Academic Exercises Read online

  And whether or not it’s Essecuivo, unless we find some food and somewhere to shelter, we’re going to die. If we go plunging into the forest, instead of digging for turtles’ eggs or whatever the hell it is people do, we’ll lose our little snippet of time, and we’ll starve.

  If I explain, perhaps he’ll listen.

  If—)

  We followed the road. To be fair, there was a distinct line through the undergrowth and rubbish; a straight line, of the sort that rarely occurs in nature. And that man had found worked stone. It could once have been a road, at that.

  Three hundred yards or so on, the straight line vanished into the trees. The duke had a compass, a beautifully dainty little thing in a silver gilt case, that hung around his neck on a blue silk cord. Eano, according to Aeneas, was thirty-two miles due north of Aos. I salved my conscience by telling myself that we were more likely to find edible animals and birds in the woods than on the beach. I had no basis for such an assertion. I’m not a true scholar.

  I’m in no mood to tell you about that walk in the woods. On the first day, someone took a shot at something that could have been some kind of pig. He missed. The noise put up about a million small black birds, which flew off screaming. After that, the only living thing in the woods was us.

  We spent the night in a bramble thicket. We chose it as a camp ground because it was too dense to hack a way through with what little energy we had left. I fell asleep as soon as my back hit its unsatisfactory mattress of crushed brambles, and didn’t wake up till somebody kicked me. I’d have let them leave me there, because I ached so much I’d rather have died than try to move, but they wouldn’t allow it. Tempers were getting short, and fools weren’t being suffered gladly. I did as I was told.

  It’s usually cooler inside woods than outside them; in which case, I shudder to think what the temperature must’ve been outside, if there was an outside—for all I know, the forest covered the entire country. In any event, it was savagely hot, and we hadn’t brought any water, for the excellent reason that we didn’t have anything to carry it in. Around mid-afternoon we stumbled across, nearly fell into a river, of sorts. The duke immediately claimed it was the Aloura. I agreed. I was past caring.

  That night was bitter cold. We lit fires, which didn’t really do anything. In the morning, about twenty of the men had fevers, stomach cramps, various symptoms. There was no food. We told the sick men we’d come back for them. By nightfall, another thirty-odd were reporting the same symptoms; we left them, too. A part of me, the part that wasn’t triple-checking my body temperature every minute or so for the slightest sign of incipient fever, was doing mental arithmetic; fifty from three hundred leaves two-fifty; the Heron could carry seventy of us, at a pinch, and still get home. By the next evening, we were down to one-eighty and I was still all right. Now (that little part of me said) if only the duke were to catch this unknown disease and die, we could all—

  The duke took ill on the afternoon of the fourth day. We’d stopped because we’d found a huge spread of flat-topped green fungi, which none of us definitely knew to be poisonous. There was a bit of a free-for-all. I’m not big, strong and assertive. I didn’t get any. Some people have all the luck.

  Over half the fungus-poisoning victims died during the night. By daylight, none of the survivors could move. They were sweating, twitching, bleeding from the nose. The duke somehow managed to haul himself up against the trunk of a tree, presumably so he wouldn’t die sprawled in the leaf-mould. I sat and watched him for about three hours. His breathing was slow and shallow, but he kept on and on doing it. After that I’d had enough. I got up and stumbled off, crashed around in the holly, brambles and brash until my foot caught in something and I fell over. When I opened my eyes, I found I’d landed on top of a big, fat creamy-white fungus, the sort they call Chicken-in-the-woods. You’re supposed to cook it first. The hell with that.

  By the time I’d finished stuffing my face it was getting dark. I tried to retrace my steps, got completely lost, gave up, looked around for somewhere to sleep and caught sight of a man’s feet sticking out from behind a tree. It turned out I’d been going in circles, or a freak storm had blown me off course, or something like that. Anyway, I was back at the camp. I went to look at the duke.

  Ninety-six men died from eating the poison mushrooms. The duke survived. By the time I got back he was sitting up straight, the map on his knees, though it was already too dark to read. He looked up at me as I trudged towards him and said, “If I’m right, those hills over there are Cata Ano.”

  I stared at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Cata Ano. Where Aeneas changed horses on the post road to Eano. In which case, Eano is twelve miles dead ahead.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “I might head back to the ship.”

  He smiled at me. “What, and miss all the fun? I don’t think so.”

  “I think I’ll go back,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You’ll sail the ship all by yourself back to the Republic,” he said. “What an exceptional fellow you are. And on an empty stomach, too.”

  I didn’t tell him about the Chicken-in-the-woods. I said; “I don’t think Eano’s there any more. If it’s the capital, and it’s only twelve miles away—”

  He raised a hand, and I shut up. “I think I’d like to be proved right before I die,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”

  I thought; he’s going to die, and he’s talked himself into believing, so why not let him die happy? But, if we all turned round and went back, maybe we could catch fish or something. If he said go back, they’d go back, wouldn’t they? “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” And I told him.

  I shall never forget the look on his face. Hard to describe. The nearest I can get is, he didn’t believe me, and he was deeply puzzled at why I should choose to make up such an improbable story. When I eventually ground to a halt, he gazed at me for a while, then looked down at the map. “From Eano,” he said, “we should be able to row down the Pelanaima, assuming we can hire boats, and follow the coast back to Aos. That’ll save us having to walk back the way we came.”

  I shook my head. “You’re forgetting,” I said. “There’s a waterfall at Deudo. Aeneas said it was as high as the steeple of the New Year Temple.”

  “There’ll be a portage,” the duke replied.

  “Aeneas never mentioned one.”

  “There’ll be one by now,” the duke said. “After all, that was three hundred years ago.”

  So I went looking for someone else in authority. That proved to be difficult. The captains and first mates of both the Lion and the Heron were dead; three from mushrooms, one from fever. The helmsman of the Heron was still alive, but delirious and shouting at people who weren’t there. At least that explained why there’d been no mutiny; nobody left to lead it.

  I wandered round the camp, counting heads. By now I was feeling considerably better, thanks to the chicken-fungus. I counted sixty-one, of whom probably fifty-eight would still be alive in the morning. Then I sat down under a tree with my head in my hands and burst into tears. Nobody objected, commented or seemed to notice.

  While I was bawling my eyes out, it occurred to me that there was still one high-ranking officer still alive; me. I was, after all, the Gorgias professor of humanities at the Studium, which made me an ex officio member of the Lower Conclave and standing delegate to the College of Deacons. I wasn’t sure if my jurisdiction extended to the ends of the earth, however. Also, I didn’t want to be a leader. It’s bad enough dying; dying when it’s your fault must be so much worse.

  Twice during the night I got up, with the intention of walking away, back down the trail we’d blundered through the forest. I didn’t, of course. Too scared. It had all happened so fast—the deaths, the disaster, the sudden falling-apart of everything. I tried to put my finger on the moment when we’d lurched from in control to doomed, but I c
ouldn’t. The obvious truth, which I found I couldn’t hide from no matter what I did, was that by this point there really wasn’t anything I or anyone else could do. There was definitely no hope if I went back. We’d come too far. If we went on—well, who knows? We might just stumble to the edge of the forest, or meet with friendly savages, or kill a very large, stupid, slow-moving, half-witted animal.

  In the morning, nobody was in any hurry to move on, not even the duke. We spent a while looking at the dead—we didn’t have the energy or the tools to bury them, so we left them where they lay, but we looked at them, as being the only sign of respect we could still afford. Gradually, in twos and threes, we hauled ourselves to our feet, hesitated; then, without orders or words of command, we silently turned to face due north and began picking our way.

  I don’t know how long we’d been going—the canopy was high and dense, so we rarely saw the sun—when the man next to me, I never did find out his name, grabbed my shoulder and pointed. He wasn’t the only one to have noticed. On the skyline, in a fortuitous gap between the trees, was a human outline, standing straight and perfectly still.

  Someone yelled out; we all joined in. The human outline didn’t move. We surged forward, howling, pleading. Actually, I’d sort of figured it out before anyone got close enough to see. Accordingly, I slowed down and walked while the others broke into a run.

  Aeneas had liked most things he saw in Essecuivo, but he was mildly scathing about their works of art. Their paintings, he said, were simplistic and garishly-coloured, and their sculptures were stiff and unnaturalistic. But, he added, you can’t help but be impressed by the sheer size of some of them. There was one, he said, a mile outside Eano on the main road to Aos, an advancing draped female in basalt, that had to be fifteen feet high—

  Well, it was too badly weathered and worn to be sure what it was supposed to be, other than a human being, walking forward. We gathered under it, staring up. There was no face. But on the pedestal—too low to catch the wind and sheltered from the rain—was an inscription, in an alphabet I’d never seen before.

  The duke crouched down to peer at it, then got up slowly and painfully. “Nearly there,” he said.

  History demands absolutes. History would like to say that, at three minutes past the tenth hour of the seventeenth day of the sixth month, twelve hundred and seventy-one years after the foundation of the Republic, the duke entered Eano by the west gate. History, of course, is written by people like me.

  As a historian, however, I’m at an overwhelming disadvantage. I was there. Accordingly, if I want to cling on to the few tattered scraps of intellectual honesty I have left, I’m forced to say, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what time it was, because the forest canopy was so high and dense I couldn’t see the sun. I can guess at the date, but I suspect I’ve lost a day somewhere in my recollections; other survivors I’ve talked to remember another day before we reached the statue, which I have no memory of whatsoever. I can be reasonably sure of the year (but bear in mind Suavonius’ recent and highly persuasive paper arguing that the Republic wasn’t founded in Year One, but two years earlier). As to where we made our entrance, who knows? We walked between what looked like two ivy-smothered dead trees, which turned out to be the broken stubs of stone columns. The duke reckoned they were the remains of a gate, but for all I know they were the back door of a very large tannery. And as for the name of that city; well, ask someone else. Thanks to my lifetime of exhaustive study, I’m the least qualified man in the world to offer an opinion.

  We spent the rest of that day and most of the next wandering round in a sort of daze, like country people on their first trip to town. We tripped over the fallen remains of walls, fell into gutters, cisterns, fountains and what may just possibly have been Aeneas’ great central open-air bath (but it was filled with a tangle of vines, briars and creepers, so there was no way of knowing how deep it once was). At one point, we definitely walked across the flat roof of a large building. My guess is that something like twelve feet of leaf-mould had built up over what used to be ground level, so we were at least two storeys high; in which case, we most likely marched straight over the suburbs without knowing they were there. We found about two dozen inscriptions in the same unknown script; the duke was desperate to copy them down, but nobody had a pen or a pencil; someone tried lighting a fire and charring the end of a stick, but it didn’t work.

  I forget the name of the man who found the window. He was one of the soldiers, a short, cheerful man with the unusual ability to sleep standing up; I’d exchanged a few words with him from time to time, until his optimism got on my nerves. He was poking about in the undergrowth when he came up against what looked like a huge anthill, except that under all the forest-floor garbage there was stone. He poked some more, and was mildly shocked when his questing boot shattered a pane of glass. The noise brought the rest of us, and we crowded round; there was just a chance, after all, that a relatively intact building might have been used as a food store by people coming this way.

  The window proved to be big and round, and when we looked inside, there was just enough light to see that what we’d stumbled across was a rose window in a tower. Someone found a stone and pitched it through. We listened for the sound of it hitting the floor, but there was nothing. Then, just as we’d given up, we heard a faint, distant plink. The soldier stuck his head through as far as it would go, then wriggled back out in a hurry. The stink, he explained, was unbearable. What was down there? No idea. But the window was a very, very long way off the ground, and it was a sheer drop all the way down. If we had a lot of strong rope—But we didn’t, and even if we had, we’d have lacked the strength to hold a man’s weight, all of us put together.

  How much of the city we explored I really couldn’t say, because mid-afternoon on the second day we made a discovery that put everything else out of our minds, and accounts for me being here to tell you this story.

  It was just as well we had a couple of farm boys with us. They recognised the yellowy-green turd-shaped things dangling from the trees as plantains; a cheap, low-grade animal fodder that we import by the flyboat-load from Scheria. You can eat plantains.

  Later, we decided that they must have been the fifth-or sixth-generation descendants of a grove of ornamental plantains (the tree’s quite nice to look at, apparently) planted to decorate some public space or building. Mercifully, they’d bred more or less true, which most cultivated fruits don’t. What we ate was unripe and decidedly bitter, but somehow or other we rose above that and gorged ourselves till we could barely stand. Then, having learned at least a small part of our lesson in comissariat management, we crammed every pocket and aperture in our clothing with plantains, strung bunches of plantains together on creepers and slung them over our backs. There were still a few desolate survivors hanging from the trees when we left, but only because they were too high to reach.

  Next morning, after we’d slept off the effects of the plantain orgy, we got up and started walking back the way we’d come. Nobody gave an order or made a decision; nobody objected. The feeling was a bit like a theatre at the end of a rather boring play; everybody stands up and slowly files out, not saying much. I’d expected the duke to make a scene; I imagined he’d want to stay and carry on exploring. Maybe he had more sense than I credit him for; if he’d tried to stop us from going back at that point, I don’t imagine he’d have lived very long. I don’t think so, though. I believe that he found still being alive after his apotheosis moment of entering the lost city came as such an anticlimax that he simply gave up and couldn’t be bothered any more. True, the next day he was showing signs of coming back to life. He put himself at the head of our pathetic little column and made a point of leading (which meant we got lost twice). He went round asking everybody who they were, an unfortunate thing to do in the circumstances, since it emerged that of the fifty-four of us still alive, only seven were sailors; and later, two of them died of a resurgence of the unknown fever, along with three others. T
hat only seemed to energise the poor fellow. He started making plans for the five remaining sailors to train the rest of us in the maritime arts, so we’d be able to sail the Heron back home. Nobody paid him much attention.

  We still had masses of plantains left over when we emerged from the forest into the light, to find ourselves on a shingle beach we’d never seen before. We weren’t unduly upset about that. Getting out from under those horrible trees more than made up for being somewhat lost. We spent a night on the beach in more or less total silence; then, at dawn, the duke pointed left up the beach and said, Follow me. We didn’t move. He said it again. We stayed put. Then he shrugged and walked right, down the beach, and we followed. We reached the bay a couple of hours later.

  For some reason, I’d spent most of the walk back through the forest trying to prepare myself in advance for the shock of finding that the ship wasn’t there any more; that something had happened, it’d sunk or been burnt or carried off by passing buccaneers. Nice, just for once, to be wrong; because as we rounded a headland and saw the bay, there was the Heron, drawn up on the beach, exactly where we’d left it. More remarkable still, it wasn’t alone.

  The crew of the Squirrel had had, they told us, a pretty miserable time. The storm that sank the Whelp and the Attempt and effectively did for the Lion had blown them past rather than into the bay, and shoved them into the path of a strong current that swept them two days’ sail down the coast. They’d lost their masts, so there wasn’t much they could do, until the current eventually petered out, leaving them stuck on a sand bar. The next tide floated them free, and they’d sent the longboat ashore to cut two tall trees to make into new masts. No sooner had these been shaped and fitted than another sudden wind picked them up and threw them back out to sea. They weathered the storm, just about, and slowly picked their way back to shore, only to find the Heron beached and deserted, and no sign of life to be seen anywhere. They spent the next day fishing, being fortunate enough to hit a monster shoal of a sort of dark blue sardine; and then we showed up, looking like death; and where the hell was everybody else?