Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  “Why are there no people?” His voice was loud in the utter silence. “Shouldn’t there be villages, towns?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There are Outlanders.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “No.”

  There was no line between water and sky; it was all one gray. The hooded sun burned dimly Inward, and a light like it burned within the lake.

  There were no trees here; perhaps the shelf of the world below had grown too thin to contain their roots. There were only bunches of brown weed that stood up leafless and sharp, with a silver circle of wake around each stem. Only by these weeds could they tell their little boat moved at all.

  They could see far off to their right a moving smudge of pink on the water. It rose up, settled again. Then a long boat gray as the lake crept from the weeds out there, and gray men with nets attached to long poles began to snare the pink birdlets that had floated away from the flock. When one was snared it cried out, and the pink clot rose, and then settled again nearby.

  “Quickwings too stupid to fly all away,” Nod said. It was the first time she had spoken that day, except to answer him.

  “You will speak to them. Ask them…”

  “No.”

  “Ask them…”

  “I will not, not, not!” She looked around her, looking for escape, but there was only gray water, gray sky, indifferent, featureless. She sat down suddenly in the bows and began to weep.

  He only stared at her, long hands on his knees, mystified.

  Far off where the nets moved quick as birds in the gloom, men turned and pointed at their boat.

  The birdmen had made themselves an island on that placeless lake; it was a raft, anchored to the bottom, an acre of lashed beams, platforms, rotten wood. All night the quickwings they had caught that day fluttered within long cages of wicker and string; all night the lake oozed up through the ancient beams of the raft. So old and big it was, their raft grew little groves of mushrooms, and fish lived out their lives amid the sheltering fronds that grew from its bottom. It was to this island they brought Nod and the Secretary, not quite prisoners, yet not quite guests either.

  All night the one-eyed birdman sat next to Nod, talking in a language she didn’t understand. He would slip off into the dark and return with some token, a stone, a rag of figured, moldered cloth, a lizard’s tooth.

  She told herself he wasn’t there. She sat with her knees up, trying to clean from her feet the inexplicable sores that had begun to appear there.

  She glanced up now and again; far off, in the muddy light of a lantern, the Secretary sat talking with some of them. They gestured, stood, pointed, sat again. He listened, unmoving. She had the idea he understood no more of their talk than she did.

  When the one-eyed birdman, with a sudden gesture, slipped his moist hands beneath her clothes, she rose, furious, and made her way over incomprehensible bundles and slimy decks to where the Secretary sat, looking Outward.

  “Protect me,” she whispered fiercely, “or give me back my Gun.”

  Dawn was a gray stain everywhere and nowhere.

  “Do you hear? I am helpless here. I hate it. Are you a man?”

  “There.” He pointed Outward. A light that might have been marsh-light flickered far away and disappeared. “There. The last house in the world, they said; and the one who lives there has spoken to Leviathan.”

  2

  The tower of Inviolable may be the highest place in the world. No one has measured, but no one knows a higher place.

  There are many rooms in the tower, scholars’ rooms, put there less for the sublimity of the height than in the Order’s belief that men who spend their lives between pages should at least climb stairs for their health. Because Inviolable has no need for defense, the tower is pierced with broad windows, and the windows look everywhere, down the forests to the lake in the center of the world, a blue smudge of mist on summer mornings. Outward over the Downs where the river Wanderer branches into a hundred water fingers, to the Drum and farther still. But when the scholars put down their pens and look up, their gaze is inward; the vistas they see are in time not space.

  One looks out, though, a slight and softly handsome man in black, looking for something he probably could not anyway perceive at this height, this distance… There is, far off, a tower of dark cloud, a last summer storm walking Inward across the Drum to thresh the harvest lands with hail; Learned Redhand can hear the mutter of its thunder. The storm raises winds around the world; even here in the forests, wind turns leaves to show their pale undersides as though it flung handfuls of silver coins through the trees. It will be here soon enough. Yes: the Black Protectorate raises an army on the Black Downs, Redhand’s dependents unfurl, however reluctantly, their old battle banners: the storm will come soon Inward.

  Was it this that old Mariadn died to avoid, this the burden she ordered the Grays never to envy him? Did she lay it on him only because he deserved to suffer it, or because she saw something in him that might mitigate it, some strength to make a shelter from this storm? If she did, he cannot find it in himself.

  In another tower bells ring, low-voiced and sweet, reverberating through Inviolable, saying day’s end, day’s end. Around Learned, books close with the sound of many tiny doors to secret places, and there is the sound of speaking for speaking’s sake, now that silence has been lifted. They pass behind Learned on their way downward, greeting him diffidently, expecting no reply, Arbiter, Arbiter, good evening, good day, Arbiter, our thoughts are with you… Against the sound of their many feet descending the stairs, he hears the sound of someone ascending; as those going down grow distant, one comes closer. He is alone now in the tower; the square of sunlight printed on the wall behind him is dimming, and the window before him rattles as the winds begin to enwrap Inviolable.

  The unquestioning affection, the sincere hopes of his scholars, he knows to be less for him than for the black he wears; though, perhaps, by the end of his lifelong Arbitration, he may earn it for himself. Or they may call him, as they do some others of ancient times, a white Arbiter, foolish, useless to the world.

  Or worse, a Red.

  No. Not ever that.

  A bone-white Gray at last achieves the room Learned sits in and comes to him, hesitant, unwilling to break Learned’s meditation.

  “Yes? Come in. What is it?”

  “There is a rider below, Arbiter, all in red leather.”

  “I have expected him, I suppose.”

  “He says he comes from your brother the Protector. He brings you this.”

  It is a small piece of scarlet ribbon tied in a complex knot.

  “Tell him to wait,” Learned says, turning the ribbon in his fingers, “and see my carriage is made ready to travel.”

  Later that night, in a secret place in the forest far below Inviolable, white hands laid out cards on a board within a painted tent. The Neither-nor shivered, and the lamp flame too, when wind discovered the tent’s hiding-place and made the tent-cloths whisper; but it was not only the wind that made the Neither-nor shiver.

  For the seventh time It had turned down the card that bore an image of Finn: a death’s head, with a fire burning in his belly, and this motto: Found by the lost.

  The Neither-nor had chosen the card Roke to be the girl whose name was called Nod; and Roke should fall in some relation to the card Caermon, who was Redhand; should fall with the trump Rizna between, It had hoped. But Caermon hid within the pack, and Finn fell. Odd.

  Where was Nod?

  Dead… no; the cards did not seem to say so. Gone, lost. Anyway, her task remained undone, that was clear. Redhand hid. The Neither-nor snapped the Roke card’s edge against the board.

  The wind, with a sudden gust like a hand, picked up the tent’s door flap. Outside, clouds raced across the Wanderers, or the Wanderers raced, it could not be said which; the forest, opulent in
the windy darkness, gestured toward the Neither-nor’s door.

  Someone was coming up the secret way toward the Neither-nor’s tent.

  With a sudden rush of feeling, the Neither-nor thought it to be Nod. But in another moment the figure became a man, a boy really, who did look like the girl Nod. His name was called Adar, the Neither-nor remembered: a name chosen for great things.

  As the Neither-nor had partly suspected, Adar had come to ask after the girl.

  “No word, no word.”

  “The cards…”

  “Silent, confused it may be.”

  They sat together as though afloat; the tent-cloths filled like sails, and the forest creaked and knocked and whispered continuously. The Neither-nor began to lay out cards, aimlessly, hardly watching, while the boy talked.

  “The King has begun a tomb in the City. A hundred artisans are at work on it. He plays with this while the Queen gathers strength.”

  Doth, Haspen, Shen, Barnol, Ban, the trump Tintinnar, Roke and Finn again.

  “I have watched near Fennsdown. They will not move without the King. Redhand…”

  The Neither-nor’s pack released the card Caermon.

  “Redhand.” The Neither-nor knew the next card. Adar fell silent. Whatever had become of Nod, whatever the chill card Finn spoke of, at least now It knew the next step.

  “Redhand,” said Adar, and the Neither-nor laid Rizna reversed before him, Rizna with sickle and seedbag, who constantly reaps what he forever sows.

  “It will storm soon,” the Neither-nor said. “Sit with me awhile before you go…”

  All through that night, and through the next day and the next night, the Arbiter’s closed black carriage rolled over the world, following the man in red leather.

  Once out of the forest, they flew over the streets of Downs villages rain-washed and deserted nearly; along streets cobbled and dirt, past shuttered walls where loud placards of the Just were pasted, that the Folk would not or dared not remove; and on then, past the last cottage lamplit in the dark and stormy afternoon, on Outward.

  Inside, the Arbiter, in a wide hat against the dripping from a leak in the roof, his hands on a stick between his knees, listened to the rattle of the fittings and the knocking of the wind against his door. Off and on, he turned over in his mind an old heretical paradox: if a man has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on endlessly back to the beginning of time, then how could it be that the world began with only fifty-two?

  The carriage rolled; eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, a hundred and twenty-eight, two hundred and fifty-six… In thirty generations or so the number would be almost beyond counting. And yet the world began with fifty-two…

  The road went plainly on, wet and silvery between endless low retaining walls of piled fieldstone where rabbits lived. The few Folk left trying to gather in sodden hay in the rain turned to look as he passed.

  High in a headland tower that looked out over Redsdown, in a room she never left any more, Mother Caredd sat by the window putting up her fine white hair with many bone pins. Far below her, on the Outward road, a carriage appeared as if conjured. It topped a rise and seemed to float down into a slough on the rainwings it cast up, and disappeared, only to appear, smaller, further on. She watched it go; it seemed to have some urgent appointment with the black clouds far Outward that the road between stone walls ran toward.

  “Hurry,” said Mother Caredd, and her servant looked up. “Hurry, hurry.”

  By nightfall of the next day, the man in red had brought the carriage within a vast circle of watchfires on the Drum, past sentries Red, Black and Outlander, into the Queen’s encampment. It looked as though half the world had gone to war.

  “And Caredd?” Redhand asked.

  “Well, Untroubled. The house is guarded, but she is left in peace. Only she is not allowed to write, not even to me.”

  It was odd to think of, but Learned had never been within one of his brother’s war tents, though his brother had lived as much in tents as he had in houses. It was large, shadowy, hung with tapestries. Rugs covered the Drumgrass underfoot; a charcoal brazier glowed on a tripod. There were chairs, chests, a bed, all cleverly contrived to be folded and carried on wagons. The furnishings seemed ancient, much used, battered like old soldiers. How long and well, Learned thought, we prepare for war, how thoughtfully and lovingly is it fitted out.

  “Have you seen the Queen?” Redhand asked.

  “No.”

  “You will wish to.”

  “No.”

  Redhand looked up from the papers he studied, pushed them aside. His reading lamp shone on armor, carefully polished, that stood up on a stand beside him like a second Redhand. “Learned.” He smiled, his old, genuine smile. “I am grateful. It can’t have been a pleasant ride.”

  “There was time to think.”

  Redhand got up, and Learned seemed to see for a moment another man, old, weary, to whom even the business of standing and sitting is too much labor. He poured steaming drink for the Arbiter from a pitcher by the brazier. “For the chill of the Drum.

  “I would have come to you,” he went on, “but I am an outlaw now, my name is posted in the towns like a horse thief’s. You understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “What we wish of you,” he said, turning his mug in his hands, “is simple, and doubtless you have suspected it. We wish only that you retract the decision of the old Arbiter in favor of the Senlin claims, and restore all to Little Black.”

  “Only.”

  “Say she was old, incapable. You know the words.”

  Learned wished suddenly he need not tell his brother what he must; he wished only to listen to that harsh voice, quick with authority. He savored the sound of it, carefully, as though he might never hear it more. “Do you remember,” he said, “when first I went away, first put on Gray?”

  Redhand smiled shortly. There was much to do.

  “That Yearend when I came home, in my new white, so smug; I would take no orders from you, or turn the spit anymore when you said to.”

  “I remember.”

  “I was hateful. I bowed to Father, but only in a conditional sort of way. They had told me, you see, that my family had me no more, nor would I ever have any other: the Grays were all, and I owed them all.”

  “There was something about a horse.”

  “My painted. You said if I was Gray now, I had no more claim on any Redhand horse.”

  “We fought.”

  “Fought! You beat me pitilessly. I was never a fighter.”

  “Do you forgive me?” Redhand said, laughing.

  “More important, brother, dear bully, you must forgive me, now, in advance.”

  Redhand put down his cup.

  “I cannot do what you ask,” Learned said softly. Terrible to see him so, stunned, helpless, in the power of a younger brother who had ever followed him. “Redhand, all my powers, resources are yours.”

  “All but this judgment.”

  “That is not mine to give. It belongs to Righteousness.”

  “Pious.” He spat out the word. “Pious. When it was all lies, Learned, your judgment, and made at my bidding, at your House’s bidding…”

  “I know that. Don’t go on. I cannot do this.”

  Redhand sat again. “Will you condemn me?”

  “The old judgment stands.”

  “Call me traitor?”

  “Are you not?”

  They sat without looking at each other; the hostile silence was palpable between them. Outside, muffled drums marked the watch. Redhand poured cold water on his hands, wiped his face and beard, and sat then with his hands over his face.

  “Redhand, if you leave this thing.” It was hard to say. “Leave that tripes and her malcontents to their war, then… you will be under my protection. When the Queen is beaten, the King may forgive you. Return you Redsdown…”

  Redhand looked up, but not at Learned, at nothing. “And what will I do at Redsdown? Pr
ay?” With his knuckles he struck a gong that hung behind him. The sour sound hung in the tent. “That painted you spoke of. It died only last autumn, after a long life. He was a proud one, and fathered many.”

  “Yes.”

  “When we fought, it was because I was afraid you would have him gelded, and made a Gray’s palfrey. You understand.”

  Two armed men showed themselves at the tent’s door.

  “Do you still play War in Heaven?” Redhand asked his brother.

  “Rarely.”

  “Well. I have crossed the line, Learned. All my stones are on the board. If I must break rules I will break them. I am gone out to make a king again, and I suppose I can make an arbiter too.” He motioned the armed men in. “Take the Arbiter,” he said, “to some secure place, and keep him close.”

  “Redhand, don’t do this.”

  “He shall have all comforts, but let him not escape.”

  The two men took Learned, tentatively, with respect. He stood, took up his wide hat against the rain outside. “You will have war.”

  “To the death, mine or his.” It scarcely seemed to matter to him which. “It would help me to have this judgment. When you wish to render it, only tell me, and we will send you home.” The guards began to lead Learned away. “Wait.”

  The light of the brazier lit two dull fires beneath Redhand’s thick brow. He sat huddled in his camp chair, as though he, not Learned, were the prisoner. “A point of law,” he said. “I would make a will. How can I make it so that Caredd will have all, and in safety?”

  “I’ll consider it,” Learned said. “There are ways.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I have a problem for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “If a man has two parents, and four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on back to the beginning of time, how is it then that the world began with fifty-two?”

  “Did the world?”

  “So it is said.”

  Redhand regarded him, chewing on his thumbnail. “Do you know the answer?”