The Lord of the Black Land

by John C. Wright

  He sighed a sigh of satisfaction. “First this place, then on to Raamah and Sabtechadur. That will be one thorn in the great buttocks of the great Lord of Magicians plucked out, and he can go back to using the jakes with a sigh of relief, him and the Great King, too.”

  I guess as a guy who fixed toilets, he talked about buttocks a lot. Then again, so did all the boys younger than me, when the grownups were not around.

  “What aeon is being invaded? Has it got a name?” I asked, very casually.

  “I just told you: Raamah. The Rhammanitae are the world that was given the art of banishing the twilight, the way we were given to call it. It is the world where Nimrod’s brother Rama prevailed over him, the opposite of real history! Raamah, the one world they think we can never reach. Do you know the story? Kai Khosrow was the last king there. He hated ceremony, gave all his cups and gems and loot away to the poor, abdicated, and was granted superhuman span of life. He sleeps beneath the mountain in Shazand, and will wake when our troops arrive. He will defend his people bravely — and die bravely, of course. No splendor in trampling frail foes.”

  “And the other aeon?”

  “Sabtechadur is where the glass-watchers are from, and all crystal balls and seeing stones. They say the Seven-Ringed Cup is there, and a whore witch who uses it to watch the Great King in all his counsels and secret meetings; she watches him do everything from rut in the harem to poop in the privy. There is a storm of twilight surrounding their holy mountain where all the gates to the buried garden-city are hidden, Agarththa. The storm is so vast and thick that even we cannot break through without the ylem-quelling master lanterns of Shazand.”

  Buried garden city is my translation. The word he used meant a walled and hidden garden, but with a prefix indicating it was subterranean, and a suffix indicating it was a military city, a walled city.

  I admit that when I realized who the whore witch was, I was torn between the desire to ask more, and the desire to yank his helmet off, and, while he choked and begged, to rip his jaw out of his skull and beat him to death with it. Call me weak, but I gave in to curiosity.

  “No, I meant the first aeon, the unimportant one.” To my own ears, my nonchalant tone of voice was the fakest thing ever.

  “We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right?”

  And here I was hoping we’d be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “That one. If there is only one… I mean, there must be some more places that have abortions?”

  “Not likely. Expose infants, yes, lots of you barbarians do that, but when that happens, the spirits get their chance to save the baby by sending a shepherd or a she-wolf or something to find it crying. And the children are at least allowed to draw their first breath. Nope. Albion’s the only one that kills them by the millions before they breathe.”

  I said casually, “English-speaking, you said? But maybe there are lots of languages on that world.”

  “Maybe. But if those other languages do not set the rules for the world, what good are they, eh? Just create confusion. Never understood why you barbarians tolerate it. Living in a mess of words like that! But who understands the slave-worlds, eh? Not even the slaves!”

  I was still puzzled about the newspapers. I said, “Why would the news of successful battles be printed up beforehand? Wouldn’t you want that stuff to be kept secret?”

  “Secret why?”

  “So that whoever is being mugged doesn’t know.”

  He laughed. “Better for us if they do know! Then they try to struggle against the net, and they offend the stars, and bring curses, and the woes fall all the faster on them. These barbarians don’t even know the difference between First and Second Order Recursive Paradoxes, or how to avoid Self-Cancelling Interference Modes!”

  “Don’t you want to hide the future from them?”

  “Hide? We do all we can to get the prognostications into the hands of the trampled worlds! The barbarians never know when it is best to go face-in-the-mud, and let the cartwheels of fate roll over your neck. Jackass-brained jackanapes only bow when their legs are chopped, they do. Hide the future? Hah! The more they see, the quicker they cave in.”

  “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “What?” He was still chuckling and shaking his head at the idea of hiding the future from the trampled worlds.

  “The war? What is it being fought over? Why are you attacking?”

  “We are all One. We have never been scattered and confused. One is one. How can it be two? When Atrahasis the Exceeding Wise, the First of the Aeon Lords, was shown by the star-gods how to open the Gates of Twilight and cross the sea of Uncreation, it was found that there were other worlds, men who were not One, not part of the Oneness: and the stars wept blood in wrath.”

  “Aren’t there other people on this world?”

  He explained that there were not.

  It took him a while to make it clear to me, since the concept was so odd: In this version of history, there was no one living in China or the Far East or Australia or Indonesia or the Pacific Islands, no one in North America or South America. The entire Western Hemisphere was untrod by human foot. No one in Scandinavia, no one in the British Isles, no one in Europe north of the Rhine, no one in Russia east of the Caucasus.

  He told me that there were farms and plantations, ranches and mining colonies in India, and in Egypt up the Nile to the red desert — but no Ethiopians. No black men at all on the planet. Nor were there any Orientals, or Caucasians, Polynesians or American Indians.

  There were no blonds, no redheads, no brunettes.

  No Australian Aborigines, no Eskimos, no Tibetans, no Hottentots or Kalahari Bushmen, no Portuguese, no Patagonians, no Maori, no Slavs.

  And no Irish need apply.

  I rubbed my temples, since another stab of hatred for this dark world went through me yet again. In America, we say, e pluribus unum, out of many peoples, unity. This planet was all one same nation and tribe and race. It sounded like some eugenicist’s daydream gone mad. It was the opposite of America. It was just the unity without the peoples.

  And there were no cities, no large towns, no fortresses. Only villages and hamlets.

  Pally told me the towns were allowed to hold no more than nine hundred ninety-nine people, not allowed to build walls or towers, not allowed to build houses out of thick stone or with narrow windows.

  Ur was the sole metropolis on the world of Ur. The Great City of Cities brooked no rivals.

  I said, “So you don’t have any Japanese on this world? Who draws your anime?”

  He spread his hands. “The outlandish aeons will be domesticated one day, and become part of the One.”

  (I don’t know if his power to speak all languages allowed him to understand who the Japanese were, or if he only understood they were people from an outer world, not Ur, not part of the all-consuming Oneness and therefore no more than uncaught and undomesticated slave livestock.)

  I realized I was treading on dangerous ground, but I was getting angry, and his self-satisfaction at being a member of an all-conquering race grated on me. “Is that really what this war is about? Even though you never met them, and even though they have nothing to do with you, you just can’t stand that there are free people out there somewhere? Just the fact that they exist bugs you?”

  “It is not natural for men to be apart. All men are brothers. All serve the Dark Tower.”

  I looked carefully at the joints of his helmet, wondering how hard they would be to rip out.

  Pally spread his hands yet again. “It won’t be long! But soon we’ll all be together, and you barbarians can be cleaned up and given your places and fates. The Dark Tower can always add another thousand feet! Plenty of work to do!”

  I blurted out: “Maybe the people of Earth have their own work they want to do! We never did anything to you!”

  He spoke with a note of surprise
in his voice. “What do you mean ‘we’? You are not from there.”

  I choked.

  This was it. I was caught.

  I tried to play it nonchalant. “Not from where?”

  “Whatever you called it. Dirt. Earth. The aeon of Albion out of Ariphi of Thoebel. Never occurred to me you might like whatever mudhole of fate-blindness you lived in. Gee, ah, sort of rough luck for you. Sorry, punk. You, ah — must not like this much. But don’t worry none! It means the end of war and crime, and people not knowing about their lot in life. All that fear and worry — I don’t know how you can stand it. But it will be over soon.”

  Look, I wanted to yank his helmet off his head and break his teeth to shut him up, but you got to realize, in his own way, he was trying to be nice.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “I just assumed you knew where you are from. I assumed you knew that whoever taught you your gooble-gooble talk were not your folks. Never occurred to me you’d have feelings for them! Everyone says your world got no emotions but hate. You seem nice enough, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering where you are from.”

  “I’m from Earth. Albion.”

  “No, I mean your real home.”

  Ever had that feeling that your universe had just had its main structural supporting members eaten by termites so that it imploded and collapsed into the basement?

  “How—How do you know I — ?”

  “Well, it’s obvious as soon as you open your mouth.”

  “W-what?”

  “The Sons of Albion are technomancers. They speak English. Where is your flying rocketpack, night-seeing lenses, listening machines, your chemical-gunpowder fire-arm, all your toys? Sons of Albion always carry toys.”

  I stood there with a dumb look on my face, thinking about all the high-tech gear my Dad carried with him on his business trips.

  Pally said, “You are a Lalilummutillut. Here you are walking around with scars from deadly wounds, but not dead, and no rare-breath armor. Your real parents come from an antediluvian hell-world from before the confusion of tongues, an aeon called Cainem, and they speak Ursprache, the One Speech.”

  At that moment, the Third Blemmyae whose name I could not pronounce, Knack Ace You (if I may use a more polite version of his name), reached up to thump me roughly on the back of my head to get my attention. Or he tried to. What really happened was that I turned and blocked the blow with my arm, grabbing him by the wrist and throwing him with a hip throw. Or I tried to. He slammed me to the deck. So what really, really happened was that I found myself on the floor, sitting on my butt, dazed. It felt like my tailbone was broken and my spine was cracked.

  Knack Ace You was strong as an ape, and he had just shaken off my hold the way you’d shake off a pushy ten-year old.

  He slurped and snorted at me, making what you would call whale-song sounds, if you were in a good mood, or farting noises, if you were not.

  Pally said, “Time to go. No horseplay. He’s freeborn. Doesn’t matter if he has a head or not, brains or not. Rational creatures all serve the Dark Tower, and whoever is above us, is above. Remember what I said about wiping and eating hands, eh? Time to get aboard your Raising Vessel.” That was his name for the blue glass rowboat. “Your Wayship is due to pass.”

  3. Cramped but Grinning

  So I spent what seemed an hour folded up in a cramped little bottle that was designed to seat men shorter than me, and skinnier than Knack, with a headless monster much stronger than me, who thought I was lunch.

  But I laughed and smiled most of that time, because Pally had unintentionally told me that Enmeduranki had fooled me. The Dark Lord who never lies had lied, or at least tried to mislead me. He did not know who I was or who my parents were. He had heard me talk, and made a guess about my origins, just like Abanshaddi had, just like Pallishabdu had.

  (And I also laughed, wondering whether my dad actually really and truly owned a jetpack. That would be totally awesome.)

  Suppose Enmeduranki had been misleading me about other things? I wondered if the Dark Tower had even broken through to Earth, or managed to connect with a working Moebius coil to transport in soldiers and supplies, or establish a beachhead. Pally had not mentioned troops mobilizing to go there. Earth might not be conquered. It might not even be a battleground.

  And I thought about my mother in a twilight-poisoned world called Sabtechadur, buried in a walled garden city called Agarththa. And I wondered about a world called Raamah where a man named Kai Khosrow slept in a place called Shazand.

  And Earth. I wondered about the aeon called Albion. I wondered what would happen there, what the outcomes of these three worlds of battle would be.

  It was dispiriting to think that everyone who read the papers in the Dark Tower already knew those answers. And had known, years and years beforehand.

  4. Never Stop to Look

  After being stuffed together in the same Raising Vessel, a volume not much bigger than a coffin, and sniffing each others’ sweat, and sliding down a sheer drop like the neverending first slope of a roller coaster, so that we had the worst parts of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, Knack Ace You and I reached a landing somewhere far lower, where the air was warm and normal, and I saw a throng of people, mostly Persian-looking fellows in square beards and brass armor, crowding the docks.

  Knack kicked open the Raising Vessel lid with a grunt of distaste. I could see he hated me from the look on his chest, as I gave him a cheery three-fingered Boy Scout salute, and climbed from the car.

  I should have taken off like a jackrabbit. I stopped and gawked for a moment.

  That turned out to be a mistake.

  5. Embarkation

  In addition to soldiers and officers in togas, kirtles, and cloaks, from various sword-and-sandal films, were men in mail byries from King Arthur flicks, figures in shawls and hoods and headscarves from the Arabian Nights tales complete with forked beards and crooked swords, and painted cannibals in grass skirts armed with bamboo javelins on spearthrowers carved from mastodon-tusk ivory carried at the shoulder. All of them ignored me.

  There were also women old and young, some in many-layered gowns adorned with feathers being escorted by slaves holding parasols adorned with bells; other women wore saris or kimonos or feathered headdresses like showgirls; others wore sleek, satin, and long-skirted versions of the uniforms of their men, pips of their husband’s rank on their shoulders.

  There was a pecking order. The ones dressed in rough leather got out of the way of the ones dressed in silk; and the ones dressed in burlap tunics belted with rope got out of the way of the ones dressed in rough leather. Everyone got out of the way of any lady with a bell-tinkling parasol, including soldiers and officers. Even among parasol-shaded dames there was a hierarchy. Matrons and noblewomen dressed with birds and feather designs deferred to royalty dressed in designs of stars and constellations.

  It was not hard to guess what all the bustle meant. Several golden wayships longer than freight trains were being loaded with troops, and the families highborn and low had gathered to see them off.

  The otherworldlies and nonhumans being marched into the cattle cars from a fenced-off section of the wharf also had their women and young ones with them: I saw savage-looking bowmen and slingers from some race whose feet and legs were put on backward wearing peaked caps and cloaks of bright red adorned with spirals of gold, hairy human scalps as bibs or scarves; I stared at even more savage-looking fellows dressed in bearskins and blue grease; I squinted at the freakishly big-eared midgets I had seen before; I grimaced at wolf-headed hominids loping and gamboling; and looming above all were creatures shaped like serpents larger than crocodiles from the waist downward, and which from the waist upward wore the panoply of Hellenic Hoplites, heavy shields round as the moon and lances longer than a human-sized soldier could carry. These serpent-men were resplendent in brass chestplates and shining Corinthian helmets adorned with crests, their faces half-unseen and s
kull-like beneath the Y-shaped eye-and-mouth openings.

  Each inhuman race of men had their womenfolk saying tearful farewells or stern: sharp-featured women in caps as tall as miniature towers, with nicely-combed scalps (no doubt severed from enemy skulls) worn as scarves or boas, and their backward-pointing feet in delicate, decorated sandals; doe-eyed cavewomen dressed in doe-skin leather; slender, dark girls wrapped from neck to knee in their own ears, the outside flaps of which were adorned by hundreds of beads in rippling sand-painting patterns and mandalas.

  But the most striking of all were the she-cobras, snake from the curvaceous hips down, but gorgeous from the wasp-waists up, with hourglass figures and generous bosoms, and all glittering with silver and sapphire and ruby and emerald, with scores of bracelets on each wrist, armlets at the elbow, nose rings piercing the nose, earrings the ears, buttons of diamond piercing the belly button, not to mention necklaces and sinuous waist-belts of fine gold chain. The snake women glittered like glass when they moved, coiling and uncoiling, for they had adorned the Cobra-patterns of the scales of their hips and tails with additional geometries and swirls of embedded gems and polished stones.

  I was staring at all this when Knack the headless monster grabbed me from behind.

  6. Crooked Speaking

  The Blemmyae reached out with a hand twice the size of mine, and the flesh of the hand had little bristles growing out of it, like the hair of an elephant. I wonder if he had used his left hand to grab me for a reason, because there seemed to be a stink coming from his fingers.

  He took my mantle by the back of the neck and heaved up his arm and dangled me by one hand over the side of the wharf, so I was both choking and kicking, my feet in midair above an infinite drop.

  Faces in the crowd were turning toward us, for even among the bustle and commotion of the embarking, a murder is always a spectacle.