, from behind the thin veil of cloth. She tapped the goggles with one finger. He could see the smile in her eyes behind the green lenses. “It’s how I knew you were a liar, Smoke.”
Smoke, he realized, was her naming him again. He shrugged. “I’m still from far away, but no, I didn’t walk here.”
“I know where you’re from,” she said. “And how you got here.” She caught his eye. “I remembered.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Lady,” he said lamely, shouldering the water bag. “How can you remember me when I am sure I have never met you before?”
Her mouth pou
ted into a perfect circle. “It’s a mystery,” she agreed, nodding soberly. He detected sarcasm, he felt sure, even though her Spanish was strange to him. She was mocking him.
She said something then in a language he didn’t know, but which sounded familiar to him. Germanic? Latin? She pursed her lips and leaned against the door. It began to move, opening slowly.
They stepped into the bright sun, the sky above them a merciless yellow murk, heavy with airborne sand. She had not exaggerated, and he knew it. She was right, he would be blind out here without eye protection in days, if not sooner. They were in a rut, mounds of weedy, overgrown rubble all around them.
Glancing behind, he saw the size of the hillock covering her warren. It bristled with the stumps of, not trees, he realized, but iron beams, long gone to rust. He scrambled across the uneven ground, following her down the rut, which connected with another such, but wider. A street, he realized, but eroded into a gully. Collapsed mounds rose to either side, buildings settling back into the earth.
“This was a large city,” he called to her. “What was its name?”
But she didn’t answer, just paused for a moment, then resumed walking. He followed, lugging the heavy bag over his shoulder, trying not to stumble on the uneven ground.
She, he noticed, walked with ease, picking always the best, easiest path through the obstacles, hopping lightly with a graceful, skipping step that never seemed to stumble or misplace her footing. She was easily making twice his speed, and she occasionally allowed him to catch up. He repeated his question, though he knew she had heard him. “Walk,” she said. “We’ll talk later,” and she resumed leading him deeper into the city.
He knew it was a city, as their path led up a low ridge. He could see, from the crest, long, broad avenues running north and south, cutting through the jumbled mess of collapsed buildings. This had been a massive city once, a true metropolis. To the east, he could see what looked like flatter, less crumbled land, a broad plain or desert. The suburbs? Such cities had them, he knew, sprawling settlements where workers who tended to such a place would have lived.
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