The Sea Peoples(29)
Fit for the halls of Surt, Deor thought, as the mist mercifully closed in again.
But he knew some corner of his self was storing images for the song he’d make of this one day. He shook his head as he dodged around the rusty wreck of an automobile lying canted in the roadway, at the foot of a heroically nude statue, headless and holding aloft the stump of a broken sword.
More and more of them cluttered the way ahead, a sight familiar enough to anyone who’d seen the lands around the dead cities of the ancient world. Hand-bones gripped a wheel seen dimly through dirty, impact-starred glass. Wisps of hair clung to the skull between them, and something seen dimly retracted itself into a gaping eye socket. An ancient tang of rust and decay long contained in sealed places crept under the scent of acrid dust.
Ragged thornbrush crowded close to the sides of the road, a wall the height of a man laced together with oddly swollen, lumpy vines with thorns like bone claws; dead trees reared above the thickets. Tendrils of fog crept through the brush, and they had to slow to weave their way through more piled wrecks, sometimes clambering cautiously—there was nothing like rusty iron to give you lockjaw if you cut yourself on it.
Something else crawled through the brush, many things, with a faint rustling and chittering. If you looked closer you saw that wrecked automobiles were scattered through the undergrowth as well to either side, as if they’d swung wide to try and dodge the pileup themselves. The charred trunk of a great tree lay across the crushed remains of one, where the impact had brought the oak down and they had burned together. The trunk of the car had burst open, revealing many small bones.
Ahead Toa swung up a clenched left fist like a small beer keg, and they all stopped. Fog hung over the path before them too, like a sluggishly moving gray wall pouring over the dead machines. The Maori went to one knee, peering about.
“Stuff moving in the bush,” he said. “Around those busted cars.”
“Toa, did you notice the cars are all pointed in one direction?” Pip said. “As if they were all trying to get away from something up ahead of us.”
“Right,” Toa said. “Didn’t work, though.”
“And they look burned,” Thora said. “Half melted, some of them.”
Deor blinked and looked more closely, narrowing his focus for a moment from the wide-spread alertness you used in hostile country. Usually you didn’t notice wreckage of the ancient world much, not enough to see detail unless there was some reason to, when you were looking for valuable salvage or for something hidden among it.
The young woman from Townsville was right: they were all headed in the same direction, on both sides of the road, though he knew it had been the custom for streets this narrow to have two lanes moving traffic in opposite directions, keeping to the left or right—living cities used the same pattern where traffic was dense enough.
Thora is right too.
The rear ends of the cars were scorched and buckled and sometimes steel and glass had run, as if some flash of fire brighter than a thousand suns had hammered them all in an instant. Others were tumbled and crumpled by some great storm-wind that had accompanied the light. The ground crunched beneath their feet, as if littered with something thin and fragile. Looking down he saw that it was, but irregular and sometimes in the shape of the road’s ruts, earth itself seared to brittle glass.
“Odd-looking autos, too,” Pip observed. “Not like any wrecks I’ve seen. More like really old pictures or paintings of autos, from well before the Change.”
They didn’t look much like those he’d seen in his home in Westria or around the world amid the wreckage of the old world. In dry areas some were still unworn enough that you could get a good sense of how they’d appeared. These were boxier, more angular, and the wheels were narrower and higher—the way two different schools of craft might make the same thing, say a wagon or ship, the variance of tradition and place always there within the boundaries imposed by function.
“They didn’t just stop, either, I think,” Deor said thoughtfully.
That was why the roads of the world he’d grown up in were still littered with such; on that day nearly half a century before they’d simply ceased to function as the Change flickered around the globe in an invisible wave of alteration. Plenty had crashed as their controls and engines died, and burned then or later; then time and rust had had its way with them, or human hands looking for spring steel for blades, or mechanisms to be incorporated into a watermill, or glass to be melted down and blown into bottle and plate and sheet metal to be beaten into shield-covers. In lands still peopled they’d long since at least been pushed aside to free the roadways for the modern world’s animal-drawn vehicles, and most salvaged down to the scraps.
But these looked as if they’d been undisturbed since they were caught moving and beaten with a lash of fire. Or a wave of it. The word wave sparked a comparison in his mind.
“They fled from Death with all the speed they had, and Death followed them still faster,” he said. “Not just foemen, but something terrible beyond common thought. Remember the beach at Topanga?”
They glanced at each other, remembering. Remembering the storm clouds gathering in a clear sky like a churning funnel as lightning slashed through it in an endless flicker. Then it toppling towards them . . . not only the cloud, but the scourging wind, and the water towering higher and higher and crashing down as the ship’s stern rose and rose in a world gone black and actinic blue and the Korean warships tumbled and smashed like toys beneath a boot. . . .