by Felix Gilman
The General stood and tried to wander off. Liv held him back; he struggled feebly, but she easily overpowered him. She sat him down on the dry earth of the riverbed, and she sat beside him.
The absurdity of it! Liv nearly laughed; she felt as though she should laugh. Creedmoor seemed to think she could mend the man in a matter of days, while they fled helter-skelter into the wilderness. Creedmoor had her confused perhaps, with a fairy-tale witch or fairy godmother. She did laugh, and she turned to the General and asked him, “Sir, do you have any stories about a fairy godmother? Anything to pass the time.”
The General said nothing. He was shivering. She held him close to her. His breath and his heartbeat fluttered. She stroked his bony shoulder. She felt a great and ridiculous affection for him. For a moment, she felt close to tears.
Slowly she became aware that the General’s eyes were wide and fixed forward, down the valley ahead of them.
Some twenty feet westward, the valley floor narrowed; two big rocks nearly met and pinched it shut. In the gap between them stood—what was it?
It was not a goat, but it was goat-ish. It was too large to be a goat; it had shoulders almost like a bull, but it had a goat’s horns and legs and fur. Black fur. It had terribly wild and pained red eyes. It stamped and pawed the earth with a hoof like a grave-digger’s shovel. It snorted and whinnied. It smelled of—weeds? Stale water? Loamy earth? It smelled terribly of it.
“Once upon a time,” the General announced, “there was a bridge over a river in a forest in a land ruled by three queens and in a forest in the mountains and over a river, and a goat lived under that bridge. In midwinter when the river was frozen and like a necklace of diamonds a traveler approached not in hopes of crossing the bridge but in search, you see, aha, of the bridge itself, the border itself, it having been foretold . . .”
The creature did not move; nor did Liv. She gripped her sharp arrowhead tightly and waited.
She was ashamed to hope desperately for Creedmoor’s return.
The creature’s fur was black, and the long hair that hung scruffily from its throat was stone-stiff with dirt. Its eyes were blazingly red. Its shoulders were huge and swollen.
“The traveler is driven forward by love of a woman,” the General continued. “The goat is fixed by mute love of his place, of his bridge. Before there was a bridge there was a mountain, and before there was a mountain there was a great city of the First Folk, and before that there was nothing.”
Liv wished she could silence the old man’s ravings, but she did not dare make any sudden movement. The thing stared at her and she stared back. She averted her eyes—it occurred to her that the animal might take her fixed stare as a challenge. When she looked back again, it was gone.
There was nothing there but a dark rock; and a stand of reeds; and moss crawling across the rock; and two red circles painted on the rock—spirals, rather.
“. . . the goat,” the General explained—excited; something about the incident had him more voluble than she’d ever seen him— “attempts to explain itself to the traveler, who is uncertain. There is a murder, and a change of costume. Goat? It was said of Sam Self, first Governor of the first colony at Founding, that he was known to transform into a wolf. Secrets are lost with the death, with every death. Nothing can be atoned for, but errors can be corrected and sickness cured. The moral lesson of this story is clear. It teaches . . .”
He had not inhaled for some time. A word caught in his throat and he began to choke. He fell forward and Liv caught him. She held his head back until he began to breathe again.
“General Enver?”
His eyes were frightened. She kissed his wrinkled forehead to calm him.
He said nothing further all day.
She did not mention the incident to Creedmoor when he returned.
CHAPTER 30
LOWRY IN THE WILDERNESS
The Linesmen were beyond refueling range for the Heavier-Than-Air Vessels—which were ferocious guzzlers of fuel, which was a proof of their spiritual excellence. The motor vehicles had all been left behind; they’d struggled in the mud of the downpour, and were nearly worthless anyway over the roadless untamed hills and valleys. That meant leaving behind the heaviest artillery. They now had three motor guns, one of which no longer worked but might conceivably be repaired. They had two light cannon. It took half a dozen Linesmen to push and drag each one of those huge wheeled weapons across uneven ground. The rest of the Linesmen slogged on foot in two columns, each 160 men deep—160 men on paper, that is. In fact, there’d been bears, and a fever, and a rockslide, and the patrols that hadn’t returned, and the actual numbers were rather lower, and uneven. Their marching form was decaying out in the wilderness. They were going ragged and wild. They looked like a bunch of slagging tinkers.
They’d marched through a field of tall grass, and the green stalks had followed them, straight-backed, in march formation, roots rustling and slithering, as if mocking them. . . .
And one of the riflemen had brought down a rabbit, and it had had the glittering glass eyes of a microscope, and the long black jaws of a spider, and it had gushed black blood and guts that smelled of oil. . . .
And last night when Lowry woke, gut twisting from bad food, bad water, to take a long runny painful shit behind a tree, the moon in the starless sky had been like a mirror, in which his yellow face was reflected, bug-eyed and straining, smeared, distended, hideous. . . .
And the silence! The empty sky swallowed sound so that even when Lowry shouted, it sounded like no more than a whisper. No noise but footsteps through muck and wind through trees—and that was another thing!—Lowry didn’t like trees at the best of times, but the trees out here were entirely unprincipled, a nasty stupid joke. Some were crudely impossible, being five times the size of any natural tree, or no taller than Lowry’s leg. Others were more subtle—the patterns of their branches was wrong, too complex, developed according to mathematical principles different from those that pertained in the more solidly made world, but in ways that Lowry could spend hours staring at and not fully be able to articulate; in ways that intruded on his sleep.
They were beyond reach of the Engines. They were so far distant from even the most remote Station of the Line that the Song could not reach them. Lowry had never been so long outside their Song.
They’d gone into the wilderness with three telegraph devices, two spare. Three Linesmen had been selected to carry them; it was just about possible for each man to carry one telegraph strapped to his back, though they bent near-double under the weight, and lagged behind, and looked in silhouette on long evening marches like gigantic parasites were feeding on them, and were generally thought likely to die soon. Only the poor bastard who labored under Lowry’s amplifier had it worse.
Two of the telegraphs were ruined by the rains. The third survived but soon proved useless anyway.
On the first day out, Lowry had wired:
AGENT FLEEING WEST WITH TARGET. ALL AVAILABLE
FORCES IN PURSUIT. LOWRY IN COMMAND.
There’d been no answer for nearly twenty-four hours, during which time he dreaded that he’d displeased them, but dreaded more turning back, and so kept going. At that point, there were still trucks, and he sat in the back of a truck with the telegraphs and waited for them to speak. He sat with a single translator and a pistol in his hand and wasn’t sure whether in the event that the telegraph condemned him he would kill the translator, or himself, or both. At last, in the early evening, as the convoy was reversing itself to navigate a steep rocky incline, it spoke:
MORE FORCES COME BEHIND YOU. DO NOT SLOW. DO NOT
FAIL. TAKE THE TARGET ALIVE AT ALL COSTS. HE MEANS
VICTORY. DO NOT FAIL.
Then came the rains, which it seemed no signal could penetrate. When the rains were gone, he wired back again, on the one remaining telegraph:
DESPITE ADVERSITY WE GO FORWARD.
Six hours later, the telegraph began suddenly to clatter, knocking its
unfortunate bearer to his knees. It stopped almost at once. The message simply read:
LOWRY.
Two hours after that, another message came: LOWRY. And another, an hour after that: LOWRY. And another, half an hour after that: LOWRY. And again. And again. LOWRY. LWROY. LOWWRY. LOO-WWWYRRY. LOW. YRWOL. LOW. WL.
Then it stopped. No further communications came.
Lowry attempted to keep this from his men but could not. Rumor got out. They were alone. Half a dozen men threatened to break ranks and go running back; one had to be shot. Better numbers than Lowry expected.
But the wheel turns up as well as down! There was one good thing. In the clear silent air out there was nothing to interrupt the signal from the device the woman carried, and it came with exceptional clarity.
Two men of the Signal Corps carried the heavy receiving apparatus between them. Every now and then, they stopped and consulted the machine—which could be powered, in desperate and debased circumstances such as these, by a foot-wheel and a lot of huffing and puffing.
They’d bring Lowry the transcripts, and he had to admit: it was damn good stuff. They caught nearly every word the woman spoke, the bastard Agent spoke, the target spoke. Most of it was useless. The General talked nonsense, the woman was barely better.
But this! He held the transcript paper in shaking cracked and sunburned hands. There in the old man’s ravings: Secrets are lost . . . Errors can be corrected, sickness cured . . .
“Is this it?”
The Signalman nodded. “He went silent after that.”
“What secrets?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Who’s Sam Self? Is that a real person?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“No.” If it was a real person, there would be a file somewhere, a thousand miles away back east, in the minds of the Engines. But what good was that to Lowry now?
“All right. Well? Fuck off, then.”
Lowry thought for a moment. Then he called Subaltern Thernstrom over.
“Tell all the officers: We’re going to go slow now. For a while. All right? We’re going to stay on that bastard’s track, right enough, but we’re going to give him some room. See how some things work themselves out.”
“Sir—our orders were to pursue with all—”
“You spying on me, Thernstrom?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir. The target may speak. Maybe the woman’s not so useless after all. Maybe he likes her. No need to risk confrontation, then. We listen. We wait.”
“Sir—”
“And the Agent speaks to the woman; we’ll learn his plans. His secrets. Stay outside his sight, Thernstrom. He won’t expect that. We’ll see who’s cleverer. We’ll see.”
“Sir, our supplies will run out in four days. We lost a lot in the rains, remember, sir.”
“I remember.”
“After that, we don’t have enough to return.”
“I understand. We’re all in this together, aren’t we?”
“Our orders—”
“Are silent. The Engines do not have access to this information.”
Thernstrom looked shocked. Lowry was shocked, too. It had been a dreadful and blasphemous thing to say.
“You have your orders, Thernstrom.”
Lowry watched the Subaltern walk away. He had no idea where the notion of waiting had come from. Much as he dreaded the wilderness, the idea of watching and spying had a strange appeal; so had he acted selfishly? Had he acted from pride or even viler motives? How would he explain himself if and when there was inquiry? He was suddenly terrified. Thernstrom had gone over to talk to Slate and Drum, and the three of them were gesturing and glancing back Lowry’s way. Lowry turned his back to them, so they couldn’t see his face turn green; he stared out over the hills, over the uneven forests, into the mountains and a livid sunset where in the distance an eagle was circling, searching, suddenly diving! It looked like an eagle—who the fuck knew what sort of monster it was in its guts. It swooped low and Lowry’s gut lurched in time and he felt sick and lonely and shameful.
CHAPTER 31
THE GAMES
In the middle of the night—her hands shaking at the horror of what she was about to do—Liv rose, held the little stone arrowhead like a dagger, and crept silently over to Creedmoor’s sleeping body.
Creedmoor lay on his back, snoring. The rope around the General’s ankle was connected to Creedmoor’s belt. Creedmoor lay with his legs and his arms crossed and his head resting on a mound he’d made of dry river-mud.
Liv stood over him. In the moonlight she could count the tiny white scars on his face. She could see how thin and strawlike his hair was; in the moon, it was quite white and he seemed like an old man. She raised the weapon anyway, over his throat.
His eyes opened quite leisurely, and he smiled up at her.
“No, dear,” he said. “Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
She dropped the crude blade and recoiled in horror.
“I take no offense. It is my fate to be hounded like a wild beast from every brief resting place. I have chosen it. I am well used to it.” Creedmoor sighed; then he winked to show his good humor. Then he rolled over and was soon snoring again.
She thought that she would never be able to sleep again that night, but as it turned out, she was quite wrong.
In the morning, some instinct prompted Creedmoor to shake out his boots; and indeed, there was a scorpion, glistening and white and red and heavy-coiled like a dead thing’s intestines, hiding in the heel of the left—or, as he observed to Liv, the sinister—boot. “The world is very full of treachery,” he said. She flinched, and he smiled to show he bore no grudge.
In fact, scorpions always reminded Creedmoor of his youthful days in a backwoods scorpion-handling cult in Gacy. (The trick was to be so unrighteously drunk, the creatures would disdain to touch you.) The little beasts now afflicted him, not with fear or distaste, but with a kind of affectionate embarrassment. He stamped on it anyway.
The river’s empty gorge stretched on for another day, and they followed it. Dry mud gave way to a loose and shifting sand. The gorge narrowed and sharpened. The sun rose behind them; all morning their shadows stretched long and dark before them.
The hills on either side of the gorge were purple with heather and sage. Round rocks—strange molten shapes, the rock of ancient fires and eructations—swelled up out of the purple—like an army of trolls out of the myths of old Koenigswald.
At midmorning, Creedmoor—who was in fine form—called a halt to their progress. Two beautiful birds—white breasted, golden crested; powerful, regal, remote—circled and swooped across the valley. Creedmoor said that he wanted to watch them, for a moment, only for a brief moment. He seemed sincere. To Liv’s surprise, he did not kill them. At first she watched, skeptically, Creedmoor’s face; soon she, too, was watching the birds.
When she returned her gaze to the earth, Liv shrieked and put her hands to her mouth in shock.
The hunched rocks on either side of the river had faces and glittering red eyes; and they were looking coldly down on her.
Their shoulders were covered in long black hair that fell to the ground. Beneath the hair the rock was now bone-pale skin. They hunched and crept forward on through the heather. Their legs were too long, overarticulated, which should have made their gait awkward; somehow it was not. They carried stone spears, stone axes.
There were a hundred or more of them; their ranks stretched up into the distant hills.
Creedmoor put a hand on Liv’s shoulder and said, “Steady.” He drew his weapon. She flinched to cover her ears, expecting the flash and the thunder; but he did not fire. Instead he held the weapon by its barrel, at arm’s length, as if it was a talisman.
Creedmoor called out—and now Liv did cover her ears, because his voice was impossibly, inhumanly loud—“We do not dispute your ownership of this valley. We do not wish to challenge its spirits. We are passing through. We do not
want to do you harm. But if you try to stop us, we will surely destroy you. My demon is stronger than any of yours.”
Creedmoor’s voice rose in volume throughout this speech; by the end, it boomed and echoed off the rocks like an avalanche.
He spoke again, in a different language, guttural and choking; and again, in a deeper and harsher tongue that Liv recognized as Dhravian, and he boomed out the words yet again in the nasal Kees-tongue. Liv turned away, her hands clamped over her ears, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the rocks were only rocks and the valley was still and quiet, save for the wind and those circling distant birds.
Creedmoor was staring darkly into the middle distance.
“Were they really here or was that a trick of the valley? Will they let us pass?”
Creedmoor said nothing. She approached carefully.
“Creedmoor. Will they let us pass? Creedmoor—if they will not let us pass, we must go around them—you cannot take the General into—”
Creedmoor shook himself. His eyes cleared and he smiled. He gave her shoulder an avuncular pat and said, “They’re only playing a game with us. I wouldn’t worry yourself overmuch.”
—The First Folk. These lands are not ours yet, so they’re theirs still. I have never seen so many free and wild. If they decide to make themselves our enemy, it may go badly for us. Their powers will be terrible here, where things are loosely made already. The earth will serve them.
There was no answer.
—Listen. If they decide we are an enemy and they should decide we are an enemy if I were them I would decide we were an enemy then we are likely dead or dead if we are lucky; I hear tell that when they torture a man they have it in their power to keep him alive for eternity as his entrails are wound on a spear; they are very curious about our workings. They want revenge. I know you understand revenge. They will drag us down under the red rock where there is no time and no dying. They are before us and the Line is behind. What shall we do?