She knew the word for tree. It stood over her, with one branch reaching across the water and another broken short against the sky. She knew that the small hard things among its leaves were fruit. She had never seen either before.
All around her, people drew breath.
Some sat up. One rolled onto his side and coughed. A woman with silver in her hair began to laugh, stopped to listen to herself, and laughed again.
The young woman beneath the tree lay still a little longer. Her body was full of instructions. Her chest rose, her eyelids closed when the light hurt them, her fingers caught the branch she reached for. But when she tried to remember reaching before, there was nothing. No darkness, no journey, no place from which she had come. The attempt stopped at a smooth edge.
She was lying in a shallow hollow lined with grey cloth. Beyond its rim grew grass, flattened in an oval around her body. Similar hollows lay scattered beneath the tree and down the island's gentle slope. People were climbing out of them, pulling on the loose grey garments which had been folded against their sides.
She put hers on. Her hands knew how to find the armholes.
A man nearby stood too quickly and went over backwards into the grass. He lay looking at the sky, then raised one hand with its fingers spread.
“That,” he said, “was farther than I expected.”
She went to help him. His palm was warm.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Just there.” He pointed at the hollow.
“Before.”
His smile went away. He sat up carefully this time.
By the time they had all asked one another, the sun stood clear of the eastern ridge. Twenty-nine people occupied the island. They counted twice, because nobody had done it before. There were tall people and short people, pale faces and dark faces, tightly curled hair, hair straight and black, a broad-shouldered man whose beard came in white at the chin. All wore grey. All knew how to speak. None could remember hearing a voice before that morning.
Their names came when they were asked for them. Nothing followed the names.
She was Neral. The man who had fallen was Orr. The silver-haired woman was Sivven, and she had counted them.
The island was small enough that they could hear one another from opposite shores. A narrow fringe of reeds grew on its southern side. Everywhere else, grass and bare stone met water so still that the tree appeared to stand upon its own branches.
Beyond the lake rose green slopes, long valleys opening between them, and mountains with pale snow caught beneath their summits. Neral could see a bird going from one end of the world to the other. It took a long time to reach the nearest ridge.
“Someone else will be here,” Orr said.
“Where?”
He turned slowly, searching the hills. “I don't know.”
Neral walked to the water. She crouched to look at her face. A dark crescent marked the skin beneath her left eye. She leaned closer to see its edge and found something below her reflection.
At first she thought the lake had another shore below its surface. A long pale line ran out from the island, crossed by darker lines at regular intervals. Farther down stood two upright forms, with an opening between them large enough to swallow the tree. Behind those, blue with depth, rose a succession of enormous terraces.
She put a finger in the water. Her face broke into widening rings. The terraces remained.
Orr knelt beside her. He dropped a pebble and watched it fall past the pale line, smaller and smaller, until it settled somewhere they could not see.
“Who did that?” he asked.
He meant the structures. Neral understood him perfectly, although his question had come out in a frightened whisper.
They followed the pale line around the island. On the northern side it rose beneath the water until Neral could touch it with her foot. It was the top of a wall, broad enough to walk along, running towards the nearest shore. Below its outer edge, steps descended into the clear blue. Each step was higher than her waist.
They crossed in single file, the lake first at their knees, then their ankles. Some carried the loose linings of their hollows folded over their arms. The last person took Sivven's hand to climb onto dry land. Behind them, ripples travelled out across the drowned avenue.
No one on the island had made it. No one could remember making anything.
The path began on the shore.
Grass had grown over much of it, but here and there the same pale stone showed through. It curved between low bushes, climbed a hill, vanished behind a spur of rock, and appeared again far above them. Neral looked for footprints in a patch of soft earth. Their own were the only ones.
They found fruit in the bushes. They found cold shade under an overhang, and a shell with a hole through it. Orr held the shell to his eye until Sivven asked whether he could see more that way.
“Less,” he admitted.
Their voices travelled strangely in the open country. Sometimes they all spoke at once. Sometimes a silence fell, and every one of them turned at the scrape of a foot.
By midday they had reached the first difficult stretch. The path ended against a steep face of rock. Above it, six hollows surrounded a shallow depression, then another six, then another. They climbed diagonally towards a ledge.
Orr put his feet in the lowest two and stretched for the next.
“Too far.”
Neral stood back. Some of the hollows faced sideways. Others opened downwards, where a foot would have fallen out of them.
“They aren't steps.”
“Then what are they?”
She could not answer. They went around, pushing through bushes and helping one another up a short, muddy slope. From the ledge they could see that the hollows continued all the way to the ridge. They had been cut to a pattern. Whatever had used them must have been able to hold on in several places at once.
The first monument stood against the sky.
It had looked like a crooked pillar from the lake. Up close it was a figure, worn so deeply that only one side remained legible. A broad body hung among six jointed limbs. The ends of the limbs opened into clusters of digits. Its small head was tucked between two high plates which swept backwards over its body.
One of its hands rested on a square block. Rain had collected in the hand's central hollow. Neral set her own hand beside it. Hers would have fitted between two of its fingers.
There were others along the ridge. One had fallen and broken, its stone face turned up among the roots of a bush. Another held something round against its body. A small version of the same many-limbed form clung to the round thing's edge.
Orr walked around that one twice.
“Could people have made these?”
“We could make a shape that wasn't us,” said Sivven.
“Then they could have been like us.”
Neral looked down the cliff. Six hollows, six more, six again, fitted the reach of the stone creature's limbs.
“They used the path.”
Orr followed her gaze. He was quiet after that.
The route over the mountain was worse. It rose beyond the last monument in a great sweep of sheer stone, with the familiar six-part clusters set widely apart. A low shelf ran beneath an overhang at its base, disappearing under a curtain of trailing stems. Neral crouched on it. There were little dents beneath the growth, filled with soil; above her, the deep six-part holds climbed out of reach. Even Orr did not try them. He threw a stone upwards. It struck far short of the first useful handhold and came rattling down.
They made their resting place in a hollow below the ridge. A few people explored towards the next valley. Others went back for more fruit. Someone discovered that the grey cloth from the island could be pulled apart into long, strong strips. Neral sat beside the fallen figure and picked soil from a crease in its hand.
The roots around it were thicker than her arms. A dead root passed through a split in the wrist; a younger one had grown through that root's rotted centre. Under both, the stone had weathered smooth.
She had no memory of yesterday, but there had been enough yesterdays for this.
Towards evening the mountains darkened. Light gathered along the undersides of the clouds until the whole western sky seemed to be opening over a fire. People stopped what they were doing. Orr came to sit beside her.
“Look,” he said, too late. Everyone was looking.
The sun reached a notch in the distant ridge. A bright line flashed across the hand Neral was cleaning.
It came from the standing monument above them. There was an opening through its square block. Along the opening's upper edge, a narrow polished facet shone clear of the dirt. A chain of pale reflections ran down the cliff towards a dark cleft close to the lake.
Neral stood. The bright marks were showing a second path.
She could see three turns before the cliff hid the rest.
“Tomorrow,” Sivven said.
Orr had already taken a step towards it. He looked at the descending sun, then at the distance below them, and stepped back.
That night, Neral woke at every unfamiliar sound. They were all unfamiliar. Once she heard someone whispering the twenty-nine names, trying to keep them.
In the morning, six of them helped Neral and Orr down the first part of the cliff. Where the holds stretched beyond a human reach, they used the cloth strips. Where the old route passed around an overhang, they found a narrow shelf below it and shuffled along with their backs against the rock.
They had agreed that two would go into the passage. The others would wait above until afternoon, then return to the ridge. Sivven made Orr repeat that part.
“I heard you.”
“You were looking over the edge.”
“I can do both.”
“Repeat it.”
He did.
The entrance lay well above the lake. Inside, the passage descended in a long curve. Daylight followed them through a series of slanting shafts, changing from white to green as they went lower. Water trembled somewhere overhead. Eventually Neral looked up through a broad, cloudy pane and saw fish passing across the sky.
She stopped so abruptly that Orr bumped into her.
They were under the lake.
Beyond the pane lay the avenue they had seen from the island. Its enormous steps went down between buildings with open arches high in their walls. Roofs had fallen in. Long plants drifted through the empty rooms. A tree trunk, silver and stripped of branches, lay against a tower.
The passage continued into a building whose lower chambers remained dry. Here the holds ran across walls and around doorways. Broad resting surfaces projected at different heights. Some had been polished into shallow curves by bodies settling on them again and again.
Nothing was at the right height. Nothing offered a place for two feet and two hands.
Orr climbed onto a low shelf. He had to haul the rest of himself up after his shoulders. Above him a smaller shelf projected from the wall, with six shallow depressions surrounding its centre. A little object lay in one of them.
He brought it down.
It was a ring of dark metal, with six flexible spokes joined to a bright bead. When he turned it, the bead ran around the ring. Neral took one spoke, Orr another. The bead darted between them and made a clear, ridiculous chirping sound.
Both of them startled. Orr let go.
The bead stopped.
He looked at the shelf again. There were more little objects on it, within easy reach of something much smaller than the figures outside.
Neral turned the ring once more, gently.
They left it where they had found it.
Farther in, the walls changed. The great climbing holds continued overhead, but below them stood rows of narrow platforms. Twenty-nine, arranged around a central shaft.
Each platform had a shallow hollow, rounded at one end, widening below it, then narrowing to two long channels.
Orr lay down in one before Neral could stop him.
His head fitted the round end. His shoulders settled into the wider space. His legs filled the channels.
He sat up at once.
The grey lining had come away from the platform with him. It was the same cloth as his garment.
For a while neither spoke.
Near the foot of each hollow stood a cluster of delicate tubes. Most had broken. One remained attached to a soft cap, with branching threads inside it, and Neral found herself touching the back of her head. There was a little ridge beneath her hair, no longer than the tip of her finger.
Orr had one too.
“Beds,” he said.
“Perhaps.”
“What else would fit like that?”
Neral looked at the tubes.
Orr got off the platform.
At the room's centre they found a model of the lake. Buildings rose around an open basin. Where their island should have been stood a low, round roof. Twenty-nine shapes lay beneath it in a circle. A narrow shaft joined the roof to the room in which they stood.
The real shaft above them was closed. Roots had found their way through its upper seams; several had been pulled apart, showing wet white ends.
Neral imagined the hollow she had woken in travelling upwards through the dark. She could not make that imagined journey turn into a memory.
“They put us here,” Orr said.
She looked at the great climbing holds above the beds. “Or they found us.”
“What would they want with us?”
She had no answer for that either.
Beside the model lay several short cylinders in a fitted rack. Some had cracked. One remained whole, translucent, wound through with lines finer than hair. Neral lifted it carefully. Six grooves circled its base.
In the weak green light, something seemed to move inside it. She held it up to a shaft of daylight. Fragments crossed her palm: part of a limb, a black curve, a scatter of white. She turned the cylinder. They slid across one another, all their separate pieces superimposed.
“Broken?” Orr asked.
On the model, at the edge of the basin, stood a little version of the ridge monument. Its square block held a socket surrounded by six channels.
Neral set the cylinder beside it. The shapes matched.
“I think it needs the thing above.”
They wrapped it in a strip of grey cloth. Orr carried it against his chest on the way out. At the difficult places he passed it up to Neral, and she passed it back when his feet were secure.
Their companions were still on the ledge when they emerged.
Sivven had come down to wait with them. Her face changed at the sight of the bundle.
“What is it?”
“Something we can't see yet,” Neral said.
They told the others about the rooms, the ring that chirped, the narrow hollows beneath the island. People asked them to describe the hollows again. Several touched the small ridges beneath their hair.
The man with the white beard wanted to know whether anyone had been in the city.
“No one we saw.”
“Could they still be there?”
Neral looked at the figures along the ridge. For the first time she wished she had looked behind more doors.
They brought the cylinder to the standing monument. Orr climbed onto its square block and cleared the earth from the socket. Beneath the dirt was a ring of dark metal. The cylinder fitted it.
Nothing happened.
“It fits,” Orr said, defending it.
Sivven looked through the opening towards the western mountains. “It isn't evening.”
Waiting was harder than the climb. Neral went back to the mountain route, then returned. She ate without tasting much. Clouds gathered beyond the peaks and she watched their edges, afraid that the light would fail them.
At last the sun came beneath the clouds.
Gold spread over the slopes. The aperture in the stone brightened, and the cylinder inside it began to turn. Neral heard a series of small, dry clicks.
A red limb reached across the valley.
People cried out and stumbled backwards. Orr dropped from the block. The limb passed through a standing figure and disappeared. Another appeared beside it, then a broad body, then the small head sheltered beneath a fan of golden plates.
The creature stood upon the opposite slope, taller than the trees.
It moved one of its lower hands, shifting its weight. Two other hands held a smooth slab on which a smaller creature lay kicking all six limbs. Another small one clambered onto the adult's back, caught a plate, slipped, and was caught without the adult turning its head.
Sivven gave a short, startled laugh.
The little creature on the slab was holding a ring. A bright bead ran around its edge.
Neral felt the sound of it again in her fingers.
The scene changed. Light ran over the grass in broad, broken sheets. The great avenue appeared dry beneath a sky streaked with unfamiliar pale bands. Hundreds of the six-limbed people climbed its terraces. They moved easily along walls which had seemed sheer to Neral. They carried folded materials, bowls, young ones. One stopped above a doorway and bent down to touch another's face.
For a few moments, the lake and the drowned city occupied the same place. The water shone through bodies going about their day.
Then there were fewer of them.
The pictures came in fragments. A hall full of empty resting places. People wearing rigid shells over their small heads. One reached for a climbing hold, but its fingers slid open again. Another came down the wall to brace its body from below. A tree with bare black branches. Rows of plants beneath glass, tended by figures whose movements grew slower as the images changed.
Something had happened to their world. Neral could see its effects without understanding its cause. She wanted the cylinder to stop, to return to the crowded avenue. It kept turning.
Now a room appeared which she knew.
The platforms around the central shaft were new. Their surfaces gleamed. A six-handed figure lowered a vessel towards one hollow. Inside the vessel floated a small curved body, pale against its red hands.
The body had two arms. Two legs.
Orr made a sound beside her.
Another image: the body larger, still curled, its closed face turning slowly in clear fluid. Fine threads branched around its head. On a surface above it, pictures succeeded one another. A tree. A stone. A hand. Marks beneath each, which Neral found she could read.
Then a fully grown woman lay in the hollow, eyes shut. Tubes joined her to the platform. The figure above her drew one enormous finger along her palm, opening the little fingers one by one, examining them with care.
The woman had a dark crescent beneath her left eye.
Neral touched her own face.
She had seen that mark in the lake.
Around her, people began to move closer to the monument. The white-bearded man came until his shoulder touched hers. Nobody tried to speak over the images.
The figures in the room changed. One had a cracked plate, another a white band around its middle. Their great hands fitted tubes, adjusted the narrow platforms, held the sleeping heads. One carried a second towards the door. Later the one with the cracked plate worked alone.
It stopped beside Neral's hollow. Four hands held the platform. A fifth rested over her chest, broad enough to cover her from shoulder to shoulder.
The sixth reached towards something outside the image.
For an instant the creature's small face turned towards them. Neral saw two dark eyes beneath the plates. Then the room was empty.
Only the sleeping humans remained.
The picture held long enough for her to count the hollows.
Twenty-nine.
Above the real lake the clouds burned orange and rose. Wind passed over the ridge, lifting the loose edges of their clothes. Neral looked down at the water. A whole city lay there, under the rippled gold. Its doorways had led into homes. Its high shelves had held toys.
Orr's hand found hers. He gripped it hard, watching the empty room.
The sun went into the ridge. The image of the room thinned, its platforms filled with distant grass, and it was gone.
The cylinder clicked once and stopped.
They stood together in the afterlight. Far below, a bird skimmed the lake, cutting a line across the last bright water.
Neral let go of Orr's hand and put her own against the stone hand beside her. Her fingers fitted between two of its fingers.
She looked towards the mountain. The dirt-filled marks beneath the low overhang had seemed like little scars in the stone. She had been looking upwards, measuring the enormous reach they could never make. The little dents had been much closer together than the old holds.
“They made the beds to fit us,” she said. She pointed to the low overhang. “What if there's a path for us under there?”
“We can look,” Sivven said.
They stayed until the first stars appeared. Before they went down to their resting place, Orr lifted the cylinder from its socket and wrapped it again in the grey cloth. When Neral woke in the night, he was asleep with the bundle held in the crook of one arm.
In the morning they went to the mountain.
Orr carried the cylinder back to the monument before they left. He put it in its socket and stayed there a moment, his hand resting on the stone. The rest waited for him.
At the cliff, Neral knelt beneath the overhang. Sivven held her by the waist while she leaned out and pushed aside a curtain of trailing stems.
Her fingers found a hollow.
She cleared the soil from it. It was worn by weather, a little rough along one edge, and just large enough for her hand. No ring of six surrounded it.
The next lay within easy reach.
She set her foot, lifted herself onto the low shelf, and turned beneath the great climbing holds. Her heart began to beat harder. The lake opened below her. For a moment she could see the island, its single tree, the small pale hollows among the grass.
Around the turn, the shelf widened. An opening broke the rock behind a tangle of leaves. Light showed through at the far end. She stepped inside and pushed her way forward until the leaves parted against her face.
On the other side, the mountain fell away into green country.
A valley opened, then another beyond it, vast slopes blue with distance. Snow shone above the clouds. Down on a far ridge stood a line of crooked stone figures, so small from here that she would once have mistaken them for broken rock.
Sivven came through behind her, then Orr. One by one, the others emerged into the morning. The man with the white beard stood with both hands on his head, looking out.
After a while he turned to look back through the passage.
“We'll be able to go back?”
“Yes,” Neral said.
“I keep thinking of the doors.”
“So do I.”
The path descended from the passage. Grass grew across its centre. Where it met a steep patch of rock, the great six-part clusters continued upwards, and beneath them, close together, ran the smaller holds.
Neral waited until all twenty-nine had crossed. Behind them the lake lay hidden by the mountain, but she could still feel its shape: the island above the sleeping chambers, the empty homes, the little ring left on its shelf.
Orr went ahead a few paces. He turned to see whether she was coming.
She followed him. Before them the ancient path curved out of sight, keeping, wherever the rock rose steeply, the measure of a human hand.