The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran) Read Online Free Page B

ground. He kept walking.
    Fruits and vegetables lay in bins, smelling sweet and earthy. At another shop, slabs of meat hung open to the air, but as he approached, confused by their lack of smell, he felt the warning tingle of a field generator ; Diana had explained to him that, like glass, it protected objects from the open air. He stepped back quickly, not trusting khaja sorcery. Well, he knew it wasn’t sorcery, but he still didn’t trust it. Above awnings, huge images of people and things lay flat against the buildings, holding on by some agency he did not understand (Diana called them projections or billboards ) and here and there, in shop windows and in little tableaus and often moving around, he saw people—whole and living and breathing like himself—that he could see right through. It seemed to him that there were far too many things in Diana’s country that weren’t solid, that didn’t have weight. Once he caught the smell of horses, from somewhere out in the park, but they had the close, pungent scent of khaja horses, boxed into stables. He did not choose to investigate that way…yet.
    It was just past midday, hot, a little sticky. A few clouds obscured the sky, and now and again they drew a welcome blanket over Mother Sun’s bright face. Farther along, where the park gave out onto more (more!) buildings, an arch and a statue of a soldier mounted on a horse graced the corner of the park. Pausing here, he felt the ground tremble deep beneath his feet, the dull rumble of the subterranean creatures called the Underground that swallowed and disgorged travelers. But he wanted to go on, not down. He could not read any of the signs, but he could manage to cross the great roads alongside other people. That was the other thing: London was an inconceivably great city, filled with people, many of whom walked briskly along beside him or passed beside the walkers on their bicycles or clambered on and off buses or climbed up stairs into the light from the passages below. Yet it did not have the intense, galloping pace of Jeds, whose streets had been crowded with wagons and horses and animals and people in a hideous roar of activity that had reminded Anatoly of the chaos of the attack on Karkand.
    He followed a straight broad avenue down past what could only be a palace—although compared to the graceful, light palaces of the Habakar kingdom, this one seemed heavy, dense, and drab—circling past a monument boasting a golden winged woman at the top, and farther yet, to a square guarded by stone lions where some poor soldier stood frozen in stone so high up on a column that Anatoly supposed him sick from the height. At last he came to the river.
    Boats passed quietly on the waters which lapped at stone banks. A path led along the bank. He followed it. It smelled of water here. The sun played light over the slow course of the waves. Passengers on a barge waved at him, and he lifted a hand in greeting, felt at once awkward, and then cheered when a child called out an incomprehensible but perfectly friendly greeting. A breeze lifted off the waves and laughed in his hair, which he had cut short again. He had sheared off his braids on the day he had boarded the thick iron arrow that had lifted far above the land and brought him (in time and taking him to other metal ships along the voyage) here. One of the braids he had sent back to the jaran, hoping it would reach his sister. One he had given to Diana. The third he kept with him, to give in time to his firstborn daughter.
    He was alone in the middle of a great khaja city. Yet he was not lost. He knew exactly how to make his way back to Diana’s tent—to her flat. So it was possible physically to explore. Now he must learn the khaja language. Although from all he had seen, he wondered if he would ever understand them. They seemed completely indifferent to his foreign-ness. They carried hand-sized thin slates called modelers, or computers, with them everywhere as if they were