Mountain of Black Glass (67 page)

It took a while before Orlando realized he was dreaming now, just dreaming. At first the strange filtered light and the half-glimpsed shapes seemed almost a continuation of what had gone before, but then the blurriness lifted and he found himself staring at . . . a bear. The animal was sitting on its rump on wet gray concrete with its leather footpads extended. A collar of nearly white fur around its neck made a startling contrast to the rest of its black pelt.

Something bounced off the bear's chest. It snapped downward with its jaws, but the peanut had fallen away, skittering into the cement moat and out of reach. The bear's eyes were so piercingly sad that even though it was a dream of the remote past, Orlando found himself weeping all over again. Conrad's head appeared at the edge of his vision, poking in past the netting his parents used to keep Orlando safe from both bright sunshine and prying eyes.

“What's wrong, honey? Does the bear scare you? It's called a sun bear—see, it's friendly.”

Something moved on his other side. Vivien's hand came through the netting and took his fingers, squeezed them. “It's okay, Orlando. We can go somewhere else. We can go look at some other animals. Or are you tired? Do you want to go home?”

He tried to find the words, but the six-year-old Orlando—far too old for a stroller if he had been a normal child, but condemned to one by his frail bones and easily overtaxed muscles—had not been able to explain the deep sadness of the bear. Even in this dream-version he still could not make his parents understand.

Someone tossed another peanut. The bear waved at it with its paws, and for a moment almost had it, but the peanut slithered down its belly and into the pit. The bear looked mournfully after it, then looked up again, bobbing its head, waiting for another throw.

“Boss?”
someone said. Orlando looked down. He was holding a shelled peanut in his own bony, knob-knuckled little hand, a peanut he was afraid to throw for fear he would not even be able to make it across the moat, but the peanut was moving. Tiny legs had sprouted from its side and waved helplessly in the air.
“Boss, can you hear me?”

He stared at it. Vivien and Conrad were still talking to him, asking if he wanted to see the elephants, or maybe something smaller and less frightening like the birds. Orlando did not want to lose them, did not want to miss what they were saying, but the squirming of the peanut was distracting him.

The peanut, the peanut's voice, his parents, the white-collared sun bear, all began to fade.

But the dream had evaporated, and Beezle and his parents were gone—so completely vanished that he felt certain he had left them all behind forever.

 

The diffuse light made everything almost gray. This time there was no mechanized womb of an expensive hospital bed, no angel's-eye-view of a dying boy, only the inconstant light of burning embers gleaming through translucent fabric.

The wind mounted outside, fretful and searching. Something was beneath him—a bed, but rough and unfamiliar. It felt like nothing so much as a pile of coats, as though someone had put him down in the spare room during one of his parents' parties and then forgotten to come back for him.

Orlando tried to sit up, but even the effort of trying almost pulled him back into oblivion once more. Dizziness so great he would have thrown up if it had not been too much trouble, if he had anything in him to throw up, swept over him.

Weak,
he thought.
So weak. I can't do this again—can I? Start over?

But he had to. He had made his choice. If he had lost his last moments with Vivien and Conrad, it had to be for something. He closed his eyes and tried to take inventory.

We were in the temple,
he remembered.
And what's his name, Osiris, came and broke down the walls. Then we were running for the back room and something hit me on the head. Did I make it through the gateway?
All he could remember was light, flickering like the light on the fabric around this bed.

He slowly turned his head to one side. He could see dark walls beyond the thin cloth of the bed hanging: he seemed to be in a sort of cabin made of rough boards. The bit of the roof he could see was dry thatch. A brazier full of coals smoldered near the farthest wall. The energy it took to move his head exhausted him, and for a while he only lay, staring at the play of fire across the embers.

When he felt a little more strength returning, he shoved himself back until he found something soft and yielding behind his head. He steeled himself for the effort and pushed with legs that did not feel quite like his own until his head slid up onto whatever lay rolled behind him and tipped upward, so that he could see what was in front of him.

The cabin or hut was large, several meters wide, and almost entirely empty. The floor was pounded earth; light leaked in at the bottom edges. A graceful handled jug stood on the ground near him, and beside it lay a rolled cloth bundle. The only other objects in the room stood opposite the brazier—one very long spear and a few slightly smaller versions, a short stabbing-sword he had never seen but which seemed inexplicably familiar, and a huge round shield leaning against a weird figure like a truncated scarecrow.

The manlike shape was armor on a crude stand, the bronze polished until it glinted—a breastplate, some other pieces, and a helmet with a horsetail crest perched on top.

Orlando sighed. Fighting, then. Of course.

They don't need me for my smile or my sense of humor,
he thought.
Not much left of either of those, anyway.

So where was he? It looked old-fashioned, but he was too tired to think about it much. Troy? Had they been lucky with the gateway?

A shadow skimmed across the bottom of the wall as something moved outside the hut. A moment later a man pushed open the door and stepped inside. He wore simpler armor than that which hung on the stand, boiled leather held together with rope and straps and buckles, and a kind of skirt made of leather strips. He dropped to one knee inside the doorway, his dark, bearded face turned down to the ground.

“Forgive me, Lord,” the soldier said. “There are many who wish to speak with you.”

Orlando could not believe it was all starting again so soon. Where was Fredericks? Bonnie Mae and the others? “I don't want to see anyone.”

“But it is the Great King, Lord.” The soldier spoke nervously, startled by Orlando's refusal but determined to deliver his message. “He sends a messenger to say that the hope of the Achaians rests on you. And Patroclus also asks to see you.”

“Tell them all to go away.” Orlando managed to raise a trembling hand. “I'm sick. I can't talk to anyone. Maybe later.”

The soldier seemed about to say something else, but instead nodded and rose to slip quietly back out of the cabin.

Orlando let his hand drop. Could he make himself do it all again? How? It was one thing to make a choice, another to have the strength to see it through. What if he couldn't? What if he didn't get any stronger?

Something scratched on the cabin wall, a quiet but insistent noise. Orlando felt a surge of indignation—hadn't he just told them all to leave him alone? He gathered his energy to shout, but found himself staring openmouthed instead as a small shape crawled in through the gap where wall and floor did not quite meet.

“You are confused?” the turtle asked, turning its head to fix him with an eye like a drop of tar. “Do not worry—I will tell you what you need to know. The Great King is Agamemnon, and he fears you are upset with him over the matter of a slave girl.”

Orlando groaned. It was like another stupid Thargor adventure, but one he did not even have the energy to participate in. “I just want them to leave me alone.”

“Without you, the Achaians cannot win.”

“Achaians?” He closed his eyes and let his head sag back, but the voice of the turtle was not so easily silenced.

“The Greeks, we will call them. The federation that have come to conquer Troy.”

So he had reached Troy after all. But he could not find any pleasure in the knowledge. “I need to sleep. Why do they want me? Who the hell am I supposed to be?”

There was a pause as the creature made its way to the section of dirt floor just beside his trailing hand. “You are Achilles, the greatest of heroes,” it said, nudging his fingers with its cool, rough little head. “Aren't you pleased?” Orlando tried to sweep the turtle away, but with surprising nimbleness it moved just beyond his reach. “Great Achilles, whose deeds are legend. Your mother is a goddess! The bards sing of you! Even the heroes of Troy tremble at your name, and you have left the burned wrack of many cities behind you . . .”

Orlando tried to shut out the lecturing voice, but even fingers in his ears would not silence it. He missed Beezle more than ever.

“Please leave me alone,” he murmured, but apparently not loud enough for the turtle to hear. It continued on, reciting his fabulous history with the hideous cheer of a tour guide, even after Orlando had rolled over and pulled the bedding close around his head.

“I
CAN'T believe you.” Del Ray Chiume rolled his eyes in a theatrical way that made Long Joseph want to kick him. “How could you not know how to get back? What would you have done if you hadn't met me?”

“Met you?” Joseph pushed off from the wall, away from Renie's irritating ex-boyfriend, but two steps took him out into the drizzling rain and he quickly moved back beneath the cement overhang. They were drinking their coffee on the street. Even in this backwater sector of Durban, the restaurant proprietor had taken one look at Del Ray's stained, rumpled suit and Joseph's slightly lurching gait and asked them to take their coffee in travel cups and their business outside. If the man hadn't been black, Joseph would have called it racism. “Met you? You crazy? Seems to me you came at me with a gun, boy.”

“Probably saved your life, too, although you've done your damnedest to make up for it.” Del Ray cursed as hot coffee squirted out of the foam container and down his chin. “Why I let you talk me into going back to that hospital . . .”

“I had to see my boy.” Despite the misery of the experience, Joseph felt no qualms. That was why he had left that mountain place, after all. Why was it so surprising he didn't know how to find his way back—was he supposed to have made a map or something?

“Well, we're going to have to figure it out. It's up in the Drakensberg—you don't just walk around up there hoping to stumble onto some government base.” He frowned. “I wish my brother would hurry up.”

Joseph was looking at a black van parked at the far end of the street, the silver antenna strip above its windshield pounded underneath a torrent of water draining off one of the roofs. It was one of the fat ones people in Pinetown called a “pig,” and it seemed a little rich for the neighborhood. He thought about pointing it out, but didn't want to send Del Ray off on another long speech about how foolish they'd been to go to the hospital, and how they were probably being followed by Boer hitmen . . .

His thoughts were scattered as an old car pulled up beside them. Joseph felt a moment of alarm when he recognized it as the one into which he had been thrown before, then realized that of course it was the same car, and the same brother who had driven it. As Del Ray climbed into the front, Long Joseph opened the other door to find three small children playing a noisy game of I-smack-you, you-smack-me on the back seat. “What the hell is this?” he growled.