“The dunes are steeper,” said Lamia as they struggled up to another crest and slid down the other side. The surface was hot, and already her shoes were filling with sand.

Silenus nodded, stopped, and mopped his face with a silken hand kerchief. His floppy purple beret hung low over his brow and left ear, but offered no shade. “It would be easier following the high ground to the north there. Near the dead city.”

Brawne Lamia shielded her eyes to stare in that direction. “We’ll lose at least half an hour going that way.”

“We’ll lose more than that going this way.” Silenus sat on the dune and sipped from his water bottle. He pulled off his cape, folded it, and stuffed it in the largest of his backpacks.

“What are you carrying there?” asked Lamia. “That pack looks full.”

“None of your damned business, woman.”

Lamia shook her head, rubbed her cheeks, and felt the sunburn there. She was not used to so many days in sunlight, and Hyperion’s atmosphere blocked little of the ultraviolet. She fumbled in her pocket for the tube of sunblock cream and smeared some on. “All right,” she said. “We’ll detour that way. Follow the ridgeline until the worst of the dunes are past and then cut back on a straight line toward the Keep.”

The mountains hung on the horizon, seeming to grow no closer. The snow-topped summits tantalized her with their promise of cool breezes and fresh water. The Valley of the Time Tombs was invisible behind them, the view blocked by dunes and the boulder field.

Lamia shifted her packs, turned to her right, and half-slid, half-walked down the crumbling dune.

As they came up out of the sand onto the low gorse and needle grass of the ridge, Martin Silenus could not take his eyes from the ruins of the City of Poets. Lamia had cut left around it, avoiding everything but the stones of the half-buried highways that circled the city, other roads leading out into the barrens until they disappeared beneath the dunes.

Silenus fell farther and farther behind until he stopped and sat on a fallen column, which had once been a portal through which the android laborers filed every evening after working in the fields. Those fields were gone now. The aqueducts, canals, and highways only hinted at by fallen stones, depressions in the sand, or the sand-scoured stumps of trees where once they had overhung a waterway or shaded a pleasant lane.

Martin Silenus used his beret to mop his face as he stared at the ruins. The city was still white… as white as bones uncovered by shifting sands, as white as teeth in an earth-brown skull. From where he sat, Silenus could see that many of the buildings were as he had last seen them more than a century and a half ago. Poets’ Amphitheatre lay half-finished but regal in its ruin, a white, otherworldly Roman Colosseum overgrown with desert creeper and fanfare ivy. The great atrium was open to the sky, the gallerias shattered—not by time, Silenus knew, but by the probes and lances and explosive charges of Sad King Billy’s useless security people in the decades after the evacuation of the city. They were going to kill the Shrike. They were going to use electronics and angry beams of coherent light to kill Grendel after he had laid waste to the mead hall.

Martin Silenus chuckled and leaned forward, suddenly dizzy from the heat and exhaustion.

Silenus could see the great dome of the Common Hall where he had eaten his meals, first with the hundreds in artistic camaraderie, then in separation and silence with the few others who had remained, for their own inscrutable and unrecorded reasons, after Billy’s evacuation to Keats, and then alone. Truly alone. Once he had dropped a goblet and the echo rang for half a minute under the vine-graffitied dome.

Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse.

There was a sudden explosion of sound, and a score of white doves burst from some niche in the heap of broken towers that had been Sad King Billy’s palace. Silenus watched them whirl and circle in the overheated sky, marveling that they had survived the centuries here on the edge of nowhere.

If I could do it, why not they?

There were shadows in the city, pools of sweet shade. Silenus wondered if the wells were still good, the great underground reservoirs, sunk before the human seedships had arrived, still filled with sweet water.

He wondered if his wooden worktable, an antique from Old Earth, still sat in the small room in which he had written much of his Cantos.

“What’s wrong?” Brawne Lamia had retraced her steps and was standing near him.

“Nothing.” He squinted up at her. The woman looked like some squat tree, a mass of dark thigh roots and sunburned bark and frozen energy. He tried to imagine her being exhausted… the effort made him tired. “I just realized,” he said. “We’re wasting our time going all the way back to the Keep. There are wells in the city. Probably food reserves too.”

“Uh-uh,” said Lamia. “The Consul and I thought of that, talked about it. The Dead City’s been looted for generations. Shrike Pilgrims must have depleted the stores sixty or eighty years ago. The wells aren’t dependable… the aquifer has shifted, the reservoirs are contaminated. We go to the Keep.”

Silenus felt his anger grow at the woman’s insufferable arrogance, her instant assumption that she could take command in any situation.

“I’m going to explore,” he said. “It might save us hours of travel time.”

Lamia moved between him and the sun. Her black curls glowed with the corona of eclipse. “No. If we waste time here, we won’t be back before dark.”

“Go on, then,” snapped the poet, surprised at what he was saying. “I’m tired. I’m going to check out the warehouse behind the Common Hall. I might remember storage places the pilgrims never found.”

He could see the woman’s body tense as she considered dragging him to his feet, pulling him out onto the dunes again. They were little more than a third of the way to the foothills where the long climb to the Keep staircase began. Her muscles relaxed. “Martin,” she said, “the others are depending on us. Please don’t screw this up.”

He laughed and sat back against the tumbled pillar. “Fuck that,” he said. “I’m tired. You know that you’re going to do ninety-five percent of the transporting anyway. I’m old, woman. Older than you can imagine. Let me stay and rest a while. Maybe I’ll find some food. Maybe I’ll get some writing done.”

Lamia crouched next to him and touched his pack. “That’s what you’ve been carrying. The pages of your poem. The Cantos.”

“Of course,” he said.

“And you still think that proximity to the Shrike will allow you to finish it?”

Silenus shrugged, feeling the heat and dizziness whirl around him.

“The thing is a fucking killer, a sheet-metal Grendel forged in hell,” he said. “But it’s my muse.”

Lamia sighed, squinted at the sun already lowering itself toward the mountains, and then looked back the way they had come. “Go back,” she said softly. “To the valley.” She hesitated a moment. “I’ll go with you, then return.”

Silenus smiled with cracked lips. “Why go back? To play cribbage with three other old men until our beastie comes to tuck us in? No thanks, I’d rather rest here a bit and get some work done. Go on, woman. You can carry more than three poets could.” He struggled out of his empty packs and bottles, handing them to her.

Lamia held the tangle of straps in a fist as short and hard as the head of a steel hammer. “Are you sure? We can walk slowly.”

He struggled to his feet, fueled by a moment of pure anger at her pity and condescension. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Lusian. In case you forgot, the purpose of the pilgrimage was to get here and say hello to the Shrike. Your friend Hoyt didn’t forget. Kassad understood the game. The fucking Shrike’s probably chewing on his stupid military bones right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the three we left behind don’t need food or water by this point. Go on. Get the hell out of here. I’m tired of your company.”