Descent

The first day, the wind blew, and the second day the sun shone, and I gathered overripe oranges and apples, that fell from the untended trees in the small courtyard. The large courtyard lay, burned, whether intentionally or caught up in the events that swept everything else aside, and the pink granite blocks which made the east wall of the Hall now lay veiled in black, in mourning, among the ashes and stumps of the orange trees there.
Both of the overshot waterwheels still ran, creaking and splashing, but their gearing had broken, the wooden pegs snapped, and rows of rust marked silently our inventions. Two large pigs looked up at me, curiously, from one end of the roofless building. It was their inquisitive strength that cleared the paths, I was sure, as they twisted and ripped at the fallen wood, to find out what was on the other side. I could have told the, but only now. When I'd left, I didn't know, either.
It was when I got down to the lake's edge, south of where I'd landed, and saw the powder mills, that I knew. Low stone walls and revetments cluttered the roads like cobwebs, their crevices jammed with silent guns and scattered white bones. My precocious students, children of illiterate farmers, invented trench warfare while I was gone, digging themselves in around the only source of gunpowder, protecting it as they destroyed each other.
Walls of stone faded back and clotted outside of the small powder mill, leaving a large clearing, triangular, in front of it. The grinding buildings and mixing buildings were interconnected with low walls, and a large clear beaten space stood between these and the nearest of the revetments I'd followed down from the castle. To the east, where we'd built the barracks for the hired troops, was a second line of walls, forming the last leg of the triangle. Between them, in the swept area, were burnt remains of wagons, their harnesses still encompassing long blackened bones of horses and oxen. Dark green plants wrapped around the sunflowers in the field, their white flowers like stars around the yellow burst in the center.
The wooden aqueduct was down and burned, so I knew that in the end, the explosive blood of their war had stopped flowing. I wondered if they'd gone back to swords, to clubs.
My pack had the few things I'd recoveed from the debris in the castle, and sat heavily on my back. Other people might have taken gold or coins -- indeed, the evidence was that they had. I'd dug out hand-lettered books and pieces of rust-covered steel -- a drawplate, full of holes; three plates with red dust speckling their carefully scraped and filed flat surfaces. Apples and oranges sat on them, just behind my neck.
I stepped away from the walls, and started across the clearing towards the lake, towards the low buildings we'd assembled at the shore. Their tops and backsides were wooden, their fronts made of heavy stone backed with earth.
A shout, "Stop! You can't go there!" and as I turn, a man scrambles up to the top of a wall, waving at me. In his left hand is a sword, bare, the tip broken and reground to the length of a dirk. Another man beside him, with an oaken club, both dressed like me: finely woven wool shirts and pantaloons, our most famous product.
"Who are you?" they yell.
I stop, wave. "I'm a traveller. I wanted to come see the city."
The walk towards me, no effort to sheathe their weapons. They are gaunt and as they walk towards me they separate, coming from the sides.
"What's in your pack?" one says.
I turn and run. Peripherally, I see two other men rise, start forward off to my right as I retrace my steps towards the castle. My revolver is in my hand, heavy steel reassurance, as I scramble over rocks and logs through a maze they surely know better.
To one side I hear the dark thump of shoes hitting dirt after a fall, and in the narrow pathway ahead, the man with the dirk crouches, facing me. I shoot wildly at him, the crack of the pistol high and sharp, dancing off the rock to either side and crackling across the valley, announcing to everyone where I am.
His eyes open and he falls to his knees, letting go his sword and covering his face. "Witch," he says, as I run past him, and then he screams louder, "One of the witches!"
That's our legacy, then.
From behind me, more shouts but not getting any closer now, as I run through the boiler-room that we'd not finished. Copper pipes lie in green tangled piles and the fireboxes are still white with sand, striped by light as it passes through the latticed rof.
I scramble through a rubble-filled pit where someone breached the castle outer wall with explosives, and head back towards the docksides. The half-mile walk is easier because the fires here leveled everything; the warehouses and rope barns of the wharf district were entirely wood and there is no cover in any direction. I turn and look back, at one point; one man stands at the top of the road, looking down at me, but he can't catch me now. The docks themselves are mostly intact, the huge redwood pilings sunk into the sticky mud of the lakeshore and the planking heavy and perenially wet. I splash through the water, stepping from log to log, as they float caught in the tangle of cable and rope, and cross to a low dock, its connection to the shore broken by fire.
It is time to be away from this place. I run to the end, my feet thumping and reverberating on the thick wood. Gulls scream at each other, as they float the currents of air above the waves. The hulk of a grounded cargo boat, its masts ripped off by the blast which blew the deck off and sunk it, rocks in the water neaby. My craft faces the shore; I turn and hop in it. The seat is hot from the sunlight.
I stand and swing it to, and it swings easily, catches, and comes to life. I look up for one last image of the castle, its walls ragged and low against the skyline, where they once stood tower to tower in straight silhouettes, and I see twenty, maybe thirty people slowly walking down the burned slope towards the waterline, looking at me. The four men I'd encountered earlier are near the front, not running, just watching me, and behind them other men, women, children, thin, dressed in furs or rough leather, with the occasional stretch of woven wool and the sometime glint of steel. Those two, and the charred lakeside topped by the fallen walls, are all that show we were ever here. Other than that, they could be exactly the same ragged, wary people that met us on our first landfall here, when we were starving, lost, wandering, with nothing more than the shirts on our backs and the rowboat we'd found on the shoreline.
They sat and watched as I turned my ship and pointed towards the mountains in the west. The iron wires begun to sing in the air, water blast-driven up into my face, as I turned my back on the city we'd built. It was a community, our mutual obsession that we'd put a part of our souls into. Don't imagine that we all felt this, or that this is all we felt. But for a moment, a year, a decade, we had our Camelot on the shore. We turned our backs on it to go play with prettier toys, and the knots slipped, came undone.
The floats snapped across the lapping waves, sticking and then coming free, and my iron butterfly in a snarl of smoke and spray took me back to our Xanadu.