Otherwise

by John Crowley

  Strange, he thought; she and he had talked so much of the new, oath-breaking way of the world, and yet when he swore to her, she accepted it unhesitatingly. It was inconceivable to her that he, a Gray, in no matter how disastrous a day, could swear falsely.

  Perhaps indeed he hadn’t. Without the Grays, Learned Redhand would be someone else’s younger brother, nothing more, the Grays’ strength and health were his. In any case, soon or late, there would be a testing of that oath, a reckoning. He wondered how he would bear.

  He rose to go. The autumn evening had grown dense; the great age of the garden seemed to him suddenly palpable, and deeply melancholy.

  Haspensweek Eve, and suddenly cold even in the City in its cup of mountains. That night they moved King Little Black from the Citadel to an old Black mansion, long shuttered, that sat inaccessible on a finger of rock, called Sping, just outside the High City gates.

  For it had been decided, in a Whole-meeting of the Protectorate, that Red Senlin was Little Black’s heir, and Viceroy too in times of the King’s madness. The Black lords, of course, had stayed away from the meeting; so had many others. And even the Reds and Folk ombudsmen who had come, mostly dependents of Senlin’s and Redhand’s, were so glum and silent that Red Senlin had ended his brief screaming insults and arguments, his shouts echoing in the near-empty rotunda. No matter; It had been decided.

  The small cavalcade, shielded by armed men, moved through the shadowed dark of the thousand-faced street. It had been decided that the King was indeed in his madness now, and for sure looked at least sickly and weak. He huddled on his nag, folded up in an old black cloak, and looked apprehensively from the silent crowd to the gleam of axes and spears, the smoky, flaring torches of his escort.

  The Viceroy Red Senlin rode with his golden Son. It had been decided that the Son and his younger brother, dark Sennred, with a number of adherents, should ride toward Senlinsdown and rally there all the Protector’s friends. Young Harrah, the Viceroy had learned, had gone off in quite another direction, toward the Black Downs and the Queen.

  Redhand rode on the King’s right side; on his left rode Redhand’s father, Old Redhand. Around Old Redhand’s neck hung an ancient chain, giltwork once, now worn again to the naked iron, that had ever been the sign of the chiefest of the vast Redhand clan. From this old chain hung now something new: the great carved beryl that is the City’s seal, borne by the King’s lieutenant, Master of the City—until recently, Black Harrah.

  It had been decided that the family Redhand should inherit that rich honor.

  It had been more than deference in Redhand that had insisted that not he but his father be given the City seal. Redhand knew that war with the Queen would come quick as anger, and he had hoped that the City seal would keep his father safe in the City while he and Red Senlin acted out the treasonous show they had trumped up together against the old man’s wishes. But it hadn’t worked. It had been instead decided—by Old Redhand, decided with all his remaining strength and will—that in case of sudden need the seal would devolve upon his son, and he, Old Red-hand, would take command of the Redhand arms. He wasn’t too old to fight for his friend.

  Redhand tried to keep his eyes on the street, on the King, on the faces of the crowd—but they were drawn by his father’s face. It was a face marked like a cliffside by wind and time, harder than his steel, and not softened by the halo of sparse hair he wore in the old fashion cropped close around his ears. His eyes, unlike his son’s, were drawn to nothing, but looked ahead, farther than the end of the street or the end of the world.

  When they passed through Farinsgate and out onto the Heights outside the City walls, the crowd became thinner. It wasn’t a time for High City people to be outside their gates. The great mansions of this side, Farin’s House, Blackharbor, were dark; only one house was lit, there, at the causeway’s end, on the rock Sping, lit by the torches and watchfires of those assigned to guard close forever the little King.

  Suddenly Old Redhand stopped his horse. Someone was pushing his way into the ranks ahead; the Viceroy Red Senlin leaned out to hear his news. A murmur went up from the armed men. Someone whispered to the King, and a pale smile grew on his face. Younger worked his horse to Redhand’s side and told him the news.

  The Queen had gathered an army on the Drumskin. She had turned Inward, had ceased to flee since none pursued, and unless a large force met her soon there was nothing to prevent her laying siege to the City itself. It hadn’t happened in time out of mind. The Queen, seemingly, intended it.

  Old Redhand, with only half a glance at his son, spurred forward to where Red Senlin summoned him.

  It meant battle, and there was much to decide.

  4

  All day since before chill dawn the red-jacketed riders with their striped packs had come down the water-stairs toward the lake, guiding their mounts along the horse ramps. Shouted orders carried far in the still, cold air; captains perspired despite the frost steaming from their bellowing mouths. Great straining pulleys lowered painted wagons toward the ferries; horses reared and laughed; harried ostlers attempted to count off from lists, screaming at the watermen, whom no fee could hurry.

  The girl had pulled and hauled since morning, somehow intensely elated by the first winey wrong-way breezes of the year; now the hard sunlight cast unaccustomed glitter on the stirred waters and heated her shorn blond head. She laughed out loud to see them struggle with their war there on the bank. Her laugh was lost in the uproar; whips snapped, and the oxen on the far bank lowed in misery as they began to turn the creaking winches once again.

  Soldiers sitting atop piled bundles above her called down pleasant obscenities as she pushed to the forward end of the laden barge. She climbed up a crate that had Redhand’s open-palm sign on it in new red paint, and, shielding her eyes, looked up to where the four tongues of bridges came out of the High City’s gate-mouths. She thought probably there, at the gate called Goforth, the generals would come out—yes, there, for now, as she looked, their banners all burst forth from the Citadel onto the bridge-stairs, as though a giant had blown out from the gate a handful of petals. She couldn’t see faces, but for sure they must be there, for there was Redhand’s open palm, and the dried-blood red of Senlin marked with ancient words; the soldiers and the City cheered them, and she cheered too, laughing at the thought that the bridge might break under their great weight of pride and drop them, leaving their banners only, light as wind.

  Something colder than his cold armor took hold on Redhand’s heart, there where he stood among the gay flags with his brother Younger. Through Goforth his father, Old Redhand, with harsh pulls at the reins, forced his warhorse Dark Night. Through the cloud of banners before the gate, through the ribboned throng of riders, hearing no salutations, up to where his sons stood.

  “Is our House all here?” he said, and then said again, over the great-throated war viols’ endless chants.

  “Yes,” Redhand answered him. “Father…”

  “Then give me the baton.”

  So many things, hurtful or too grownup for the child, had Redhand ever given up to his father: but never with such black presage, too cold for anger, as now when he lifted the slim general’s stick to his father’s outstretched hand.

  “You can still stay,” he growled. Both their hands held the baton. “Stay and see to the City…”

  “You see to it,” his father said. “Give it to me.”

  Redhand released it; Old Redhand tucked it into his sash and leaned out toward Younger, whose look clung desperately to his father’s face. Old Redhand pulled Younger to him with a mailed hand, kissed him. He kissed him again, slapped his cheek lightly without word or smile. Turned away and tore from his old neck the Redhand chain with the City seal hung from it.

  “Senlin!” he called out in a voice not his own. Red Senlin stood in his stirrups and waved to him. “Would you be King?” Red Senlin drew his sword, pointed Outward. Old Redhand turned to Redhand his son. He tossed him the chain. “Take
care,” he said. “Watch well.”

  Too proud to dismount to cross the two generals walked their heavy steeds with infinite care over the swaying bridge. Redhand watched their exertions till he could bear no more, and ran, his heart full, up the stairs, through Goforth, into the silent City that the chain he held made him master of.

  That evening the first light snow was dusting Redsdown, blown in from the Drum. From a window in the high headland tower that marked Reds-down’s edge, Caredd and her mother watched the Protectors’ horses, and Fauconred and his redjackets, and the horsegatherers, and the Visitor too, gather on the rutted road toward the mountains and the far-off City. They were dim in the gusts of fine blown snow; there was the Visitor in his brown Endwife’s cloak. The horsegatherers flicked their lashes, and the company unwound, their sharp hooves loud on the new-frozen ground.

  “See how he drives them,” Mother Caredd said.

  “Fauconred?” Caredd asked.

  “Yes, he is driven too.”

  “Who drives them, Mother?”

  “Why, Rizna, Daughter,” said her mother. “Surely you see him there, so tall, with his black eye sockets, and the sickle hung on his neck… See how he makes them step along!”

  “Mother…”

  “Like some great raggedy shepherd driving silly sheep… What great steps he takes!”

  “Mother, there’s no such thing there.” Yet she looked hard, holding her throat where the blood beat.

  “Why does he drive them, where, for what? See them look back, and then ride on for fear…”

  “There’s nothing there, Mother! Stop!” She strained to see the caravan, strung out along the road; they were shadows already, and then disappeared in a mist of blown snow. Mother Caredd began to put up her hair with many bone pins…

  If snow fell heavily in the mountains as they went up the high road Cityward, they would be delayed till long after Yearend, holed up in some bleak lodge or pilgrim house of the Grays, and Fauconred didn’t want that at all. He hurried as fast as he could through the black, leafless forest, had men ride ahead and behind to watch for the Just: these mountains were their castles and cities, they knew the rocky highlands and had a name for every thick ravine, could appear and disappear in them like the dream faces Fauconred saw in the knotted treeboles. He harried his riders till he was hoarse with it, and would have pushed them on through the nights, if he hadn’t feared breaking some valued leg or his own neck in the dark even more than he feared the sounds and silence beyond the vague, smoky hole his campfires made.

  He told himself, he told his men, that what made him afraid was ambush, the Guns of the Just. But the horsegatherers, Drumskin men, had their own tales of these mountain forests, and told them endlessly around the fire: stories of the Hollowed. “My grandfather’s half-brother was taking horses to the City once, on this same road, and saw a thing, about dawn, running along beside the road, in the trees, making no sound, a thing—a thing as fearful as if you saw a great hooded cloak stand up and walk with no one in it, my grandfather’s half-brother said…” The Hollowed, they said, were the bodies of the Possessors, abandoned by the Possessors themselves to their own malignant dead wanderings when the Strengths had driven the Possessors from the homeplaces of men into the Deep. Here the bodies wandered, Hollowed, unable to rest, empty cups still holding the dregs of poison, drinking up what souls they could seize on to sustain them, insect, animal, man.

  Most days now they could see, far and dim, higher than any reaching crag, Inviolable in its high seat, placid and strong; even thought they heard, one cold still day, its low bells ring. But then they turned a twisting mile down the valley, between two high naked rocks men called the Knees, and the weather grew enough warmer to raise thick, bitter fogs; Inviolable was lost. By dawn on Lowday, the day before Yearend, the day of the Possessors’ Eve, they were deep in the river Wanderer’s rocky home.

  Somewhere below their narrow way, Wanderer chased herself noisily through her halls, echoing in flumes and gorges, spitting at cave-mouths; but they could see nothing of her, for her breath was white and dense almost as haysmoke, and cold as Finn.

  Fauconred wouldn’t? stop. It was baffling and frightening to try to pass this way in a fog, and hurry too, with the river’s roar filling up your head; but it was worse to stop, so that the horses, stuck on a ledge, might panic and leap. It took all his strength and lungs to force them further down, to where at last the high wall beside them broke and a pass led down away, high-sided, obscure, but a pass: the Throat they called it, and it spoke with Wanderer’s great voice even as it swallowed them. The Throat took away their own voices too, when they were inside it, amplified them in a weird way, so that every man who spoke looked behind him with a start for the source of his own words.

  It was the Visitor, whose ears had proved sharp as a dog’s, who first heard the other horsemen in the pass.

  “It’s only the Throat,” Fauconred said, “our own hooves echoing.”

  “No. Make them stop, and listen. Down there, coming up.”

  Fauconred tried to read an imagining fear in the Visitor’s face, but there was only attention. The fear was his own. He shouted a halt, and the horsegatherers sang out to still the herd. Then they waited for their own echoes to cease.

  It was there, the noise of someone somewhere. The Visitor said ahead, Fauconred said behind, the horsegatherers and guard stared wildly here and there, their panic spreading to the horses and confusing every ear. Mist drawn into the Throat went by in ragged cloaks to hide and then reveal them to each other. And then they saw, far down the Throat, gray shapes moving at a mad pace toward them, gesticulating, pale as smoke.

  A rasp of steel unsheathing. Fauconred knew that if they were men, they must be charged, hard, for he could not be forced back through the Throat and live. If they were not men… He shouted his redjackets forward and charged hard, hoping they dared follow.

  The pale riders drew closer, coalescing out of fog and thunder of hooves. For sure they were men, yes, living men—were—were a war party, arms drawn, were a Red party—Redhand! “Redhand!” he shouted, and twisted his mount hard. They nearly collided. Fauconred just managed to keep his riders from tangling with his master’s. He turned to laugh with Redhand out of relief, and looked into his face, a gray, frightening mask, eyes wide and mad. “Redhand…” He seemed a man, yet as Fauconred watched him stare around him unseeing, drawn sword clutched tight, he felt a chill of fear: Hollowed… some dream shape they could take…

  The form Redhand spoke. “Turn your men.” The harsh voice was an exhausted croak, expressionless. “Make for the Outward road.”

  Fauconred saw the iron chain of the Redhands hung on his neck. “What’s happened?”

  “War with the Queen.”

  “Red Senlin…”

  “Slain. Slain before Forgetful… Why don’t you turn?” he asked without inflection. Someone came up suddenly beside Fauconred, and Redhand flung out his sword arm with a cry: “Who is it… what…”

  “The one I sent to tell you of. The… Visitor.”

  “Keep him for right’s sake from me!…” The Visitor drew back, but Redhand’s wide eyes still fixed him. Fauconred thought to speak, did not. There was a moment of freak silence in the Throat, and Redhand burst into strange, racking sobs.

  He hadn’t slept in days, had pressed every man he could into service, had flung them through the forest without mercy, once turning rebellious laggards at sword-point… Fauconred, taking command reluctantly, coaxed them all back through the Throat the way Redhand had come, had camp made and a precious cask broached, that calmed anger and fear both: and while Blem had his say, Drink-up, Sleep-fast, No-tomorrow, Fauconred drew from his master the tale, in words drunk with weariness and grief.

  The Queen had led the Red army a quickwing chase across the plains toward the barren Drumsedge, Red Senlin desperately trying to cut her off from the Inward roads and her Outward strength both, until, weary with chase and no battle, he had made f
or Forgetful, watch castle of the Edge, where the garrison owed him. They had reached it Finnsweek Eve. They struck a truce with the Queen to last over Yearend. And then some of Red Senlin’s men had been out foraging and been attacked by a marauding party of the enemy. Old Redhand and Red Senlin had issued from the castle to help—and been boxed by the mass of the Queen’s army, who had thus drawn them out.

  Red Senlin was among the first killed. Old Redhand had been killed or captured, none knew, none could tell him…

  For two days Redhand had stayed in the Harbor in an agony of fear. And then another messenger arrived, a boy gaunt with cold and hunger, the red palm sign on his shoulder.

  Old Redhand had been captured in the battle and imprisoned in Forgetful’s belly where the day before he had been guest. Next day in thefirst light the boy watched them take him out into the courtyard, where snow fell; and a bastard son of Farin the Black chopped off his head with a sword.

  The boy had fled then. He knew only that Young Harrah would be master at Forgetful, and that the Queen came Inward, behind him, with her army.

  “They will be at the margin of the Downs tomorrow,” Redhand said. “Red Senlin’s Son is marching from Senlinsdown to stop her; we must go on, we must march before night…” He tried to rise, but Fauconred restrained him gently.

  “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep awhile.”

  Redhand slept.

  They made a crown for Red Senlin of paper, and put it on his head; put the head on a pole and carried it before them as they streamed Inward across the Drum. Old Redhand they left in the courtyard of Forgetful where Young Harrah, its master now, could bury him or not, as he chose; but Red Senlin went before the Queen’s army.

  The immense, dull armor the Queen had had made for herself, wide-winged and endlessly riveted, crossed with chains and bristling with points, would have seemed comical if it hadn’t first seemed so cruel. It took a great laborer of a stallion to bear both it and the Queen; her captain had paid high for it after she had ridden to death the strong black she had fled on. Beneath her visor, above the heavy veil she wore against the cold, her eyes, lampblack-soft and dark, made it seem that somewhere amid the massive flesh and unyielding armor a beautiful woman was held captive. It had been, at times, a useful illusion.