She nodded. ‘Everyone knows their parts. There’s just the fear that we should make some recognition signal as we enter harbour ...’
That was it. There was some reassurance to be gained from the consideration that never before had a ship been taken, or even attacked. That was what had made the assault on the Northern Outpost so easy and cheap in lives: ships were useless to the valley people: the city’s colonies traded only with the city.
‘We can safely discount that.’ He smiled, reassuringly, and was suddenly personally aware of her beauty. Ciphers we call them, he thought, because they are content simply to live, while we must explore and quest endlessly; perhaps we are truly the ciphers. His eyes dwelt a moment on the peach skin of her face - all that the suit revealed - almost envying Gwent his chance. After a moment, he averted his gaze, and forced the thoughts down: he was too deep set in his ways.
* * * *
Seen from the sea, the City was a green horse-shoe, both ends jutting into the sea itself. Between them, separated from them by the glaucous water, rose a tall island of green veg-muscle, and this was connected by the narrow umbilical of bridge to the citadel tower that rose, a third, but vertical prong from the very centre of the City’s seaward wall. Perhaps other arteries and veins ran beneath the sea’s surface, through the huge suction pad by means of which the City clung to the coast, all now hidden by the opacity of the slimy ocean.
The City grew large, enormous, dwarfing even the great barge they rode in, its matt green yielding to a chromatic symphony of blending greens, a creation of breath taking beauty that they were about to steal, and perhaps destroy in the act of stealing.
The barge, its biological engine pumping at maximum pulse, veered close to the sheer walled island of vegmuscle that served the City as heart and breakwater. The steersman, and Jehane, who now commanded him, were navigating well. But Hrunting had other things to think of - of the assault team who stood with him at the pinnacle of the barge’s top-heavy superstructure, of what to say to them. He looked over the thirty faces. They were expressionless. He considered a short, rousing-speech, and it died still-born in his throat. They had all been carefully instructed. There was nothing to do now but wait, and fight, and hope.
Already the citizens had sensed the wrongness. Several times they heard the whistle of stone chips shuttering above their heads from the mangonels of City and island. Hrunting looked again at the assault party and noticed Piers among them, a godless priest with a face of carpentered wood...The barge was slowing. The low part of the bridge near the island loomed below: if it held and did not shear!
Slower and slower the barge glided. Finally came the impact, the superstructure cutting into and through the hollow bridge with a savage, tearing sound of ruptured vegmuscle. The mangonel barrage became particularly intense: chips buried themselves in the half-living but unfeeling vegmuscle. Hrunting didn’t heed it. Now! he thought - and leapt from the sagging tatters of the barge’s superstructure down on to the slippery, curved surface of the broken bridge. The bridge shook as the stream of concentrated sungreen, the life-giving sap of the City, jetted uselessly down over the maltreated superstructure of the barge.
He lost his secondary sword, needing the hand that held it to steady himself on the swaying, seawet surface; but he held on. The rest of the assault party overcame their difficulties with like determination.
The stone chips hailed at them in a constant stream now, but only from the citadel; the heart island’s mangonel couldn’t be brought to bear. Hrunting looked about him; on the faces of the assault party, sternness was yielding to stark fear. How best to impel them to action? An impassioned harangue. No. There was only one way.
‘For the Gate!’ he screamed, and began to race down the truncated stump of the bridge for the heart island.
* * * *
He heard the sound of movement behind, and looked back to see the ciphers running wild-eyed in his wake. Behind them, the great ship was alive again, her jet beating up the waters to a fine frenzy as it forced the longer element of the bridge away at an angle. If a repair of the bridge could be effected, the island could be reinforced, and they were dead. Otherwise...
But he had no time for speculation. His men were about him now, and he greeted them with a grandiloquent onward motion of his sword. An unspent chip caught him in the right upper arm; he almost dropped his sword, but the long training of his youth told, and he ran on, forcing the pain out of his mind, and with it, almost everything else but the urge to give battle.
The bridge gave on to a downward stairway at the island end. He took the stairs by the half dozens, almost falling at the end; but he was on his feet when he was confronted in the well of the stairway. The wattle-faced man swung at him wildly. He parried the blow in the high line, recovered with practised ease and struck at the pale oval of his opponent’s face with arm-wrenching force. The blow bit through cartilage and bone; the citizen jerked, then fell like an abandoned puppet, splaying his limbs.
Now he was no longer in the lead. Assault group ciphers had flowed about him as he fought, down along the corridor that led to the heart chamber stairway. He followed them. At the head of the stairway he paused; he could make out the sounds of fighting, the raspings, grunts and smothered curses as both sides clawed for dominance in the life-generated flourescence of the heart chamber, and the spaced-out bursts of the tin-can rattling of knife and sword work, terminating in screams.
Inevitably, he leapt down the stairway, avoiding a pair of broken legs only by the best good fortune. A thrown knife bedded in the vegmuscle nearby, perhaps flung in haste by one of his own side from the position they held behind the tendon posts, where the white-green tendons that regulated the spasm of the city’s heart chamber were fixed to their controlling levers. Sense told him to take cover; impulse sent him in full fury at the nearest citizen hiding behind one of the unused ceramic posts. The citizen, unarmoured, twisted fearfully about to face this new challenge. He parried Hrunting’s first blow, but not well enough; deflected, it severed the left upper arm, and the citizen fell, his stumped arm issuing blood in great, pulsing gouts.
Hrunting paid him no further attention. A sword swished past his own ear, and he heard a screech of agony that could only have come from one of his own men. Ignoring it, he ran on, wielding the sword like a meat cleaver, drinking the heady melange of blood, fear and death about him, exulting in it, yet knowing with some remaining sane element of his mind that afterwards, if he lived, he would despise himself for this indulgence.
Suddenly, he caromed against one of the tendon posts, slipping in blood he had shed. A green shape loomed - an armoured citizen. Hrunting’s sword was struck from his hand; a blade, reflecting the odd white of the tendons, swung at him. So they must finally still the heart without him. He hardly felt afraid, just curious: how would it feel when it bit... ?
* * * *
4
The Elder was the handsome father of a handsome daughter, and accoutred as he was, as a warrior, ready to give the signal for Gwent to lead the first attack, he held all eyes. But Gwent’s eyes unwillingly: the vast bulk of the green ramp that led to the open city portal, with the over-scaled frieze brooding over ramp and portal, lured them to fleeting, fearful glances.
The watcher stationed by the coast lowered his arms. That meant he could no longer see the barge: it was in the harbour. The Elder shouted. Gwent started like a hare, racing up the ramp, half the young blood of the valley people behind him, racing to be in front.
Out of his eye corners, Gwent could see them draw level with him, all sword waving and fury. His own sword stayed firmly scabbarded: if all went well, there would be no use for it. The great portal drew closer; he could see quite clearly the flower-like heads that made up the detail of the frieze; he saw them move, braced himself. And suddenly he was running into the wall of sea that issued from them, and water was all over him, crushing the air from his lungs; he was drowning - and then, just as suddenly, he was lying with a sma
ll host of others on the ramp, wet, winded, dead if the citizens chose to counter-attack. But with the bulk of the army still untouched, no counter-attack spilled screaming through the portal.
Wearily, he got to his feet, looking at the tempting, open portal with a kind of hate. It was a trap. There was positively no way past that wall of water. If Hrunting had failed ...
The Elder was signalling again. This was the full attack. Gwent motioned his still dripping men onward, drawing his own sword this time. They had scarcely managed more than a few paces when the water again struck them. But without quite the previous violence. Digging their swords in the rubbery ramp, they held their places. Slowly they continued their upward passage. The water struck a third time; but the force of it had ebbed. The heart of the city had been broken! The main body of the army was screaming its charge, and Gwent impelled his own men upwards, faster and faster - so they would escape being impaled on the weapons of their rearward comrades.
Then they were through the portal, a toll taken of them by a flight of arrows, one bouncing harmlessly off his living suit, past the flaccid petals of the frieze of water into the bloody, mindless business of hand to hand fighting. Citizens and valley people alike slid into the redder, hazier waters of psychogenetic rage ...
* * * *
Part Three: The Gate
1
He was dying: it was no new sensation. He tried to open his eyes, but only pain sprang at his consciousness. He held on, and, gradually, the memory of a sword slashing down at the only unprotected part of him - his face - came to mind. He no longer had eyes. The question was: had he a face? He moved his lips, forced out a word.
‘There?’
There was an answer of some kind, but it dissolved in a miasma of pain. A moment or an eternity later, he spoke again. The pain was less this time.
‘Who?’
‘Gwent.’
‘Ah ...” It was a sigh of relief. The city was taken: there was a Gate for him. Before him, only the little death of the Gate ...
* * * *
Gwent looked down on what had been wrought with a dulled horror. His sword had wrought as much and worse only hours before. Jehane knelt and dabbed at the mangled redness, and he walked away, to the window, whence he could see the wreck of the great bridge, the longer remnant swaying gently in the sea breeze. He stood there a long time, the lassitude of battle won leadening his limbs.
He felt his arm being taken. He half turned and saw Jehane’s face, caught in the window light, all grace and beauty caught in an instant of time. The instant lengthened into a moment, a duration; it could stretch into a lifetime, ruling this city with her; unbidden, his mind began to picture it. Then the weak voice of Hrunting ended the moment.
‘An end to entropy ...’
For a moment again, the words seemed without meaning, and then things began to fall in place in Gwent’s mind, the hints, the nuances, the half completed assertions. Entropy, time travel, Manganon ... A passing thought: the words spoken no longer mattered: he knew. Manganon was the creation of eternity! He knew it - not how, or why, or by whom, but what!
Jehane knew: not the fantastic idea blossoming in his mind, but of her danger of losing him. He could see it in her eyes. She was like nothing in the primary world, he thought suddenly; and he realized how distanced everything there was, had been from the beginning. Had the Gate of Transfiguration done more than he had suspected? Or hadn’t all that blood and soil ranting, street fighting and the easy, amoral cameraderie of the Movement really mattered much to him? Just a way of easing boredom under the New Order? Was she just another, passing comrade? His hand brushed her cheek, tentatively then tenderly.
Then Hrunting moaned again, piteously, and she was drawn back to her charge. As she knelt over the wounded Traveller, Gwent slipped silently out of the room.
Wulf, resplendent in an apple green living suit, awaited beyond the sphincter door.
‘The Gate!’
Wulf nodded, and led him down dim green corridors that towards the end, in sight of the huge flap door, were littered with refuse and offal. In the chamber, beyond the door, there was more, but seemingly without smell - the citizens had been excellent bio-engineers.
In the centre of the chamber, as if sculpted from the veg-muscle of the floor, was a deep green flower, slightly speckled over with red; from petal to petal it was larger than a man, but the indentations were shallow, and gave it an ornamental aspect.
The citizens were grouped about the flower in a great inward shuffling spiral, tired men, naked now of their armour, their eyes almost dead. The guards, just as tired, but obviously exultant in bizarre compromises of their own and living armour, prodded the unfortunates, moving the spiral inward. One prisoner was almost upon the flower centre of the chamber.
‘We have to pass this way,’ Wulf said, almost guiltily.
A guard ran to the prisoner nearest the flower, gestured at it with his sword. The prisoner looked at the sword, then at the flower, and spoke softly in the silence.
‘Crystal splintered,
shards glittering fell;
hoarse the screaming day
welcomed night’s advent:
the city panted:
living gods were sundered:
the green bridge
veining with black
folded into the silent torrent...’
The guard smiled, made to jab the man with his sword, but the prisoner anticipated him, and stepped on to the inset petals of the flower.
Gwent, whose arms were still rimed with the blood of citizens, whose arms ached with slashing into their flesh, froze with horror. For, unhurriedly, the flower ate the man.
Slowly, with infinite delicacy and grace the petals did their work and for the most part of a dilated minute, Gwent was held rigid by the horror of it, towards the end, what remained of the man over the reddening petals uttered a small cry, and Gwent grasped his sword hilt, whether to end the man’s sufferings or begin those of his murderer, he had no idea. But whatever his intention, enough of it was divined to frustrate it all. The strong arms of Wulf engulfed him in a bear hug.
‘No, master. The Elder ordered this.’
The grip eased, and, unprotesting, Gwent was led on through the chamber - one of the city’s refuse disposal chambers, he realized with sudden clarity - as the process continued.
‘... the crack-faced gods,
despoiled of their sublimity,
wither to their stone shells:
like animals submit
the former images of man ...’
The words themselves died as new flap doors closed behind them; but they lingered in his mind a few moments longer: there was something odd about them. For a moment, he thought they were English, an odd, clipped English with a strange intonation, but it was easy enough to mistake Gate Language for one’s primary tongue. Yes, that was it; had to be.
* * * *
2
Sunlight was a rebirth, its warmth a benediction: it faded the reds and browns of trauma into a soft beige, soon to be dissolved in the Lethe waters of Sanity.
Distanced - by space, or the fury of battle - the citadel tower rose imposing; now, seen from its plaza, the towering green height and the smooth green bulk of its curving surface was an imposition, a blow between the eyes. Gwent stared at it, wondering at the men who had built this city, in whose wanton destruction he was playing a part.
Whump! A mangonel stone crashed into the citadel’s base, and then another, and another, all into the same place, which in no way betrayed any signs of a door; they all bounced off without causing any obvious damage. Gwent turned to see the Elder ordering a battery of mangonels at the perimeter of the plaza.
It had the air of a pointless exercise, but an unasked Wulf voiced a contrary opinion.
‘We’ll have it before sunset.’
The Elder was tired, bloody, sweaty. He still wore his own improvised armour, leathern jack and cap, and the sword that swung from his hip was his
own. His eyes were harder than before, betraying a fixity of purpose Gwent had not suspected - although it had been obvious all along, he realized. It was as if he were seeing the Elder for the first time: the previous weeks since his transfiguration could have been a dream, with the world revolving around his consciousness. They had ended in nightmare, debouching him into reality.
The Elder greeted him, smiled at Wulf in his stolen armour, and looked back at the citadel.
‘They built that over the Gate,’ he said. ‘They used to let our dying in, for the new life; then they went mad. Now we shall have that without their charity!’
The battering continued; the valley people slaved at the mangonels, forming human chains to bring stones to them, and Gwent just stood watching, feeling his apartness, and knowing wonder and horror and awe as he hedged about the idea Hrunting had half suggested, as if he were luring him into it by degrees, and near completed in his delirium. Their purpose.
Not necessarily the true purpose; but the one Travellers believed in: an end to entropy. Not as a doctrine of means, not in everyday affairs, but a doctrine of ends, a teleology, and perhaps, in its ramifications, a kind of theology.
New Writings in SF 28 - [Anthology] Page 18