The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  Don’t ask me about the voyage. I wasn’t there; at least, my body was, but the rest of me was somewhere else. My body—poor abused, long-suffering flesh—spent three weeks in a tiny box, curled up on a wooden shelf with nothing but a sack stuffed with moldy feathers between my aching joints and the rough-planed planks. Occasionally someone remembered me and brought me food; rather better food than I’d have had back at High Table, but I didn’t want to eat it. Why bother? It wasn’t going to stay down very long, and when it came back up again, it just added to the misery.

  I don’t suppose I missed very much. The sea is, after all, the sea. From time to time I asked the steward if we were nearly there yet, but he only smiled. Once, after a particularly violent episode in the course of which I was repeatedly hurled off the shelf against the side of the box, I asked him if the ship had taken much damage from the storm. “What storm?” he said. I’d have told him about it, but he chose that moment to take the cover off a plate of scrambled eggs, so of course I was sick all over his shoes.

  There came a day when the ship seemed to have been sitting still for rather a long time. I didn’t mind that in the least. The thing I’d been dreading most about the voyage was boredom; how naive I was, back then. When you’ve been subjected to twenty-one days of incessant torture, with your guts trying very hard to force their way up through your mouth, a prolonged interval of nothing at all strikes you as the sort of bliss reserved by the Invincible Sun for the blessed elect. In fact, for a while I wondered if I’d died. But no. No such luck.

  I was just nerving myself to sit up when the door opened and the duke came in.

  He, of course, had proved to be a natural sailor. He’d divided his time between standing on deck looking magnificent in gold braid and sitting in his cabin doing precise calculations with mathematical instruments. He looked at me and winced, and covered his nose with a linen handkerchief.

  “You might care to come up on deck,” he said, and left the room.

  The light hit me like a hammer as soon as I stuck my head through the hatch.

  “Thank you for joining us.” I could hear the duke’s voice, but all I could see was blinding clouds of orange, yellow and red. “I thought you might like to be present at this extraordinary moment. After all, it’s your dream too, and your father’s.”

  He wasn’t making any sense. I groped my way forward until my hand connected with something I could hang on to. It proved to be a man’s arm. I let go quickly, staggered, and slumped against what turned out to be the mast. The firework display was thinning out a little. I could see the deck of the ship, a clear blue sky, dark blue sea. Nothing extraordinary about that.

  “Essecuivo,” the duke said.

  Don’t be silly, I wanted to say, there’s nothing out there, just too much sky and water. But he was pointing—to be precise, he was posing for the statue that would presumably one day be cast to commemorate this moment; back straight, side on like an archer drawing, right arm outstretched at right-angles to his body, pointing. At what? I looked. There wasn’t anything, apart from a grayish blur of clouds on the horizon.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  He didn’t reply. There were four or five other men, too clean and well-dressed to be sailors, and they were looking at the clouds too. Humoring the great man, who’d finally flipped. Maybe not.

  They weren’t clouds. Instead, I was looking at a mountain range, a very long way away. Land.

  “Captain,” the duke said. “Be so kind as to show our guest the chart.”

  Meant nothing to me, of course. Lots of pale blue, with pencil lines; some zig-zags, with dates scribbled beside the angles in tiny neat handwriting. The longest line stopped abruptly in the middle of nowhere. Something told me to look up and trace the latitude and longitude.

  “Exactly where Aeneas said it would be.”

  No, I thought. No, please. Not even the Invincible Sun, that incorrigible practical joker, who designed the human digestive and reproductive systems, gave Man the brain of a god and half the lifespan of a beech tree, could be so cruel, so capricious. I stared, longing for the mountains to be clouds, but they weren’t. They were mountains, just like the mountains Aeneas had described, in words that had gone up in smoke on Carchedonius’ hearth, that you see as you approach Essecuivo from the north-west; the Aoidus mountains, at the foot of which sits the mighty city of Aos.

  No good will come of this, said my little voice. Indeed. There are times when I wonder whose side I’m on.

  The wind had died away completely almost as soon as we came within sight of land. The sails were flat, dead, and the smoke from the galley fire went straight up into the air, like a pine tree.

  We sat there for two days. We couldn’t quite hear the children’s voices or smell the woodsmoke, but we were that close; but not quite close enough to launch a boat and row over. So we sat. The duke managed to keep his composure, but he spent most of the time peering at the distant bump through a colossal brass telescope, which he didn’t offer to share. As far as I was concerned, the total stillness of the ocean more than made up for the frustration of being stuck. I was able to eat food, get up and walk about. I found a quiet place on deck not apparently required for seafaring purposes, snuggled down on a coil of rope, and read a book.

  In the small hours of the morning of the third day, the wind got up. I began to suspect that something was wrong when I was thrown off my shelf and bounced off the ceiling. I didn’t land terribly well, and I was lying there wondering if I’d been killed—I honestly don’t know about all that stuff; how are you supposed to know the difference between a fractured skull and a nasty knock?—when someone barged in, dragged me off the floor and bundled me out through the door. I assumed I was being arrested and taken to be executed—it didn’t require much imagination to supply a possible reason—but it turned out that we’d been holed on submerged rocks and they needed everybody to work the pump.

  Everybody. The duke was there, leaning all his weight on the lever. It didn’t seem to be working. It was a while before I noticed, but I remember looking down and not being able to see my knees because they were under water. That made me forget about my poor soft hands and pulled muscles, and I dragged on my allotted area of lever as though I was pulling myself up out of a snake pit. It was only when we stopped that I realized I was so blown I could scarcely breathe.

  We pumped until well after dawn, at which point the wind suddenly died away, the ship stopped moving, and we all collapsed like empty clothes for a while. When eventually someone came down to tell us what was going on, the news wasn’t good.

  The storm had blown us almost to shore. We weren’t quite there because the captain and the helmsman had fought like lunatics to keep us back, otherwise we’d have been crunched against the reefs like corn in a mill. The Lion’s Whelp and the Attempt hadn’t been so lucky. The lookout had seen them go down, and there wasn’t any point looking for survivors. Where the Squirrel had got to, nobody knew. The Heron, fifty years old and built in the Imperial yards, had bobbed about like a bit of stick on a fast stream and was more or less unharmed. The Lion, however, was looking pretty sick. All three masts had gone (all the spares were in the Whelp, remember), she was badly holed below the waterline, two ribs had cracked through and she was only holding together through ignorance and force of habit. There was a chance—say one in ten—of getting her onto the beach, in which case it might have been possible to fix her up if we still had the tools and materials that had gone down in the Whelp; but only if we ditched as much superfluous weight as possible. Superfluous weight, in this context, meant the guns, the powder, the horses and their fodder, the arms and armor, the duke’s wine, and all personnel not absolutely essential to the handling of the ship.

  They had a devil of a job throwing the horses into the sea. They didn’t want to go. So we had to hood them, hamstring them and tip them off the side using spars as levers. It took a long time. I was still part of the emergency workforce, though all I was fit for
was fetching and carrying spars. I was too tired to think, which was a blessing. We worked all day and well into the night, spurred on by the pleasant thought that the wind could get up again at any time. The duke stayed till early evening before transferring to the Heron, which stayed with us through the night. I think I fell asleep standing at the windlass. I woke up in a sort of sprawl on the deck, and every bit of me hurt.

  Come dawn, we were stuck again. They’d taken a mast off the Heron and jury-rigged it so that, with any luck, it’d get the Lion to shore, assuming a very gentle wind in precisely the right direction. Which was what, about halfway through the morning, we got. The ship, what was left of it, sort of slid lazily across the water at more or less walking pace. Just as it got dark, they dropped anchor and lowered the boats. Wherever the hell we were, we’d arrived.

  The duke had drawn a map while we’d been becalmed, before the storm. It was one of a handful of things he’d managed to take with him, stuffed down the side of his boot. It was based on Aeneas and the rest of the available material, and if I hadn’t known better, I’d have believed in it.

  He stood on the beach with this thing in his hands, looking up at the mountains. They took me to him; I was, apparently, necessary. I’d come in on the Lion, which very nearly made it all the way, close enough that we were able to get nine-tenths of the passengers and crew off in longboats. The rest were picked up by boats from the Heron, which was shallow-bottomed enough to ride in close.

  “That,” the duke was saying, looking up from his extrapolated map, “must be the Ieria bluffs.”

  I knew all about them; the foothills of the Aoidus mountains, to which (in Aeneas’ day) the suburbs of Aos were just starting to extend. He was measuring distances with a pair of dividers, doing calculations; his lips were moving. I looked for myself, and felt obliged to point something out.

  “If that’s the Ieria,” I said, “where’s the city?”

  I maintain that it was a valid point. Aos was visible from the ocean; Aeneas saw it on his way in, sailed right up to the splendid granite quay, which stuck out a quarter of a mile into the bay. We’d landed on a sandy beach, and there was nothing man-made to be seen anywhere.

  He ignored me. “In that case,” he went on, “the mouth of the river should be no more than six hundred yards to our left.” He lowered the map and turned his head. I looked with him, and saw, on the surface of the sea, the score-marks and ripples of an undertow. Exactly where he’d said it would be. But; no city.

  “Follow me,” he said, and we all set off up the beach, the wet sand sucking at our heels. A few minutes later, we were standing beside a fast-flowing river at the point where it emptied out into the sea. The duke looked as though he’d just been personally awarded the Order of Merit by the Invincible Sun, in a gold-and-pearl tiara. “The river,” he said. “This is where the piazza used to be.”

  Used to be—I stared at him. That thought hadn’t occurred to me.

  “I imagine what happened,” the duke said, “is that over time the bay silted up and became useless, which is why it was abandoned.” He smiled gently. “The circumstances of our own arrival would tend to support that view, don’t you think?” He turned aside and poked at the ground with the tip of his sword. “I assume that the piazza is somewhere under the sand here. A pity. I was looking forward to seeing the great bronze statue of the Founder.” He shrugged. “Presumably they moved it when they left here, so we’ll see it in due course.”

  I think, as a scholar, that the text of Holy Scripture has been corrupted during the course of manuscript tradition, in some places. For example, I think the famous line should read; Blessed are those that have seen, and still believe.

  One of the others started whacking the undergrowth with his sword. I looked at him, and heard the clinking noise of steel on stone. He knelt down, yanking out handfuls of weed and stuff. The duke came and stood behind him. “There,” the man said. “Look.”

  It was worked, finished stone, peeping out between the stubble of hacked-off green shoots.

  We searched for an hour or so, but didn’t find anything else. Then the captains of the Lion and the Heron came looking for the duke and led him gently but firmly away. They had to talk, they insisted, about what was to be done.

  Basically, we had nearly three hundred people on the beach, the crews of both ships plus the duke’s party and the soldiers. There was enough food left on the Heron to feed them all once, maybe twice if we all went a little hungry. A hundred and fifty people could probably crowd on board the Heron without sinking her, but it’d be a tight squeeze, and obviously she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere like that. Something had to be done about food and shelter. Instructions, please.

  The duke wasn’t particularly interested. He told them to do whatever they thought fit. Then he left them to it and walked away up the beach, his nose in the map. I wanted to stay and eavesdrop on the captains, but they made it fairly clear that I wasn’t needed, so I left them and trotted back to the duke.

  He’d found what he reckoned was the point where the main street—so wide, according to Aeneas, that four grand coaches could run side by side without scraping wheels—came down to the harbor. Follow it up—he pointed at the dense forest that swept down off the hills—and we’d come to the Great North Road, which ran from Aos to the capital, Eano, through a narrow pass in the mountains. If we set off straight away, he said, we could be in Eano by noon next day. At Eano, they’d give us all the food and shelter we could ask for, and we could open negotiations for shipping to take us home, or, at the very least, materials to build a ship to carry the rest of our people. I was the leading authority, he said, lifting his head from the map and looking straight at me. What did I think?

  (What did I think? Let’s see. I thought; this isn’t Essecuivo, it can’t be. Through a combination of uncanny coincidence and extreme wishful thinking, we’ve all perceived a resemblance; but, please note, the map the duke is holding was drawn after we got here; after he’d spent a long time peering fixatedly at the coast through his monster telescope. The map is therefore not evidence. Discount the map, and we’re back to interpretations of the text. For all I know, there may be a thousand bays and natural harbors with rivers running down to them all over the world. Maybe it’s an abundant form in nature, something you always get wherever there’s a confluence of certain factors—estuary plus mountains plus prevailing winds and certain sorts of tides equals something more or less like this. Therefore, the professor regrets to inform you that your hypothesis has not been adequately proved and your paper cannot be accepted for publication.

  And whether or not it’s Essecuivo, unless we find some food and somewhere to shelter, we’re going to die. If we go plunging into the forest, instead of digging for turtles’ eggs or whatever the hell it is people do, we’ll lose our little snippet of time, and we’ll starve.

  If I explain, perhaps he’ll listen.

  If—)

  We followed the road. To be fair, there was a distinct line through the undergrowth and rubbish; a straight line, of the sort that rarely occurs in nature. And that man had found worked stone. It could once have been a road, at that.

  Three hundred yards or so on, the straight line vanished into the trees. The duke had a compass, a beautifully dainty little thing in a silver gilt case, that hung around his neck on a blue silk cord. Eano, according to Aeneas, was thirty-two miles due north of Aos. I salved my conscience by telling myself that we were more likely to find edible animals and birds in the woods than on the beach. I had no basis for such an assertion. I’m not a true scholar.

  I’m in no mood to tell you about that walk in the woods. On the first day, someone took a shot at something that could have been some kind of pig. He missed. The noise put up about a million small black birds, which flew off screaming. After that, the only living thing in the woods was us.

  We spent the night in a bramble thicket. We chose it as a camp ground because it was too dense to hack a way through with w
hat little energy we had left. I fell asleep as soon as my back hit its unsatisfactory mattress of crushed brambles, and didn’t wake up till somebody kicked me. I’d have let them leave me there, because I ached so much I’d rather have died than try to move, but they wouldn’t allow it. Tempers were getting short, and fools weren’t being suffered gladly. I did as I was told.

  It’s usually cooler inside woods than outside them; in which case, I shudder to think what the temperature must’ve been outside, if there was an outside—for all I know, the forest covered the entire country. In any event, it was savagely hot, and we hadn’t brought any water, for the excellent reason that we didn’t have anything to carry it in. Around mid-afternoon we stumbled across, nearly fell into a river, of sorts. The duke immediately claimed it was the Aloura. I agreed. I was past caring.

  That night was bitter cold. We lit fires, which didn’t really do anything. In the morning, about twenty of the men had fevers, stomach cramps, various symptoms. There was no food. We told the sick men we’d come back for them. By nightfall, another thirty-odd were reporting the same symptoms; we left them, too. A part of me, the part that wasn’t triple-checking my body temperature every minute or so for the slightest sign of incipient fever, was doing mental arithmetic; fifty from three hundred leaves two-fifty; the Heron could carry seventy of us, at a pinch, and still get home. By the next evening, we were down to one-eighty and I was still all right. Now (that little part of me said) if only the duke were to catch this unknown disease and die, we could all—

  The duke took ill on the afternoon of the fourth day. We’d stopped because we’d found a huge spread of flat-topped green fungi, which none of us definitely knew to be poisonous. There was a bit of a free-for-all. I’m not big, strong and assertive. I didn’t get any. Some people have all the luck.

  Over half the fungus-poisoning victims died during the night. By daylight, none of the survivors could move. They were sweating, twitching, bleeding from the nose. The duke somehow managed to haul himself up against the trunk of a tree, presumably so he wouldn’t die sprawled in the leaf-mould. I sat and watched him for about three hours. His breathing was slow and shallow, but he kept on and on doing it. After that I’d had enough. I got up and stumbled off, crashed around in the holly, brambles and brash until my foot caught in something and I fell over. When I opened my eyes, I found I’d landed on top of a big, fat creamy-white fungus, the sort they call Chicken-in-the-woods. You’re supposed to cook it first. The hell with that.