Ancient Fire 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

  Smashwords Edition

  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.

  Chapter One

  Eli: Secrets for Trees

  August 1, 2019 C.E.

  “He’s not a weapon! He’s my son!”

  “No, Sands, you’re wrong! In somebody else’s hands, he is a weapon! He’s dangerous!” “Is that why you gave me that stupid ‘Danger Boy’ name?”

  We’re having a three-way argument, and there’s a long pause after I say that.

  My name isn’t Danger Boy, but Eli Sands, and I’m a time traveler. That’s the easiest way to think of it — though, of course, being yanked around through history is never easy. I like to think of it more as being “tangled up in time,” ’cause each time you make the journey, your life gets more and more complicated.

  The two men yelling are my dad, Sandusky Sands (I don’t know about that name, either. My grandparents must’ve had a weird sense of humor), and Mr. Howe.

  Mr. Howe works for the government, in a department called Black Box because it has no real name. It’s a secret division of something that does have a name: DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

  My dad’s a physicist — or at least he was — and Mr. Howe had been watching his experiments for a long time. After Mom’s accident, Mr. Howe practically took over our lives.

  Right now, he’s staring at me. Then he stares at my dad.

  “You told him the code name?”

  “I showed him the whole file.”

  “You showed him the Danger Boy file?”

  “I don’t have any secrets from my son.”

  “Every parent should keep some secrets from his children.”

  “Not every parent does to his famil
y what I’ve done to mine.” My dad’s thinking about my mom again. About the fact she’s disappeared.

  I look at both men and think, Will you shut up? but I don’t say it. My dad and Mr. Howe have been going at it like this for a while now. Years, really. If I walk right out of the room, I bet neither of them will notice.

  “Eli! Get back here!” That’s Mr. Howe. I guess they did notice.

  But I ignore them and keep on going down the hall. Well, it’s not really a hall; it’s a limestone cave, inside an abandoned winery, which is where I live now. The winery is in the Valley of the Moon, near a town called Sonoma, in California. They make a lot of wine around here, which probably won’t surprise you, but our particular winery has been turned into a lab, which might.

  At least my room is normal.

  It has all the things you’d expect to see in a kid’s room: Gaming Guild stuff — like roam boxes — a lot of stray vidpads, baseball cards, old clothes, a box of cookies, and my gene map tacked up on the wall. Another wall is just for Comnet. Their version of Comnet. They’ve set it up so they can track any personal messages that come or go.

  It’s been that way since I got back. And I’ve only been back about a week.

  There’s also stuff in my room that’s not normal, like that little statue of the bull man with the snakes around his legs, over there on my desk. I suppose he could be an action figure, like maybe from one of the Guild games. But he’s not. He’s made of clay, and he’s supposed to be a god of some sort, called Serapis, and he was big stuff back in Alexandria.

  That’s where I got him. In Alexandria, Egypt. Well, not that exact statue. The DARPA guys took the original as evidence. Proof of my travels. Two days later Mr. Howe gave me this duplicate. “A little gesture of good faith” was the way he put it.

  You can still find Alexandria on a map, too, but that’s not the original, either. The city I know is mostly underwater now.

  But not when I was there, more than sixteen hundred years ago. Which, like I say, for me has been about a week.

  It’s been a long week.

  But that’s what happens when you’re a time traveler.

  I can try to tell you about it, but when you become unglued in time, tangled up in it, you lose track of where the “beginning” is.

  And the idea of where it might end still scares me. I think they want to send me back there. To Alexandria.

  At least, Mr. Howe does. I hear him talk to my dad: People are getting sick; strange things are happening to time itself, and people like Mr. Howe are getting worried. They think I can help make it all better.

  I’m just a twelve-year-old kid who likes baseball and vidpad games. Why me?

  Well, I know why. It’s because of my dad’s time spheres, and the fact that my mother disappeared into one, and the additional fact that I disappeared into one, too, except I came back.

  They’ve tried to keep me around the lab since I returned — Mr. Howe and his DARPA team watching me the whole time, checking up and monitoring me. Actually, I’m amazed they’ve let me be in my room alone this long without asking —

  “Eli? How are you feeling?”

  It’s Mr. Howe again, with some guy in a doctor coat who I don’t recognize. There’ve been a lot of guys I don’t recognize hanging around lately.

  “I’d feel better if I could get out of here. Take a walk. See a baseball game. Get some food. Anything. Even go to school.”

  “We can’t let you go back to school now. You’re in a special circumstance.”

  “I’d feel better if you and Dad would quit fighting.”

  “Your dad, Eli, doesn’t realize how much good you can do.”

  “Why are you calling me Danger Boy? That’s a corny name.”

  “When you do important work like ours, Eli — like yours — it’s good to have a code name. Just in case.”

  “Is ‘Mr. Howe’ a code name, too?”

  He doesn’t answer, and instead picks up the Serapis statue. “This souvenir you brought back — we should really give it to a museum. Someday.”

  “You mean the original? That one’s a fake.” Mr. Howe puts it back on my desk, gingerly. “Right.”

  Serapis was supposed to be a god of healing, but I didn’t see too much healing back in Alexandria. The city felt like it was about to explode.

  Now the doctor guy is shining a light in my eye. “Hey!”

  Mr. Howe waves him away. “Later.”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “He actually is out for a walk. Said he needed to think things over.”

  “How come he gets to go?” I ask for the zillionth time that week.

  “Because he’s not under medical observation. Because he didn’t just become the first person who we know can time-travel.”

  Now Mr. Howe sits down on the bed only a couple feet away and turns to look at me. He’s supposed to be all sincere, but his expression gives me the creeps.

  “Eli, you do know how special you are, right? Nobody wants to hurt you, but you have a chance to help a lot of people. To be a part of history yourself.”

  “Starting with slow pox, huh?”

  “Starting with slow pox, and helping us find a cure. We need to know if you’d be willing to go back again. This time, on purpose.”

  “I want to find my dad first.” I get up and head for the door and hear the doctor guy behind me. “Sir. He’s not supposed to go outside yet. Not by himself.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Howe says. Which means they’re going to have me followed. “Eli, please stay close by.”

  As soon as I get outside, I see another DARPA guy, this one in a blue uniform. He looks at me kind of unhappily, but I keep walking toward the thicket of oaks nearby and hope I can disappear before he starts to follow.

  When I make it into the stand of trees, I begin to run down the path. I don’t know if my dad came this way or not. I’m trying to get to a place called Wolf House, a couple miles from here.

  Way back last century, some guy who wrote adventure books owned it — a big old stone house in the middle of the woods that looked like it was raised up out of the earth.

  At least, that’s how it was supposed to look, but it all burned down the night before the adventure-book guy and his wife were supposed to move in. It’s a big ruin now, and they made a kind of park around it, so you could have a nice picnic where someone else’s dreams were all broken up.

  I like to sneak into the park without paying and go there to think.

  Maybe my dad’s going there, too. If I can find him, it’ll be the first time we’ve been alone together…since Mr. Howe showed up. Maybe we can talk.

  But I don’t want any of these DARPA guys hanging around. I’m running pretty hard now, but so’s the guy in the blue uniform, and when I look back, he’s yelling something into his headset, so I guess my days — or minutes — of outside walks are gonna be numbered.

  This could be my only chance to get away for a while. But if I stay on the path, it’s gonna be too obvious to the DARPA guys where I’m headed.

  “Dad! Dad!”

  No answer. He could be anywhere.

  The blue uniform is catching up. I come around a bend, then cut in fast through the brush, down toward the creek. If I can get deep enough in the bushes, he won’t be able to see me….

  Aw, nuts. But they have equipment that can amplify my heartbeat. They can hear me, even if they can’t see me.

  This sucks. Can’t I just be by myself for a little bit?

  As I move through the trees, some low branches scratch my face. One of them drags behind my ear, over my neck.

  There’s a strange tingling, almost like a sudden, intense sunburn. I reach back to feel my skin, and my fingertips tingle, too, when they touch a small rough spot the size of a quarter.

  I look at my fingertips. I can feel the substance. Because it blends in so well with my skin — it looks like a slight bruise — the doctors have missed it. And since everyone here speaks English, I forgot I
had it on.

  My lingo-spot.

  A lingo-spot is a plasmechanical device for translating languages. Plasmechanical means something that’s half biology and half technology.

  How do I know all that? A dinosaur told me.

  But I don’t want to explain any of this to Mr. Howe or DARPA, so I start wiping off my lingo-spot on the bark of another tree. It looks like it’s a redwood.

  Then I wonder if the lingo-spot will suddenly help the tree understand human beings. Let it hear our secrets.

  But that would mean, what? Translating words into sap? Into the rustle of leaves? How do you make a language out of that?

  I jump at what sounds like a burp, but there’s no one around. It seemed to come from the direction of…

  …the tree. Like the lingo-spot made a noise.

  At least, that’s what I hope it was.

  I move a little farther away. Even if the redwood could hear secrets, it wouldn’t matter. Not with mine: They’re doozies. Like the dinosaur I just talked about. I originally met him in a place called the Fifth Dimension.

  Ah, forget it. The tree wouldn’t believe me, either.

  Chapter Two

  Eli: Snowball Fight

  June 7, 2019 C.E.

  Even before I got tangled up in time, I’d been to a lot of places.

  Like, for example, the Motel Bayou Deluxe, outside New Orleans. My dad and I had a snowball fight there, and I hit two grand slams in one inning.

  “You know, it never really used to snow in New Orleans, especially in summer. But the weather seemed to make a lot more sense when I was a kid.”

  My dad was using that phrase a lot back then, “when I was a kid.” It’s a way grown ups have of talking when the present moment has them kind of mixed-up or sad.

  Dad was actually pretty happy during the snowball fight, even when I ambushed him by hiding under our parked truck with an armful of icy ammo and pelting him on his back and head when he walked by. He actually laughed. He hadn’t done that in ages.