Shrine of Stars

Book 0: Confluence

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Who would lay time to rest, or raise it up from its tomb? The Ancients of Days - humans returned from a long exile in the depths of time and space and history - brought heresy and doubt to the artificial world of Confluence, and ignited a terrible civil war, of all the varied creatures of Confluence's ten thousand genetically manipulated bloodlines, only young Yama holds the power to end the conflict, for who ever controls him controls the myriad machines of the world. Though now a helpless captive being forged intoa weapon of horrific consequence, Yama must win the struggle to reclaim his soul, and complete his search for the true story of his origin - a story mapped eons before his birth.

Release date: May 29, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

The two ill-matched men were working in a small clearing in the trees that grew along the edge of the shallow reach of water. The larger of the two was chopping steadily at the base of a young sweetgum tree. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope and was quite hairless, with flabby, pinkish-grey skin and an ugly, vacant face as round as a cheese. The head of his axe had been blackened by fire; its handle was a length of stout pine branch shucked of its bark and held in the socket of the axe head by a ring of whittled wedges. His companion was unhandily trimming branches from a pine bole, using an ivory-handled poniard. He was slender and sleek-headed, a shipwrecked dandy in scuffed and muddy boots, black trousers and a ragged white shirt with an embroidered collar. A ceramic disc hung from his long supple neck by a doubled leather thong, and a circlet woven from coypu hair and studded with tiny black seed pearls was loose on his upper arm. Now and again he would stop his work and stare anxiously at the blue sky beyond the tree-clad shore.

They had already built a raft, which lay near the edge of the water. It was no more than a pentad of blue pine logs lashed together by a few pegged cross-pieces and strips of marsh-antelope hide, and topped by bundles of reeds. Now they were constructing a pyre, which stood half-completed in the centre of the clearing. Each layer of trimmed sweetgum and pine logs was set crosswise to the layer below, and dry reeds and caches of resinous pine cones were stuffed in every chink. The body of a third man lay nearby. It was covered with fresh pine boughs, and had attracted the attention of a great number of black and bronze flies. A fire of small branches and wood chips burned beyond, sending up white, aromatic smoke; strings of meat cut in long strips dangled in the smoke, curling as they dried.

Some way beyond the clearing where the two men worked was a wide, shallow basin of vitrified mud flooded with ash-covered water. All around, swamp cedars, sweetgum trees and blue pines leaned in the same direction, most of them shrivelled and scorched. A few of the biggest trees had fallen and their upturned roots had pulled up wedges of clayey soil. Nothing remained of the blue pines which had cloaked the ridge above but ash and smouldering stumps.

Except for the ringing of the axe, the land was silent, as if still shocked by the violence recently done there. On one side, beyond the island’s central ridge and a marshy creek, were the low black cliffs of the old river shore and a narrow plain of dry scrub that ran along the edge of the world; in the other, beyond the reach of shallow water, a marsh of reeds stretched towards the edge of Great River. It was noon, and very hot.

The slender man cut the last branch from the pine bole and straightened and looked up at the sky again. ‘I don’t see the need to trim logs which are only for burning,’ he said. ‘Do you love work so much, Tibor, that you must always make more?’

‘The pyre must go together neatly, little master,’ Tibor said, fitting his words to the rhythmic blows of his axe. ‘It must not fall apart when it burns, and so the logs must be trimmed.’

‘We should leave it and go,’ the slender man said. ‘The flier might return at any moment. And call me Pandaras. I’m not anyone’s master.’

‘Phalerus deserves a proper funeral. He was a good man. He always bought me cigarette makings whenever the Weazel put into port.’

‘Tamora was a good friend,’ Pandaras said sharply, ‘and I buried her burnt bones and the hilt of her sword under a scrabble of stones. There’s no time for niceties. The flier might come back, and the sooner we start to search for my master the better.’

‘He may be dead too,’ Tibor said, and stood back and gave the pine a hard kick above the deep gash he had cut around its trunk. The last measure of wood in the cut cracked apart and the little tree fell with a threshing of its boughs.

‘He’s alive,’ Pandaras said, and touched the circlet on his arm. ‘He left the fetish behind so that I would know. He was led into an ambush by Eliphas, but he is alive. I think he entrusted me with his disc and his copy of the Puranas because he suspected that Eliphas might betray him, as Tamora so often said that he would.’

Tibor took papers cut from corn husks, and a few strands of coarse tobacco from a plastic pouch tucked into the waist of his trousers, and began to roll a cigarette. ‘We should not have climbed down to the shrine, little master. I know about shrines, and that one had been warped to evil ends.’

‘If we had not followed them, we would not have learnt what happened. Fortunately, I was able to read the clues as any other man might read a story in a book. There was a fight in the shrine, and someone was hurt and ran away. Perhaps Eliphas tried to surprise Tamora from behind, and she managed to defend herself. She wounded him and chased him outside, and that was when she was killed, most likely by someone from the flier. Eliphas didn’t have an energy pistol, or he would have used it much earlier – there would have been no need to lead my master away from the ship into an ambush. But it was an energy pistol that killed poor Tamora, and melted the keelrock of the stair, and no doubt the same energy pistol was used to subdue Yama. He was taken alive, Tibor. I swore when I found the fetish and I swear now that I will find him, even if I must follow him to the end of the river.’

Tibor crossed to the fire and lit his cigarette with the burning end of a branch. ‘We will find the Weazel,’ he said, ‘and Captain Lorquital will help us find your master.’

‘She is dead. They are all dead, Tibor. You have to understand that.’

‘We found no bodies except poor Phalerus’s,’ Tibor said stubbornly. ‘And nothing at all of the ship, except the axe head.’

‘A fire fierce enough to transmute mud to something like glass would have vaporised the ship like a grain of rice in a furnace. Phalerus was hunting in the marsh near the island, and was caught in steam flash-heated by the blast of the flier’s light cannon. The others died at once and their bodies were burned up with the ship.’

Pandaras and Tibor had found Phalerus’s scalded body lying near an antelope that the old sailor had shot. It was clear that he had not died immediately: he had put the shaft of an arbalest bolt between his teeth and nearly bitten it through in his agony. Pandaras remembered a story that one of his uncles had told him about an accident in a foundry. A man had slipped and fallen waist-deep in a vat of molten iron. The man’s workmates had been paralysed by his terrible screams, but his father had grabbed a long-handled ladle and had pushed his son’s head beneath the glowing surface. Phalerus had died almost as badly, and he had died alone, with no one to ease his passing.

Tibor started to trim the larger branches from the pine he had felled. After a little while, he stopped and said, ‘The captain is clever. She’s escaped pirates before, and that’s what happened here. The flier’s light cannon missed the Weazel, and she made a run for it. Maybe Phalerus was left behind, but the rest will be with the ship. The captain won’t know your master has been taken, and maybe she’ll come back for him.’ He ran a hand over the parallel scars that seamed his broad chest. ‘I belong with the ship, little master.’

Pandaras swiped away the tiny black bees that had clustered at the corners of his eyes to drink his sweat. ‘I’m not your master,’ he said again. ‘We will travel together as free men. Eliphas betrayed my master and murdered your shipmates, and I will kill him for that. He claimed to know of a city hidden in the Glass Desert where others of my master’s bloodline lived, and so lured him all this way from Ys. Eliphas is a liar and a traitor, but all lies have some truth in them, and I think we’ll find the place where he has taken my master if we continue downriver. You will help me, and then you can set out on your own road.’

Pandaras did not want the responsibility of looking after Tibor, but he needed him because the hierodule knew how to survive in the wilderness. Pandaras had lived all his short life in Ys. He knew the city’s stone streets and its people; he knew words which if whispered in the right place could kill a man; he knew the rituals and meeting places of decads of cults, the monastery where anyone could beg waybread and beer at noon, the places where the magistrates and their machines never went, the places where they could always be found, the rhythms of the docks, the histories of a thousand temples, the secrets of a decad of trades. But the randomness of this wild shore confused and frightened him. It was tangled, impenetrable, alien to thought.

‘I am a slave of all the world, little master.’ Tibor drew on the stub of his cigarette, held his breath, exhaled a huge cloud of smoke. ‘Nothing can change that. Ten thousand years ago my bloodline fought on the side of the feral machines, against the will of the Preservers. In the shame of our defeat we must serve the Preservers and their peoples for all our lives, and hope only that we will be redeemed at the end of time.’

‘If you must be a servant, then serve my master,’ Pandaras said. ‘Yama is of the ancient race of the Builders, who made this world according to the will of the Preservers. In all the world, he is closer to them than any other man – the emissary from the holy city of Gond admitted as much. He is their avatar. I have seen him bend countless machines to his will. In Ys, on the roof of the Palace of the Memory of the People, he brought a baby of one of the mirror people to self-awareness. You yourself saw how he drew up monstrous polyps from the bottom of the Great River to save us from Prefect Corin. He is a wise and holy man. He alone can end the war begun by the heretics; he alone can return the world to the path which will lead to redemption of all its peoples. So by helping me find him, you will serve all the world.’

‘We will search for your master, and for my ship,’ Tibor said. He drew a last puff from the stub of his cigarette and pinched it out and swallowed it. His long red tongue passed over his black lips. ‘But a ship is easier to find than a man. How shall we find him, in all the long world?’

Pandaras showed Tibor the ceramic disc that Yama had given him before following the traitor Eliphas into ambush. It held a faint spark in its centre. Pandaras hoped that it meant that Yama was still alive, but no matter which way he turned the disc, the spark did not grow brighter or dimmer.

Tibor nodded. ‘I have heard of such things, young master, but never thought to see one.’

‘It’s real,’ Pandaras said. ‘Now work harder and talk less. I want to leave as soon as possible.’

At last the pyre was finished. Pandaras and Tibor laid Phalerus’s body on top and covered it with a blanket of orange mallows and yellow irises. Tibor knew the funeral rituals by heart, and Pandaras followed his instructions, becoming for that short time the servant of a holy slave. Tibor said prayers in memory of the dead sailor before lighting the dry reeds he had woven through the lower layers of the pyre.

When it was burning well, with Phalerus’s body a shadow in the centre of leaping yellow flames and a banner of white smoke bending towards the blackened ridge, Pandaras and Tibor clambered onto their raft and poled away from the devastated island. It took them the rest of the day to thread a way through the stands of tall reeds to the mudbanks and pioneer mangroves that lay beyond, along the margin of the shrinking river. When the water became too deep to use the pole, Tibor took up a leaf-shaped paddle he had carved from a scrap of wood.

Pandaras squatted at the raft’s blunt prow, Phalerus’s arbalest in his lap and his master’s pack between his feet. He was more afraid than he could let the hierodule know. Tibor said that the raft was stronger than it looked, that the strips of hide would shrink in the water and bind the logs ever tighter, but Pandaras thought it a flimsy craft. The idea of travelling the length of the Great River on it, like an emmet clinging to a flake of bark, filled him with dread, but he was certain that Yama had been carried away on the flier, and he loved his master so fiercely that he would follow him beyond the edge of the world. He had smeared every bit of his exposed pelt with black mud to protect himself from the biting flies and midges which danced in dense clouds over stumps and breather roots. He was a savage in a savage land. He would go naked, cover his body with strange tattoos, drink blood from freshly killed animals until he was as strong as a storm, and then he would pull down the walls of the citadel where his master was held, rescue him, and kill the traitor who had taken him. His people would make songs about it until the end of time.

Such dreams sustained his small hope. Those, and the faint but unwavering spark trapped within the ceramic coin.

The raft rounded the point of a long arm of mangroves, and the wide river suddenly stretched before them, gleaming like a plain of gold in the light of the setting sun. Pandaras stood, suddenly filled with elation, and flung out an arm and pointed downriver, towards the war.

Dr Dismas came into the big white room without ceremony, flinging open the double doors and striding towards Yama, scattering the machines which floated at various levels in the air. A decad of servants in a motley of brightly coloured liveries trailed behind him.

Yama had been performing stretching exercises that Sergeant Rhodean had taught him, and jumped up as Dr Dismas approached. Yama was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of silk trews and a wide bandage wound twice around the burns on his chest. Ever since his capture, he had wanted nothing more than to be able to command just one machine and make it fling itself into Dr Dismas’s eye and burn through his brain but, no matter how much he strained to contact the machines around him, he could not bend them to his will. The powers which he had painfully learned to master had been taken from him by the thing which had grown from seeds that Dr Dismas had planted in him at the beginning of his adventures. He was plagued by a fluttering of red and black at the edges of his vision, and was visited in his sleep by strange and terrible dreams which, although he utterly forgot them upon waking, left an indelible residue of terror and loathing.

Dr Dismas did not speak at once, but clapped his stiff hands together in an irregular rhythm and paced up and down while looking sidelong at Yama, as if trying to marshal his hectic thoughts. The servants stood in a row behind him. They were all indigens, and all were mutilated. Yama scarcely noticed them. He was watching the bent-backed, black-clad apothecary as a mouse might watch a snake.

‘You are awake!’ Dr Dismas said at last. ‘Good, good. How are you, Yamamanama? Any headaches? Any coloured lights or spots floating in your vision? Your burns are healing nicely, I see. Ah, why do you look at me that way? I am your saviour!’

‘You infected me with this disease, Doctor. Are you worried that it is not progressing as fast as you wish?’

‘It is not a disease, Yamamanama. Do not think of it as a disease. And do not resist it. That will make things worse for you.’

‘Where is this place, Doctor? Why have you brought me here? Where are the others?’

He had asked these questions many times before. Dr Dismas had not yet answered any of them. The apothecary smiled and said, ‘Our allies gave it to me as a reward for services rendered. A part-payment, I should say, for I have only just begun. We, my dear Yamamanama, have only just begun. How much we still have to do!’

Dr Dismas marched across the room and stood for a moment at the great window, his hands twisted behind his back. But he could not stand still for long, and whirled around and smiled at Yama. He must have recently injected himself with a dose of his drug, for he was pumped full of an energy that he could not quite control, a small, sleek, agitated man in a claw-hammer frock coat that reached to his knees, the stiff planes of his brown face propped above the high collar of his white shirt. He was at once comic and malign.

Yama hated Dr Dismas, but knew that the apothecary had the answers to many of his questions. He said, ‘I am your prisoner, Doctor. What do you want from me?’

‘Prisoner? No, no, no. Oh, no, not a prisoner,’ Dr Dismas said. ‘We are at a delicate stage. You are as yet neither one thing nor another, Yamamanama. A chrysalis. A larva. You think yourself a power in the world, but you are as nothing compared with what you will become. I promise it. Come here. Stand by me. Don’t be afraid.’

‘I am not afraid, Doctor.’

It was a lie, and Yama knew that Dr Dismas knew it. The doctor knew him too well. For no matter how much he tried to stay calm, the residue of his dreams, the flickering red and black fringes that plagued his sight, the thing growing under his skin and the scuttling and crawling and floating machines that infested the room all conspired to keep him perpetually fearful.

Dr Dismas began to fit a cigarette into the holder carved from the fingerbone of a murderer. His concentration on the task was absolute; his left hand had been bent into a stiff claw by the plaques which grew beneath his skin – a symptom of his disease, the disease with which he had infected Yama. At last it was done, and he lit the cigarette and drew on it and blew two smoke rings, the second spinning through the first. He smiled at this little trick and said, ‘Not afraid? You should be afraid. But I am sure that there is more to it than fear. You are angry, certainly. And curious. I am sure that you are curious.’

Yama drew on the lessons in diplomacy which his poor dead stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis, had so patiently taught him. Always turn any weakness into advantage by admitting it, for nothing draws out your enemy like an exposed weakness.

‘Of course I am afraid, Doctor. I am afraid that I might try to kill you. As you killed Tamora.’

‘I do not know that name.’

Yama’s hatred was suddenly so intense that he could hardly bear it. He said, ‘The cateran. My companion.’

‘Ah. The silly woman with the little sword and the bad temper. Well, if I killed her, it is because she was responsible for the death of Eliphas, who so successfully led you to me. An eye for an eye, as the Amnan would say. How is your father, by the way? And the stinking little city he pretends to rule?’

Yama charged at the doctor then, and one of the flock of machines floating in the airy room shot forward and clipped him on the side of the head. One moment he was running headlong, the next he was sprawled on his back on the rubbery black floor, looking up at the ceiling. Pain shot through him. His chest and face had been badly seared by the backwash of the blast which had killed Tamora and Eliphas, and his ribs had been cracked when it had knocked him down. A splinter of rock had pierced his lung, too, and although he had been treated by a battery of machines he tasted blood at the back of his mouth now.

Dr Dismas smiled down at him and extended the claw of his left hand.

Yama ignored it and laboriously and painfully got to his feet.

‘You have spirit,’ Dr Dismas said. ‘That’s good. You will need it.’

‘Where are the others? Pandaras and the crew of the Weazel. Did you leave them behind?’

‘The little ship that gave you a ride downriver? Oh, that’s of no consequence. It is only you I am interested in, dear Child of the River. Are you all right? Not hurt by your fall? Good. Come and stand by the window with me. I have much to tell you, and we will make a start today.’

Yama followed Dr Dismas unwillingly. The room was part of a palace built along one side of a floating garden. Its single window, bulging like an eye, overlooked a vast panorama. Far below, Baucis, the City of Trees, stretched away in the golden sunlight of a perfect afternoon. Other floating gardens hung at various heights above their own shadows, like green clouds. Some were linked together by catenaries, rope slides, and arched bridges of shining metal. An arboreal bloodline had inhabited Baucis before the heretics had come; their city had been a patchwork of ten thousand small woods separated by clear-felled belts and low, grassy hills. Now many of the woods had been cut down. New roads slashed through the rolling landscape, a network of fused red-clay tracks like fresh wounds. The heretics had made their encampments on the hills, and a miasma of smoke from weapon foundries and numerous fires hung over the remaining patches of trees.

Beyond the city, the vivid green jungle stretched away beneath the mist of its own exhalations. The floating garden was so high up that both edges of the world were visible: the ragged blue line of the Rim Mountains on the right and the silver plain of the Great River on the left, and all the habitable world between them, dwindling beneath strings of white clouds towards a faint hint of red. In the days since he had been captured, Yama had spent a great deal of time gazing at this scene, and had convinced himself that he could see beyond the fall of the Great River and the mountains at the midpoint of the world to the beginning of the Glass Desert.

Dr Dismas exhaled a riffle of clove-scented smoke and said, ‘Everything you see is the territory of the heretics. Two hundred cities downriver of this one, and a hundred more upriver. Thousands of bloodlines are theirs now. And soon the rest, Yamamanama. Soon the rest, unless something is done. Their triumph is great, but they must be prevented from completing it. They have meddled in much that they do not understand. They have tried to wake the great engines in the keelways of the world, for instance. Fortunately, they did not succeed.’

The apothecary looked sideways, but Yama said nothing. Dr Dismas had a habit of alluding to enigmas and mysteries, perhaps in the hope of drawing out Yama’s secrets, as a fisherman might scatter bait to lure fish to the surface. Yama had glimpsed something of the vast machines beneath the surface of the world when Beatrice had returned him to the peel-house by the old roads in the keelways, but knew nothing of their powers and functions. He had not known much about his own powers then, and had not thought to question them.

‘Well, for now you will help the heretics,’ Dr Dismas said briskly. ‘You will provide a service for which we will later ask payment. Please. For your sake do not make any more sudden moves. My servants here are simple things and have very literal minds. I would not like to see you hurt because of a misunderstanding.’

Yama’s fist was so tightly clenched that his fingernails pressed four points of pain into his palm. He said, ‘Whatever I was able to do has been taken away from me. I am glad that it is gone. Even if I still had it, I would never choose to serve you.’

‘Oh, it isn’t a question of choice. And it is still there, somewhere or other. I’m sure it will surface again.’

‘Do what you will. Invoke the thing you placed inside me. Invoke your disease. But do not involve me. Do not try to make me take your side or see your point of view.’

Yama turned away and crossed to the bed and sat down. Dr Dismas remained by the window. Hunched into his frock coat, he carefully lit another cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke while gazing at the city spread below, like a conqueror at his ease. At last, without turning around, he said, ‘You have it easy, Yamamanama. I envy you. I was alone when I was changed, and my paramour was old and badly crippled. We both nearly died before the union was complete, and we nearly died again when we retraced my path across the Glass Desert. That was almost forty years ago. An odd coincidence, don’t you think?’

Yama was interested, despite the loathing he felt towards the apothecary. He said, ‘I suppose that it was something to do with the Ancients of Days.’

‘Good, good. You have been learning about your past. It will save us much time. Yes, it had something to do with one of them. With the most important of them, in fact. All the Ancients of Days were merely variations on a single theme, but the one who called herself Angel was closest to the original. I believe that you have met her.’

The woman in the shrine. The woman in white. Yama said, ‘It was the revenant of something five million years old, of a pathetic scared fool who failed at godhood and escaped her enemies by fleeing to a neighbouring galaxy. She found nothing there and returned to meddle with Confluence. She was the seed of the heretics, and was killed by her fellows.’

‘Indeed, indeed. But before she was killed, Angel left a copy of herself in the space inside the shrines. Her aspect – that was who you talked to. She wants you on her side, and so she told you her story. And told you how powerful she was, no doubt.’

‘I destroyed her, Doctor.’

Dr Dismas smiled. ‘Oh, I think not. You have much to learn about distributed information. She is stored as a pattern of interrupted light deep within the space inside the shrines. Perhaps your paramour will destroy her, when it is stronger, and if I so choose, but you destroyed only the copy of a copy.’ Dr Dismas plunged his right hand into the pocket of his frock coat and brought out the plastic straws which he habitually cast when he needed to make a decision. He rattled them together, smiling craftily. ‘The fate of gods in my hands – don’t you find it amusing? Ah, you are a humourless boy, Yamamanama. It is not your fault. Anyone brought up by that stiff-backed narrow-minded backwards-looking innumerate superstitious fool would—’

Yama roared and ran at Dr Dismas again, and again was knocked down by one of the machines, but before he fell he had the satisfaction of seeing the apothecary take a step backwards. For a moment he was blinded by a silent storm of red and black that seemed to fill his head. He rolled onto his back, a ringing in his ears and the taste of blood in his mouth, and slowly got to his knees. When he stood, the room seemed to sway around him, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

Dr Dismas watched Yama with a genuine tenderness. ‘You’ll need that spirit, Yamamanama,’ he said. ‘It is a hard road I have set you on, but you will thank me at last. You will be transformed, as I have been transformed. I will tell you how.

‘It is a symptom of the disastrous reversal in the development of the peoples of Confluence that, although their technologies predated the creation of our world by five million years, the Ancients of Days were able to manipulate much that was hidden or lost to the ten thousand bloodlines. In particular, Angel was able to enter the space inside the shrines, and she learned much there.’

‘She destroyed the avatars,’ Yama said. ‘People believe that the heretics destroyed them, but it happened before the war began.’

‘Hush. This is my story, not hers. You already know hers, it seems. She tried to recruit you, but I know that you resisted, for otherwise you would not be here. You chose wisely. She is not our friend, Yamamanama. She is our ally, yes, but not our friend. Enobarbus submits to her without reservation, but we have our own plans. And besides, much of what she says is self-serving or simply untrue. Angel did not destroy the avatars. That was the work of the copy of herself that she installed in the space inside the shrines. The aspect you talked to was a copy of that copy, but no matter. In any form, in every iteration, it is a poor deluded thing. After Angel died, it found itself besieged, and it lashed out. That was how the avatars came to be destroyed. The avatars, and many records, and most of the directories and maps within the space inside the shrines. That was the true war, begun and finished before anyone alive knew about it. The war presently being fought between the heretics and the bureaucrats is but its shadow. And so the bureaucrats were defeated before the first ship of fools sailed from Ys to put down the uprisings at the midpoint of the world.

‘But that does not concern us. While Angel was travelling downriver towards the last and least city of Confluence, where she would plant the seed that would grow into the heretics, at that same moment I was entering the Glass Desert. I had been trained as an apothecary – my family had been a part of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons for thousands of years – but I sought greater knowledge. Arcane knowledge hidden or forgotten or forbidden by priests and bureaucrats frightened by the true destiny of the world. As a child I had riddled every obscure nook and cranny of the department’s library. This was before the hierodules within the screens of the library were destroyed along with the avatars, and written records were almost entirely unused then. There were vast amounts of trash, but I discovered a few gems.’

Yama said, ‘And that was where you met Eliphas.’

‘No, not then. I knew him, in the way that a boy might glancingly know everyone who works in the place where he grows up, but before I was summoned to return to the department I doubt that I exchanged a single word with him. Eliphas had long before given up searching for ancient treasures, although his friend and one-time partner, the chief of clerks of the library, did