TWO DAYS PASSED BEFORE Gibson was fully conscious again. Old as he was, fugue had taken its toll. Once Valka was certain his condition was stable, I carried him down the cliff path to the old camp, gritting my teeth through the pain in my shoulder all the way. We did not return to Racha—I did not wish to take Gibson too far from the hospital module on the off chance his condition worsened—and instead set up in one of the blocks which once had served as accommodations for the officers.

The old lights still functioned, but it took Ginoh and Imrah the better part of that first day to get the water and sanitary facilities back online with Valka’s help. Gibson muttered the while, slipping in and out of consciousness and dream. Snatches of scholastic English burbled forth, and from time to time he would call out for me, or for his Livy, or for Sister Carina, who had been his caretaker in the archivists’ grotto beneath the Great Library. Once or twice, he even called for my father. This I found most distressing of all. Gibson had been my father’s tutor when Lord Alistair had been a boy, and had counseled him through the Orin Rebellion and the attack on Linon. I did not like remembering that fact. It brought my father and me too close together.

How old he was! I stayed by his side while he recovered and tended him, and studied the familiar face. His skin was like wrinkled parchment, so folded and spotted it was impossible to imagine the young man he once had been. Rebirth had shrunk him, and beneath the heavy coverlets he was a construction of paper skin and wooden bones. For all I had suffered carrying him down from the plateau above, he was not heavy.

“Have you not slept?” His first coherent words in days, the first whose tone suggested awareness of his place or my presence.

I had been sleeping, in fact, or in a state so like sleep it made no difference. Smiling down at him, I said, “I don’t really sleep anymore.”

“Some things never change, I see,” the scholiast said. “Melodramatic as ever.”

“I’ve perhaps earned it by now,” I told him.

Gibson turned his head and peered out the window. I was not sure how much he could see, but we had chosen a room for him that overlooked the water. After a minute’s amiable silence, the old man asked, “What year is it?”

“ISD 17089,” I said shortly.

The scholiast accepted this with a scant inclination of his head. “Nearly five hundred years. May Time, Ever-Fleeting, forgive me . . .” His gaze wandered half-seeing over the rounded square of the window panes. “I never thought I’d live so long. To so remote a time . . . but it worked.” He looked at me and smiled. “I got to see you again.”

“But how?” I asked, leaning toward the old man.

“I assume your friend Siran is dead,” Gibson said, not directly answering.

“Yes,” I said. “Her great-great-granddaughter was watching over you.” Unable to stop myself smiling a little, I said, “They went and turned this island into a proper monument. You should see it.” The old man smiled himself, but old habit asserted itself and he banished the expression, shut his eyes to better take in the pale sunlight falling through the great window.

Eyes still shut, Gibson said, “Her great-great-granddaughter. Earth and Emperor, they live such short lives.”

Unable to help myself, I asked the question burning its hole in my tongue. “How?” I said, stumbling. “How is any of this possible? How did you leave the athenaeum? Where did you get the money for that hospital module?”

Gibson opened gray eyes and turned from the light. He studied me a long while, beetling brows contracted with studious concern. “What happened to you?” he said, seeing me then for the first time, the scars on my face, the white shocks in my hair. “Your face . . .”

“Later,” I said. I could spoil our reunion with talk of Dharan-Tun, of Eue, and the Prophet-made-King. But I would not. “Valka will want to see you, too. She’s here—but come! Please! Tell me how. How did you do all this?”

“It took a measure of doing,” Gibson said at last. “Your friend, Siran, petitioned the college for an archivist. It took her years.”

That didn’t make any sense. “The colleges don’t grant scholiasts to peasant eolderman.”

“They don’t,” Gibson agreed, and tried to sit up. I lurched forward to assist him, adjusted the pillows beneath his head and shoulders. “But they have been known to evoke one of us to document local populations. The Sevrastene—the islanders, that is—the Rachans and so on . . . have a unique local language and culture. Siran and her husband wanted their traditions written down. I convinced the primate to allow me to be the one to do it.” He suppressed another grin. “All my plan, of course. After we had the medica installed and I was sleeping, Siran sent word that I’d . . . passed away.” From the unsteadiness in his tone, I guessed talk of his own demise discomforted my old tutor.

“They didn’t come looking for you?” I asked in disbelief.

“Siran took them an urn—at least I assume she did. No one from Aea ventures this far south. There’s nothing out here but fishermen.”

I shook my head, disbelief still king in me. “But the fugue creches? The medica?”

“I was not always a scholiast, Hadrian.” Gibson smiled sadly, and this time his scholiast’s training did not wipe that sorrow away. “When you left here, I knew . . . I knew you would be coming back one day. Call it a scholiast’s computation, or an old man’s intuition, if you prefer.” He raised his shoulders, hands still beneath the coverlet. “I did not wish to leave you alone.”

My own shoulders shook, and I hunched over in my seat, unable to speak or articulate the wash of feelings that warred and roiled in me. Not able to name them, I could not dismiss them in stoic fashion, but then, for all my education—the aphorisms, the breathing exercises, the antique literature—I have always been a poor stoic.

“Hadrian?” Gibson sat up straighter, reached out with a gnarled hand and gripped my knee. “Dear boy, are you all right?”

I seized that hand with my three-fingered one, an answer in itself. Evil had a piece of me, and always would. Part of me was with Syriani Dorayaica forever. “No,” I said, honestly. I was not sure I would ever be all right again. “No, I’m not.” I did not tell him all then, though I would in the coming days. It was enough that he was there, enough that he was living.

We would spend years on Colchis, most of it in solitude on Thessa: Valka, Gibson, and I. Much of what transpired and what we talked about I shall not here record. They are quiet moments, private moments, moments which belong to us and to memory, not to history and you. Valka and I had each suffered, and such wounds do not ever really heal. Scars are not the flesh that was before the wound was made, and Time—as I have so oft lamented—flows in but one direction.

Years passed, and though the galaxy turned about us, we did not care. Time and again we would return with Imrah and Ginoh to join Alvar and the rest of Siran’s clan on Racha. Often I would go out with the fishermen and help them to collect their catch—leastways so much as my injuries permitted me. Thus I fell in love with Colchis and the sea, just as Siran had done so long ago. Many were the evenings I would sit and listen while Gibson lectured the children of the village, or told them some story of the ancient world, just as he once had entertained me as a boy. Valka would rest her head upon my shoulder whilst he spoke of Simeon the Red and Kasia Soulier, of Alexander and Arthur, and of the God Emperor himself. Many were the days I would spend with Gibson, walking along the paths of Thessa, speaking about what I had endured. He kept me company as I raised cairn after little cairn upon the crown of the island, first for Pallino, then for Elara, for Corvo and Durand, Ilex and Crim, Halford and Koskinen and poor Adric White. I painted their names on the hard plastic of prayer cards, sprayed them to resist the wind and rain. They are there still, there alongside ninety unmarked piles that line the path back down to the beach and our old camp.

One for each of my thousands.

All the while, Gibson would listen—at first with tears in his eyes—as I spoke of our battles, of Nessus and Padmurak, Eue and Dharan-Tun. Many and long were our days, and many, too, were the nights I spent with Valka, and those were more sweet and as healing. As Thessa once had been a place apart from the war and the horror of the universe, so it was again, and though my scars remained, their luster dimmed, and the ugliness of the world was far away.

“How long do you mean to stay here?” Gibson asked, seating himself on the trunk of a fallen tree. “Let me rest a moment.” The wind blew about us, crisp and cool with the threat of winter. We had been on Colchis then for four standard years, and the weather was growing cold at last. The gray sun shone thinly on the upland trees, and beyond the cliff’s edge the sea rolled gray and white-capped. Gone were the rich blues of summer, and the world was fading. Even the gas giant Atlas seemed gray, its vibrant oranges gone to umber.

It was not the first time Gibson had asked that question, and I answered him in the usual way. “Are you so eager to be rid of me?” I did not want to tell him the truth: that I did not want to leave Colchis, that I still woke sweating and sobbing in the night.

He knew.

“I am too old to be eager for anything at all,” Gibson answered me, and laid his cane across his knees. “But you cannot stay here forever, dear boy.”

“Can I not?” I asked sourly, probing the spot in my mouth where a new tooth was sprouting to replace one of the ones I’d lost. New teeth were always strange, discomforting reminders of the artificiality of the palatine caste. Grown men were not meant to grow new teeth.

The scholiast did not answer at once. “I told you once about the ugliness of the world. Do you remember?”

“That was the day Father banished you.”

“It was.”

Voice sharply bitter, I asked, “How could I forget?” But then another, more pressing question came to me, and I added, “Did you know?”

“Did I know Sir Felix was going to arrest me?” Gibson fixed me with gray eyes. He looked strange out of his scholiast’s green. The robes had not survived his long internment, and so he wore my own blacks. The tunic and trousers hung on him as loosely as on a scarecrow. “Yes. Alcuin told me. A professional courtesy. He knew how much you meant to me, and wanted me to have a chance to say goodbye.”

I blinked at him. “What? Why would he do that?” I had not thought about Tor Alcuin in years, in decades probably. I wondered if Father’s favorite scholiast were still alive. It was possible. Alcuin had been palatine himself, and Father was still alive, preserved—or so I understood it—by several long trips back and forth in fugue to the Consortium offices at Arcturus.

“Because he knew that I was innocent,” Gibson said. “Your father knew you were behind your escape attempt, not I. He wanted you punished, but it would not have done for him to harm you.”

Because it couldn’t be you, Father had said when I’d asked why he’d done what he’d done. I looked away from Gibson in his outsized blacks, stared out across the sea. From our height, the dim shape of Racha was visible, and the sparse fingers of the sea stacks that rose like columns from the water were like the tops of sunken towers. “Damn him.” After so many centuries, my hatred of Lord Alistair Marlowe had cooled, transformed from a white-hot coal to something oily and dead, not gone, but rotten and cold. “I wish I knew how he found out about the plan.” That had always bothered me. I had been so careful—or thought I had been careful.

“Alistair has borne much of the world’s ugliness, Hadrian,” Gibson said. “He is a harsh man. The pursuit of power calls for harsh men, as does its exercise. I believe Alistair thinks greater harshness will earn him greater power, and he may be right. Times of calamity like ours are ever opportunities for such men.” He twisted his cane in his lap. “But you should not despise him for what he is. We are all shaped by our suffering. That we are only what we are is ever our chiefest sin.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You would have me forgive him?”

“Him,” Gibson said, “and yourself.”

“I don’t deserve forgiveness,” I said, remaining agnostic on the question of my father.

“Kwatz!” Gibson exclaimed, his verbal slap. “Be grateful we do not get what we deserve, dear boy. If we did, paradise would be empty, and this life would be even darker and more difficult than it is.” He studied me then a long time with his fading eyes. “You are not your father. But you are his son.”

“You have said that before as well.”

“And it is no less true,” Gibson replied stiffly. “Alistair was not always as you knew him. His father’s death. The Orin Rebellion. Your mother. Most of all: his office. These forged him.” There was a sadness in Gibson’s voice then I had seldom heard there, a sadness his scholiast’s training did not arise to check. I wondered just what my father had been like in his youth, and if Gibson mourned the loss of that man. “Pity him his trials, and have mercy. On him, and yourself.”

We each were silent then. Nothing spoke but the wind. Coat flapping about my legs, I moved toward the treeline, looking down over the bay, the white lozenge-shapes of the old camp lining the shore like gravestones. “I led all those people to their deaths, Gibson.”

“Kwatz!” Once more I heard the sound of Gibson’s cane striking the earth. “Are you this Syriani Dorayaica?” I turned back to look at Gibson. The old man had planted his cane in the dirt between his feet, hands folded on the brass knob. “You did not kill those people.”

“I as good as,” I said.

Gibson rejected this with another thump of his cane. Into the fresh quiet, he said, “You take too much on yourself. You cannot carry the universe.”

“And yet the universe is what is asked of me!” I said, thinking of the Quiet. “Gibson, the things I’ve seen! The things I can do!”

“I know.” The scholiast clamped his jaw shut, fixed his eyes on some point on the twiggy ground between us. “Hadrian, have you considered it is not your survival that so haunts you? That it is your time here you cannot forgive?”

My mouth opened to reply, but no words came out. I shut it again. My last words to Lorian rattled in my mind. Avenge us. Avenge us. I was alive, and that charge fell upon my shoulders. What right had I to languish on Thessa in comfort and in peace? To wallow in misery and pain when so much wrong had happened?

None.

“Am I a coward?” I asked, echoing Prince Hamlet.

“No,” Gibson answered flatly.

The white sails of fishing boats stood tall against the sea, signs that the universe went on in spite of all. I watched them then, not knowing what to say. The air tasted of salt—like tears—but the music of gulls was brighter than the sun. How could the Cielcin believe all creation a lie? Beauty is Truth, wrote Keats, and the world was beautiful.

“Only the past is written,” Gibson said. “You are not dead, Hadrian. This island is not your tomb.” I nodded along, still watching the ships, the birds and the fishes. Again I probed the spot where the new tooth was coming in. “Nothing is finished.”

Nothing is finished.

“You’re right,” I said. “I only wish it weren’t so hard.”

“So do I,” Gibson said, “and so do we all, each with our own burdens. We are each Sisyphos in our way, pushing our rocks up our hills.” He groaned, stood unsteadily. I hurried to his side. “One of us will reach the top eventually.” Leaning on his cane, Gibson gripped my shoulder. “This is not the life I hoped for you, my boy.”

I laughed. “Nor I.”

But there was something then in Gibson’s eyes, a sharpness I had scarcely seen. “I hoped to spare you the whip,” he said, and I knew his fingers sensed the thick scars on my shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your doing,” I said, thinking of the scars that covered both our backs, testimony to the burdens we each had borne.

Those gray eyes grew sharper still, and I understood the point he’d scored on me. The old man smiled painfully. “Got you.”

Grimacing, Gibson and I went down from the plateau, passing by the cairns that housed Siran and her descendants. On our way, we passed the point overlooking the sheltered bay where Valka and I had kissed that first day on Thessa so very long ago. Gibson pointed at it with his cane. “When we were having the medica prepared, I used to sit out there and watch the sun come up,” he said. “Siran would tell me stories about you.”

“Did she?” I asked.

Gibson stopped walking and looked me in the eyes again. “She used to say she wished she’d gone with you. That she should have.”

I turned away. “I’m glad she didn’t.”

The old man leaned less heavily on his cane. “I am proud of you, Hadrian,” he said. “Of the man you’ve become.”

“Some man,” I said, unable to hide the derision in my voice.

“Some man indeed,” he said. “I do not pretend to understand what is happening to you, to understand this business of the Cielcin and the Quiet, but I know Siran was proud of you, too. Your friends loved you, as I do—as your Valka does. That is why they saved you. And that love, I told you, is a mighty thing! That’s worth fighting for, even after those who loved us are gone.”

“He thinks we should go,” I said, taking the wine Valka offered. I sipped it speculatively. The wines the islanders produced were all too sweet for my taste, loud and unsophisticated, so white they were almost green. Still, it was wine, and I would not abuse Imrah’s kindness by complaining. I could see Gibson below, seated among the children by the bonfire, the brass head of his cane winking in the orange light. I could just barely hear him from the porch, his deep and rasping voice reciting:

Ye sons (he cried) of Ithaca, give ear;

Hear all! but chiefly you, O rivals! hear.

Destruction sure o’er all your heads impends;

Ulysses comes, and death his step attends.

Ignoring my words, Valka asked, “What is it tonight?” She bobbed her head in Gibson’s direction, settling onto the low couch beside me. Though the nights were growing cold, she was warm, and the tall silvered column-heater warmed the veranda that encircled Imrah’s house. Siran’s house, I supposed, and guessed that she and her fisherman had sat on the nearly the same spot so many hundred years before.

Drawing Valka close beneath my arm, I said, “Homer. The Odyssey. He’s giving them a right classical education.” I could not help but smile. “He used to recite these to me when I was a boy. Made me memorize some.”

“ ’Twould explain a lot,” Valka said, and drank her wine. I swatted her, and she laughed. “I don’t know this one.”

I let Gibson go on a moment before responding. “It’s about a man—a soldier, a king—who can’t go home. He’s won a great victory, but he mocked the gods . . . and for that he’s doomed to wander.” I paused and drank my own wine, grimacing at the taste. “His son’s at home, and in his father’s absence suitors have all moved in to claim his mother and his father’s throne.” I felt Valka squirm at the word claim, and understood her perfectly. Had I not twice been so claimed by lords for their daughters? By Balian Mataro for Anaïs, and again by the Emperor for Selene?

“Does he make it home?” she asked.

“He does,” I said, and placed my cup on the table at my elbow. “But it’s not the same. Neither is he.” I told her how brave Ulysses returned with the help of his son and slaughtered his wife’s suitors, doing violence in his own home, and how he and Penelope were at last reconciled. “I suppose, in a sense, you never can go home. Because it’s never the same home.”

Below, Gibson spread his hands as he continued his recitation. He was recounting the scene in which Telemachus reproached his people for not driving the suitors from his father’s house and—finding little sympathy—begs for a ship to sail to Pylos that he might seek his father, Ulysses. The circle of children listened intently, leaning in. Gibson delivered his lyric translation in a rolling, thunderous voice so much stronger than his usual tones, as though he were a man many centuries younger, a father reading to his sons.

O prince, in early youth divinely wise,

Born, the Ulysses of thy age to rise

If to the son the father’s worth descends,

O’er the wide wave success thy ways attends.

To tread the walks of death he stood prepared;

And what he greatly thought, he nobly dared.

“He’s so good with the children,” Valka said, drawing closer, her head nestled against my chest.

Fingers smoothing her hair, I said, “He always was.”

“ ’Tis strange, no?” she began softly. “Almost all the children down there are Siran’s, five or six generations removed. Amazing how much impact one person can have.” She drew closer. “ ’Tis almost enough to make me want children.”

I did not say anything, but pressed my lips to the top of Valka’s head.

And lo, with speed we plough the watery way;

My power shall guard thee, and my hand convey:

The winged vessel studious I prepare,

Through seas and realms companion of thy care.