[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
It had been at sea for two years but hadn't been damaged by storms. It had
been shelled by a ship the likes of which they'd never seen, which raced
across the water on huge feet. The strange ship had no sails, gave off no
steam, and yet had easily averaged ninety to a hundred kilometers an hour.
Some speculated it wasn't a boat but a crustacean from the Pale Seas farther
north than anyone had traveled. The trio heard of it in pubs and restaurants.
Soon it was a common story much enlarged upon.
The story changed the atmosphere around the ports radically. But Bar-Woten
Page 32
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
maintained something else was up -- a simple tale of strange doings at sea
couldn't account for the way Mur-
es-Werd was behaving. Kiril sensed it too. "Everyone's jumpy," he said. The
Ibisian nodded.
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Hegira.txt (24 of 77) [5/21/03
12:35:57 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Hegira.txt
The next day brought a warm, dry wind from the southwest. The skies were the
color of bloody milk. Though the wind on the ground was mild, high above it
tortured and twisted the clouds into thin, smooth ribbons and shot them with
desert dirt. Mur-es-Werd was covered by a pink pall, and everyone walked
warily as in a dangerous dream.
By evening it was clear and the winds died down. But the city was restless
that night. The bars stayed open later than was normally allowed by law. Gangs
of drunken men were herded home angrily in the early morning by women wielding
cane brooms. The women wore dark dresses with strips of white tied around
their arms. From a distance doves seemed to flutter around the men, driving
them along the street with angry swishes.
Bar-Woten sat on the sand with his legs curled beneath him, watching and
listening to the foamy waves. He thought they could tell him something. But
they glowed and tossed and fussed incoherently, less powerfully than usual.
Suddenly, they slowed to an oily trickle, rushing along the shore with a
drawing bead of light. His neck hair prickled, and he sat up on his knees
wanting to run. It was near dawn -- soon the sky would turn green at the
zenith as it always had.
But ten minutes passed and the dark remained. Two fire doves twinkled pink and
orange just above the northern horizon. A third, bluish in color, hovered
above the western mountains.
They winked out.
Thousands in the city were awake, watching the sky with him. A low moan rose
from the city, the sound of distant screams and wailing. Barthel and Kiril
awoke abruptly and asked what was happening. Bar-Woten couldn't answer. How
could anyone describe something they had never seen before?
The blackness of the sky turned muddy. Not a single fire dove was to be seen.
Like the opening of two palms clasped together, the muddiness drew aside, and
a vortex of dun purple, barely visible, spread across the sky, leaving another
sort of darkness at its center.
This wasn't the warmly immediate, empty black that had always meant night for
Hegira. It was a velvety dark strewn with glowing ribbons, and between and
around and in these, twinkled points of light so fine no shape could be
discerned. Gouds of light filled the sky. For the first time in memory of
anyone living, starshine visibly brightened the land.
The city was silent under the frosty gaze of the stars. Barthel made a
growling sound deep in his throat, and tears streamed down his cheeks. "Holy
Allah," he said. "Blessed Allah."
Kiril's hand tightened around his belt. He felt like rolling in the sand and
screaming.
The streets were soon crowded with crying, stumbling mobs. They washed onto
the beaches and human waves met the water waves, forming a splashing tumult as
the citizens of Mur-es-Werd tried to put out the mad fevers that caused them
to see such visions.
The stars were crossed by sudden, silky ripples. Kiril's stomach sank. He felt
his body crawling this way and that, yet he wasn't moving; his muscles weren't
twitching. His head threatened to turn inside out, but painlessly -- a dreamy
sort of dizziness, disorientation. The ocean waves grew brighter, became
almost turquoise. He heard a deep bass note like the buzzing of giant bees. If
the whole world had been a tapestry and somebody had started flapping it to
shake out the dust, perhaps this was how it would feel -- he didn't know. For
Page 33
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
a time he thought he would be better off dead.
The rippling in the sky stopped, and the stars steadied. The beach was encased
in silence. The people around them moved slowly; even falling they drifted
like puffs of down.
Looking up, Bar-Woten thought he was going to black out. At the periphery of
his eye he could see darkness close in, cutting out the stars. But the
dizziness was gone, and his head seemed all right. The stars were being
obscured again. At the edge of the closing circle the points of light became
lines of purple, twisted, and winked out. The familiar empty black returned.
One by one, flickering, the fire doves resumed their glows. The sky at zenith
turned green, then purple, then bronze; the dawn was picking up where it had
left off.
The display had taken about five minutes. Everyone stood in silence for
perhaps five minutes more, then looked at each other, embarrassed, and
returned to their homes, trying to act as if everything was normal.
But Bar-Woten knew nothing would ever be normal again. He smiled crookedly.
Then he began to laugh.
Ten file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Hegira.txt (25 of 77)
[5/21/03 12:35:57 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Greg%20Bear/Bear,%20Greg%20-%20Hegira.txt
Barthel left the beach alone before midday and took a twisting road up the
city's central hill.
For a few hundred meters he walked alongside a crumbling wall centuries old.
Grass grew in the chinks between stones. It had become part of the ground now,
like the shell of a dead snail. The wall no longer served as armor but as a
place for people to walk by and things to grown in. From the top of the
Kassarva, the fortress that circled the summit, he could look down across the
town and port and think with nothing to bother him. Insects buzzed
hypnotically through the dried grass and sparse flowers. A large temple was
visible through the trees far below, ceramic domes glinting at each of its
five corners. Inside it, too, looked like a fortress. There was a courtyard
and small buildings within the courtyard arranged in a tomoye. Birds flew
above the temple -- gulls, curlews, and others he hadn't learned the names of.
Some resembled hawks but caught fish by the sea and had red and white feathers
in their crests.
He felt singularly ugly and afraid. The predawn unveiling had struck him
deeply. What had it told him, that message for all to see? He didn't know. But
it made nun feel as tiny as the ants beneath him, carrying bits of white stuff
in a line under his legs into a hole a few yards away.
All these creatures -- ants, birds, builders of temples -- had been put here
by the blessed One, Who had unveiled the sky that morning.
"I am Barthel," he told the sky with tears in his eyes. "I am small. Did you
do all these things that I might see them, smell them? I've done nothing in
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]