Otherwise

by John Crowley

  At the cairn, Younger stopped, staring, all his senses focused there as a rabbit’s on a fox in hiding. “In winter,” he began, in a thin, dreaming voice.

  “Yes.”

  “In winter the ground was frozen.”

  “And.”

  “He lay still. Now…”

  “He?”

  “Father. Where they buried him. The ground was frozen hard, and he couldn’t get out. Now he would push through. He must not, though; no, though he pleads with me.” He started suddenly, staring at the pile, and it was as though Redhand could feel a surge of fear through the arm he held his brother with.

  “It was Harrah’s son,” Younger said.

  “Harrah?”

  “Harrah’s son who saw him slain. Harrah’s son who threw him in a shallow hole, far too shallow, so shallow the birds would come and peck and scratch the ground. Harrah’s son, that Father would get out to go find, but must not, must not…”

  “Harrah’s son,” Redhand said slowly, “is dead. I have killed him.”

  Younger turned to him slowly. He took Redhand’s arm in a mad, steel grip. “Dead.” Tears of exhausted anguish rose in his eyes. “Then why do the stones move always? Why does he squirm? Why will he not lie still?”

  In Rennsweek when he was ten years old it had begun, this way: when the vine flowers bloomed on the walls of Old Redhand’s house, Younger had poured a child’s pailful of dirt on his father’s sleeping face, because, he said, tears in his eyes, anyone could see the man was dead…

  Night along the Edge was cold even in Rennsweek. A fire had been lit; it was the huge room’s only light. It lit Younger, who stared into it, lit lights within his eyes, though to Redhand it seemed he looked through his brother’s eyes, and the lights he saw were flames within.

  “There was a duel,” Redhand said. “A kind of duel, with carving knives, in the banquet hall at Redsdown. I killed him. Then I fled.”

  Impossible to judge if Younger heard or understood. He only looked into the fire, flames gesturing within his eyes.

  “Now I need you, Younger.”

  Always it had been that the faction that commanded a garrison of the Edge could forge it into a weapon for its use. After the battle at Senlins-down in the old days, Black Harrah returned from Forgetful without orders to do so, with an unruly army and a new big wife for the King, and the Reds who had thought the King to be in their pockets backed away.

  “The King Red Senlin’s Son,” Redhand said, “was Young Harrah’s lover. He will send an army to invest Forgetful, once he deduces I am here. I would prevent that.”

  Yes, and Red Senlin too, Redhand thought. He had gone away to the Edge to be vice-regent then, and in his time he had returned with bought Outland chiefs and an army of Edge-outcast soldiers. And Black Harrah had turned and fled… Suddenly Redhand felt caught up in the turnings of an old tale, a tale for children, endlessly repetitious. Well, what other chance had he but to repeat what his fathers and their fathers had done? He would not wait here to be ferreted like a rabbit.

  “I want to march first, Younger. I want you with me. Help me now, as ever I have done for you.”

  Younger said nothing, did not turn from the fire.

  There was this flaw in it then. The old tale stopped here, the teller faltered at this turning.

  That mob in the courtyard was no army. Fauconred had had to cut off some bandit’s ear in order to find lodging for Redhand’s household. He could flog them into order, a kind of order, with like means if he had weeks in which to do it. He did not have weeks.

  “If flesh were stone,” said Younger. “If all flesh were stone…”

  No. He couldn’t anyway face the King and the Folk with such a band. Outlanders, and men like these, had no strictures such as the Protectorate had concerning the Folk; they would take what they could. He must draw the country Defenders to his banners, keep the City open to him. It could not be done with marauders.

  And they would not flock with any will to himself. He had no true friends; his strength lay in pacts, alliances, sealed with largesse. Red Senlin’s Son had seen that, and vitiated it with his City courtiers and his own largesse.

  There must be another banner to ride Inward with than his own.

  “Her spies,” Younger said, smiling. “The messages they take her. Songs, lies, jokes. What harm is there in that?”

  With an instant, horrid clarity Redhand remembered the last time he had seen her: at the Little Lake, in the bloody snow, shuffling away on her big horse, riding Outward, looking back for fear.

  No!

  She must have had the child. Black Harrah’s, doubtless. As he had said to Red Senlin (so long ago it seemed) that didn’t matter. All the Outlands and half the world would kneel to kiss Little Black’s heir.

  No!

  A joining of Red and Black. An end to the world’s anguish. Despite his promises, the King had seized lands, divided them among his friends, who played in the City while farms rotted. The Downs would be his. And the City—well. He had been master of the City. He had friends. It would do.

  No! No!

  “What harm is there in it?” Younger said again, his voice beginning to quaver.

  Redhand took hold of his revulsion and with an effort wrung its neck, stilling its protest. “No harm, brother,” he said. “Can you find one of these spies? Do you know them?”

  “I know them. Oh, I know them all.”

  “Send for one. Have him brought here. I… have a little joke myself to tell the Queen.”

  Younger returned to staring into the fire. “Only…”

  “Only?”

  “We will go Inward. But.” He turned to Redhand. “Father must not come!” He beat his palm against the chair arm with each word. “They said he suffered from a soldier’s melancholy. They said, the Endwives said, that spring would bring him round, and they would nurse him back to health. But those were lies.”

  As in one of the new pageants the King had caused to be shown in the City, the madman in the courtyard of Forgetful had an audience, an audience though of only one; and unlike those pageants’ actors, he was unaware of being watched, for the drama unfolding within him took all his attention.

  On the belvedere above, his brother, his audience, was attentive, though feeling he had lost the thread, the point, the plot; he shivered in the warm wind, dislocated, lost, feeling that at any moment some unexpected shock might happen. He leaned against the belvedere, tense with expectation, bored with awful expectation.

  Now unlike those City pageants, this audience had an audience himself.

  Again, an audience of one.

  Only she knew the plot. This scene had been laid out in cards the troubled man she watched had never seen; it was a scene in a story begun she knew not how many millennia before she lived, whose end might come as long after her death; she only knew her part, and prayed now to many gods that she might play it right.

  From a pouch beneath her cloak of no color she drew the Gun named Suddenly. She was behind a thick pillar of duncolored stone. There were stairs at her back. Beyond, Outward, yellow clouds encircled the setting sun like courtiers around a dying Red king, and as the sun set, the war-viols of Forgetful would start, calling the garrison to meat and meeting. She hoped the noise would cover Suddenly’s voice. Afterwards, she would go quickly down those stairs, down to the stables, to Farin’s black horse she had come to love, without, she hoped, arousing more suspicion than she had already. And after that—well: she didn’t know. Nightfall. A curtain on this scene. She scarcely cared, if this was all played right.

  She didn’t know either that she, who watched the madman’s audience, had herself an audience. Pageants upon pageants: she was observed.

  He had come up the narrow stair to find his master. Had seen her at the top of the stair, dim, a blue shadow in the evening light. When she drew the thing from within her clothes, he at first did not recognize it; stood unmoving while a chain of associations took place within him.

&nb
sp; So for a moment they all stood motionless; he on the stair, she with the Gun, he on the belvedere, he below biting his nails, and also he headless within the inconstant earth.

  Then the one on the stair ran up.

  She didn’t know who or what had seized her, only that its strength was terrible. A hand was clamped over her face, she could not cry out or breathe; an arm encircled her, tight as iron bands, pressing the Gun, against her so that if she fired she shot herself. She was picked up like a bundle of no weight, and before she was trundled away fast down the stair she saw that the man on the belvedere still looked down: he had not seen or heard.

  They went quickly down. At a dim turning they paused; her captor seemed unsure. They turned down a tunnel-like hall, but stopped when the sound of men came from far off; turned back, slipped within a niche formed by the meeting of vast pillars, and waited.

  She was beginning to faint; she could not breathe, and where the arm held her the pain had faded to a tingling numbness. Sheets of blank blackness came and went before her eyes. She tasted blood; the pressure of his hand had cut her mouth on her teeth.

  When those coming up the hall had passed without seeing them, she was rushed out and down again. She saw evening light spilling from a door at the tunnel’s end, and then it was extinguished, and she knew nothing for a time.

  The thud of a door closing woke her. She woke gulping air, looking into a bald, blank face hooded in red, oddly calm. Its thin lips moved, and the words came as from a distance. “You won’t cry out, struggle.”

  “No.”

  “If they found you. If I gave you to them, they would hang you.”

  “Yes. I won’t.” He was not “they,” then?

  His face withdrew. Her thudding heart slowed its gallop, and involuntarily she sighed a long, shuddering sigh.

  The room was tiny, higher almost than wide; above her head a small window showed a square of summer evening; there was no other light. A wooden door, small and thick. A plain wooden pallet she lay on. A wooden chair he sat in; in one hand he held Suddenly by its barrel, loosely, as though it were a spoon.

  “You are Just,” he said.

  “If you drop that,” she said, her voice still hoarse, “they will know soon enough you have me.”

  He lifted the Gun, examined it without curiosity. “Does it have a name?”

  “Why do you keep me?” she said. “I know you, I know you are a thing of his.” She hoped to probe him, see if there was some disloyalty, some grudge she could play on… His face, though, remained expressionless. The same mask she had seen always beside Redhand in the City that spring. Who was he, then?

  “I was told they have names.”

  “They do.”

  “I have an interest in names.” - As though they had gathered here for some scholarly chat. She almost smiled. “And so what is yours?”

  “I am called Secretary now.”

  “That’s no name.”

  “No. I have no other.”

  She could not read him. There was nothing to grasp. His voice, cool and liquid, the strange nakedness of his face. His hideous strength. For the first time since he had seized her, she felt fear; yet could not imagine how to plead with him, beg him, felt that he knew nothing of mercy. A cold sweat sprang out on her forehead.

  “I will say a name,” he said, “if I can, and you will tell me if you know it.”

  What name? Some other she had slain? Some brother or sister? She would tell him nothing…

  “Here is the name.” It seemed to take all his strength to say it. “Leviathan.”

  She only looked at him in disbelief.

  “Leviathan,” he said again. “Do you know that name?”

  Evening had deepened. The red cloak he wore was dark now as dried blood; his pale head shone like wax. And as it grew darker in the room, his eyes seemed to glow brighter, as precious stones do.

  “Yes.” In a whisper.

  “Where he lives,” the dark form said. “Where he lives, who he is, how to come to him.”

  He could not mean this; he must be mad.

  And yet. “Yes.” Again a whisper; he leaned forward to hear. “Yes, I know.”

  Slowly, as though not meaning to, he leveled Suddenly at her. “Do you pull this? The lever here? And it will kill you?”

  She pressed herself against the stone wall behind her, but could not press through it.

  “Listen to me,” he said, the voice calm, liquid. “I will give you this choice. Take me to this one you know of, wherever, however far Outward. I will give you back this. If you refuse, tell me now, and I will kill you with it.”

  There was an old story she knew: a brother was surrounded by King’s men, who closed in upon him with torches and dogs; he was utterly lost, yet had to escape. He did this, they say: he took a step Outward, a step Inward, and a step away, out and gone. The King’s men when they closed the circle found only themselves; they never found him, nor did the Just ever see him again.

  She took the step. “Yes. I’ll take you. If we leave tonight. I’ll take you to see him, I swear it, face to face.”

  THREE

  RECORDER

  1

  How many skills he had learned since that distant morning on the Drum when with the young Endwife he had learned to say Cup and Drink! If there were wonder in him he would have wondered at it.

  With Redhand he had learned secrecy, the gaining of ends unknown to others by means devised to seem other than they were. It was not a mode that suited him; he had this failing, a curiosity about others that made it hard for him to keep himself secret. Yet he had this virtue: it all meant little to him but the learning, and he never betrayed himself by eagerness or need.

  Never till now.

  For this mission was his only. No one had assigned it to him, as Caredd had the watching of her husband, or Redhand the keeping close of his alliances. This he had found within himself, this was the engine of his being, and he had used force and cunning and even the betrayal of his trust to Redhand to accomplish it.

  And he feared for its success.

  There were winds blowing in him then, awful winds he could hardly bear: this, he thought, is what they all feel, this singularity, this burden of unknown quest, that drives all else out, obscures other loyalties, causes their eyes and thoughts to drift away in conversation, their attention to wander: a mission, whose shape they cannot perceive, whose end they fear for, an end that may be a means, they don’t know, or a lie, and yet they have no other.

  He thought that in this he had become as fully a man as any of them. It gave him joy, and fear; a fierce resolution, and a strange vacillation he had known nothing of before.

  He had stolen. Food from the kitchens, money from the purse he carried for Redhand, good boots and a lamp and a shelter from the quartermaster, a long knife and a short one. He would have stolen horses, but she said they would be useless till far beyond.

  He had left the ravished purse and its papers for Redhand, without explanation—had thought to leave a note saying he was returning to the stars, but did not—and had crept away then with the girl, at midnight. Away from his master and the trusts given him. Away from the intrigues he had had some part in directing. Away from Younger’s very instructive madness. Away from Forgetful’s Outward wall, carrying the girl Nod on his back and her Gun in his belt, down the blind nighttime cliffs of the Edge, ever down, till dawn came and the girl slept and predatory birds circled the ledge they lay on, startled perhaps to see wingless ones there.

  From there on the ledge at morning he looked over the Outlands, smoky with mist and obscured by coils of cloud. The paths of meandering rivers were a denser white than the greenshadowed land, which stretched flat and foggy to a great distance; far off the mists seemed to thicken into sky and gray rains could be seen moving like curtains in a wind. Except where low hills humped their backs above the mist, it was all shrouded. He woke her, they ate, and continued down.

  He imagined this to be like his progress
was from sky to earth, though he could remember nothing of that. As they went downward the air seemed to thicken, the sun’s clarity was dimmed, the smooth-faced rocks became slippery with moss and the stone ground began to crumble into earth, sandy at first and cut with flood beds, and then darker and bound by vegetation.

  By evening on the second day they were within the Outlands, up to their knees in its boggy grasp.

  Late in the night Nod awoke, forgetting where she was, how she had come to be there. She sat upright in the utter darkness, hearing animal noises she did not recognize. Something very close to her grunted, and she inhaled sharply, still half asleep. Then the lamp came bright with a buzzing sound, and his familiar naked face, calm and inquisitive, was looking at her.

  “Do we go on now?” he asked.

  She blinked at him. “Do you never sleep?”

  There was a halo of moisture around the lamp’s glow, and clumsy insects knocked against it.

  “How far is it?”

  “Many days. Weeks.” How would she know? How far is it to heaven, how long is death? There were a thousand spirits Nod believed in, prayed to, feared. Yet if someone had said to her, Let’s go find the bogey who lives in the lake or the dryad of the high woods, she would have laughed. All that lay in some other direction, on a path you could put no foot on, somewhere at right angles to all else. If they wanted you, they would find you.

  And perhaps then Leviathan wanted this one. Perhaps he walked that path, perhaps he was at right angles to all else.

  “It will be dawn soon,” he said.

  Yes. That was it; and in spite of what they had agreed, he led her: to the edge of the world, to look over the edge, and call into the Deep.

  Through the morning, mist in wan rags like unhappy ghosts rose up from the Outlands, drawn into the sun, but still lay thick along the river they followed. Gray trees with pendulous branches waded up to their knobby knees in the slow water.