The Weight of the World

by Tom Toner

  “I’ve written ahead and arranged a guide,” he said. “You and your sister should find him personable.”

  “You don’t know the place?”

  Jatropha shrugged. “I haven’t been up that way in eight hundred years.”

  “What is he, this guide? Noble born? They always are. Don’t expect Pentas to take to him.”

  “The mayor’s son. Comes highly recommended.” He looked at Eranthis, noticing how dark her great wide eye sockets looked in the shade. He’d had no choice; one didn’t travel west without a chaperone. “She can’t blame him for his birth.”

  “She can try.”

  Jatropha scowled. “Might I blame you for your face? For your name? You have chosen neither of these things yourself.” He looked back to the road. “She must learn.”

  “She will blame him, and then she’ll blame you. You know this.”

  He tugged at his sun hat, watching the Artery roll juddering by. There were families of thieves on any of the tributaries of the great road, but here, near the town of Erseke, a great many congregated. The object of their attentions was a broad lake about a mile east of the Artery, at which thousands of tired messenger birds stopped to drink on their way to the Nostrum. Jatropha knew from experience that it wasn’t difficult to swipe a letter from a resting bird—he still employed men to do as much for him from time to time—and as a result most letters to the Southerly Provinces were encrypted, though the knowledge of this didn’t stop people from trying their luck. He watched out now for a few of his own birds, waiting with growing impatience for news from the north and east. Jatropha had hundreds of spies in his employ, carrying colossal reams of information from as far as the Threheng Principalities and beyond, not much of it outwardly interesting, most of it irrelevant, and yet all destined to be put to some minute use at some distant point in time. Commodore Palustris still wrote to him of the Skylings’ and Firmlings’ reported movements, growing worried at the volume of refugees lining the roads from the Fourth Province. Lord General Fagus informed him of the plots against the Jalan admiralty now that the war was at a stalemate. The ladies of the Crimson Court relayed their designs for new heraldry under the Threheng princes, anticipating that the conquerors would wish to visit their newly won territories soon after the turn of the Amaranthine year. But it was his spies in the north who brought the most interesting news: news from the First.

  Immortals had been there, they said now, slowly, sheepishly redrafting their recollection of events. Not just a handful but a court, a procession of twenty or more Perennials. Some names were listed, but Jatropha didn’t know them all. They had taken over the Sarine Palace during the course of a year and summoned delegations from around the Provinces to them, spending what wealth there was to be had in the First on their own personal amusement and almost bankrupting the young king.

  And now they’ve gone, he thought as the Wheelhouse rolled ever closer to their old dominion. Gone to who knows where.

  Jatropha reached into a trunk beneath his chair and brought out his grubby linen letters from a Lacaille contact, peering to read the scribbled script again, paying no heed to Eranthis’s glances. All but a few of the largest ship manifests went unrecorded—the Prism shipping lanes being too chaotic, too unpredictable—and even then they were vague at best. Only the movements of something as large as a Colossus battleship attracted attention, a glowing shoal of superluminal flotsam always following like plankton in its wake: the Feeders of the Colossi, thousands of tiny Great Company vessels representing nearly all of the Prism races. And the Feeders had much to report, turning up as they had on the Old World itself not twenty days ago.

  Elements of the Prism were in league with these Perennial Amaranthine, Jatropha now understood, the two pinned together by some higher power, some governing force still unknown to him. The sudden— and rather late-arriving—news of a schism in the Firmament might not be unrelated.

  Jatropha folded the letters, his mind turning inexplicably to the old rumours from the west, to the stories of a demon that took the shape of beasts and men.

  He noticed Eranthis looking quizzically at him, having caught sight of the foreign papers, and struck a languid flame with one snap of his fingers, burning them in his hand.

  GOH

  The gun lay hot across his sunburned arm. He couldn’t be sure whether the dappled shape he’d seen half an hour earlier was anything more than a pattern in the grasses. Julius took a morsel of comfort from the thought; any tyger or wild dog would surely have grown tired of stalking him by now and made itself known. Shit or get off the pot, went the admirable saying. He smirked, eyeing the tall grasses once more, throwing his satchel over his shoulder and raising his foot to step carefully through the field again, his mind turning to the likelihood of snakes. He’d been bitten six times by a variety of species, all with different results. The worst, a taipan, had left him with a lingering day-long headache. Any other man would have swiftly sickened and died, but Julius was not like other men: he could inhale the breath of a consumptive’s cough and drink from the Ganges without the slightest effect. Specifically why this was the case remained a mystery to him, but after more than two thousand years it was a comfortably familiar state of being. As he strode through the grass, he knew he ought to be far more mindful of the thing he’d just shot at than anything as ineffectual as a snake, but a deeper part of himself still shuddered at the thought of something slithering over his boot and worming its way up his leg.

  At a stand of trees, Julius paused to pull out his flask of tea and stare into their depths. Off to the south, the grove had been thinned by local woodsmen—those who had first come upon the peculiarity, as the explorer Davis had called it for want of a decent translator in the region—and he knew he’d have to push through to find what he was looking for.

  He took a mouthful of tea, the tannins chalky on his teeth, and spat into the grass. It was perfect midday, the ochre grasses reflecting the heat back into his face and smearing the distant hills into shuddering ribbons of chrome. The far-off wail of a bird ceased, replaced with something more than silence, something he’d heard before.

  He listened, the spectre of the tyger fading at his back.

  This was not a place he knew. Only a week before, he’d landed at Calcutta on a Portuguese merchant ship, making his ponderous way to the outskirts of the small town of Goh. He walked a little closer to the edge of the trees, the rifle stock sure against his shoulder, the loaded ball worth its weight in platinum, worth its weight in life. He might survive a snake’s bite, but there were more than poisons in the grand, wide world.

  The sound repeated through the branches. It was as if a strip of leather was being rapidly run across something sharp, but with the expressive dexterity of a violinist drawing his bow along the strings. During each interval in the sound, a handful of swift taps punctuated the silence, some apparent inflection in them generating the impression that a question was being asked. Julius thought quickly, pulling out his knife and tapping its blade against the shining barrel of the rifle, trying to imitate the sound from the trees. As he feared, it fell silent.

  He stepped into the shade of the trees, dry branches snapping beneath his boots. Children, perhaps, or some species of bird he didn’t know, but his past experience led him to believe the source of the sound to be far more exotic. He directed his eyes upwards as he crept through a grove of Portia trees, scanning their yellow and pink flowers for anything unusual, anything peculiar. He understood, having encountered three already throughout his travels, that he would find what he was looking for in a tree not quite the same as its fellows. It would appear older, more primitive, or even of a variety no longer found on the Earth.

  Through the trees, he began to see the first worn brick columns of the pink temple, crumbled from centuries left to the mercy of the woods. Roots the thickness of his neck wormed among the stones, pale against the scuffed, bleached magenta of the walls. He crept between the crumbled pillars into an open square. Da
ncing reliefs of monkey gods played across the walls, their lithe bodies worn smooth and crossed with the strata of exposed mortar. He stood motionless for a while, ears trained to the sounds around him, a mosquito whining far, then close. He let it settle and feed, creeping further into the temple.

  In a crumbled hallway he stopped for more tea, happening to glance up and into the canopy of leaves hanging down through the roofless space.

  Julius sighted his gun with satisfaction. There.

  FALLPULL

  I sleep, sometimes, much to my surprise.

  When I wake, I’ve nothing but the view from my window to know any time has passed at all.

  Oh, but listen to me going on. You’d think from my monologues that I am a being composed entirely of self-pity. There must be greater unfortunates out in the wide worlds. And, even now, it really is quite a view.

  From where I press against the glass, misting it ever so slightly with my warmth, I can see almost the entire world, all existence curving above me like a vast, faded bauble of lands and seas. My cell, wherever it is and whatever it’s called, sticks out upon a spit of gnarled brown igneous rock, with a view beneath of pounding grey waves that slam across the promontory, blown flecks of surf flung almost to my window when the storms sweep in from east to west. I can see those clouds as they form across the world, coalescing with a brutal, dark weight and spinning slowly out over the five inland oceans. I watch the land darken, snaking ribbons of rivers and lakes turning tawny silver and then grey as the great cloud shadows track the coasts to my lonely home, until finally droplets patter the glass and smear my view to nothing.

  They’ve no idea, those who visit me occasionally in my darkened chamber, of just how far I can see, how comprehensively I understand; it is one of my few comforts in this bleak place.

  When I first came to be, in whatever manner that process came about—for I’ve quite forgotten, if I ever knew at all—then they were my superiors. I bawled, I raged, and then I was imprisoned. But I am clever, far brighter than they suspect, and they are certainly not my equals any more.

  My cell is ovoid, constructed with a symmetry and elegance that implies it was once used for something other than storing the forgotten. Across from where I like to hang there is a tall set of shelves that rises almost to the window, empty but for the four haphazardly stacked books I understand more intimately than those who wrote them ever did—that was how I first learned both ancient English and its successor, Unified, the language of my jailors. Everything I knew up until they came for me, I learned from those four jewelled cases; four little collections of symbols that, for the briefest of intervals, at the very start, meant nothing at all. Of course, this was not a dilemma for long, not for me; within the first minute I’d sifted the implied laws of grammar and orthography and spoken my first phonemes (what I’d then thought of as Clenches and Huffs), discerning their principles and chaining together my own bespoke sentences like a master jeweller. Twenty seconds later, I’d examined the first work, an eight-and-a-half-thousand-year-old volume entitled Jungle John, and enjoyed it so much that I read it ninety-nine times more in quick succession, burning through the text incrementally faster with each reading. Replete with the joy of the book, I selected the next and began more slowly, inventing for myself the concept of delayed gratification. By day’s end, I’d read all four of the odd selection and found that the limitations of the world around me had expanded a trillion-fold, an erupting snowflake of fractal possibilities gleaned from mere suggestion. Those four jewelled metal cases had become my world, carving out a life I could never see from my windows, even if its foundations remained nothing but guesswork and abstract notions, the dreams of the congenitally blind.

  I’ve long since stopped looking at those books, although once a year I might return to the odd paragraph to judge it poorly written, and now spend my time observing and examining the world through my window with growing understanding.

  I know now that I exist on the interior surface of a hollowed sphere some distance in diameter, at the edge of a large continent that branches at least half of the world like a ragged bridge across two oceans. At the rate I am able to cross my chamber, I estimate that it would take me at least ninety full days to reach the furthest point of my observations, a mountainous land mass hanging down from the top of the world. If I were ever free, of course; then my speed—among other things—might be fully tested and explored. This hollowed sphere used to perplex me as I grappled with the laws of things: how such a body might form over time, or generate weather and lands. I couldn’t see how particles of substance, namely Roundlets and Jiglets—for those were the self-taught names I used before I learned anything of the Amaranthine science—might allow such a space to exist. Forces, too, the most apparent being Fallpull, would never countenance the world I saw from my window, for up above there shone a globe of nuclear light—indeed supported unnaturally by stone columns—that could only have been forged on its own by great densities. Many days went by as I studied the world, rising to my window to watch the great monsters passing distantly out to sea. Once, one of them came close, disgorging a distantly remembered bipedal thing that stepped onto the rocks and looked about. I watched in rapt fascination; the creature—I took that term from one of my books—was wrapped in elaborate materials, swaddled as if the sea might hurt it. It stood and looked up at my prison, much larger than the versions of its kind that I remembered now from my birth, the face huge and distorted, its skin a swirling mass of colours.

  Melius. I only learned that name later. A silly word for a silly-looking thing.

  Over time, I saw them all, the living creatures that populated my hollow world. Silvers swam in the waters that broke on the rocks; Alofts sometimes landed by my window, their long heads twitching this way and that, keen eyes glancing out to the grey sea. I came to see, when I looked hard enough, how they went about their lives out there inside the great sphere. When first I glimpsed them feeding on each other, I knew at last that my estimations of the energy-transfer of my Hollow World ecosystem were correct, but I was not pleased. All living things, it appeared, required energy to endure.

  But I did not.

  So I was not like them.

  Only the glass in my window reflected enough light to suit my purpose, but it did it well, and at certain times of the day I could catch clearly the impression of the far wall and floor behind myself, but nothing more. I bore no reflection. To anyone looking, I might as well not have been there.

  When I began to no longer recognise the individual Alofts that settled by my window, I understood that a new generation had arrived. I was outliving them, yet I did not appear to be alive.

  For a time, this troubled me enormously. I watched for any sign that my hypothesis might be wrong, staring down into the waters and the glistening rock pools that exposed themselves at low tide, searching for any life that did not die. But time took everything. The levels of the water dropped, rose again, dropped. After a time, the rain that slashed my window streaked white for a hundredth-life of an Aloft, before returning to grey.

  When my makers came at last, I had named and catalogued every settled dust mote in my chamber, assigning them ranks and arranging them like legions of chess pieces in a grand battle across the floor. As the huge doors screamed open, my armies eddied into a storm, five years of carefully plotted manoeuvres obliterated in the furious gale of the hurled waves below.

  STARRY MOST

  The Nereta was a tumultuous river of startlingly blue water, glacial cobalt where it met the bleached stones of its banks. Arching over the ribbon of blue, a great, ten-man-thick bridge stood crowned with gatehouses and teetering, spindly dwellings. The Most, the ancient bridge was called, from which the citadel of Mostar had taken its name. Above the low steeples of the city, scavenger gulls hovered, riding the thermals with outstretched black and white wings, dipping now and then to settle on the walls. Messenger birds, the staple fixture of the sky above any large provincial city, were nowhere t
o be seen; special cotes where they could rest unmolested from thieves had been built into the inner curtain walls some centuries ago.

  “This is an ancient bridge. It was once called the ‘Starry Most,’ perhaps because the water that runs beneath is so clean and clear that it reflects the heavens every night,” Jatropha said to the girls as they stood at the prow of the Wheelhouse. On a beach of white shingle beneath the growth-stone bridge, the city’s Awgers—Melius that had interbred with talking beasts and been shunned to live beyond Mostar’s walls—hobbled listlessly around their encampment of cloth dwellings, the stones strewn with bones and litter.

  “But what most people don’t know is that this isn’t the true meaning of the ancient words,” Jatropha continued, apparently oblivious to their uninterest. “Starry actually meant old, Most—bridge.” He looked at Eranthis and Pentas with some satisfaction. “Old Bridge. As prosaic as that.”

  “You are a windbag, sir,” Pentas called as she made her way back into the scullery. “Your mouth is like an anus, expelling objectionable things at all hours of the day.”

  Jatropha turned from the tiller. “And what is objectionable about a little knowledge, young lady?”

  “Unasked-for knowledge, Jatropha. And I have enough bad smells coming my way from Arabis, thank you very much.”

  “Whatever’s wrong with that girl?” he asked Eranthis at his side.

  “Everything is wrong with her,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. “Haven’t you realised that yet?”

  Jatropha compressed his lips and said no more as they came rattling to the toll gate. He steadied the tiller and lowered the wooden chocks to keep the great single wheel from rolling backwards, then leaned to speak to the Tollman, who nodded for them all to climb down. Eranthis took Arabis, passing her carefully to Jatropha and alighting on the stone parapet beside a gaggle of fishing Melius. She waited for her sister, still lurking sullenly somewhere above while she locked away any precious things that the Tollman might take a fancy to, and watched the fishermen. Their lures blew sideways in the breeze, skipping along the ruffled blue water towards the shade of the bridge’s arched foundations.