Æstival Tide w-2

by Elizabeth Hand

  Nothing grew here. He stood at the edge of a flat plateau that stretched perhaps a mile across, rimmed with stunted cactus and a few sturdy mesquite. Odd shapes littered the barren landscape, some of them big as houses, others smaller, like toppled statuary. Through it all the stream ran, a dull thread nearly invisible beneath the lowering sky.

  “What is it?” Hobi shouted, but the wind ripped his words into a whisper. He turned to look behind him.

  Under a range of black and umber clouds roiled the sea, so distant that he gasped to think they had climbed this high. From here all of Araboth could be seen, rising straight above the sand on a peninsula barely large enough to contain it. The small lip of sand beneath the Lahatiel Gate glittered in the ominous light, and glints of blue and gold flickered from the spires of the Gate itself. But elsewhere there was scarcely enough sand to keep the water from lashing at the foot of the domes. Even knowing nothing of its history, Hobi realized that it could not always have been like this. Erosion, or some natural disaster unmarked inside the domes, must have gnawed away at the sands surrounding the city. Otherwise how could it have been built there, with the waves coursing so near its fundament? An awful vertigo seized him—to think he had lived there all these years with the ocean lapping right there, with nothing but that fragile shell to protect him, and the vigilance of the Architects. He swayed, and would have fallen but for a cold hand clenching about his elbow.

  “Hobi, come with me. There is shelter here.”

  Reluctantly he let her drag him away, his eyes fixed upon the vision of the domes like five clouded eyes set into the sand, the water churning around them and casting up long streamers of white and green beneath a somber sky.

  The wind howled so loudly that they did not try to speak. An overpowering reek filled his nostrils, like water clogged with blossoms. Even with Nefertity gripping his arm he stumbled—the ground was uneven, covered with sharp stones that cut through the soft soles of his boots. But when he looked down he saw that they were not stones, but bits of metal and glass, some of them worn smooth but others sharp and rusted as though just torn from some huge machine. And they were all brilliantly colored, red and yellow and green and blue and orange, and striped or spotted or laced with intricate designs. He saw fragments of words spun across sheets of metal or plastic sticking up from the ground like severed limbs. ILLER, they read, or DOL, or ING. A scalloped yellow plate, a sort of canopy twice his height, rose from where it was half-buried in the ground, and flapped in the wind.

  It shouted in bold red-and-yellow letters.

  Other things lay sprawled on the stony ground. Hollow images of creatures many times the size of a man, their huge misshapen ears cracked and bent, bulbous noses knocked awry or sometimes buried next to their crushed heads. Centuries of neglect on the exposed tor had caused their paint to ripple and crack, flaking venomous chips of acid-green and candied blue onto the scarred earth. And everywhere were the remains of machines, huge blackened metal arms shooting up from beneath heaps of rubble, flattened engines and broken domes of glass, a gigantic skeletal wheel rising against the turbulent sky like a charred and deadly moon.

  Hobi stopped. His voice croaked thin and shrill above the wind.

  “Where are we?”

  Nefertity shook her head. Her translucent body glowed dull cobalt, its shining spindles and circuits shuttling back and forth inside her chest. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “The ruins of something—a funfair, I think.”

  “A what?” Hobi yanked his arm from her and clasped himself. In a way this was worse than first seeing the world Outside alone: because that at least he had been prepared for, that was a nightmare he had fought and thrashed through all his life. But this? It was grotesque, all those inhuman faces with their lumpy grins, random letters like shrapnel flung against the desolate earth, immense scorpions of blackened steel crushing one another beneath the weight of a huge fallen tower. And through it all the stream coursing in its rust-colored bed. His stomach knotted to think he had drunk from it before.

  “ ‘Fun,’ ” Nefertity quoted softly. She pointed at the broken canopy. Her voice shifted into its crystalline recitative mode.

  “Roundabout, coconut shies, big wheels, swingboats, rock stalls, all the fun of the fair. Midget pantechnicons bearing such legends as: ‘Loades of Fun, Fun on Tour,’ etc. You press the time-switch; the lights go on; everything clicks into motion. Then stops. Until you press the switch again.”

  She stopped. The wind rushing through the broken chambers of a small building made a howling sound.

  “It’s making me sick,” said Hobi, shouting to be heard above the wind. “Who would do this?”

  Nefertity’s eyes glittered, but her voice was calm. “People long ago,” she said. “After the Second Shining, perhaps even earlier than that. They liked to go to the seashore. Loretta used to like it, she told me. They built things there—pleasure cities. I think this was one of them.”

  Pleasure cities. Hobi remembered what Nasrani had told him about the city that had stood here once. Wealthy people, slave traders, gamblers. They might have climbed here, where they could look down upon the sea, and thrown their hours and their money to the ravening winds.

  But he couldn’t imagine who would have derived pleasure from this —these broken statues, and machines whose use could never have been anything but obscure. It was worse even than the Orsinate’s dream inquisitions. He shivered, his teeth chattering. A whistling sound echoed across the tor, once and again, and again, then small reports that grew louder. Hobi cried out. Something struck his neck, then his face, and he drew away his hand to find it wet.

  “It’s started.”

  Nefertity turned back toward the ocean. A solid black line seemed to shimmer only inches above the edge of the promontory. Clouds of silver shook through the air—rain, Hobi realized, this was rain! —and a distant crashing echoed the wind screaming across the tor. In this sudden twilight Nefertity was a silvery blue beacon in the center of the world, calm and implacable as the rain lashed about her. As Hobi huddled beside her he thought he could see something out on the outermost edge of the horizon, a rent in the disturbed surface of the great ocean—something black and huge, as though the rim of the world had suddenly plunged into an abyss. He pointed at it. The rain struck him so hard that his face felt as though he had been slapped.

  “I do not know,” said Nefertity. Rain streamed down her body in fiery runnels. “But we should find shelter.”

  “ I know what it is,” the boy said slowly. As they watched the black bulge on the horizon grew even huger, and moved across the lashing gray sea, heading toward the shore. Hobi felt dizzy, almost speechless as he realized what it was that ripped across the ocean toward Araboth.

  He said, choking, “I saw it—in a, a ’file once, about the Third Ascension. A kind of wave—like what you said before, the kind of wave that came after the Second Shining.”

  “Tsunami,” the nemosyne whispered. “A tidal wave.”

  He nodded, staring numbly at the black ridge, the massive plateau of water rising to crush the sands below. “It’s really come, Nefertity.” He knew she could not hear him above the wind, he could no longer hear himself, but he went on anyway. “Like they always said—”

  “Ucalegon.”

  Nasrani had turned and fled after the rasa left him, back up the tunnel until the sand slithered beneath his feet and shallow water lapped at his soles. His breathing roared in his ears, and another sound, faint but unceasing. The pale green light that had filled the passage near the tunnel’s mouth had faded until it was nearly too dark for him to see. That was what finally stopped him.

  He stood in the middle of the tunnel, swaying back and forth. He could once again hear the murmurous explosions that rocked the Undercity, and feel the ground tremble. For the hundredth time his hands patted futilely at his greatcoat, trouser pockets, boots, searching for something, anything—empty morpha tubes, paper wrappings, ashes, lint. Nothing. He had fou
nd it all hours before, chewed it or spun it to grit between his fingers and then flicked it into the darkness. There was nothing left now, not in his pockets, not anywhere. If he went any farther back into the Undercity he would find the tunnel blocked, or be crushed by the walls caving in. Slowly he turned, and began to walk back toward where the passage opened onto the shore.

  It was some time before he realized that it should not be this dark. In the distance the tunnel’s mouth gaped, no bigger than the end of his thumb. Light trickled from the opening, but it was fainter than before, and had a greenish cast. His legs felt numb from walking. To either side the walls of the tunnel seemed to glow faintly. There was a strong smell of dead fish.

  From the corners of his eye he glimpsed small shadows flickering against the tunnel walls. When he stopped he saw that it was only a trick of the feeble light. There were no real shadows, only dark blotches on the tiles. He rubbed his eyes, then stepped toward the wall. There was something odd about it, something he hadn’t noticed before, when he had been so intent upon listening to Tast’annin ranting on and on. His foot caught on something, and he kicked away a soft object. There was enough light for him to see it was some kind of clothing, a bundle of dark blue cloth that hit the sand with a soft thud. He turned from it, knelt and ran his fingers across the wall’s broken tile, heedless of the dank mold catching under his nails.

  There were words there, written in a script all but erased by time. Words and crudely drawn pictures. Nasrani snatched his hand back when he saw that he had smeared the images, patches of ruddy clay and something black like charcoal clotted across his palm. He drew back a little, squinting as he tried to read in the watery light.

  The letters slanted down and disappeared into the sand etching the wall’s bottom edge. Behind him he could hear a faint whistling sound. Very slowly he lifted his eyes, and saw it drawn above the broken lettering. A shape like a coiled spring etched upon the tile, opening into a fluid line that circled something meant to be a hill, he thought, a hill dark with small shapes that might have been people, or houses. Above it spear-shaped missiles, wavering lines to indicate flames, a horrible thing meant to be a human face, but veined with glistening tendrils of mildew. Beneath the spiral was a carefully drawn curl, opening into a hand with fingers splayed, like the claws of a stooping raptor.

  “ ‘ The Wave is come ,’ ” Nasrani breathed. He traced the air above the image, leaned forward until his cheek pressed against the moist wall, and closed his eyes. Teeth had been drawn jaggedly in the mouth of the wave, teeth and a tongue that unfurled until it reached the smooth base of the hillside.

  Behind him the whistling grew louder, was swallowed into a gurgling roar. Too late he turned and tried to run. But it was already there, it had found him as it would find his sisters and all the others who waited for it, arrogant or fearful or unknowing. Just as they had always said, as had been predicted for a hundred years, as it had come centuries before and would come again to claim the city they had been proud and foolish enough to build within its path. He tripped in the darkness and fell, and as he slumped to the ground he heard it, a million feet pounding up the twisted passageway, its voice a roar that deafened him, winding and turning until it found him crouched beneath its image and crushed him there, while all about the stones shrieked and tumbled into sand.

  “Ucalegon,” he whispered. The wave devoured him.

  Chapter 11

  UCALEGON

  IT WAS DIFFICULT TO see what was happening from the viewing platform in the Narthex.

  “Is that some kind of fish? ” asked Nike, incredulous. Rain blew in sharp cold gusts up from the open Gate. She shivered, wishing she’d worn a rain cape or something warmer than her thin silk suit.

  At her side the precentor, still upset that her rendition of the hyperdulia had been interrupted, stood smoking a camphor cigarette and gazing out to sea with an unfocused, rather sour expression.

  “Someone over there yelled it was that thing you keep down on Dominations. The whale.” She flicked her cigarette ash in the direction of a group huddled at the edge of the balustrade, primarily intimates of the Quir who seemed giddy from kef and champagne. The chromium mitre of the Archbishop of the Church of Christ Cadillac rose above the little crowd, a somber note amid the doomsday revelry. A moment later, the Archbishop detached herself from the gathering and hurried to Nike’s side.

  “There is something you didn’t tell me,” she said angrily. Her face was bright pink and shining with sweat. She looked terrified. “This morphodite you chose for the sacrifice, what’s her name, Reed—”

  “Reive,” Nike corrected her. She patted her cheeks with her handkerchief and looked about distractedly for her sister.

  “Reive,” the Archbishop went on. “She’s innocent!” She inclined her head toward the group still leaning over the balustrade, calling excitedly to unseen people below as a hapless servant tried to hold a sheet of plastic over their heads. Shrieks and laughter as the balcony shuddered and debris hailed down from the ceiling. “The Quir says she told him she was innocent. Someone else says your sister acted in collusion with the Aviator Imperator to murder Shiyung, and falsely accused this mantic. To deliberately enact the rite of propitiation with such a sacrifice—”

  She stopped, breathless, and stared out to sea. Nike stepped beside her, wiping rain from her nose and squinting as she tried once again to pick out the Redeemer’s small shadow amid all that gray and silver. Black clouds moved so quickly overhead that she could imagine the howling wind was the sound of their passing. She could barely make out a dark shape leaping dolphin-wise upon the horizon before it was swallowed by immense waves.

  “Zalophus,” she said, turning to the precentor and shaking her head. The Archbishop stared at her as though she were mad. “The whale: a very archaic geneslave, its name is Zalophus. I can’t imagine how it escaped.”

  “The entire city is collapsing!” exploded the precentor, ignoring the Archbishop’s disapproving gaze. “You’ve brought this upon us, you and your sisters—”

  Nike made some vague ttt-ttt sounds and flapped her hands in the precentor’s face. “My sister is a fool,” she said with surprising vehemence, and poked the Archbishop with one wet finger. “Actually, they’re both fools, but at least Shiyung is a dead fool. ziz is the one you want to talk to about all this, Your Eminence. Not only was that morphodite innocent, she was Shiyung and Nasrani’s child. My sister wanted her dead. If you can find a ’file crew you might question her about it. Also about the death of Sajur Panggang, who claimed that the domes are collapsing. Please excuse me.”

  The Archbishop and the precentor fell back, dumbfounded, as Nike pushed her way past them. On the balustrade behind her triumphant cheers arose as the Quir’s aluminum shades were hoisted above the small crowd and the rain sluiced off in shining sheets.

  “May Day, May Day,” Nike muttered to herself. It was something she had heard once in a cinema show about explosions on large ships. The floor shook and she steadied herself against a column, reached into a pocket and emptied a morpha tube into her mouth. She waited a moment and tapped an amphaze ampule to her throat for good measure, then closed her eyes and grimaced, waiting for the burst of clearheadedness to come. Her back molars tingled and her mouth went dry. For what seemed like a very long time there was a shrill buzzing in her ears and a popping sound. When she opened her eyes she saw that the column she had been leaning against had toppled. She looked over to see if ziz was with the group on the balustrade and saw that the balustrade too was gone, sheared away as though it had been a bit of unwanted furze on a topiary sculpture.

  “This is very bad,” Nike said thickly. The high-pitched buzzing turned out to be screams, an unrelenting series of shrieks and moans that seemed to come from everywhere, above and beneath and to every side of the margravine. She started to take a step past the fallen column, her legs moving with unnatural slowness, and almost immediately stopped. There were people pinned beneath the column, some of th
em still moving and at least one of them screaming so loudly that Nike’s hair stood on end. When she glanced down at her feet she saw that the pointed toes of her boots were splashed with blood and what at first looked like grass. Nike made a small unhappy noise and stumbled backward. Her siblings’ many complaints about her intemperance finally seemed to be not entirely unwarranted. She wished she had not taken so much morpha.

  “Your Grace, Your Grace—”

  She turned unsteadily, her eyes tearing. Smoke was billowing up from somewhere, not the sweet-scented smoke of Æstival incense but black oily clouds with a horrible chemical tang. She could scarcely make out the small plump figure of the Quir, one half of his pallid face covered in blood as though sloppily rouged.

  “ Yes? ” she heard herself asking politely, but the Quir had grabbed her hand and was dragging her after him as though she had refused to acknowledge him. And indeed, when, coughing, she brought her hand to her mouth, she could feel her jaws tightly clenched, and could hear a droning humming noise that she realized, with embarrassment, that she herself was making.

  “Your Grace, here, may be safer, you took a bad hit back there—”

  She let her hand fall back to her side and saw that it was bright red; from the handkerchief dangling between her fingers dripped large spots of blood. She started to say something to the Quir, ask him what exactly it was the morphodite had said to him about her innocence. But then they were struggling down a long stairway, the Quir pushing bodies from their path, some limp but others lively enough to shout or howl as they tumbled from the steps. It was not until they reached the bottom that Nike could catch her breath and look around, and see that the Quir had brought her to the very mouth of the Lahatiel Gate itself.

  “My sister,” she gasped, pulling away from the Quir’s surprisingly strong grasp and striving to peer through the haze of smoke and rain that clouded everything. “ziz—”