by Jeffrey Ford
Willa walked with Wraith in her arms along the southern side of the lake. Inside the cabin it was sweltering, and she had come to catch the breeze that usually began to blow out of the forest in the afternoon. Wood ran in front of her, blazing a path through the tall meadow grass and flowers, making sure there were no snakes.
She had been trying for the past weeks not to think of Cley, but had found the hunter was always on her mind. Life at Pierce’s cabin was not the hardship she had at first feared it would be. There was plenty of food for their survival and then some, but the loneliness was always with her, an unfriendly spirit that made her talk to herself, stare for long sessions into the small cracked mirror in the bedroom of the cabin, cry at night instead of sleeping.
As she moved along the lakeside, she felt the wind begin to stir. On this day it came not from the south but instead from the opposite direction. She watched the ripples on the water and the rhythmic swaying of yellow flowers that hung in the shapes of bells from a central green stalk. Soft white clouds sailed by in the deep blue above.
She finally called to Wood to return. There was a meal to prepare for herself and the dog, and before she could get to that she knew she must nurse Wraith, who was growing larger by the day. Expecting the dog to dash past her, she waited. A few minutes passed, and he still had not come. Just as she turned to call him again, she heard a haunting noise that momentarily stopped her heart.
Wood was standing by the edge of the lake, his head lowered, his hackles raised, tail straight. She watched as he lifted his head and again howled mournfully with a voice that chilled her. The baby woke and began to cry. Willa clutched the child to her and ran for the house. She did not notice the necklace holding the wooden figurine break, spilling the remaining wooden man onto the ground.
The body scribe, in the village of the Word, made the last, precise jab with the bone needle, completing another blue image on the left buttock of the queen. The figure he had created by covering over the face of Brisden was that of a dog howling. With that final dot of color, the queen herself howled, and the old artisan knew it was time to begin his journey.
Shkchl took the corpse by the legs and pulled it toward the pool in the center of the cave. He slowly backed into the water with a hissing sigh. He had been too long out of his natural medium, and the feel of it upon his scaled flesh was soothing. Slowly, he submerged, and as he did, he dragged Cley’s body beneath the surface with him.
Willa sat before the fireplace in the high-backed chair with Wraith on her lap and the loaded pistol in her left hand. Wood, who had only given up his lament with the fall of night, lay on the floor at her feet. She was singing softly to the baby while watching the flames ripple. Cley had told her once how, at times, he thought he could see things in the fire, and she now searched for signs of him in the orange blaze. Every now and then the dog whimpered and kicked a back leg as though running in his dreams. Suddenly a scorched log dropped, and there was a burst of fire that appeared to carry a portrait of the hunter. She leaned forward and said his name, but he was gone before she realized it.
The foliate dashed through a deep forest of gnarled trees that bore fruit like lanterns. The drooping branches held at their ends large, glowing globes that attracted swarms of insects. A fox darted across his path, and so as not to trip over it, he leaped, flipped in the air, and hit the ground running. Somewhere in the canopy above, the monkeys applauded his performance.
In the murky waters at the bottom of the pool, in a clearing surrounded by huge, black, tuberous flowers that grew on stalks anchored in the sandy bottom, Shkchl went to work on Cley’s corpse. He had all of his instruments handy in valises that were giant oyster shells.
First, he secured the body so it did not float away on the strong current by tying it at the wrists and ankles to long tentacle vines that grew from the bases of the black flowers. Rummaging through his things, he found a hollowed-out fish, wide mouth open, that was used to store a thick, gooey substance that shimmered like quicksilver.
He grimaced as he dipped his webbed hand into the mouth and swiped up a big gob of the stuff. Holding his hand out to the side as if he were carrying excrement, he approached his patient. He covered every inch of Cley’s form so as to prevent decomposition. When a thin film had been applied to the hunter, he took another gob from the fish and crammed half of it into Cley’s open mouth. The other half he used to plug the remaining apertures of the body.
Now came forth the swordfish saws, the fish-bone needles, and other tools that were living organisms: minute, all jaw and fangs, to be used as clamps. There was cutting and bone-breaking, and it was hard to see what was happening because blood spewed forth in billowing red clouds.
Cley was huddled inside a tiny bubble, his legs drawn up, his arms around his knees. There was no room for anything else, save the voice of Pa-ni-ta, which was telling him tales of the history of the wilderness. In his mind, he saw everything vividly, and the ancient sorceress spared no details. The flow of words was infinitely fascinating. It was the very air he was breathing. When she spoke of the will of the Beyond, he lost the story for a moment and remembered Pierce’s cabin by the lake. Images of Willa and Wood and Wraith appeared and disappeared only to reappear against the backdrop of the brutality and grace that was the evolution of the vast territory.
“Am I dead?” he shouted.
“You are waiting for spring,” said the voice.
With this, he pictured Willa sitting in the chair before the fireplace, holding the baby. She was staring directly at him, and her look of sadness and confusion made him want to be with her. Desire became frustration, like an itch that could not be attended to.
“Sleep now,” said Pa-ni-ta.
“Wait,” Cley cried, but just then a fallen tree trunk appeared out of thin air directly in the path of the coursing foliate. Vasthasha tripped over it and fell, the thin stick at the bottom of his throat, at the end of which the bubble of Cley bobbed, hit against the hard vines of his inner vegetable skeleton. The hunter smashed against the boundary that was his prison and lost consciousness.
Vasthasha leaped to his feet and began running again. He cleared the edge of the forest and passed into the moonlight of a desert he would have to cross before the rising of the sun.
In the confines of the walls of Fort Vordor, a crow ripped the remaining flesh from Curaswani’s neck. It had come every day of the summer to feast on the remains of the soldiers, not knowing that their dead meat harbored a parasite that had already, very slowly, begun to sap its life.
Willa chopped wood with the stone ax out behind the cabin. The day was overcast, and a misty drizzle fell. Wood and Wraith lay on a blanket behind her. The child rolled over and pulled himself along, sliding on his stomach. When he reached the edge of the blanket, Wood lifted him by the back of the overalls his mother had sewn for him and returned him gently to the center of the large blue rectangle.
Shkchl had been at his work for days, setting bones, cauterizing arteries with the charges of electric eels, and everywhere probing the corpse with a three-pronged wand that he held with the ends of his antennae mustache. Wherever the triple points touched, a sudden torrent of bubbles erupted.
He retrieved from his store of implements a small snail shell. With the sharp tips of his webbed fingers, he dug into the shell and pulled out a wriggling yellow creature, like an inchworm, with delicate horns. Using his thumbnail, he made an incision across Cley’s exposed heart and shoved the creature inside the muscle. That done, he replaced the plug of bone into the sternum and welded it with the triton. Next, he applied the living clamps to the flaps of chest flesh, sealing shut the thoracic cavity.
When Cley was again in one piece, Shkchl cut the vines that held the body in place. Lifting the hunter under the arms, he swam with him up above the tall tubelike flowers. He chose one that would accommodate the measurements of the corpse and shoved Cley down inside the dark blossom. Then he gathered the top and wrapped and tied it with a piece of vi
ne.
The Water Being’s work was done, but before gathering his tools, he looked up at the flower that now was a shroud and mentally calculated the rate of disintegration for the vine, the goo that covered the body, and the snail whose life, when it ebbed, would give life to Cley.
Shkchl shrugged. “Close enough,” he thought. As he collected his oyster-shell baggage, he wondered if the great serpent yet knew it was pregnant. He pictured the blue membrane that blocked entrance to the garden above, and with a directed thought turned it off. With this, he took to the underground waterways that led back to the inland ocean.
The old body scribe ambled through the oasis where Cley had first met Vasthasha. At the heart of the lush forest he found, in a clearing beneath a tree with wide leaves, the remains of a campfire. He knelt and brought his face within inches of the burned wood. In the charred pile, he smelled the word for Cley.
Bad dreams plagued the Beshanti. Misnotishul walked through the nightmares of too many warriors, spewing the poisonous drivel of Brisden. They decided to burn Fort Vordor and erase its existence from their memories.
On the other side of the desert, Vasthasha ran through the crumbling remains of an ancient city. The ruins of the buildings still gave evidence that they had been constructed in imitation of human heads—the mouths, the doorways; the eyes, the windows; the smoke tunnels, merely the tops of elaborate hats. When the wind blew, these rotting stone heads conversed in low murmurs, and the foliate believed they were discussing the fact that he would never make it to Paradise.
The fort burned, the crow flew north, Willa laughed out loud at Wraith’s baby language, and the body scribe passed along the seashore, looking at the wreck of an old ship foundering in the surf off a distant sandbar.
Cley heard a story, in all the languages of the Word at once, about the creation of the world. It was like an impossibly complex joke, involving a bird, a fish, a tree, a snake, a man and woman, and the punch line, he knew, although it was still an eternity away, had to do with the hatching of an egg.
The summer dozed in its own heat, sleepwalking through blue days and cool nights. Its lethargy slowed Vasthasha in his race, and the foliate felt as if he were running across the bottom of the inland ocean. He stopped one afternoon, for only a moment, to drink from a green pool, next to which lay the carcass of a dead deer. As he lifted himself to continue, water dripping from the leaves of his face, he smelled it—the first hint of summer’s demise.
Later that afternoon, he passed the mouth of a cave. If he had had the time to stop and explore, he would have found inside the remains of the adept, Scarfinati, who, in his self-imposed exile from humanity, had discovered the secret of immortality only to eventually choose suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.
Two turns of the vine that held the top of Cley’s shroud disintegrated from the nibbling of one-celled organisms and the inherent catalytic processes of water.
Shkchl, on his long return to the inland ocean, was swimming through a swiftly moving underground channel when he decided to stop for a moment’s rest. He wedged his webbed feet against an outcropping of rock and let the rush of water move around him. He had not been resting long when he was struck squarely in the back by a pointy piece of debris. Reaching out, he grabbed the projectile before it could be swept away.
“What is this?” he wondered as he studied it. He saw it was a man-made tool, strung with line, at the end of which was a dangerous hook. A round spool where the line was wound had rotted badly. “A pathetic human device,” he said to himself. “Pollution of the worst sort.” He let the fishing pole go on ahead of him in the flow. “May they all, every one of them, sit on one of these and spin,” he said, and his words flew away in bubbles that would not find air against which to break for days.
One night when Wraith would not sleep, Willa wrapped him in blankets and took him out of the bed to go sit by the fire. She threw on a few more large branches she had cut that day and settled down in the high-backed chair. The child was wide-awake, but not crying, only gurgling in baby language.
At the sound of Wraith’s voice, Wood woke up. He went into the other room and returned with the book cover.
Willa smiled upon seeing it, remembering the day at her old house when she had come in from a walk and found Cley reading to Wraith and the dog from the empty book. Wood set the leather cover in her lap and took his place at her feet, looking up. And so on this night, she began telling the story of her life: “I was born in the town of Belius in the western realm …” Wraith went quiet, and the dog was asleep before she finished describing her parents, but she continued on and got as far as her first day of school.
Although the days were still warm, the nights grew cold, and the leaves started to change at their tips from green to red. The great serpent sensed the seasons shifting as the clutch of eggs grew inside of her. Twenty replicas in hard white cases, twenty transmitters that would leave the cave and spread out to form a web that would widen the consciousness of the Beyond and then multiply every spring to expand it further until it knew, again, every inch of itself. Each of the tiny Sirimon was curled in its bubble like Cley, listening to tales of the wilderness.
The body scribe found the remains of the Olsens’ house. He stood amidst the ruins, the blackened wood reeking with the word that was Cley. Watching him from a distance were the Beshanti, who knew they dared not disturb him. Beneath the remains of a curious platform full of dirt still holding the brown-needled remains of two dwarfed trees, he found a pair of miniature wooden carvings in the shapes of young women. He took them in his hand and put them in a deerskin pouch he wore on a lanyard around his waist.
The leaves that were the foliate’s arms and legs would soon begin to change color. All of his blossoms had drifted away in his wake, and now violet berries began to show where the flowers had been. At night, bats sought him with flawless sonic precision, swooping out of the dark to steal this sweet fruit. During the day it was the sparrows that swarmed down upon him in migrating flocks. He ran through both night and day, beset by pecking, grasping scavengers, and the pain of each theft was like the jab of a body scribe’s bone needle, the stab of a fishing pole carried by a rushing current.
The crow, whose eyesight was failing, whose beak was softening, and whose feathers shed as a result of the parasitic disease it had contracted from feasting on the flesh of Curaswani and his men, turned in its flight one morning and followed a path through the Beyond that defied time and distance.
It sailed into the wind of passing years and miles, above the heads of the other glowing creatures that were on their way somewhere far from where they had begun. In its flight, a feather came loose and fell. It drifted down like a bright idea and struck, on the head, Scarfinati, who years earlier had passed this way on his pilgrimage to the cave farther into the heart of the wilderness. Instantly the shining form of the adept shattered like fine glass beneath the tap of a hammer at the same moment that, years in the future, he pulled the razor across his throat. In the intervening time, he no longer existed.
The meadow lost its flowers, and the grass had turned from green to the color of wheat. In the late afternoon, when the sunlight broke through openings in the mountainous clouds above, streaming down in distinct shafts, the field, all the way to the lake and beyond, appeared a rippling sea of gold. A herd of six-legged shaggy behemoths with oblong heads, wide nostrils, and blunt faces ambled out of the forest to graze.
At first, Willa feared them for their size, but eventually it became evident that they were as afraid of her as she was of them. Wood took great pleasure in running among them and rounding them up into a tight group. The dog barked wildly, as if shouting orders to the lumbering creatures, and they responded with uncharacteristic speed to his commands.
The beasts lingered for a week, grouped together on the southern shore of the lake, and then one morning Willa woke to find them gone.
The underwater blossom that shrouded Cley’s body began to change. The lar
ge, soft petals stiffened; the soft plant matter became hard and coarse. The stalk that held it upright bent a little more with each passing day.
Vasthasha was pursued by troubling thoughts through a forest of tall trees whose leaves fell around him in a yellow blizzard. He could feel his energy diminishing. Each step took a conscious effort, but whenever he slowed, he felt the notion of failure nipping at the backs of his legs, and this served to spur him on. His own leaves had gone red at the tips, and one or two were singed brown. The vines that had made up his hair had already died and turned to short stubble.
“… and we went hand in hand out behind the town hall, the sound of the violin following us in the dark. We hid beneath the weeping willow that stood next to the bronze statue of the great horned God, Belius, and there, Christof, your father, first kissed me,” said Willa. She closed the empty book cover and sat, staring into the fire. The night was very cold, and she was feeling lonely. She thought about Cley, and decided that if he did not return, she would try to make it back to the seashore in the spring.
Before her emotions could get the better of her, she diverted her attention by making a mental list of all the chores that needed to be done the next day. Laundry, chopping wood, fetching water, sweeping the floor, preparing meals … She listened to the noise of the old crow that had taken lodging in a hole under the roof of the house. It wheezed when it breathed, and at night the sound was like a distant whistling. When she fell asleep, these respirations were transformed in her dreams into the music of a violin.