My map grows black with Hanyia’s handwriting and we draw closer to my fellow split-self. A reunion that might mean salvation or a hastening of the end.
The edge of an old, old forest, where the bones of great monsters sprawl like a city’s carcass. Ribs like arches, mouths like gates, and spines like sheer, high walls. All lined with overgrowth. It is deserted otherwise—no birds nest in the branches, no insects skitter underfoot, no predators stalk the shade.
Hanyia follows where I lead, but she keeps an eye out. I catch her searching the gaps between ribs, the porous holes that time has carved onto the femurs. “This must be it,” she says, and recoils when her voice pierces the quiet. “The path no longer forks.”
It is as she says: no more forking, only a straight course forward. I look up through the canopy of bone and ahead through the shifting light. I listen for signs.
We come to a small, old shrine of dark stone. Before it lies a tray of offerings: a bottle of liquid poetry, a tiger pelt, silver coronets, mermaid scales, pomegranate seeds. A live snake has draped itself all over this, and at first I mistake it for another offering. The animal is unremarkable, light yellow dappled in earthy green, small. It rears as I try to pass; in the hard, dark earth, sentences appear in precise, golden script. You were last here not so long ago. Do you require further passage?
Surprisingly officious for a snake. “I do require passage to where I went before.”
The previous words disappear, replaced by, I do not see your fee. Unless the crow-blessed woman is your fee?
Hanyia twitches. I put my hand on her elbow, a light touch. “She is no one’s fee,” I say. “And I overpaid.”
It is not possible for a snake to grin, but there is something self-satisfied to the way it curves itself into a winding spiral. You’re a different one. By definition you must pay. Give me the crow-blessed. No harm will come to her. It undulates over the payment already made, over the tiger pelt. The gate I keep loves beautiful things, and will hold her for just a few days.
Two is right that I’m the one who walks away, though in the end, all of us exist on a continuum. I need to find Four. But I do not need to find Four that much.
“No,” I say, and turn aside.
We go in silence the way we came, out of the ink-dark shadows, away from the ruins of enormous monsters, those bones of predators that roamed the earth long before human genesis. Here the sky will always be this precise shade of blue, the soil this exact hue of black, and the snake will always be guarding its gate. It is suspended in time, the same way I am.
I take Hanyia’s hand and bring us to a small house by a river where water runs over green glittering stone. It is not until we are inside and I have lit the lamps that she says, “The snake wasn’t lying. No harm would have come to me.”
“Not in that moment, not even the next day or the next year. It was truthful that the entire time you were kept there, not a hair on you would have been injured. But in a decade or so, the sickness would manifest.” I hadn’t known this before we visited that place, that gatekeeper. That is where it would have begun, and where it ends is in that glass coffin, that array of gold jewelry and golden silk.
“You will have to be more specific.”
“I have seen your death.” The words are heavier than I’d meant, Two’s grief in my throat like a stone. “I decline to be its cause.” Perhaps that will change Two’s existence now, even Three’s. But most likely not. Each of us exists in our own separate tributary, and one of us—perhaps most of us—sacrificed Hanyia.
“How—” She has a fair idea of the workings of foresight, and no doubt she has judged me not gifted in that area. Sitting down on a parlor chair upholstered in rose gold, she meets my eyes; hers are hard. “What are you actually. I deserve to know, after all this.”
“The place you saw in my dream. That’s me. Or that was me, at any rate.”
“City-souls no longer exist.”
“Not in your time. I’m somewhat unmoored from that concept, forward and backward.” I shut the door. Open a window. At this time of the year, the weather is crisp and clean. Distant owls call—I could make heavy shrouds of their hooting, black or indigo. “The person I’ve been seeking is one of my fragments, my other-selves; she disappeared and I’ve felt myself diminished since. The city I used to be is centuries dead. I was hoping my siblings and I could last a little longer, though perhaps it’s time we follow our ruin.” Our people, the thirty thousand that used to live within my walls; that filled my streets with song.
Hanyia parts her mouth. She lets out a long, weighed breath. “I thought that if I traveled with you, I would see that place eventually. It was so beautiful—you were so beautiful—and I’d have given almost anything to see you like that.”
Other cities have looked upon me with pity. A few dreamers, ensnared in my dream, fled once they understood they could wither within it and never see their bodies again. “Yes,” I say, “it was.”
“Tell me your name,” she says softly.
I kneel before her and speak. The lamps gutter out under the force of it, of voicing something that has been forgotten for so long.
Hanyia is gone the next dawn. I didn’t expect her to remain; our journey is over and I left her compensation on the dining table. That too is gone. She is pragmatic; if the city that she fell in love with is no longer to be found, it is sensible for her to return to her life, and this house is of the same era that she is. A half-month voyage will bring her back to Moraheen, but most likely she will seek a place richer and livelier. And now she can afford nearly any life she desires.
It stings, but in this tributary of existence, I have altered her destiny. She has not been touched by the gatekeeper, and she will not wed me and die in the Crescent Fastness. Hanyia is free. That salves me a little, even if Two will still unravel from grief and Three will forever fly in her cenotaph honoring Hanyia’s dust. Four is lost, and I will be too, eventually. But not Hanyia, and that counts for something.
I take a walk down the bright, glassy river. It is rare that I settle in any one place, any one period. How long I have remaining I cannot tell, one mortal lifetime or ten, or less. I am difficult to quantify, even to myself. Before it all ends, I will let Two and Three know that the Hanyia I met found a fate different from their Hanyias. One last favor to them, to myself; a reminder that not all is inevitable.
In the days that follow I dedicate myself to foraging, reacquainting myself with solitude. An easy task in the wild, far from civilization. In time I will be ready for human company again; I will find my level and then my peace. That is all any creature can do.
On a bleached evening, I return to the little house by the river with fresh food. Two dark rabbits, caught in a trap, whose necks I quickly wrung; no point being cruel. I measure my day out in mortal terms, and that means eating as though my body requires sustenance.
There is someone waiting on my veranda.
The rabbits drop from my slack hand, thumping against the grass. I give them no heed; I stride faster, closing the distance.
Hanyia is in a dress of iridescent velvet, like something I might coax out of opals on a cloudless day. She stands as I draw near. Smiles. “I was right that I’d still find you here. I have someone you’ll want to meet.”
The door to my house—to which only I have the key—opens and there is Four, somewhat worse for wear but whole, clad entirely in gray as though she has only had granite and limestone to spin clothes from. She watches me approach, as still as only we can be; inert in the way of statues.
“Four,” I say.
Her head tips a fraction. “One.” She glances at Hanyia, then back to me. “Hanyia found me through our name—she truly can see passages no one else can. And... I ought to explain where I’ve been, where the serpent’s gate leads.”
She doesn’t need to. On contact, we know everything about each other. That quirk of ours has not faded. “A passage of katabasis and reflection. A way to cheat our destruction.”
“To postpone it, at least. We can’t exactly return to before our city-self died, but there is a technicality. Frozen in time, an image in the afterlife.” Four’s expression turns rueful. “Other cities, too. It is where we can be as we once were. Not perfectly, and not for long.”
“It is something.” I hold my hand out to Hanyia, my oracle, my dreamer.
“And I do want my real payment.” Hanyia laces her fingers through mine. “To see you as you once were, to see that dream in the waking. More splendid than anything, the most brilliant city of all.”
Four gathers us to her and uncovers the thin veil of the world, revealing behind it a gate she has made: cobalt, just like our walls used to be, a memory of our city-self made incarnate. Arm in arm we slip into this, a gap in the fabric of existence, a crossroad through intersecting time. We are away, into the past that is also our future.
You are a city incarnated, clad in stone and glass and marble and iron, and sometimes in human form.
All is well, though it will not always be. Death waits in every crack of stone, every outbreak of sickness. But that is as it is. Even cities do not last forever. For now it suffices that you are here, and she with you; for now it suffices that the briars and the glass coffin and the long mourning are held at bay. Those possibilities may arrive, still.
But not yet.
© Copyright 2020 Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Benjanun Sriduangkaew - [BCS319 S02] Page 2