The Cydonian Pyramid (8 page)

W
ITH MOUNTING FEAR
, L
IA WATCHED THE HORSE AND
the man draw closer. A
Boggsian
! It was the Boggsians who built and maintained the few machines still used by the Lah Sept — machines like her entertainment table and the priests’ shock batons. Some said that Boggsians were immune to the Plague. Others maintained that they were themselves victims and carriers. The priests denounced them for their digital ways and their peculiar religious practices, even as they purchased their digital technologies.

We know little of what the Boggsians do in their domains,
the Lait Pike had once told her.
Their ways are hidden. It is said by some that they never change their clothes, that their prayers are woven of numbers and dark thoughts, that they eat the eggs of crows. Still, they are a necessary evil, like white lies and black knives.

As the Boggsian and his horse clopped toward her, Lia noticed a curious thing. The
clop-clop-clop
sound did not match the fall of the horse’s hooves, as if the horse was walking silently while a recording of an entirely different horse played. The driver pulled back on the reins. The horse stopped, but the sound of its hooves continued for a moment.

The Boggsian was dark haired, olive skinned, and nearly as big around the middle as his horse. He touched the brim of his black hat with a thick-fingered hand and spoke in a voice that made her think of tumbling stones.

“Be this the
shayner maidel
?”

Shayner maidel?
Lia had been taught several languages, but these words were unfamiliar.

The man on the cart saw her incomprehension. He leaned toward her and spoke carefully. “My name is Artur Zelig-Boggs, child. You must call me Artur.” She could not see much of his mouth because of the beard, but the corners of his eyes crinkled in a kindly fashion.

“Your horse is not a horse,” she said.

He raised his heavy black eyebrows in surprise. “Ach, but he is! Gort is a very
goot
horse!”

Lia reached out to touch the horse. Her fingers disappeared into its flank. She jerked her hand back.

“I’ve never seen a horse like
that
before!”

Artur chuckled. “You see his image. You will come with me and see him fleshwise,
nu
?” Artur patted the seat beside him.

Lia looked from Artur to the guards.

“Go,” said the guard on her left.

“What if I don’t want to?”

The guards did not reply, but she feared she knew the answer. If she refused to go with the Boggsian, the Medicants would take their payment in body parts. She took a step closer to the cart and touched the wheel. It felt real — a steel hoop shod in hard black rubber. The solidity of the wheel reassured her. Perhaps the Boggsian meant her no harm. He reached down. Lia grasped his thick hand and let him help her up onto the padded bench seat. He was, she thought, the largest man she had ever met.

Artur gave the reins a twitch. The cart moved forward. The wheels turned smoothly. A faint vibration rose up through the wooden seat. The not-horse moved its legs.

Artur guided the cart around a row of autos, then directed it back toward the exit. The guards stayed where they were, watching until the cart left the garage and rolled out of the building and onto the street.

Lia had given no thought to what might lie outside the Medicant hospital, so her reaction to the surrounding city was utter and complete amazement. The street they turned onto ran straight as an arrow through a walled canyon of nearly identical blocky buildings, hands of stories tall, all faced with a stonelike substance in gray, beige, and tan, all with windows of uniform size and shape. Each building had symbols affixed to its front. Lia suspected that the symbols represented numbers; she tried not to look at them. The street itself was several lanes of smooth gray concrete filled with humming, moving vehicles — mostly the same sort of autos she had seen parked inside the hospital building, though some were larger. Artur calmly guided the horse and cart into the traffic stream. The autos shifted and slowed to make room for them. They settled into the right lane. Autos passed to the left, their occupants staring at them with open curiosity.

“Where are they all going?” Lia asked.

“They are
shpatzirs,
” said Artur. “They do not know where they go. That is why they hurry. To find out where they wish to be.”

“Where are
we
going?”

“We go to Harmony.” Artur gave the reins a shake. The horse abruptly accelerated its gait from a walk to a trot; after a heartbeat’s delay, the cart sped up as well.

“What makes us move?” Lia asked.

“The wind, child.”

Lia could feel no wind.

“Why did you buy me?” she asked.

“I did not buy you.”

“They said I was sold.”

“I give them
bupkis;
they give me you.”

“What is
bupkis
?”

“Nothing of value. A trinket. I make an even trade.” He winked at her.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“I am going to introduce you to Gort, who does not yet know he has already met you.”

“Gort is a real horse?”

“Indeed.” He gave her a sideways look. “You came here through a disko,
nu
?”

“A Gate.”

“Gate, disko, it is all the same. You are from a time yet to come.”

“I am a Pure Girl.”

“I thought as much.”

“You know other Pure Girls?”

“Some.”

“Are there Pure Girls where we are going?”

“Did you think you were the first?”

Lia felt her eyes heat up. She blinked, and a tear spilled down her cheek. Other Pure Girls lived here! She would not be alone.

They continued along the same street. The buildings became less uniform and their design more varied. Off to their left, Lia saw a large, pyramid-shaped structure. Several men were dragging a large block of stone up the steep sides on wooden rollers. A tingle of recognition shivered her spine.

“You see it,
nu
?” Artur twitched the reins; the cart moved to the side of the street and stopped.

Lia said, “It’s a pyramid.”

“The Pyramid of the Lambs. Once, it was no bigger than a shepherd’s hut, but it grows ever larger. The Lambs believe it will bring them closer to heaven.”

Just above the pyramid’s flattened top, a disk of light caught her eye. It flickered, then disappeared.

Artur spoke. “They are your people,
nu
?”

“The Lah Sept,” she said, still staring at the spot where she had seen the Gate.

Artur grunted. “In this day, they call themselves the Lambs of September.” He gestured at the building. “You have seen the finished structure?”

Lia nodded. “It is at the center of Romelas.”

“Romelas is not yet,
bubeluh.
The Medicants call their city Mayo, as it has been for half a millennium.”

Lia did not know how long half a millennium was, but she gathered it was a very long time.

“The Lambs bide their time,” Artur said. “They are buzzards, waiting for the Medicant beast to die so that their own rough beast might rename the city once again.”

Lia flinched as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something pale and gauzy swoop past them. She turned toward it, but there was nothing there.

“What did you see?” Artur asked, looking at her intently.

“Something flew by.”

He nodded slowly, then shook the reins. The cart moved back into the stream of traffic.

“Do you know us yet in your day?” he asked.

“You mean Boggsians?”

Artur chuckled. “Boggsians, yes. What the
goyim
call us. It is better than some of the old names. You have met my descendants, yes?”

“Once I saw a family dressed like you. Outside the palace, in a horse cart. But the horse was real. It left a nuisance upon the pavement.”

Artur laughed. “Yes, yes! We
nuisance
the pavement, we Boggsians. Like the cockroach and the carp, we abide. Six thousand years in this world, yet still, we abide.”

“You use numbers,” Lia said after a moment.

Artur nodded. “Numbers do not harm us.”

“What of the Medicants?”

“You have met them,
nu
?”

“They have machines on their bodies.”

“They compensate for the damage they have done to their souls.”

“You mean Plague?”

“The Lambs call it Plague. The Medicants call it evolution. I call it
autismus.
”

“They are sick with numbers.”

Artur raised his prodigious eyebrows. “So say the Lambs.”

The traffic thinned as they approached the outskirts of the city. After a time, Lia saw a tree, and then another, and then an open field planted with some sort of crop. Soon they were surrounded by more land than buildings, and the only other traffic consisted of a few larger transport vehicles. The open areas grew more expansive — one field planted with corn stretched as far as she could see. Artur did something with the reins. The “horse” vanished, and the cart accelerated rapidly. Lia gripped the armrest with both hands. Within seconds they were traveling so fast that the wind stung her eyes and blew her hair straight back. Fields and trees became a blur as they raced down the highway. Artur’s face was wide open, his mouth drawn into a joyful smile.

They maintained their speed for some time. When nothing terrible happened, Lia’s fear turned to exhilaration. She was filled with wonder at the distance they had covered. The tall buildings of the city sank into the horizon. Flat fields became rolling hills. The road carried them up a long slope, then down into a valley and along a meandering river. The cart slowed. They turned off the highway onto a narrower road. Artur twitched the reins, and the horse reappeared before them. The clopping sound resumed.

Artur raised an eyebrow at her. “You like that,
bubeluh
?”

“It was . . .
fast,
” Lia said. They had slowed to a walk. It felt as if they were crawling. “Why do we now go slowly when we could be moving quickly?”

“Better you should ask, ‘Why go quickly when we could take our time?’”

“I don’t know.”

“I will tell you.” A boyish grin cut through his bearded face. “Because it is joyful fun to race the wind, but only when no one is watching.” They entered a forested area. The pavement ended, and the road surface became hard-packed dirt. Trees and brush pressed the sides of the road; an occasional branch dragged across the sides of the cart.

“You don’t want people to see you go fast?”

“It is unseemly to motor free before worldly eyes.” The road curved toward the river and led onto a low wooden bridge. Lia leaned to the side and looked over the railing into the water as they crossed the river. She could see fish holding their places, facing into the current.

The narrow road climbed slowly, making frequent turns, back and forth, up the side of the lush river valley. Artur withdrew into his own thoughts as Lia watched the numberless trees pass them by.

A
S THEY FOLLOWED THE
CLOP, CLOP, CLOP
OF THE
not-horse up the switchback road, Lah Lia thought back to her time as a Pure Girl. In her memory, hardly a day had passed since she had stepped through the Gate on the pyramid, but already her years in Romelas felt like another life, distant and gone. The Lait Pike had once remarked upon this.

We travel into the future by leaps and bounds,
he had told her.
Each step opens a gulf between our present and the past. Wherever we go, there we are, moving toward what is to come.

Even though the Gate had taken her to the distant past, she was moving inexorably into her own future.
Clop, clop, clop.

They came up over a rise and out of the woods into a wide-open treeless space, rolling hills displaying a checkerboard of cultivated fields. Artur pulled back on the reins; the cart slowed.

“Listen,” he said.

Lia heard a faint sound, like a gurgling creek, becoming louder. Artur pointed at the field just ahead of them on the right. The surface of the field was moving, as if covered with a living soft, pulsating layer of dusky blue and gray. The gurgling sound became a rumble, almost too low to hear. Lia could not imagine what she was seeing. Artur brought the cart to a halt, dropped the reins, and clapped his hands loudly.

The field exploded. Birds! The flock erupted at the edge of the field nearest the cart, peeling up from the earth, a rising blanket of feathers and noise. More birds than she had seen in her lifetime. The sound of their gurgles and chuckles hit her with the force of a gale — Lia gasped and gripped the armrest. Birds continued to rise from the field, an area larger than the central zocalo of Romelas, larger than a hand of zocalos. The avian sheet twisted and wrapped around itself to become a gyrating, sky-darkening cyclone.

More birds, she thought, than could possibly exist.

Another chuckling sound came from beside her. Artur was laughing.

The last birds lifted from the farthest corner of the field; the flock reorganized itself to become a vast flying carpet and moved off at tree height. They watched until it merged with the horizon.