by Jeffrey Ford
With great care for the slipperiness of the boulder and his still-aching joints, he stood in order to view their situation. The sun felt wonderfully warm upon his skin, and before looking out over the water, he turned his face to stare straight into the burning disk. When the orange spots cleared from his eyes, he noticed that it was perhaps the clearest day he had yet spent in the Beyond. The sky was cloudless, and all around them flowed the transparent, jade-green river, carrying in its slow current, bushes and sticks, wild-flowers and grass.
Measuring the height of the water against the base of their boulder island (the one he had hoisted himself onto was now completely submerged), he estimated that the depth must be a uniform seven feet. He wondered if it was possible that so much rain could have fallen in two days. It was a certainty that to the south, at higher elevations, rivers had breached their banks and emptied into the flatland. It was all heading somewhere, and he tried to picture its destination—an immense whirlpool, a limitless ocean, or perhaps Paradise, which would accept all the Beyond had to offer.
He removed his shirt and pants and set them out on the rock to dry in the sun. Wearing only his underwear, he lifted the rifle and began to explore the confines of his tiny kingdom. Each step had to be planned and executed with care, for to slip and fall could easily have been fatal.
“We are in the Country of Six Boulders,” he told Wood, whose toenails tapped against the rock with every step.
Down the other side of the tallest boulder, there were three more of decreasing size. The entire half-dozen set was not arranged in a straight line but in a clutch and closely enough together that moving from one to another did not require leaping. The reconnoitering of the new country took all of five minutes. There was nothing remarkable to report from any of the provinces—all hard rock and water.
When they reached the last one (the second lowest of the six that had not been submerged), Cley stopped and peered out toward the horizon. He thought he had caught something on the very boundary of his sight out to the northeast. Using his hand as a shade, he looked more intently. At first, he was unsure if what he was seeing was a mirage, the reflection of the light on the water mixed with his own desire, but he swore there was the very faint trace of a tree line.
“Land ho,” he said.
Cley sat on the highest of the boulders, trying to think of ways to gain sustenance enough to survive until the flood receded to a depth that would allow them to escape. Nothing came to him, and eventually, all of the thoughts of filling his stomach made him ravenously hungry. He left his perch and retrieved the copper pot from his pack. With Wood at his side, he descended to the lowest boulder that had not been submerged. Kneeling, he reached out over the rushing water and scooped up a good measure. Although the sudden river was a deep green, he was pleased to see that the portion of it he had taken appeared to be clear. He sniffed at it and found it had no foul odor. Then he put the pot to his mouth and drank deeply. The water was cool and refreshing, and it served to fill his stomach for the time being. After he had his fill, he again leaned out and brought in a potful for Wood.
Cley’s clothes dried quickly in the heat of the bright sun. He dressed, put on his hat, and sat down on a lower boulder with his back against the tallest one, waiting for whatever might happen next. The Beyond was in complete control, and he knew it would do no good to struggle against it. Either it would destroy him or send him an opportunity for survival. It took Wood longer to come to the same conclusion, for he moved restlessly from one province of the Country of Six Boulders to another and back again.
The sun grew more intense as it reached its apex, and Cley could feel himself baking on the hot surface of the rocks. He considered a swim but feared the current might snatch him away from his island nation and drown him. Wood nosed through the pack in search of the book, but the hunter told him, “No.” He motioned for the dog to come and sit beside him. His companion uttered something like a sigh before giving in. The two of them did all that was left to them. In sleep, Cley dreamt of the green veil, flying high over the wilderness of the Beyond.
He was awake and staring up into the bottomless blue sky of late afternoon before he even realized it. The heat had diminished somewhat, and there was a slight breeze. He could hear the water moving and the black dog breathing. Something sailed through the sky, crossing his line of sight. At first, he thought it was the veil, having flown out of his dream. When he squinted, he saw it was instead a bird—a large one at that. “A crow?” he wondered. The bird circled back into his field of vision, and he squinted again. He determined it was not a crow by the fact that, even at the great height at which it flew, he could see it was not black but a deep scarlet color. “The wings are too large,” he said to the dog, who was still asleep.
It was a beautiful sight the way it spiraled down and then upward with an absolute minimum of wing thrust. The knot in his stomach then tightened a notch, and he came completely awake to the possibility. Nudging the dog in the ribs with his boot, he whispered, “Wood, time to hunt.” In an instant, he scrabbled up to the highest rock and grabbed the rifle. Making sure the chamber was loaded with two shells, he pushed off his hat and brought the gun to his shoulder. Before he could sight the bird, the black dog was next to him. He prayed the rain had not ruined the weapon or bullets.
He followed the progress of the elegant creature as it slowly spiraled above them. The task was to shoot when the bird was at its lowest point and also off to the south of the island so that if he managed to fell it the current might sweep it past them. He waited for it to break from its course and fly off, out of range of the rifle, but it never did. As he continued to aim, he gave a grim laugh, realizing that the target might be a species of carrion bird, like a vulture. It could very well have had him and the dog in its own sight as two likely prospects for a future meal.
“The hunter is hunted,” he said to Wood as he watched the large, red figure swing southward in its orbit of the island. He pulled the trigger and the report of the gun was startling. The bird neither dropped nor fled. It didn’t change its course in the least.
“I didn’t lead it enough along the arc,” said Cley, and Wood growled either in agreement or admonishment.
The bird circled southward again, and when it dipped low in its spiral, Cley aimed and shot. It continued to glide for a few moments as if nothing had happened, and then, suddenly, it plummeted straight into the water, three large feathers drifting after it.
The hunter yelled, the dog barked, as they looked to find the carcass riding atop the green water. They immediately spotted it bobbing toward them on the flow, its bright scarlet like a moving wound. Cley hastily set the gun down and, forgetting the danger of the slick rocks, leaped to the lowest dry boulder. Wood followed his lead and beat him to a safe landing. The bird was floating toward them, only thirty yards away. It appeared that all he would have to do was lean over, stick out his arm, and it would be his.
At twenty yards away, their dinner began to drift out toward the eastern side of the island. Cley moved left on the rock and, leaning out as far as he could, waited for the bird to pass. It seemed to take forever to come even with the boulder, but when it finally did, it moved rapidly past, just out of reach of his fingers.
“Shit,” Cley bellowed, but it changed nothing. Wood bounded twice, leaped over his companion’s body and into the swiftly moving jade river. The dog surfaced immediately and began paddling toward the kill. Cley called to him to return, afraid he would be swept too far off to fight the current back to the rocks.
“Come on, boy,” Cley yelled, as Wood took the huge bird between his jaws and turned against the current. The dog paddled with all his strength and began to make slow but steady progress. When Wood finally reached the side of the boulder that Cley lay on, the hunter reached down with both hands. He placed one on the scruff of the dog’s neck, one at the base of his tail, and with a mighty heave, pulled him up out of the water and to safety. Wood dropped the red bird at Cley’s feet,
and although exhausted, moved in close to be praised and petted.
The sun descended toward a pale orange horizon. Cley sat atop the country of boulders, the bird laid out before him, and took his stone knife from his boot. Wood watched quizzically, his head cocked to the side. The hunter studied the carcass—the iridescent wing feathers shifting from red to purple to pink in the dying light. The eyes were an unsettling pure red with no obvious pupil, and the beak was as black and shiny as onyx.
“Not my first choice,” he said, “but it’s the specialty of the house.” Bringing the stone blade to the bird’s neck, he sliced the head off with one deft cut. Then, lifting the body as though it was a flagon of mead, he let the blood run into his mouth. At first, there was no taste, just a warm sensation passing down his throat. When the blood did reveal its flavor, it was not bitter or salty but almost unbearably sweet, like a wine made of sugar. He could feel the life liquid charging his body with energy as he drank it.
When he had taken as much as he could stand of the cloying sweetness, he held the carcass up to the dog’s mouth. He tilted the bird, but Wood growled, closed his mouth, and backed away.
“It’s all we’ve got,” Cley said, but when he again approached with the bird, Wood leaped down to another boulder and sat, watching.
Cley knew there was not much chance of it, but he wondered if the bird might be a female carrying eggs. Wood’s favorite meal was bird eggs. Lifting the knife again, he sliced open the body from the neck to where the tail feathers began. A dark smell rose from the innards of the prey. He gagged momentarily and then went to work, digging into where he believed the bird’s womb might be. At first, he felt nothing but a sickening, wet mess. Still, he continued probing, and his fingers actually closed around something substantial. He pulled whatever it was out into the dim twilight.
In his hand was not an egg at all but a human ear, severed neatly where it would attach to the side of a head. Cley felt the sweet blood begin to rise in his stomach. He retched twice without vomiting. As soon as he had control of himself, he lifted the remains of the creature and tossed them out into the flood.
As the dark came on, he fetched water in the cooking pot for himself and the dog and then enough to obliterate every trace of the bird’s remains. Only when the surface of the rock had been cleaned did the dog again approach the perch at the top of the island. Cley noted the uneasy look in Wood’s eyes as the moonless, starless dark clamped down over the Beyond. He fell off to sleep in spite of the dog’s soft whining.
He woke into darkness, half-delirious, with chills and sweat. His teeth chattered, and he could not control the spasms in his legs and arms. It was all he could do to remain awake while vomiting, afraid that if he lost consciousness he would choke on his own spew. The dog sat next to him, staring down at the shivering invalid he had become. The blood of the red bird had poisoned him, infected him, was turning him inside out. What he had thought was an opportunity offered by the Beyond for him to save himself he now knew was to be the agent of his demise. The wilderness had grown weary of entertaining his quest. Amidst the involuntary groans that welled up from his tortured gut, he cursed the land.
Hours passed, and his condition worsened. There was nothing for Wood to do but sit by and watch. Near morning, bright colors flashed in front of Cley’s eyes and the sounds of the water rushing by, his own frenetic heartbeat, seemed heightened to a deafening decibel. His head felt as if it would split down the middle in the manner in which he had cleaved open the bird. Blood ran from his nose and across his lips. Its taste was anything but sweet.
He drifted in and out of consciousness. Once, upon waking, he saw before him the apparition whose necklace he had taken back in the demon forest. She knelt above him, rocking forward and back, her long hair reaching down at times to cover his face. Her eye sockets were, as before, empty, and when he cried out in fear of her, she opened her own dark hole of a mouth, emitting a piercing note that drilled the night. The touch of her bony hand upon his chest quelled his shivering. He believed he was dying and that the worlds of death and life were mingling. The terror of her presence overwhelmed him. When something red and feathered shot from her mouth and into his left ear, he lost consciousness.
Cley heard Wood barking as if at a great distance. He was still burning inside, and the pain in his head made his vision blurry. The sun had risen either in reality or in one of the thousand dreams through which he flew. In the midst of his wavering awareness, he sensed that there were people nearby. He looked up through watery eyes and saw a man standing over him. The fellow was tall, with long, tangled hair, and perfectly naked. His skin was the oddest shade of gray, the color of cold cigarette ash, and marked everywhere with blue designs that looped, swirled, and turned into pictures of birds and bees and plants. Across his chest was etched the skeletal head of Sirimon.
Cley felt many hands upon him. He was being lifted and carried. In his helplessness, he cried out for Wood and heard the dog answer his call. Following this, he blacked out for a short time. When he revived, he found himself surrounded by others like the man—naked with decorated flesh. They all seemed to be moving together through the flood on a boat or barge. These images and sensations ran together like watercolors in the rain, eventually mixing into black.
Motes of dust whirlpooled through thin beams of sunlight that pierced a thatched roof. All else was bathed in soothing shadow. There was a woven mat of reeds beneath him and some kind of animal skin covering his naked body. It was warm inside the narrow structure composed of young tree trunks and branches. He caught a glimpse of a young woman with long black hair, her ashen skin a backdrop to a wild garden of blue vines. He did not notice her eyes, but he would never forget the intricately petaled florets whose centers were her nipples. Her face held no scribbling but for the finely rendered blue flies inscribed on either of her cheekbones. She poured water on his forehead and made him drink a bitter, herbal potion. Even in his debilitated state, he knew that one of the ingredients was flowering akri, a natural antibiotic.
“Thank you,” he tried to tell her, but when he spoke, she covered her ears as if the sound of his voice was painful.
She gently put the fingers of her left hand to his mouth to quiet him.
He wanted desperately to stand as proof, if only to himself, that he would not die, but the mere movement of pressing his arms against the ground exhausted him and sent him again into a dreamless sleep that seemed to last for days.
When he woke again, he found that a good portion of his strength had returned. His mouth was no longer bone dry and his head had lost the whirling sensation that made him feel he was spinning in circles when his back was flat against the ground. He sat up slowly and stretched his arms.
The first clear thought that entered his mind concerned the fate of the black dog. Before he attempted standing, he put his lips together and whistled. There was no response. In fact, there was no sound coming from anywhere. He wondered where his rescuers had gone off to. He whistled again, this time louder, and a moment later, he heard Wood bark. The sound of the dog’s reply filled him with energy. He scrabbled to his feet and found his way, haltingly, to the animal-skin flap that was the doorway of his infirmary.
The sunlight was bright, and he was forced to close his eyes at its insistence. A refreshing breeze swept around him as he stepped away from the entrance. The movement of it across his body suddenly reminded him that he was naked. He stood there, a little weak now, wavering slightly from side to side. Then he heard Wood bark again, directly in front of him. He tilted his head back and rubbed his eyes to clear the glare from them. The twin dots of bright orange finally dissipated from his field of view, and he beheld a sight that startled him.
Sitting before him at ten paces was Wood, a garland of purple flowers draped around his neck. Gathered closely together in a semicircle behind the dog, as if posing for a group portrait, were twenty or thirty of the gray, tattooed people. Although men, women, and children were all naked save for
the blue drawing on their skin, they all covered their eyes with their left hands, embarrassed at Cley’s immodesty. The young woman who had ministered to him in his illness came running forth, one hand still over her eyes. She slipped past him and into the hut. In seconds, she reappeared with his clothes. After dropping them at his feet, she fled back to the safety of the group.
Cley laughed out loud. He gathered up the pile of his belongings, finding both his knife and hat among them, and retired back inside to dress. When he stepped forth into the day again, he found that the people had dispersed to different areas of the small village. Wood had waited and leaped up to greet him. Cley hugged the dog to him and rubbed the top of his head. Just then, an old man approached. He was bent over, and his decorated skin hung loose. His face was a web of design and wrinkles, his head, bald but for one long, white tress descending from the back. He lightly touched Cley on the shoulder, then pantomimed eating. When the hunter nodded that he understood, the man pointed to a hut at the far end of the village.
“Thank you,” said Cley.
The old man turned to lead him, and the hunter noticed, with a stab of revulsion he dared not give voice to, that his guide was missing an ear. In its place was a ridge of ugly scar tissue surrounding a dark hole.
As they passed through the middle of the village, Cley noted its circular design—huts of various sizes, like the one he had recovered in, made of thin logs and branches and reeds, were positioned to form a perimeter. Within that ring there were places where men and women were at work, weaving reeds, cooking on small fires, using stone knives, not unlike Cley’s, to fashion either weapons or tools out of wood. Amidst this scene of industry, the children, also tattooed but not as thoroughly as most of the adults, ran and played. With the exceptions of the crackling of the fires and the knives hacking away at branches, the place was perfectly calm and quiet. Cley realized, as they reached the destination the old man had pointed to, that not one of the people had uttered so much as a single word.