Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  “No. The Blacks would think their King was murdered…”

  “Was he not?”

  “They would fight. Redhand. Listen to me now. I want to begin with no war. This was never my quarrel. The King said to me: burn Redhand’s house, his fields; let nothing live. I won’t. It hurts me, Redhand, not to do what he asked. But I can’t.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m asking you to desert the Queen. Take your army away. Decamp, by night. There will be no reprisals. I swear it.”

  A weird apprehension rose in Redhand’s throat like spittle. “And who are you?” he said, almost whispered. “Who are you, Sennred, to swear such a thing?”

  “Heir. Heir to it all: Black and Red. There’s no other. Redhand, the King Red Senlin’s Son is dead.”

  With a sudden whirr all Redhand’s tense suspicions, doubts, plans took flight, left him for a moment blindly empty. Why had he not realized…? With sickening certainty, he knew he was about to weep.

  Give way, give way…

  Toward dawn, Sennred rode away. Fauconred handed him up, and he and Redhand watched till he was gone.

  “Go on, then,” Redhand said. “We shouldn’t return together.”

  “No.” The old man mounted with clumsy grace and pulled his cloak around him. “The sun won’t shine today.”

  “No. Fog, I think. A Drumskin fog.”

  “It will be easier then.”

  “Yes. Go now.”

  Fauconred stood his horse a moment; a cock crowed. He thought he knew what it was his cousin felt, but knew nothing to say to it. He saluted, and spurred his heavy horse.

  Redhand stood a long time in the little yard, watching the air thicken around him. It was utterly still. A red dawn Inward was being extinguished as fast as it grew; Dreaded was thick with fog.

  What if he was wrong?

  All those boys and men, their loins rich with descendants, would escape death tomorrow. Perhaps it was wrong that they should live, perhaps their children’s children, that might not be, would boil over the edges of the little world… He shrugged it all away. The truth he had glimpsed had grown tenuous and thin; he vowed not to touch it again. He was not one for notions; he was only grateful for what he felt now: calm, peaceful almost, for the first time in many weeks.

  Behind him, sudden in the stillness, the shutters of the cottage banged shut. He turned, saw a frightened face look out before the last one closed. When he turned back, someone was coming toward him, out of the fog, from Dreaded.

  As the figure condensed out of the whiteness, he saw with a rush of joy that it was his lost Secretary, of whom he had not thought in weeks. But then, no, the figure came closer, changed; it wasn’t him.

  It was the blond boy who had brought him Sennred’s message.

  Redhand stepped toward him, was about to speak to him, tell him what had come of his mission. Then he saw the Gun in the boy’s hands.

  They stood for a moment not far apart.

  The boy’s only thought was a hope that the old Gun not misfire in the wet. Redhand felt only a faint resentment that the boy had told him he couldn’t read.

  The shot made Fauconred’s horse start, and Fauconred cry out. It echoed long, rolling through the low country, almost reaching the place of two armies before the fog drowned it at last.

  There were two Endwives, a young girl named Norin, an old woman named Ser, who had come several miles through the fog with a hospital wagon, not sure of the way, getting down now and again to lead the horses, who were afraid to go on; sure then that they had lost the way in the fog. Toward night, though, which was a thickening of the fog only, they came to high ground. There were lights, watchfires, dull gobbets of flame in the wetness: their sisters.

  Through the night, others arrived, fog-delayed; they prepared themselves, listening to the faint sounds of a multitude on the plain below them, moving, stirring—arming themselves, probably. They talked little, saying only what was necessary to their craft; hoping, without speaking it, that the fog would hold, and there would be no battle.

  Before dawn, a wind came up. They could feel it cold on their Outward cheeks; it began to tear at the fog. Their watchfires brightened; as day came on, their wagons assembled there began to appear to them, gradually clearer, as though they awoke from a drug.

  When the sun rose the fog was in flight. Long bars of sunlight fell across the plain where the battle was to be.

  But there was no battle there.

  There was one army of men, vast, chaotic, the largest army anyone had ever seen. There was a royal tent in its center, and a Dog banner above it; and there was a flag near it that bore a red palm. It was quiet; no war viols played; the Endwives thought they could hear faint laughter.

  Opposite, where the other army should have been, there were a hundred guttering campfires. There were some tents of black, half dismantled. Soldiers, too, scattered contingents late in realizing what had happened in the night, but not many; the many were away over the Drum, a long raggedy crowd, no army, going Outward, not having planned on it, quickly.

  By noon there was no one at all facing the world’s largest army. All who had not joined it had fled it.

  Only a single closed carriage remained. Beside it, a man in a wide black hat stood with his hands behind his back, the freshening breeze teasing the hem of his black coat. The carriage’s dappled gelding quietly cropped the sparkling, sunlit grass.

  EPILOGUE

  When the snows came, the Neither-nor hibernated.

  Deep in a rug-hung cave, in a bed piled with covers, pillows, furs, It dozed through week on week of storm that stifled Its forest, locked the Door.

  In Rathsweek, pale and weak as an invalid, the Neither-nor crept out from bed, to the cave-mouth, to look out. The forest glinted, dripped, sparkled with melting snow; the rock walls of the glen were ruined ice palaces where they were not nude and black.

  It was a day, by Its reckoning, sacred to Rizna, a day when Birth stirs faintly below the frost, deep in the womb of Death. Not a day to look out, alone, on a winter forest, spy on its nakedness. But the Neither-nor was not afraid of powers; It owned too many for that; and when the figure in red appeared far off, like blood on the snow, the Neither-nor awaited it calmly, shivering only in the cold.

  But when it came close, stumbling, knee-deep in snow, near enough to be recognized, the Neither-nor gasped. “I thought you were dead.”

  The girl’s eyes stared, but didn’t seem to see. Except for the shivers that racked her awful thinness, and the raggedy red cloak, real enough, the Neither-nor might have still thought her dead.

  On feet bound in rags, Nod struggled toward It. Overcome with pity, the Neither-nor began to make Its way toward her, but Nod held up an arm; she would come alone.

  When she stood before the Neither-nor she drew out Suddenly, and with all the little strength left her, struck the Gun against the rock wall, cracking its stock. “No,” the Neither-nor said, taking Nod’s shoulders in the Two Hands. “You haven’t failed. You haven’t. The task is done. Red-hand is dead.”

  She stood, the broken Gun in her hands, a negation frozen on her dirty face, and the Neither-nor released her, frightened, of what It could not tell. And Nod began to speak.

  He had not his brother’s enthusiasm for works and words, but he had loved his brother deeply, and in his kingship the works would go forward. In that winter the Harran Stone was completed; there his brother lay, with Harrah, their flawed love made so perfect in their tomb that even in the darkest of winter days, shut up in the Citadel, Sennred had not sensed his brother’s ghost was restless.

  He had turned an old prison into a theater. A scheme for making books without writing them out by hand, that Sennred little understood or cared about, he had fostered anyway.

  He looked after these things, and his peace, patiently through the winter of his mourning. And hers.

  It had been easy to confirm her in sole possession, in perpetuity, of Redsdown; he had with pleasur
e expunged every lien, attachment, attainder on the old fortress and its green hills. To console her further was impossible, he knew; with grownup wisdom he had let time do that.

  When spring, though, with agonizing delays began to creep forth, he sent gifts, letters impeccably proper, so tight-reined she laughed to read them.

  And on a day when even in the cold old Citadel perfumey breaths of a shouting spring day outside wandered lost, he prepared to go himself.

  There were seven windows in the chamber he sat in. Against six of them the towers of the castle and the City heights held up hands to block the light. The seventh, though, looked out across the lake and the mountains; its broad sill was warm where he laid his hand.

  Out there, in those greening mountains, somewhere, the Woman in Red held her councils.

  She was not Just, they said, though like the Just she spoke of the old gods—but when she spoke she cursed them. What else she spoke of the King couldn’t tell; his informants were contradictory, their abstracts bizarre. Of the woman herself they said only that she wore always a ragged red domino, and that she was a waterman’s daughter with cropped blond hair. The Grays thought her dangerous; the old ones’ eyes narrowed as they glossed for him one or another fragment of her thought. The King said nothing.

  People were stirred, in motion, that was certain. He gathered she spoke to all classes—Just, Defenders, Folk. Some he sent to hear her strange tale listened—and didn’t return.

  A spring madness. Well, he knew about that… almost, it seemed, he might have brought it forth himself, out of the indecipherable longings that swept him on these mornings: he felt himself melt, crumble within like winter-rotten earthworks before new rivulets. Sometimes he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Down on the floor of the old Rotunda as the King and his retinue went through, the patient Grays were still at their cleaning work. They had accomplished much since Sennred had first noticed them, that day Red Senlin had come to the City to be King. The tortured circle dance of kings he had seen them uncover then had proved to be not a circle but part of a spiral, part of a History they thought, emanating from a beginning in the center to an end—where?

  You must learn to pretend, dead Redhand had said when they stood here together, if you would live here long. Well, he was learning: would learn so well, would live here so long that he could perhaps begin to lead that spiral out of its terrible dance, lead it… where?

  In the center of the floor, the Grays had begun to uncover bizarre images—a thing with vast sails; stars, or suns; creatures of the Deep.

  Didn’t the Woman in Red talk too of suns, and sails, and the Deep? She had for sure talked of bringing her news to the King. Did he dare stop, on his way Outward, to speak to her, listen to her? They had all advised him against it. A spring madness, they said, people in motion.

  He stepped carefully past the grinning kings to the door Defensible, newly widened that winter. His laughing servant held a brand-new traveling cloak for him.

  And what if it was not madness at all, not ephemeral? What if Time had indeed burst out of his old accustomed round, gone adventuring on some new path? Would he know? And would it matter if he did?

  He took the cloak from his servant. He would see Caredd soon, and that did matter, very much.

  BEASTS

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  ONE The shot tower

  TWO Sphinx

  THREE The flaying of Isengrim

  FOUR Go to the Ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise

  FIVE Of the pack

  SIX Vox clamantis in deserto

  SEVEN In at the death

  EIGHT Hieraconpolis; six views from a height

  If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee, when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass: if thou wert the ass, thy dullness would torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf… What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast?

  TIMON OF ATHENS, IV, iii

  1

  THE SHOT TOWER

  Loren Casaubon thought of himself as a lover of solitude. He hadn’t chosen fieldwork in ethology strictly for that reason, but he thought of it as an asset in his work that he could bear—and believed he preferred—the company of the wild and the inhuman. The old shot tower and its new ferocious inhabitants, which Loren was to spend a summer nurturing, suited him exactly. He had laughed aloud when he first saw it, responding immediately to its lonely intransigence: he felt he had come home.

  Because it lay hidden in the last few folds of wooded hills before the low country began, the shot tower, despite its hundred-foot height, came into view without warning. It seemed to step suddenly out of the mountain granite and across the road to block the way; or to have stood up suddenly from sleep on hearing the approach of a man. For over two centuries it had had no human company. The vast lowlands pocked with marshes that slid from the mountains’ margins down to the sea, which the tower guarded as though it were the utmost watchtower of a mountain warlord, were inhabited only by wild things.

  Whatever foresightless pioneer it was who had planned this marsh-aborted industrial development here so long ago had gotten no further than the tower and a few stone outbuildings. All that had been made of wood was gone now. The canal that he had counted on to bring him into touch with the rest of the manufacturing world had ended in bankruptcy forty miles away. He must have been more dreamer than businessman anyway, Loren decided when he first encountered the tower. It should have been a purely utilitarian structure, a factory for the making of lead bullets; its striking slim height was necessary only so that molten lead, poured through sieves at the top, had time as it fell to form into perfect round balls like leaden raindrops before, striking an annealing tank of water at the bottom. But the builder had been unable to resist the obvious romantic associations his tall, round, granite tower had, and in fact had made a castle keep, grimly Gothic, with narrow, ogive arrow slits and a castellated top. It was a fake feudal keep in a new world, whose only true affinity with real castles was its reason for being: war.

  That reason had long passed. The ingenuity of the tower and its lead shot had been long supplanted by more horrid ingenuities. It had had, until Loren came, no function but its absurd picturesqueness. Loren brought it a new purpose: it was to be a substitute cliff for four members of a nearly extinct race of cliffdwellers.

  He could feel motion inside the cardboard box when he lifted it from the carrier of his bike. He put the box on the ground and opened it. Inside, the four white birds, quilly and furious, set up a raucous squawking. Alive and well. Biking them in had been harrowing, but there was no other way to get into the area; the rutted road had brought his heart to his mouth at every carefully negotiated bump. He laughed at himself now for his scruples. Healthy and strong as young devils, the four immature peregrine falcons, two males and two females, looked harmful and un-harmable. Their fiercely drawn brows and hooked beaks belied their infancy, their crying was angry and not pitiful. They, of course, couldn’t know that they were among the last of their land.

  The process of breeding peregrine falcons in captivity and then returning them to the wild—a kind of reverse falconry, which in fact used many ancient falconers’ techniques—had begun years ago in that rush of sentiment about wildlife and wild places that had rendered the word “ecology” useless. Like all rushes of sentiment, it was short-lived. The falcon-breeding program had been curtailed along with a thousand other, more ambitious programs—but it had not quite died. The handling of feral birds was a skill so demanding, a challenge so compelling, that like the old falconry it had proved self-perpetuating. The small band of correspondents engaged in it were a brotherhood; their craft was as difficult, esoteric, and absorbing as that of Zen monks or masters of Go. Their efforts were, almost certainly, all that kept peregrines in existence; just as certainly, if they s
topped, extinction would follow. The falconers were too few; and the birds they released were too few to find each other easily to mate once they were free. Some studies Loren had read put the survival rate for large aerial predators released from captivity at twenty per cent. Of these, perhaps a tenth mated and raised young. So, without Loren and the others, all sponsored by quixotic foundations or unguarded university departments, the falcon would disappear from this continent. The proudest and most independent of winged things had become, in an odd sense, parasitic to man.

  Holding the box carefully level, Loren ducked through the arched door and into the tower. Inside, not even the spooky, narrow bars of dust-filled sunlight from the arrow slits could disguise the fact that this place had after all been a factory. The narrow spiral staircase that went up to the top was iron; it rang dully beneath Loren’s boots. At various levels the iron struts of platforms remained; from each level a different size of shot would have been dropped: dust shot from forty feet, bird shot from higher, buck shot still higher; musket balls from the topmost platform, which was still intact, though a large section of castellated wall had fallen away and the platform was only half roofed. It was here that Loren had built his nesting box, a barred cage for the birds’ first weeks. He had placed it facing the gap in the wall so that the birds, even while caged, could look out over their domain.

  The wind was strong at this height; it tossed Loren’s thick, dark hair and tickled his beard without haste he opened the nesting box and one by one placed his four round feather-dusters inside. He could feel their quick heartbeats, and their young talons griped his hands strongly. Once inside, they ceased to cry out; they roused and shook down their disturbed plumage in miniature imitation of the way they would rouse when they were fully grown.