Barbarian’s Taming by Ruby Dixon

16

MADDIE

It’s soweird to round the corner in what is an uninhabited crevasse on a deserted, icy planet populated with nothing but other crash-landed aliens…and realize that there was someone else here before you.

Long, long before you.

I reach out and touch one of the even, neatly stacked stones that make up the crumbled wall. At my feet are more even stones, covered by a thin layer of ice and debris. Cobblestones. These stones stretch ahead, and as I let my gaze move, I see more stones, more cobbled road…and then ahead, I see buildings.

Tucked against the walls of the crevasse are a bunch of squat, stone buildings. They’re square and even, lining a street, and if I ever had any doubt that this stuff was man-(or alien-)made, those have been firmly put aside. Someone lived here. Someone lived here a long time ago…or is living here now.

“This isn’t a ship,” I tell Hassen. “It’s a city.”

He frowns, trying to digest this word. “It is a place that people live? Like a tribal cave, but in the open?”

“Right.”

A tribal cave in the open is right on the money. It’s not a city like I know of, with skyscrapers and suburbs. This is a Paleolithic city of some kind, tucked along the walls of the rocky canyon. The cobbled road underneath my feet stretches out and leads to neat rows of small, squatty-looking brick buildings with no roofs. They’re square and set in neat rows along the streets, almost as if someone took a grid and placed them all exactly where they needed to be. The size of each one is uniform, about as big as a bedroom back at home, and farther down the street, the buildings get bigger, one the size of a house. Still no roof, though.

It’s all very strange. It’s like all the roofs disappeared and so…everyone left? But that makes no sense.

“I don’t know that anyone is here.” I don’t see anyone moving around, and the feeling I get is one of…stillness. Quiet. Emptiness. In a place this big, surely it would have some noise. I stop in my tracks and start counting buildings.

I stop when I get to forty, because, okay, that’s a lot of buildings. There’s more than that, but it tells me plenty—this was a settlement of some kind. Is a settlement. “Could it be…metlaks?”

At my side, Hassen makes a sound of disgust. “They do not create things. They do not live in ships.”

“Cities.”

“Cities,” he amends.

“And your people didn’t build this?”

“If they did, would they not live here?”

Yeah, I guess they would. It doesn’t seem natural to leave behind a perfectly good city. “So where did they go? Unless they’re here and we can’t see them.” I think of the metlaks that were stalking us earlier, and draw a little closer to Hassen, spooked.

“There are no tracks,” he tells me, gesturing at the path before us, then turning and waving a hand at the trail we’ve left behind us. “If there were people, we would see traces of them.”

“I know. Logic says there’s no one here, but…”

He nods. “I feel the same way.” He releases my hand and cups his mouth. “Ho! Is anyone there?”

His shout echoes off the canyon walls. It’s eerie, but effective. After a moment, I’m pretty convinced we’re alone here, too. I get brave enough to take a few steps forward, looking up. Sunlight spills in from above, but the walls are sheer and I don’t see any paths or handholds. No one’s coming down from this direction.

So while this is wild and strange…it also feels a little safer than I expect. “Do you think we should stay here tonight?”

“Here…where?” Hassen looks at me curiously. “In one of the hollows?”

“I think those were houses, though I don’t know where the roofs went.” I shrug. “We could put a skin over a corner and make ourselves a little nest for the night. Explore the place and see what we can find. Maybe there’s a hint as to where these people went.”

“Are they all dead?” he asks.

“Good question.” Eek, I hope not. “One way to find out, though. Shall we go exploring?”

Hassen looks troubled. “I…do not know. This feels like walking into a hunter cave left by a…a stranger. I do not know how I feel.”

I guess strangers are a big concept to a guy that grew up knowing all the people on the planet. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell him, holding my hand out. “We’ll check it out together. I’d rather see what’s down here than go back up and face the metlaks.”

He nods slowly, then takes my hand, his spear gripped tight in his other. “Let us see what we can find, then.”

* * *

Whatever happenedto the people of this little Stone-Age city, it wasn’t plague or famine or anything like that. We peek in on each house, and they’re all empty. Every single one is completely body- and bone-free, which makes me feel better. I think I’d probably have turned around and faced the metlaks if we’d found a stack of bodies. It’s all very quiet and peaceful, just…empty.

I think it’s old, too, and I tell Hassen that. A few of the small ‘houses’ have rotted bits of what must have been furniture. There’s nothing left but a few frames and piles of dust that suggest stuff was here that didn’t survive the elements. Everything is coated with a thin layer of ice, too. Even the floors. Each of the small houses is made the same, a perfect little square with an ice-covered dugout section that must be a fire pit, and something that looks suspiciously like a kitchen area. There’s a debris-covered cubby connected to each house that has grime and detritus caked into the ice, and I can’t figure out what they’re supposed to be used for…until I find one that has a hole in the floor, and then I get excited.

“These aren’t Stone-Age people,” I tell Hassen. “That’s a motherfucking toilet.” I get down on my hands and knees, leaning over the ice-covered hole. “Give me your spear!”

“What are you doing, Mah-dee?”

“Looking for pipes,” I tell him. He hands me his spear, and I jab the butt of it against the ice, cracking the thick layer after a few stabs and uncovering the hole. I peer into it and then drop a chunk of ice down the hole. I can’t see anything down there, but despite the shadows, it looks like there are pipes of some kind.

Crude pipes are still pipes.

“These people had toilets,” I tell him, excited. I get to my feet. The stone walls suddenly look a lot less crude to me. Romans had running water and pipes, didn’t they? Maybe this is the ice planet equivalent of an ancient Roman civilization.

I’m going to ignore the whole Pompeii-Vesuvius equivalent my brain immediately draws. There’s no lava here. The volcano was a jillion miles away. “This place is fantastic, Hassen!”

“Why is it fantastic?” He gazes at me, hard brows draw down.

“Because toilets. That means running water somewhere around here. Let’s go find it!”

He’s mystified by my excitement, but takes his spear back and follows me as I dash around the icy remains of the city.

I’m not wrong—in the big house, there’s a bright blue hot spring bubbling, the edges lined with squared pavers. It looks deep and smells stinkier and more sulfurous than the one back at the old cave, but it’s fresh water. I glance around. “Maybe this was a bathhouse. Or a communal gathering spot.” I see lots of benches and another hollow that’s probably a fire pit. “This place is so great!”

“Mmm.”

I turn to look at Hassen. “You don’t like it?”

“I do not like that there are people here, Mah-dee.” He still holds his spear, alert. “How can people have lived here without the tribe knowing?”

“Maybe they’re other sa-khui?” I rub my lip as I think. “Actually, that can’t be right. You guys crashed here about three hundred years ago, and these ruins look way, way older. That means this planet was inhabited before you guys got here.”

His mouth sets in a grim line. “What does this mean?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly, rubbing my arms. “It could mean any number of things. It could mean that the people that lived here are long gone and we’re the only ones left on the planet. It could mean that there are people living somewhere else, but far away. Maybe they didn’t like how cold it was here and left.”

“For Jo-see’s island?” He snorts. “If so, they are gone now.”

I wince at the thought of another tribe of people vaporized by a poor living location. “You might not be wrong. But we don’t know. What I do think is that we should stay here tonight, and then we need to tell Vektal about it. This could be a place to live during the brutal season.”

He looks around, clearly not seeing what I see. “Here?”

“Yes, here.” I gesture at the pool of water. “We’ve got water. We’ve got plumbing, however frozen. We’ve got houses. Those are like caves. People live in them.”

“There are no tops!”

“We can make tops,” I tell him. “Roofs, I mean. We can make roofs for each of the houses. And look at this place!” I point to the high canyon walls. “We’re snug here. I bet it doesn’t get much snow. No metlaks are going to wander down here.”

“No sa-khui either. We fell down a hole,” he says in a flat voice.

“Then we can make ladders. My point is, it’s not the worst idea.”

“And if the people that left come back?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re not coming back, big guy.” I look around at the empty, forlorn house, trying to imagine it full of people and furniture, with a bright fire burning in the big hearth. “I’m pretty sure they all left hundreds—or thousands—of years ago.”