The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  Cley listened as a steady stream of words poured forth, some obtuse invective concerning time and consciousness, fact and fable. It was a mighty cyclone of inexplicable terminology celebrating language as reality.

  “He’s leaking words like a stuck dictionary,” said the captain.

  The hunter nodded, struck speechless at the sight of this second memory come to life. “First Anotine, now Brisden,” he thought. “I am haunted.”

  Just as Cley was pondering the living Brisden, the heavy speaker looked up suddenly, his jowls bouncing, and stared directly at the hunter. His voice rose a decibel, and he said, at a speed that sounded like a drawl in comparison to the normal rapid flow of his monologue, “Cley, did you really think you had escaped the evil?”

  The hunter stepped back as if pushed. While Brisden again achieved his old speed and incomprehensibility, Cley looked to the captain, and said, “He knows me.”

  “He doesn’t know the difference between his ass and his mouth,” said Curaswani.

  “But he knew my name,” said Cley.

  “I spoke your name first,” said the captain. “He’s playing with you.”

  The hunter shook his head and turned away from the cell. “I cannot contemplate what his statement suggested,” he said in a whisper. Without turning back to look again, he told the captain he had seen enough.

  “That certainly makes two of us,” said Curaswani, replacing the torch in its holder. “Let’s get out of here. The smell of his breath is all over the place. Good-bye, Brisden.”

  “You’ll be seeing me soon,” said the voice from the shadows.

  Once out of the cellar, Cley asked Curaswani for a glass of whiskey. No demon or Wraith had ever upset him the way the sight of Brisden had.

  During a very cold night watch, Cley and Dat crouched in the shadows beneath the southern catwalk, with Wood sitting between them. The stars and moon were brilliant, and there was a fierce wind whipping down from the north. The young man broke the silence and confessed to Cley that even though he had told all of the other soldiers that he had lost his eye in a knife fight over a girl, it had really been a beating from his drunken father that had blinded him.

  The hunter’s first thought was to ask why the youth was telling him this, but instead he held his tongue. When the wind finally died down for a short spell, he said, “I’ve heard you tell that story about the girl, and you tell it well.”

  Dat nodded.

  “I’d stick with it,” said Cley.

  Willa Olsen walked through the compound now on those afternoons when it didn’t snow. She carried Wraith bundled in three blankets. The soldiers nodded to her and smiled, but she said nothing in response. Like a sleepwalker, she trod the perimeter of the wall once, and then returned to her room.

  Cley and Dat took a large buck in the marsh to the north of the fort one day. When the hunter cut into it, he found it had no heart.

  At the same moment that Wood lunged across the compound, barking and growling after an invisible enemy near the eastern wall, a knife blade suddenly appeared out of nothing and, in one fluid movement, sliced the throat of Private Soames where he stood on the southern catwalk. Weems and Cley, through their practiced routine of lantern and pistol shots, dispatched the Wraith on the ground as the body of Soames fell from on high into the snow of the compound.

  In the bright moonlight, Dat, on the northern catwalk, spotted the floating knife blade that had killed Soames. Praying for a right-handed Wraith, he quickly calculated the distance from the hand to the heart of a normal-sized man and shot. There was a scream and a dark spot of blood in the air, but he did not wait to see what would happen. In seconds, he loaded the rifle again, brought it to his shoulder, and without bothering to use the sight, fired. Only when the bleeding wounds appeared to fall upon Soames’s body did he leap off his perch and run to join Cley and Weems.

  “There may be more,” said Weems, pointing to the still-barking dog. As he spoke, the door of the captain’s quarters opened with a creak, as if of its own volition.

  Before any of them could run to Curaswani’s rescue, a pistol shot sounded from inside the low structure, followed by a scream from Morgana.

  Cley, Weems, Dat, and the other men on sentry duty made for the open doorway, with Wood in the lead. As the hunter entered the one large room, he reloaded his pistol. There, in the far corner, next to the fireplace, Curaswani and Morgana were lying together on the large cot where the captain slept. He was in an indelicate position atop the old woman, whose legs encircled the military man. In her hand, she held a smoking pistol.

  Cley looked down at the floor and saw, next to the table at which he and the captain took their afternoon whiskey, a fist-sized wound, leaking onto the planks.

  Morgana was smiling broadly. “I saw it moving through the lingering pipe smoke,” she said.

  “That scream, though,” said Cley. “I thought you were done for.”

  “That was her victory cry, so to speak,” said the captain.

  “I grabbed the pistol right out of his belt and just pulled the trigger,” said the old woman.

  “Nice shot, madam,” said Cley, who tried to block the doorway so that the soldiers behind him could not see in.

  “Cley,” said Curaswani.

  “Yes?” asked the hunter.

  “Close the door.”

  Cley did as he was requested and a few minutes later the captain appeared, fully clothed in the compound. The other men were standing around the body of Soames, and Weems was telling the others how the dead private had left behind, in the realm, a wife and two children.

  Obviously not wanting to give grief a chance to set in, Curaswani ordered the men to materialize the bodies of the dead Wraiths and burn them outside the fort. He told Weems to put together a detail to hack a hole in the earth off the western wall for Soames’s burial. “Quickly,” he said.

  The soldiers moved slowly, and one young man was overcome with tears. The captain put his hand on the private’s shoulder. “We’ve got to move, Private Hast,” he said, “or we’ll all wind up like Soames. Stay with me, boy. I need everyone.” Hast nodded, and he and the others moved off.

  “This is unusual, Cley,” said Curaswani. “More than one Wraith at a time. They must be upset that we are getting the better of them.”

  “Is that good or bad?” asked the hunter.

  “Everything here, at Fort Vordor, is bad,” said the captain, rubbing tears from his own eyes.

  “The spring is only about a month and a half away,” said Cley.

  Curaswani nodded and was about to speak, when he was interrupted by another voice. He and the hunter turned to find Willa Olsen standing behind them, staring as if in a trance.

  “A ghost has taken my son,” she said.

  “What do they want with the child?” asked Cley.

  “Perhaps they want Brisden,” said the captain. “He had become very influential with the head man of the Beshanti.”

  “Get him for me,” said the hunter. Then he turned to Willa, and said, “I’ll go for the child.”

  She did not change her expression, but opened her mouth and released a sound like the howling of a wounded animal.

  Cley and Dat, armed with rifles, moved through the woods as another frozen dawn broke over the wilderness. Tied to a tether with a noosed loop around his neck was Brisden. The young soldier occasionally gave the disheveled talker a vicious kick in the rear end whenever he slowed down. The words were spewing out like the blood from Soames’s slit throat, and although they had threatened to shoot him as many times as yards they had traveled, it seemed impossible to shut him up. The hunter had reluctantly left Wood behind, the dog being too valuable to the protection of the others to risk bringing him. They had picked up the trail of the fleeing Wraith, the only set of fresh tracks moving away from the fort. What Cley meant to do when he finally met the Beshanti, he had no idea.

  After an hour of walking through the peaceful forest, the sun now fully risen, Cley no
ticed that the footprints of the kidnapper had disappeared. The hunter stopped in a small clearing surrounded by white birches and got down on his hands and knees.

  “What is it?” asked Dat.

  “See here,” said Cley, and pointed to the ground. “They’ve tried to cover the tracks.” He indicated a place in the snow that appeared unusually smooth in relation to the rest of the area.

  Dat pulled Brisden along with him and bent over to look. “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “They know we have come after the child,” said Cley.

  “So the village is nearby?” asked Dat.

  “I doubt it,” said the hunter. “I don’t think they will let us get anywhere near the village. Their village is probably off in the opposite direction somewhere.”

  “What do we do?” asked the young man, now standing straight and looking around nervously.

  “I don’t know,” said Cley, “my specialty is delivering babies. I believe, before too long, they will find us.”

  “If this bag of wind doesn’t shut up soon, I’m going to have to kill him,” said the soldier. With this, he took the butt of his rifle and slapped Brisden lightly in the back of the head with it. “Close that bunghole of yours,” he yelled.

  The lumpen prisoner winced with the blow, but continued to jabber.

  “Easy, boy,” said Cley. “He is our commerce. We are trafficking in Brisden today, as sorry a pile of goods as he is.”

  Cley remained on his haunches for a moment, thinking about how to proceed. As he was about to stand, he heard a sharp whistling noise that seemed to pass just overhead. The constant babble abruptly stopped, and the sudden silence was deafening. The hunter looked up and saw an arrow sticking out of Brisden’s throat. Blood dripped from his mouth. There was a look of utter surprise on his face as if he had just discovered the end of language. Two more arrows flew through the air, one piercing his chest and the other lodging itself in his shoulder. He fell, in his dirty white suit, like a sack of molded flour.

  Cley turned and began crawling back toward the tree line. At the same moment, Dat opened fire.

  The hunter got to his feet, and yelled, “Run!” He heard the screams of the warriors behind him. Dat caught up to him and they had almost made it back among the trees, when the soldier fell forward with a low grunt. Cley turned to help him up, and discovered a stone hatchet wedged in the back of the young man’s head. Blood and brain matter, slivers of bone were strewn in the snow.

  The hunter wheeled around and brought his rifle up just in time to fire at a rushing warrior. The double-barrel shot ripped half the charging attacker’s face off as if it were no more than a leather mask. As he fell dead, another charged behind him. Cley had no time to get up. He reached for his knife and secured it in time to stop, with his free hand, the enemy’s arm from bringing down a hatchet onto his own head. The weight of the body fell upon him, and the two began wrestling. Cley’s hat flew off, and the younger warrior’s grip, like the jaws of a ferocious animal, squeezed the strength out of the hunter’s fingers. The stone knife dropped uselessly into the snow. The warrior raised his hatchet to finish Cley, and just as the weapon was beginning to descend, the Beshanti stopped. He leaped off the hunter and backed away.

  Cley did not understand what had happened, but he seized the opportunity to retrieve his knife and get to his feet. When he stood, he saw that he was surrounded by a contingent of twenty or so strong-looking men wearing deer-hide tunics and leggings fashioned from beaver pelt. Their hair was long and dark and worn in braids that reached to the middle of the back. In the midst of his dilemma, Cley noticed that even in the snow, they wore nothing on their feet.

  The hunter turned cautiously, holding the knife thrust outward in as threatening a manner as he could muster. He thought to himself how pitiful he must look, and wondered which of them would finish him. A warrior stepped forward, a large man dressed in a derby hat and a maroon dinner jacket that one might wear to a party in the realm. The sight was unnerving, and Cley could not help but blink his eyes.

  The man walked slowly up to Cley, opened his hands to show he had no weapons, and then reached out and touched the hunter on the forehead between the eyes.

  “The Word,” he said, and Cley was amazed to hear the language of the realm coming from the Beshanti.

  The hunter remained silent.

  “Yes, I know your tongue,” said the man.

  “Brisden?” said Cley.

  The Beshanti nodded. “I am Misnotishul. In your language this means ‘Rain.’”

  “Why did you kill Brisden?” asked Cley.

  “We called him the pale toad. I learned from his croaking, but now he is useless to us,” said Misnotishul.

  “And me?” asked Cley.

  “You have been marked by the Word. If we had killed you, we would not have lived long,” said the Beshanti.

  “I’ve come for the child,” said the hunter.

  “I told the Shensel, the spirits, to bring me the baby so he would not be killed when we attack. Is the child yours?” asked the warrior.

  “Yes, he is my son,” said Cley, looking down so the man could not see his eyes. “He is to be marked by the Word this spring.”

  Misnotishul motioned with his left hand and pronounced a string of words in Beshanti. A man stepped out from a stand of birch trees, carrying the child still wrapped in his blankets. The bearer of the child handed him over to Cley.

  “Tomorrow, we are going to vanish those of the western realm from our land,” said Misnotishul. “No one in the fort will be left alive. You may go your way with your son and your wife, but the others, I promise you, will die.”

  “Why must they?” asked Cley.

  “They are an illness in the land. We tried to let them grow here, but they are like poisonous weeds. I am sorry, but I want the realm, the home of Brisden and yourself, to know that no more should come. Once the last of them is dead, I must undergo a ritual to forget your tongue. I wanted the power that the Word have to know all language, but the pale toad has given me a destructive knowledge.”

  “But …” said Cley, and the Beshanti waved his hand in front of him as if erasing the hunter’s voice. Misnotishul turned and motioned for his men to follow him.

  The hunter stood in the clearing in the birches, holding the sleeping child. He looked down at Dat and shook his head, thinking of the times they had gone hunting, the young man’s confession to him about his father, his amazing one-eyed aim.

  Cley was confused, weighed down by grief and unable to move. Then the baby woke and started to cry. The hunter picked up his hat and put it on. With his free hand, he slipped the knife back into his boot. He took a slow, weighted step, and then another, and another, until Fort Vordor came into view.

  Curaswani drew on his pipe, lifted his drink, and finished it all in one draught. “Then you will go,” he said to Cley.

  “The others, though,” said the hunter.

  “We will hold the fort,” said the captain. “Three saved is better than none. It will be our victory.”

  Cley shook his head.

  “An order,” said the captain, as he poured them each another glass.

  That night there was a party in the barracks. Captain Curaswani ordered whiskey be served, and relieved all men from guard duty. Private Dean played his harmonica, and Morgana danced with each of the soldiers. Some of the men sang old songs from the western realm while others sat about telling jokes and tall tales, smoking pipes and cigarettes. The captain was the barkeep, and he kept all drinks filled to spilling. There was venison cooking on the stove, and Morgana had, through kitchen alchemy, created a cake with icing made from melted sugar cubes and lard.

  Willa Olsen had also come downstairs, carrying the baby. She stood off to the side most of the time, staring blankly at the goings-on. She approached Cley, who was sitting on one of the soldiers’ cots, smoking a cigarette he had begged from Weems. The hunter looked up from his thoughts and took a sip of his drink.
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br />   “Thank you,” she said in a voice that was nearly smothered by the noise of the party.

  Now it was Cley who could think of nothing to say. He reached up and touched the baby’s blanket. She began to turn away, and he called her back.

  “Get some sleep,” he said. “Early tomorrow, you and I and Wraith are leaving Fort Vordor. Say nothing to the others tonight about it. Pack whatever you can possibly carry along with the child.”

  She nodded quickly and walked away. He was uncertain as to whether she really understood what he had said.

  The captain’s voice was like thunder as he called the men to attention just before sunrise. They lifted themselves, groggy and disoriented, from the places where they had fallen but a few hours earlier. There was a lingering fog of tobacco smoke in the barracks, mixed with the smell of venison that had been left to char on the stove.

  Cley had not slept, but was fully dressed, wearing his black hat and the yellow coat. His bow and quiver were slung over opposite shoulders. In his left hand he carried a rifle, and there was a pistol in his belt. The new pack that Curaswani had given him was filled with some food, the book cover, his fire stones, and as much ammunition as he could carry. He stood in the darkness of the compound, with Wood at his side.

  As the soldiers came from the door of the barracks, limping into boots and buttoning their uniforms, Curaswani, dressed in full uniform and bearing all of his medals on his chest, issued them rifles and pistols he had gathered on the ground in a heap. He directed them to where he wanted each to take up a position on the catwalks.

  Cley saw in the young men’s faces that they knew something portentous was about to happen. One or two had tears in their eyes, and nearly all of them were trembling. No one questioned the captain, but all moved quickly to their assigned posts. On his way to the great door of the fort, Weems passed the hunter and slipped a pack of cigarettes into his hand.

  “For luck,” said the young man, and was gone.