Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  “We must go up,” she said. “We have to have dry ground, though we lose the way Outward.” That she knew, that the rivers flowed Outward here as they flowed Inward on the other side of the Edge. But they would have to find another marker, or spend a lifetime in mud here.

  They had begun to decide which way was up when the Secretary stopped still, listening. She stopped too, could hear nothing, and then sorted from the forest’s murmur the knock of wood on wood, the soft slosh of water around a prow. A sound she knew well.

  The Outlanders she had known were dour merchants she had ferried to the City, resplendent for the occasion but awed too: she had felt superior to them in her City knowledge. Here it was otherwise, and she sank behind the knees of a great tree. The Secretary followed; she was, after all, the guide.

  The boat sounds grew closer, though they could see nothing through the shroud of mist; and then there came, walking on the water it seemed, a tall, tall figure, hideously purple of face with staring eyes… It took them a moment to see it was the boat’s carved prow.

  Dark men with long, delicate poles sounded the river channel, and called softly back to those who rowed. Deep-bellied, slow, with tiny banners limp in the windless air, it passed so close they could hear the oarsmen grunt, and its wake lapped their feet. Yards of it went by, each oarhole painted as a face with the oar its tongue, and each face looked at them unseeing.

  In the stern, stranger than all the painted faces, there was a woman under a pavilion, a vast woman, a woman deep-bellied like the ship. She lay cushioned in her fat, head resting on an arm like a thigh, fast asleep. At her feet, in diverse attitudes, Outlanders, chiefs with brass spangles braided in their beards, slept too; one held to his softly heaving chest a grotesque battle-ax.

  The boat passed with a soft sound, rolled slightly with the channel, which made the Queen list too, and was lost in the mist.

  Other boats came after, not so grand but stuffed full of armed men, spiky and clanking with weapons. One by one they appeared and glided by. Deep within one boat, someone chuckled.

  “Is the child strong?” Redhand asked. “Healthy? Is it male or female?”

  The Queen said nothing, only continued with her refreshment. Before her was a plate like a tray, tumbled up in Outland fashion with cakes, fruits, cheese, and fat sausages.

  “I would see the child,” Redhand said.

  “There are other things,” the Queen said, “that must come first.” She was waited on by a lean, fish-eyed man, her companion and general, a man named Kyr: Redhand and he had exchanged names, looked long in each other’s faces, both trying to remember something, but neither knew that it was Kyr who had nearly killed Redhand at the Little Lake. Kyr passed to his mistress a napkin; she took it, her eyes on her food.

  So they waited—Redhand; Fauconred, who looked red-faced and furious as though he had been slapped; and Younger Redhand.

  It had been an awful week. Redhand, with Fauconred’s help, had locked his screaming brother in a tower room, at dead of night so no one saw. Then he had ordered the cairn in the courtyard dismantled.

  He dug out of the garrison an unshaven, wispy man who said he was Gray, made him presentable, and then, with him presiding, had Old Redhand exhumed from the courtyard. He forced himself to look on, his jaw aching with nights of sleepless resolve; he made the garrison look on too, and they did, silent and cowed before his ferocity and his father’s mortality.

  He had found a quiet chamber within Forgetful, that once may have been a chapel, with dim painting on one wall he could not read, of a smiling, winged child perhaps; it would do. He had the great stones of the floor torn up, and a place made. From the dark wood of old chests a carpenter of his household had made a box.

  “Wine,” the Queen said. “No water.”

  When the last of the floor stones had been mortared back into place, and the same carpenter had tried an inscription on them, two or three ancient letters only that would stand for the rest, Redhand went to the tower and released Younger. Hesitant, his cheeks dirty with dried tears, Younger allowed himself to be taken and shown the empty place in the courtyard, and the quiet room and its secure stones. Now, Redhand had said, gripping his brother’s shoulders, now you have no more excuse to be mad. Please. Please… They had embraced, and stood for a while together, and Redhand from exhaustion and confused love had wept too.

  Whatever it was, the true burial, or Redhand’s strength in doing this, or only that the vine flowers fell in that week: the horrid surgery worked. Younger slept for a day, worn out by his adventure, and woke calm: well enough to sit with his brother and Fauconred now, somewhat stunned, with the look of one returned from a long and frightening journey.

  Kyr poured water from a ewer over the Queen’s fingers, and only when she had dried them did she look up, with her marvelous eyes, at her new allies. “Have this cleared,” she said, gesturing with a ringed hand at her pillaged feast, “and we will talk.”

  There had been little time for Redhand to worry over his Secretary and his weird disappearance, though now he felt in need of him. The man, if man he had been, was so fey that in a sense Redhand felt he had not ever been truly there: this though he had saved Redhand’s life, twice. Well, there was no help for it. Redhand felt less that he had lost a friend or even an aide than that he had misplaced a charm, lucky but possibly dangerous too.

  “Now, lady,” Redhand said.

  “We have conditions,” she said. “We have drawn them up, you and whoever else will sign them.”

  “Conditions.”

  “Certain incomes I demand. Honors restored. There is a house near Farinsdown I wish for my summers.” She took a paper from Kyr. “There are names here of those I want punished.”

  “Punished?”

  “Much wrong was done me.” As though it were a morsel, her fat hands unrolled the paper lovingly. “Red Senlin’s Son, I have him here, and he must die.”

  “So must we all.” Something like a smile had begun to cross Red-hand’s features. “Who else have you?”

  She let the paper curl itself again, her dark eyes suspicious. “There are others.”

  “Half the Red Protectorate?”

  “I will have revenge.”

  Redhand began to laugh, a hoarse; queer laugh that he owed to his old wound, and over his laughter the Queen’s voice rose: “I will have revenge! They murdered Black Harrah, they imprisoned my husband, they took my crown, they killed my child!”

  Redhand stopped laughing. “Your child.”

  The Queen stared at him defiantly.

  “Where is the child?” he asked.

  She rose slowly, raised her head, proud. “There is no child,” she said quietly. “Red Senlin murdered him.”

  “Murdered a child?”

  “His relentlessness. His constant harassment. I miscarried on the Drum.”

  Redhand too rose, and came toward the Queen, so malevolent that Kyr stepped close. “You have no child,” Redhand said. “Then tell me, Lady, what you do here with your conditions, and your demands, and your revenges. Do you think we owe you now, any of us, anyone in the world? For your beauty only, did you think?”

  She did not shrink, only batted her black lashes.

  “These,” he said, flicking her papers, hoarse with rage, “these will be our reason then to cross the Drum? Answer me, Lady. To kill the King, and any else who might have mocked you once or done you wrong?”

  “No, Redhand.”

  “What reason, then?”

  “To free my husband from the house they have prisoned him in. Free Little Black, and make him King, again.”

  Redhand turned away, flung himself in his chair. But he said nothing.

  “Send to the Black Protectorate,” the Queen said. “Send word that you mean to do this. He has always been their King. They will rise.”

  Redhand glared at nothing, his jaw tight.

  “It is your only hope, Redhand.”

  “The old man may be dead, or mad,” Fauconr
ed said.

  “He is not dead. I have spies near him. And he is no more mad than he ever was.”

  “When the King learns of it,” Redhand growled, “he will kill Little Black. It surprises me he has not yet.”

  The Queen sat heavily. “He will not learn of it. Send word to Blacks only, I will say whom, they will not reveal it. To your Red friends say only you want their help. Put it about that the child lives.”

  Redhand slowly shook his head.

  “The notion brought me you,” the Queen said lightly. “And before Red Senlin’s Son learns that you mean anything but to save yourself, Little Black will be with us. I have people, Redhand, in the City, who have planned his escape, are ready to pluck Little Black from that awful place at my word.”

  “I have no faith in this,” Redhand said.

  “Nor I,” said Fauconred.

  The Queen’s eyes lit fiercely. “Then you tell me, exiles, outlaws, what other chance you have. What other hope.”

  There was a long silence. Far away, from the courtyard, they could hear a fragment of an Outland song. Redhand, sunk in thought, looked less like a man weighing chances than one condemned reconciling himself. At last he said, almost to himself: “We will go Inward, then.”

  The Queen leaned forward to hear him. “Inward?”

  “Send word to your people. Free the King, if you can.”

  She leapt up, flinging up her arms, and began a vast dance. “Inward! Inward! Inward!” She lunged at the table, reaching for her papers. “The conditions…”

  “No.”

  “You must sign them.”

  “No. No more. Leave that.”

  She turned on them in fury. “You will sign them! Or I return!”

  “Yes!” Redhand hissed. “Yes, go back to your bogs and lord it over your villages, weep storms over your wrongs. I will have no vengeance done. None.” He raised his arm against her. “Pray to all your gods you are only not hanged for this. Make no other conditions.”

  “My incomes,” she said, subdued. “What is due me.”

  “If this succeeds,” Redhand said, “you will be treated as befits the King’s loved wife. But all direction, now and hereafter, will be mine.”

  “You would be King yourself.”

  “I would be safe. And live in a world that does not hate me. You find that hard to grasp.”

  She rolled up her papers. “Well, for now. We will talk further of this.”

  “We will not.” He turned to leave her; Fauconred and Younger stood to follow.

  “Redhand,” she said. “There is one further thing.” Regal, on feet strangely small, she made progress toward them as though under sail. “You must kneel to me.”

  “Kneel!” Fauconred said.

  “You must kneel, out there, before them all, or I swear I will return.”

  “Never, he never will,” Younger whispered.

  She only regarded them, waiting for her due. “Kneel to me, kneel and kiss my hand, swear to be my Defender.”

  Fauconred, and Younger with his whipped boy look, waited. Red-hand, with a gesture as though he were wiping some cloud from before his eyes, only nodded.

  It all took so long, he thought. So terribly long. Life is brief, they said. But his stretched out, tedious, difficult, each moment a labor of unutterable length. He wished suddenly it might be over soon.

  Of all hard things Sennred had ever borne, imprisonment seemed the hardest. Adversity had never hurt him, not deeply; he seemed sometimes to thrive on it. The mockery of children at his misshapenness had made him not hard but resilient; death and war had made him the more fiercely protective of what he loved; the intrigues of his brother’s brilliant court had made him not quick and brittle as it had the Son, but slow, long-sighted, tenacious. Though he was young, younger by years than the young King, Sennred had nothing left in him impetuous, half-made, loud.

  What marked him as young was his love. He gave it, or withheld it, completely and at once. He had given it to his brother, and to Redhand. And then lastly to a young wife with autumn eyes and auburn hair, a free gift, without conditions, a gift she knew nothing of yet.

  And what galled him in imprisonment, made him rage, was to be separated from those he loved, deprived of his watching over them; he could not conceive they could get on without him, it blinded him with anxiety that they were in danger, threatened, taking steps he could not see.

  Where they had put him he could hardly see if it was night or day.

  As though it were a maze made for the exercise of some small pet, most of the great house he had been shut in had been sealed off. The rest, windowless, doorless, he had his way in. It had been a Black mansion in some ancient reign; there were high halls where ghostly furniture still held conference, moldering bedrooms, corridors carved and pillared where his footsteps multiplied and seemed to walk toward him down other carved corridors. For days on end he went about it with candles cadged from his guards, exploring, looking he was not sure for what: a way out, an architectural pun somewhere that would double out suddenly and show him sky, blue and daylit.

  His companions were a woman who brought food, deaf and evil-smelling—he thought sometimes her odor had got into his food, and he couldn’t eat—and his guards, whom he would meet in unexpected places and times. He seemed rarely to see the same guard twice, and could not tell if there were multitudes of guards or if they were only relieved often. Anyway they were all huge, leather-bound, dull and seemingly well-paid; all he could get from them were candles, and infrequently a jug of blem, after which he would go around the great rooms breaking things and listening to the echoes.

  And there was the ghost.

  He had at first been a glimpse only, a shadow at the far edge of vision, and Sennred never saw more of him than a flick of robe disappearing around a corner. But the ghost seemed to delight in following him, and they began a game together through the dayless gloom of the house; Sennred supposed the ghost suffered as much from strangulating boredom as he did.

  Natural enough that such a place would have a ghost, though Sennred red suspected that this one was at least a little alive. Nor had it taken him long to deduce whose ghost it might be. He would have asked the guards, but he was afraid they would make new arrangements, and his only relief from the torment of imprisonment was his plan to catch this other one.

  His trap was laid.

  He had found a low corridor, scullery or something, with doors at each end of its lefthand wall. He learned that these were both doors of a long closet that ran behind the wall the length of the corridor. He learned he could go in the far door, double back through the closet, taking care not to stumble on the filthy detritus there, and come out the other door, just behind anyone who had followed him into the corridor.

  Once he had discovered this, he had only to wait till his ghost was brave enough to follow him there. As near as he could measure time, it was a week till he stood listening at his trapdoor for soft, tentative footsteps…

  When he judged they had just passed him, he leapt out with a yell, filthy with cobwebs, and grappled with his ghost.

  He had a first wild notion that it was truly a ghost, a greasy rag covering only a bundle of bones; but then he turned it to face him, and looked into the face he had expected, wildeyed, the mouth open wide in a soundless scream.

  “Your Majesty,” Sennred said.

  “Spare me!” said the King Little Black in a tiny voice. “Spare me for right’s sake!”

  “And what will you give me?”

  “What you most want,” said the ghost.

  “Freedom,” Sennred said. “Freedom from this place. With the power of your crown, old man, grant me that.”

  He was old, and lived by lizard hunting. Perhaps the bloodstained boat was all his living; the Secretary, anyway, didn’t think of that, though he did perceive the old man’s terror when they appeared before him as though risen out of the mud. The coins they gave him must have been nearly useless to him; it didn’t matter, they
had been ready after days of mud to wrest the boat from him if need be, and the old one knew that.

  The Secretary turned back once to look at him as the girl poled off. He stood unblinking, wrinkled as a reptile, his old claw clutching the gold.

  Nod had long ago given up any idea of overpowering her captor, seizing the Gun from him, murdering him by stealth. Even to slip away, leaving the Gun, though it would have been like losing a limb, even that she had abandoned; he slept only when she slept, and her slightest stirring woke him.

  So she went Outward, days into weeks, in a weird dream, the half dream the sleeper seems to know he dreams, and struggles restlessly to wake from. Yet she could not wake. Waking, she poled the boat. Sleeping, she dreamt of it.

  It seemed they moved through the interior of some vast organism. It was dark always, except at high noon when a strange diffracted sunlight made everything glisten. The trees hung down ganglia of thick moss into the brown river slow with silt; the river branched everywhere into arteries clogged with odorous fungi and phosphorescent decay. At night they lay in their shelter listening to the thing gurgling and stirring.

  They came once upon a place where a fresh spring had come forth in the scum and decay, like a singer at a funeral. The spring had swept clean a little lagoon, and even bared a few rocks of all but a slimy coat of algae.

  She swam, dappled by sun through the clotted leaves.

  He had some notion, abstract only, of men’s bodies and their heats and functions, and had stored up court gossip and jokes to be explicated later. He watched her, faintly curious. She was made not unlike himself.

  She wriggled up onto the rocks, laughing, brushing the water from her face, pale and glistening as a fish.

  She saw him watching. “Turn away,” she said sternly, and he did.

  When at last the forest began to thin, and the tree trunks stood up topless and rotted like old teeth, and the rivers merged into a shallow acrid lake that seemed to have drowned the world, they had lost track of what week it was.