The First Dragon(34)

Kipling ignored the question. “Why are you here?”

“This is the only place and time in history where I could find a codex to the language of the angels,” Dee said as he walked back toward the door and swung it open. “There are runes and markings and even a manuscript written in their manner of speech, but nothing that remained after this time that could tell me how to translate them. And that was essential.”

“Why do you need to understand the angelic languages?” Kipling asked. “What possible use could that be to you?”

“If I understand the language,” said Dee, “then I can speak it correctly. And if I can speak it, then I can call an angel by his name. And,” he added as he closed the door behind him, “if I know an angel’s name, then that angel . . .

“. . . can be bound.”

♦ ♦ ♦

The notes inside Deucalion’s box were taken just as seriously as the one he had been given that had instructed him to build the ark. The companions watched somberly as he called his family together and instructed them to begin gathering the animals together in preparation for the long-anticipated flood. It was to their credit, Madoc thought, that not a one among them hesitated or questioned their patriarch in the slightest. He had raised them to believe what he told them, and they trusted him implicitly.

“You are not of this world, are you?” the old shipbuilder asked the companions as they left his tents to make their way back to the Indigo Dragon.

“Of this world, yes,” Quixote said primly. “Of this era, ah, no. Not exactly.”

Deucalion nodded. “I could tell as much. You have the smell of Kairos about you.”

“Sorry,” Uncas and Fred chorused. “We got a bit wet when we were watering the goats,” said Fred.

The old shipbuilder smiled. “I think the smell of wet badger fur is more pleasant than the smell of a rose garden,” he said.

“Y’see?” Uncas said to Madoc. “That’s why ev’rybody loves him.”

Madoc laughed. “I’m starting to understand that.”

“Uh-oh,” Fred said as they approached the spot where they had left the airship and the Zanzibar Gate. “You know that whole ‘don’t meddle with history’ thing the Elder Caretakers are always nattering on about? Well, I think we’ve just meddled.”

The airship, which resembled a boat enough still that everyone who looked at it completely ignored it as another one of Deucalion’s desert follies, was still sitting in the sand where they had left it. But the Zanzibar Gate was drawing a considerably larger amount of attention.

Craftsmen from all the tribes had formed a perimeter around the gate and were constructing their own replicas of it. Even just a cursory glance among the works-in-progress showed that pyramid-like structures from all the great cultures of the world were being sculpted: the Egyptian, and the Maya, the Chinese, and even the latecomers of Mesopotamia.

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” said Quixote.

“Not likely,” said Madoc. “This is the First City. No one else on earth has built anything like a pyramid before, and suddenly one just appeared out of thin air in the middle of the desert. That’s too significant a happening to be ignored.”

“Well, at least we finally know the answer to the question as to why there are nearly identical pyramids in every culture around the world throughout recorded history,” said Fred. “They were all inspired by the work of William Shakespeare.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Observing from the circle of Caretakers seated at Conan Doyle’s table in Tamerlane House, John tightened his grip on his colleagues’ hands when he saw a child moving among the sculptors who were making the replica pyramids.

“There,” he said, hardly daring to breathe. “That boy—isn’t he . . . ?”

“Yes,” Verne said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “In this time he was Enkidu, friend of Gilgamesh. But when he grows older, we will know him as the End of Time.”

“Theo,” Jack whispered. “It’s good to see you again.”

Almost as if he had heard, the boy stopped and cocked his head. He wiped the sweat from his brow and then ran back the other way, moving closer to the companions and the Zanzibar Gate.

♦ ♦ ♦

Deucalion had moved past the others to examine the Indigo Dragon. He knelt next to the hull and ran his hands along it. “A fascinating vessel,” he murmured, “of impeccable construction.”

“Don’t let’s be patting ourselves on the back too hard,” said Laura Glue.

“What?”