Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes

by Raphael Ordoñez

  Daybreak was heralded in the city by a terrifying din of gongs and horns. It was a menacing invitation to enter. There was nothing to do but accept.

  Part I

  5 Enoch

  Thinking it unwise to approach the city from the air until I knew what manner of people dwelt there, I took my odonatopter apart and hid the pieces in the ravine behind the half-dome. Then, with my scrip over my shoulder and my hand on my sword’s hilt, I set off down the defile.

  It curved around the mountain, east and south, growing ever deeper as it dropped toward the canyon. At its foot a heap of mossy boulders poured out into a glade carpeted with pink, dewy lichens. Pernathim towered on every side, their stems pale and scaly, branching high above into umbrellas of soft boughs and livid leaves. The air was moist and chilly and full of the smell of damp earth and growing things.

  I circled the clearing and set out into the forest. There I struck a path that followed a stream. Soon the sun’s rays broke through the canopy behind me, setting the undergrowth on fire.

  There were jade cups lined with vermilion hair, lichen-bushes with wiry yellow-white tentacles, giant purple-green fiddleheads, blue-green bifurcating mosses, scarlet spearheads and pale orange parasols waving on slender stalks. It was a delicate bifrostian world. I walked lightly.

  After a few stades I came to a long pool. Sunbeams shot into the water and filtered through the swaying canopy. Passing in and out of the shifting shadows were lithe creatures with long, pale bodies and red-feathered gills. The pond narrowed to a brook again at the far end and went tumbling down the slope through green caverns.

  The canyon floor leveled out. The stream became a quagmire that seeped into a long swamp. The view expanded.

  There were thickets of giant scouring rushes and copses of pale green ynathim with scaly stems and tufted heads. The air was thick and heavy and full of the drowsy hum of the huge dragonflies looping and dodging over the water. Armor-faced efts were flushed from their coverts as I picked my way along the bank. Horsetails showered me with warm dewdrops, soaking my sandals, my breechclout, and my harness.

  The canyon walls ended in shaggy shoulders at the mouth of the valley. There the range fell abruptly into the wetland beyond. A pool ran along the foot of the faultline as far as I could see. Beyond it was an earthen causeway.

  I made for a plank laid across the pool, but froze as I set foot on it. Two white-skinned man-shapes with enormous round heads were sitting on the opposite slope.

  * * * * *

  Then, all of a sudden, they began to laugh. I watched them without comprehension, fingering the pommel of my sword. I saw now that what I had taken for skin was only white gauze wrapped around their limbs and their broad, conical hats. Their faces were invisible. One of them was short and scrawny; the other was of giant proportions.

  They were still laughing. “We are laughing at you!” the small one said.

  “I know,” I replied. “I’m wondering why.” That only made them laugh harder. “Will you let me cross your bridge?”

  “Gods of dung! It is not our bridge!” the small one exclaimed. But the big one had already gotten to his feet. He bounced out along the plank, swinging a mallet. “Come along, little man,” he rumbled in a voice like gongs and waterfalls. I drew my sword and stepped out to meet him.

  “Where did you get that thing?” screeched the little one. “What is it? Bronze?”

  “This is the sword of my fathers.”

  “And a lot of them you’ve had, by the looks of it,” the big one growled. “This, my friend, is iron. If you want to go far in life, carry iron.”

  “Stop fooling around, Gehud,” said his mate. “Crush his skull or whatever it is you want to do and we’ll get to work. It’s time now.”

  Gehud roared and swung his mallet. I slipped aside and sent him flying head-foremost into the putrid water with a slap of my sword’s flat. Gas bubbles rose to the surface. Gehud came up with them, sputtering like a swamp monster.

  I leaped to the far bank and tore the small one’s hat off, revealing a pallid face and large, pink eyes that smarted in the sunlight. I boxed him in the side of the head with my fisted sword hand. Now they were both in the pool.

  I looked down at them. “I never have spilled a man’s blood,” I said, “but I will if I have to. What are your names?”

  “Mine’s Maruch,” the little one whined, trying to smile. He was missing his four upper front teeth, so that his canines looked like fangs. “What do you want from us?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to cross, and now I have. Is this how you treat every stranger?”

  “No,” said Gehud, “just the freaks.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Yes, anything,” said Maruch. He was more careful to be polite, being with reach of Deinothax.

  I waved my sword at the western sky. “A while ago I looked out from a high place and saw a palace set among the stars. Which of you knows the way there?”

  “Oh, I see!” said Gehud, nodding. “He’s a born Narvene! That explains everything.” He tapped his head.

  “Quiet!” hissed March. Then, to me: “You mean the Hanging Gardens? Now what would you want there?”

  “I seek the medicine of immortality, the elixir to restore life to dead bones. Does such a thing exist? Do you know?”

  Gehud laughed. Maruch didn’t laugh. His wide eyes stayed on Deinothax. “No, friend,” he said. “I wouldn’t know about that. We’re just helots. You’d better try the phylites, the great ones of Enoch.” He gestured vaguely toward the line of towers.

  “Is that the city’s name?”

  They were both wide-eyed now. “You really didn’t know that,” said Maruch, “did you, Bronze?”

  “As I said, I’m a stranger. Farewell.” I slid my sword into its place at my side and backed up the bank. The two men remained where they were.

  The swamp, I saw, continued on the far side, but the view was blocked by a patty of huge horsetails like gigantic green bottle-brushes topped with violet strobili. The causeway ran between field and forest, with intersections every stade or so where tracks diverged at right angles.

  I made my way to the nearest division. Every now and then I glanced back, but the helots were just sitting in the water, waiting for me to be gone. I turned down the intersecting causeway. Soon the corner of the field cut them off from view.

  The track ran clear to the city between two rows of fields. Midway down it I passed a big green-black building standing knee-deep in the water, surrounded by horsetails. Something inside it roared like a bottled daemon. It was crowned with jets of quivering air.

  The two helots were wading toward it on the other side. Maruch had replaced his hat. I slipped away before they saw me.

  * * * * *

  The causeway ended at another that ran along the inner edge of the belt. The city began a stone’s throw away.

  Its foundation rose like a cliff out of the water, a wall of shattered masonry with iron beams sticking out like the ribs of a crushed victim, all stained with rust-streaks like dried blood and littered with heaps of trash. Braided viaducts ran its length, borne on pylons whose feet were sunk deep in the putrid water. Rail-cars moved along them with screeches and hisses that drifted down to the swamp.

  I crossed a metal footbridge suspended from iron posts. On the far side a tunnel continued straight ahead into the pile, while rusty stairs climbed to a place where one of the viaducts branched off into the city over a dark dead end. The breath of the tunnel was humid and rank, so I chose the stairs.

  Higher and higher I went, back and forth around the corner of a tower. Soon I could see clear over the wetlands to the moss-forest and the peaks piled one behind another to the sky.

  There was a chained gate at the top. A low rumble came from the other side. I crept up and put my eye to a chink, and saw a grated walkway that ran along the tracks into the city. It was crowded with people.

  For a long time I stood there, transfixed by the torren
t of detail. For they were graceful, the great ones of Enoch, their limbs swathed in flowing silk, their skin covered with ornate tattoos or dyed blue or saffron or pink, their cheeks pierced by delicate, ruby-hung chains. Some bore tusks or horns. Others loped on long, splayed toes. But each was beautiful, flawless in his or her own way. They reminded me somehow of the clay figures on my uncle’s chessboard; perhaps it was their eyes, which were large yet unseeing, as though shuttered from within.

  There are some who hesitate over every decision. I am not one of them. For me, to see a branching of ways is to pick one and dash down it, dealing with whatever comes. So I climbed the gate and leaped over.

  The people closest to me swerved and passed by. No one spoke to me or even looked at me. I was like a stone cast into a swift, shallow stream.

  I went up to a woman with pale pink hair. “I’m a stranger here,” I began. She seemed not to see me. I tried the man behind her: “I looked out from a high place,” I said. Again I was rebuffed.

  I was in the middle of the walkway now, with people rushing past on every side. I was invisible to them. If they had taken any action at all I would have picked my way as seemed best, but as it was I didn’t know what to do. So I climbed back over the gate and descended to the platform.

  Maruch and Gehud were coming along the causeway. “Dung gods!” cried Maruch. “What is it, my friend?”

  “No one sees me here.”

  “Aiee! That’s what I was just saying to Gehud! ‘We’d better go see how he’s doing,’ I said. ‘Those phylites, they might not be too helpful.’“

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I met the helots on the bridge.

  “It’s just how they are, my friend,” said Maruch. “Each belongs to his own phyle. Phylites from different phyles don’t notice each other, except in the Cheiropt.”

  “Cheiropt? What’s the Cheiropt?”

  “The Cheiropt—why, the Cheiropt is everywhere. It’s everything.”

  “How am I to obtain their help if they won’t notice me?”

  “I was just coming to that. Gehud and I, we’re only simple helots, but we know people. We have a friend who might be able to help you get across to Bel.” He patted my arm in a friendly way.

  “What is Bel?”

  “Bel is the tower in the middle of Tethys, the sea. It’s how you get to Narva.”

  I considered the offer. “Very well,” I said at length. “Thank you. Lead the way.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful!” cried Maruch, cracking his knuckles with glee. He went past me with Gehud stalking behind. Together they entered the mouth of the tunnel.

  I hung back, reluctant to follow. The air coming out of the opening was like foul breath. “Wait,” I said.

  The helots turned. Maruch smiled. “What is it, my friend?”

  “Do we have to go down there?”

  “Hela is where we live. Hela is where our friend lives.”

  “Do the songlines run through it?”

  Gehud muttered under his breath. Maruch kicked him. “Indeed they do. Of course, if you don’t want our help…”

  “No, I’ll come,” I said. The helots turned, and I followed them into the tunnel. I heard a muffled explosion somewhere out in the marshes. Sirens started to go off, but the sound was swiftly muted as we went down the shaft.

  “What is all that?” I asked.

  “That? Oh, that’s some accident. Don’t worry about it, Bronze. Someone will come take care of it soon.”

  Passages began to branch off in every direction. There were narrow lanes lined with lime-encrusted brick, vast echoing crypts and vaults. Yellow lights trembled, troubling the gloom. The air was heavy with the smells of rotten mortar and escaped gas.

  “What is this place?” I whispered, half to myself.

  “It is Hela,” said Maruch.

  “Did your people build all this?”

  “Hela is Old Enoch. The phylites pile the city higher and higher. When they want a new building, they knock down an old one and fill it in and build on top of it. Then helots come along and find parts that aren’t filled, or dig out parts that are.”

  Our way led down. It was like being in the belly of a behemoth. Gas pipes murmured along old alleys like clotted arteries. Dynamos thundered in the gloom, shooting jets of steam. The cavernous cloaca roared behind thick walls.

  We began to pass solitary helots, all pallid and pink-eyed like Maruch. It was a tenement district, but there were few people abroad. “Do helots sleep during the day?” I asked.

  “Mostly,” said Maruch. “They work the gas fields at night. When they have to go out in the sun, they wrap themselves up like this.”

  We turned from the main byways into a labyrinth of narrow corridors. At last we came to a metal door in a dead-end passage. Maruch rapped on it. A shutter slid open, then closed. A bolt shot back and the door swung inward. I followed my guides inside. The doorkeeper kept hidden in shadow.

  We went down a little flight of steps and through another door into a square room lined with benches. There was a long, tall table without chairs in the middle, and an iron gate on one side. Gehud swung it open, revealing a small cell with a solid metal door in the far wall.

  “You sit in there and wait,” said Maruch. “We’ll go around the far side to let you through.” I went in and sat. Gehud closed the gate and locked it. They both vanished.

  They were gone a long time. Despair settled on my shoulders. I read for songlines, but there were none. Enoch had obliterated them. I was unmoored, spinning helplessly through space.

  There was a buzz and a loud click. The metal door swung open, revealing a dank, tiled room and an identical door in the opposite wall. That door swung open, too. I went through them both.

  I was at the bottom of a large octagonal pit. The walls and floor were tiled with dirty green and white tiles, stained with mildew and rust and blood. Pipes stuck out from six of the walls, three on each side. There was a big gate in the seventh, opposite the door through which I had come. A drain yawned in the middle of the floor. Bright lights hung down from an unseen ceiling.

  “Well, was I lying?” came Maruch’s wheedle, drifting down out of the blackness beyond the lip of the pit.

  “You dragged me out of bed for that?”—an old woman’s voice—“Where did you find him?”

  “He was wandering around out beyond the fields. Sheol knows where he came from. A regular hatchling, he is! They don’t make them like that anymore.”

  “Five rods,” the woman said shortly. Her voice was like someone throwing gravel on a metal roof.

  “Five! Five rods! And him armed and dangerous! Almost killed the two of us. Probably not even completely human. No, no. Fifty would be more like it. It’s only a fraction of the profit you’ll turn.”

  “Ten rods.”

  “Ten! Ten rods!”

  I ignored the argument. I was pacing the pit like a caged animal indeed. With a sudden resolve I tensed and sprang, swung myself up to a pipe, and leaped again, grasping the edge of the pit with my fingers. I hung there, trying to make good my purchase and scramble over.

  The old woman swore. Maruch shrieked. Gehud simply strode up, grasped my wrists, and tossed me off.

  I landed on my back, stunned. A hissing noise filled my ears. A sickly-sweet smell like vomit invaded my nostrils.

  “Twenty,” the old woman said. Her voice sounded like it was coming down a long, long tube.

  “Sold,” cried Maruch. But I scarcely heard him. I was already drifting off into a place without dreams.

  6 Caged

  I opened my eyes. They met with bars of gold-brown and black. A sense of betrayal was in the back of my mind. Someone had buried me deep in the earth.

  I sat up. I was on a narrow cot. Dim light fell through the bars that formed one side of my cell, striping the floor and the wall. A showerhead hung with stalactites of lime stuck out of one corner. A washstand, a chamber pot, and a pitcher stood in the other.

  “Hello?” I called.
“Hello?” My voice echoed into the darkness. Dimly a voice cursed me. The pipes murmured. All else was silent.

  I stood up. They hadn’t taken my harness or breechclout, and my father’s pendant had gone unnoticed, but my scrip was missing. I searched the cell. Deinothax was gone, too. I thought obscurely of grubby hands pawing it, drawing it, using it basely. A wave of rage washed over me. But the horror of the city piled layer upon layer above my head overbore my anger. I was a mite buried deep in a vast, teeming mattress, alone in a maze of men who knew me not, a mere nothing. What a fool I had been! I had never known there were such liars in the world.

  The showerhead caught my eye. I’d never seen anything like it before. Pipes I knew from the fossil cities of Arras, but my people hadn’t used them. I went over and twisted the valve experimentally. There was a rattling gurgle. Then a jet of rust-red water exploded from the head. I shouted in surprise and fumbled with the spigot. It was tight and slippery. I was drenched by the time I got it off.

  A raucous laugh grated on my ears. I turned. There was a face at the bars of the cell across from mine. It was a round face with small eyes, a bulbous nose, and big ears that stuck straight out. The toothy grin was yellow in the gaslight.

  “What are you laughing about?” I said. The man just kept giggling. I decided to ignore him. I turned to my own cell and sat down on my cot. It was wet through. I sighed with misery and stretched myself out. The moisture had unleashed a hundred mysterious odors from the old blanket. I pushed it off and lay on the bare sacking.

  My bones told me it was daytime in the world outside. But I knew I needed rest, that I might escape when a chance offered itself. I was still in a torpor from the sleeping gas, too. But for a long time sleep refused to come.