Oddembar’Seil had to flee, but had nowhere to flee to. The South was still neutral, but not safe; the South was never safe for power-seekers. And Oddembar’Seil sought power. He fled northward. Not alone, to be sure. He divided his men into groups which blended in with the various groups fighting each other in every region they had to cross through, and pushed them on northward, far north, in a desperate and not very rational effort to reach the sea, to find ships in which they could sail down the coast on the old shipping route and disembark and attack from the east. It looked as if he might succeed. Most of his troops caught up to him in the foothills, and on a summer morning they marched off again and came to the gates of the city. I don’t know, nobody knows, whether Bloodthirsty cursed or grinned; I don’t know whether he looked at the unknown city with greed, or scratched his head in puzzlement. I do know he entered it peacefully, his men carrying their weapons handy but not brandishing them, and that the inhabitants of the mountain city watched him with curiosity. I know that they even approached him and offered food and shelter. He needed both, but did not accept them. I know that the enemy army caught up to him there, striking at the rear guard while it was half in the city streets, half still on the plains. Goodbye ships, good-bye shipping route and hopes of a surprise attack from the east. Everything was lost, but when you have to fight, you fight.
There have been hideous battles in the long history of the Empire. It’s even possible there have been some, a few, crueler than the one that was later called the Battle of the North, as if there was only one north, one battle. But it’s hard for anyone to imagine what happened, and I don’t know if I can give you any idea of it. I’ll try, that’s all I can do. Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty gave a great shout when he heard that the enemy was advancing and his men were in a vulnerable position, unready, some of them crowded into the narrow city streets and others scattered out through the fields around it. Concerning these men of his, you can say anything that’s usually said about soldiers and warriors, but not that they were cowardly or undisciplined. They heard him shout and they regrouped, took arms, fell in as best they could, and tried to repel the attack. Bloodthirsty leapt across the fallen and ran to fight in the front rank, shoulder to shoulder with his men. He was no coward either.
The Battle of the North lasted exactly fifty hours. The men attacked, broke, scattered, retreated, had a bite to eat, and returned to the attack. Telling such things one is sickened by what men are. They were not men; nor were they wolves, nor hyenas, nor vultures, nor eagles. They were blind organisms, mindless, nerveless, without feeling or thought, with only the power to wound, and blood to shed. They didn’t think, believe, feel, see, or hope; all they did was kill and kill again; all they did was retreat and retreat again, and attack again, and kill again. They had been born, they had worked, loved, played, grown to manhood for nothing but this, to kill in the fields of the North under the walls of a mossy, flowery city. Fifty hours after the first attack not more than a hundred men were still afoot, naked, dirty, bloody, maimed, mad. They didn’t know or care who the enemy was: they went on killing, attacking, shouting with their lacerated mouths, weeping from their wounded eyes, breathing through their split nostrils, holding their weapons with what fingers they had left, returning to attack, to kill. It was then that Oddembar’Seil cut off a head that rolled on the blood-soaked ground, and on the headless body, on the filthy, hacked breastplate, flashed a collar of gold and amethysts. The future emperor shouted again, and so ended the Battle of the North: he had killed Reggnevon son of Reggnevavaun, pretender to the imperial throne.
You know how the inhabitants of the northern city and his few surviving soldiers crowned the Emperor Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty on the site of his victory as he stood erect over the body of his enemy, dirty, wounded, feverish, naked, with a marble crown hacked with hammer and chisel from the head of a statue that adorned an old aristocratic garden now used for playing-fields, and how then and there he signed his first decree, declaring the city that had witnessed his triumph the capital of the Empire.
Six thousand days hadn’t passed, not yet. But the war was over, and when that time really had gone by, the northern city was still capital of the Empire; and the courtiers, the functionaries, the ladies, the admirals, the judges, went to and fro by the Fountain of the Five Rivers, under the arch on which stand the mourning figures from the first mayor’s tomb, through the winding, narrow streets, and sometimes stopped to drink or to wet their fingers and forehead in the alabaster basins that still ran with healing water. For the emperor had ordered that they be preserved: he never forgot that the citizens had offered him food and shelter, and he believed that this had brought him luck. He commanded that his palace be built using the walls of the Empress Sesdimillia’s palace, keeping its style and plan, antiquated as they were, and he prohibited any change in the streets and buildings, the parks and fountains. The outside of houses could be repaired and painted, but not changed; the incredible staircases could not be moved; the inopportune walls could not be taken down. Building could take place outside the city limits, and did, and interiors could be remodeled, and many were, so that houses could return to what they’d been in the reign of the Listener and his heirs. And nothing more.
The 6,000 days of the Emperor Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty were fulfilled, and another 6,000 days passed, and a bit more. His rule was harsh and violent; he was implacable with his enemies and soft with his friends. But it must be said for him that he reorganized the Empire and brought it peace, territory, and unity. He did so brutally, with more blood, more deaths, with woe and mourning, but Reggnevaun would have been no more merciful, nor can we know what might have happened if the Six Thousand Day War hadn’t been fought. A stroke finished him in the midst of a banquet, and the tears shed for him were few and false.
Many years have passed and many emperors have lived and reigned, but the mountain city is still the capital of the Empire. Toadies and social climbers invent poetical names and illustrious origins for it, and Drauwdo the Brawny is a mere character in bedtime tales for children who don’t want to go to sleep yet, but the Bloodthirsty was perhaps the first who understood it, and made his understanding clear when he ordered that it not be touched or changed. And those who came after him must have guessed the profound wisdom in this order, which seemed so little in accord with the spirit of the times, since they too enforced it. Here it stands, as in the years of the healing waters, of the gods, of the musicians, of the battles. It looked like a dense mesh of gold, with tiny, irregular openings, pulled tight, stretched across the mountains. It’s grown on the farther side, of course, and seven more roads have been added to the one that ran to it; all eight are wide and well-paved as royal roads should be, and swarm with travelers and traffic. It turned its back on the plain that was a desert, a garden, a battlefield; the new mansions, the rich houses, the palaces of the nobility, are to the north, on the road that leads to the distant port. It shines at night, and the light on the peaks never goes out, only dimming in the dawn, as when the painters and poets used to talk and drink in the cafes. It prospers and thrives as it did when the healing water welled up out of the ground. It’s a splendid capital, beautiful, mysterious, charming, old as the capital of an old Empire should be, solid, wealthy, built to last thousands and thousands of years. And yet I wonder…
THE RADIANT CAR THY SPARROWS DREW
Catherynne M. Valente
Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk: a soulless phantasm and nothing more. “Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!”
—Wordsworth Donisthorpe,
in
ventor of the Kinesigraph Camer
View the Famous Callowhale Divers of Venus from the Safety of a Silk Balloon! Two Bits a Flight!
—Advertisement Visible in the Launch Sequence of
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
EXT. The cannon pad at the Vancouver World’s Fair in 1986, late afternoon, festooned with crepe and banners wishing luck and safe travel.
The Documentarian Bysshe and her crew wave jerkily as confetti sticks to their sleek skullcaps and glistening breathing apparati. Her smile is immaculate, practiced, the smile of the honest young woman of the hopeful future; her copper-finned helmet gleams at her feet. Bysshe wears women’s clothing but reluctantly and only for this shot, and the curl of her lip betrays disdain of the bizarre, flare-waisted swimming costume that so titillates the crowds. Later, she would write of the severe windburns she suffered in cannon-flight due to the totally inadequate protection of that flutter of black silk. She tucks a mahogany case smartly under one arm, which surely must contain George, her favorite cinematographe. Each of her crewmen strap canisters of film – and the occasional bit of food or oxygen or other minor accoutrements – to their broad backs. The cannon sparkles, a late-model Algernon design, filigreed and etched with motifs that curl and leaf like patterns in spring ice breaking. The brilliant nose of the Venusian capsule Clamshell rests snugly in the cannon’s silvery mouth.
They are a small circus – the strongmen, the clowns, the trapeze artist poised on her platform, arm crooked in an evocative half-moon, toes pointed into the void.
I find it so difficult to watch her now, her narrow, monkish face, not a pore wasted, her eyes huge and sepia-toned, her smile enormous, full of the peculiar, feral excitement which in those days seemed to infect everyone who looked up into the evening sky to see Venus there, seducing behind veils of light, as she has always done. Those who looked and had eyes only for red Mars, all baleful and bright, were rough, raucous, ready and hale. Those who saw Venus were lost.
She was such a figure then: Bysshe, no surname, or simply the Documentarian. Her revolving lovers made the newsreels spin, her films packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times ’round. Weeks before a Bysshe opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theater, selling genuine cells she touched with her own hand and replica spangled cages from To Thee, Bright Queen! sized just right to hold a male of Saturnine extraction. Her father, Percival Unck, was a brooding and notorious director in his time, his gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths perpetually agape with horror or orgiastic transcendence. Her mother was, naturally, one of those ever-transported actresses, though which one it is hard to remember, since each Unck leading lady became, by association and binding contract, little black-bobbed Bysshe’s mother-of-the-moment. Thus it is possible to see, in her flickering, dust-scratched face, the echoes of a dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, easily forgotten but for the legacy of their adoptive daughter’s famous, lean features, her scornful, knowing grin.
Bysshe rejected her father’s idiom utterly. Her film debut in Unck’s The Spectres of Mare Nubium is charming, to say the least. During the famous ballroom sequence wherein the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, little Bysshe can be seen crouching unhappily near the rice-wine fountain, picking at the pearls on her traditional lunar kokoshnik and rubbing at her make-up. The legend goes that when Percival Unck tried to smudge his daughter’s eyes with black shadows and convince her to pretend herself a poor Schirm relation while an airy phantasm – years later to become her seventh mother – swooped down upon the innocent child, Bysshe looked up exasperatedly and said: “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”
And so she would be, forever, only and always Bysshe. As soon as she could work the crank on a cinematographe herself, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age seven) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale,” (age twentyone) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double exposure drivel.” Her first documentary, The Famine Queen of Phobos, brought the colony’s food riots to harsh light, and earned her a Lumiere medal, a prize Percival Unck would never receive. When asked if his daughter’s polemics against fictive cinema had embittered him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said: “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”
Of her final film, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, only five sequences remain, badly damaged. Though they have been widely copied, cut up and re-used in countless sallow and imitative documentaries on her life, the originals continue to deteriorate in their crystalline museum displays. I go there, to the Grand Eternal Exhibition, in the evenings, to watch them rot. It comforts me. I place my brow upon the cool wall, and she flashes before my eyes, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannoncapsule with the ease of a natural performer, a natural aeronaut – and perhaps those were always much the same thing.
EXT. Former Site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.
A small boy, head bent, dressed in the uniform of a callowhale diver, walks in circles in what was once the village center. The trees and omnipresent cacao-ferns are splashed with a milky spatter. He does not look up as the camera watches him. He simply turns and turns and turns, over and over. The corrupted film skips and jumps; the boy seems to leap through his circuit, flashing in and out of sight.
When she was seventeen, Bysshe and her beloved cinematographe, George, followed the Bedouin road to Neptune for two years, resulting in her elegiac And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly. There, they say, she learned her skill at the sculpting of titanium, aquatic animal handling, and a sexual variant of Samayika mediation developed by a cult of levitation on tiny Halimede, where the wind blows warm and violet. There is a sequence, towards the melancholy conclusion of And the Sea, wherein Bysshe visits coral-devoured Enki, the great floating city which circumnavigates the planet once a decade, buoyed the lugubrious Neptunian current. Reclining on chaises with glass screens raised to keep out the perpetual rain, Bysshe smokes a ball of creamy, heady af-yun with a woman-levitator, her hair lashed with leather whips. When theaters received the prints of And the Sea, a phonograph and several records were included, so that Bysshe herself could narrate her opus to audiences across the world. A solemn bellhop changed the record when the onscreen Bysshe winked, seemingly to no one. And so one may sit on a plush chair, still, and hear her deep, nasal voice echo loudly – too loud, too loud! – in the theater.
The levitator told her of a town called Adonis, a whole colony on Venus that vanished in the space of a night. Divers they were, mostly, subject both to the great callowhales with their translucent skin and the tourists who came to watch and shiver in cathartic delight as the divers risked their lives to milk the recalcitrant mothers in their hibernation. They built a sweet village on the shores of the Qadesh, plaiting their roofs with grease-weed and hammering doors from the chunks of raw copper which comprised the ersatz Venusian beach. They lived; they ate the thready local cacao and shot, once or twice a year, a leathery ’Tryx from the sky, enough to keep them all in fat and protein for months.
“It was a good life,” the blue-skinned levitator said, and Bysshe, on her slick black record, imitated the breathy, shy accent of Halimede as the onscreen version of herself loaded another lump of af-yun into the atomizer. “And then, one day – pop! All gone. Houses, stairs, meat-smoking racks, diving bells.”
“This sort of thing happens,” Bysshe dismissed it all with a wave of her hand. “What planet is there without a mysteriously vanished colony to pull in the tourist cash? Slap up a couple of alien runes on a burned-out doorframe and people will stream in from every terminus. Might as well call them all New Roanoke and have done with it.” (In fact, one of Percival Unck’s less popular films was The Abduction of Prosperina, a loose retelling of that lost Plutonian city, though presumably with rather more d
emonic ice-dragons than were actually involved.)
Crab-heart trifles and saltwhiskey were passed around as Bysshe’s crew laughed and nodded along with her. The levitator smiled.
“Of course, Miss,” she said, eyes downcast within the equine blinders knotted to her head. “Well, except for the little boy. The one who was left behind. They say he’s still there. He’s stuck, somehow, in the middle of where the village used to be, just walking around in circles, around and around. Like a skip on a phonograph. He never even stops to sleep.” The Documentarian frowns sourly in black and white, her disapproval of such fancies, her father’s fancies, disappeared heroines and eldritch locations where something terrible surely occurred, showing in the wrinkling of her brow, the tapping of her fingernails against the atomizer as bubbling storms lapped their glass cupola, and armored penance-fish nosed the flotation arrays, their jawlanterns flashing.
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women Page 56