On the Banks of the River of Heaven

by Richard Parks

  Makan dutifully laid the adze aside. He rose from the bench where he had been working and brushed the metal filings from his lap. Julan waited until Makan stood beside him and then held up the mirror to show their images, side by side.

  Makan was over forty years younger than his father, yet it was very difficult to tell them apart. Their hair was the same shade of black, their faces no more or less lined than their time working in the sun over the years could account for.

  “Well . . . you’re well preserved, Father. Part of your famous luck.”

  Julan laughed. “I am not well-preserved; I’m not aging at all! There’s not enough luck in the world to account for that.”

  “If that is so, then what are you going to do?”

  Julan thought about it a little more, though in truth he had done little else for the past few days. “What I should have done at least five years ago. I’m going to die.”

  Makan turned pale. “You don’t mean to harm yourself??”

  Julan shrugged. “If I thought it might work . . . yet for all I know this enchantment—if such it is—would let me live yet with my throat cut or my vitals pierced, and then where would I be? No, Son, do not worry: First, I will find out who has done this to me and lift the curse. Then, as will doubtless be right and proper, I will die. Not before.”

  Julan did manage to die in one small regard: He left the farm and all chattel to his son by the expedient of selling the land to him for the sum of one silver penny, duly recorded in the shire clerk’s great book. All Julan took with him was some food, a blanket, clothes, his good cloak and the plain soldier’s sword he had worn in his younger days. He wasn’t sure if a sword was the proper item to carry on a quest for Death, but Julan was a firm believer in keeping his options open.

  “The farm is yours. Marry soon, and I hope you choose as well as I did. Know you have your father’s love, always, but you will not see me again,” was all he said.

  Then Julan embraced his son for the last time and left his home and what had been his life, seeking his death long-delayed. He walked until the sun went down, in no particular direction. When night came he found a place beneath a tree and slept, and dreamed. There were no visions to guide him now, not as there had been before, but still, there in his dreams, he saw a familiar face. The Enchantress Widow. After fifty years he had never managed to forget her. There was a time he had wondered about that. Perhaps it was guilt at what he had done, no matter how necessary. Julan had never quite been able to puzzle it out.

  The next morning he woke and repeated the journey from the day before. At night he dreamed, and again it was the Enchantress Widow who came to him. After the third day it was clear that he was traveling, but it wasn’t so clear that he was getting somewhere.

  The situation had been very different on his first quest. Then he had a clear-cut goal; the fortress of the Enchantress Widow where, a fevered vision told him, a beautiful young girl wrapped in spider’s silk awaited a horrible fate. There was a helpful forest hermit who was more than he seemed to show him the way and even, as Julan now recalled, a talking squirrel or two. Yet he hadn’t seen a single hermit’s bower in the last three days, and no animals of any kind other than birds, and none of them had said so much as ‘good morning.’

  Julan sat down under an ancient oak to puzzle on the matter for a bit. “I suppose quests can’t be the same at seventy-five as they were at twenty-five. I’ll have to learn all over again. First I need a direction. I’m searching for my death, which has gone missing. Where should I look?”

  He heard his dead wife’s voice then, clear in his memory, and the words she said every time he had ever misplaced anything and asked, as men do, if she knew where it was. The answer was always the same: Where did you see it last?

  It took Julan a little longer to remember where he had last seen his Death, but he finally managed.

  “Julan, Blessed of Astonei, smote the evil with his bright blade, pure as the Fires of Eternal Truth, bringing light to the foul pit of darkness”

  —The Ballad of Julan the Lucky, Amatok Monastic Version, lines 2087-2088 inclusive.

  Julan reached the borders of the Abandoned Lands just as the summer heat was finally breaking. Or perhaps it just meant he’d walked far enough north to change climates. He wasn’t sure, just as he wasn’t sure now why this place was called ‘The Abandoned Lands’ in the first place. When he was young he’d assumed that the Enchantress Widow’s evil had kept the place free of people and most other animals. Now, fifty years or more since Widow’s demise, it looked pretty much the same as Julan remembered: bleak, rocky, and full of spiders.

  Julan saw their webs wherever he looked: large garden-spider webs strung between dead tree limbs in a place that had never been a garden. Dull gray funnel webs in rocky crevices, vast tent webs that covered the tops of small trees and bushes. Curiously, the only actual spiders he saw where the brown wolf-spiders that foraged among the rocks and, so far as he knew, made no webs at all. He wondered for a moment what they ate, but the answer was obvious: other spiders. It’s not as if there was much else.

  Julan felt the weight of his pack and tried to judge. He had maybe enough food for three or four days. He hoped that would be enough. Seeking death was one thing. Eating spiders along the way was quite another.

  The sun was setting. Julan found a bare expanse of flat rock relatively free of spiders to make camp. Sleeping on stone didn’t appeal to him but the idea of sleeping under and among spiders’ webs appealed even less. He built two campfires on either side of where he planned to sleep in the hope of keeping them away. Firewood was no problem, as there were almost more dead trees than the living sort. It seemed trees did not get very tall, or live very long, in the Abandoned Lands.

  “Yet new trees grow, despite that. Even in this wretched place.”

  LIFE WANTS TO LIVE.

  For a moment Julan thought that, perhaps, he was not so alone as he had thought. Yet he was pretty sure he had actually heard nothing; the voice had come in its own way.

  Another memory.

  Certainly, but which one? Kalissa, his wife? No. The voice was wrong. Yet it was familiar. Julan couldn’t quite place it. He shrugged and piled more wood on the fire; he couldn’t do anything about the hardness of his bed but the sun had sunk below the mountains and the air was growing colder by the moment. At least he had an answer for the cold.

  The spiders were stirring. Julan had more or less expected that. What he hadn’t expected was that they would be so large. These weren’t the small wolf-spiders he’d noticed earlier. These were large, black, and hairless; their bodies shone in the firelight like obsidian. He saw their eyes reflected in the firelight, row on row of them.

  Been awhile since they tasted the blood of a warm animal, I fancy.

  Yet whatever brought them to him, curiosity or hunger, it didn’t last long. One by one they moved off, going about their own business of the night, whatever it was. All save one. It sat about twenty feet away from the campfire, all eight of its eyes on him.

  “You should go away too,” Julan said aloud. “There’s no meal for you here.”

  “I’m not hungry,” said the spider, in a low, clicking voice.

  Julan didn’t say anything for a long time. The spider waited patiently. “It’s been a long time since an animal spoke to me.”

  “No doubt it’s been a long time since you did anything worthy of comment,” said the spider.

  Julan reddened slightly. “What do you know of that?”

  The spider shrugged. At least it raised its slightly in a gesture that seemed like a shrug. Julan had never seen one do that before, though he freely admitted he was no student of spider ways and just might not have noticed.

  “Perhaps nothing,” the spider said. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m seeking something I lost. The last time I saw it was at the fortress of the Enchantress Widow many years ago.”

  “Something? That’s rather vague.”

 
“I know what I lost. Pardon me, but I didn’t tell you since it’s none of your business.”

  The spider seemed to consider. “Or perhaps you didn’t tell me because you don’t really know what it is.”

  “Listen . . . oww!”

  Julan slapped at his left hand with his right. A small black spider, almost a copy in miniature of the one speaking to him, had crawled through the gap in the fires behind him and bitten him. It curled up and died as it fell into the flames.

  “It’s only a little poisoned. You won’t die—in case you cared. Go to sleep. You’ll find Widow’s fortress when you awaken.”

  The spider turned and disappeared into the night before Julan could answer. Julan started to look through his pack for medicines for the bite, but was suddenly overcome with an incredible weariness that made him feel as if his had turned to lead. Despite his best intention, he lay down between the flames and did exactly as the spider suggested.

  “The maid was fair, fairer than fair, glowing skin and golden hair, the Golden Prize of the spider’s lair. That’s why he’s ‘Julan the Lucky.’ ”

  —The Ballad of Julan the Lucky, cleaner bits of the version sung in the taverns near Borasur.

  When Julan awoke there was no trace of the bite on his hand. He flexed his fingers carefully, but felt nothing, no numbing nor soreness. The fires had long since burned down to ashes but there were no spiders nearby. Julan shrugged and rolled up his blanket. A pause for a little water and dried biscuit, then a quick answer to nature’s call and he was on his way.

  He hadn’t gone more than the length of a bowshot when the world fell away, almost beneath his feet.

  “I know this place.”

  He stood at the edge of what seemed to be a vast cliff, but a closer look showed the edges circling away on either side of him to meet again in the distance. Julan stood on the edge of a great dark pit, and in the center of which the land rose again on a rocky spire and there was the Widow’s fortress. There was a mist hovering down in the pit that partially obscure Julan’s view, but he could see well enough to be sure. Not that he believed there were so many great dark pits, even in the Abandoned Lands, that he might mistake this one for another. He found the way down, a very precarious trail winding its way down along the rock face, starting between two upright stones exactly as he remembered.

  Good thing I didn’t bring a horse. I’d have to leave the poor beast for the spiders . . .

  Julan started down. He found himself looking away from the rock wall and appreciating the view. This was different from before; as a young man Julan had been terrified of heights, and it had taken every ounce of courage he possessed to make his way down the narrow trail to the bottom. Now he found himself looking with eagerness out into the distance. Perhaps it was because he was no longer afraid to die. Or perhaps because there was something of great heights and distance that suggested things unknown and beyond oneself, vast cosmic realities that had nothing to do with him or cared one way or another how his quest played out. Fall, don’t fall. Find what you seek or simply endure until the end of Time itself. All one to them.

  “A strange thought for this early in such a fine morning,” Julan mused.

  “What is?”

  The spider was back. Just as large as Julan remembered, maybe six feet from him, clinging to a long thin web attached somewhere high overhead.

  “I thought I’d dreamed you,” Julan said.

  “Maybe you did. Maybe you are. So. What’s so strange?”

  “I was thinking of infinity, if you must know.”

  “A large subject,” the spider conceded, “or rather, an endless one, which is not quite the same.”

  “Why are you following me? Are you hungry now?”

  “Human flesh’s value as a meal is over-rated. Your skin is too soft to fully contain my poison and thus liquefy your insides properly, as any decent insect can manage. Besides, if I wanted to eat you I’d have done it already.”

  “It might not be so easy as you think,” Julan said.

  The spider gave our a whistling sigh. “Your pride hasn’t changed.”

  “Are you claiming you know me?”

  “Of you, which is often the same. Julan the Lucky, also called Widowsbane, though the name is subject to misinterpretation. One would think you went about murdering helpless old women.”

  “I did kill one woman in my time,” Julan said, “and she was anything but helpless. Yet I am not proud of it, as some think. I had no choice.”

  “Didn’t you? That’s good to know.” The spider dropped to the trail behind Julan and followed along about seven paces behind him.

  Julan hadn’t gone more than a few feet when he couldn’t stand it any more. “Stop following me!”

  “How do you know I am following? I might simply be going in the same direction.”

  Julan inched his sword out of the scabbard, just enough so that the spider could see the shine on his steel. “I will not have a dangerous creature like you so close to my back. Either leave or I will kill you.”

  “Humans are as dangerous as my kind, if not more so, and you have had several close to you over the years. Some very close indeed, back and front too.”

  “Those I trusted. I do not trust you.”

  “Fair enough, but I still have my own business to attend. Say I go ahead of you. Will that be all right?”

  Julan wanted to say it was not, but so far the creature had done nothing of a threatening nature and he had no real reason to object. Besides, what did he really have to fear? That the creature would kill him?

  Julan sighed. “Very well.”

  The spider scurried ahead on its eight legs while Julan followed at his own pace. The spider never seemed to be either hurrying or slowing down, but always managed to keep pace and distance with Julan as he made his own way down the trail. It took a few hours, but Julan finally stepped away from the sheer rock wall onto relatively level ground. That is to say, the drop was now gradual rather than sheer, and he was able to pick his way carefully down the slope.

  Every now and then he could see the spider ahead of him. Julan thought it a little strange that the spider should be going in the same direction but, since it had no eyes in the back of its head he fancied that it couldn’t really know which way he was going and thus was truly on its own path. He considered what little he did know of spiders, and one was that they sense vibration with their feet. Perhaps the spider could tell which way Julan was going by the small jarrings of his footfalls, and adjusted its own path accordingly.

  OR MAYBE THIS ISN’T ALL ABOUT YOU.

  The voice again. Julan was sure it was no memory this time, but what it might be was still a mystery. If I live long enough I may try to sort it out, for want of something better to do.

  Julan stopped to rest at a place he knew very well indeed. The pillars were still there. Two massive columns of rough black stone flanked the only direct path to the fortress. Beyond them, the land rose again sharply to where Widow’s fortress sat in brooding shadow well below the lip of the pit. Now the fortress, so far as Julan could see, was in ruins. The narrow defile that led to the stone bridge that was, as best Julan recalled, the only way to reach the fortress short of climbing up the little mountain it sat on, was choked with stones and debris. And everywhere, as always, were the spiders’ webs.

  There had been one more web the last time Julan had been there, a massive one stretching from pillar to pillar and blocking the way forward. On that web had sat the Guardian, a massive spider probably ten times larger than the small one—if a spider the size of a deerhound could rightly be called small—that had been accompanying Julan on his quest.

  Julan smiled. This was the place. He remembered. His Death had been there, at the moment he met the Guardian in combat. Julan had recognized it at once from the look in its cold black eyes although, as it occurred to him now, he had not quite looked into Death’s face before the battle had been joined and he had no time to look or even think about what the
intent in those eyes might mean for him. When it was over, and the Guardian lay in ragged pieces, its web destroyed, Death wasn’t there. Julan had then proceeded to the fortress and, youth being what it was, had given no more thought to the matter.

  “This is where I saw it last . . . ”

  “The thing you are missing?”

  The spider sat atop the rightmost pillar, idly spinning a small ball of silken thread like an old woman at her knitting. “I thought you had your own business to attend,” Julan said.

  “This is my business,” replied the spider. “And I am tending it. I have made a pilgrimage to the shrine of my ancestor, whom you knew as the Guardian.”

  Julan smiled. “Ah. You came here for revenge! Well, then, I am ready for you.”

  “Far too ready,” the spider said, and it sighed. “I’m not here for revenge.”

  “I killed your ancestor! You said as much yourself.”

  The spider lowered its briefly; probably the closest it could come to a nod. “Who would have eaten you, had matters gone differently. If she had not wished to risk death, she should have chosen softer prey. Revenge is not the way of spider-folk; we’re as like to eat each other as not. Even for the visit I’ll admit more curiosity than sentiment. Was the Guardian really as large as they say?”

  “So large that the length of my arms twice over would not have marked her tip to tip. Her mandibles where like the horns of a black ox. I have not seen her like before or since.”

  “That is an interesting to know. So. I told you why I am here. Why are you here? It’s only fair.”

  Julan sighed. “Not that it matters to you, but I’m seeking my Death.”

  The spider considered this. “Why all the bother? Couldn’t you have just made one too many steps at the edge of the pit and settled the matter?”

  Julan shrugged. “Perhaps, but I don’t know. I’ve already lived well past my allotted span, in good health and sound of limb. You may not realize this, but among my kind I am very old. Three-score and fifteen; far too old to be as I am. Unless I’ve found my Death, and know it for what it is, how do I know I wouldn’t just lie, broken and in pain, on the rocks near here while I waited to heal? And then be misshapen and in pain for centuries to come? I should have died already, and I have not. I need to know why.”