Travellers in Magic (21 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that when this plain is finally explored there will be no trace of us left. We will have gone away, into the heart of the jungle. People will think the stories of El Dorado a myth, nothing more.”

“Then let me grant you the time you need. Let me tell the king there is no El Dorado.”

The chief sighed. “I'll have to think about it. But I will tell you this, Sir Walter—you have more courage than any man I have ever met. Your king was a fool to keep you imprisoned.”

“Aye, he was,” Walter said, and grinned. Somehow he had transferred his loyalty to this chief who sat before him. Nay, not a chief—he had wanted to be called king. And why not? He had earned the title, unlike James.

One of Tuala's men led Walter through the main tower to a room he had never seen before. Something Tuala had said made Walter think the man might be some sort of surgeon, but one who practiced a medicine unlike any Walter had ever known. The surgeon stopped at a doorway and took out a key. Walter looked on in surprise—he had not seen any locked rooms since he had come to El Dorado, not even his own.

The surgeon opened the door. Francis lay on a bed inside. He sat up when the surgeon came in and began to speak angrily. “Why am I imprisoned here? When am I to be released?” His eyes widened when he saw Walter, and he had the grace to look afraid.

“I would not have killed you,” Francis said quickly. “I was to make certain you claimed El Dorado for King James, nothing more.”

“Of course,” Walter said evenly. Did the man's treachery have no end? Was this fool typical of the men James liked to have around him? Elizabeth would have taken Francis's measure in minutes, and then dismissed him forever.

The surgeon gave Francis food and drink, and the man ate and drank hungrily. “You'll get me out, won't you, Sir Walter? When the king finds out how I've been treated he won't be pleased. He'll return with an army, won't he, sir? Tell this fool what the king will do to him.”

His words grew slower, disjointed. Finally he lay back on the bed, his eyes unfocused. “I put the potion in his drink,” the surgeon said. “Watch.”

Fascinated, Walter listened as the surgeon described a journey Francis had never taken. The surgeon led Francis over the plains and beyond, to the forests and highlands of the lower Orinoco. Francis nodded in agreement, his eyes glazed. “When you return to your ship you will remember nothing of this city,” the surgeon said. “You will be able to tell your king you could not find us. El Dorado is a pretty story, nothing more.”

Francis nodded. “A pretty story,” he said, and slept.

Three months later, at dawn, King James's men led Sir Walter from the Gatehouse to the scaffold at Westminster Hall. Someone kindly gave him a cup of sack and asked how he liked it. “It's a good drink,” Walter said, “if a man might tarry at it,” and was pleased to see that the old jest still had the power to make men laugh.

He felt very nearly content. The fever that had infected him on the way to Guiana had returned, and his limp was worse than ever. He was an old man, his life over. Yet he had one act more to play out, one final secret to carry to the grave.

All during the voyage home, while around him his men slowly forgot the gardens and golden towers, while they spoke of a voyage that had never happened, a dream-voyage, he had torn out pages from his journal and substituted another story. Anyone who found his journal would think that he had never left Trinidad. He wrote a letter to Bess and thought about Wat, his impetuous son who had been so much like him. His life was over. He had lost, and won. He had found quite another sort of riches.

In the dawn air he shook from cold and from his fever. He hoped that the crowd would not take his shivering for fear. For there was a crowd, and a large one, although King James had scheduled the execution on the same day as the Lord Mayor's pageants and shows. It was important that all of London talk about his execution, and that there be no mention of the gold mine he had gone to find. His death would buy King Tuala and his people the hundred years they needed.

He mounted the scaffold and looked out over the crowd. In spite of himself he felt gratified that so many people had come to see him, all his old friends and enemies, even folks who knew him only as a legend. “I thank God that He has sent me to die in the sight of so honorable an assembly and not in the darkness,” he said.

His listeners expected to hear a defense of the charges of treason and atheism brought against him, and so he spoke a little more. He saw their upturned faces, listening raptly. Aye, he had not lost the ability to move a crowd. London would talk about nothing else for a very long time to come.

Finally he lay himself down on the block. The executioner hesitated, and he heard someone say into the silence, “We have not another such head to be cut off.” He closed his eyes and saw before him the high towers of El Dorado, and then the shadow of the axe. Then he saw and heard nothing more.

A
FTERWORD

Infinite Riches” grew out of research I did for my Elizabethan novel
Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon.
Most Elizabethans, I found, led lives as compelling as novels; some days I gave up the pretense of research entirely and just read where my fancy took me. What fascinated me about Sir Walter Raleigh was how he was able to go from a tiny room in the Tower of London to vast open seas and uncharted countries. What on earth could that have been like?

If you read any history at all you find yourself taking sides, favoring one person over another. This is bad for historians, but perfectly acceptable behavior for a writer. I have to count myself as one of Raleigh's supporters—because he spoke his mind in an age when most people thought it politic to dissemble; because he succeeded at so many different things: courtier, poet, historian, explorer, philosopher; because, perhaps alone among Elizabethan husbands, it seems that he was faithful to his wife.

Gardner Dozois, who bought this story for
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
had me take out fifteen pages of fairly tedious up-the-Orinoco travelog. If “Infinite Riches” works at all it is at least in part due to him.

D
EATH
I
S
D
IFFERENT

She had her passport stamped and went down the narrow corridor to collect her suitcase. It was almost as if they'd been waiting for her, dozens of them, the women dressed in embroidered shawls and long skirts in primary colors, the men in clothes that had been popular in the United States fifty or sixty years ago.

“Taxi? Taxi to hotel?”

“Change money? Yes? Change money?”

“Jewels, silver, jewels—”

“Special for you—”

“Cards, very holy—”

Monica brushed past them. One very young man, shorter even than she was, grabbed hold of the jacket she had folded over her arm. “Anything, mem,” he said. She turned to look at him. His eyes were wide and earnest. “Anything, I will do anything for you. You do not even have to pay me.”

She laughed. He drew back, looking hurt, but his hand still held her jacket. “All right,” she said. They were nearly to the wide glass doors leading out into the street. The airport was hot and dry, but the heat coming from the open glass doors was worse. It was almost evening. “Find me a newspaper,” she said.

He stood a moment. The others had dropped back, as if the young man had staked a claim on her. “A—a newspaper?” he said. He was wearing a gold earring, a five-pointed star, in one ear.

“Yeah,” she said. Had she ever known the Lurqazi word for newspaper? She looked in her purse for her dictionary and realized she must have packed it in with her luggage. She could only stand there and repeat helplessly, “A newspaper. You know.”

“Yes. A newspaper.” His eyes lit up, and he pulled her by her jacket outside into the street.

“Wait—” she said. “My luggage—”

“A newspaper,” the young man said. “Yes.” He led her to an old man squatting by the road, a pile of newspapers in front of him. At least she supposed they were newspapers. They were written in Lurqazi, a language which used the Roman alphabet but which, she had been told, had no connection with any Indo-European tongue.

“I meant—Is there an English newspaper?” she asked.

“English,” he said. He looked defeated.

“All right,” she said. “How much?” she asked the old man.

The old man seemed to come alive. “Just one, mem,” he said. “Just one.” His teeth were stained red.

She gave him a one (she had changed some money at the San Francisco airport), and, as an afterthought, gave the young man a one too. She picked up a paper and turned to the young man. “Could you come back in there with me while I pick up my suitcase?” she said. “I think the horde will descend if you don't.”

He looked at her as if he didn't understand what she'd said, but he followed her inside anyway and waited until she got her suitcase. Then he went back outside with her. She stood a long time watching the cabs—every make and year of car was standing out at the curb, it seemed, including a car she recognized from Czechoslovakia and a horse-drawn carriage—until he guided her toward a late model Volkswagen Rabbit. She had a moment of panic when she thought he was going to get in the car with her, but he just said something to the driver and waved good-bye. The driver, she noticed, was wearing the same five-pointed star earring.

As they drove to the hotel she felt the familiar travel euphoria, a loosening of the fear of new places she had felt on the plane. She had done it. She was in another place, a place she had never been, ready for new sights and adventures. Nothing untoward had happened to her yet. She was a seasoned traveller.

She looked out of the car and was startled for a moment to see auto lights flying halfway into the air, buildings standing on nothing. Then she realized she was looking at a reflection in the car's window. She bent closer to the window, put her hands around her eyes, but she could see nothing real outside, only the flying lights, the phantom buildings.

At the air-conditioned hotel she kicked off her shoes, took out her dictionary and opened the newspaper. She had studied a little Lurqazi before she'd left the States, but most of the words in the paper were unfamiliar, literary words like “burnished” and “celestial.” She took out a pen and started writing above the lines. After a long time she was pretty sure that the right margins of the columns in the paper were ragged not because of some flaw in the printing process but because she was reading poetry. The old man had sold her poetry.

She laughed and began to unpack, turning on the radio. For a wonder someone was speaking English. She stopped and listened as the announcer said, “—fighting continues in the hills with victory claimed by both sides. In the United States the President pledged support today against what he called Russian-backed guerrillas. The Soviet Union had no comment.

“The weather continues hot—”

Something flat and white stuck out from under the shoes in her suitcase, a piece of paper. She pulled it out. “Dear Monica,” she read, “I know this is part of your job but don't forget your husband who's waiting for you at home. I know you want to have adventures, but please
be careful.
See you in two weeks. I love you. I miss you already, and you haven't even gone yet. Love, Jeremy.”

The dinner where she'd met Jeremy had been for six couples. On Jeremy's other side was a small, blond woman. On her other side was a conspicuously empty chair. She must have looked unhappy, because Jeremy introduced himself and asked, in a voice that sounded genuinely worried, if she was all right.

“I'm fine,” she said brightly. She looked at the empty chair on the other side of her as if it were a person and then turned back to Jeremy. “He said he might be a little late. He does deep sea salvaging.” And then she burst into tears.

That had been embarrassing enough, but somehow, after he had offered her his napkin and she'd refused it and used hers instead, she found herself telling him the long sad chronology of her love life. The man she was dating had promised to come, she said, but you could never count on him to be anywhere. And the one before that had smuggled drugs, and the one before that had taken her to some kind of religious commune where you weren't allowed to use electricity and could only bathe once a week, and the one before that had said he was a revolutionary.… His open face was friendly, his green eyes looked concerned. She thought the blond woman on his other side was very lucky. But she could never go out with him, even if the blond woman wasn't there. He was too … safe.

“It sounds to me,” he said when she was done (and she realized guiltily that she had talked for nearly half an hour; he must have been bored out of his mind), “that you like going out with men who have adventures.”

“You mean,” she said slowly, watching the thought surface as she said it, “that I don't think women can have adventures too?”

The next day she applied to journalism school.

She didn't see him until nearly a year later, at the house of the couple who had invited them both to dinner. This time only the two of them were invited. The set-up was a little too obvious to ignore, but she decided she didn't mind. “What have you been doing?” he asked between courses.

“Going to journalism school,” she said.

He seemed delighted. “Have you been thinking of the conversation we had last year?” he asked. “I've thought about it a lot.”

“What conversation?”

“Don't you remember?” he asked. “At the dinner last year. About women having adventures. You didn't seem to think they could.”

“No,” she said. “I'm sorry. I don't remember.”

He didn't press it, but she became annoyed with him anyway. Imagine him thinking that a conversation with him was responsible for her going to journalism school. And now that she was looking at him she realized that he was going bald, that his bald spot had widened quite a bit since she'd seen him last. Still, when he asked for her phone number at the end of the evening she gave it to him. What the hell.