Revenant Read Online Free PDF Page A

pockets, but the keys were too large to stay securely in the shallow spaces. I put them into the purse and folded Rafa’s map into my pocket instead.
    At a bend in the street, I paused to read the street’s name off a tiled plaque on a wall. I checked the map, turned to continue on my way, and found myself looking out at a sea of red-tiled roofs and hidden courtyards, tumbling in a maze of streets down the slopetoward a wide band of glittering water that must have been the Tagus River. For a moment I just stood there and stared at it. The hill was so steep that the houses were almost like terraces in a photo of Asian rice paddies, each little bastion bounded by its own short sweep of walls that fell sharp and straight down to the next. The angles were all higgledy-piggledy and random, like the honeycomb of disturbed bees. And they were old . . . so old that the narrow, twisted streets thronged with more of the dead than the living—the dead of centuries stretching back so far, I couldn’t even guess the eras. They climbed, ran, strolled, and urged their beasts of burden through the stone-paved passages, between tall houses real and ghostly, their collective voices twining into the noise of the Grid as a song both beautiful and sad that coiled through the twisted streets like fog. The houses they passed, current and not, were mostly plastered in cream, red, blue, and yellow, the colors faded and peeling from the unremitting sun. The rest were covered in tiles glazed with repeating geometric patterns that crazed the eye, broken by symmetrical ranks of windows with small iron balconies strung with drying laundry, or piled with flower boxes drooping red and purple blossoms over their filigreed metal sides. Here and there, the ghost of an older house or a terraced Moorish garden of tiled fountains and orange trees hung over another, but the overlay of phantom buildings was rare—at least from the outside.
    I couldn’t afford to stand and stare, but it was a hard sight to turn from, so unlike anything American. I had to keep an eye on my feet as I continued down the road, the twisting slope so long and precipitous that it made the Counterbalance up Queen Anne Avenue North in Seattle look like a speed bump. I was glad it wasn’t raining, as it would have been at home. The dust in the road was dry and tamped down too much to make the sidewalks of laid flat stonesslippery with grit. All stone and plaster, wood and iron, Alfama was old the way things in the Americas never are.
    I wended my way down until I passed through an arch in a wall and out into a sort of arrow-shaped intersection of two narrow streets shaded with trees. A sign on the wall to my left gave information about the Castelo de São Jorge, which now lay behind me. I could no longer see the river and I wasn’t sure which direction I was facing. I looked at Rafa’s map and recognized the switchback hard on my right where the pedestrian path doubled back on itself, past a row of shops, and downward to a flatter bit of road. My shins and knees ached from the activity after so many hours of lying still.
    I rounded the corner and the river reappeared as an aqua ribbon that seemed to float above the end of the street as if the paving rolled down into it. It didn’t. The street turned abruptly after a block—though “block” was a complete misnomer here—and I turned to my right with it and continued.
    The route was necessarily twisted and longer than the distance point to point, but with a few more turns and a walk past a small triangular plaza created by the high, pink-painted embankments that held up the streets, I was into much flatter streets that first went down and then rose gently upward again, turning away from the river. The architecture changed from the close-packed old houses of Alfama and its yellow stone walls to broader, younger buildings with flat fronts and stone pediments—a sort of plain-Jane version of Baroque.
    The road was covered in