The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  Some of the feelies had noticed them and were edging forward in small groups, stopping, whispering agitatedly among themselves, then edging forward again, all with the hesitant curiosity of savages; and although no signal had been given, the curtains over the cubicle entrances were being thrown back, heads were poking forth, and tiny figures were shinnying down the ropes, crowding into baskets, scuttling downward on the rope ladders, hundreds of people beginning to hurry toward her at a pace that brought to mind the panicked swarming of an anthill. And on first glance they seemed alike as ants. Thin and pale and stooped, with sloping, nearly hairless skulls, and weepy eyes and thick-lipped slack mouths, like ugly children in their rotted silks and satins. Closer and closer they came, those in front pushed by the swelling ranks at their rear, and Catherine, unnerved by their stares, ignoring Mauldry’s attempts to soothe her, retreated into the channel. Mauldry turned to the feelies, brandishing his cane as if it were a victor’s sword, and cried, “She is here! He has brought her to us at last! She is here!”

  His words caused several of those at the front of the press to throw back their heads and loose a whinnying laughter that went higher and higher in pitch as the golden light brightened. Others in the crowd lifted their hands, palms outward, holding them tight to their chests, and made little hops of excitement, and others yet twitched their heads from side to side, cutting their eyes this way and that, their expressions flowing between belligerence and confusion, apparently unsure of what was happening. This exhibition, clearly displaying the feelies’ retardation, the tenuousness of their self-control, dismayed Catherine still more. But Mauldry seemed delighted and continued to exhort them, shouting, “She is here,” over and over. His outcry came to rule the feelies, to orchestrate their movements. They began to sway, to repeat his words, slurring them so that their response was in effect a single word, “Shees’eer, Shees’eer,” that reverberated through the chamber, acquiring a rolling echo, a hissing sonority, like the rapid breathing of a giant. The sound washed over Catherine, enfeebling her with its intensity, and she shrank back against the wall of the channel, expecting the feelies to break ranks and surround her; but they were so absorbed in their chanting, they appeared to have forgotten her. They milled about, bumping into one another, some striking out in anger at those who had impeded their way, others embracing and giggling, engaging in sexual play, but all of them keeping up the chorus of shouts.

  Mauldry turned to her, his eyes giving back gleams of the golden light, his face looking in its vacuous glee akin to those of the feelies, and holding out his hands to her, his tone manifesting the bland sincerity of a priest, he said, “Welcome home.”

  III

  Catherine was housed in two rooms halfway up the chamber wall, an apartment that adjoined Mauldry’s quarters and was furnished with a rich carpeting of silks and furs and embroidered pillows; on the walls, also draped in these materials, hung a mirror with a gem-studded frame and two oil paintings—this bounty, said Mauldry, all part of Griaule’s horde, the bulk of which lay in a cave west of the valley, its location known only to the feelies. One of the rooms contained a large basin for bathing, but since water was at a premium—being collected from points at which it seeped in through the scales—she was permitted one bath a week and no more. Still, the apartment and the general living conditions were on a par with those in Hangtown, and had it not been for the feelies, Catherine might have felt at home. But except in the case of the woman Leitha, who served her meals and cleaned, she could not overcome her revulsion at their inbred appearance and demented manner. They seemed to be responding to stimuli that she could not perceive, stopping now and then to cock an ear to an inaudible call or to stare at some invisible disturbance in the air. They scurried up and down the ropes to no apparent purpose, laughing and chattering, and they engaged in mass copulations at the bottom of the chamber. They spoke a mongrel dialect that she could barely understand, and they would hang on ropes outside her apartment, arguing, offering criticism of one another’s dress and behavior, picking at the most insignificant flaws and judging them according to an intricate code whose niceties Catherine was unable to master. They would follow her wherever she went, never sharing the same basket, but descending or ascending alongside her, staring, shrinking away if she turned her gaze upon them. With their foppish rags, their jewels, their childish pettiness and jealousies, they both irritated and frightened her; there was a tremendous tension in the way they looked at her, and she had the idea that at any moment they might lose their awe of her and attack.

  She kept to her rooms those first weeks, brooding, trying to invent some means of escape, her solitude broken only by Leitha’s ministrations and Mauldry’s visits. He came twice daily and would sit among the pillows, declaiming upon Griaule’s majesty, his truth. She did not enjoy the visits. The righteous quaver in his voice aroused her loathing, reminding her of the mendicant priests who passed now and then through Hangtown, leaving bastards and empty purses in their wake. She found his conversation for the most part boring, and when it did not bore, she found it disturbing in its constant references to her time of trial at the dragon’s heart. She had no doubt that Griaule was at work in her life. The longer she remained in the colony, the more vivid her dreams became and the more certain she grew that his purpose was somehow aligned with her presence there. But the pathetic condition of the feelies shed a wan light on her old fantasies of a destiny entwined with the dragon’s, and she began to see herself in that wan light, to experience a revulsion at her fecklessness equal to that she felt toward those around her.

  “You are our salvation,” Mauldry told her one day as she sat sewing herself a new pair of trousers—she refused to dress in the gilt and satin rags preferred by the feelies. “Only you can know the mystery of the dragon’s heart, only you can inform us of his deepest wish for us. We’ve known this for years.”

  Seated amid the barbaric disorder of silks and furs, Catherine looked out through a gap in the curtains, watching the waning of the golden light. “You hold me prisoner,” she said. “Why should I help you?”

  “Would you leave us, then?” Mauldry asked. “What of the Willens?”

  “I doubt they’re still waiting for me. Even if they are, it’s only a matter of which death I prefer, a fingering one here or a swift one at their hands.”

  Mauldry fingered the gold knob of his cane. “You’re right,” he said. “The Willens are no longer a menace.”

  She glanced up at him.

  “They died the moment you went down out of Griaule’s mouth,” he said. “He sent his creatures to deal with them, knowing you were his at long last.”

  Catherine remembered the shouts she’d heard while walking down the incline of the throat. “What creatures?”

  “That’s of no importance,” said Mauldry. “What is important is that you apprehend the subtlety of his power, his absolute mastery and control over your thoughts, your being.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Why is that important?” He seemed to be struggling to explain himself, and she laughed. “Lost touch with your god, Mauldry? Won’t he supply the appropriate cant?”

  Mauldry composed himself. “It is for you, not I, to understand why you are here. You must explore Griaule, study the miraculous workings of his flesh, involve yourself in the intricate order of his being.”

  In frustration, Catherine punched at a pillow. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll die! This place will kill me. I won’t be around long enough to do any exploring.”

  “Oh, but you will.” Mauldry favored her with an unctuous smile. “That, too, is known to us.”

  Ropes creaked, and a moment later the curtains parted, and Leitha, a young woman in a gown of watered blue taffeta, whose bodice pushed up the pale nubs of her breasts, entered bearing Catherine’s dinner tray. She set down the tray. “Be mo’, ma’am?” she said. “Or mus’ I later c’meah.” She gazed fixedly at Catherine, her close-set brown eyes blinking, fingers plucking at the folds of her gown. />
  “Whatever you want,” Catherine said.

  Leitha continued to stare at her, and only when Mauldry spoke sharply to her, did she turn and leave.

  Catherine looked down disconsolately at the tray and noticed that in addition to the usual fare of greens and fruit (gathered from the dragon’s mouth) there were several slices of underdone meat, whose reddish hue appeared identical to the color of Griaule’s flesh. “What’s this?” she asked, poking at one of the slices.

  “The hunters were successful today,” said Mauldry. “Every so often hunting parties are sent into the digestive tract. It’s quite dangerous, but there are beasts there that can injure Griaule. It serves him that we hunt them, and their flesh nourishes us.” He leaned forward, studying her face. “Another party is going out tomorrow. Perhaps you’d care to join them. I can arrange it if you wish. You’ll be well protected.”

  Catherine’s initial impulse was to reject the invitation, but then she thought that this might offer an opportunity for escape; in fact, she realized that to play upon Mauldry’s tendencies, to evince interest in a study of the dragon, would be a wise move. The more she learned about Griaule’s geography, the greater chance there would be that she would find a way out.

  “You said it was dangerous…How dangerous?”

  “For you? Not in the least. Griaule would not harm you. But for the hunting party, well…lives will be lost.”

  “And they’re going out tomorrow?”

  “Perhaps the next day as well. We’re not sure how extensive an infestation is involved.”

  “What kind of beast are you talking about?”

  “Serpents of a sort.”

  Catherine’s enthusiasm was dimmed, but she saw no other means of taking action. “Very well. I’ll go with them tomorrow.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful!” It took Mauldry three tries to heave himself up from the cushion, and when at last he managed to stand, he leaned on his cane, breathing heavily. “I’ll come for you early in the morning.”

  “You’re going, too? You don’t seem up to the exertion.”

  Mauldry chuckled. “It’s true, I’m an old man. But where you’re concerned, daughter, my energies are inexhaustible.” He performed a gallant bow and hobbled from the room.

  Not long after he had left, Leitha returned. She drew a second curtain across the entrance, cutting the light, even at its most brilliant, to a dim effusion. Then she stood by the entrance, eyes fixed on Catherine. “Wan’ mo’ fum Leitha?” she asked.

  The question was not a formality. Leitha had made it plain by touches and other signs that Catherine had but to ask and she would come to her as a lover. Her deformities masked by the shadowy air, she had the look of a pretty young girl dressed for a dance, and for a moment, in the grip of loneliness and despair, watching Leitha alternately brightening and merging with gloom, listening to the unceasing murmur of the feelies from without, aware in full of the tribal strangeness of the colony and her utter lack of connection, Catherine felt a bizarre arousal. But the moment passed, and she was disgusted with herself, with her weakness, and angry at Leitha and this degenerate place that was eroding her humanity. “Get out,” she said coldly, and when Leitha hesitated, she shouted the command, sending the girl stumbling backward from the room. Then she turned onto her stomach, her face pressed into a pillow, expecting to cry, feeling the pressure of a sob building in her chest; but the sob never manifested, and she lay there, knowing her emptiness, feeling that she was no longer worthy of even her own tears.

  Behind one of the cubicles in the lower half of the chamber was hidden the entrance to a wide circular passage ringed by ribs of cartilage, and it was along this passage the next morning that Catherine and Mauldry, accompanied by thirty male feelies, set out upon the hunt. They were armed with swords and bore torches to light the way, for here Griaule’s veins were too deeply embedded to provide illumination; they walked in a silence broken only by coughs and the soft scraping of their footsteps. The silence, such a contrast from the feelies’ usual chatter, unsettled Catherine, and the flaring and guttering of the torches, the apparition of a backlit pale face turned toward her, the tingling acidic scent that grew stronger and stronger, all this assisted her impression that they were lost souls treading some byway in hell.

  Their angle of descent increased, and shortly thereafter they reached a spot from which Catherine had a view of a black distance shot through with intricate networks of fine golden skeins, like spiderwebs of gold in a night sky. Mauldry told her to wait, and the torches of the hunting party moved off, making it clear that they had come to a large chamber; but she did not understand just how large until a fire suddenly bloomed, bursting into towering flames: an enormous bonfire composed of sapling trunks and entire bushes. The size of the fire was impressive in itself, but the immense cavity of the stomach that it partially revealed was more impressive yet. It could not have been less than two hundred yards long, and was walled with folds of thin whitish skin figured by lacings and branchings of veins, attached to curving ribs covered with even thinner skin that showed their every articulation. A quarter of the way across the cavity, the floor declined into a sink brimming with a dark liquid, and it was along a section of the wall close to the sink that the bonfire had been lit, its smoke billowing up toward a bruised patch of skin some fifty feet in circumference with a tattered rip at the center.

  As Catherine watched, the entire patch began to undulate. The hunting party gathered beneath it, ranged around the bonfire, their swords raised. Then, with ponderous slowness a length of thick white tubing was extruded from the rip, a gigantic worm that lifted its blind head above the hunting party, opened a mouth fringed with palps to expose a dark red maw, and emitted a piercing squeal that touched off echoes and made Catherine put her hands to her ears. More and more of the worm’s body emerged from the stomach wall, and she marveled at the courage of the hunting party, who maintained their ground. The worm’s squealing became unbearably loud as smoke enveloped it; it lashed about, twisting and probing at the air with its head, and then, with an even louder cry, it fell across the bonfire, writhing, sending up showers of sparks. It rolled out of the fire, crushing several of the party; the others set to with their swords, hacking in a frenzy at the head, painting streaks of dark blood over the corpse-pale skin. Catherine realized that she had pressed her fists to her cheeks and was screaming, so involved was she in the battle. The worm’s blood spattered the floor of the cavity, its skin was charred and blistered from the flames, and its head was horribly slashed, the flesh hanging in ragged strips. But it continued to squeal, humping up great sections of its body, forming an arch over groups of attackers and dropping down upon them. A third of the hunting party lay motionless, their limbs sprawled in graceless attitudes, the remnants of the bonfire—heaps of burning branches—scattered among them; the rest stabbed and sliced at the increasingly torpid worm, dancing away from its lunges. At last the worm lifted half its body off the floor, its head held high, silent for a moment, swaying with the languor of a mesmerized serpent. It let out a cry like the whistle of a monstrous teakettle, a cry that seemed to fill the cavity with its fierce vibrations, and fell, twisting once and growing still, its maw half-open, palps twitching in the register of some final internal function.

  The hunting party collapsed around it, winded, drained, some leaning on their swords. Shocked by the suddenness of the silence, Catherine went a few steps out into the cavity, Mauldry at her shoulder. She hesitated, then moved forward again, thinking that some of the party might need tending. But those who had fallen were dead, their limbs broken, blood showing on their mouths. She walked alongside the worm. The thickness of its body was three times her height, the skin glistening and warped by countless tiny puckers and tinged with a faint bluish cast that made it all the more ghastly.

  “What are you thinking?” Mauldry asked.

  Catherine shook her head. No thoughts would come to her. It was as if the process of thought itself had been can
celed by the enormity of what she had witnessed. She had always supposed that she had a fair idea of Griaule’s scope, his complexity, but now she understood that whatever she had once believed had been inadequate, and she struggled to acclimate to this new perspective. There was a commotion behind her. Members of the hunting party were hacking slabs of meat from the worm. Mauldry draped an arm about her, and by that contact she became aware that she was trembling.

  “Come along,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

  “To my room, you mean?” Her bitterness resurfaced, and she threw off his arm.

  “Perhaps you’ll never think of it as home,” he said. “Yet nowhere is there a place more suited to you.” He signaled to one of the hunting party, who came toward them, stopping to light a dead torch from a pile of burning branches.

  With a dismal laugh, Catherine said, “I’m beginning to find it irksome how you claim to know so much about me.”

  “It’s not you I claim to know,” he said, “though it has been given me to understand something of your purpose. But”—he rapped the tip of his cane against the floor of the cavity—“he by whom you are most known, him I know well.”

  IV

  Catherine made three escape attempts during the next two months, and thereafter gave up on the enterprise; with hundreds of eyes watching her, there was no point in wasting energy. For almost six months following the final attempt she became dispirited and refused to leave her rooms. Her health suffered, her thoughts paled, and she lay abed for hours, reliving her life in Hangtown, which she came to view as a model of joy and contentment. Her inactivity caused loneliness to bear in upon her. Mauldry tried his best to entertain her, but his mystical obsession with Griaule made him incapable of offering the consolation of a true friend. And so, without friends or lovers, without even an enemy, she sank into a welter of self-pity and began to toy with the idea of suicide. The prospect of never seeing the sun again, of attending no more carnivals at Teocinte…it seemed too much to endure. But she was either not brave enough or not sufficiently foolish to take her own life, and deciding that no matter how vile or delimiting the circumstance, it promised more than eternal darkness, she gave herself to the one occupation the feelies would permit her: the exploration and study of Griaule.