Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams

head…and felt my body
tingling again. The colors of the Fifth Dimension swirled in front
of me and I nearly passed out…
    “Boy sick?” It was Clyne, leaning over me,
waving the hat in front of my face like a fan. “Time-stretching
does that.”
    I started to wonder what was up with the
cap.
    I didn’t wonder long, though. Coming up
toward the ship, we had some new, curious visitors: a tiger, a pair
of sauntering giraffes, and farther away, a rhino, stomping, head
down, taking aim at the ship.
    This wasn’t just a courtyard. It was a zoo.
And we’d landed in the middle of it.
     
     
     

Chapter Eight
    Thea: Bazaar
    415 C.E.
     
    My name is Thea, daughter of Hypatia, last
librarian in the city of Alexandria, keeper of archives and
records, seeker of truth. This is my record, and whoever reads
this, know that I would not lie. A lizard man and a boy wizard
really did come to my city, fly around the lighthouse, and escape
from a rhinoceros.
    And that was before we’d been properly
introduced. But proper is the wrong word
for this story.
    Their ship came at the stroke of noon. I’d
climbed the tower with my mother, who was preparing a demonstration
for her lecture on “The Bending of Light and the Movement of
Time.”
    With the sun at its zenith, she revealed a
carefully placed row of crystal prisms she’d set up in front of the
lighthouse mirror. Normally, that mirror is used at night, or
during dense fog, when the flame of Pharos burns and is reflected
and thrown far out to sea.
    But now, the lighthouse threw instead a
blazing rainbow, and within moments, the airship appeared.
    “What’s happening?” I asked Mother. There had
always been whispered stories about ancient flying ships from
distant lands, but I had never seen one before.
    “The lighthouse signal seems to have drawn
another kind of ship here. I wonder where it’s from? Or, perhaps, when it’s from? And if it’s friendly.” My
mother looked at the rows of crystals. She’d spent months shaping
them and calculating how to line them up. “I wonder if this was
such a good idea.”
    I leaned out over the railing to get a closer
look at the ship, and that’s when I first saw the boy.
    He was staring at me, too.
    “Where are you from?” I shouted, but I’m not
sure he understood me. He said something that sounded like
“Neujarzii,” but it made no sense.
    Still, we might have shouted more questions,
marveling at each other’s strangeness, if “Brother” Tiberius hadn’t
hit him in the head with a rock.
    Tiberius is friends with Cyril, the head of
the church in our city. It used to be the Romans who ran the place
were always mad at the Christians. Then the Christians began taking
over, especially Cyril, and it was their turn to get mad at the
Romans.
    So the Christians began doing to everybody
else what had been done to them.
    Mother said, “People have long memories here
in Alexandria. And in a place with so many different names for God
and heaven, that can be dangerous.”
    Perhaps the city is not so advanced after
all. Tiberius had been saying in public that Mother was a witch,
because she lived alone—without a husband — and because she played
music, knew both elemental and advanced science, and believed in
Serapis.
    Serapis is a god who dwells mostly in the
underworld. They say he brings light and dark together and can heal
both human and animal.
    I don’t know if he’s real.
    Nor, at that moment, did I care. The ship
disappeared, heading off in the general direction of the Royal
Quarter with its museum, zoo grounds, and library. And it didn’t
seem as though Serapis, or anybody, human or god, could get us
safely out of that tower.
    I wished that we were on the airship, too.
Between the appearance of the boy wizard and his strange,
lizard-like companion, Tiberius and his dozens of followers were
convinced, utterly and forever, that Mother and I were witches of
the most terrible sort. It didn’t help that the lizard man
resembled