by Jeffrey Ford
I moved next to the schoolteacher and looked out the window. There was a mob of fifteen or so men carrying rifles and torches.
“Send out the devil’s dog,” a voice called from the street.
Those around me appeared nervous.
Feskin turned again to us, and said, “Who will keep them busy until I can get Misrix out the back entrance?”
No one made a move to help, and I did not blame them. Then Emilia pushed her way through the crowd and made for the door. Her mother grabbed after her, but she was already going through the entrance onto the porch.
“Here is the devil’s dog,” I heard her yell at them, and somehow I knew that she was holding up the carving I had given her.
The schoolteacher was moving me out of the room through a back hallway, but I could hear the men saying things to her in sheepish voices and Emilia yelling back her replies without fear.
As we came to the end of a dark passage, Feskin said, “You will have to give me a little more time to work on your behalf. We are making real progress, though. We thank you for coming.”
He opened a door at the end of the hall. It led to a field where I had in my previous reconnaissance flights seen the children playing their games in the afternoon.
“A wonderful time,” I told him.
“We will come and see you soon,” he said.
Then I was off, mounting into the clear sky. I circled around to the front of the building at a great height in order to see that Emilia was unharmed. She was still standing her ground, giving the zealots a tongue-lashing. I could not help myself, but unzipped the infernal trousers and extracted my member from this useless second skin of cloth, making a mighty piss of rum punch down on the angry mob. Their torch flames sizzled and turned to smoke in the downpour. Leaving in my wake a fart like a clap of thunder, a message from their angry God, I took wing and sped off through the night sky, feeling for all the world like a mischievous child myself.
I returned to my ruins, but instead of the broken stalk that was the Top of the City, I now see before me a white fort in a clearing of a forest, lying very close to the shore of the inland ocean. The snow is falling, and there is one lone man accompanied by a black dog. He is pounding on a huge oaken door, pleading to be admitted to the company of his own kind.
the walls of this fort
The small, whitewashed room had a single window that let in the dim light of the gray afternoon. On one side of a scarred table, atop which rested a long, green bottle holding a lit candle, sat Cley, the black dog at his feet on the plank floor. Across from him sat Captain Curaswani, a heavyset man with a great white beard and mane of white hair. He was dressed in a rumpled yellow uniform, complete with black buttons and epaulets at the shoulders. Between each of his statements he drew on a pipe, the thin stem of which was nearly as long as his forearm. The bowl of the instrument had been fashioned to resemble the face of a woman, staring up at the ceiling, her mouth a wide, screaming aperture from which puffs of a bluish smoke occasionally issued.
“So,” said the captain, “you are in search of Wenau? I have never heard of it.”
“It’s toward the north,” said Cley.
“To be sure,” said the captain. “There are worlds upon worlds toward the north. I suppose you would like to winter here with us?”
“If I may,” said the hunter. “I will do my fair share of the work. You see, I’ve spent a winter out there in the wilderness, and, without the happenstance of some very lucky occurrences, I know I would have died. As it was, I found a cave with a draft of the earth’s heat coming up from below. Still, we almost starved.”
“You and the dog?” asked the captain.
“Wood is his name,” said Cley.
“He seems like a fine fellow,” said the captain, who smiled, smoke leaking out at the corners of his lips. “Of course, you may stay, but I have to tell you two things. At the fort, I am in charge. You must be willing to take orders from me.”
Cley nodded in acceptance of this rule.
“The other is that with the state of things as they are, you may be safer out in the wilderness. I just arrived here, myself, this past autumn. I was dispatched with a group of fifteen soldiers to protect the small contingent of citizens of the western realm, who had come a few years ago to farm and trap and make a monetary gain from the resources of the Beyond.”
Before continuing, Curaswani shook his head and sighed. “It seems that in the relatively brief span they have been here, they have managed, in the time-honored tradition of western realm arrogance and stupidity, to completely incense the local population. By the time I and my men arrived at the fort, there were only five individuals left out of sixty-five. Those who were out on the land retreated here for safety, and, one by one, over the course of the past year, they have been brutally butchered.”
“Who is it you have made an enemy of?” asked Cley.
“The Beshanti, who, when our settlers initially arrived, were a peaceful group. Then our people started grabbing land they shouldn’t have, killing game they shouldn’t have. Look, Cley, as a military man, I don’t mind fighting wars that are unavoidable, but I have an aversion to having my men killed over petty acts of greed.”
“Can’t you retreat back to your ship and go home?” asked Cley.
“When we were sent, we had no knowledge as to how bad the situation was. We were merely coming to try to restore order. The ship won’t be back until the spring. We’re trapped here, and already in the past month, two citizens and one soldier have been diced up within the very confines of the walls of this fort.” The captain set his smoldering pipe down on the table and rubbed his eyes.
“Within the walls?” asked the hunter.
Curaswani laughed. “Not exactly cozy, eh?”
“How?” asked Cley.
“From what I can ascertain from the settlers, the Beshanti have a group of warriors that can somehow physically blend in with their surroundings. You know the lizard, the chameleon? Well, these fellows have the same attribute. The settlers have named them Wraiths after the old tales of angry ghosts. They are reportedly flesh and blood, but I’ve yet to actually see one. I have, though, seen their work. Two days ago, Private Ornist Heighth had his throat cut and his stomach split open so that his vitals lay in a steaming heap on the ground. It happened in front of two other men. They said a patch of wall came to life, wielding a nine-inch blade. Once the knife was dropped, they could no longer make out any aspect of the attacker.”
“Wraiths,” said the hunter.
“Welcome to Fort Vordor,” said the captain, and gave a mocking salute.
Curaswani showed Cley around the inside of the compound. His quarters were in a low building that was separated from a larger structure housing the barracks and the rest of the living quarters. There were also two outhouses positioned at the southeast corner and the northwest corner of the rectangle. All of this was surrounded by a high wall that had but one egress, the tall oaken doors that were now barred by three thick wooden beams. Along the top of the perimeter wall there was a catwalk on which five or six soldiers stood guard. The two structures and the entirety of the wall had been coated in whitewash.
The captain carried a long-barreled pistol in his belt and a short sword at his side. He limped across the snow-laden enclosure at a weary pace, followed by the hunter and Wood. At the midway point between his quarters and the larger structure, he stopped and called out, “Attention.” Those on the walls and the others in yellow uniforms passing to and fro turned to face him.
“This is Mr. Cley. He will be staying with us for the winter. And his dog, Wood,” said the captain.
From the battlements, the soldiers called down greetings, and the hunter waved to them.
“Back to it,” called Curaswani. The men above turned around to face again the wilderness, while those on the ground continued on their errands.
The captain led Cley into the larger of the structures, a two-story building without windows. They en
tered a wide room lined with sleeping cots under which were stored the soldiers’ individual trunks. Hanging on one wall were a rack of rifles and a rack of pistols. In the back corner there was a small kitchen and a long table for meals.
Passing through the barracks area, they entered a hall with a stairway off to the left. They ascended the steps and entered another dim hallway lined with rooms. The captain opened the first door on his left.
“Here you go,” he said. “It’s not exactly comfortable, but when the wind really starts to bite, I think you’ll find it better than that cave.”
Cley thanked the captain as he put his bow, the quiver of arrows, and the empty book cover on the bed and sat down. “I haven’t slept on a mattress in over a year,” he said.
“Come down in a little while. They will be serving dinner. You’ll smell it cooking. Let’s hope the aroma cannot be mistaken for anything else. I will issue you a coat and a weapon. You can stand guard tonight,” said Curaswani.
“Yes,” said Cley.
“Can you shoot a rifle?” asked the captain.
“I can drill a swooping demon at a hundred yards,” said the hunter.
“The demons are, luckily, in hibernation now,” said the captain. “Can you drill a ghost at a hundred yards? That seems to be the question.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Cley.
“Very good. Since you are an experienced hunter, I’m going to need you to lead a party out into the wilderness for game from time to time.”
“As you wish,” said Cley.
The captain bent over and patted Wood on the head. “If we make it until the spring, it will be something of a miracle. But you, Cley, strike me as one who has witnessed miracles.”
“Indeed, I have,” said the hunter.
Dinner was a venison stew, biscuits, and beer. The soldiers sitting around Cley at the table struck him as being no more than boys. He doubted that some of them had begun shaving yet. Still, the lot of them seemed energetic, strong, and good-natured. They had many questions for the hunter about his experiences in the wilderness, about his strange tattoo. He could sense that he was quite an enigma to them—someone who had thrived in a place that, from their limited vantage point, seemed impossible to survive in for any length of time. They were also taken with Wood, calling to him, petting him, and slipping him chunks of meat under the table.
When asked about his earlier life, Cley told them that he had been a midwife in his village before entering the Beyond, and they all laughed good-naturedly at the idea of it. “From one harrowing occupation, staring into the wilderness, to another,” he said.
They asked a hundred questions about the demons they had heard existed to the south, the strange flora and fauna, natural wonders he might have witnessed.
“It seems like a place from a fantastic storybook,” said one fellow, whose name was Weems. He was a tall, blond youth with wide shoulders and biceps that stretched the sleeves of his undershirt.
Perhaps from having lived so long away from people, Cley was reluctant to tell too much about himself. He was sly in his method of turning the questions back upon the soldiers and finding out about their lives.
“We heard that the Well-Built City had been destroyed in the east,” said another young man.
“Yes,” said Cley. “It succumbed to its own gravity.”
The soldiers weren’t sure what he was talking about, but in order to be polite, they nodded as if it were a foregone conclusion.
“How did your ship get to the inland ocean? We were unaware of its very existence back in the eastern realm,” said the hunter.
“There are channels through deep gorges, very dangerous to navigate, that lead from the oceans of our world to this one,” said the soldier to Cley’s left. Although he was not yet a man, he bore a wicked scar across his left cheek and an eye patch on the left side. The others called him Dat.
“How long is the voyage?” asked Cley.
“Four months,” said Dat. “The inland ocean is enormous, with many strange beasts, leviathans, and krakens, and more. I was pleased to set foot on solid ground.”
“But the strangest, Cley, was the ghost ship we found floating low in the water and wrecked as if it had met its fate in a typhoon. Some of the sailors boarded it and said they saw in the hold a block of ice with a naked woman trapped inside,” said Weems.
“They said she was beautiful,” said the largest of all the young men, a fellow named Knuckle. “I could see from their expressions when they returned to our ship just how beautiful she must have been. From that moment, they seemed to be lost in a daydream for the rest of the trip.”
“And do you have wives and girlfriends back home?” asked Cley to change the subject.
Many nodded quietly and appeared to be daydreaming, themselves, in response to his question.
“And what of the Wraiths?” asked the hunter.
“We don’t talk about them if we don’t have to, Mr. Cley,” said Weems. “Better not to dwell on them, says the captain. He says he doesn’t want us going mad.”
There was a moment of silence.
“After you see what they can do, you’ll be as scared as we are,” said Knuckle.
It was midnight, and Cley stood on the narrow catwalk of the northern wall of the fort, staring out across the moonlit field of new snow at the dark tree line of the forest two hundred yards away. It was cold, and he huddled inside the large, yellow army coat they had given him. The rifle he carried was of inferior quality to those manufactured in the Well-Built City. It was a single-shot weapon with a double barrel, so that it held only two shells at a time. They had, though, given him a pocketful of shells. The western realm had never been known for its technology.
The hunter still basked in the afterglow of the pleasant time spent conversing at the dinner table. His humanity had been revived somewhat from its desolation through the months wandering in the Beyond. He was very pleased with his new home and his status among the soldiers. It was a certainty that the captain could use his skills as a hunter. With a place to rest and a job to do, he looked forward, without dread, to the winter months.
He turned and peered back down inside the fort to see that all was well. Wood sat on the ground beneath the catwalk, watching Cley’s every move. On each of the other three walls there was a soldier at sentry duty. In the yard within the compound there were another four men making their rounds. The hunter tried to picture the slaughter the recruits must have faced when first they arrived at Vordor. A brief scene of butchered corpses flashed through his mind. He remembered one of the young men telling him that they had spent the first week at the fort digging graves out in the earth fifty yards off the western wall.
He looked back over the field and spotted a deer moving. Although he soon became weary, he occupied his mind with thoughts of Anotine sailing haplessly from ocean to ocean, forever frozen in Time. He wondered now if she was the sign that Vasthasha had told him Pa-ni-ta had predicted he would find. “Could there be such a coincidence? The world is too large to grant such a meeting,” he thought to himself. “But then, as the foliate had assured me, it is also too complex not to.”
Wood quietly growled and Cley woke to the darkness of his new room. It seemed to him that he had only minutes ago come in from his watch. He heard the door opening slowly, and with that sound reached for his knife, which was hidden beneath the pillow. “Wraiths,” he thought, but then a familiar voice sounded. It was that of Captain Curaswani.
“Cley,” he said, and the door opened all the way. The hunter saw the light from a candle that the captain was holding. “Get dressed. I need your expertise.”
The hunter was fully dressed, still not having had the time to shed his habits from a life in the wilderness. He slipped into his boots and was on his feet in a moment.
“What is it?” he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“An emergency,” said Curaswani.
“A Wraith?” asked Cley.
“Even that
might be preferable at this juncture,” said the captain.
He led Cley and Wood down the hallway, speaking over his shoulder in whispers.
“There are only three of the settlers left living in the fort,” he said. “Two of them are women, and one, now a widow since her husband was separated from his head by a Wraith, a Mrs. Olsen, is inconveniently with child. Private Dat has informed me that you had been a midwife or something close to it in your previous life. I’m ordering you to deliver the child in question, if you don’t mind.”
The captain stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway. From behind it, Cley could hear sounds of heavy breathing and muffled cries of pain as if someone was screaming into a pillow. Curaswani turned and patted Cley on the shoulder.
“Pull this off, and I’ll see to it that you are awarded an honorary medal of honor in the armed forces of the western realm.” He saluted the hunter, then retreated back down the hall as fast as he could manage on his bad leg.
The room was cramped and very warm. The flames of the two candles sitting on the night table next to the bed guttered with the heavy breathing of the expectant mother. Shadows danced, a rocker creaked behind the hunter, and he turned quickly to see an old woman sitting with a bottle of spirits in her hand.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked in a cracked voice.
“Cley. I know something about delivering babies,” he told her.
“Good, because as much as I know about it, you could fit in a flea’s ass,” she said, and took a pull at the bottle.
“What is the mother’s name?” he asked.
“Willa Olsen,” said the old woman, whose hair was done up in a silver pile atop her head. She was wearing a high-necked, green-velvet dress. Although the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes testified to her age, in the shifting shadows of the candlelight she appeared to him alternately beautiful and haggard.
“And what is your name?” asked the hunter.
“Morgana,” she said.