Read Online Daylight on Iron Mountain by David Wingrove - Free Book Online Page B

light, no shadows on the green.
    Amos Shepherd was a powerful-looking man, long, grey hair and a short grey beard framing his handsome, sun-burned face. He was in his fifties now, yet he had the look of a man ten years his junior: an ageless, almost biblical appearance, his sea-green eyes set deep into a face that seemed all-knowing; his powerful, aquiline nose like something carved.
    In the stillness of his concentration, he was a statue in flesh.
    Somewhere far off a cuckoo called. As silence fell, so a single bee drifted close and then away.
    Amos narrowed his eyes, trying to pierce and penetrate the veil of appearance, trying to see beyond it. To decode it.
    To outward eyes he seemed entranced, but this was the moment when it happened, when he slipped through and saw reality. Or something close. Some deeper level, anyway. Something the casual eye could never see.
    The sound of the craft grew slowly. Indiscernible, at first, it grew in his head. It cut across his consciousness like a fissure in the rock.
    Amos looked up.
    Of course. Tsao Ch’un’s new marshal.
    Leaning forward, he selected a brush. Squeezing a tiny bead of black from the tube, he dipped the brush and drew a horizontal line, needle thin at one end, thickening at the other, dividing the canvas.
    Skyline and surface.
    As the craft swooped in over the bay, the vibration of its engines filling the air, Amos stood, watching it slowly descend to the lawn beside the cottage.
    He had met Jiang Lei before, at official functions. But that had all been rather formal. There was little chance to come to know a man in such circum stances. But this time the man had come to stay for a day or two, so Amos could get to know him.
    It had been Tsao Ch’un’s wish.
    Amos looked back at the canvas. He had laid the first stone. What followed would follow. He had no idea yet what it was, only that it was ordained. Not in a fatalistic way, but as all his paintings were, because they pursued an ineluctable yet undiscoverable logic.
    They painted him, not he they.
    Amos smiled. Now wouldn’t
that
have sounded pretentious had he ever uttered it aloud? Yet it was true. It was all a process of surrender. He was but the channel for it.
    Tearing his attention away, he walked across to his visitors. The craft had set down now and as the ramp descended, so Jiang Lei stepped out, blinking against the bright sunlight.
    This would not be so strange for him as for others who had come here in the past. At least Jiang had some recent experience of the outside. Some of them had been inside so long that it startled and disturbed them. Like in that old Asimov novel,
The Caves of Steel
.
    Maybe he’d show Jiang some of that stuff. See what he thought of it.
    ‘Jiang Lei!’ he hailed, walking across to greet him, offering his hand, conscious of the other’s awkwardness at that – how Jiang half made to bow before tentatively putting out his own hand.
    ‘It’s good to see you again. I’m really pleased that we’ll be working together.’
    ‘
Shih
Shepherd…’
    Jiang bowed despite himself. He couldn’t help it. None of these Han could. It had become an auto-reflex with them. Like in the old days. And those clothes. They were like something from a costume drama.
    ‘Amos,’ he corrected him. ‘While you’re here you must call me Amos. You are my guest. If there’s
anything
you need…’
    Again that awkwardness, that slowness to respond. He liked that. This one wasn’t as slick and superficial as the rest. Tsao Ch’un had chosen well in that regard.
    He knew that Jiang Lei would not irritate him. At least, not in the way that so many of the others did.
    He watched Jiang look about him; saw how he registered his surroundings.
    ‘It’s… stunning.’
    Amos smiled, pleased. ‘Yes… isn’t it? There’s no place like it on earth. Not now, anyway.’
    Jiang Lei looked back at him. ‘I’m sorry, I…’
    But the words were lost in the whine of the craft’s engines as it lifted