by Clive Barker
Joe did the same and was not disappointed. The water had a pleasant pungency about it. He swallowed several mouthfuls and then waded back to the shore, feeling more replete than he’d imagined possible given the fare.
In the time he and Noah had been discussing fish and God, the entire procession had arrived at the crack—which was indeed growing larger: it was half as tall again as it had been when he’d stepped through it—the members of the procession now gathered at the threshold.
“Are they going through?” he said.
“It looks that way,” Noah replied. He glanced up at the sky, which though it had no sun in it was darker than it had been. “If some of them remain,” he said, “we may find our crew among them.”
“For what ship?”
“What other ship do we have but this?” Noah said, slamming his palm against The Fanacapan.
“There are others in the harbor,” Joe said, pointing along the shore toward the city. “Big ships. This thing doesn’t even look seaworthy. And even if it is, how the hell are we going to persuade anyone to come with us?”
“That’s my problem,” Noah said. “Why don’t you rest a while? Sleep if you can. We’ve a busy night ahead of us.”
“Sleep?” Joe said. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
He thought about getting a blanket and a pillow out of one of the cabins, but decided it wasn’t worth being lice-ridden for the little snugness they’d afford, and instead made himself as comfortable as he could on the bare stones. It was undoubtedly the most uncomfortable bed he’d ever attempted to lie upon, but the serenity of the sky made a powerful soporific, and though he never fell into a deep enough sleep to dream, he drifted for a while.
From Everville
The distance between the shores of Mem-é b’Kether Sabbat and the mountainside where Tesla and Phoebe were climbing was not readily measured. Though generations of thinkers in both the Cosm and the Metacosm had attempted to evolve a theory of distance between the two worlds, there was little consensus on the subject. The only thing the various factions agreed upon was that this distance could not be measured with a rule and an abacus. After all, it was not simply the distance between two points: it was the distance between two stores. Some said it was best viewed as an entirely symbolic space, like that between worshiper and deity, and proposed an entirely new system of measurement applicable to such cases. Others argued that a soul moving from the Helter Incendo into Quiddity underwent such a radical altering that the best way to describe and analyze the distance, if the word distance were still applicable (which they doubted), was to derive it from the vocabulary of spiritual reformation. The notion proved untenable, however, one man’s reformation being another’s heresy.
Finally, there were those who argued that the relationships between Sapas Humana and the dream-sea were all in the mind, and any attempt to measure distance was doomed to failure. Surely, they opined, the space between one thought and another was beyond the wit of any man to measure. They were accused of defeatism by some of their enemies; of shoddy metaphysics by others. Men and women only entered the dream-sea three times, they were reminded. For the rest of their lives Quiddity was a lot further than a thought away. Not so, the leader of this faction—a mystic from Joom called Carasophia—argued. The wall between the Cosm and the Metacosm was getting steadily thinner, and would—he predicted—soon disappear altogether, at which point the minds of Sapas Humana, which seemed so pathetically literal, would be revealed to be purveyors of the miraculous, even in their present, primal state.
Carasophia had died for his theories, assassinated in a field of sunflowers outside Eliphas, but he would have found comforting evidence for his beliefs had he wandered through the minds of the people gathered along the parade route in Everville. People were dreaming today, even though their eyes were wide open.
Parents dreaming of being free as their children; children dreaming of having their parents’ power.
Lovers seeing the coming night in each other’s eyes; old folks, staring at their hands, or at the sky, seeing the same.
Dreams of sex, dreams of oblivion; dreams of circus and bacchanalia.
And further down the parade route, sitting by the window from which he’d so recently fallen, a man dreaming of how it would be when he had the Art for himself, and time and distance disappeared forever.
Though the trees that bounded the shore of Ephemeris grew so close together their exposed roots knotted like the fingers of praying hands, and the canopy overhead was so dense the sky was blotted out altogether, there was not a leaf, twig, or patch of moss that didn’t exude light, which eased joe’s progress considerably. Once in the midst of the forest, he had to rely upon his sense of direction to bring him out the other side, which indeed it did. After perhaps half an hour the trees began to thin, and he stumbled into the open air.
There, a scene lay before him of such scale he could have stood and studied it for a week and not taken in every detail. Stretching in front of his feet for perhaps twenty miles was a landscape of bright fields and water-meadows, the former blazing green and yellow and scarlet, the latter sheets of silver and gold. Rising overhead, like a vast wave that had climbed to titanic height and now threatened to break over the perfection below, was a wall of darkness, which surely concealed the lad. It was not black, but a thousand shades of gray, tinged here and there with red and purple. It was impossible to judge the matter of which it was made. It had the texture of smoke in some places, in others it glistened like skinned muscle; in others still it divided in convulsions, and divided again, as though it were reproducing itself. Of the legion, or nation, that lurked behind it, there was no sign. The wave teetered, and teetered, and did not fall.
But there was another sight that was in its way more extraordinary still, and that was the city that stood in the shadow of this toppling sky: b’Kether Sabbat. The glory of the Ephemeris, Noah had called it and, had Joe’s journey taken him not one step closer to the city’s limits, he would have believed the boast.
It was shaped, this city, like an inverted pyramid, balanced on its tip. There was no sign of any structure supporting it in this position. Though there were myriad means of ascent from the ground to its underbelly, which was encrusted with what he assumed to be dwellings (though their occupants would have to have the attributes of bats to live there), the sum of these ladders and stairways was nowhere near sufficient to bear the city’s weight. He had no way to judge its true scale, but he was certain Manhattan would have fitted upon the upper surface with room to spare, which meant that the dozen or so towers that rose there, each resembling a vast swathe of fabric, plucked up by one corner and falling in countless folds, were many hundreds of stories high.
Despite the lights that blazed from their countless windows, Joe doubted the towers were occupied. B’Kether Sabbat’s citizens were choking the roads that led from the city, or rising from its streets and towers in wheeling flocks.
Such was the sheer immensity of this spectacle he was almost tempted to find himself a comfortable spot among the roots, and watch it until the wave broke, and it was obliterated. But the same curiosity that had brought him from the shore now pressed him on, down the slope and across a swampy field, where a crop of crystalline flowers sprouted, to the nearest of the roads. Despite the vast diversity of faces and forms in the throng upon that road, there was a certain desperation in their faces and in their forms a common dread. They shuddered and sweated as they went, their eyes—white, golden, blue, and black—cast over their shoulders now and again toward the city they’d deserted, and the teetering darkness that shadowed it.
Few showed any interest in Joe. And those few that did looked at him pityingly, judging him crazy, he supposed, for being the only traveler on this highway who was not fleeing b’Kether Sabbat, but heading back toward it.
From Weaveworld CAL, AMONG MIRACLES
True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.
Thus it was, when the dust s
torm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread before him, he felt as though the few fragile moments of epiphany he’d tasted in his twenty-six years—tasted but always lost—were here redeemed and wed. He’d grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumor of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire.
It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die.
And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him.
He was on a hill. Not high, but high enough to offer a vantage point. He got to his feet and surveyed this newfound land.
The unknotting of the carpet had by no means finished; the raptures of the Loom were far too complex to be so readily reversed. But the groundwork was laid: hills, fields, forest, and much else besides.
Last time he’d set eyes on this place it had been from a bird’s-eye view, and the landscape had seemed various enough. But from the human perspective its profusion verged on the riotous. It was as if a vast suitcase, packed in great haste, had been upturned, its contents scattered in hopeless disarray. There appeared to be no system to the geography, just a random assembling of spots the Seerkind had loved enough to snatch from destruction. Butterfly copses and placid water meadows; lairs and walled sanctuaries; keeps, rivers, and standing stones.
Few of these locations were complete: most were slivers and snatches, fragments of the Kingdom ceded to the Fugue behind humanity’s back. The haunted corners of familiar rooms that would neither be missed nor mourned, where children had perhaps seen ghosts or saints; where the fugitive might be comforted and not know why, and the suicide find reason for another breath.
Amid this disorder, the most curious juxtapositions abounded. Here a bridge, parted from the chasm it had crossed, sat in a field, spanning poppies; there an obelisk stood in the middle of a pool, gazing at its reflection.
One sight in particular caught Cal’s eye.
It was a hill, which rose almost straight-sided to a tree-crowned summit. Lights moved over its face, and danced among the branches. Having no sense of direction here, he decided to make his way down toward it.
There was music playing somewhere in the night. It came to him by fits and starts, at the behest of the breeze. Drums and violins; a mingling of Strauss and Sioux. And occasionally, evidence of people too. Whispers in the trees; shadowed figures beneath a canopy which stood in the middle of a waist-high field of grain. But the creatures were fugitive; they came and went too quickly for him to gain more than a fleeting impression. Whether this was because they knew him for the Cuckoo he was, or simply out of shyness, only time would tell. Certainly he felt no threat here, despite the fact that he was, in a sense, trespassing. On the contrary, he felt utterly at peace with the world and himself. So much so that his concern for the others here—Suzanna, Apolline, Jerichau, Nimrod—was quite remote. When his thoughts did touch upon them it was only to imagine them wandering as he was wandering, lost among miracles. No harm could come to them; not here. Here was an end to harm, and malice, and envy too. Having this living rapture wrapping him round, what was left to envy or desire?
He was within a hundred yards of the hill and stood before it in amazement. The lights he’d seen from a distance were in fact human fireflies; wingless, but describing effortless arabesques around the hill. There was no communication between them that he could hear, yet they had the precision of daredevils, their maneuvers repeatedly bringing them within a hairbreadth of each other.
“You must be Mooney.”
The speaker’s voice was soft, but it broke the hold the lights had on him. Cal looked off to his right. Two figures were standing in the shade of an archway, their faces still immersed in darkness. All he could see were the two blue-gray ovals of their faces, hanging beneath the arch like lanterns.
“Yes. I’m Mooney,” he said. Show yourselves, he thought. “How do you know my name?”
“News travels fast here,” came the reply. The voice seemed slightly softer and more fluting than the first, but he couldn’t be certain it wasn’t the same speaker. “It’s the air,” said his informant. “It gossips.”
Now one of the pair stepped into the night light. The soft illumination from the hill moved on his face, lending it strangeness, but even had Cal seen it by daylight this was a face to be haunted by. He was young, yet completely bald, his features powdered to remove any modulation in skin tone, his mouth and eyes almost too wet, too vulnerable, in the mask of his features.
“I’m Boaz,” he said. “You’re welcome, Mooney.”
He took Cal’s hand, and shook it, and as he did so his companion broke her covenant with shadow.
“You can see the Amadou?” she said.
It took Cal several seconds to conclude that the second speaker was indeed a woman, the processes of his doubt in turn throwing doubt on the sex of Boaz, for the two were very close to being identical twins.
“I’m Ganza,” said the second speaker. She was dressed in the same plain black trousers and loose tunic as her brother, or lover, or whatever he was; and she too was bald. That, and their powdered faces, seemed to confuse all the clichés of gender. Their faces were vulnerable, yet implacable; delicate, yet severe.
Boaz looked toward the hill, where the fireflies were still cavorting.
“This is the Rock of the First Fatality,” he told Cal. “The Amadou always gather here. This is where the first victims of the Scourge died.”
Cal looked back toward the Rock, but only for a moment. Boaz and Ganza fascinated him more; their ambiguities multiplied the more he watched them.
“Where are you going tonight?” said Ganza.
Cal shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “I don’t know a yard of this place.”
“Yes, you do,” she said. “You know it very well.”
While she spoke she was idly locking and unlocking her fingers, or so it seemed, until Cal’s eyes lingered on the exercise for two or three seconds. Then it became apparent that she was passing her fingers through the palms of the other hand, left through right, right through left, defying their solidity. The motion was so casual, the illusion—if illusion it was—so quick, that Cal was by no means certain he was interpreting it correctly.
“How do they look to you?” she inquired.
He looked back at her face. Was the finger-trick some kind of test of his perception? It wasn’t her hands she was talking about, however.
“The Amadou,” she said. “How do they appear?”
He glanced toward the Rock again.
“Like human beings,” he replied.
She gave him a tiny smile.
“Why do you ask?” he wanted to know. But she didn’t have time to reply before Boaz spoke.
“There’s a Council been called,” he said. “At Capra’s House. I think they’re going to reweave.”
“That can’t be right,” said Cal. “They’re going to put the Fugue back?”
“That’s what I hear,” said Boaz.
It seemed to be fresh news to him; had he just lifted it off the gossiping air? “The times are too dangerous, they’re saying,” he told Cal. “Is that true?”
“I don’t know any other,” Cal said. “So I’ve got nothing to compare them with.”
“Do we have the night?” Ganza asked.
“Some of it,” said Boaz.
“Then we’ll go to see Lo; yes?”
“It’s as good a place as any,” Boaz replied. “Will you come?” he asked the Cuckoo.
Cal looked back toward the Amadou. The thought of staying and watching their performance a while longer was tempting, but he might not find another guide to show him the sights, and if time here was short then he’d best make the most of it.
“Yes. I’ll come.”
The woman had stopped lacing her fingers.
“You’ll like Lo,” she said, turning away, and starting off into the night.
He followed, already full to
brimming with questions, but knowing that if indeed he only had hours to taste Wonderland he should not waste time and breath asking.
From Weaveworld
THE ORCHARD OF LEMUEL LO
Neither Boaz nor Ganza were voluble guides. They led the way through the Fugue in almost complete silence, only breaking that silence to warn Cal that a stretch of ground was treacherous, or to keep close to them as they moved down a colonnade in which he heard dogs panting. In a sense he was glad of their quietness. He didn’t want a guided tour of the terrain, at least not tonight. He’d known, when he’d first looked down at the Fugue from the wall in Mimi’s yard, that it couldn’t be mapped, nor its contents listed and committed to memory like his beloved timetables. He would have to understand the Weaveworld in a different fashion: not as hard fact but as feeling. The schism between his mind and the world it was attempting to grasp was dissolving. In its place was a relationship of echo and counter echo. They were thoughts inside each other’s heads, he and this world; and that knowledge, which he could never have found the words to articulate, turned the journey into a tour of his own history. He’d known from Mad Mooney that poetry was heard differently from ear to ear. Poetry was like that. The same, he began to see, was also true of geography.
They climbed a long slope. He thought maybe a tide of crickets leaped before their feet; the earth seemed alive.
At the top of the slope they looked across a field. At the far side of the field was an orchard.
“Almost there,” said Ganza, and they began toward it.
The orchard was the biggest single feature he’d seen in the Fugue so far; a plot of maybe thirty or forty trees, planted in rows and carefully pruned so that their branches almost touched. Beneath this canopy were passages of neatly clipped grass, dappled by velvet light.
“This is the orchard of Lemuel Lo,” Boaz said, as they stood on the perimeter. His gentle voice was softer than ever. “Even among the fabled, it’s fabled.”