Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

or tunics and wore
sandals with lots of lacing. Their faces looked pretty sunburned,
like maybe they spent a lot of time outdoors. This particular group
all seemed to be holding rocks or clubs, and I thought I saw a
drawn sword or two.
    It didn’t look like they’d come to dance.
Clyne checked some controls. “Cabin air good. Outside breathable.”
He tapped some gauges, then tapped them again. “Chrono-compass
still unworking.”
    He stared, and tapped one more time. Then he
turned to look at me with those big, round lizard eyes and
shrugged. “Stuck in this present until fix-up. But where-when are
we?” He looked through the glass. “Mammals below, on two legs,
somewhat advanced, have streets, buildings, boats, and wagons.” He
turned back to me, still fairly cheerful. “Probably your planet! Kkzht! Let’s look.”
    The speckled glass of Clyne’s time-vessel
slithered open along each side — I didn’t even know there were
windows in it.
    Clyne stuck his head out.
    They weren’t silent anymore; you could hear
them shouting. The lingo-spot let me understand them. “Devil!”
someone screamed. “Demon!”
    I heard a couple thunks against the side of the ship. Someone from down
below was hitting us with rocks. They must’ve had a pretty good
arm. Too bad for them baseball hadn’t been invented yet.
    Then my eye caught something else. We were
hovering near the top of the lighthouse, and as the rainbow-colored
beam moved away from us, I could see a girl, about my age, also
wearing a robe, with dark hair around her shoulders. She was
leaning out of one of the archways in the top of the tower, staring
at our ship.
    And now she was staring at me.
    I didn’t know what else to do. Through the
open window, I waved.
    Instead of waving in reply, she looked
startled and stepped back. I guess I couldn’t blame her.
    Then she was joined at the railing by an
older woman, who looked a little bit like her. Thick brown hair
just kind of flowed around her face. Her mother?
    The woman was shouting at us. At me.
Sometimes, when the lingo-spot was working hard, there’d be a
tingle, and the slightest delay, like listening to an announcer in
a ballpark.
    “Where are you from?” she was asking.
    “I’m from New Jersey!” I yelled back. “And
the Valley of the Moon!”
    I don’t think they understood me.
    It didn’t matter, because my part of the
conversation ended when a rock hit me on the forehead. It knocked
me back into the ship, making me dizzier than even time travel
does.
    I touched my head and saw I was bleeding a
little bit. I crouched and peeked out through another part of
Clyne’s ship — it was made from some kind of transparent metal,
which we don’t have on Earth — and saw one guy who’d actually
climbed a few yards up the side of the tower.
    He had a beard and long hair and eyes that
seemed to pierce you from a mile away. His robes were brown and
kind of scraggly, and he was shaking his fist at us.
    I think the rock came from him.
    “Maybe mammals aren’t dancing,” Clyne
decided. He pulled the ship away from the light- house. “Yet both
of us stuck in this ‘now’ until compass is fixed. Need to land — k’ingg! — and rethink studies.”
    We floated over the city of Alexandria: There
were spires, stone boulevards, pillars, arches, and huge statues of
men and warriors along the roadways. Also, a few statues of
half-men or half-women. The other half would be animal — like a guy
with a bird’s head or something.
    I wonder if they thought Clyne was like one
of those statues come to life.
    He was still looking for a place to land. Up
ahead, we saw a wide clearing, mostly grass, with some bushes, in
the middle of a huge complex of buildings. Like a palace courtyard
turned into a giant park.
    Clyne steered the ship toward it, hovered,
landed. As we came down, we could see a couple people scurrying
away.
    The ship hit with a bump, and I stepped out.
I reached down to put the Seals cap on my