Ancient Fire

DANGER BOY

Ancient Fire

Mark London Williams

Danger Boy: Ancient Fire

By Mark London Williams

Copyright 2001, 2004, 2011 Mark London Williams

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

First published by Tricycle Press in 2001

Candlewick Press Edition 2004

Cover by Michael Koelsch

Dedicated,
with
l
ov
e
and
thank
s
,
to
Elijah,
muse
and
inspi
r
ation,

and
Ashe
r
,
his
companion
in
ad
v
entu
r
e

M.
L.
W
.

TABLE OF
CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Prologue

Alexandria — 415 C.E.

The year is 415 of our “Common Era.” Still early in
the first millennium. It’s night and there’s fire on the water.

The flames come from a burning fleet of ships, which
are sinking in the harbor. Some of the pitch — the tar that seals
up the boats and makes them leakproof — is melting off in little
globs and drifting over the waves. The globs still burn as they
float away, lighting up the water like rows of lanterns at a
party.

But this isn’t the kind of party you’d want to get
invited to: The fire has spread to shore, moving from the boats to
the docks to the Royal Quarter beyond, shooting through the city
like a deadly, fast-moving vine. The flames are even heading out to
the dikes and levees that separate the necropolis — the city of the
dead, the burial grounds — from the rest of the city. Where the
dead are getting no rest at all.

The splintering wood from the dikes has allowed the
seawater to rush in and sweep the mummified bodies out on the
waves, setting them adrift like rotting boats moving toward the
lighthouse. Toward a very scared thirteen-year-old girl, who finds
herself surrounded not only by the fire but also by an angry mob of
people who want to hurt her.

Onshore, the fire races toward the Royal Quarter,
toward the place inside it that had been her home: a large complex
the locals call both a library and a museum. As far as anyone
knows, this library has the single largest collection of books on
Earth. In the year 415, it’s very hard to make a book: Each of them
is really a scroll, hand-printed on papyrus or dried animal
skin.

It’s difficult to make books, yet this library has
nearly half a million of them: nearly all the ideas anybody has
about art, math, science, philosophy; copies of famous plays and
poems.

All in one place. All at one time. The fire closes
in.

And if the library burns — when it burns — all the
ideas, the plays, the poems, will burn with it. Most of them will
disappear forever, vanishing with even less of a trace than the
mummies bobbing in the water by the docks.

Someone else has escaped the fire, too, and is
trying to make his way to the lighthouse. He travels through the
burning city, only to be taken prisoner again: a boy, about twelve
years old. Like the girl, he’s both scared and brave.

Somewhere else in the fire and flood is another
person. Except this person is a human-sized lizard, quite
comfortable walking on two feet and talking. His name is Clyne.
Versed in human tongues, he’s been mistaken for a demon. And he’s
part of the reason the girl in the lighthouse is in so much trouble
now, accused of being a sorceress.

She doesn’t know what Clyne really is, but he’s not
a demon. One word the boy used to describe him was “dinosaur.”

Out in the lighthouse tower, the girl waits
desperately for the boy. Or the lizard. Someone who’s on her side.
It’s her city that’s burning: Alexandria, Egypt, on the shores of
the Mediterranean Sea.

The girl’s name is Thea, which means “moon.” Like
the moon, she’s trying to conjure light at night and make the
lighthouse come alive, casting its great beams off the mirrors
inside the tower, which aim back out toward the city. With light,
someone will know she’s there. But the city is covered by its own
light as the flames grow stronger.

In the year 415, this lighthouse on the tiny island
called Pharos is the tallest building on Earth. But it may not be
tall enough: The people who’ve surrounded it are using a battering
ram on the doors below, and eventually they’ll break in. The
crowd’s leader scares Thea more than the fire, more than the bodies
floating in the water: He’s a monk named Tiberius. Yesterday — the
last day of Thea’s old, regular life — he came for her mother,
Hypatia, and dragged her through the streets.

Hypatia used to be the head librarian. According to
Tiberius, she knew too much about too many things. Especially for a
woman.

Thea just barely escaped the same fate herself.
She’s pretty sure she won’t be able to escape the mob a second
time.

Right now, Thea’s main hope is that the boy with the
strange speech and strange clothes can somehow figure out a way to
get to her and maybe help her vanish into thin air for a while —
the same way he does.

The mob howls below: “Thea!” “Witch!”

Thea looks out across the water as burning pieces of
ship drift toward the island and toward the city, occasionally
colliding with the dead. She thinks that if she looks hard enough,
she just might see something, some tiny speck of something that she
recognizes. Something familiar despite all the fire and terror in
the air.

She closes her eyes a minute and summons up faces to
give her strength: her mother’s face, the lizard man’s, and the
boy’s. The boy is even wearing his funny hat. He told her what it
was, but the words made no sense: a “baseball cap.”

But how could they make sense? That kind of hat
won’t be invented for almost another fifteen hundred years.

And the boy himself hasn’t even been born yet.

Chapter One

Eli: Secrets for Trees

August 1, 2019 C.E.

“He’s not a weapon! He’s my
son
!”

“No, Sands, you’re wrong! In somebody else’s
hands, he
is
a weapon! He’s dangerous!”
“Is that why you gave me that stupid ‘Danger Boy’ name?”

We’re having a three-way argument, and
there’s a long pause after I say that.

My name isn’t Danger Boy, but Eli Sands, and
I’m a time traveler. That’s the easiest way to think of it —
though, of course, being yanked around through history is never
easy. I like to think of it more as being “tangled up in time,”
’cause each time you make the journey, your life gets more and more
complicated.

The two men yelling are my dad, Sandusky
Sands (I don’t know about that name, either. My grandparents
must’ve had a weird sense of humor), and Mr. Howe.

Mr. Howe works for the government, in a
department called Black Box because it has no real name. It’s a
secret division of something that
does
have a name: DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency.

My dad’s a physicist — or at least he was —
and Mr. Howe had been watching his experiments for a long time.
After Mom’s accident, Mr. Howe practically took over our lives.

Right now, he’s staring at me. Then he stares
at my dad.

“You told him the code name?”

“I showed him the whole file.”

“You showed him the
Danger
Boy
file?”

“I don’t have any secrets from my son.”

“Every parent should keep some secrets from
his children.”

“Not every parent does to his family what
I’ve done to mine.” My dad’s thinking about my mom again. About the
fact she’s disappeared.

I look at both men and think,
Will you shut up?
but I don’t say it. My dad and Mr.
Howe have been going at it like this for a while now. Years,
really. If I walk right out of the room, I bet neither of them will
notice.

“Eli! Get back here!” That’s Mr. Howe. I
guess they
did
notice.

But I ignore them and keep on going down the
hall. Well, it’s not really a hall; it’s a limestone cave, inside
an abandoned winery, which is where I live now. The winery is in
the Valley of the Moon, near a town called Sonoma, in California.
They make a lot of wine around here, which probably won’t surprise
you, but our particular winery has been turned into a lab, which
might.

At least my room is normal.

It has all the things you’d expect to see in
a kid’s room: Gaming Guild stuff — like roam boxes — a lot of stray
vidpads, baseball cards, old clothes, a box of cookies, and my gene
map tacked up on the wall. Another wall is just for Comnet. Their
version of Comnet. They’ve set it up so they can track any personal
messages that come or go.

It’s been that way since I got back. And I’ve
only been back about a week.

There’s also stuff in my room that’s not
normal, like that little statue of the bull man with the snakes
around his legs, over there on my desk. I suppose he could be an
action figure, like maybe from one of the Guild games. But he’s
not. He’s made of clay, and he’s supposed to be a god of some sort,
called Serapis, and he was big stuff back in Alexandria.

That’s where I got him. In Alexandria, Egypt.
Well, not that exact statue. The DARPA guys took the original as
evidence. Proof of my travels. Two days later Mr. Howe gave me this
duplicate. “A little gesture of good faith” was the way he put
it.

You can still find Alexandria on a map, too,
but that’s not the original, either. The city I know is mostly
underwater now.

But not when I was there, more than sixteen
hundred years ago. Which, like I say, for me has been about a
week.

It’s been a
long
week.

But that’s what happens when you’re a time
traveler.

I can try to tell you about it, but when you
become unglued in time, tangled up in it, you lose track of where
the “beginning” is.

And the idea of where it might end still
scares me. I think they want to send me back there. To
Alexandria.

At least, Mr. Howe does. I hear him talk to
my dad: People are getting sick; strange things are happening to
time itself, and people like Mr. Howe are getting worried. They
think I can help make it all better.

I’m just a twelve-year-old kid who likes
baseball and vidpad games. Why me?

Well, I know why. It’s because of my dad’s
time spheres, and the fact that my mother disappeared into one, and
the additional fact that I disappeared into one, too, except I came
back.

They’ve tried to keep me around the lab since
I returned — Mr. Howe and his DARPA team watching me the whole
time, checking up and monitoring me. Actually, I’m amazed they’ve
let me be in my room alone this long without asking —

“Eli? How are you feeling?”

It’s Mr. Howe again, with some guy in a
doctor coat who I don’t recognize. There’ve been a lot of guys I
don’t recognize hanging around lately.

“I’d feel better if I could get out of here.
Take a walk. See a baseball game. Get some food. Anything. Even go
to school.”

“We can’t let you go back to school now.
You’re in a special circumstance.”

“I’d feel better if you and Dad would quit
fighting.”

“Your dad, Eli, doesn’t realize how much good
you can do.”

“Why are you calling me Danger Boy? That’s a
corny name.”

“When you do important work like ours, Eli —
like yours — it’s good to have a code name. Just in case.”

“Is ‘Mr. Howe’ a code name, too?”

He doesn’t answer, and instead picks up the
Serapis statue. “This souvenir you brought back — we should really
give it to a museum. Someday.”

“You mean the original? That one’s a fake.”
Mr. Howe puts it back on my desk, gingerly. “Right.”