Julia Defiant

by Catherine Egan

  Outside, the city is like a painting, one-dimensional, unmoving. Only the bird and I are alive, in motion. The bird shoots down the street, dipping and rising, and I run after it, light on my feet. Like the bird, I am real, I am alive, fluid and shining. I pass people in the streets, but their faces are blank and wooden, their expressions painted on. The road curves, and I follow the bird up stone steps that wind and twist up a craggy hill that has never been in this city before. Tianshi seethes below, falling farther and farther behind us. The air turns sharp, acrid. The bird falls like a stone and lies smoking at my feet, its feathers singed.

  Before me, there is a crumbled archway—or what must have been an archway once, but now the top is broken and so it is two curved pillars in the road, crusted with lichen. My blood hums, and I step through it, over the scorched bird.

  The road runs straight into a muddy swamp. A mist lies over the swamp, obscuring whatever is beyond it. Behind me, the stone stairs are crumbling down toward the painted city. I can go back or I can go forward. I step into the mud and instantly sink up to my thigh. I wade a bit, and it gets deeper, rising over the wound in my side. What am I to do? Then the ground is gone and I am flailing, looking for something to hang on to, but there is nothing. I swim through the thick muck and into the mist, where I can see nothing at all.

  My hand touches slippery rock. Weak with relief at finding something solid, I clamber up onto the shore, my clothes heavy with mud. The fog around me lifts, and there is—I want to say a woman, but she is not quite that—a creature shaped like a woman on the path before me, pointing a bow, with arrow drawn, at me, but the bow and the arrow are made of fire. I blink, but the apparition is still there.

  “Hold on, don’t shoot.” I scramble to my feet. A rope of mud bursts out of the ground and wraps itself around my ankle. I scream and try to kick it off, thinking it a snake or some creature living in the mud, but then another one bursts forth and grabs my other ankle. The mud vines give a yank, and I am flat on my belly, winded, on the ground before the woman-thing and her fiery bow and arrow.

  “Please…,” I begin, but I can’t decide—please, what?

  She is naked, a reddish brown color, and there is something odd about her skin—something claylike about its consistency. Her face too appears to be made of wet clay and is not holding its shape very well. Her eyebrows are mossy clumps, her hair a shag of weeds and reeds, her eyes black stones, shiny and unmoving. When she bares her teeth at me, they look to have been stuck haphazardly into her gums—each one sharpened to a point. She is a terrible thing to behold.

  “Raaaa,” she gurgles at me—a thick, muddy sound.

  “Is this Ragg Rock?” I cry.

  She jerks her head at me, as if to say, Go on. Or maybe Go away—who can tell?

  “I’m in trouble. I need help….” I realize suddenly that I don’t feel it here—that tug from Kahge. My arm and my side hurt badly, but it is an ordinary pain, the kind of thing you would expect to feel after being whacked with a sword and then stitched up without anesthetic. “There’s a little boy, a happy, gorgeous fellow, but he’s got part of The Book of Disruption stuck in him, and he’s going to end up killed or worse if we can’t get it out of him.”

  I’m babbling. Slow down, Julia. Figure out what’s going on here. What this thing is. Where you are.

  “Raaaa,” she says again. Then, gurglingly: “Hel-lo.”

  “Hello,” I pant.

  “Raaaaaaggh. Tell me…more.”

  “Is this Ragg Rock?” I ask again.

  “I am,” she says. Her voice sounds a bit less liquid. She folds the flaming bow and arrow into a sphere between her hands and extinguishes it. The tentacles, or whatever they are, fall away from my feet, crumbling into mud. I rise slowly.

  “Do not…hurt me,” she says.

  The mud around my feet curls up like a wave, threatening, as if to back her up.

  “Of course I won’t,” I say. “I didn’t come here to hurt anybody.”

  She really is made of mud and clay, I realize—like somebody tried to build the semblance of a woman out of earth and moss and stone. There are cracks in the dry clay of her legs, and yet she moves quite as well as I do. Rather better, at the moment.

  “Come,” she says, beckoning me along the path, up the hill—a craggy, damp rock covered in moss and brambles. The sky is an evening color, a deep blue-gray, with shreds of cloud moving fast over it, but no sun or moon or stars that I can see. Muddy rivulets run down the hill to the swamp below, which surrounds the rock like a moat. A black hut stands at the top of the hill—black, as though it has been burnt, though it stands firm enough—and all at once I recognize this place from the vision of my mother with the Ankh-nu. She was here—my mother was here—and the memory comes back vividly, the way I felt looking at her, that awful longing, but it wasn’t me, please Nameless, it wasn’t me.

  I climb after Ragg Rock. When I look behind me, I can see Tianshi tumbling at the bottom of the hill, beyond the swamp, a little bit askew. The green rice fields and the forests stream out from the city and its tilting walls. There is Tama-shan, poking up like a red finger, and beyond it, the desert. As I look, I feel the world rushing toward me, or my perspective soaring out over it, over the desert. There are walled cities, the rivers and railroads that zig and zag between them, miles of terraced rice fields cut out of the hills, old fortresses where warlords sit glowering in heavy robes. I put out a hand to steady myself as it all goes zooming past me. A woman drinking from a jeweled cup, out her window the yellow sand whipped by the wind. The grasslands becoming foothills becoming mountains. It is moving too fast—the swaying ocean, palaces, and villages, wild beasts hunkered down in their dark places, old women whispering around fires, children playing on muddy riverbanks. It is like seeing everything up close and from a great distance all at once—an exaggerated version of how I see when I am midway between the world and Kahge. I yank my gaze from the wide world and stagger on the path behind Ragg Rock. Dizzy, I hurry after her, leaving the world reeling and unspooling behind me.

  When we reach the little hut, she does not take me inside but, instead, takes me around to the back of it, to the other side of the hill.

  Far below us, a ghostly, smoking Spira City forms and dissolves along with other places I have seen, and places I’ve never laid eyes on too. Cities and forests rise up, take shape, then undulate and collapse, becoming something else. Beyond this shifting, burning no place, black cliffs and mountains spit fire, and beyond those, that giant whorl of purplish green cloud, spinning and roaring.

  “Kahge,” I say, and Ragg Rock croaks, “Kahge.”

  “What is that?” I ask, pointing at the roaring storm of cloud in the far distance.

  “That? I wonder. Maybe it is the edge of…something, or everything.”

  “Maybe? Don’t you know?”

  “Why would I know?”

  She looks right at me, and that is unsettling. Can she really see me with those black stones stuck unevenly in the mud of her face?

  “Speak more,” she says. “Tell me…” She thinks for a moment. “Tell me a story.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now I’m to tell fairy tales to Ragg Rock, whatever she is, wherever this is, and who knows what is happening back at Mrs. Och’s. But I don’t know what to do except obey. I tell her the story of the girl-bear and the bear-girl that I thought of at Count Fournier’s house. She nods avidly while I speak. When it’s finished, I say, “It’s not a very nice story, is it?”

  “It’s a very good story,” she says, speaking more easily now. One of her teeth has come loose and is hanging lopsidedly from her gums, which are the same red-brown mud as the rest of her. “Come inside—I want to show you something.”

  I follow her into the hut. There is nothing much here, nowhere to sit, just a cauldron boiling with, as far as I can tell, more red mud, and a hutch made of wire and wood.

  “Look,” she says, squatting by the hutch. I crouch next to her. Inside it, a thin
brown rabbit is sniffing despondently at a pile of grass. Ragg Rock reaches one of her clay hands into the hutch and strokes the rabbit’s back.

  “This is my bunny,” she croons. “He’s so soft. I can’t decide what to name him.”

  I have no idea what to say. She looks at me with those pebble eyes. Her voice is much less garbled now. “Do you want to pet him?”

  I don’t particularly, but I reach in and stroke the soft fur. He is warm, and breathing fast.

  “So there are animals here?” I say.

  “No—he is from the world. Tianshi’s Silver Moya brought him to me as a present. Wasn’t that nice? She thought I’d like a pet.”

  Is that the key to magical, otherworldly assistance? Bring a fluffy bunny to the made-of-mud creature at the edge of the world? Wouldn’t Mrs. Och be surprised to hear it.

  “He’s lovely,” I say. It comes out sarcastic. Hounds, be nice to the mad mud woman, Julia. Try not to get killed.

  “What should I name him?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What about George? He looks like a George.”

  “Does he?” She turns her gaze back to the rabbit, stroking his back rhythmically. “That’s what I’ll call him. I like him. I like to touch him. I’m lonely.”

  “I’m not surprised.” It is hard to imagine a more desolate place, and surely there can be no place more isolated.

  “You’ve come to ask me for help, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose so.” It seems foolish now—given that I don’t really know where this is, what she is, what her allegiances might be, if any.

  A rumble in her throat, like a growl. She rises, making an impatient gesture for me to follow.

  “People want things,” she says, striding out of the hut and around to the side of it. “The shadows in Kahge want things too: Make us whole. Make us alive. How am I to do that? Mothers from the world come, begging me to return their dead children or some such impossible thing, and I can’t, and I don’t want to watch anybody else drown themselves in the mud. Witches come, and they say they will give me things, but they do not have things I want. Sometimes they try to hurt me because I cannot help them. They think they can make me do things. They think they can take something from me, from this place. I don’t like that. I don’t let the strong ones come here, the ones who might hurt me, not them, I don’t let them in, never.”

  So that’s why the Xianren could never reach her. Quite right of her to fear them too. I’m confused by her sudden fluency, the casual tone, why she speaks Fraynish when she seemed not to use language at all mere minutes ago.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I say.

  She looks at me, and her muddy lips form a smile. “I know. You cannot hurt me. But I need more food for the rabbit.”

  “What kind of food?”

  “Silver Moya gave me apples and lettuce, but he ate them all, and now I have just grass and corn for him. He doesn’t care for grass and corn so much. The corn isn’t right, anyway. She hasn’t come back. She brought me the rabbit because I asked her to live here with me. She’s afraid I won’t let her leave if she comes again. But I only want food for the rabbit, nice things that he likes.”

  She looks as desperately unhappy as someone with a face made of mud could possibly look.

  “I could bring you apples and lettuce,” I say. “Where did you get him corn? I don’t see any corn here.”

  She pats the big boulder we’ve stopped at, and I realize it is not a boulder but a massive dial. The black face of the rock is shot through with streaks of copper and silver and iron. Characters that look vaguely like the old pictorial Yongwen characters I saw in the Imperial Library are carved all around the edges of the rock face. The dial at the center points to a character very like the Yongwen character for earth that I’ve seen at small shrines by the road.

  Ragg Rock grabs the dial and twists it to the right with an awful grinding sound that I feel in my teeth and bones. The rock shudders under my feet. A thick blanket of moss crawls over the ground, and trees shoot up like spikes out of the moat at the bottom of the little hill, branches spreading outward and bursting into green. They grow up and up, obscuring the view of the city below, creeping up the hill toward us. Dusky, skeletal butterflies the size of my head come winging out of the sudden woods, spiraling around the hut behind us and into the evening-colored sky, and there are other flickering shapes among the trees, like animals, but not fixed, colorless.

  “I can find some things,” says Ragg Rock. “The bugs are the most real, but my rabbit does not like bugs. I can find grass and grain.” She twists the dial again, and the woods collapse into a cornfield, tall and yellow. I stagger as the moss under my feet recedes.

  “Water,” she says with another twist, and water pours out of the rock, the cornfield tumbling into a proper moat now, like a river circling the hill, bright and fresh and moving. “Animals must have water, you know. I can keep him alive, but he liked the apples and the lettuce best, the things from the world. I’ve found some trees that bear fruit, but not apple trees. I’ve found crops, but not lettuce.” She yanks the dial again. The ground heaves. I think I’m going to throw up. I grab the boulder to keep myself steady, and the water turns back into mud. She turns a horrible, sharp-toothed grin toward me.

  “I liked your story about the girl and the bear. I can tell someone has hurt you. If you bring me some apples and lettuce, you can stay here as long as you like. This is a good place to hide. Nobody would find you. Nobody can come if I don’t let them in, and I can tell when somebody asks to come—the blood tells me things—what they fear and what they want, how strong they are.”

  “I’ll bring you apples and lettuce,” I manage to say, cautiously letting go of the rock now that she seems to be done changing the landscape. “But I can’t stay. I wanted…I thought maybe you would know what I am.”

  “Why would I know?” she asks, impatience creeping into her voice. “Everybody thinks I will just know things. I know some things. I have this view”—she sweeps her hand in a circle, taking in both open doorways of the hut, the world at one side and Kahge at the other—“and I’ve been watching things happen for…oh, a very long time. But I don’t know you. You look like a girl. Aren’t you a girl?”

  I realize with a horrible start that she is sounding more and more like me. Not just the way she speaks—her casual, low-class Fraynish, which sprang up after her initial gurgles and foreign-sounding hello—but her voice. After several minutes with me, she has learned to mimic me perfectly, borrowing my language and my sound.

  “Maybe I am,” I say. “You said those shadows in Kahge ask you for things.”

  “They want to come into the world, be real, be whole. This is the closest any of them get. They can see the world from here, if I let them. I don’t anymore. Not since one of them got out. I made a mistake. I get lonely sometimes, and I make mistakes.”

  One of them got out. I feel sick.

  “I’ve been to Kahge,” I say. “I can go there.”

  She looks at me with those pebble eyes and says, “How?”

  “I don’t know. I just can. And some of the shadows are not really very shadowy. They have bodies. I mean, their bodies are like a mix of animals from the world.”

  “Oh, them,” she says, almost sheepishly, if it’s possible for a mud woman to look sheepish. “I know the ones you mean. That was a mistake too.”

  “What are they?”

  “Just shadows, like the others. But a witch came to me…oh, nearly half a century ago now. I should never have let her in. Too strong. But so much grief that it pushed out everything else I might have seen, and I was curious what she meant to do with all the body parts.”

  “Body parts?” I say faintly.

  “She made a deal with them. She met them here and brought them parts from the world. She fastened those parts onto them with magic so they would have bodies. And she gave them other things too. They can love and feel pain, they can sleep and even eat. I wanted to see if it would work.
”

  “Why did she do it? What did they do for her?”

  “They each gave her some essence. A tiny bit. Enough for a terrible spell, to bring life back to someone she’d lost. But I don’t think it went how she wanted. She tried to come back here again, and there was so much rage it frightened me. I didn’t let her. She tries, and I never let her. And those shadows with the body parts are angry too and trying to get into the world, and I don’t let them come here either anymore. Too much trouble. The whole thing was a mistake.”

  I reckon I can guess what they want with me. I think about those hooks biting into me, the sucking tubes, the way it felt like my core was being pulled loose. Perhaps they think they can take from me whatever enables me to cross over. Perhaps they can.

  But that doesn’t explain why they call me Lidari. So I tell her: “I saw them in Kahge. They tried to kill me. And…they called me Lidari.”

  The mossy eyebrows go up. Something guarded comes into her expression.

  “Lidari was their leader,” she says, and then adds after a long pause: “But he’s gone now.”

  “Gone where?” I ask, thinking, Please not inside my skin and bones.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said one of them got out. Did you mean Lidari?”

  She nods slowly. She is not relaxed anymore. She has gone very wary.

  “When?”

  “The last time…maybe seventeen years ago. The others were so angry that he’d left them behind.”

  My heart is thundering in my ears now. I steady myself on the rock.

  “And a witch helped him, didn’t she?”