Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe (3 page)

‘It’s like a ship,’ Manda called from her own carriage. ‘A ship of stone, with its prow to the south and stern to the north …’

‘What is this, envoy?’ Xaia asked Jeffares. ‘Some kind of artistry to draw in the pilgrims?’

‘Hardly,’ the envoy said. ‘The wall is entirely functional.’ He glanced at the sky, the elevation of the sun. ‘You’ll probably see for yourself in a day or two.’

‘Then we’ll wait.’

As they approached the city they passed through a hinterland of farms, where the remains of winter crops, cabbages and cauliflowers, stuck rotting out of the ploughed fields. There were no buildings here, just the fields. When Manda asked where the farmers were, and why a summer crop had not yet been sown, envoy Jeffares just shrugged. ‘Wait and see.’
 

The envoy negotiated their entry through a broad metal gate set flush in the shaped wall. The gate guards, armed with comically inadequate-looking pikes, spoke a variant of the Anglish that was spoken across the Scatter, but laced with rich dialect words. Xaia was irritated to find they had to pay an entry fee.
 

As the envoy argued, Xaia got out of her carriage and walked to the wall. Close up it was still more impressive, stretching three metres above Xaia’s head, and its smooth curve extended to right and left as far as she could see.

Teif ran a finger along the lines between blocks at his chest height. ‘These blocks haven’t been shaped by human hands. Look at these scratches, the wear. The stone is worn smooth.’

Looking more closely, they saw that the odd pattern of wear extended up for metres above their heads; above that height a rougher surface cast a speckle of shadows in the light of the sun. Manda murmured, ‘I wonder what storm did this shaping.’

Teif said, ‘What storm stops above head height?’

And as they spoke Xaia heard a rumble, like thunder, or the firing of distant guns. When she looked to the north she saw a faint band of cloud on the horizon, an orange-brown stripe. A dust storm, perhaps.
 

Jeffares, his negotiations concluded, led the way through the gate. Once inside the walls Xaia found herself in a city of cramped, cobbled streets and mean-looking stone housing that was broken by broad stretches of open ground where crops grew, wheat and maize. The people here were crammed in; the rutted, muddy track along which the envoy led them was flanked by dirty children who came out to stare, and resentful-looking adults, and fat, wheezing pigs that rooted in the muck. Xaia wondered why the people lived squashed up in here – why not go colonise the farmland outside? This evidently wasn’t a continent plagued by war, and there seemed no reason to huddle within these walls.

At the heart of the city a much more impressive building loomed out of the huddle of housing. Long in plan, decorated with crenellations and statues, it was almost like the Christian cathedral in Zeeland, but oddly shaped. This was, of course, the Shrine of the Shuttle. Taller buildings, some topped with green, gathered around this focus. The envoy said this was the centre of Ararat’s government; these towers housed ministries and agencies, and the clerks and cleaners and cooks who serviced them.
 

Jeffares led them to the city’s best hotel, one of the stone spires, once again named for the Founders. As the envoy negotiated with more guards and handed over more Zeeland dollars, Xaia found herself growing impatient.
 

Teif, always sensitive to her moods, touched her arm. ‘Are you all right, Lady?’

‘I feel locked in. Walls and riddles. Teif, why have I added months to my journey to come to this museum? What is there for me here?’

He raised eyebrows like thickets. ‘Do you need me to say “I told you so”?’

She pulled the envoy away from his negotiations. ‘Jeffares – oh, don’t quake so, man. Take me to the Shuttle. I’m far more interested in that than where Teif will be entertaining his whores tonight.’

‘Of course. This way. Please …’ But the envoy, even when flustered, was efficient; he hastily left one of Teif’s officers behind to finish the negotiations at the hotel, and sent another scurrying ahead to make sure the Shuttle keepers were ready to receive Zeeland royalty.

The Shuttle’s Shrine was only a short walk from the hotel. Within, beneath an impressive vaulted roof, the interior was brightly lit by electric bulbs of pinkish glass, perhaps blown from the rusty sand outside. They were met by a curator – ‘Keeper Chan Hil at your service’ – a young, smooth-faced man who babbled about waiving the usual pilgrims’ tithes for the co-Speaker of far Zeeland. Flapping, intelligent-looking but evidently nervous, and dressed in a cloak embroidered with stars and planets, he nevertheless had the presence of mind to pocket the cash bribe Jeffares slipped him. ‘This way to the viewing gallery – the best site to see the historic relic …’

Xaia had never had much interest in the endless memorialising of the Founders that monopolised so much of society’s energy in Zeeland and elsewhere. Nevertheless she found her heart pounding as she followed the curator up a flight of steps cut into the inner stone wall; here she was in the presence of history.

At last they came to a gallery. Xaia noted that the wall before them was lined with collecting boxes. And from an elevation of perhaps twenty metres they looked down on the Shuttle. It was like a bird, Xaia thought immediately, a fat and ungainly bird, white above, black below, sitting on open orange ground, with a rutted scraping in the dirt stretching off behind it. There were words painted on its side, in a blocky, graceless script: UNITED STATES. Xaia had no idea what that meant.

‘Its windows are like eyes,’ Manda said, evidently uneasy. ‘I can’t look away.’

‘It’s an authentic Founder artefact,’ Teif murmured. ‘The first
I
ever saw save for the Speaker’s Fourteen Orbs. Made by human hands on Earth. That’s what’s giving me the shakes.’

‘You must imagine it,’ Chan Hil said, evidently launching into a standard speech. ‘On the day of Landfall, nearly four centuries ago, this Shrine wasn’t here, nor the city of Ararat. The Shuttle detached from the Ark and fell onto an empty land – empty save for the dust and the Purple. As it rolled to a halt its wheels scratched ruts in the virgin dirt – and that track, recreated from the Founders’ photographs, extends off beyond this chamber, and is set under glass in the rooms beyond where you can view it. It is said that Cora Robles, your own husband’s ancestor, Speaker, was the first to touch the ground of Earth II –’

‘By now she’s everybody’s ancestor,’ Xaia murmured. ‘Why the collection boxes?’

Chan spread his hands apologetically. ‘It is not cheap to maintain this historic vehicle.’

Manda asked, ‘I’ll swear that tail plane faces the wrong way … It’s preserved just as it landed, is it?’

‘Not exactly,’ Chan said. ‘The Shuttle was ingeniously designed to be taken apart, to provide the Founders, the first colonists, with raw materials for their first shelters. This was the founding of Ararat, the first city on the planet, built from the material of the Shuttle itself. In later generations these components, scattered among a hundred homes, were painstakingly traced, gathered together and reassembled.’

‘And you got it all back, did you?’ Teif asked.

‘Almost all of it.’

Xaia asked, ‘And you’re sure you recreated the ship exactly where it landed?’

Chan’s mouth opened and closed. ‘Almost sure. Would you like to go aboard? You can see the Founders’ couches, and try the lavatory …’

Manda shook her head. ‘Why, when they had all the world to choose from, would they come here? To the middle of this desiccated continent. It would have made much more sense to land on one of the Scatter’s bigger islands.’

Chan Hil said brightly, ‘The Founders were scientists. They believed that the Belt offered the widest range of land habitats reachable without a sea crossing – the coasts, the riverine environments, the poles. They wanted to learn as much as they could about their new world while their instruments and electronic archives lasted. It was to be a legacy for us, for future generations. And they achieved a great deal. They did explore the Scatter, and even visited the Frysby, all within the first couple of generations …’

‘But it’s all ossified now, hasn’t it?’ Teif snapped.
 

Xaia frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘When the Founders’ grandchildren turned away from studying a planet to building a world, when history began, the ancestors of these people in Ararat stayed put.’ He spat on the dusty floor of the balcony. ‘With all the initiative and wanderlust gone, here they still are where the Shuttle came down, milking pilgrims and scholars for a chance to see these cobbled-together remains.’

‘I’m not here for the Founders, or their works,’ Xaia muttered. She turned to Chan. ‘I’m looking for the City of the Living Dead.’

Chan’s eyes widened. ‘Wow.’ It was a dialect word Xaia had never heard before. ‘The Founders searched for that. Or rather, for traces of the intelligent culture that evidently once inhabited this world, traces besides the ruins on Little Jamaica, and the Reef.’

Xaia frowned. ‘The Reef? What’s that?’

‘More ruins, to the north of here, surveyed by the Founders … But just ruins. If you want to find where the Dead
went
, Lady, you will have to go far beyond that.’

‘Then that’s how it will be,’ Xaia said grimly. ‘But this Reef sounds the place to start.’

Teif asked, ‘How far, exactly?’

Chan said, ‘About a thousand kilometres.’

Teif groaned and slapped his forehead. Manda laughed. ‘You can’t be serious,’ Teif said.
 

‘We’ll send most of the ships home,’ Xaia said, thinking aloud. ‘That will keep your precious crews happy, Admiral Teif, or most of them. Keep back just enough to support an expedition to the north, tracking the coast. Pick the crew with backbone, who want some adventure. We can live off the land, and the sea. As long as it takes -’

There was a rumble, like thunder. The building, a massive stone structure,
shook
. Xaia saw a trickle of plaster dust fall down on the Shuttle’s pale surface, like snow.

Manda snapped, ‘What was that? An earthquake?’

Envoy Jeffares laughed. ‘We don’t have earthquakes on the Belt.’

Manda didn’t enjoy being laughed at. She grabbed him by the front of his jacket and bodily lifted him off the ground. ‘Then what, you pipsqueak?’

‘I’ll show you! Please …’

At a nod from Xaia, Manda put him down. He stumbled, coughed, straightened his clothing, and had Chan Hil lead them all out of the Shrine.
 

In the open air that thunderous rumble was much louder, and it was continuous, not spasmodic like a storm. Xaia saw Manda and Teif exchange uncertain glances; it sounded like they were in the middle of a war zone. Led by Chan, they made their way to the city’s curving outer wall, and climbed another stone stair to a viewing gallery set just below the parapet. And here, along with a line of citizens, they looked down on the plain outside the city.

The plain was empty no longer. A river of animals washed down from the north, a tremendous stampede that spanned the world from horizon to horizon. Xaia saw horses that dwarfed even the great war beasts of Zeeland and Brython, and long-legged cattle and sheep, and even birds, tremendous turkeys that ran two-legged with the rest. This must be the source of the dust cloud she had seen on the horizon some hours ago. The whole mixed-up herd was moving at a tremendous speed, and raised a cloud of dust that billowed into the air around the city.

Every so often, in the headlong rush, a beast would fall. There would be a perturbation in the flow as others stumbled around it, and then predators would descend, cats and dogs and things like rats, to tear the hapless fallen into bloody segments. But these breaks were momentary; the unending surge would pass on and over the scavenged and scavengers alike.

Jeffares yelled above the noise in Xaia’s ear. ‘I’m glad you got to see this, Speaker. These herds can take a day to pass.’

Teif leaned over. ‘Now I see why they aren’t out working those fields yet – and why the city’s shaped like a boat.’ He pointed. The herd was forced to part at the ‘prow’ of the city’s walls, and flowed around it, as a river would flow around a streamlined island of mud, Xaia thought. No wonder the walls were worn smooth, with the friction of those thousands of carcasses.

She turned to Chan. ‘What are they fleeing?’

‘In this season, the heat. Speaker, when the north polar lands face the sun they are baked to aridity; when the pole faces away from the sun it is plunged into a cold so deep every river freezes over. Facing such extremes, animals can only hibernate or migrate. Many herds cross the equator altogether. Animals brought here from Earth grew big quickly, and learned to run so fast because they have so far to go. It is only on the Belt, which stretches from pole to pole, that such migrations are possible. I have made a study of the migration patterns. When I was a boy my brother and I would try to count the individual animals passing in an hour … It was impossible.’

‘Such curiosity seems unusual here.’

He shrugged. ‘Life is easy in Ararat. People come for the Shuttle; wealth flows in, without us having to do anything much. But I am fascinated by the world we live in. I am a scholar, self-taught.’

‘That’s probably the best sort.’ An impulse hit her, another in a lifetime of impulses. ‘Keeper Chan, where we’re going we could use a guide. Want to come?’

He stared, eyes comically wide open. ‘To the Reef?’

‘And beyond.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course.’

‘You bet I’ll come.’

Another idiom she’d never heard before, but she could tell from his grin that his answer was positive.

Manda pointed down. ‘Look what they are doing now!’

Xaia leaned over the wall to see. Booms were being let down from the walls, bearing nets that dangled into the stampeding herds. Fleeing animals were soon tangled up, horses and cattle and sheep and even a few long-legged pigs, and the nets were drawn up with a groan of pulleys and winches.

‘And so we are fed for a few more months,’ Chan said. ‘In Ararat, even the food just comes flowing in, like the money.’