A week went by, and then another. And finally Gratius spoke to her again. “It is time,” he said. “I leave tomorrow.”
“Have you told them?”
He shook his head. “I will speak to them tonight.”
She didn’t respond, and finally he walked away. Palta closed her eyes and tried to imagine a thousand different futures, on a thousand different worlds. Would she be happy in any of them?
Gratius told Valleia and Carmody of his decision after dinner. They didn’t seem surprised, and they didn’t try to talk him out of it. “We wish you every success and happiness,” Valleia said. “We owe our lives to you.”
They also approved of Gratius’s destination. “There was so much knowledge in the schola,” Valleia said. “I’m sorry to hear that it’s gone. But I suppose you had no choice.”
“We didn’t think so, at any rate,” he replied. “The priests used that knowledge wisely—as wisely as they could, at any rate. We feared that the Gallians would not do the same.”
They didn’t say anything more. Gratius wanted to get an early start in the morning, so they went to bed early. They rarely stayed up long after dark in any case.
Palta still slept near the others, on the floor in front of the hearth. It felt familiar to her, comfortable, although not as comfortable as lying next to Larry, as she had so often. She had no wish to be by herself at night.
But tonight she couldn’t sleep. Affron was gone, and Larry, and soon Gratius would be gone as well. And she needed to make her own happiness. But she didn’t know how.
She heard movement in the room, and she opened her eyes. Valleia had risen from her bed. Was the baby fussing? Palta hadn’t heard him.
No, Valleia wasn’t going to the baby. She squatted down on the floor next to Palta. Palta sat up. Valleia said nothing at first. The fire was burning low. Carmody was snoring peacefully. Palta waited.
“We were never close in Roma, you and I,” Valleia began finally, speaking softly in the darkness. “I didn’t see why we needed you or Larry. You just seemed to complicate things, when all I wanted to do was save Affron. I was wrong, of course. We wouldn’t have survived without you. I still need you, but in a different way. But you and I both know that you don’t belong here. You must go with Gratius, even if I don’t want you to leave.”
“What if I don’t belong anywhere?” Palta responded. “Least of all Hibernia.”
“Go wherever you like,” Valleia said. “I don’t know what you will do, but I know that you will accomplish something important.”
“I wish I could believe you.”
Valleia put her arm around Palta’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Ah, but you must,” she said. “I have visited many worlds, and I have done and seen many things. So trust me. Believe me. Obey me.”
Palta leaned into Valleia and closed her eyes. She didn’t know if Valleia was right. But she was a mother now, and that seemed to make a difference to Palta. Palta had never known her mother. “I will go,” she whispered.
“That’s good,” Valleia murmured. “It will be fine,” she added. “It will be fine.”
In the morning Palta announced her decision to the others. Gratius was surprised, of course; Carmody was not. Presumably Valleia had told him about their conversation. “It is hard to make a life in a world that isn’t your own,” he said to her. “I know this. But perhaps you will be fortunate, as I have been.”
“I hope so,” she replied.
So everyone agreed that this was the right thing to do. Why, then, did it feel so wrong?
She packed up her few possessions and went out to put on Renni’s blanket and saddle. She realized with a pang that she would not be able to take Renni to Hibernia with her; she would have to sell him in Flendys or whatever port town they chose as the start of their long sea voyage. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to him. “It seems that I must leave everything behind.”
Gratius approached her. “They have packed food for us,” he said. “They could not be kinder.”
“Well, then,” she replied. “Whenever you are ready.”
They said their final good-byes, and Palta held the baby in her arms one last time. And then they mounted their horses and took the path that would lead them back to the King’s Road. Away from the cottage, away from Valleia and Carmody, away from the hill that had taken Affron and Larry to some unknown world.
Palta knew that, like them, she would never return.
Twenty-One
Larry
“It’s not what I thought,” Larry said.
“How could it be?” Affron replied.
“I mean—it’s there. It’s everywhere. You just have to see it. Except not with your eyes.”
“More or less.”
“But it goes in and out of focus. It…flickers.”
“The flickering will go away.”
“And I can’t make it stay.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Is this how it happened for you?”
“More or less.”
“How long did it take you?”
“I’m not sure. Forever?”
“But you succeeded.”
“Yes. And here we are.”
Time passed. Months? Years? Larry noticed that his voice had changed, and hair was growing in places where it didn’t before. He was a man.
It didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was what he was creating in the air in front of him. It grew and dissolved, grew and dissolved. Sandcastles destroyed by the incoming tide. No: memories he was trying to recover, words at the tip of his tongue. Almost there, and then gone.
But so much more. A network of neurons transferred outside his brain, rebuilt synapse by synapse in the air.
No, not in the air. Through the air. Tunnels. What was the word? Wormholes.
But wormholes went to single points, if he understood them, if they even existed. These wormholes were networks, infinitely branching, infinitely looping.
Or something. Metaphors were useless. Words withered when they confronted this. It was why Affron was so maddeningly vague. Understanding came only gradually, from the inside out.
But it came.
His hand disappeared into nothingness and came back out. And then his hand couldn’t do this again for a week, a month.
Where did his hand go? He should have been terrified, but he wasn’t. It would be all right; wherever his hand had gone, he could make it come back.
One night Affron forced Larry to take a break. They went outside and wandered through the crowded, sultry streets. They bought spicy food at a café and ate it in some kind of park. There seemed to be a festival taking place; but then, there always seemed to be a festival taking place. Men wearing nothing but loin cloths beat drums or played some kind of pan flute, their bodies gleaming with oil and sweat. Women, naked except for long bright scarves, twirled and shook and strutted. Fireworks exploded in the sky, to shouts and cheers from the crowds. One of the women grabbed Larry and pulled him into the dance, laughing at his awkwardness. He laughed too.
And her lovely, bouncing breasts suddenly reminded him of Siglind and Palta, bathing naked with him at the Gallian consulate in Roma. Siglind, who gave up her life to save him at the temple of Via. Palta, his companion in all his journeys on Terra, abandoned so that he could come to this place, to sit in a room and wave his hands in the air.
His laughter faded.
Eventually the woman let go of his hands and twirled away.
Affron handed him an icy green drink he had bought in the park. Larry took a sip. It was sweet, and very alcoholic.
“People are happy here,” Larry said to him over the din of the music.
“They certainly seem to be.”
“Do you think they know the secret to living?”
“Perhaps the secret is to die young. Medicine is not very advanced in this world.”
“Ah.” Larry took another sip. He could feel his brain starting to spin like his body during the dance. Siglind
, Palta, Gratius. Valleia, Carmody, Kevin, Professor Gardner. Mom, Dad, Cassie, Matthew, Stinky Glover, Nora Lally—the girl he’d had a crush on back in Glanbury. They all spun with him. “We can’t stay here forever, right?” he said to Affron.
“No, this is not our final destination,” Affron replied.
“What is our final destination?”
“I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.”
Larry swallowed the rest of the drink and closed his eyes. His brain was filled with fog now. But even as the fogs beclouded the looping, branching networks of neurons, he knew one thing: tomorrow he would return to the shrine and continue his work.
A hand, then two hands, and then eventually the gap, the tunnel, the wormhole was big enough for an entire body. But it did not persist; the gap closed, the wormhole faded into mere air. How did you make it persist? How did you create something that you could leave behind for someone else to find on a Scotian hill, or in conservation land in Glanbury, Massachusetts?
“Right now it is just you,” Affron murmured. “It is outside you, but it isn’t really real. You need to make it real.”
“How?”
“You have to give it up. You have to leave it behind.”
“How?”
Affron shrugged. “I didn’t say this would be easy.”
But why was it so hard? Why wasn’t it as easy to find as the power he had found within himself in the temple of Via—the power to inflict a vision of the multiverse on someone else, to overwhelm them, torture them, with its immensity? He had needed that power to save his life, and there it was, waiting for him. The old woman aiming the gant at him staggered back in agony, tumbled thirty feet to the floor below, and he had triumphed.
It was far easier to destroy than to create, apparently.
But he did not give up. If he gave up now, what was left of his life?
And eventually he saw what he needed to see, felt what he needed to feel. Create it, and leave it behind. Like a mother giving birth. It’s part of you, you give it life, but finally you know that it is not yours. And somehow it knows this too. The parting has to come from it, not from you.
And it is agony—like childbirth. Your mind is shattered, your brain is turned inside out. You cannot do this. But you cannot not do this. It is too late to turn back, to return to playing video games and surfing the internet and practicing the piano. To thinking about college and jobs and girlfriends. This must happen.
And so, finally, it does.
He was on his feet. Trembling, sweat-soaked, facing the emptiness.
“Go ahead,” Affron said, from somewhere far away.
Larry took a step, and then another. Into the emptiness, surrounded by fog. Another step, and then one more. And he was out the other side.
He stood on a featureless plain. The sky was gray; the air was cold. Birds circled high overhead. He looked down. He was standing on hard-packed earth. A few tiny weeds poked up through it.
No trees, no houses, no roads.
He was alone. He shivered, but he did not move.
He was somewhere. And he had come here on his own.
After a long time, he turned and walked slowly back through the fog and into the shrine room, where Affron stood waiting for him.
“Well, then,” Affron said.
It was a long time before Larry could speak. And when he finally did, he surprised himself. “There are others,” he said. “Not just us.”
Affron nodded. “Yes, I believe there are others.”
“Have you seen them? Have you met them?”
Affron shook his head. “How would I do that? I’ve been here with you, carrying pots and statues.”
“How do I know that there are others?”
“I don’t know. How do I know that?”
“Where are they?”
“I have no idea.”
Larry considered, and finally he said, “We have to find them.”
“Yes,” Affron replied. “Yes, we do.”
Twenty-Two
Gratius
Gratius and Palta traveled south all day on the King’s Road. It was a far more pleasant journey than the one they had taken along this same road in winter. His heart was light; he knew he had made the right decision.
There were concerns, of course.
What if he couldn’t find the priests in Hibernia? What if their effort had fallen apart?
He could go home, of course. To Comum, in northern Italia. It was not an important place, just a small town next to a beautiful lake, with beautiful mountains in the distance. But you could swim with your friends in the lake, or lie back at night in the hills and stare at the stars. You could chase each other in the narrow streets and amid the stalls in the marketplace, laughing with each other over jokes that no one else could understand.
Ah, but it would not be the same.
Someone, sooner or later, would turn him in to the Gallians. He would not help them, of course, but what would they do to try to convince him? Perhaps they would leave him alone if he refused to help. But he did not think that’s what would happen.
He would be lucky if his death was painless.
No, he could not go home. If he couldn’t find the other priests, he would have to change his identity, become a teacher in some foreign city. Perhaps marry, have children—lead a normal life at last. Perhaps he would end up as happy as Valleia.
He glanced at Palta, riding next to him. He had not expected her to come with him; he had expected her to wait at that cottage forever, hoping for Larry’s return. But here she was. “Are you all right?” he asked her, not for the first time on the journey.
Palta shrugged. “It is a lovely day for a ride,” she replied.
“We have days of riding ahead of us,” he pointed out.
“There’s nothing I enjoy more.”
“That’s good. It’s growing dark. We must find an inn before long.”
“We can sleep in the open if you wish. We have food and blankets. We just need pasture for the horses.”
“It will not be comfortable lying on the ground.”
“Neither will lying on a hard bed in a Scotian inn. We have done both, Gratius.”
“True,” he agreed. “We will find a spot, then.”
“Not just yet, though. The further we go, the less chance I have of changing my mind.”
Gratius nodded. “As you wish.”
He wondered if Palta would fit in with the priests. Would they even want her to join them, once they found out her role with the Gallians? He thought they would; Borafin and the others understood such things. They would welcome her help. And if they didn’t, if Palta was unhappy there or anywhere, she could always return to Scotia. She would be all right.
In the distance a solitary man on horseback approached. They had met far more people on the King’s Road today than when they had ridden along it back in the winter—merchants and farmers mostly, this far north. No noblemen, no soldiers. He assumed they would encounter them further south, near the larger towns. All who passed had been friendly, and Gratius now knew enough Erse to carry on a conversation with them.
The man wore a long brown cloak. He was beardless, and his hair was streaked with silver. He didn’t look like a farmer. But if he was a merchant, where were his wares? Gratius nodded to the man as he drew near. “Good day to you, sir,” Gratius said, in the polite way of the locals.
The man simply nodded and said nothing.
Ah, but his eyes! It felt as if Gratius had seen those eyes before.
But he could not recall where. He had seen too many eyes, encountered too many strangers. It would be good to be with other priests once again, even in a place like Hibernia.
He began searching for a spot where they could spend the night.
Harmalo
The man wore Scotian clothes, but he was not Scotian. That much Harmalo was sure of. He had spoken only a few words in Erse, but his accent had been Roman. And the self-assurance with which he carried himself, the
power of his gaze, in the instant their eyes had met…
Was he a viator? Not Affron, of course. He did not look like Affron. But perhaps one of the others in the complicated story of Affron’s disappearance from Roma. And the girl? There had been a girl in the story as well. Three people landed in Flendys looking for Affron. One of them had been a girl, according to the story the Scotian lord had told. Perhaps these were two of those three.
But where were they headed? Why were they traveling south? Had they found Affron? More likely: Had they failed to find him?
Harmalo’s journey up the King’s Road had proved frustrating. He had dismissed his retinue, hoping to travel fast and carry out his mission without fuss. But these Scotians were a tight-lipped people, though friendly enough. If they had any knowledge of Affron, they weren’t going to share it with a stranger. He could threaten them with the gant, of course. He could kill one or two of them, if they were unclear about the gant’s power. About his power. Oh, how he longed to do this! But what was the point, if they didn’t know anything?
But these two…
Harmalo slowed his horse and pondered the situation. Finally he turned around and headed south.
His horse was tired and disinclined to speed up. This annoyed Harmalo; he had no wish to be riding in the dark. “Come on then, you filthy beast,” he muttered.
The horse did not go any faster.
Harmalo wrapped his cloak more tightly around him and pressed on as darkness fell and the air grew colder. His anger increased—at the horse, at the stubborn, ignorant Scotians, at the man and girl who were making him chase them through the night.
The stars came out. He should just stop. Go into the woods, tie up the horse, and try to sleep on the hard, cold ground. If he didn’t find the man and the girl tomorrow, he would simply turn around and head north again.
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