River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  A small hand took hers. The baboon stood by her knee, looking up, his muzzle scratched and bloody. “I am here, my friend. When Emily came free, I let go.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Renie’s legs had been threatening to give way, and now they did. She sat down with a bump beside !Xabbu. “Twice in one day.”

  Martine and Florimel were kneeling beside the pregnant girl, who appeared to be regaining consciousness. T4b stood over them, his arms outstretched, his gloved fingers clenching and unclenching, helpless once more after his brief moment of heroism. No one remembered William until he coughed and spat out blood.

  “Is . . . there . . . any water?” His voice was as scratchy as wind in leaves.

  Renie crawled across the ground to his side, quickly joined by the others. Her momentary hope evaporated. William’s eyes were wandering, unfixed, and his breath made a terrible bubbling sound.

  “We have found no water in this place, William,” !Xabbu said. “I am sorry.” He hesitated for a moment. “Have this water from me,” he said, then bent close and let a stream of saliva run from his mouth to William’s.

  The pale, bloodied jaw clamped, then the gorge rose and fell as the injured man swallowed. “Thank you,” he sighed.

  “You should save your strength,” Florimel told him sternly.

  “I’m dying, Flossie, so belt up.” He took another liquid breath. “You’ll be rid of me . . . soon, so . . . the least you can do is hear me out.” For a moment William opened his eyes wide; they lit on Renie, then he winced and let the lids fall shut again. “I thought I heard your voice. So . . . so you’re back, are you?”

  She took his hand. “I’m back.”

  His eyes opened again at a new thought. “Quan Li! Watch out for Quan Li!”

  “She’s gone, William,” Martine told him.

  “She tried to kill me, the miserable . . . old bat. Didn’t want me . . . comparing notes with anyone . . . about that night in Aerodromia. I told her I heard . . . someone come back.” He fought for breath. “She said she did, too, but she said it was . . . Martine.”

  The blind woman leaned close to him. “Is that why you came to me for that strange conversation? Why you told me all those things?”

  “I . . . wanted to see how you responded. I told you the truth about me, though. I thought you would . . . know if I lied.” He laughed a little, a horrible sound. “Granny played me like a . . . frigging violin, didn’t she?” His face contorted, then relaxed. “God, this hurts. It’s slow, though. Feels . . . like I’ve been dying . . . for days.”

  Renie didn’t know anything about the night he was referring to, and it hurt her to see him struggle for speech. Martine could explain it all later. “It doesn’t matter, William. Quan Li’s gone.”

  He appeared not to have heard her. “Guess this answers . . . any questions about . . . dying online, eh, Flossie? No one . . . could fake this feeling. You . . . drop off the perch here, it’s for . . . for real.”

  Florimel’s face was still set in its usual hard lines, but she was clutching William’s other hand in hers. “We are all with you,” she said.

  “Martine, I didn’t tell you . . . the whole truth,” the dying man murmured. His eyes were again open, but now he seemed to be the blind one, unable to find the Frenchwoman. “I told you that . . . friends of mine, online friends . . . that some were in comas. But, you see . . . there was one in particular. I was . . . I was in love with her. I didn’t know that she was so young. . . ! I never met her in real . . . real life.” William’s face contorted with pain. “I never touched her! Never! But I told her . . . how I felt.” He moaned, and there was a terrible harmonic from his punctured lungs. “When she . . . got sick, I thought it . . . was my fault. I came here . . . because I wanted to find . . . find her and . . . tell her I was . . . sorry. Because I thought she was . . . a grown woman, truly I . . . did. I would never . . .” He gasped and then fell silent but for labored breathing.

  “It is all right, William,” the blind woman said.

  He shook his head weakly. He opened his mouth, but it was a while until the words came. “No. I was . . . a fool. Old fool. But I tried . . . to be . . . a good man. . . .”

  He went on breathing raggedly for a time, hitching and gasping, but no more words came. At last he shuddered and went still.

  Renie looked at his stiffly unoccupied sim, then pulled a corner of his black cape over his face and sat up. She blinked away tears and wiped her cheeks with her hands. Long moments passed in silence before she said: “We have to bury him. After all, we may be here a while.”

  “Have you no decency?” Florimel demanded angrily. She still held William’s hand. “He is only just dead!”

  “But he is dead, and the rest of us are alive.” Renie stood. Have to be cruel to be kind, she thought. They had lost William and they had lost the access device. It was important to have something to do-not just important for her, but for everyone. Even a funeral was better than nothing. “And the thing that killed him might come back any time. We have a lot of other things to talk about, too.” She pointed to a spot where the strange landscape had moved a little closer to normality, its gray, protoplasmic color at least formed into shapes that resembled rocks and earth and grass. “If we pick one of the solid spots, like that, we won’t have to keep looking at his empty sim for however long we’re here. You don’t really want to do that, do you?”

  “Renie, we are all very tired and upset . . .” Martine began.

  “I know.” She turned in a slow circle, surveying, taking stock of things. “Which is why there are some things we have to do now, so we don’t wind up in this situation again.” She heard herself sounding imperious and softened her voice. “By the way, Martine, I was impressed with the way you went after everyone. You can be a bit of a bulldog when you want to.”

  The Frenchwoman strugged awkwardly and turned away.

  !Xabbu came to stand beside her. “Tell me what I can do to help.”

  Emily 22813, awake again, but deserted by her rescuers, sat up. “That woman tried to kill me!”

  “We know,” Renie said. “!Xabbu, if there is any way to make a fire in this place, I think it would be a very, very good time to have one.”

  “I will see what I can do.” He loped away up the patchwork hillside.

  “She tried to kill me!” the girl howled. “Me and my baby!”

  “Emily,” said Renie, “we all know what just happened, and we’re sorry about it. Now, we’ve got a lot of problems to solve, so just for once, would you please shut up!”

  Emily’s mouth snapped closed.

  !Xabbu found some of what Renie could only think of as non-wood-wire-framed deadfall, like tree branches made of stiffened fishnet. He stacked them in a careful pile, and managed by dint of hard work to induce frictional sparks to ignite this fictional kindling, resulting in a remarkably healthy non-campfire. The flames shifted color and texture in some very disconcerting ways, and sometimes became holes which seemed to show depths not present in the environment, but whatever it looked like, it was a campfire: it persuaded the environment to supply them with a node of warmth and a focus for their attention, which was what Renie had wanted.

  It’s like what !Xabbu said about finding your story, she thought as she looked around at the dazed, fretful faces. If you can’t have a real fire, you have to agree on a fire. She fought off another great wave of exhaustion. There was work to do that was more important than sleep. In any case, they would need sentries now, which meant she would have to pull first shift, even though she was so tired she felt she might collapse like a wet sack any moment. If you want to be the hero of the story, she told herself—and apparently someone has to be—then you have to do the work.

  T4b, glinting with the light of the strange flames; Emily, small face full of self-absorption, far more mysterious than she appeare
d; !Xabbu, his brown eyes warm in his monkey face as he watched her; stubborn Florimel, her own sim features set like a mask, but her shoulders slumped in weariness; and Martine, face lifted, listening to something no one else could hear—Renie looked at each in turn, considering.

  “Right,” she said at last. “There’s a lot to talk about, and a lot of frightening things have happened. We’ve lost at least one of our company, and Sellars hasn’t reached us—may never reach us, for all we can tell. But we’re here, we’re alive, and we know more than we did. Am I right?” The nods and murmurs were not stirring votes of support, but they were a better response than she would have received an hour earlier. “We managed to find each other across the network, and not all of that was because of the Grail people’s access device—!Xabbu and Martine both had a lot to do with it, yes? Isn’t that true?”

  “Are you trying to make yourself the leader, Renie?” Florimel asked. There was a touch of her normal belligerence in the question, but only a touch.

  “I’m trying to tell you what I think. Everyone else is welcome to talk, too. But am I going to stand by, listening to people bicker while we fall apart? No. No, I’m not.”

  Florimel smiled a little, but said no more. The others nodded and murmured, sad but not hopeless. Everything seemed alloyed in this place, in this gray hour; even the smoke rising from the alien fire was a shimmering combination of solid and unsolid.

  “There are things we can do,” Renie went on. “Listen to me! Good things, starting here, starting now. We can go forward. But first we truly have to talk.” She looked at them all once more, feeling for the word, the tone, that would bring them with her. She had a direction now she could sense—perhaps what !Xabbu had meant by “seeing with the eyes of the heart”—but the endpoint was as faint and theoretical as a distant star, and without help she would lose it again. “And we can’t have any more secrets from one another,” she urged. “Do you understand? More than ever, our lives are in each other’s hands. No more secrets.”

  Fire could be made to burn, in that unfinished land, but night could not be made to come. They spoke and argued for long hours, even laughed and wept a little, then lay down to sleep with the light still unchanged.

  As she sat through her sentry shift, Renie watched the oddly neutral sky and thought about her brother Stephen.

  I’m coming, my little man, she promised him. Her silent declaration was not just for Stephen, but for herself, too, and as a warning for all those things and people which still stood in her way. I’m coming to find you.

  From now on, she swore, she would keep her eyes wide open.

  Afterword

  HE found himself on a beach, face down in pale sand. After the long, long night of Venice, it was strange to feel the sun shining on his skin again, especially this bright sun that bleached the sand pale as snow and turned the blue ocean into a shining enamel plate.

  Paul stood, muscles aching, and looked up and down the deserted beach. Even the sky was empty except for a few ragged tufts of clouds, and the monogram silhouettes of seabirds wheeling slowly from the cliffs to the sea and back again.

  A vast, low house stood high atop the headlands, a thing of stone and wood, surrounded by a gated wall. Shepherds, tiny smears through the heat haze, were driving their flocks out of its gates and down the hill paths and a wagon piled high with earthenware jars was being wheeled in past them into the courtyard. Paul looked along the beach again, then out at the sun-painted ocean, then turned and began to walk toward the house on the cliffs.

  Something even whiter than the sand caught his eye. He squatted to examine it and found the half-buried skeleton of a bird, translucent bones disarranged by wind or scavengers. Paul felt a dim empathy. That was how he felt inside-bleached, scoured, dry. There would be worse things to do than lie beneath the sun and let the sand bury him, the tides wash him.

  If he had owned a coin, he would have tossed it to decide his fate, caring so little whether he went on or lay down that he was willing to let the gods choose for him. But the rags that clothed him held nothing but salt and sand fleas.

  Not drifting any more, he told himself, making a bleak joke. He continued up the beach, toward the bottommost of the hill paths.

  None of the sandaled, bearded men at the gates tried to stop him entering, although several made rude comments about his filthiness and age. Incapable of caring what anyone thought, especially shadows like these, puppets unaware of the strings that made them dance, he trudged past. Goats and a few pigs nuzzled his tattered robes, searching for food, but none of the human inhabitants paid him even that much attention until he stopped in the shadow that lay along the threshold of the great house to look back at the wide, flat blue ocean.

  A woman in a hooded garment, her hands cracked like leather and twisted by age and hard work, offered him a bowl of wine. He thanked her and raised it to his lips, still watching the endless flight of seagulls out over the water as they circled, dipped, then rose to circle once more.

  The old woman seemed very taken by his face. Paul watched with a certain sense of detached curiosity as tears came to her eyes, and then the gnarled hand which a moment ago had been reaching for the dipper took hold of his own hand instead.

  “My lord,” she whispered, voice as rough as her skin, “my lord, you have come back!”

  Paul nodded wearily. If that was the game, then so be it, but he could not become excited at the acting out of yet another scenario. He had done what he had been told. Nandi had said that the Wanderer and the Weaver would be found in Ithaca, and so he was here.

  “Come,” she said, “oh, come!” She smiled broadly, excitement making her almost girlish. “Follow me, but do not speak a word. The house-your house, my lord-is full of evil men. I will take you to your son.”

  He frowned. He knew nothing about any son. “I was told to look for the Wanderer’s house. I was told that I must release the Weaver.”

  The serving woman’s eyes grew wide. “Has some god put a spell upon you? You are the wanderer, my lord, and this is your house.” She looked around worriedly, then turned her teary gaze back to him. “I will take you to her-but please, my lord, on your life, you must go quietly, and speak to no man!”

  He allowed himself to be led around the wall of the great stone and wood house, then in through a side door and into a smoky kitchen. The women working there eyed his rags with distaste and shouted ribald questions at his guide, who seemed to be named Eurycleia. He was beginning to suspect what story he inhabited. When an old dog rose from its place near the hearth and limped toward him, growling, then sniffed his hand and began avidly to lick his fingers, he was certain.

  “Odysseus,” he said quietly. “King of Ithaca.”

  Eurycleia turned to him in alarm and made a terrified warning gesture at her lips. She sped her pace to lead him through a great hall whose walls were hung with spears and shields. Outside the hall’s open doors, a score or more of men lolled in the shadows around the courtyard, their clothes and weapons clearly those of nobility. They seemed to be having a party. Meat was being roasted over pits full of coals, and servants too slow to serve were being cursed at and kicked and smacked with fists. One of the guests was singing an obscene ballad, his bearded chin jutting toward the sky, the object of his attention a darkened window overlooking the central yard.

  “Hark how sweetly Antinous sings, Lady!” one of the others yelled hoarsely, a man drunk before midday. “Will you not let him up to sing to you privately?”

  Nothing moved in the window. The men laughed and returned to their amusements.

  Paul was numb inside. Even as he followed the old woman up the creaking ladder to the upper floor, moments away from something he had sought for a very long time and through at least a handful of different worlds, he was finding it difficult to care.

  They killed the child. The thought had been there, wor
dless, since his eyes had opened, but he could not keep it at bay any longer. The memory of the boy’s limp body, and of his own helplessness, had burned inside him until there was nothing left to burn. He had led the boy to his death. He had sacrificed him like a pawn, and then he had escaped.

  He was empty.

  Eurycleia stopped at the chamber door. She pushed aside the hanging and gestured Paul to step through. As he did, she caught at his hand again and kissed it, then pulled the knuckles against her forehead in a gesture of willing servitude.

  The Weaver looked up at his entrance. Her loom, from which she was even now plucking threads, undoing a picture which she had all but finished, stretched before her like a harp made of colors. The tapestry was all birds-birds of every sort, doves, crows, lapwings, and all in motion, walking, pecking, flying with wings outstretched. Their feathers were of every hue, furiously bright.

  The woman at the loom stared back at Paul. He had half-suspected the face he would see, but even with his heart a bleached bone inside him, it still made his breath quicken. She was older here than in her other guises, but she was also somehow startlingly young. Her thick, glossy hair spilled on her shoulders and hung down her back like a dark curtain. Her eyes were as deep and haunted as the stares of dead strangers in old photographs. But she was no stranger-she was something much less explicable. She knew him. And although he could not name her, he knew her too, in every cell of his being.

  “You are here,” she said, and even the voice was like coming home. “At last you have come.” She stood and spread her arms, her robes billowing like wings. As she smiled, her face suddenly seemed that of a young girl. “There is so much that we must talk about, my long-lost husband-so very much!”

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