The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,138

it. So I told him I did, but I don’t think I give much sign of it. In fact, the more he told me to be happy, the more miserable I got. He seen it too, and tried to argue me out of it, which given the sorry fix I was in was not like to work.

Then I remembered all the things Monono told me about Tokyo, and I thought at least I could pay him back in his own coin. “I know about one of those wonders that we lost, Senlas,” I said. “Maybe the greatest of them. It’s Tokyo I mean.”

“Tokyo,” Senlas says, kind of running the word over his tongue. “Yes. Yes, I remember it well. Tell it to me, Koli.”

I gun to talk about how Tokyo was when it yet stood. That there was towers all the way up to the sky, and trees that didn’t move unless they was bid to, and signs to point the way because it was such a big village that you would get lost without the signs to guide you.

Senlas smiled wider and wider, and he nodded his head at every word. “Oh yes,” he said. “Oh yes, yes, Koli. I see them towers now, and the trees, and the signs, and the lights, and the people all beautiful like they was angels their own selves. Say the name again.”

“Tokyo,” I says. “On the island of Honshu.”

“Honshu Island. That’s it. I was born there, in one of them Tokyo towers. And every morning when I waked I opened up my window and touched the sun, that was hanging right outside. And the sun drawed heat and light from me and shined down on Honshu Island like honey pouring out of a comb.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I never met nobody besides Monono that knowed about Tokyo. I remembered what Ursala said though, about how Senlas got you thinking he knowed more than he did. I was sure he never said nothing about Tokyo or Honshu until I said it first, yet it was hard for me to keep remembering that. His voice kind of run over me and through me, and other things got pushed away by it.

He talked to me a lot more, and mostly after that I just sit and listened. Then by and by he said he was tired and the hand women should take me back to the seclusion. I guess that was the place behind the grating. “Bless you, Koli,” he said. He set his hands over his eyes, only there was more eyes again on the backs of them. “Bless you for the sacredness that’s in you. I feel it. I feel it strong. Go now. I got to meditate.”

They took me back to where I was before. They had got to carry me pretty much, for my leg was so stiff with being in the one position all that time that I couldn’t make it move at all.

“Is there one of you here that used to be called Jud?” I asked them. They didn’t give me no answer.

Ursala was glad to see me. She asked me what had happened, and I told her. She was insistent that I give her all the details. “The only way we’re going to get away from here,” she said, “is by thinking our way out. The more we know, the better our chances.” So she kept on asking me questions, and I answered her as best I could.

Most of what I told her was about what Senlas said to me, but some of it was about what I seen in the cave. She said she already knowed that the wagon-house was set up on the metal bands. “It’s a train, Koli,” she said, like that ought to settle it. She was a lot more interested in that thing that was like a water tank, that all the shunned men and women dipped their bowls in.

“What was it made of?” she asked me.

Being a woodsmith before I was sent faceless, I knowed this and could tell it better than most would of done. “Wooden staves with strips of metal to hold them together. Kind of like a barrel, only it didn’t have no bilge in the middle and it was a whole lot bigger. I guess it’s where they get their water from.”

“No,” Ursala said, “that’s not it. The whole tunnel is dry as far as I can tell. There’s no water seeping into it