The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  "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 what 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.

  By the time I’d finished stuffing my face it was getting dark. I tried to retrace my steps, got completely lost, gave up, looked around for somewhere to sleep and caught sight of a man’s feet sticking out from behind a tree. It turned out I’d been going in circles, or a freak storm had blown me off course, or something like that. Anyway, I was back at the camp. I went to look at the duke.

  Ninety-six men died from eating the poison mushrooms. The duke survived. By the time I got back he was sitting up straight, the map on his knees, though it was already too dark to read. He looked up at me as I trudged towards him and said, “If I’m right, those hills over there are CataAno.”

  I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

  "CataAno. Where Aeneas changed horses on the post road to Eano. In which case, Eano is twelve miles dead ahead.”

  "I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I might head back to the ship.”

  He smiled at me. “What, and miss all the fun? I don’t think so.”

  "I think I’ll go back,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You’ll sail the ship all by yourself back to the Republic,” he said. “What an exceptional fellow you are. And on an empty stomach, too.”

  I didn’t tell him about the Chicken-in-the-woods. I said; “I don’t think Eano’s there anymore. If it’s the capital, and it’s only twelve miles away—”

  He raised a hand, and I shut up. “I think I’d like to be proved right before I die,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”

  I thought; he’s going to die, and he’s talked himself into believing, so why not let him die happy? But, if we all turned round and went back, maybe we could catch fish or something. If he said go back, they’d go back, wouldn’t they? “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

  "Really?”

  "Yes.” And I told him.

  I shall never forget the look on his face. Hard to describe. The nearest I can get is, he didn’t believe me, and he was deeply puzzled at why I should choose to make up such an improbable story. When I eventually ground to a halt, he gazed at me for a while, then looked down at the map. “From Eano,” he said, “we should be able to row down the Pelanaima, assuming we can hire boats, and follow the coast back to Aos. That’ll save us having to walk back the way we came.”

  I shook my head. “You’re forgetting,” I said. “There’s a waterfall at Deudo. Aeneas said it was as high as the steeple of the New Year Temple.”

  "There’ll be a portage,” the duke replied.

  "Aeneas never mentioned one.”

  "There’ll be one by now,” the duke said. “After all, that was three hundred years ago.”

  So I went looking for someone else in authority. That proved to be difficult. The captains and first mates of both the Lion and the Heron were dead; three from mushrooms, one from fever. The helmsman of the Heron was still alive, but delirious and shouting at people who weren’t there. At least that explained why there’d been no mutiny; nobody left to lead it.

  I wandered round the camp, counting heads. By now I was feeling considerably better, thanks to the chicken-fungus. I counted sixty-one, of whom probably fifty-eight would still be alive in the morning. Then I sat down under a tree with my head in my hands and burst into tears. Nobody objected, commented or seemed to notice.

  While I was bawling my eyes out, it occurred to me that there was still one high-ranking officer still alive; me. I was, after all, the Gorgias professor of humanities at the Studium, which made me an ex officio member of the Lower Conclave and standing delegate to the College of Deacons. I wasn’t sure if my jurisdiction extended to the ends of the earth, however. Also, I didn’t want to be a leader. It’s bad enough dying; dying when it’s your fault must be so much worse.

  Twice during the night I got up, with the intention of walking away, back down the trail we’d blundered through the forest. I didn’t, of course. Too scared. It had all happened so fast—the deaths, the disaster, the sudden falling-apart of everything. I tried to put my finger on the moment when we’d lurched from in control to doomed, but I couldn’t. The obvious truth, which I found I couldn’t hide from no matter what I did, was that by this point there really wasn’t anything I or anyone else could do. There was definitely no hope if I went back. We’d come too far. If we went on—well, who knows? We might just stumble to the edge of the forest, or meet with friendly savages, or kill a very large, stupid, slow-moving, half-witted animal.

  In the morning, nobody was in any hurry to move on, not even the duke. We spent a while looking at the dead—we didn’t have the energy or the tools to bury them, so we left them where they lay, but we looked at them, as being the only sign of respect we could still afford. Gradually, in twos and threes, we hauled ourselves to our feet, hesitated; then, without orders or words of command, we silently turned to face due north and began picking our way.

  I don’t know how long we’d been going—the canopy was high and dense, so we rarely saw the sun—when the man next to me, I never did find out his name, grabbed my shoulder and pointed. He wasn’t the only one to have noticed. On the skyline, in a fortuitous gap between the trees, was a human outline, standing straight and perfectly still.

  Someone yelled out; we all joined in. The human outline didn’t move. We surged forward, howling, pleading. Actually, I’d sort of figured it out before anyone got close enough to see. Accordingly, I slowed down and walked while the others broke into a run.

  Aeneas had liked most things he saw in Essecuivo, but he was mildly scathing about their works of art. Their paintings, he said, were simplistic and garishly colored, and their sculptures were stiff and unnaturalistic. But, he added, you can’t help but be impressed by the sheer size of some of them. There was one, he said, a mile outside Eano on the main road to Aos, an advancing draped female in basalt, that had to be fifteen feet high—

  Well, it was too badly weathered and worn to be sure what it was supposed to be, other than a human being, walking forward. We gathered under it, staring up. There was no face. But on the pedestal—too low to catch the wind and sheltered from the rain—was an inscription, in an alphabet I’d never seen before.

  The duke crouched down to peer at it, then got up slowly and painfully. “Nearly there,” he said.

  History demands absolutes. History would like to say that, at three minutes past the tenth hour of the seventeenth day of the sixth month, twelve hundred and seventy-one years after the foundation of the Republic, the duke entered Eano by the west gate. History, of course, is written by people like me.

  As a historian, however, I’m at an overwhelming disadvantage. I was there. Accordingly, if I want to cling on to the few tattered scraps of intellectual honesty I have left, I’m forced to say, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what time it was, because the forest canopy was so high and dense I couldn’t see the sun. I can guess at the date, but I suspect I’ve lost a day somewhere in my recollections; other survivors I’ve talked to r
emember another day before we reached the statue, which I have no memory of whatsoever. I can be reasonably sure of the year (but bear in mind Suavonius’ recent and highly persuasive paper arguing that the Republic wasn’t founded in Year One, but two years earlier) As to where we made our entrance, who knows? We walked between what looked like two ivy-smothered dead trees, which turned out to be the broken stubs of stone columns. The duke reckoned they were the remains of a gate, but for all I know they were the back door of a very large tannery. And as for the name of that city; well, ask someone else. Thanks to my lifetime of exhaustive study, I’m the least qualified man in the world to offer an opinion.

  We spent the rest of that day and most of the next wandering round in a sort of daze, like country people on their first trip to town. We tripped over the fallen remains of walls, fell into gutters, cisterns, fountains and what may just possibly have been Aeneas’ great central open-air bath (but it was filled with a tangle of vines, briars and creepers, so there was no way of knowing how deep it once was). At one point, we definitely walked across the flat roof of a large building. My guess is that something like twelve feet of leaf-mould had built up over what used to be ground level, so we were at least two stories high; in which case, we most likely marched straight over the suburbs without knowing they were there. We found about two dozen inscriptions in the same unknown script; the duke was desperate to copy them down, but nobody had a pen or a pencil; someone tried lighting a fire and charring the end of a stick, but it didn’t work.

  I forget the name of the man who found the window. He was one of the soldiers, a short, cheerful man with the unusual ability to sleep standing up; I’d exchanged a few words with him from time to time, until his optimism got on my nerves. He was poking about in the undergrowth when he came up against what looked like a huge anthill, except that under all the forest-floor garbage there was stone. He poked some more, and was mildly shocked when his questing boot shattered a pane of glass. The noise brought the rest of us, and we crowded round; there was just a chance, after all, that a relatively intact building might have been used as a food store by people coming this way.