by Lavie Tidhar
Its twisting lanes are of great antiquity. Its houses of stone have weathered the storms and the rise of the sea and the breaking of the moon. To these were added more modern structures, simple exoskeletons of wood and bamboo and cloth, rising around and above the old buildings. Its sewers often smell of strange alchemical odors, which mix not entirely unpleasantly with the aroma of fish and other sea creatures, which the residents of Tyr devour with a great appetite. It is a place, also, where some of the old religions are still preserved, in however makeshift and haphazard a way. Some still pray in the direction of drowned Mecca, some speak each year of the next being in Jerusalem-Which-Vanished, and some pray still to a figure of a man bound with thorns on a rosy cross. It is a place of argument, of learning, of constant chatter and debate in the town squares and in its numerous coffee houses and tearooms, yet it is also a place where it is easy to disappear, get lost, find oneself in an unknown, quiet blind alley, and be startled anew by an unexpected sign, an ancient statue or a sundial or a graveyard filled with a cacophony of roses, blue and red and pink.
It was to Tyr that I came, years earlier, as a student, and it was from Tyr—from its academy, which as I said dominates the highest peak above the harbor—that I graduated. It was there that I first met Gawain, a foreigner from a faraway land, from beyond the sea. Atlantis, we would say, laughing, and he would say, No, no, in our tongue its name remains Britannia.
Mowgai and I arrived in Tyr with the Green Caravanserai. I was glad to see it—glad, too, for the smell of the sea. It had always made me long for travel, and adventure. The minarets of Tyr rise into the sky above the port, itself the color of a memory trinket recording tuned to some implausible recollection. We found shelter at a small hotel near the harbor and said our good-byes to the Caravanserai. Iqbal wanted to take the matter of the anthill to the Profesoura, that informal body of the learned—they are an argument upon themselves, like the discordant notes of a badly tuned orchestra, yet they represent, to us, a sort of collective memory, an active form of preserving. Which did not mean I envied Iqbal when he went to present to them his question. Professors, I always found, are best handled individually, or not at all.
The morning after our arrival, we wended our way down to the port. We needed to find a coast-hugger, yet there were none moored behind the breakers, and the port master told us it might be some days before one arrived.
“The Hermit Crab’s out beyond Gorgon’s Point,” the port master said. She scratched her temple, hidden under her thick braids of hair. The water was still and the air hazy with humidity. “The Albatross went searching for the Isles of the Nesoi a fortnight back. Idlewild’s exchanging in the ports of Turkiye. I don’t know, Mai. You may be stuck here a while. Besides, where you want to head? No ship goes that far out.”
“What about Gawain?” I said. “You remember him, Elle. The day he came.”
“Damn, Mai,” she said, and the smile she gave me had something wistful in it. “I remember the ship when it arrived. The Fikturiya, out of New Atlantis. She was a salvage-ship, nothing we’d seen around here in all the time I’d been at Sea. Hammered together out of wood and sheet metal and hope, with sails as old as the end of the world and just as ugly. How it made that journey, there is no one alive in Tyr who could tell you. Abandon-tech, I think. Verboten stuff, from the old days. That thing had power.”
“They do things differently there,” I said, but quietly.
“It isn’t right, Mai,” she said. But a smile was playing at the corners of her mouth, and I could see her tanned, rough hands open and close as though she were picturing herself steering the old vessel along the coast of Francia. “It isn’t right, but she would get you there, a ship like that.”
I thought about Gawain. A sort of barbarian-prince, we called him, teasingly. A tall, gangly youth with wild hair, and tales of ancient households enclosed in dryland forts, somewhere so distant we could barely imagine it. The ship that brought him, the Fikturiya, named after some ancient queen of his people, had stayed in port a month or so before taking her leave. Gawain claimed they had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and visited the floating Isles of the Nesoi; that they had seen monsters rise to the surface from the deeps in open seas, vast creatures casting shadows miles wide with eyes as large as sailboats. Sailors’ tales, of the sort you’d hear in any port’s bars. We never did fully know him. He was one of us, a student and a bright one at that, but some of the past had clung to him in a way that it hadn’t to the rest of us.
“He was part-Sea,” Elle said. “He was part-Sea, and when you sail out far enough, when there is no more Land, it is as though the world had never changed, because time moves differently out there—past, present, future are erased and there is only Sea.”
She was always a bit of mystic when she got going, Elle. She dreamed of tankers and container ships, the great old metal beasts that crossed the seas with careless ease, back when people still thought they ruled the planet. Instead she ruled over a fishing port from which small dhows and schooners sailed over what had once been Land, passing blithely above drowned streets and towns, watery graveyards in which the bones of the dead rose and fell in whispers.
“Stay for lunch,” Elle said. Mowgai excused himself, and I knew he would haunt the wharf-side hostelries where the salvagers congregated. Ocean salvage was a different discipline from Mowgai’s own, and there were few who did it. It was possible our best bet would be to find a salvage-ship to take us at least part of the way to our destination.
I remained behind, and the port master and I adjourned to her offices by the harbor wall. Elle brought out fresh bread and an assortment of pickled vegetables, some cheese, a platter of fried whitebait. She watched me with amusement as I passed on the fish.
“Everything we take, whether Land or Sea, is nevertheless taken,” she said.
“I realize that,” I said.
“We are still animals. We still evolved to eat other species.”
“And look where it brought the people of before,” I said.
“We are not them,” she said. It was an old argument. “We only take a little, and only with need.”
“And I don’t need to eat the fish,” I said.
She laughed, conceding my point. “But they are so tasty.”
“What of the Nesoi?” I said.
“The Nesoi won’t help you,” Elle said. “Mai… why do you need to go?”
“To Atlantis?”
“Yes,” she said, with a scowl. “To Atlantis.”
“Gawain asked—”
“Gawain!” she said. “And do you trust him?”
“Trust him? I’m needed, Elle. And it’s my job.”
“To dig into the past.”
“Someone has to tell the stories of the dead.”
“I could take you,” she said, out of nowhere.
“What?”
“I grow restless here, watching over fisherfolk. I know you, Mai. You want adventure. Well… perhaps I do, too.”
“That far?” I said. “No one in living memory—”
“The Atlantids did it, when they brought over Gawain.” She scowled again. “You think what they can do, we of Tyr can’t do, and better?”
“They make use of old technology, their interpretation of the Covenant is looser than most.”
“I could take you,” she said.
“How?”
“The Argosy is currently moored off Helicon,” she said. I knew that was a nearby island. “She was built by my aunt, and by me. When I was a girl, we took her as far as Jezreel and back, and saw Harmegiddon rise out of the sea. It could make the journey, I’d stake my life on it.”
“You’d have to, if you went.”
“Well?” she said.
“I would not like to put you in danger,” I said, and she snorted.
“Have some more wine,” she said, pouring red from the bottle into our glasses. I accepted. As we sat there watching the harbor, I noticed more and more people gathering by
the quayside. They came solemnly, alone or in small groups, all congregating at the same spot and looking out to sea. The sight brought back memories, and I was sure I had been witness to it before, but what were they doing?
“You don’t remember?” Elle said. “It’s the Linking of the Cables. They do it every year… We went once, remember? It’s just an excuse to have a drink.” I noticed she’d finished her glass and was topping it up as we spoke. And indeed, the people on the quay looked festive. Streamers and banners and drinks were brought out. It had the air of an impromptu carnival.
“Linking?”
“The submarine cables. You know. The cobweb?”
Once upon a time, the world was very large, and then it grew very small, and then it grew large again. In the time when it was very small, it was because everything moved rapidly from point to point, and there were so many people that they always needed to talk to each other, and for that purpose they had woven a sort of web that linked them to each other; but each delicate silk thread was actually a sort of thin, extremely long cable that ran along the bottom of the sea from coast to distant coast. Those cables carried the bulk of this global conversation, and they were protected from the raging storms by being deep, deep under the sea.
“Can you see it? Is it coming?”
“Not yet. Wait…”
It was long gone, the cobweb. The ravages of time had done their work, the earthquakes and the storms and the volcanic eruptions had torn that beautiful, delicate shape that once spanned the world. Once the world was big, and then it grew small, and then it grew big again. Torn threads, a great silence. But the people of Tyr remembered what it was like, in the old days, and so they reenacted the great Joining, the way it had once been celebrated all across the world – the linking, the joining together.
“It’s coming!”
I could see it, then, the small boat bobbing on the waves, dragging in its wake a thin, long thread of wire. When it reached the shore, they began to haul the cable up and out of the water. Once, it would have run for thousands of miles, allowing someone in Yurop to talk to Afriq or Sneyland in an instant. And there came a solemn procession from the Land, carrying the other part of the cable, the host body, and the two processions, of Land and Sea, came toward each other with measured steps, and a band struck up music.
Then it happened, just like it had all those centuries before. The two cables met, and were Joined. And that was it—that was how it happened, though back then no one had paid much attention to the process of joining, and it had happened quietly, out of sight, just a bunch of workmen bringing up the cable from the sea, without fanfare.
It was a symbolic gesture, nothing more. The underwater cable linked nowhere now, and the machines that had sustained that worldwide conversation had been mute for centuries, not even useful salvage. Yet there was something moving about this reenactment, and for a moment I was lost in daydream, trying to imagine a world where you were always present as a node on an ever-shifting, never-silent, spun-silk cobweb that enveloped the planet.
Then the celebrations began in earnest, and I drank my wine, and Elle smiled at me crookedly over the rim of her glass and said, “So?”
I sighed. “How soon can we leave?” I said.
Another memory trinket waited for me when I returned to the inn. Who had left it there, I didn’t know. It had the same old, scratched quality as the last, and I was not surprised to discover my name inscribed into the casing. Mai. I put it to my temple. Transition was instantaneous this time…
“Mai.” I could see Gawain in the mirror again. His body lithe, dark from the sun, and there were new scars on his chest and abdomen. He smiled at his reflection—at me. “If you get this then you’ve made it to Tyr, at least, and I hope you’re on your way. I had hoped to send a ship to greet you, but that decision was overruled. The Plantagenet will be waiting just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It can meet you there and escort you the rest of the way… We no longer enter the Medius Sea.” An expression I couldn’t decipher crossed his face, as of old, remembered pain. “But it should be safe for you to do so.”
He looked out of the window, as he had before, and there was a disorienting change of perspective, as though for just a moment I was seeing events through the eyes of a seabird plunging rapidly from the windowsill down toward the sea. The beach rose sharply ahead and then the bird plunged into the water, and my perception changed yet again. Once more, I saw the divers moving sluggishly through the water, and the ruins of tall skyscrapers jutting out of the sand at the bottom.
“These used to be our docklands,” his voice said in my ear, startling me. “The great ships came and went from the docks, and an empire had spread all over the planet. Then came the great shortening, and a new kind of web rose—”
Once again, we sank deeper in the dark water, and once again I saw shoals of silver fish, darting in tandem until they resembled a silver screen blowing in a wind; I saw the skyscrapers of metal and glass lying on their sides, their windows broken, crustaceans scuttling under barnacle-covered desks. Telephones rotted, their lines trailing like entrails.
And I could see them, I could see them all. The cables were thin and ethereal. They lay along the floor of what had once been river, was now open sea. They converged onto this spot, onto these Docklands, like the threads of a spider’s web, and I realized this place had once been a major hub, a point on the global cobweb. I followed the gently undulating threads in the water, how they shone against the light of my diver’s helmet, how they were still… extant.
And I saw, deep down below, a shuttered metal eye, the hidden opening to a buried vault. I saw the cables rising from it, like the tentacles of a squid, like a mesh of threads. There was something inside it, something living, and again I felt myself falling, falling toward it, and for just one brief moment I thought I could see it—And I was plunged, without warning, into the world of before, and living streets where people trudged through gusts of rain, people in thick coats and hoods with goggles protecting their eyes, bent over as they pushed against the storm. The sky overhead was a perfect dome of clouds, a hurricane sky. There was no sun, no moon, no stars. And I realized I was walking among them, on the street, through dirty puddles, and I could smell ozone and smoke, dung—somewhere nearby, someone cooking meat on a grill. A vehicle came into sight, flashing lights, and a man and a woman in uniforms stepped out, blocking my way.
“Your papers, miss.”
“Papers?”
I saw them reaching for objects on their hips—I thought, horrified, could those be guns?
“Your identification, please, miss.”
“But I don’t have identification—” I began to say, when the skies cracked open with thunder, and the world was torn in half and began to burn like an old, flammable document. I shot upward, until I was a fragment of light in Gawain’s green, gold-speckled eyes.
“We tunneled a breach into the vault,” he said. “But it didn’t go well. You saw… Well, I’m not sure what you saw. It’s interacting with our equipment in ways we can’t really account for.” His smile in the mirror was apologetic. “Please, come.”
“Wait,” I wanted to say, “Gaw—”
But it was just a recording. Wasn’t it? For a moment I saw confusion in his eyes, as though he’d heard me. Then everything went blank and I came to in my own body, and a beating pain in my head, and I felt the bile rise in my throat, until I threw up all over the floor. Red wine and bread and cheese… I took deep, gulping breaths of air.
When I gingerly touched the memory trinket again, it was inert.
Several days later, on a clear, balmy day, with the salt spray of the sea fresh in the air and the winds high and favorable, we sailed out of the harbor of Tyr, heading west. Seagulls cried overhead, and as the old city receded in the distance I felt a sharp pang of loss. What lay beyond, I couldn’t know. We would try to sail close to shore, follow the coastline along the wilderness, but beyond this point, few had ventured in recent mem
ory, and all the maps were vague. What did “Beware a Pod of Globsters” mean, or “Here Be Dagon”?
There were annotations on the map, dotted lines crisscrossing themselves, tracing the last known movements of the Nesoi. There were small human settlements marked beyond Tyr, but these grew sparse and then vanished entirely as the only annotation left on the map was one simple word.
Wilderness.
VI. Shipwrecked
Ship’s Diary, Day 3
Pirate birds with long hooked bills soar high overhead. Storm petrels in the distance patter impossibly on the surface of the sea, and I admire the way they move, how they seem to walk on water. I say, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’
Beside me Mowgai, not displaying much enthusiasm for bird-watching. Face greenish, his exoskeleton struggles onboard the ever-moving ship, the sloping deck, the toss and sway of the waves. The sky overhead is a dark blue, with few clouds, but Elle’s face is troubled as she scans the distance with a pair of ancient binoculars.
“Is something the matter?” I say.
“Something is always the matter,” she says.
I leave her to it. Up in the crow’s nest Dain gives a short, sharp whistle, but what it signifies I do not know. We are only three days’ sail from Tyr, yet the world is already transmogrified, changed. The Land is a thick swash of dense, vibrant greens. Primordial forest, nothing like the gentle woodlands of my home. The sea is a green-blue pond. It is a window: Through its depths we can see the rooftops of sunken homes, wide highways traversed now only by shoals of fish. Clonal colonies of Neptune grass undulate gently in fields stretching in every direction. I try to imagine all that is hidden there, lives preserved, drowned worlds beyond measure. Bellman on the prow pulls up a mahi-mahi with his rod and grunts as the heavy fish flops onto the deck.