The shallow flight of stairs led to a street paved in stone. Where had the builders found stone among these interminable prairies? And yet stone it was, glistening in the fall of light rain, still polished after buried centuries. The stone was interrupted at intervals by curbs and pediments surrounding open spaces in the pave.
“There were trees here.” Brother Mainoa gestured upward. They looked up, feeling the shadow of moving branches, hearing the rustle of leaves. Marjorie’s eyes widened. There were no trees. Only the empty plots. And yet she had seen, heard the sounds of foliage, the movement of leaves…
“What kind?” she asked. “Of trees, what kind?” The young, skinny brother answered, eagerly telling her what Mainoa had told him. “A tree found only in the swamp forest, ma’am. Some of the wood was still here when the town was uncovered. Preserved, it was. They examined the remains, and they weren’t a kind of tree that grows out here. A fruit tree, they think it was.”
Fronting on the narrow street were carved housefronts and wooden doors, the doors carved, so Brother Mainoa instructed them, with scenes of religious life among the Arbai.
“Religious?” Father Sandoval asked. He was too well schooled to sneer, but his doubt was manifest—Brother Mainoa shrugged. They were scenes definitely mysterious, possibly mystical. What were they doing in those carvings? How could one be sure? What meant these figures offering tiny boxes or cubes to one another, these figures in procession? What meant these kneeling creatures, seeming to watch a grass peeper with expressions of awe upon their faces? The unknown artist had carved the peeper as though it was almost spherical and bracketed it with two hounds, noses pointed upward, surrounding the design with vines and leaves as all the designs were surrounded with vines and leaves. Personally, Brother Mainoa thought the carvings were religious. He smiled at Father Sandoval, daring him to disagree.
Father Sandoval smiled in return, keeping his opinion to himself. Father James looked from face to face, fretfully.
On another door two Hippae were back to back, kicking clods of earth at one another. Or perhaps at the strange structure between them. Was it a sculpture? Or a machine? Beside them the Arbai stood, solemnly watching. What did it mean? And how could one tell what details might have been lost when the doors were broken?
For they were broken. Splintered. Fragmented and crushed inward upon their hinges. Inside the excavated rooms—simple rooms, floored in the same stone as the streets, walled with what Brother Mainoa said was polymerized earth, with wide windows which had once looked out onto the prairies—inside those rooms were bones, hides, scales, mummified forms of people who had lived here once. Arbai. Near enough human-shaped to evoke human responses when humans saw their agony.
There were mouths open as though screaming. Empty eye sockets gazing upon horror. Here an arm and there the body, the remaining three-fingered, double-thumbed hand reaching toward the detached limb as though to reclaim it, possess it, at least to die whole—a denial of whatever horrible thing was happening.
Young ones, or at least small ones, torn in half, with adults clutching what remained to their breasts. Elsewhere, time had disintegrated the bodies and there were only piles of bones and piles of the glossy scales which had covered their hides. Everywhere the same, down every street, in every house.
Marjorie shut her eyes, hearing voices the next street over. A slippery language, full of sibilants, but punctuated with very human-sounding laughter.
“Are there other friars here?” she asked. “Digging? Working?”
“None today.” Brother Mainoa smiled, regarding her curiously. “What you hear is what you hear? The sounds of this city, perhaps? Or is it only the wind? How many times I have asked myself that question. ‘Mainoa,’ I say. ‘Is it only the wind?’ Or is it the sound of these people, Lady Westriding?” So he had already known her name.
Tony said, “I get the feeling that this place is … well, intentionally strange. For this world, I mean.”
Brother Mainoa gave him an approving look. “So I have felt, young sir. Intentionally made, by these poor creatures, a little like their own home place, perhaps?”