Strength of Stones (8 page)

She had palmed three pieces of fruit and was looking for the best route to leave when the market square manager appeared in front of her like a _djinn_ out of the dust. "Who are you, woman?" he asked. She looked up and shook her head.

"You know what it means to steal?"

Reah turned and tried to shuffle away. The manager grabbed her arm and an orange fell from the sleeve. One of the boys laughed and retrieved the fruit. "These are hard times," the manager said. "We all need to eat." Reah looked at him hopefully. "Those who steal, steal from the mouths of our children. You know that?" His face was reddening and his eyes were elsewhere. Some inner fury was building and all of Reah's humble slouch and scared eyes couldn't satisfy it.

"Thieves have their hands cut off," he growled. "So it is written, _billah_! So our fathers would have done it long ago. But in our misery and exile we've forgotten these laws. Now it is time to remember!"

Reah shook her head again, afraid to speak.

"I stoned a thief here last week!" the manager shouted, raising his hand. He brought it down on her head and she sprawled in the dirt. "Brothers, here's a thief! Spawn of _Iblis,_ a stealer of food!"

The morning shoppers crowded around. Reah found no sympathy in their eyes. She stood and raised her hands defiantly, swaying back and forth, trying to make them go away with her power. They would learn better, tangling with an _ifrit._

A rock whistled from the circle and struck her on the back. She forgot her fear and hunger and ran. The crowd followed like a single beast. She dodged a stone and fell against a slow-moving cart, then to the ground. The crowd circled again. She looked at their feet swinging under their robes and heard bells. A crowd of bronze bells circled her, ringing, buzzing like insects. Among them she saw a man with a strong face, a muezzin perhaps but still part of the crowd, eyes pitiless and glazed, slightly upturned, looking at the sky, stone clutched in his hand. He raised the hand.

She stood and clung to him. "I am thy suppliant," she rasped. "No one can deny my need."

He looked down on her and the crowd stopped. His eyes cleared and he cursed under his breath.

"_Ullah yafukk' ny minch!_" the strong man exclaimed. Only a muezzin or a scholar would speak the old tongue so well.

"Allah wills it," she whispered, eyes almost commanding him. "You cannot refuse."

The man shook his head and raised his hand to stop the crowd. So was the custom -- he could not deny a suppliant. She was in his care now and by his faith he must keep her from harm, at least for the moment. The crowd paced around them restlessly. Reah looked over his shoulder at the stones and hands and cold faces. "Wolves," she said. "I will fly before wolves."

"Stop," the man said. "She's not in her right mind. It isn't just to stone the sick -- "

"Even the sick must obey the law," the manager said. She looked up into the strong man's face.

"He's right," he said. "You have to leave the town or they'll stone you."

She nodded. There was little about the next hour that she remembered. Only the dipper of water, the giving of a knapsack filled with stale bread and a few figs, the cup of _leban_ from the near-empty jar of the muezzin's wife. He brought out a worn water-skin and took her to the south gate, pointing her direction. She must circle around Akkabar and head north, but not until dusk. Her life in Akkabar was over. He said a prayer for her and sat under the shadow of an abandoned lean-to by the gate.

"At night," he said. "When it is cool. _Shalaym alaycham."_ For the prayer and the farewell he fell into the more colloquial tongue of the city politicians. He gave her the skin of water and returned through the gate.

Reah looked out steadily at the flat river plain until her eyes watered. She slept for a while and awoke to the distant sounds of hunting night-insects. Dusk was settling. She stood carefully, dusted her cloak off, and began to walk around the walls until she was going north.

To the north lived the Habiru, more prosperous than the Moslems but still cursed. They might give her food and shelter. She fingered a string of clay beads as she walked, saying scattered prayers, long-engrained thanks for choice rags, clean bones, bits of metal and glass or edible food.

No living city had ever wandered onto the alluvial plain. A thousand years ago, before the Exiling, the old river had flowed across all of this land. In the memory of the cities, water still ran here. They stayed on the other side of the mountains, or in the foothills six kilometers away. Reah shaded her eyes and saw the outline of towers directly north. There was nothing for her in a living city.

She had been close to one of the cities as a young girl, on a trip with her father and mother to barter with the Habiru. That was before trade restrictions had tightened between Christians, Jews, and the few Moslem communities. It had been a glorious thing, its towers glowing and humming in the night, like a magic green tree filled with insects. They had camped under the light of two full moons, sharing a picnic supper with the families of her father's business partners. One of the old women, a spinner of tales to three generations, had told them first about the building of the moons, how trained birds big as mountains had hauled loads of mud-brick into the sky. One of the young men, testing his masculine authority, had offered an alternate version -- that the moons had been brought from other worlds. Reah preferred the first version now. The families had gone over the old stories about the living cities, how the prodigal Jew Robert Kahn had designed them to the specifications of the Last of the Faithful ... how they had been built from the seeds of a thousand altered species, and made to incorporate steel and stone and other materials which were now lost secrets ... and, as the night grew old and the fires cooled, they listened with damp eyes to the Exiling.

She shuffled under the sun, host to a swarm of unorganized memories. She didn't see the troop of men keeping step with her to one side, laughing and shushing each other.

"Woman, where are you from?" one called.

She turned and squinted at them, then continued walking. They came closer.

"She's from the town," one said. "Durragon's there now..."

They blocked her path. The largest of them reached out and pulled back her cowl. "Hag, dis ol' gol, hag all aroun'. Hard by t'use dis ol' gol."

"She's a woman," another said. The older men backed away, smiling and shaking their heads. The younger ones closed in, faces troubled. "Dis em neba had a gol befo', ol', bri' o de skin, nor kine't all!"

"She'll do," another young one said.

They pulled her to the ground, took off her robes, and raped her. She ignored them, dreaming of the living cities and their cool green spires, assuaging her thirst with the memories.

When they were done, they left her in the waning daylight and continued patrolling south. She stood and gathered her supplies, then found a scrawny bush and slept under it. It was harder getting up to the pale dawn, harder to walk under the growing heat. She rationed her water carefully, but ate the food quickly. Different masters controlled her actions. Her stiff, knotted hair crackled in the heat.

Another party of soldiers passed by. She was like a ghost, lurching into the thin breeze, arms held out. Somewhere behind her was the empty water sack and the last of the crumbs. Her clay necklace lay under the bush where she'd slept. The soldiers watched her with mixed fear and disgust, then went south to join their army. Rifle fire echoed across the river plain.

By nightfall she was sitting under cottonwood trees and drinking from a shallow spring. She was sure she had entered the first stage of Paradise. Still, the men said that in Paradise women served, and she didn't like that idea. _Ifrits_ did not serve. They were mean as scorpions when crossed.

In the morning she ate a few shreds of grass and nuts dug from a seed-pod, which made her faintly ill. By afternoon, following an overgrown dirt path, she found a Habiru village. It had been burned to the ground and the stone walls knocked over, probably by evil giants. The village overlooked the plain and from its southern end she had a good view of the two river beds and Akkabar. Holding her nose against the lingering smell of dead flesh, she looked back at her home and squinted. Smoke was rising from the center of the town. A grey mass of specks surrounded the mud and stone walls. In an hour, the pillar of smoke was black and tall. "I really _am_ an _ifrit_," she murmured. "Soldiers rub the walls and out I pour in a cloud of soot, to sit in the hills and laugh."

She left the dead Habiru village and followed the road to a high grassland beyond, swatting at the insects which clung to her bare, peeling arms. Her strength was rapidly fading. She managed to keep walking until her feet struck clear, glass pavement. Her legs still kicked after she fell.

An hour passed and she lay motionless under the stars, eyes closed, lulled by a pleasant hum. Something beautiful was near. She opened her eyes and pulled a final moment of reason from her reserves. She was on her back, nearly dead. Beyond her feet was a tall, intricate arch, polished and green, glowing with its own light and exhaling a warm wind.

Perhaps she was already dead. She was on the perimeter of a living city. The pavement around her should have bristled into an impenetrable barricade, keeping all humans out. Then her reason slipped away and she sang weakly to herself, until strong mandibles closed around her legs and shoulders and she was taken through the arch, into the pale underwater luminosity.

Durragon the Apostate, commander of three thousand Chasers and a handful of Expolitan grumblers, felt a vague regret about the smoking Moslem town. He kicked aside a pile of rags filled with bloody meat and stood in the middle of the ruin, eyes half-closed, trying to think. The smell was awful. The Chasers were marvelous scrappers but no good at restraint. Still, they were the only thing between him and anonymity. They obeyed his orders with a kind of reverence, if only because he could kill any two of them in combat, and had. But it didn't make much sense, economically speaking, to let them continue. It was time to risk their contempt and demand discretion in the looting.

He put his hand on the bare, scabbed shoulder of his left-flank runner, Breetod, and spoke into his ear. "Take the three torchers into the market. I'm not happy with this, not happy at all. We could have lived here a while. Now even the grain stores are burned."

Breetod's face fell into unhappy creases, but he ran off to carry out the orders. Durragon took out his pistol and loaded it thoughtfully. He walked through the rubble to where the market had been, sidestepping the charred bodies.

The three torchers stood by the jagged black heaps of the market stalls, hands folded, grinning nervously. One of them took a step forward and was restrained by Breetod.

"Dis we, no' try t' -- "

"Quiet," Durragon said softly. His stomach twisted. He didn't like this at all, but it was necessary. Without him, they would still be unorganized savages. They were like children. Sometimes their discipline had to be harsh. He took out his pistol. The torchers stopped smiling.

Other Chasers stood around, grim and silent. He motioned them away from his line of fire.

"Day-o," the youngest torcher moaned.

His teeth gritted, Durragon pulled the trigger three times. The Chasers broke up and walked to the outskirts of the ruins, where their camp-followers waited. The rest of the marauders were on the other side of the town, searching the rubble for scraps of molten gold and silver. Akkabar had been a poor town. They weren't likely to find much.

Reah thought a clear, untroubled thought for the first time in ten years. She stood in the middle of a clean white room with a bunk in one corner, a green-tinted window along one wall, and a very strange desk which might have been a wash basin. Something like music came out of the ceiling, which was a flowing, oily gold color. She turned around slowly and saw the open doorway and a hall beyond. Her hair was clean and straight, even faintly scented. She wore a white gown, not flattering -- she had let herself go too long to be flattered by clothing -- and a pair of sandals made from some soft fiber. It was delightful. She waited a moment for the uncertainties and clouds of insects to rise in her head, but all was still. She had a mild headache and was hungry, but she was no longer an _ifrit._

She walked out the door and through the clean white hall until she reached a balcony, two floors above a courtyard. The music followed her. She peered over the railing. The floor of the circular mall below was an indescribable gray-green color. Looking closer, she saw it wasn't a solid color at all -- the floor was a mosaic of tiny moving patterns, forming geometric forests with the slowness of a burning candle. A hundred meters away, four people dressed in white and orange robes strolled on the edge of the mall. Birds flew over them, through a wide gateway flanked by green arches. Her throat seized up and she thought she was going to cry.

"Hello," a male voice said behind her. She turned to look, lower lip quivering. He was about thirty, with black hair and dark, tan skin, a few centimeters taller than Reah but not much stockier. His nose was small with delicate nostrils, and his eyes were gray like fine clay dirt. He looked well-fed and healthy.

"I'm in a city, aren't I?" she said. "But it's supposed to be empty." Her hands fluttered nervously across the front of her robe, reaching for frayed ends of a shawl she no longer wore.

"This one doesn't have much control any more. It's dying, like an old person. Some parts still work, others don't. It lets sick people in. Can we help you?"

"I'm better now ... I can feel it. Is this a hospital?"

"All cities were made to treat their citizens. You're the one found on the paving outside -- from a Moslem town, right?"

"I saw Akkabar burning. My town. Was I dreaming?"

The man shook his head. "Akkabar was destroyed two weeks ago. We watched it from the Tower Plaza, near the top. I don't think many escaped. You're the only one in Resurrection. That's what this city is called. You must have walked fifty, sixty kilometers."

She thought that over for a moment, then held her hand out to touch him and see if he was real. He looked down at her fingers on his arm and she withdrew them quickly, hacking away. "I -- we heard stories that the cities made things like people ... shaped like us. There was one in Akkabar when I was a girl. Someone killed him in a duel. He was like a plant and a machine inside. Are you human?"

"Flesh and blood. All of us are. Most of us come from Bethel-Yakob. Why don't you go back to your room -- "

"I'd rather stay here."

"Whatever you want."

"Did the city fix you, too?"

He nodded. "Most of Expolis Capernahum was slaughtered by Durragon and his Chasers. We were wounded."

Reah shook her head slowly, not knowing what to believe. "I remember walking through a Habiru village. Yours?"

"Probably not. I'm from twenty kilometers northeast of here."

"When will Durragon come for us?"

The man smiled. "He won't. The city only lets injured people in. We're all of a kind here. Patients." He pulled up a sleeve and showed her his upper arm. It was covered with a milky-white, skin-tight bandage.