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

by Raphael Ordoñez

  “Someone told me that there were no more Eldenes.”

  “That is understandable. There are certainly very few of us. And the Cheiropt doesn’t formally recognize our existence as such.”

  “Do you know where I’m from?”

  “You are the young Phylarch of Arras, or believe yourself to be.”

  “Did I say that as I raved, too?”

  The old man smiled. “Not in so many words. I made some inferences.”

  “And do you believe I am what I claim to be?”

  “I am inclined to. Scions of long-vanished realms are commoner than madmen of such cunning.”

  “Is it true that Arras and Eldena were sister realms?”

  “If we are to delve into the annals of elder ages,” the old man said, “you had better help me to clear away this mess and clean my crockery. It’s too long a tale to tell over dirty dishes.”

  30 Elder Ages

  We were walking through the forest now. The understory was a riot of color and form with a fretted roof upheld by the pale, glossy stems of the scale-trees. It was chilly, and I had my hands in the voluminous pockets of my habit. The air was moist and earthy, as at the entrance to a cavern. I breathed it in deeply. I was already hearkening to the silent songs and wordless litanies of the land at the mountains’ roots.

  “The Psalter Hexaemera,” Gaspar was saying, “sets forth four ages of man. First the Age of Gold, man’s long infancy in the warm garden-rifts of the hyperborean regions, in glacier-beleaguered Sharon. Then the Age of Silver, after Sharon fell to the wanderers of Leng, when the twin daughter-realms, Eldena and Arras, began anew here in the south. Arras vanished beneath the encroaching sands of Eblis, while Eldena was wracked by disasters and swept away by invaders. Thus began the Age of Bronze, in which some say we now live.”

  “And what is the fourth age?” I asked.

  “The Age of Iron. The Psalter foretold it, but nothing has been added since the death of the last archon. Some believe that it has yet to come. My own belief is that it began with the Inception of the Cheiropt.

  “The Enochites’ annals look back only to the foundation of Enoch Minor in Lesser Panormus. They call the time before that the Age of Wandering. The Age of Strife began as the tribes settled around Tethys and established city-states. The forging of the Synoecism under Enoch opened the Age of Glory. The Age of Peace began with the Inception.

  “The fall of Eldena came at the end of the Age of Wandering. For myriads it existed as a land of contention between empires. Then came the Synoecism, and the Eldenes became a diaspora in ocean-girding Enoch.”

  We crossed to the other side of the stream. The canopy became denser, and the lichens and mosses gave way to huge fungi. Big spiders with long, drooping bodies and pale legs hung from dew-sprinkled webs in the shadows. The path rolled in and out of pits and dells.

  “When I was in Enoch,” I said, “a friend told me that it was the Eldenes who built Bel and the Gardens.”

  “So they did,” said Gaspar. “The Enochites can follow any course laid out for them, perfecting and extending it like no other people, but leaps of insight there are none. The Great Library is a mere formless heaping of disconnected works, a confused babbling of many tongues. An Enochite can lay one brick upon another, but only an Eldene could have planned the Tower of Bel and placed Narva in the sky.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why would they have labored like that for the people who oppressed them? Weren’t they making themselves slaves?”

  “Who can say? They were never slaves in name, although there are subtler means of coercion. My own belief is that they built Bel because they could. It may seem strange, but that time was a great flowering of new ideas for them. Perhaps they thought that their lot would be bettered if all Enoch lived in a single house. But then came the Inception.”

  “The Age of Iron,” I said. “The Cheiropt, the prison of black iron.”

  Gaspar nodded. “While the Eldenes worked in daylight, the artificers of the great social machine labored in secret. They set it in motion as Bel neared completion. It took on a life of its own, developed faster than they had anticipated. The week was shortened from seven days to six, and Eldena was driven into the catacombs. Their eyes were opened. They realized that they had been building a prison. The Tower sits unfinished to this day. It’s falling into ruin now, but the Enochites haven’t the skill or the heart to repair and finish it.”

  We drew up to a rotten scale-tree stump, a pithy, crannied mass wreathed in spider silk. Gaspar set down his empty hamper. “Here,” he said, handing me a hatchet he’d had hidden among the folds of his habit. “Work for your gruel. Break that stump up into chunks and fill the basket.”

  “These are the coals I saw at your house?”

  “Yes. They burn slowly but hotly. I learned it from the helborim of Nightspore.”

  “What is Nightspore?”

  “The moss-jungle that covers the southern continent at the mouth of Tethys. There’s an ancient kingdom of goblins in its depths, and many other curious things.”

  I worked in silence, hacking at the stump and pulling out fragments with my hands. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “Why not leave it as it was? The week, I mean.”

  Gaspar smiled. “There’s no point in asking why the Cheiropt does what it does, any more than in asking why water flows downhill. But there is a certain inexorable logic in its every action. The Enochites use a system of counting based on sixes. It’s well adapted to the annual calendar. It was only logical to divide the year into six-day weeks grouped into sixty-day cycles, with an intercalary period at each end.”

  “They’re exact in their measurement of days and seasons, then,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. There are no orreries in Enoch, but they can predict eclipses myriads ahead of time.

  “The change in the week’s length was a cataclysm even among the phyles. But hierophants of the Cheiropt pointed out that it would give the gods one day of worship for every five of work, rather than one for every six. Who could argue with that? And so the prison of black iron swallowed up every last Enochite in the space of a year or so. Even their gods were assimilated. Only the Eldenes refused to adapt, and were branded recusants for their obstinacy.”

  I began placing the fragments I’d broken up into the hamper. “Don’t pack them too tightly,” said Gaspar. “They won’t burn properly if they’re smashed.”

  “It was Narva that first drew me to Enoch, you know,” I said. “I saw it hanging in the sky, and set out to wrest from it the secret of eternal life.”

  “The Narvenes are said to have found the key to immortality,” said Gaspar, “gods and angels know how. They think themselves divine, though they discreetly keep the fact to themselves. Each one there thinks he is secretly the ruler of the rest.”

  “It seems madness now,” I said. “I was alone in the desert. My people were all dead, and the wells were rotten and foul. Do you see? There was nothing to do but escape. Then I got here, and the Cheiropt was waiting for me.”

  “The vision is one that can’t be rescinded,” Gaspar said quietly. “If you say nay once and to one thing, you say nay at all times to all things. You have a fracture running across your being. You must learn to live with it. If you try to escape it, you’ll only be assimilated by the Cheiropt again. Next time it will be so complete that you’ll never suspect what happened.”

  I worked in silence for a moment. “If the Narvenes have no wisdom as the Eldenes had,” I asked, “then how can they keep the Gardens in the sky?”

  “A class of adepts keeps the palace in place through a compounding of epicycles within epicycles, extending algorithms laid down by Eldena which the Eldenes would have replaced long ago.

  “The Enochites are a people of algorithms. There is an island, once known as the Holy Isle of Thera, now called the Isle of the Combinators, where they have analytical engines as large as buildings, each capable of processing and storing a thousand million pieces of data and pe
rforming computations to any degree of accuracy. But even something as fundamental as the division of a number into indivisible factors is beyond them.”

  “This is full,” I said.

  Gaspar got to his feet. “Let us go, then.”

  I shouldered the hamper, and we began retracing our steps.

  * * * * *

  “Master,” I said after we had crossed the stream again.

  “Yes, my son.”

  “How long may I stay with you?”

  “The room you’ve been sleeping in is unoccupied. I have no objection to your staying as long as you wish. But you’re a young man. Do you not want to be off and doing?”

  “I do,” I said. “But I don’t know what.”

  “Ah,” said Gaspar.

  “I came here in search of immortality. It turns out that that was only a way of taking on the yoke of the Cheiropt. So now what do I do? I’m back where I started.”

  Gaspar shook his head. “You must find your own path, Keftu.”

  We walked without talking for a few minutes. At last I had enough courage to say: “I believe I know what I must do.”

  “Yes?”

  “I must destroy this Cheiropt that holds all Enoch in its grip. Then, if I—”

  “Destroy!” said Gaspar, with something like a frown. “How does one destroy chaos? You may as well scourge the sea, or bludgeon a fog bank. Have you not heard all I’ve said?”

  My face turned red. I stammered: “I—I’ll continue to think about it. I don’t wish to be a burden to you. I—I am a hunter. Perhaps…if you have a spear…”

  “I do not. I abstain from flesh meat. But perhaps it would do you good to hunt. It would also put less strain on my stores. There’s an old smokehouse behind the cottage. You’ll have to provide yourself with tools. But don’t tax yourself. You’re still recovering.”

  “It was that armor that made me so weak,” I said.

  “I know. Did you bring it all the way from Arras?”

  “No,” I said. Again I blushed. “I took it from a tomb buried beneath the city. I was forced to go delving for treasures.”

  “Treasures! Are there still treasures under Enoch?”

  “Perhaps ‘treasure’ is the wrong word. We mostly just brought up curiosities that could be sold by the person we worked for.”

  “Ah. An antique mart for phylites.”

  “You’ve heard of such things?”

  “These marts appear from time to time. As a rule the phylites have no thought for anything beyond their own experience, but sometimes one or another will become obsessed with antiques. It’s counted a shameful thing among them, and the Cheiropt penalizes them for bringing disparate objects into their apartments. That’s why they have to sneak down to Hela to get them. How did you end up in such a place?”

  I recounted how I had flown to Enoch, how I had been lured into Hela and sold to Granny, how I had fought in the pit and then delved for curiosities. “When I escaped with her,” I said, “she was afraid to go out into Hela, so I took her down, deeper than I had ever delved. There I found a monstrous corridor twisting through the under-city.”

  “Ah,” said Gaspar.

  “A songline runs through it,” I said.

  “A songline?”

  “A stepping from time before time, when man was not.” I looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Tell me what you mean, Keftu.”

  “I thought you must know, Master, for your house stands at their confluence. But there’s little to tell. They’re not the kind of thing one talks about. They are a web of…of relations, with signs that signify themselves… We follow them, as the sun draws the moss-tree up out of the earth, pulling its branches and leaves along the channels laid out for them; as the stars steer their courses through the sky; as the fishes swim the paths of the sea. When I came to Enoch I thought at first that there were none here. But I was only deaf and blind to them. When I found them at last, it seemed to me that whoever laid the city’s foundations must have heeded them.”

  “Imagine,” said Gaspar, “how it was at the beginning of the Age of Glory. Sprawling cities set on hills and promontories around the ocean, growing ever larger, reaching out long tendrils to one another. Causeways and viaducts overleaping low-lying areas, woven so densely that they hide the sun. Men crowded out of the centers, pushed to the periphery.

  “Long before building the Tower—itself a feat of many generations—the Eldene architects were called upon to lay foundations for the city’s growth. Legend has it that they were assisted by anakim. Perhaps they were guided by these songlines, or something like them.”

  “Was the armor I found Eldene?” I asked.

  “Possibly. They made many curious things.” He looked at me. “It’s a strange thing that you found it as you did.”

  “Why does it drain me so?”

  Gaspar smiled grimly. “You were being digested by the Cheiropt, Keftu. You see, old age—senility and decay—come early in Enoch. The phylites have ways of retaining their youth outwardly, but when they reach a certain age—it depends on the phyle—they deteriorate almost overnight. It’s a fearful thing to see, but very rare, for the Cheiropt compels them to drink a mycotoxin when they near the age of degeneration. They’re so bored by that point that they mind it but little. In much the same way, when you gave yourself up to the Cheiropt, you severed your link to the life of things. The panoply, drawing on your vital forces, drained you too quickly.”

  “Would it have killed me?”

  “No. Its force would have diminished with your life, both tapering together toward nothingness, in theory indefinitely. You would have died of natural causes before long, of course. If you hadn’t been…infested.”

  “Would I have been infested if I hadn’t been wearing it?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. It was your succumbing to the Cheiropt that laid you open to it. Tell me. Where do the princes of the air like to dwell?”

  “Among desert tombs,” I said. “And in old houses left alone, where men have lived, but not too long ago. I’ve seen the marks they leave in the dust at sunset, when light slants through the windows.”

  Gaspar nodded. “In Enoch they haunt empty lots, in-between spaces, abandoned flats. Any place where disorder is advancing rapidly. When perfect disorder approaches, they become latent. It is the same with the minds of men.”

  “The Inception must have been a fearful time, then,” I said.

  “Let us not speak of such things,” said Gaspar.

  31 A Roasted Heart

  We reached the cottage. “Are there sail-beasts in this forest?” I asked as I emptied the fragments into a crib.

  “There are adrothim and deinothim farther down the valley.”

  “Do you have a whetstone?”

  “On the top shelf.”

  “Today I will sharpen my sword,” I said. “Tomorrow I will go hunting.”

  Soon I was seated at the table, honing my blade. Gaspar sat across from me. He was sewing a shift of chitin-cloth.

  “Master,” I said.

  “Yes, Keftu.”

  “Where do the Eldenes live now?”

  “Nowhere in particular. They have to live as they can, doing business with one another. The Cheiropt has mechanisms to keep them from treating with phylites.”

  “Why don’t they leave Enoch?”

  “Some did, long ago. Their city, Darien, is said to lie far to the northwest, across Tethys, beyond the karst plateaus and the great basin. Recusants emigrate there from time to time, but no one ever hears from them again. If the Darenes still exist, they must be a people apart by now, with their own ways and customs. Most of us feel that Enoch is where we belong. We get along as we can.”

  “Why are you here in the mountains?”

  He smiled. “I’ve lived a long life. I did my part in the long defeat, a magus of the White Flame, the Heart of the Sun. One day it seemed that I ought to withdraw. So I came here.”

  “To wait for
me?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You told me earlier that you knew I was coming.”

  “That’s putting it too strongly. I wouldn’t even call it a feeling. It’s something like your songlines, perhaps.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Not long at all, it seems to me,” he said. “Longer than your lifetime, though.”

  “You’ve been here alone that entire time?”

  “I have two books for company. The Psalter Hexaemera, of which I spoke earlier, and the book of the nature of things. The first is writ in the mazes of my mind. The second flows past the windows of my eyes.”

  “Then you don’t have Sephaura,” I said. “I thought perhaps you did.”

  “What is Sephaura?”

  “The abstract tower of knowing. It is the first duty of the phylarchs of Arras to protect and preserve it, and to approve new additions. It has a life of its own.” Briefly, I sketched for Gaspar its layout: its solid foundations; its mansions and ordered gardens; its dynamic nodes and branches; the places where it was incomplete. “It keeps me awake at night,” I said, “knowing what must die with me, if I die. I’d hoped Eldena preserved it also.”

  “Why not set it in writing?”

  “That is forbidden. ‘Wisdom dies imprisoned.’“

  “Did your people not write?”

  “Yes, but only messages, and edicts, and things of that sort.”

  Gaspar bowed his head. “Steppings from time before time and the ivory palace of knowing,” he said. “It’s a strange and vehement wisdom you bring to us from a land we thought dead. You call me Master, Keftu, but in some things it seems that you must be our master.”

  I drew the stone along the now-gleaming edge of my blade, filling the room with its ring.

  * * * * *

  I set out the next morning, following stream and songline downhill, loins girt, sword at my side, a scrip over my shoulder. At midday I reached a place where the stream fell over a narrow cliff into a ravine. The swaying scale-trees arched high overhead, filling the defile with livid gloom. I slid down the moss-carpeted wall and landed on my feet in the pool.