Free No Brighter Dream: The Pascal Trilogy - Book 3 by Katherine Kingsley

aside, then leaned back in his chair to devote his full attention to the story. “It is an important point, Andre.”
    “Of course it is,” Ali said. “Men always want to die in glory. Go on, Handray.”
    “Yes, well, I think I had better skip over the years of distant Persian rule, and Alexander’s conquest, and more Persian rule, since not much blood was spilled and you don’t seem to care about the history,” he said. “I’d hate to bore you.”
    “Thank you—but you may leave in the part about the League of Twenty-three Cities and all those nice rich people.” Ali fiddled with her sash. She really liked this part.
    “I wouldn’t dare miss it for fear of my life,” Andre said, puffing on his cheroot. “Let’s see. Lycia grew prosperous, having formed a democracy of its own, despite all the warring going on around them. People grew rich—and yes, Ali,” he said, forestalling her, “I’m sure they had jewels and servants and precious oils and handed them out all over the place. We do know that they were very generous with their own people.”
    “Well, of course they were,” Ali retorted. “They were kind and brave and perfectly glorious in every way.” She leaned toward him. “You may do all this studying and recording, but you forget that these were real people who lived good lives right here on this very soil. It was not all crumbled ruins then, you know.”
    Andre stared at her, then at Joseph-Jean, and they both burst into laughter.
    “Well, it was not,” she said uncertainly, wondering why they found that so amusing.
    “No,” Andre said, recovering his composure. “It wasn’t. That’s the point, little one, that’s the point. Why do you think we’re doing all this work, if not trying to make that period come alive?”
    Ali, now annoyed, folded her arms across her chest. “And that is my point. Copying old inscriptions and making drawings and maps does not make something come alive. You talk about Xanthos as if you were giving a history lesson.”
    “And how else am I supposed to talk about it?” Andre asked curiously. “I can’t change the facts to suit you.”
    “If I were you, I would tell a story, a good one, with people and families, speaking of the tragedies that happened to them, things everyone can understand.” She looked up at the ruins for a moment. Dusk was drawing down and the silhouette of the old buildings and tombs stood dark against the deepening blue of the sky.
    She tried to imagine how it would have been almost two thousand years before, a girl watching the night approach, the sounds of the city about her, wondering what she might have been doing—how she might have felt if she knew that war was encroaching on her city, for that was the next, most sorrowful part of the story.
    “Ali?” Joseph-Jean asked. “What has made you suddenly so quiet?”
    Ali turned to him. “If someone were to come along in another two thousand years, Jojan, and wonder about what my people were like, I would not want him to think of emptiness, of a mass of people without faces, the way we think of them.”
    She inclined her head toward the ruins. “I do not mean the big names, the important ones that you and Handray speak of, but people like me, like Umar, or Muzaffer and his wife,” she said, looking back at Joseph-Jean. “I would want these people to know our names, to know about the details of our lives, in a way that would help them to understand what we were like.”
    “But we can’t know,” Joseph-Jean said. “We can only imagine.”
    “Exactly,” Ali said triumphantly. “And if I were to imagine what it was like here in Xanthos all that time ago, I would make up a family.”
    “Oh?” Andre said, leaning his forearms on his thighs and looking down at her. “And what sort of family would you make up, Ali?”
    She rested her cheek on her fist, thinking hard. “I would start with a family who had lived a simple life here.”
    “What, no riches?” Andre asked