Destination Unknown by Katherine Applegate Page A

three of them, Mo’Steel, his mother, and Jobs. Violet, with her hand still leaking blood, was in no condition to carry anything.

    They stood on a rise, not a hill so much as a low plateau overlooking a long, shallow valley. The river had slowed and now meandered toward a green, unhealthy-looking bay dotted with wooden ships that might almost have been the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria .

    There was a village directly ahead. Strange, ungainly buildings, some little more than roughlean-tos, others patched plaster houses with steep, dormered roofs. Jobs saw a brick bridge, arched, with a square tower. The perspective seemed odd; the relative sizes of buildings were wrong.

    Within the village, people, all in costume, or what seemed costume to a modern eye. Men wore tunics and feathered caps, some wore crimson tights and brocaded jackets. The women wore white linen head wraps and voluminous peasant dresses and aprons.

    There were pigs running in the dirt street, gaunt dogs, and chickens.

    The people were busily engaged in a series of odd activities. One man in a close-fitting felt cap was facedown on a wooden table, stretching his arms to the left and right. Another man wearing only one shoe appeared to be trying to crawl through a sort of transparent globe. A man was shearing a sheep while beside him a man tried to shear a pig. A man armed with a curved knife was slamming his head against a brick wall.

    It was ritualized, unnatural, not for a moment to be confused with anything real. The people were identifiably human, but behaving more like automatons. A man waded into the river waving a large fan and with his mouth open as if he was shouting. Butno sound came forth. Another was perched on a steep roof and shot a crossbow at what looked like a tumbling stack of pies.

    This unsettling, strange tableau extended into the distance, melding into a less-detailed vision of a crowded city. But dominating it all, overwhelming all with its sheer size was a massive building. It was round, built like a wedding cake but one that might have been carved out of a single mountain of yellowed rock. It was seven layers of arches, each set back from the lower one, so that the whole thing might in time have risen to a point.

    But the structure was imperfect, asymmetrical. The top few layers of this stone cake had been slashed and within the gash, a sort of tower-within-a-tower, more arches, more layers.

    Jobs turned to Violet. She held her disfigured hand up at shoulder level, trying to help the blood to clot. She was an incongrous sight in her tattered feminine finery, stained with blood. Her hair, once piled high, hung down unevenly, a fallen soufflé. She was dirty, like all of them, in pain, hungry, scared. And yet, Jobs thought, she had a determined dignity that he admired. And the truth was, her knowledge of art was proving at least as useful as his own technological facility.

    Violet stared at the scene, awed, rapt, eyes shining. “I know this,” she said. “I’ve seen this!”

    Mo’Steel was salivating. “I see piggies down there. Where there are piggies there is bacon. And chickens. That means eggs. I am seeing bacon and eggs. I am seeing about a dozen eggs and maybe a pound of bacon, all hot, all hot from the pan.”

    Jobs was hungry, too. But to him the tableau was just creepy, impossible, absurd. Unnatural. “Talk to us, Miss Blake,” Jobs said.

    “I’m trying to remember,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “I forget what it’s called. The style, I mean.”

    “I don’t care,” Mo’Steel said. “Question is: Are we going to get us some bacon and eggs?”

    “It’s like a video loop,” Jobs said. “Each of those people keeps doing the same thing over again.”

    Miss Blake nodded. “It’s an allegory, or a series of allegories. It’s the kind of thing that would have meant more to a person of that era. Each of those people is demonstrating a fable or a saying of some sort. I don’t recall