The Sea Peoples(53)

Where am I? he thought. It’s like . . . just a room.

Plaster over thin laths in a style he recognized; you could see how horsehair had been mixed with the plaster as a binder. Wooden boards on the floor, and a window with tattered, yellowed curtains.

He was uneasily aware, even through the pain as he tugged at the bar running behind his neck, that this was a technique his mother’s father had used to break men down. A voice like that of his confessor scolded him to save guilt for his own, reasonably abundant, sins. Wallowing in vicarious offenses was a form of laziness and spiritual pride.

—and why . . . how . . . didn’t the others keep the enemy from carrying me off? I’m certainly here, wherever here is. Pip wasn’t far away when the tower fell . . . I hope she’s all right. . . .

He tried to pray again, but there was a clank of fetters. The young man chained to the wall across from him looked to be about his own age, a few years on either side of twenty—you looked older when you’d been beaten and chained up—and likewise with a swordsman’s build. Brown hair but a bit lighter than John’s, and a strikingly regular face with a slight exotic cast.

John tried to speak, and found that his mouth and throat worked . . . more or less. Unfortunately that also made him conscious of how ragingly thirsty he was.

“Who . . . are you?” he croaked. “Where is this place?”

It took a moment for the man’s eyes to focus on John. They were green, with a darker green rim around the outside of the pupils.

“I’m . . . not sure who I am.”

John had a musician’s ear for language, aided and abetted by a life spent traveling all over Montival with his parents when they were on Progress. It didn’t take conscious analysis to spot the dialect:

Boise. Some rural part northeast of Boise City at that. An educated man but not one who’s spent much time in town.

The voice went on, a monotone of bewilderment and pain: “Part of me is here. Part of me is there. Part of me is . . . everywhere. Alan. Am I Alan? Or am I just pretending? Or is he pretending? Could I know if I was pretending to be me? Everything’s mixed up here. Good and bad. Alive and dead. Me and you and him. And Him. And Him!”

Crazy, poor fellow, John thought. Then: Of course, enough of this, whatever this is, would drive anyone crazy. St. Michael, aid me—and while you’re at it, this man too. Aid us against the snares of the Adversary, you who cast Lucifer down from the ramparts of heaven.

He could think, but not well or quickly; it was like having a loud buzzing noise in the innermost ear of his mind, making concentration exhausting. Simply thinking that through brought extra sweat to his face, dripping down onto the worn boards of the floor around his bleeding toes.

“My ancestor,” the man who might be called Alan said. “My ancestor is here. My ancestor is near.”

The green eyes met John’s brown. Suddenly they seemed deeper, whirlpools spiraling into nothingness. He began to thrash, and there was a smell of dry dust as it stirred and made motes of light in the beams that came through the rents in the curtains. . . .

It smelled dusty—

Then there was a memory. It came suddenly and it was overwhelmingly strong, and it took John instants to realize it wasn’t his memory. Riding down into a dry valley somewhere ringed by mountains, sagebrush country, he recognized the general type from his travels with his parents and then on his own, but not the specific place. It could have been anywhere inland of the Coast Range. He was a child, eleven or twelve, riding a quarter horse with a couple of dogs at heel and a broad-brimmed hat on his head, and a light bow across the horn of his silver-studded saddle.

The old ranch-house was hidden under the edge of a caprock ridge. It had been well-built once, adobe walls and framed windows, and dead trees showed where there had been a garden, now gone to tumbleweed and thorn and bunchgrass. The boy felt curiosity—the more so as by some freak of preservation the glass windows hadn’t been broken, and there were even pre-Change machines, a car on the rims of wheels sunk in the dirt with dust mounded up one side, and a rusted tractor by the charcoal stubs of a barn that had burned at some time.

The boy realized that it might well have stood here since the Change, though he wondered why it had been abandoned—there was good water nearby, enough to be brought by a furrow to irrigate likely-looking land, and plenty of grazing, and firewood not too far away. There was even the remains of a wind-pump by the barn, though it looked decrepit enough to have been abandoned long before the Change. Two or three wooden poles that had brought the wires of the ancient world to this place still stood; one of them had three Harris’ hawks “stacked” on its crosspiece, perching on each other’s backs in that way those flying pack-hunters used to spot game.

The dogs whined and hung back as he dismounted, dropping the reins to signal the horse to stand. He put an arrow to the bow and made sure his bowie knife was ready to hand as he walked up the steps to the porch and threw his weight against the door. If the place hadn’t been salvaged since the Change any number of treasures might be inside.

The smell hit him as he opened the door, ancient and dry but tightly contained in the nearly sealed space, the smell of ancient rot. The boy stared for a moment at the mummified corpses scattered about what had once been a living room, his mind stuttering as he realized what the marks and the bonds and the positions meant. He backed up, swallowing and spitting as cold gummy saliva flooded his mouth, and cold sweat broke out on his forehead. . . .