by Jeffrey Ford
“You knew all along,” said the hunter. In his head, he heard the foliate laughing.
“We made it, Cley. There are no deserts so unforgiving as those that lie within.”
Vasthasha told the hunter that they would follow the shoreline of the inland ocean northward, for he knew of a place a few hundred miles ahead where Cley and Wood could winter with members of their own tribe—an expeditionary force from the western realm that had some years earlier come to the Beyond to set up a base camp.
“Then I am not alone,” said Cley, as they walked side by side along the edge of the violet sea.
“There have been others. There will be others,” said the foliate. “The wilderness is more ancient than you can imagine. I will show you something in our time together before the season of frost that will help you understand. There was a war in the Beyond, a disruption to the balance of nature that changed everything.”
“I believe I saw in my dream last night that you and others like you were created to be warriors in that battle. Am I right?” asked Cley.
“You were not the first, Cley, but I am most assuredly the last. We were brought to life by Pa-ni-ta, physical manifestations of nature energy. Imagine how difficult it is to defeat an opponent that regenerates itself every spring. Still, our enemy was powerful enough to find a way. Moissac was a deserter. That is why he was still alive to help those who came in search of Paradise.”
“And what about you?” asked Cley.
“It will become clear in the days to come,” said Vasthasha.
The foliate turned away from the shoreline and headed inland toward a grassy plain. He motioned for Wood to come to him and relieved the dog of the book cover. Putting the empty binding under his arm, he pointed toward the trees.
“We will stay near the ocean but travel where you can hunt for food,” he said.
“Tell me,” said Cley, hurrying to catch up to the foliate, “why does the dog care about that damnable piece of book?”
“He thinks it is a device that helps you to tell stories,” said Vasthasha, and the twin fires of his eyes blazed for a moment.
“Why would a dog care about stories?” asked Cley.
“He knows they are what the world is made of,” said the foliate.
They traveled on through open country for days, the sea always to their left. Each time Cley encountered the sight of it from the top of a hill or when rounding a thicket of trees he was startled by its immensity and beauty. The landscape they passed through was teeming with game—white deer, wild pigs, long-legged turkeys, and a type of diminutive, three-toed, striped horse. The hunter found Vasthasha to be a first-rate teacher in how to survive in the Beyond. The foliate expounded on the properties of the exotic flora they passed, and Cley questioned how the specimens might interact with an animal system. Since the green man had a root in both worlds, so to speak, he could readily surmise their effects.
At night, around the fire, Cley related the wonders and terrors he had lived through in the realm, and the foliate questioned him about human love and treachery. While they conversed, Vasthasha grew, in the course of an hour, from the root that was his left index finger, perfectly straight shafts of branch that Cley could turn into arrows.
No night was complete until the book cover was opened and Cley extemporaneously confabulated a tale for the dog and their green friend. The foliate wanted to hear about the stars, what they were made of, and why they were there. He told Cley that Wood liked best those stories with at least one dog in them. The hunter became adept at creating such yarns, and spun them with greater and greater ease as the days passed.
One afternoon, he heard the foliate warn that a giant bird was diving for his head. Cley fell face first on the ground as the huge creature, a yellow sparrow the size of a fox, with a razor beak and piercing talons, swooped dangerously close to him. He came up with an arrow on his bow but missed the shot. As he watched the monstrosity fly off, he realized he did not have a leaf beneath his tongue.
At the top of a wooded hill overlooking the ocean, they found a pickax jutting straight up out of a mound of stones. Hanging from the head of the ax was a rusted miner’s helmet. Cley thought back to Anamasobia and to Arla Beaton. He saw her in his memory, walking down the main street of that now-ruined town.
“She was beautiful,” he told Vasthasha. “I wonder what she looks like today,” he said.
The foliate pulled a small white flower from his chest and placed it on the miner’s grave. “Like the summer, now,” he said, “moving toward autumn but still carrying a bright sun.”
There was a moment of silence, and then they turned and continued down toward the sea. Wood urinated on the ax handle before running to join them.
It was a night of falling stars, and Vasthasha feared the heavens were collapsing. Cley took an object from his pocket and held it up in the light of the flames in order to divert the foliate’s attention from the meteor shower.
“We are in no danger, my friend,” said the hunter. “Think of it as the sky shedding old leaves. They will burn to cinders before they reach the world. But here, look at this.” In the palm of his hand rested the crystal given to him by the body scribe of the Silent Ones. “What do you make of it?”
Vasthasha nervously diverted his attention from the sky and looked at the stone. “Where did you find it?” he asked.
Cley told him the story of his rescue and stay among the tattooed people—how they ate the book, disposed of his fiercest weapon, duped him, and marked his forehead.
“Yes,” said the foliate. “I know of them. They have lived in the wilderness longer than I can say. The other tribes of the Beyond call them Shantrei. It means ‘the Word.’ They worship language in all its forms. The fact that you thought of them as the Silent Ones is not without humor, since they know a multiplicity of languages—human, animal, and vegetal. Each of them is decorated with an array of images that combine to form an original idea, and each individual body is the expression of the word for that idea.”
“I have my own word for them,” said Cley, staring into the light captured by the crystal.
“They have marked you. That is unusual since you come from the other side of the demon forest. Through wearing the hat, I felt your sense of betrayal concerning them. They are trying to help you. Do not lose that stone.”
“Are they in league with Pa-ni-ta?” he asked.
“They were at one time her enemy, but things change. They obviously left you where you and I could find each other,” said the foliate, and then looked back overhead.
“Am I a word now to them?” asked the hunter.
“You are the word for you,” said Vasthasha.
Cley shook his head. “When I came to the Beyond, I thought I would be escaping such complications and convolutions. The farther I travel, the more complex and confusing it all becomes. Back in the demon forest, I understood—kill them before they kill you, find food, make fire.”
“The life of one termite here is more complex than all the history of your realm,” said Vasthasha. “Simplicity will be yours in the grave.”
“Comforting,” said Cley.
Then the foliate suddenly sat upright, the fires of his eyes flared, and the tendrils that were his hair straightened.
“What is it?” asked the hunter.
Wood got up instantly, reacting to Cley’s distress.
“It’s coming,” said Vasthasha.
Cley got onto his knees and reached for the bow. “A creature?” he asked.
“No, the autumn,” said the foliate. “It is close.”
The green man bowed his head and fell into silence. Cley watched the sky, waiting for Vasthasha to speak again, but he did not.
The waves of the ocean broke a hundred yards to their left. It was an overcast day, and a light drizzle was falling.
“There are demons in this forest,” said the foliate.
“Can we avoid it?” asked Cley.
“No, I want to show you something
important at its heart,” said Vasthasha.
In among the trees, whose trunks were straight and tall, the sand of the beach gave way to a carpet of brown needles and leaves. Cley lifted the bow, and Wood hung back beside him as if understanding that danger might be close by.
They continued through the dim morning, Cley now recalling the terror engendered by demons. He tried to remember how he had found the courage to battle the creatures with such tenacity, and all he could dredge from his mind was his fear of them.
It was late afternoon and though the rain had tapered off the sun had still not burned through the mist. They stopped to rest and eat some roots and mushrooms. For Wood there was a piece of deer meat left from the previous night’s meal.
The large, round, orange heads of the fungus tasted like cooked apples and the roots like licorice. As the foliate split the last disk to share between them, Cley noticed that the small white flowers that had dotted the thatch of his green guide’s body had all turned brown as if singed at the edges. Then he saw, across Vasthasha’s chest, a pattern of red leaves mixed in with the usual emerald.
He was about to note the change to his companion when he was interrupted by the cry of a demon as it swooped from branch to branch above them. The hunter looked up and spotted three of the creatures in the tattered autumnal canopy overhead. He lunged for his bow as two of them dived, their wings outstretched.
Wood rose to the attack as if it was only yesterday that they had left their cave. Cley drew an arrow from his quiver, but fear made his hands tremble, and he fumbled in the act of nocking the shaft onto the string. In the next moment, he was flat on his back, with the weight of a demon upon him.
The creature reared back and opened its mouth to display long fangs. The hunter tried to reach for his knife, but his arms were pinned. He waited for the thing to sink its teeth into his face, but then saw a green vine twirling rapidly around his attacker’s throat. In the next instant, five sharp roots poked through its chest where its heart might be. Blood splattered, covering the hunter.
The demon fell backward onto the ground, dead, to reveal Vasthasha, whose fingers and hair were now growing back into themselves. Cley wasted no time, but loaded an arrow and looked to see where Wood was. The dog was running madly in circles, chased by two demons. The hunter fired at the larger of the monsters. The arrow pierced one side of its head and the tip of the shaft poked through the other. There was a shrill scream as the wounded demon fell into the arms of his brother. The unharmed creature lifted the dying one, flapped his wings, and ascended into the treetops.
They survived three demon attacks in as many days. Vasthasha proved to be a more than able warrior. On one occasion Cley watched as the foliate shoved his sharp root fingers into a demon’s back. A moment later, branches poked out of the creature’s eyes just before its skull literally exploded outward with the force of a spiked bush growing with incredible speed from within.
“I am invisible to them,” the foliate told him. “They think I am any plant or tree in the forest. Not being meat has its advantages here.”
They pushed on through the dangerous landscape, killing when they had to, running when they could. In the very hour of the particular day on which Cley began to question, to himself, the prudence of the course they were taking, they passed through a thicket of tall, white birch, and there, before them, across a large field, lay the ancient city of dripping spires that the hunter recognized from his dreams and mnemonic journey as the Palishize.
As they trod the winding, shell-cobbled streets, passing around the broad bases of the mounds, Cley half-expected to see the ghostly form of Bataldo hail him from one of the dark openings that riddled the sides of the crude structures.
“I have been here before in both my mind and that of Misrix’s, the demon,” Cley explained to Vasthasha.
“And now in the body,” said the foliate.
“Why does this deserted city figure so prominently in all that has to do with the Beyond?” he asked.
“This is not a city, Cley,” said the foliate. “The best I can describe it, using the words and ideas I gathered from your hat, is that it is an earth machine.”
“It is not a dwelling place for an ancient people from the sea? This is what I had gathered from my psychic and psychotic machinations,” said Cley.
“It was created by our enemy, the O, who were a people from beneath the surface of the inland ocean. Although they walked upright with the stature of men, like ourselves, they had long fish tails, webbed fingers and toes, a shimmering red, scaled flesh, and a sharp fin that ran from the forehead to the center of the back,” said the foliate.
Cley whistled to Wood, who was about to enter one of the dark holes at the base of a mound, the spire of which reached a good two hundred feet in the air.
“I know that the Palishize is laid out in a large spiral,” said the hunter.
“Yes, it draws and focuses the energy of the earth. Its presence disrupted the power of Pa-ni-ta. I and the other foliates were sent here to kill the O. They died easily when we could wrap our vines around their necks, but they were a shrewd people. They had many inventions, many strange and miraculous devices.”
“How many did you kill?” asked Cley.
“More than I can count,” said Vasthasha. “Then they infected my kind with a type of mite that caused us to be unable to regenerate each spring. When our raiding parties were hacked to pieces, they ceased to be. Pa-ni-ta saved me and carried my seed when she fled. One of their assassins overtook her as she was nearing the boundary of the Beyond. She had gone south in search of help.”
“There was the body of a fish-tailed creature in the burial chamber where I found her remains,” said the hunter.
“Yes, she and a small contingent of her people were wintering in that cave. Those who were not killed off through the autumn by the demons were slain by the O assassin. Pa-ni-ta’s ghost reached across the boundary of death to kill her murderer. She took him down in the burial chamber as he was laying the last of the children’s bodies next to hers,” said Vasthasha.
“And then, in the form of a seed, you waited to be reawakened?” asked Cley.
“In the sleep of the seed I was told to find one from outside the boundary of the wilderness. Only an outsider can reverse the treachery of the O,” said the foliate.
“And I am that outsider?” asked Cley.
“You will profit through helping by success in your journey,” said Vasthasha.
“What is the nature of my task?” asked the hunter.
“We will know this only in the spring,” said the foliate.
“What is at stake?”
“The very consciousness of the Beyond.”
On their second day within the walls of the Palishize, Vasthasha led Cley and the black dog into one of the openings. The tunnel ran through the center of the mound and then angled downward. They traveled through a pitch-black corridor for over an hour before a circle of light could be seen far in the distance. As they made their way slowly toward it, the foliate told Cley that the experience was like being reborn.
“But you could have told me the history as we walked along the shore, around the Palishize,” said Cley. “Why did we have to enter it?”
“The shoreline south of the structure is planted with a thousand traps and devices of death. This route is the only one through which I can ensure your safety. I remember, so long ago, the day Moissac and I discovered it. We took down five of the O in this very passage,” said Vasthasha.
An hour later, with Wood leading the way, they exited the dark catacomb beneath the Palishize and found the ocean lapping the wall that was built right at the edge of the sea. Luckily it was low tide, and they were able to make their way along the beach, in water only to their knees, before the waves grew and thundered in to smash against the foundation of the incredible structure.
The landscape north of the Palishize was composed of wooded hills rolling down to a mile-wide field of sand dunes tha
t bordered the sea. Vasthasha insisted that they follow the beach as much as possible for it was a faster route than through the woods.
On those days when they had to cross the dunes in order to hunt in the forest, Cley noticed very readily that the season was changing. The leaves of the trees had turned orange and gold and fell in droves. At night, as they sat around a driftwood fire in the hollow of a large dune, the air was cold, and the hunter’s speech came forth in puffs of steam. Vasthasha had begun to move more slowly as the leaves of his body dropped off, a few each day, and were carried away on the wind. More of his viney thatch had gone brown, and the fires in his eyes were dimmer.
One night the foliate woke the hunter from his shivering sleep, and said to him, “If I should leave you soon, do not be alarmed. Continue along the shoreline, and you will come to a fort inhabited by people like yourself. They will take you in for the winter. In the spring I will find you, and we will do our work.”
Cley could only nod at the message, for the prospect of losing his new friend saddened him. He lay awake for a long time, staring at the full moon cast in a golden hue. It was so clear in the crisp air that he could make out its mountains and craters.
Wood found a leviathan stranded on the sand. He barked wildly at the amorphous black body, as the immense creature’s tentacles, each fifty yards long, weakly swept the air. The noise the thing made was like a soprano’s aria. Cley asked Vasthasha what the monster’s song meant.
“Help, I am drowning,” said the foliate.
They waited for the thing finally to die, and then Vasthasha instructed Cley in how to cut open its bulbous head and find the brain. They climbed upon the body of the leviathan and hacked away until, beneath its shiny black flesh, buried in a thick layer of fat, the hunter discovered a little red parcel amidst the oozing green blood.