by Clive Barker
"Shall I take over?" Pie suggested.
"No," Gentle snapped, "I can do it," and continued to labor in the same inept fashion, the blade dulled by now and the muscles driving it weary.
He waited a decent interval, then got up and went back to the fire where Pie was sitting, gazing into the flames. Disgruntled by his defeat, he tossed, the knife down in the melting snow beside the fire.
"I give up," he said. "It's all yours."
Somewhat reluctantly, Pie picked up the knife, proceeded to sharpen it on the rock face, then went to work. Gentle didn't watch. Repulsed by the blood that had spattered him, he elected to brave the cold and wash it off. He found a place a little way from the fire where the ground was untrammeled, removed his coat and shirt, and knelt down to bathe in the snow. His skin crawled at the chill, but some urge to self-mortification was satisfied by this testing of will and flesh, and when he'd cleaned his hands and face he rubbed the pricking snow into his chest and belly, though the doeki's fluids hadn't stained him there. The wind had dropped in the last little while, and the sky visible between the rocks was more gold than green. He was seized by the need to stand unencumbered in its light, and without putting his coat back on he clambered up over the rocks to do so. His hands were numb, and the climb was more arduous than he'd anticipated, but the scene above and below him when he reached the top of the rock was worth the effort. No wonder Hapexamendios had come here on His way to His resting place. Even gods might be inspired by such grandeur. The peaks of the Jokalaylau receded in apparently infinite procession, their white slopes faintiy gilded by the heavens they reached for. The silence could not have been more utter.
This vantage point served a practical as well as an aesthetic purpose. The High Pass was plainly visible. And so, some distance off to the right, was a sight perplexing enough for him to call the mystif up from its work. A glacier, its surface shimmering, lay a mile or more from the rock. But it wasn't the spectacle of such frozen enormity that claimed Gentle's eye, it was the presence within the ice of a litter of darker forms.
"You want to go and find out what they are?" the mystif said, washing its bloodied hands in the snow.
"I think we should," Gentle replied, "If we're walking in the Unbeheld's footsteps, we should make it our business to see what He saw."
"Or what He caused," Pie said.
They descended, and Gentle put his shirt and coat back on. The clothes were warm, having been left beside the fire, and he was glad of that comfort, but they also stank of his sweat and of the animals whose backs they'd been stripped from, and he half wished he could go naked, rather than be burdened by another hide.
"Have you finished with the skinning?" Gentle asked Pie as they set off, going by foot rather than waste the energies of their remaining vehicle.
"I've done what I can," Pie replied, "but it's crude. I'm no butcher."
"Are you a cook?" Gentle asked. "Not really. Why'd you ask?"
"I've been thinking about food a lot, that's all. You know, after this trip I may never eat meat again. The fat! The gristle! It turns my stomach thinking about it." "You've got a sweet tooth."
"You noticed. I'd kill for a plate of profiteroles right now, swimming in chocolate sauce." He laughed. "Listen to me. The glories of Jokalaylau laid before us and I'm obsessing on profiteroles." Then again, deadly serious. "Do they have chocolate in Yzordderrex?"
"By now, I'm sure they do. But my people eat plainly, so I never got an addiction for sugar. Fish, on the other hand—"
"Fish?" said Gentle. "I've no taste for it." "You'll get one in Yzordderrex. There's restaurants down by the harbor..." The mystifs talk turned into a smile. "Now I'm sounding like you. We must both be sick of doekimeat."
"Go on," Gentle said. "I want to see you salivate."
"There are restaurants down by the harbor where the fish is so fresh it's still flapping when they take it into the kitchen."
"That's a recommendation?"
"There's nothing in the world as good as fresh fish," Pie said. "If the catch is good you've got a choice of forty, maybe fifty, dishes. From tiny jepas to squeffah my size and bigger."
"Is there anything I'd recognize?"
"A few species. But why travel all this way for a cod steak when you could have squeffah? Or better, there's a dish I have to order for you. It's a fish called an ugichee, which is almost as small as a jepas, and it lives in the belly of another fish."
"That sounds suicidal."
"Wait, there's more. The second fish is often eaten whole by a bloater called a coliacic. They're ugly, but the meat melts like butter. So if you're lucky, they'll grill all three of them together, just the way they were caught—"
"One inside the other?"
"Head, tail, the whole caboodle."
"That's disgusting."
"And if you're very lucky—"
"Pie—"
"—the ugichee's a female, and you find, when you cut through all three layers of fish—"
"—her belly's full of caviar."
"You guessed it. Doesn't that sound tempting?"
"I'll stay with my chocolate mousse and ice cream."
"How is it you're not fat?"
"Vanessa used to say I had the palate of a child, the libido of an adolescent, and the—well, you can guess the rest. I sweat it out making love. Or at least I used to."
They were close to the edge of the glacier now, and their talk of fish and chocolate ceased, replaced by a grim silence, as the identity of the forms encased in the ice became apparent. They were human bodies, a dozen or more. Ice-locked around them, a collection of debris: fragments of blue stone; immense bowls of beaten metal; the remnants of garments, the blood on them still bright. Gentle clambered and skidded across the top of the glacier until the bodies were directly beneath him. Some were buried too deeply to be studied, but those closer to the surface—faces upturned, limbs fixed in attitudes of desperation—were almost too visible. They were all women, the youngest barely out of childhood, the oldest a naked many-breasted hag who'd perished with her eyes still open, her stare preserved for the millennium. Some massacre had occurred here, or farther up the mountain, and the evidence been thrown into this river while it still flowed. Then, apparently, it had frozen around the victims and their belongings.
"Who are they?" Gentle asked. "Any idea?" Though they were dead, the past tense didn't seem appropriate for corpses so perfectly preserved.
"When the Unbeheld passed through the Dominions, He overthrew all the cults He deemed unworthy. Most of them were sacred to Goddesses. Their oracles and devotees were women."
"So you think Hapexamendios did this?"
"If not him, then His agents, His Righteous. Though on second thought He's supposed to have walked here alone, so maybe this is His handiwork."
"Then whoever He is," Gentle said, looking down at the child in the ice, "He's a murderer. No better than you or me."
"I wouldn't say that too loudly," Pie advised.
"Why not? He's not here."
"If this is His doing, He may have left entities to watch over it."
Gentle looked around. The air could not have been clearer. There was no sign of motion on the peaks or the snow-fields gleaming below. "If they're here I don't see 'em," he said.
"The worst are the ones you can't see," Pie replied. "Shall we go back to the fire?"
They were weighed down by what they'd seen, and the return journey took longer than the outward. By the time they made the safety of their niche in the rocks, to welcoming grunts from the surviving doeki, the sky was losing its golden sheen and dusk was on its way. They debated whether to proceed in darkness and decided against it. Though the air was calm at present, they knew from past experience that conditions on these heights were unpredictable. If they attempted to move by night, and a storm descended from the peaks, they'd be twice blinded and in danger of losing their way. With the High Pass so close, and the journey easier, they hoped, once they were through it, the risk w
as not worth taking.
Having used up the supply of wood they'd collected below the snow line, they were obliged to fuel the fire with the dead doeki's saddle and harness. It made for a smoky, pungent, and fitful blaze, but it was better than nothing. They cooked some of the fresh meat, Gentle observing as he chewed that he had less compunction about, eating something he'd named than he thought, and brewed up a small serving of the herders' piss liquor. As they drank, Gentle returned the conversation to the women in the ice.
"Why would a God as powerful as Hapexamendios slaughter defenseless women?"
"Whoever said they were defenseless?" Pie replied. "1 think they were probably very powerful. Their oracles must have sensed what was coming, so they had their armies ready—"
"Armies of women?"
"Certainly. Warriors in their tens of thousands. There are places to the north of the Lenten Way where the earth used to move every fifty years or so and uncover one of their war graves."
"They were all slaughtered? The armies, the oracles—"
"Or driven so deep into hiding they forgot who they were after a few generations. Don't look so surprised. It happens.'1
"One God defeats how many Goddesses? Ten, twenty—"
"Innumerable."
"How?1'
"He was One, and simple. They were many, and diverse."
"Singularity is strength—"
"At least in the short term. Who told you that?"
"I'm trying to remember. Somebody I didn't like much: Klein, maybe."
"Whoever said it, it's true. Hapexamendios came into the Dominions with a seductive idea: that wherever you went, whatever misfortune attended you, you needed only one name on your lips, one prayer, one altar, and you'd be in His care. And He brought a species to maintain that order once He'd established it. Yours."
"Those women back there looked human enough to me."
"So do I," Pie reminded him. "But I'm not."
"No... you're pretty diverse, aren't you?"
"I was once...."
"So that puts you on the side of the Goddesses, doesn't it?" Gentle whispered.
The mystif put its finger to his lips.
Gentle mouthed one word by way of response: "Heretic."
It was very dark now, and they both settled to studying the fire. It was steadily diminishing as the last of Chester's saddle was consumed.
"Maybe we should burn some fur," Gentle suggested.
"No," said Pie. "Let it dwindle. But keep looking."
"At what?"
"Anything."
"There's only you to look at."
"Then look at me."
He did so. The privations of the last many days had seemingly taken little toll on the mystif. It had no facial hair to disfigure the symmetry of its features, nor had their spar-tan diet pinched its cheeks or hollowed its eyes. Studying its face was like returning to a favorite painting in a museum. There it was: a thing of calm and beauty. But, unlike the painting, the face before him, which presently seemed so solid, had the capacity for infinite change. It was months since the night when he'd first seen that phenomenon. But now, as the fire burned itself out and the shadows deepened around them, he realized the same sweet miracle was imminent. The flicker of dying flame made the symmetry swim; the flesh before him seemed to lose its fixedness as he stared and stirred it.
"I want to watch," he murmured.
"Then watch."
"But the fire's going out...."
"We don't need light to see each other," the mystif whispered. "Hold on to the sight."
Gentle concentrated, studying the face before him. His eyes ached as he tried to hold onto it, but they were no competition for the swelling darkness.
"Stop looking," Pie said, in a voice that seemed to rise from the decay of the embers. "Stop looking, and see."
Gentle fought for the sense of this, but it was no more susceptible to analysis than the darkness in front of him. Two senses were failing him here—one physical, one linguistic—two ways to embrace the world slipping from him at the same moment. It was like a little death, and a panic seized him, like the fear he'd felt some midnights waking in his bed and body and knowing neither: his bones a cage, his blood a gruel, his dissolution the only certainty. At such times he'd turned on all the lights, for their comfort. But there were no lights here. Only bodies, growing colder as the fire died.
"Help me," he said. The mystif didn't speak. "Are you there, Pie? I'm afraid. Touch me, will you? Pie?"
The mystif didn't move. Gentle started to reach out in the darkness, remembering as he did so the sight of Taylor lying on a pillow from which they'd both known he'd never rise again, asking for Gentle to hold his hand. With that memory, the panic became sorrow: for Taylor, for Clem, for every soul sealed from its loved ones by senses born to failure, himself included. He wanted what the child wanted: knowledge of another presence, proved in touch. But he knew it was no real solution. He might find the mystif in the darkness, but he could no more hold on to its flesh forever than he could hold the senses he'd already lost. Nerves decayed, and fingers slipped from fingers at the last.
Knowing this little solace was as hopeless as any other, he withdrew his hand and instead said, "I love you."
Or did he simply think it? Perhaps it was thought, because it was the idea rather than the syllables that formed in front of him, the iridescence he remembered from Pie's transforming self shimmering in a darkness that was not, he vaguely understood, the darkness of the starless night but his mind's darkness; and this seeing not the business of eye and object but his exchange with a creature he loved, and who loved him back.
He let his feelings go to Pie, if there was indeed a going, which he doubted. Space, like time, belonged to the other tale—to the tragedy of separation they'd left behind. Stripped of his senses and their necessities, almost unborn again, he knew the mystif s comfort as it knew his, and that dissolution he'd woken in terror of so many times stood revealed as the beginning of bliss.
A gust of wind, blowing between the rocks, caught the embers at their side, and their glow became a momentary flame. It brightened the face in front of him, and the sight summoned him back from his unborn state. It was no great hardship to return. The place they'd found together was out of time and could not decay, and the face in front of him, for all its frailty (or perhaps because of it), was beautiful to look at. Pie smiled at him but said nothing.
"We'should sleep," Gentle said. "We've got a long way to go tomorrow."
Another gust came along, and there were flecks of snow in it, stinging Gentle's face. He pulled the hood of his coat up over his head and got up to check on the welfare of the doeki. It had made a shallow bed for itself in the snow and was asleep. By the time he got back to the fire, which had found some combustible morsel and was devouring it brightly, the mystif was also asleep, its hood pulled up around its head. As he stared down at the visible crescent of Pie's face, a simple thought came: that though the wind was moaning at the rock, ready to bury them, and there was death in the valley behind and a city of atrocities ahead, he was happy. He lay down on the hard ground beside the mystif. His last thought as sleep came was of Taylor, lying on a pillow which was becoming a snowfield as he drew his final breaths, his face growing translucent and finally disappearing, so that when Gentle slipped from consciousness, it was not into darkness but into the whiteness of that deathbed, turned to untrodden snow.
23
Gentle dreamed that the wind grew harsher and brought snow down off the peaks, fresh minted. He nevertheless rose from the relative comfort of his place beside the ashes, and took off his coat and shirt, took off his boots and socks, took off his trousers and underwear, and naked walked down the narrow corridor of rock, past the sleeping doeki, to face the blast. Even in dreams, the wind threatened to freeze his marrow, but he had his sights set on the glacier, and he had to go to it in all humility, bare-loined, barebacked, to show due respect for those souls who suffered there. They had endured cent
uries of pain, the crime against them unrevenged. Beside theirs, his suffering was a minor thing.
There was sufficient light in the wide sky to show him his way, but the wastes seemed endless, and the gusts worsened as he went, several times throwing him over into the snow. His muscles cramped and his breath shortened, coming from between his numbed lips in hard, small clouds. He wanted to weep for the pain of it, but the tears crystallized on the ledge of his eye and would not fall.
Twice he stopped, because he sensed that there was something more than snow on the storm's back. He remembered Pie's talk of agents left in this wilderness to guard the murder site and, though he was only dreaming and knew it, he was still afraid. If these entities were charged to keep witnesses from the glacier, they would not simply drive the wakeful off but the sleeping too; and those who came as he came, in reverence, would earn their special ire. He studied the spattered air, looking for some sign of them, and once thought he glimpsed a form overhead that would have been invisible but that it displaced the snow: an eel's body with a tiny ball of a head. But it was come and gone loo quickly for him to be certain he'd even seen it.
The glacier was in sight, however, and his will drove his limbs to motion, until he was standing at its edge. He raised his hands to his face and wiped the snow from his cheeks and forehead, then stepped onto the ice. The women gazed up at him as they had when he'd stood here with Pie 'oh' pah, but now, through the dust of snow blowing across the ice, they saw him naked, his manhood shrunk, his body trembling; on his face and lips a question he had half an answer to. Why, if this was indeed the work of Hapexamen-dios, had the Unbeheld, with all His powers of destruction, not obliterated every last sign of His victims? Was it because they were women or, more particularly, women of power? Had He brought them to ruin as best He could— overturning their altars and unseating their temples—but at the last been unable to wipe them away? And if so, was this ice a grave or merely a prison?