Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  I lay on the hillside

  I dreamed of Adar.

  “King Red lies at Drumriven

  But he’ll rise up no more.

  This one I call Shouter of Curses,

  This one I call Shouter of Curses,

  This is the flint, this the ball I will feed him

  To spit in King Red’s eye.”

  I woke on the hillside

  The brothers and sisters were gathered.

  “King Red lies at Drumriven

  A stone ball in his forehead.

  But the one called Shouter of Curses is broken

  And Adar’s flesh stills the hounds that mourn King Red.”

  Adar, the grass grows still on the hillside

  The long, forgetful grass that covered us:

  Why, why will you not come to where I lie waiting?

  The paved highway soon gave way to dirt rutted with spring rain, and the dirt often to a lane, marked only by stern stone bridges the ancients had built to arch the deepest ravines. These she kept count of, and at the fifth, as the sun and a thin mist were rising together, she stopped; she looked quickly behind her and then went into the ravine beneath the bridge. A path, that might have been made by rain but hadn’t been, led steadily downward, deep beneath the aged trees whose tops filled up the ravine. As she went, what seemed impassable from above became more and more an easy glen in the gloom below. She ate bread and cheese as she walked, listening to the birds awake; and before the mist had entirely burned away, she stood before the Door in the Forest.

  Had there ever truly been one called Adar?

  She knew of some who had named their names for him. Yet for sure King Red had died in his sleep at a great age, imprisoned in the Citadel.

  Once, so long ago no one now knew his or the King’s name, one of the Just had killed a king.

  And now, she thought, the kings kill each other. May they, she prayed, go on doing so until the last of their line stands alone, deserted, with his prize that crown, alone before the Just; and may a Gun then speak intimately with him; and the Folk be at last made free.

  In her lifetime, in her youth? How many of the Just had wondered that, since how long ago…

  To any not allowed to pass through it, any not Just, the Door in the Forest would not have seemed a door. It was only a narrow way between the entangled roots of two elder trees, with impassable deadfalls on either side; yet she was careful to make all the proper signs to the Door’s guardians she could not see but knew were watching there.

  Beyond the Door was much the same as before it; here too was dim glen and the birds awaking. Yet she felt she had left all her fears at that Door, and had come at last home. When the path at length came out of the grove and opened out into a wide meadow, she could see far down the whole length of the valley; beyond this meadow another meadow and another went on like pools of grass in the forest, down to where the stony sides of the valley seemed to close a farther Door. Then sheer mountains rose up; far, far away was a pale glitter: sunlight striking the white stones of Inviolable. She could see it, but it couldn’t see her: a thrill of private pleasure.

  Here, at the edge of the meadow, new moss spangled with flowers made a bed, and she lay gratefully, suddenly exhausted; the Gun in its pouch she laid beside her, and her pack under her head, and slept.

  She woke because she felt a presence. She had forgotten where she was, or when she had come there, or what time of day it now was: but she knew someone was near, and watching. She sat up with a start, and seemed at the same time to coalesce here: late afternoon, beyond the Door, and a boy, Just, before her, smiling.

  A mirror image of her almost, he had her blond short hair, her pale eyes, her long limbs, and she smiled his smile. His homespun was faded to a blue like his eyes—as though it were part of him, it was creased for good, like his hands, smooth and useful as his naked feet. Across his back, as long almost as he, hung a black figured Gun.

  From a pouch he drew a handful of gray withering leaves. “I gathered these for you.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  He smiled. “I found you hours ago. Gathered these. I’ve been watching you sleep.”

  As he said it, she seemed to remember dreaming of him. “What is your name called?”

  “My name is called Adar.”

  “My name is called Nod.” Not her name, but what her name was called. Why did it seem to reveal her more to say it than to say her name?

  Adar had found a flat stone and laid the gray leaves on it; with flint and steel he started the little pile smoldering. Hungrily Nod bent over it, beckoning the smoke into her face with her hands and breathing it in. Adar did the same when Nod moved away satisfied; they bent over it in turns till it was all pale ash. And sat then together, looking out over the valley.

  Though woolly clouds rose over and crossed the valley, to them now it seemed that the valley turned beneath still clouds, sharp and clear as though painted for some vast pageant. So the wind too, which moved the clouds, seemed to be rather the valley’s passage through still air: they at its center watched the world turn beneath the sky.

  Then the turning valley entered new country: the clouds it moved under were denser, gray as lamb’s wool, and the valley moved faster through cool, wet air that stirred their hair and opened their nostrils. The valley groaned in its quickened passage, ground rocks perhaps that sparked pale lightnings: then its forward edge passed through a curtain of rain, and the fat drops filled up the air, startling them and dispelling their dream. They moved close, back into the dense grove that was suddenly noisy with rain; found themselves tasting each other’s rain-wet flesh.

  His hunger surprised her; she herself felt cool, poised, as she liked to feel before doing a dangerous thing, though often didn’t; she relished the feeling now, helping his helpless-eager hands undo her. She let him feast on her, let herself by degrees expand with heat out of her reserve until she must cry out: letting herself cry out felt like falling backwards when something soft is sure to break the fall. Her cry stilled him, his hands grew less sure; so she began to take him, moving the smooth homespun from his smooth flesh.

  Thunder beat on them. The grove grew wild and dark with storm.

  It had always fascinated her, blind, eager, so helpless and vulnerable and then too imperious, not to be denied. She felt once again poised, but now on some higher peak, ready to leap yet delaying. He made some motion toward her, it didn’t matter, this one held her with its blind eye: when she took it, it leapt in her hand as though startled.

  Around her as she woke the grove let drops fall from leaf to shuddering leaf. Outside, the clouds were dark rags against pale night sky where only the brightest stars could be seen. Around the meadow sat many, in dark groups of two or three, the long black of their Guns sharp in the weird light. More came from the forest and the valley below, noiselessly, calling out in the voices of night things to announce themselves. Adar was gone.

  It was this she had come for.

  At the meadow’s center, a pavilion, a gesture toward a pavilion—two slim stakes, a gauzy banner, a rug thrown over the wet grass. On the rug Someone to whom, singly, each in the meadow came. Nod waited, watching, till she felt some invisible motion in the whole of them that brought her to her feet, moved her in her turn to the pavilion.

  Slim, soft, white as Death, maned with white hair, the Neither-nor perched upon the rug like an ungainly bright bird. Laid out on the painted board before It were the painted cards of an oblong deck.

  The Neither-nor, neither man nor woman, arbiter of the Just, keeper of the Fifty-nine Cards and of all secrets. It—not-he-not-she—resolved in Its long, fragile body the contradictions that the rulers of this world (and their Gray minions especially) would keep at war: ruler and ruled; good and evil; chance and certainty; man and woman.

  Since the Just had been, such a one had guided them; since the first appeared, ages ago, to free men from tyranny. That first Neither-nor had appeared out of nowhere, pure
emanation of the Deep or the heavens, bearing in one hand the Cards, in the other a Gun—sexless, without orifice or pendants; birthless, without omphalos; deathless, who had only Departed and left nothing behind.

  This Neither-nor, successor to the first, holy body of Chalah, Two Hands of Truth, threw down Its paint pot and bit of mirror in disgust. In this light, Its eyes could not be made to look the same…. Its anger passed, dispersed by a motion of the Two Hands. Nod came close to sit before It; It turned Its fabulous head to look at her; within the softness of Its face Its eyes were still fierce and male somehow. For this Neither-nor was not clean of sex, not truly neither, but only both, vestigially. It had been taken, soon after birth, by the Just, raised up to be successor to the old Neither-nor when It would die. So this one would die, too: was only human, however odd. But there was this Providence, and always (the Just believed) had been: the Neither-nor was Just, most Just of them all; wise; chose well from the Cards whom the Guns would speak to; watched their secrets well, and would die to keep them secret. It was enough. The Neither-nor received their love, and gave them Its love freely, even as It dealt Death.

  “Child.” With a jingle of bracelets It reached out a Hand to stroke Nod’s shorn head. “Many have told me of Black Harrah.” Its fluid fingers turned and turned the Cards. “Do you know. I have a stone, a leaf, a bit of earth from the places where six of your brothers and sisters lie, six who drew Black Harrah from my cards?” Nod could say nothing. The Neither-nor regarded her, a tiny smile on Its mauve lips. “Do you come again then so soon to draw another?”

  “What else could I do, Blessed?” It was not bragging; in the winey, wind-blown night, chill after rain, here before fate, Nod felt transparent; her words to the Neither-nor seemed so truthful as not to be hers at all. The Neither-nor lowered Its head, made a tiny motion, turned a first card. Nod began to speak, telling what her life had been, plainly; what she had seen; who of the great she had been near. Once the Neither-nor stopped her, said over what Nod had said: “In Redhand’s train, dressed in red domino…”

  “A naked face, his eyes not like men’s eyes. In the battle with the Queen, it was he who saved Redhand when he fell…”

  She watched as the Neither-nor turned down a card: it was an image of Finn, with a death’s head and a fire lit in his belly. It had this motto: Found by the lost “Strange,” the Neither-nor whispered. “But no, not him… Go on. Is there Young Harrah in it?”

  No, Nod thought. Not both father and son. Let the cards say not so… She went on slowly, watching the silent fall of the cards.

  “They call themselves Brothers of the Stag.” She swallowed. “They are both Red and Black, and say they have put aside their quarrel to all serve the King. Young Harrah is their chief…”

  The Neither-nor turned down a card. “Not Young Harrah, then. Here is Chalah.”

  The deck the Neither-nor read from contained fifty-two cards, each a week, and seven trumps. These trumps were they whom the Grays called the Possessors, whom the Seven Strengths did endless war with in the world and in men’s hearts. The Just knew otherwise, that there were but Seven and Seven alone, and contained the contradiction that for their own ends the Grays had turned into open war so long ago. At the turn of each trump, the Neither-nor named it; for it was these Seven who ruled Time, which is the Fifty-two.

  Chalah, who is Love and its redemption, is also Lust and its baseness.

  Dindred, who is Pride, Glory, thus Greatness in the world’s eyes, is also blind Rage, thence treachery and ingloriousness.

  Blem, who is Joy and good times, Fellowship and all its comforts, is too Drunkenness, Incontinence and all discomforts.

  Dir, who is Wit, is the same Dir who is Foolishness.

  Tintinnar is the magnanimity of Wealth, the care for money, thus meanness and Poverty.

  Thrawn is Strength and Ability, exertion, exhaustion, and lastly Weakness and Sloth.

  These six, when they fall upon a name, shelter the one named, or throw obstacles in the path of the Just were they to pursue him; thus Chalah, for a reason the Neither-nor could not tell, protected Young Harrah. Nod went on, her heart beginning to tap at her ribs.

  “Redhand stays apart from them, though he wears the badge too. He gathers strength. His brother Learned is a dark Gray. His brother Younger holds the castle Forgetful. His father is slain, all his father’s honors and lands are his. He is greater than the King…”

  Lips pursed, the Neither-nor turned down the last trump.

  Rizna is Death. Death and Life, who carries the sickle and the seed-bag, and ever reaps what he continually sows.

  “You are brave,” It says in Its sweet, reedy voice.

  “No.”

  “Implacable.”

  She cannot answer.

  “Just.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you are.” It slides Rizna reversed toward Nod. “Are you afraid?”

  “Yes.” Till Death—his or hers—they have been wedded here.

  Tears have suddenly begun to course down the Neither-nor’s white cheeks. It is an ancient being; so many fates has It read, so many It has sent to death; weeps now because It can see nothing.

  “Redhand,” Nod says, trying to take him by the name. “Redhand.”

  The Arbiter Mariadn is dying.

  The old, old grayest of all Grays lies propped on pillows within her chaste apartment. Its casement windows have been opened to the garden, though the doctors think it ill-advised, and a breeze lifts the edges of many papers on tables.

  Her face is smooth, ashen, calm. Before sunset, before morning surely, her heart will stop. She knows it.

  Through all this week they have come, the great Grays and the lesser, from every quarter, from the court, the law offices, the country seats, foregathering here like a summer storm. For a time she could feel their presence in Inviolable, in the chambers outside her still room; they have mostly faded now. Her world has grown very small; it includes the window, the bed, the servant ancienter even than herself, her dissolving body and its letting go—little else now.

  The servant’s face, a moon, orbits slowly toward her.

  Has he come yet? she thinks she asks. When the servant makes no reply, she says again, with pain this time, “Has he come yet?”

  “He is just here.”

  She nods, satisfied. The world has grown very small, but she has remembered this one thing, a thing expressed in none of the wills and instruments she has already forgotten. She would have it over; does not wish it, an oath in an autumn garden, a thing still left to do, to intrude on her dissolution, a process that has broken open all her ancient locked chests, torn down her interior walls, let past light in to shine on present darkness: the light of a farm on the Downs, in the spring, in seedtime, warming young limbs and brown earth…

  He has been there some time when she again opens her eyes.

  “Learned.”

  “Arbiter.”

  “They will not deny me…” She stops, her lips quivering. She must not ramble. There must be strength for this. There is: she draws on it, and the world grows smaller. She calls her servant. “Call them now. You know the ones. Those only.”

  She takes his warm hand in her cold. “Learned, lean close… Learned, my successor will be named by the Councils. Hush, hush…” He had begun some comforting words. There is no time for that; her time spills as from a broken clock. “Help me now. For our Order’s sake. You must; you have no choice, no reason to deny me that can stand. Lift me up. They’ve come.”

  A cloud of smoke at me bed’s end coalesces into faces, forms. Many she has known since they were boys and girls; it seems they have changed not at all. She must be firm with them. “I would have Redhand succeed me.” She cannot tell if they are looking at her, at Redhand, at each other. It is too long ago to remember which is which, who would accede, who would be swayed by which other. It doesn’t matter. “There is no time or strength left me to argue it. Take him at my word or do not. But let not one
of you desire my place. Shun it. I place on Redhand only labor and suffering. Remember that. If you will not have him whom I name, let whomever you name have your pity and your love.”

  All done; and the last of her strength leaks away. She finds it hard to listen to the words spoken to her, Arbiter, Arbiter; she has forgotten why this man should not be excluded from her world like all else, except that his hand is warm and his voice pleasant though senseless.

  Done. Sunset has come suddenly, the room is dark. Her little world with a grateful sigh shuts up small, smaller than a fist; it draws to a fine point and is gone.

  And yet, and yet—strange: even when she is cool on the white-clothed bed, still the sunlight enters soundlessly in at the casements, the wind still lifts the corners of many papers on tables. In the garden trees still drop blossoms on the paths that go their ways; Learned Redhand at the casement can see them, and can feel on his face the hot, startling tears, the first he has shed since he put on Gray.

  3

  To my best-loved Caredd, at Redsdown:

  He who bears this is known to you, and can tell you much that is too long for this.

  You must know that the Arbiter Mariadn is dead. It was her wish, and the Grays in Council acceded to it, that my brother Learned be successor to her. This is great news and cause for celebration—no other in our family has risen so high in this. The ceremonies & all else attendant on this have been secret in part & I have heard of them only through Learned’s hints, but it is all very solemn and grand.