Four Hundred Years in the Sky - Aaron Redfern (good books to read for 12 year olds TXT) 📗

and in that time he did defeat the Tammaphites led by Mag Rul Bog upon the field of battle, and drove them from the land.

He came upon his wife as she lay with another man, and he cast her into the earth...

There he found men of learning, and they showed him the way to bring fruit from the soil, and how to defeat his enemies with sling and sword. And so it was…

And so it was…

And so it was…

A book was in his hand. His gaze lay on a space where it had been before. He could put it back, and take another.

He let it fall to the floor.

He turned and shuffled away. Tiles and days and years passed underfoot. He was very, very tired.

The Book lay open on his desk, where he had left it.

Thou dwellest now in the Skyreach Temple of Watching…

He read it again. There must be something about the door. It seemed the only important thing now. Surely they must have known.

When he reached the end of it, he flipped a few more pages, knowing nothing was there. And then, on a whim, he flipped a few more. He turned over a hundred pages at a time, flipped a few more, opened again and again to blank paper, exactly as he expected to each time. Then he stopped.

What he saw on the page froze him.

It was written not in the flowing script of the original writer, but in another hand. A Watcher had written it. The one whose place he had taken, or the one before, or the one before him…it might be thousands of years old. For the first time, he had found a sign of someone else who had gone before. This other Watcher had left a message, a communication. There were five words.

What lies behind the door?

The Watcher spun, nearly falling over in his hurry. He lurched four steps and emerged in a white hall covered in ornate bas relief. He went on, half staggering, the closest he could manage to haste. Four more shifts, and he was there.

The wood was old and dark. The silver pull-ring hung still. Silence surrounded it.

The drift-ghosts went by in the shadows, little more than shadows themselves. They whispered without sound, and in their wake came a breeze without motion. He paid them no heed.

The door was there, less than a yard away, inviting and repelling him. There was something behind it. He must know what. He could bear it no more.

He grasped the ring. It was full of life and terror. He tore his arm away, flung himself back until he hit the wall. He heard himself whimper. And he buried his face in his hands, and staggered away.

* * *

There was a cloud of dust. It came from the south.

He had watched her mount at the edge of the gray lands. She had brought the horse through the wastes carefully, lovingly, leading it by the reigns. She had spared most of her food for it, so that it could serve her now. She had barely eaten at all.

She was coming now, as fast as it could take her. She must know that she would ride it to death before she cleared the desert, but something was so important to her that she kept coming. Her clothes were filthy and torn. Tar stained her skin, and she bled from a hundred small cuts. A silver chain hung from her neck, and on the end of it was a ring, flapping against her chest as the air rushed around her. It was a simple band of gold with an emerald set into it.

For some reason, it frightened him.

* * *

The Watcher began to spend his days pacing the tower, floor by floor. He took no shortcuts; he walked every inch of it, from the top to the bottom and back to the top again. There were thirty-one floors, counting the cellar. It took him a full day and some of the night to make the full loop once. The rest of the night he slept. There was no more than that. Each time he went down or up he passed the door, and he went by it quickly, pretending that he could not feel something on the other side drawing him to it.

The Connoisseur let him pass by the first five times without looking up from its work. The sixth time, it stopped halfway up its stepladder, holding a wrapped parcel tied with string, and stared at him with a cocked head, and remarked, “You have been down here a lot lately.”

“Yes,” said the Watcher, reaching the other end of the cellar and pausing to catch his breath. In a moment, he would begin retracing his steps.

“There are sometimes years between your visits,” said the Connoisseur, putting its parcel on a shelf, “but now you come every day.”

“Connoisseur,” the Watcher said, “Have there been many other Watchers?”

The Connoisseur reached the bottom of the ladder and, without hesitation, began to drag it backwards. The feet of the ladder scraped along the floor. “Fifteen. You are the sixteenth.”

“And you have been here all that time?” said the Watcher.

“Oh, yes,” said the Connoisseur. It found the place it wanted to be and climbed the ladder again.

“Do you ever wonder why?” he asked it.

“No,” it said.

“Neither have I,” said the Watcher.

The Connoisseur was peering into a shelf, scanning its contents. The shelves in that room were so deep that its whole body could have disappeared into one of them, if it chose to crawl inside.

“What happened to the others?” the Watcher asked. “The other Watchers.”

“They ceased to be here,” said the Connoisseur, “and were replaced by other Watchers.” It withdrew a flask of sickly, green liquid, stepped down from the ladder, and brought the flask to its work bench. “The ninth Watcher was only here for a few years. He must have been a mistake.”

“But what happened to them?

” said the Watcher.

The Connoisseur, now at its work bench, shrugged without looking.

“Have you seen the rest of the tower, Connoisseur?” the Watcher asked.

“No,” it said.

“It is a grand place,” said the Watcher. “The thing that will come from the south must be terribly important to warrant its presence.” He thought for a moment, and added, “Suppose it came out of the wastelands ten miles to the west? It might appear small, too small to see at that distance. It might pass us by entirely.”

“I suppose,” said the Connoisseur, “that someone else would see it instead.” It poured green liquid from the flask into a small glass tube and stared intently at it for a moment. Then, with a satisfied nod, it poured all the liquid back into the flask, recorked it, and carried it back to the shelf.

The Watcher left.

He wended his way back up toward the top of the tower, slowly zigzagging up through the floors in succession. He picked up where he had left off.

He found himself at the end of the hall on the sixteenth floor, staring at a pattern of bricks inches away. It would take him up to the seventeenth floor. The door would be there.

He turned away. Ten steps away was a hole with a ladder, leading down. He took it, and climbed out onto the twenty-seventh floor. Three more steps, and he stood beside his desk and the Book, facing the south balcony. The spyglass gleamed bronze in the sun.

He could almost see the wastelands through the tiny eyehole from where he stood. His vision was still good. The magic of the tower must preserve his eyes, so that he continued to be useful as a Watcher. He began to hobble out to the balcony.

As a child, his eyes had been so much better than the other boys’. He had seen fish moving under the surface of the river at night. But none of them were allowed to be out at night, and his father had switched him for it. Or had it been one of the other boys who had been switched? And he could not remember what the fish in the dark had looked like.

The Watcher peered through the spyglass. The wastes were there. He knew each gray rock formation that lay in the view of the lens. He had seen more of that place in his dreams, but could see no more through the glass. The tripod legs would not come loose from the stone railing, and the joint where they met the tube of the spyglass did not turn. It was fixed in place.

He draped his palms over the shaft, just inward from the eyepiece, and pushed down. Nothing happened. He pushed again, rocking himself up and down, but not the spyglass. He was far too weak to be hurling himself at immovable objects. But he pressed down again, and leaned all his weight on his palms.

There was a faint creak. The spyglass shifted, it’s glass eye tilting a fraction of an inch upward. The Watcher’s hands slid away, and he lost his balance. The floor of the balcony came to him, and pounded his downturned palms. He fell to it.

For many moments he knelt, letting the pain fade away to dull throbs on his hands and knees and hip. No one would ever know what had just happened, but his dignity suffered. His dignity was something that he still had, something that still belonged to him. He wanted to erase the fall he had just taken. He wanted to go to the Book and declare that the sixteenth Watcher had never been victim to a fall. But that would appear suspicious to later readers, whenever they might come.

He wondered how long he was to be the Watcher. It might be hundreds more years.

He picked himself up unsteadily, and as he did his eye brushed past the eyepiece of the spyglass, and he thought he saw a glimpse of a color that was not gray. He bent back and stared into it.

He saw the tops of what he thought were the same handful of old familiar earthen spires, and just beyond them an apparently insurmountable thorned wall of rock. But farther still, as far as the spyglass could see, there was a band of green.

Something lived out there, past the gray lands. He had never known.

A mad notion took him. He was tired of living in the tower. He wanted to go there, to the band of green. Its beauty and vibrance sung to him. He wished to find that place, and learn what manner of creatures dwelled there.

There might be other lands too, to the north. He imagined himself,