Sea of Silver Light (41 page)

"By that logic," Martine pointed out through chattering teeth, "we could not be bitten in half by a giant scorpion, either—it would only be a tactile illusion. But none of us were very eager to test that assumption, were we?"

Florimel opened her mouth, then shut it.

"We need to find something to use as paddles, anyway," Paul said. "It will take us days to drift through at this rate."

"Only thing for sure is turning all ice," T4b grumbled. "Rest of you can jawjack about it. Want to get warm, me."

"We should huddle close," Martine said. "Whatever the somatic truth, I can perceive heat leaving your virtual bodies very quickly."

They crowded into the center of the boat. For once even T4b, not the most companionable of their number, had no complaints. The boat moved, but the current was sluggish, the black river flat as glass.

"Somebody talk," Paul said after a while, "Keep our minds off this. Martine, you said you remembered a story that went with that song the . . . the Other was singing?"

"That is just the p–problem." She was shivering so badly now she could hardly speak, "I don't re–re–remember it. It's been so long. It was just an old fairy tale. About a b–boy, a little boy who fell down a hole."

"Sing the song." Worried for her, Paul began rubbing her arms and back, trying to make some heat by friction. "Maybe that will tell us something."

Martine shook her head, but began in a low, trembling voice to sing.
"An . . . an angel touched me, an angel touched me. . . ."
She frowned, thinking.
"A river . . .
no,
the river washed me and now I am clean."

Paul remembered it clearly now, the eerie sound echoing across the black mountaintop. "And you think that it's significant somehow. . . ?"

"I know that story," Florimel said abruptly. "It was one of Eirene's favorites. From the Gurnemanz collection."

"You know it from a German book?" Martine said, surprised. "But it is an old French fairy tale."

"What's that?" T4b asked.

"A f–fairy tale. . . ?" Martine was stunned despite her suffering. "You d–d–do not know what a fairy tale is? My God, what have they done to our ch–children?"

"No," said T4b disgustedly. "What's
that
?"

He was pointing at a mound of snow perhaps a thousand meters ahead of them, one of the outriders to the cluster of snowy hills Paul had seen earlier.

"It's a pile of snow." Paul said it a trifle rudely, but he wanted to hear what Florimel had to say about the story. A moment later he was startled and embarrassed to see the glint of something that was not snow or ice. "Good Lord, you're right, it's a tower. A tower!"

"What, think I'm blind, me?" T4b growled. A moment later he frowned and turned to Martine, "Didn't mean no slapdown."

"Understood." She frowned into the distance. "I p–per–ceive no signs of life at all. I ca–ca–can barely sense that there is anything there at all beside ice and snow. What do you see?"

"It's the top of a tower." Paul squinted. "It's . . . very narrow. Like a minaret. Decorated. But I can't see anything of what's underneath. Damn, this current is slow!"

"A minaret, yes," said Florimel.

"Maybe this is the Mars I visited before," Paul said excitedly. "That strange sort of late-Victorian adventure world. It had a lot of Moorish-looking architecture." His gaze slipped to the countless miles of deadening white spread over both sides of the river. "But what
happened
?"

"Dread," said Martine quietly. "The man called Dread has happened to this place, I would bet."

They were all straining to see something now, all except for Martine who had let her trembling chin sink to her chest. As they drew closer to the great mound of snow and its single protruding spire, Paul saw something on the bank beside them, a much smaller shape half-covered by white drifts. "What the hell is that?"

T4b, who was leaning so far out of the boat the little craft was tipping to one side, said, "It's one of those
Tut-Tut and the Sphinx
things, like—you know, that netshow for micros? That animal they ride with bumps?"

Paul, whose grasp of popular culture had been diminishing rapidly since he left boarding school, could only shake his head. "It's a sphinx?"

"He means a camel," Florimel said. If she had not been pressing her teeth together to keep them from chattering, she might have laughed. "It is a frozen camel. Did they have camels on your Mars?"

"No." Now that they were closer, he saw the boy was right again. The dead camel was on its knees at the river's edge, teeth exposed in a hideous grin, the skin stretched so tight on its neck and head that it seemed mummified, but it was definitely a camel. "We must be in Orlando's Egypt. Or something like it,"

Martine stirred. "That man c–called Nandi. If we are in Egypt, p–p–perhaps we could find him. Orlando and Fredericks said he was the Circle's special expert on the gateways. He might be able to help us reach Renie and the others."

"If he's here, gotta be a popsicle," T4b suggested.

"Ancient Egypt with minarets?" asked Florimel sourly. "In any case, I have changed my mind about trying to outlast this cold. So let us head toward that tower or none of this speculation will matter, because we, too, will be . . . popsicles."

"We'll have to paddle with our hands," Paul said. "We'll have to get there fast or we'll all get frostbite."

"We will take our hands out in turn to warm up," Martine said. "Two paddling, two warming. Now."

For a moment, as he plunged his fingers into the dark river, Paul felt nothing but clean chill, like an alcohol-swabbing before an injection. Then his skin began to burn like fire.

It was only snow and not ice they had to kick through to reach the open arched door of the building beneath the looming, white-shrouded tower, a piece of luck for which Paul was terribly grateful. Within a few moments they were standing in a decorated antechamber, painted head to ceiling in a beautiful, elaborate scarlet, black, and gold fretwork of repeating shapes. They did not stop to look, but continued forward, bending over the freezing hands they all held pressed against their bellies.

Three more doors and three more decorated chambers led them to a smaller room whose walls were lined with shelves full of leather-bound books, and the glorious discovery of a tiled fire pit and a stack of wood.

"It's damp," Paul said as he stacked logs in the fireplace with clumsy, stinging fingers. "We need something to use as kindling. Not to mention a match."

"Kindling?" Florimel pulled a book down from the shelf and began tearing out pages. It seemed somehow sacrilegious to Paul, but after a moment's consideration he decided he could live with the feeling. He looked at a page and saw that it was in English, but English rendered in a spidery print that had the feeling of Arabic script. As he crumpled pages and arranged them around the wood, he saw a pretty lacquer box tucked into an alcove in the tile on the outside of the fireplace. He opened it, then held it up. "It's flint and steel, I think, and thank God for that. I wish !Xabbu were here. Anyone else know how to use this?"

"We did not even have electricity at Harmony Camp until I was ten years old," said Florimel. "Give it to me."

Perhaps a quarter of an hour passed, the sound of clicking teeth gradually subsiding, before Paul was willing to take his hands away from the wonderful heat of the fire. After a bit of exploration he turned up a storeroom full of soft rugs which he and the others wrapped around themselves like cloaks. Warmer now and feeling almost human, he picked up one of the discarded books and opened it.

"It's definitely supposed to be Arabic—this book is dedicated to His Majesty the Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Hmmm. It seems to be a story about Sinbad the Sailor." Paul looked up at the shelves. "I think this is a library of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights."

"Ain't spending no thousand nights here in this popsicle pit," T4b said. "Lock that. Lock that
tight
."

"That's just the name of a book," Paul told him. "A famous old collection of stories." He turned to Florimel and Martine. "Which reminds me. . . ."

"I said I could not remember the story," Martine began.

"But I said I could." Florimel pushed herself back a little way from the fire. Bundled in the stiff carpet, and with the makeshift bandage covering her eye and a large portion of the side of her head, she looked more than ever like some medieval hedge-witch.

Which is funny,
Paul thought,
since the witch of the group is Martine.
It was an odd realization, but no less true for being odd.

"I will tell it as I remember it." The German woman scowled, exaggerating her already daunting appearance. "It is only memorized because my daughter asked to hear it—and several of that Gurnemanz collection's other stories—many, many times, so don't interrupt me or I will lose the rhythm and forget parts of it. Martine, I am sure it will be different than the version you knew, but tell me about it afterward, will you?"

Paul saw the ghost of a smile flicker on the blind woman's face. "That is fair, Florimel,"

"Good." She arranged her damp but drying robes beneath her, opened her mouth, then shut it again and glared at T4b. "And I will explain the parts you don't understand after I'm done. Do you hear me, Javier? Don't interrupt or I will throw you out into the snow."

Paul expected anger, or at least teenage indignation, but the boy seemed amused. "Chizz. Bang those squeezers. Listening, me."

"Right. Very well then, here it is as I remember it."

"Once upon a time there was a boy who was the apple of his parents' eye. They loved him so fiercely that they were frightened something would happen to him, so they got him a dog to be his companion. The dog was named Sleeps-Not, and was fierce and loyal.

"Even with the love of two parents and the mercy of God, not all accidents can be avoided. One day, while his father was out working in the fields and his mother was busy preparing the afternoon meal, the boy wandered far from the house. Sleeps-Not tried to stop him, but the boy cuffed the dog and sent him away. The dog ran back to summon the boy's mother, but before she could reach him, the boy fell down into an abandoned well.

"The boy fell and rolled and tumbled a long, long time, and when he finally struck the bottom of the well he was in a cavern very deep in the earth, by the side of an underground stream. When his mother discovered what had happened she ran to get her husband, but no rope they had in the house would reach down to the bottom. They brought all the other villagers as well, but even with their ropes all tied together they could not reach the bottom where the boy was trapped.

"The boy's parents called to him that he must be brave, that somehow they would find a way to get him out of the deep, deep hole. He heard them and was a little heartened, and when they had dropped some food down wrapped in leaves to cushion the fall, he decided to make the best of it.

"Late at night, when his parents and the other villagers had finally gone in to sleep and the boy thought he was alone again at the bottom of the well, he began to weep and to pray to God.

"No one heard him but Sleeps-Not, and when that loyal dog heard his little master crying, he rushed off to roam the wide world in search of someone who could help the boy in the well.

"The boy's parents dropped food to him every day, and he had water to drink from the underground stream, but he was still sad and lonely, and every night, when he thought that no one was listening, he wept. With his dog Sleeps-Not out searching for help, there was no one to hear him at first, except the Devil, who after all lives deep in the ground. The Devil cannot cross rushing water, so he could not reach the little boy and take him down to Hell, but he stood in the darkness on the far side of the river and tormented the boy with lies, telling him that his parents had forgotten him, that everyone above the ground had given up hope of getting him out long ago. The boy's weeping became greater and greater until an angel heard him and appeared to him in the darkness in the form of a pale and fair woman.

" 'God will protect you,' the angel told the boy, and kissed him on the cheek. 'Put yourself into the river and all will be well.'

"The boy did as he was told, and then climbed out again wet and shivering, and sang this song: 'An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me and now I am clean.'

"The second night the Devil sent a serpent up from the dark depths to attack the boy, but Sleeps-Not had found a hunter, a brave man with a gun, and brought him to the top of the well. Although the hunter could not bring the boy up from the hole, with his keen eyes he saw the serpent coming and killed it with a shot from his gun, and the boy was safe. Again the boy said his prayers and stepped into the river, and again stepped out again, singing: 'An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me and now I am clean.'

"The next night the Devil sent a ghost to attack the boy, but Sleeps-Not had brought a priest to the top of the well, and although he could not bring the boy up from his hole, the priest saw the ghost coming and threw down his rosary, dispatching the spirit back to hell. The boy said prayers of thanks and stepped into the river, then came out singing: 'An angel touched me, an angel touched me, the river washed me and now I am clean.'

"The next night the Devil sent all the hosts of hell after the boy, but Sleeps-Not had brought a peasant girl to the top of the well. It seemed there was little she could do to save the boy from all the hosts of hell, but in truth she was not a peasant girl but the angel who had first helped him, and she flew down into the well holding a fiery sword and the hosts of hell drew back, afraid.

" 'God will protect you,' the angel told the boy, and kissed him on the cheek. 'Put yourself into the river and all will be well.'

"The boy stepped into the water, but when he would have come out again, the angel raised her hand and shook her head. 'God will protect you,' she said. 'All will be well.'