by J L Forrest
A raven’s deep caw draws my attention. Twenty meters from me, Nevermore perches on the lowest branch of an oak tree.
Someone says, “The fool’s awake.”
A Horned Lord comes into view, standing a few paces beyond the foot of my cot. Two spear-carrying women approach from the right. One holds a simple wooden chair in her free hand, and she sets it beside me.
She’s of Japanese descent, I’m certain. Beautiful, difficult to look away from her. Her lips are an unusual mauve, a color I haven’t yet seen in the spectra of the Faen, in whatever infects this land.
Backing to the edge of the canvas, she stands guard.
Across camp, Bettina finishes a conversation with two gray-haired men, who bow to her and hurry off on some task. The Queen musses the hair of a young boy, waves to his mother, then crosses the camp. She looks me over and sighs.
“You,” she says, “are one dumb sonuvabitch.”
I manage a smile. “I like to think of myself as determined and focused.”
She settles in the chair. “How’re you feeling?”
My leg throbs and pain spikes from my knee to my lower back. I try wiggling my toes but can’t feel them, can’t be sure if they moved or not. My thinking feels fuzzy.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I assume I’m on painkillers?”
“Doped out of your mind,” she says. “What were you thinking? A spy needs to be more than a good observer or a good fighter or a good athlete or a good swimmer.”
“What sort of painkillers?”
“The strong kind.” She sighs. “Foremost a spy needs to be a good liar.”
“Yeah?”
Her earthy irises flicker side to side as she studies me. “You’re a terrible liar.”
My laugh is honest and unexpected. “I’ve got to return to Station.”
“That we cannot allow you to do, Aur, not yet. You’ve crossed into the Faen, an unwanted guest.”
“Guest?”
“A one-way guest.”
“Why?”
“For obvious reasons,” she says, “we can’t let you report anything you’ve seen here, not to Avidità, not to anyone else.”
“Why not kill me?”
She leans back, resting her hands on her knees. “Don’t imagine for a moment your reprieve is permanent, is guaranteed.”
“Who determines whether I live or die? You?”
“You, actually.” She gestures to a glass water bottle on a wooden table. The Horned Lord brings it to her, and she offers it to me. I hadn’t realized how parched I felt, how cracked my lips had become despite the humidity and cold—maybe because of the cold and all that time in salt water. “The Faen has you, Aur. Let it have you. Everything you once did for Avidità, we want you to do for us.”
I guzzle the bottle, and she hands it back to the Horned Lord.
“You want me,” I say, “to betray Mr. Avidità? Never to see him again?”
She half shrugs. “Who knows what the future holds? But your only option, Aur, is to say yes.”
“If I say no?”
Bettina smiles, laying her hand on my shoulder. “The Horned Lord will know if you refuse, or if you lie, as He knew you were lying at Threshold.”
I glance at the man standing nearby, a man as shaggy and wild as the other Horned Lords, his antlered headdress touching the tarp above him, his red- and blue-stained leathers marking him as an entity of the forests, no one meant for civilization. His darkly stained lips frown, as all other men like him tend to frown. Yet I know Bettina doesn’t mean this Horned Lord, and it occurs to me all the Horned Lords may reflect a single identity, a single expression of the Horned Lord, who is no man at all.
The Horned Lord will know if I refuse.
He’ll know if I lie.
Uncomfortable, I shift in the cot. “How bad is the leg?”
“Dr. Falwell doesn’t know if you’ll keep it. Another reason why you won’t be returning to San Francisco—or to orbit—anytime soon.”
Dr. Jane Falwell, once of Strickland Industries, now a devotee to the Queens.
“Up there,” I say, “they could save it.”
“Maybe, but you’re not ‘up there.’ Down here the best I’m going to guarantee you is you won’t die from gangrene or a Clostridium infection.”
“How reassuring.”
“Dr. Falwell will check on you this evening,” Bettina says, rising from her chair, looking down at me, “assuming you live that long. This afternoon, her nurses will change your bandages.”
“When do I receive my sentence?” I ask.
“Sunset.” She walks into the daylight, leaning back and closing her eyes to the sky. “You still thirsty, Aur? Hungry?”
“Both. Very.”
“The sun is wondrous!” she says. “Would you like to come out and join me?”
Why the hell not? The giggles of children grow louder, some game of chase, as many as a dozen cavorting throughout the forests.
“What’s there to eat?” I ask.
She looks over her shoulder, her brown eyes catching the light. “Spring greens, squash, cornbread, rice. Eggs, of course. Baked vegetables. Roasted chicken. Plenty of barbecued rabbit.”
“Barbecued rabbit?”
“On these islands there’s an overabundance of coney.”
“No long pig on offer today?” All those rumors about the Horned Lords and cannibalism.
“On Easter?” Bettina chuckles. “If you need to wash your meal down,” she says, “we’ve got beer and mead too.”
“I should stick with water.”
“You sure?” she says. “It could be your last day on Earth.”
I think she understands the irony.
She also said barbecued rabbit.
I’m starving.
Easter eggs. Yes, the children were chasing and wrestling and giggling and playing, but they were also hunting for Easter eggs. Scores of eggs around the encampment, dyed brightly and outrageously patterned. In my twenty-seven years I’ve never participated in an Easter-egg hunt, though I understand quite a few Stations host them, places with Christians.
Here, on Wrangell, this is not a Christian celebration.
Nevermore sometimes circles above us, sometimes flies elsewhere. I seldom notice the moment he comes or goes. Several dozen people of all ages gather here. A fiddler and drummers play ditties which could be centuries old, tunes from the Yukon or Appalachia or Ireland, and listeners dance as they’re inspired. At the other side of the clearing, Alastar’s nurse holds the infant at her breast. The toddler plays at her feet, a brown-skinned girl with untamed hair.
“She’s your daughter,” I say to Bettina.
“Yes,” says the Queen, her gaze wistful, lingering on the children.
“What’s her name?”
“Firyali.”
A Kenyan word meaning extraordinary, if I remember correctly. I feel it wise not asking who the father might be. Across the extended encampment, I count a hundred adults. There’re dozens of children. I see no easily defined “nuclear” families anywhere.
“What’s to happen to Alastar?” I ask.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s to happen?’ We’ll raise him as our own.”
“I’m happy to hear that.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” she says, “we know he’s some trickery of Avidità. I admit, too, I thought he might’ve been a weapon, suggested killing him the night you arrived.”
I don’t bother hiding my horror.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “If Alastar was a weapon, Avidità would’ve used it already, don’t you think? There’s been ample time.”
“I’m sure he’s not a weapon,” I say.
“Would Avidità have told you if the child was?”
I’m not certain.
“The afternoon’s getting late,” she says. “Sun’s almost to the trees. Did you get enough to eat, Aur? Enough to drink?”
“I’ve had my fill.”
From the trees to the east
, Cailín and Eagna emerge. The girl holds her puppy, the mottled charcoal fluff ball, which lies contentedly in her arms. Not more than five kilos’ worth of dog. I don’t figure I’ll see the white one but then—
There it is, playing behind her legs.
Eagna looks straight at me, the way she might look at a dull landscape. Stepping behind her mother, she scratches each puppy’s head.
“It’s time,” says Cailín.
Two Horned Lords lift my cot and carry me in the direction from which Cailín arrived. A procession forms, including the Queens, four of their mauve-lipped spearwomen, the Horned Lords, the musicians, Eagna and her puppies, the nurse with Alastar, Firyali, the two gray-haired men, and twenty others. Nevermore caws and croaks and laughs as if at his own private joke.
After a few hundred meters a stand of cedars yields to an expanse of oaks. One in particular towers, its crown overarching the forest, its lowest bows a hundred paces wide. Ribbons of blue and red and purple flutter from its branches.
How can it be that I’m relieved to count nine human skulls hanging from its limbs? No vacancies to fill—
On the oak’s other side, the circle of white standing stones await us. At their center lies the charred fire pit, and the Horned Lords set me down beside it. The musicians strike a slow rhythm, the fiddler’s melody lulling and bittersweet. The gray-haired men hand two folds of cloth to Cailín.
The Queens join me in the circle and the others take up positions outside it. Nevermore disappears into the labyrinth of branches, and the oak darkens, its shadows condensing. Sol settles behind the forests but sponges the western sky in a riot of amber, scarlet, and cobalt.
Bettina sits beside me on the dirt, and she sets a bowl beside her. Cailín circles the pit and, as she does, its fire sparks, grows, and blazes. At its other side she turns toward the oak, raises her arms, and speaks in that strange tongue.
The only word I understand is Nodens.
“Listen,” I say to Bettina, conscious of the rising panic in my own voice, “I have to tell you something.”
She smiles, caresses my cheek, and waits for me to continue. Cailín continues her chant.
“If I don’t report back to Mr. Avidità,” I say, “he’ll finish what he started. He’ll destroy you, then he’ll destroy the rest of the world.” Once the words start coming, they flow. “An ice age! He plans to return the Earth to an ice age. I’m the only one who can stop—”
“Stop,” says Bettina, her smile unfaded, her voice gentle. “We already know all that.”
Of course they do.
A dusting of aubergine powder coats the bottom of the bowl. Bettina swipes her thumb through it, then pressed her thumb to my forehead, right above my eyes.
No pain this time.
“Tell us,” she says, “here in the Grove of the Horned Lord—do you wish to live, or do you wish to die?”
A loss of life, I have always felt, points to some earlier and more essential error and I told myself, before departing EIK-Cel Station, I’d try to get this done without dying. The darkness beneath the oak deepens further, and maybe it’s the setting sun or maybe it’s something else, but that darkness feels as much like a blanket as it does anything else.
I’ll get this done without dying.
“Life,” I say. “I choose life.”
Bettina’s smile is pure cheer, Cailín’s words reach a crescendo, and the fire’s warmth and light dance with the shadows.
Leaning over me, Bettina slides her hands through my hair. She gazes into my eyes and the tip of her nose brushes mine, a touch easeful and intimate. Lingering in it, she kisses me—
A hint of marshmallow, pepper, and pheromones in the taste of her.
—and she kisses me—
—and she kisses me.
Horns made of cold flame curl from the sides of her head, encircling her ears. Ewe’s horns. The only crown this Queen needs.
Cailín rounds the fire once more, fiery antlers rising above her hair. From the cloths she retrieves two small metallic devices, encased in resin, and she throws these into the fire. I recognize them—Avidità Corporation personal-data trackers.
Bait, now used up.
Again, Bettina kisses me, patient and ambrosial and sovereign. Magic pulses through this land, beacons of Light and rivers of Darkness which appear to me for the first time, spreading from this grove. Wrangell is the center of the cosmos. I vanish into Bettina’s kiss and this time I know—
Mr. Avidità and his Corporation.
Nesteler and the UPRC.
All the Gods of the New Moons.
—they haven’t got a prayer.
Further Reading (and Listening)
Songs at the End of the World
I. When the World Ends
II. Gods of the New Moons
III. Queens of the Horned Lord [Coming 2019]
IV. Memories of the Damned [Coming 2019]
V. When the World Begins [Coming 2019]
Short Fiction
Minuscule Truths (Short Fictions II)
Delicate Ministrations (Short Fictions I)
The Eternal Requiem
I. Requies Dawn
II. Requies Day [Late 2019]
III. Requies Dusk [To Be Announced]
IV. Requies Night [To Be Announced]
For Your Consideration
Join the Newsletter for new releases and special announcements.
Listen to “Re-Entry”, the Track which inspired this novella.
Learn more about King Makis and the musicians at NiceFM.
If you liked this book, one of the best things you can do is recommend it to others and leave a positive review at Amazon.
Afterword
I wrote this book’s predecessor in an epistolary form, through the journal entries of Bettina Ukweli. Epistolary storytelling is less common in this twenty-first century, but some of the best-known Victorian writers mastered it. Epistolary arrives from the Latin epistolāris, meaning “that which belongs to a letter.” For the Victorians, this included correspondences, contracts, reports, official records, articles, and even journal entries—a letter to oneself. Epistolary stories fascinate me in four ways.
I. Creative Constraints
Epistolary storytelling constrains narrative, even more than limited-third-person or first-person points of view (POVs) do. First- or limited-third-person POVs permit the writer to shift slyly into omniscience. The epistolary POV resists that.
II. Focus
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is famously epistolary, its narration razor honed. As his characters’ story emerged through correspondences, Stoker could waste few words, his exposition confined. Thus, Dracula’s prose obtains force. By comparison, Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm inches along, its prose flaccid, its storytelling limp, its exposition clunky, its characters indistinct.
White Worm employs a mishmash of limited-third person and omniscient third. The epistolary magic which constrained Stoker’s worst impulses in Dracula appears nowhere in White Worm.
III. Unreliable Narrators
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club gave us one of the most unreliable narrators in all literature. Told in limited first person, Fight Club depended upon its narrator’s own confusion—and dissociative disorder.
Stories told from multiple first-person accounts generate a similar sense of unreliability. Journals, letters, emails, and communiques of every kind lend themselves to unreliable narration. Competing first-person accounts imply the cracks, inconsistencies, and missing pieces in an incomplete narrative. Who's telling the truth? Who's lying? Who's wrong? Who's right?
Characters, like real people, perceive reality through myriad lenses.
No other storytelling structure creates such tension between narratives as the epistolary. Third person often implies an objectivity; the epistolary makes no such promises.
This is both its strength and its weakness. Some readers, I'm convinced, crave narrative reliability—they want to believe the narrator
, or perhaps the writer, is telling the “truth”—but epistolary POVs deny this to both reader and writer. The tension this creates is delicious, if one can acquire the taste for it.
IV. Voice
Third-person narratives depend upon the singular power of the author’s voice. First-person narratives emerge out of a narrower POV, but most first-person stories belong to one character alone—whether in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart.
An epistolary story can draw from numerous accounts in many voices. Dracula’s first hundred pages contain nine unique POVs, told in first and third person. No other form allows an author so many points of view and with so many voices, varying tense, style, language, and grammar.
The grammar gives me some consternation. I admit, I worry some readers won’t stay with me. For example:
There, where the UPRC might’ve killed us, I feared for Aurelius more than myself. After all, I love him.
That last clause—I love him—uses the present tense. As a journal entry, the writer is recounting earlier events, but in writing I love him, she’s in her mind in the present moment. She still lives, Aurelius still lives, and so her love is in the present too. In a usual third-person narrative, the final clause would have also been in a past tense, as if the entire story occurs in a flash memory on one’s deathbed.
In fact, that’s how I think of most limited-third-person fiction. This must be one’s life, recalled on the deathbed, flashing before one’s eyes? Mustn’t it?
Yet that is how most authors write most third-person fiction.