Ancient Fire (Danger Boy Series #1) Read online

DANGER BOY

  Ancient Fire

  Mark London Williams

  Danger Boy: Ancient Fire

  By Mark London Williams

  Copyright 2001, 2004, 2011 Mark London Williams

  All Rights Reserved

  First published by Tricycle Press in 2001

  Candlewick Press Edition 2004

  Cover by Michael Koelsch

  Dedicated, with love and thanks, to Elijah, muse and inspiration,

  and Asher, his companion in adventure

  M. L. W.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Prologue

  Alexandria — 415 C.E.

  The year is 415 of our “Common Era.” Still early in the first millennium. It’s night and there’s fire on the water.

  The flames come from a burning fleet of ships, which are sinking in the harbor. Some of the pitch — the tar that seals up the boats and makes them leakproof — is melting off in little globs and drifting over the waves. The globs still burn as they float away, lighting up the water like rows of lanterns at a party.

  But this isn’t the kind of party you’d want to get invited to: The fire has spread to shore, moving from the boats to the docks to the Royal Quarter beyond, shooting through the city like a deadly, fast-moving vine. The flames are even heading out to the dikes and levees that separate the necropolis — the city of the dead, the burial grounds — from the rest of the city. Where the dead are getting no rest at all.

  The splintering wood from the dikes has allowed the seawater to rush in and sweep the mummified bodies out on the waves, setting them adrift like rotting boats moving toward the lighthouse. Toward a very scared thirteen-year-old girl, who finds herself surrounded not only by the fire but also by an angry mob of people who want to hurt her.

  Onshore, the fire races toward the Royal Quarter, toward the place inside it that had been her home: a large complex the locals call both a library and a museum. As far as anyone knows, this library has the single largest collection of books on Earth. In the year 415, it’s very hard to make a book: Each of them is really a scroll, hand-printed on papyrus or dried animal skin.

  It’s difficult to make books, yet this library has nearly half a million of them: nearly all the ideas anybody has about art, math, science, philosophy; copies of famous plays and poems.

  All in one place. All at one time. The fire closes in.

  And if the library burns — when it burns — all the ideas, the plays, the poems, will burn with it. Most of them will disappear forever, vanishing with even less of a trace than the mummies bobbing in the water by the docks.

  Someone else has escaped the fire, too, and is trying to make his way to the lighthouse. He travels through the burning city, only to be taken prisoner again: a boy, about twelve years old. Like the girl, he’s both scared and brave.

  Somewhere else in the fire and flood is another person. Except this person is a human-sized lizard, quite comfortable walking on two feet and talking. His name is Clyne. Versed in human tongues, he’s been mistaken for a demon. And he’s part of the reason the girl in the lighthouse is in so much trouble now, accused of being a sorceress.

  She doesn’t know what Clyne really is, but he’s not a demon. One word the boy used to describe him was “dinosaur.”

  Out in the lighthouse tower, the girl waits desperately for the boy. Or the lizard. Someone who’s on her side. It’s her city that’s burning: Alexandria, Egypt, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

  The girl’s name is Thea, which means “moon.” Like the moon, she’s trying to conjure light at night and make the lighthouse come alive, casting its great beams off the mirrors inside the tower, which aim back out toward the city. With light, someone will know she’s there. But the city is covered by its own light as the flames grow stronger.

  In the year 415, this lighthouse on the tiny island called Pharos is the tallest building on Earth. But it may not be tall enough: The people who’ve surrounded it are using a battering ram on the doors below, and eventually they’ll break in. The crowd’s leader scares Thea more than the fire, more than the bodies floating in the water: He’s a monk named Tiberius. Yesterday — the last day of Thea’s old, regular life — he came for her mother, Hypatia, and dragged her through the streets.

  Hypatia used to be the head librarian. According to Tiberius, she knew too much about too many things. Especially for a woman.

  Thea just barely escaped the same fate herself. She’s pretty sure she won’t be able to escape the mob a second time.

  Right now, Thea’s main hope is that the boy with the strange speech and strange clothes can somehow figure out a way to get to her and maybe help her vanish into thin air for a while — the same way he does.

  The mob howls below: “Thea!” “Witch!”

  Thea looks out across the water as burning pieces of ship drift toward the island and toward the city, occasionally colliding with the dead. She thinks that if she looks hard enough, she just might see something, some tiny speck of something that she recognizes. Something familiar despite all the fire and terror in the air.

  She closes her eyes a minute and summons up faces to give her strength: her mother’s face, the lizard man’s, and the boy’s. The boy is even wearing his funny hat. He told her what it was, but the words made no sense: a “baseball cap.”

  But how could they make sense? That kind of hat won’t be invented for almost another fifteen hundred years.

  And the boy himself hasn’t even been born yet.