Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

enough.’
    ‘No wonder Jeanna said the place was haunted.’
    ‘She said that, did she now?’ Druin pondered.
‘I’ll have another chat with yon lassie sometime.
Anyway. Let’s go on. Keep the voice down a bit
though.’
    Neither of us had spoken loudly at all, but theslightest sound
seemed magnified by the tunnel’s acoustics. We turned again
and walked on, the pool of light from Drum’s torch enabling
us to avoid the stones on the floor, and almost to ignore the
apparitions they cast. Almost – for the still faces of the
men and women depicted in this intangible statuary were caught in
a moment of anguish and alarm, which, as they repeatedly loomed
out of the dark and passed us – or passed through us
– was enough to inspire, in me at least, a creeping
sensation of disquiet. They looked uncannily like the lost souls,
the damned of the Christian and Mohammadan superstitions, and it
would have taken a stouter faith in Reason than mine to have
walked that dark path unshaken. Irrational as it may be, I drew
some comfort from the fact – known to any child old enough
not to be frightened by the ‘ghost tent’ at a fair
-that hollows have no existence outside the light, and that,
therefore, there was not an unseen crowd of them in the darkness
behind us.
    Presently we passed beyond their eerie company, and closer to
the source of light at the end of the tunnel (an expression whose
full force I for the first time appreciated). The air smelt
damper, and at the same time fresher. We had reached the foot of
the slope; the rocky floor of the tunnel here was flat. Druin
switched off his torch and we proceeded very slowly and silently
for the remaining few metres. The reason for the light’s
vagueness turned out to be a sharp bend in the tunnel; we crept
around it, keeping close to the outer side of the crook, rifles
gripped (though not, I recalled at that very moment, loaded).
    I nudged Druin and, taking a shell from my pocket, made to put
it in the rifle. He shook his head, firmly, and I desisted,
reassuring myself withthe reflection that the pistols on our
belts were ready for immediate use. We rounded the bend and found
ourselves looking out at a brightly lit space of great size
– at least twenty metres across, I guessed, and ten high.
The lighting came from overhead panels, and seemed like sunlight.
The walls curved over to the ceiling, all stone; a cavern then,
and not a natural one. Its full length was not obvious from where
we stood, at one corner of it.
    It contained row upon row of stone troughs, connected with
stepped open pipes through which rivulets of water trickled; some
arranged to feed the troughs, others to carry away waste –
or so I guessed, from the fact that no channel that came out of a
trough went into another. I could make out half a dozen people
working there, moving from trough to trough, making undetectable
adjustments to the flow or sifting some powdery material in. They
looked like hydroponic gardeners, and I thought at first glance
that they were following this familiar trade, possibly for some
recondite component of the tinkers’ food-supply. Then I
noticed the contents of the troughs farther to my right, and
– as I quickly realised – of more mature growth. They
were growing seer-stones – I could distinctly see the
larger ones lined up, five to a trough.
    ‘Well, well,’ said Druin, as though thinking, as I
was: so that’s how it’s done! He slung his
rifle on his shoulder, glanced at me and shrugged.
    ‘No point in creeping about now,’ he said.
    With that he marched boldly out into the light.

 
10
Forget Babylon
     
     
    They made their way back from the ossuary, ducking under
arches and through hammered holes in the walls, into the church.
Beneath pocked, defaced Orthodox murals a Turkish woman sold
silver and jade and crochet. They ignored her gestured pitch,
stepped outside, stalked past more stalls. Across the hollow from
the hilltop where the church stood, a hillside of streets of
empty, roofless stone houses fought the slow green entropy of
birch and bramble. The light was blinding, the heat choking, the
silence intense. The cicadas broke it, the birds, the skitter of
a lizard.
    Jason wandered around to the front of the church, traced a
date in coloured pebbles on the paving.
    ‘1912,’ he said. That’s when they finished
it. How proud of it they must have been. Ten years later, they