by John Crowley
“Perhaps,” Learned said. “Perhaps, Redhand, and perhaps not.”
“They will make me King again.”
Oh, he was agile; he flew up back stairways Sennred had not known about, in the dark, as if by some other sense overstepping the rotten stairs. He climbed to porticos like a busy spider. Sennred for all his young strength could hardly follow him. No wonder he had eluded Sennred for weeks; no wonder he could communicate with spies the King’s men knew nothing of.
Upward they went, climbing the great house as though within a chimney.
At a crack, a window incompletely sealed, a fugitive ray shone in full of golden motes. The King Little Black stopped, and for the twentieth time drew out the paper, much folded, soft as kidskin. He read or spoke by rote the contents quickly: “Fear not, Sir, your deliverance is near. Redhand and the Queen’s army is thousands now and the Son is on the march, and when you are with them their hearts will be high and you shall succeed in this. Be where we agreed before, on any night after you have this, we will watch every night. Sir, be quick if you can; we are in great danger here.” He folded the note. “You see, you see?”
“Yes. Let’s go on.”
“You shall be rewarded,” the King went on in his tiny voice. “I know the loyal, and you shall have reward. You shall be my minister. You shall see that their heads fall, yes, severed, every one.” He paused to pry up a board that sealed the way, that Sennred would have thought immovable; when they had squeezed through, he pulled it carefully back into place. “Redhand, he shall have his neck cut quite through, yes, and Red Senlin too.”
He seemed to confuse the war that had unseated him with this one, to want to slay his new allies and resurrect old enemies. It had always been thought that the executions during his reign had been all Black Harrah’s doing, because the King had never shown himself. If only little Black knew, the loyal used to say. But Sennred had for days been listening to his grisly tastes. He thought for sure the King had found in those days some secret niche to watch all from.
By a sudden echo of their footsteps in the dark, Sennred could tell that the back stairs had debouched into a wide high place, bare-floored, empty of furniture.
Beneath the smell of must and disuse in the room, there was another odor, intensely familiar to Sennred.
“Stop. Wait awhile.”
“Hurry, hurry!”
That smell… Yes! He was sure now, and he stumbled with his arms outstretched to find the wall, and the racks on the wall he knew must be there… He stepped into some pieces of armor that rang like bells, and the King gave a frightened squeak.
But Sennred had found what he wanted.
How many hours he had spent in such a room, a room smelling of leather and steel polish, sweat and moldering straw targets, loud with weapons; how much of his life’s little happiness he had got there! He gripped the sword’s handle gratefully; it was like slipping into warm clothes after having been long naked.
“Lead on, Majesty,” he said. “Your minister comes close after.”
There was a suffocating hour when they had to crawl up between two close walls of crumbling brick, by elbow and knee and will. The King went scrabbling first, and Sennred pushed him from below, his nose full of the smell of the old man’s rusty clothes, hating him fiercely; and then there was a hole in the floor above them, and they crawled out into a tower room windowed and full of breeze.
Air. light. Stars. Sennred stood panting, wiping the filthy sweat from his face.
They were near the very top of the house, up among its steep-pitched roofs and chimney stacks and fantastic cupolas. Below them the high-piled City was already starred with lamplight; all around, the lake lay like a hole pierced in the Deep.
The house stood outside the High City walls, on a finger of rock called Sping that was connected to the High City by a causeway; down there, watchfires burned, guards stood, they knew. On this side, though, the walls of the house went down and met the sheer walls of the rock Sping which went down, down to the lake and down then to the bottom of the world presumably.
“They will show a lantern,” Little Black said. “Down there, where Sping meets the house. There are no guards there; they don’t know there is a way there down the rock to the lake.” He giggled. “They will know, one day, when they are all flung down Sping one by one. One by one.”
“A lantern. And how will we get down to them then?”
“Crawl down, crawl down, swift as anything.” He peered out over the window ledge into the gloom. “There are ways. There are handholds.”
“And once down…”
“They have a boat, concealed at the bottom on the lake. Over there there is a path up the mountain that meets the High Road.” He patted his hands together, gleeful. “And then free! Free!”
Sennred leaned out with the King. “Show me. Point it all out, how you will climb down.”
The King’s crooked finger traced the way down, along gutters, down roofs, clinging to gargoyles, walking ledges. With the horrid fear already biting into his knees, Sennred memorized it.
“There!” Little Black cried. “There they are!”
Down where the walls of the house met the walls of the rock Sping, a yellow light winked once, again.
Now, shouted all prudence in Sennred’s mind, do it now, here, there will be no other chance…. He gripped the sword, staring at the King’s back; the King’s matted white hair stirred in the evening wind.
He could not do it; could not raise the sword, could not thrust it within the black cloak. The King turned and grinned wildly at him, and then slipped over the window ledge.
There was nothing for Sennred to do but follow. He didn’t even know the way back into his prison.
A tiled roof went steeply down from the tower room, down to a gutter green with verdigris; the King let himself slip down the tiles, like a child at play, and caught himself on the gutter. Sennred, going slower, had a harder time; his caution caught him up on the tiles and nearly flung him into the night. He lay crouched at the gutter, panting, collecting himself. There is no way, he thought, to do this but fearlessly, I will fall otherwise… He tried to find in himself the fearlessness that the King (whispering urgently to him from around the roof’s turning) had as a gift of his foolishness.
It was easier for a while around the roof’s turning; they walked through a chute formed by two roofs’ meeting, crept around clustered chimneys standing eerie and unconcerned in the moonlight, and stood then looking over a cornice. Here the wall went down sheer; there was only a ladder of stones, outcropping for some obscure mason’s reason, that could be descended. With a little grunt of triumph, the King started down. Sennred could only follow because he was sure that he would fall, that caution was useless…
He stepped off the last stone onto a ledge, almost surprised.
They were in a valley between two wings of the house. A narrow chasm separated the ledge they stood on from a symmetrical ledge on the wall opposite; it must be jumped; they could not continue down on this side or they might be seen. The chasm was dark; how far down it went could not be seen, to the bottom of the house or further…
Outward, between the two wings of the house, was a narrow banner of night sky, still faintly green at the horizon but already starred. They could look down that way to the lake and the way that they had been promised was there; and even as they looked down, the yellow light winked again.
Across the chasm, a lizard, a stonecutter’s fancy, clung to the wall above the ledge.
“Leap, leap,” the King said. “Take hold of that thing when your foot strikes the ledge, and hold yourself to the wall.” He prodded Sennred, who stood transfixed, looking down. “No!” the King said. “Look only at that, at that”—waggling his finger at the monster.
Sennred leapt.
His hand took hold of the lizard’s foot as his foot took hold of the ledge; a weird sound came from his throat and he clung there a moment, stone himself, till the King’s urgings made him let
go and edge away.
The King poised himself a moment; his hair stirred in the air that sped through that narrow place; his hands moved like claws. Then he leapt too.
His hand took hold of the lizard’s head, and gently, as though made of rotten wood, the head came away.
The King, looking faintly surprised, drifted backwards off the ledge, one hand spooning the air, the other holding the lizard’s head as though it were a gift.
Sennred leaned over with a cry, almost falling himself, and snatched at the King’s black cloak. It came away in his hand, rolling the King out as from a bag.
He fell soundlessly. It was Sennred who screamed, not knowing he did so, watching the King, storing up in a moment a lifetime of vertiginous dreams.
He stood a long time on the ledge, holding the cloak, staring down. Did the King live, clutching some ledge? He called out, his voice a croak. No sound answered. Then, down at the base of the house, the signal light winked again. Whoever was down there had seen nothing, heard nothing.
Would they expect some password, some sign?
No. All they looked for was a little man, dressed in black, alone and unarmed. Little. Dressed in black.
He looked at the greasy rag in his hands, and at the way he must go down, and a dark wave of fear and disgust washed over him.
3
Whenever Caredd the Protector Redhand’s wife reined in her horse, the riders in King’s livery reined in theirs not far off. The two had some difficulty in keeping with her as closely as their orders required, and out of pity for them she paused often to let them catch up.
It was that luminous harvest day when the world, dying, seems never more alive. A chill wind pressed against her, flushing her cheek like an autumn fruit. Dark, changeful clouds, pierced by sunrays that moved like lamp beams over the colored Downs, hurried elsewhere overhead; when they were gone they left the sky hard, blue, filled up with clean wind to its height.
She rode everywhere over Redsdown from white misty morning to afternoon, overseeing the slow wagons that toiled toward the barns under their great weight of harvest; planning the horse-gathering with the horsemaster as cheerfully as though no war were being waged; stopping everywhere to talk to the children who scared the birds from the grain and the old ones who sat in the year’s last sun in their cottage doorways. She was Redsdown’s mistress, servant, its reins were in her hands, and yet when she reined in a short way from where the road ran Outward screened by dusty trees, she had a mad impulse to fly to it, outrun her pursuers, make for her husband’s tent.
As she stood there, she could hear, coming closer, the sound of wagons and many men. She turned her horse and rode for higher, nearer ground; those two followed.
It was an army that moved Outward, raising dust. Through the screen of trees along the road, she could see the long lances that stood up, bannered and glinting, and the tops of heavy war wagons, and the heads of a glum, endless line of footsoldiers. Boys like her own Reds-down boys, like the two who watched her. She stood in her stirrups and waved to her guards to come close. They were hesitant and, when they did canter up, deferential. They were both very young.
“Whose army is that?”
“The King Red Senlin’s Son’s, Lady.”
“Where do they go?”
“To punish the outlaw Redhand.”
“The Protector Redhand,” the other said quickly. “And the Queen.”
Her horse turned impatiently beneath her, and she steadied him with a gloved hand. In the midst of the line of march she could see a canopy, in the King’s colors, moving like a pretty boat along the stream of men.
“Who is that carried in a litter?”
“The King, Lady.”
“Taken sick,” the other said.
“Will he die?”
“We will all die, Lady.”
She thought suddenly of dark Sennred in the tower room: When I am King…
Around them in the yellow pasture wind threshed the ripened weeds, broadcast seed. Insects leaped at the horse’s feet, murmuring. The sky had turned a lapidary green on the horizon, marbled faintly with wisps of cloud. Till it was nearly dark, the columns and wagons and mounted men and pennons went by.
She did not wish the King’s death.
She shuddered, violently, with not wishing it. And turned her eager horse homeward.
Homeward.
The last house in the world was a squat tower of wood and stone on the lake’s Outward shore. Patches of weed grew close around it as though for shelter, but there was no other life; beyond, the beach, undifferentiated, a rusted color, went on as far as could be seen.
There was no sign of the last man who lived there.
From the tower, a long tongue of pier stuck out over the water. Staying as far from the tower as they could, the birdmen piled up on the pier’s end, silently and hurriedly, a large supply of food in oiled skins, and many bundles of sticks wrapped up too. They put off the girl and the Secretary and then rowed as fast as they could away.
Nod and the Secretary stood on the pier, waiting.
“The sticks are for a beacon,” the Secretary said. He pointed to the closed door at the pier’s end that led into the tower. “He lights it. To warn the birdmen when they come too near the shore.”
“Why do they need such a warning?”
“It angers him, they said. This one who lives here is called Sop to His Anger.”
“How long has he been here?”
“Since Old Fan died, they said. If he lives to be as old as Old Fan, they said, he will have to light the beacon only sixty summers more.”
“Horrible.”
“He will go mad soon. The madness will give him strength to live. They said it was his gift.”
There was a curious wind here, blowing Inward, that they did not remember feeling on the lake. It was steady, insistent, like the gentle pressure of fingers pushing them away. It played within the tower, a penetrating, changeless note.
The door at the end of the pier began to open, squeaking, resisting, as though long unused.
The last man in the world was not a man; he was a boy, skinny as death and as hollow-eyed, with lank black hair down his back and a stain of beard on his white cheeks. He stared at them, hesitant, seeming to want to flee, or speak, or smile, or scream, but he said nothing; only his haunted eyes spoke; they were a beacon, but what they warned of could not be told…
On top of his tower the ashes of the previous night’s beacon were still warm.
Since all around them was flat, the tower seemed a giddy height. Nothing anywhere stood up. Inward there was the lake and the sky like it; horizonless, empty, bleeding imperceptibly into night Outward the featureless beach went on toward the Deep; out there was an occasional vortex of dust. The sun, setting, seemed huge, a distended ball, vaporous and red.
Nod felt poised between nothings, the world divided into two blank halves by the shoreline: the gray, misty half of the lake, and the rust-colored half of desert and dust. The sun frightened her. Almost without meaning to, she slipped her arm into the Secretary’s, stood half-sheltered behind him, like a child.
“He’ll give us food for a week, ten days. Fuel for the lamp,” the Secretary said.
Why a week? Nod thought. How does he know the world will end in a week?
The last man in the world nodded, in assent or at something he saw Outward. The wind lifted his lank black hair, threw strands around his face that now and again he raised a hand to brush away slowly, abstractedly.
“I see his eye out there, sometimes,” he said, in a voice thin and sweet as a quickwing’s. “I see his eye, like a little moon. I hear him.”
“What does he say?” the Secretary asked.
“He says Silence,” said the last man.
There is an edge, a lip, Fauconred had said to him on that day in the beginning of his life when they had stood together watching the horse-gathering; an edge, as on a tray; and then nothing.
For days the horizon seem
ed to draw closer, not as though they approached a ridge of mountains but as though the world steadily, imperceptibly foreshortened. When the sun set they could see a dark line at the horizon, a band of shadow that thickened each evening.
Beneath their feet, what had been in the first days recognizably sand changed character, became harder, less various; the occasional rain-cut ravine, even pebbles and earthly detritus, became scarcer. What they walked on was hard, infinitely wearying, like an endless flat deck; it seemed faintly, regularly striated, the striations leading Outward.
Somehow, impossibly, it seemed they came closer to the sun.
Each evening it set in a blank, cloudless sky; vast and shapeless, almost seeming to make a sound as it squatted on the horizon, it threw their shadows out behind them as far as they had come. It lit nothing; there was nothing to reflect it. The earth’s faint striations deepened, like stones across a game board, they rolled toward their Player.
Then on a night the setting sun lit something.
At the top of the band of shadow that was the world’s edge something caught the sun’s fire for a moment, lit up with its light, a spark only, and it faded quickly. If there had been anything, anything else to see in all that vastness, he would not have noticed its brief light.
“Look,” he said, and she stopped. She would not raise her eyes; she could no longer bear the setting sun. When she did look up, the sign was gone. He could only tell her it had been there; she only looked from him to the fast-darkening edge whose shadow swept toward them; expressionless, faceless almost, like a brutalized child.
How was it, that as far Outward as she had gone, just so far within had she gone also? With every step a layer of her seemed to come away; something she had been as sure of as her name became tenuous, then untenable, and was shed like skin. She had not known how many of these layers she owned, how many she had to lose. When she felt she had been bared utterly, was naked as a needle of all notions, suppositions, wants, needs, she found there was more that the silence and emptiness could strip her of.