The Physiognomy

by Jeffrey Ford

  Ea and Arla were watching me from inside the paradise. As I held onto Below’s quivering body, trying to stay on my feet in the face of the aftershocks, I noticed that the Traveler looked very weak. This was my last, best chance, and it wasn’t going to work. I had decided to simply kill Below and be done with him, when I noticed Arla hand the baby over to her companion, step up close to the boundary, and touch it as if begging me not to give up.

  The Master came awake then and began struggling with me to free himself. He had gotten some of his strength back and was able to turn and wrap his fingers around my throat. I did the same to him, and we were locked in that position. As he applied pressure, I let go with one hand and punched him in the side of the head. This slackened his grip, but not for long. I was about to deliver another blow, when to my astonishment, small geysers of flame shot from his ears and a thick smoke issued from his open mouth. What I feared most, his magic, was reclaiming some of its potency. Now I could not think of killing him, it was all I could do to simply hold on so he would not escape.

  Clutching tightly on one side to his shirt collar and on the other his jacket lapel, I steeled myself against his trickery. The smoke cleared and his face melted and transformed into that of a saber-toothed cat. His hands became snakes that twined more completely around my throat. Small dark birds flew from the sleeves of his jacket, their fluttering wings blinding me for seconds at a time.

  “You are already dead, Cley,” he said in the deep voice of the creature he had become.

  “It is all an illusion,” I repeated in my mind, but I was losing the strength in my neck muscles as the twin serpents applied greater pressure. No air was passing into my lungs, and I was growing light-headed. I could feel my grip on his clothing quickly weakening.

  As my hands slipped to my sides, he spun me around to face the crystal and smashed my face into it as I had done to him. He pulled me back quickly then, and I could feel his lips on my left ear.

  “When this is over, I’m going to do some work on you. I think Greta Sykes could use a mate.”

  I was slipping in and out of consciousness, finding it hard to focus. Looking up one more time, I saw Arla in front of me, through the clear boundary. She was touching the bottom of her veil, and although I was barely alive, I knew instantly what she had in mind. I slackened every muscle in my body and dropped to my knees, so that she would be face to face with Below.

  I heard the Master begin to scream, and I knew she must have lifted the green cloth. The snakes turned back to fingers, loosened, and then left my throat. For a moment, the air around us became dead calm and a strange silence pervaded the underground chamber. Then a sound like thunder was instantly everywhere, followed by a great cracking noise like a frozen river thawing all at once. The explosion blew us back across the cavern amidst a wave of crystal shards. Even when I landed, I did not stop, but rolled and bounced another few feet before coming to rest.

  I looked up from where I lay and saw the Traveler walking toward me, passing through a gap in the sphere that was like a jagged doorway. Arla was behind him, carrying her son. I blacked out for a few minutes then. When I finally came to, they were standing over me.

  “I forgive you, Cley,” I heard her say flatly from behind the light green veil.

  The Traveler leaned over and gave me his hand, helping me to my feet. “You have journeyed far,” he said to me.

  It took me a little while before I could see straight, but when I was thinking clearly again, I searched around the floor of the cavern for Below. Somehow he had managed to escape. Perhaps the crystal had been enough of a barrier to Arla’s terrible power to save him, but it was not strong enough itself to withstand the vehemence of her gaze. She was able to break through because she had something to focus her hatred upon outside the shell. I only wondered if it was Below or myself.

  On the opposite side of the sphere, we found an entrance to that network of tunnels that ran beneath the city and took to it like rats running a maze. The impossible had been accomplished, but now we had an even more difficult job—getting out of the city alive.

  There, beneath the streets, we ran into a band of conspirators carrying weapons, and they told us that there was a full-fledged war being waged now above. They did not have to tell me that Below was still alive, because every now and then we felt the tremors as another piece of his miraculous creation blew apart. They said the city gates were impassable not only because of the buildup of troops but also because the rubble from the decimated Ministry of the Territory had blocked the way. We were told to head toward the eastern boundary of the city, where a large hole had been blasted through the outer wall. They could not accompany us, because they were needed to reinforce a battalion taking up positions in the waterworks.

  To my surprise, many of the conspirators we met had either heard of or knew Ea. While he was being held in a cage after first arriving in the city, and while the construction of the sphere was taking place, he had spoken to the workers. They could not resist his calm demeanor and his smile. As one young woman put it, “He showed us that our own fear was the Master’s greatest magic.” I learned that it was through this contact that the idea of overthrowing Below had come about. Ea was the one who had given them the O sign and told them of Wenau. Before they pushed on toward the battle, they lined up and shook his hand.

  “He told us you would return,” one of them said to me. “He told us you were searching for paradise and were a changed man.”

  Then we were alone again in the dark underground, and as much as I tried to ignore it, the beauty was not willing to let me go so easily. I faced the prospect of withdrawal with great fear, for I knew that it would only slow us down. Arla and Ea would not leave me, though. We hid in the tunnels for two days while they tended me. The Traveler fed me sweet little berries from the pouch he wore on his belt, and they eased the pain and nausea. All the time we were down there, as I sweated out the last remnants of ignorance and fear, we heard the explosions continue. There was the distant crack of rifle fire, and the smell of burning flesh reached even below the earth.

  On the third day, though I was still shaky and sometimes needed support to continue, we came up out of hiding near the eastern wall. The entire City was in ruins. It didn’t appear that there was a single building left standing, just mountains and mountains of debris everywhere. The bodies of citizens, the bodies of soldiers were strewn amid the wreckage, and the smell was horrible. We made our way through the destruction and came to the hole in the wall we had been told about. Out beyond it we could see pastures and forests, and it seemed to me the world that had been always right before my eyes was a sort of paradise. I was weak and still groggy from having beaten the beauty for a second time, and I could not help but weep at the sight.

  “Cley,” I heard a voice say as we moved toward freedom.

  I turned around and saw the Master standing fifty yards behind us, holding a leash with Greta Sykes straining at the end of it.

  “It’s over, Cley. They’ve all either died or left,” he said. “From the time as a young man when I first journeyed here across the sea and over the mountains, my mind near bursting with a sublime reality, the only thing I was unable to see was how it would end.”

  His face was now a death mask, gaunt as that of an unwrapped mummy. I don’t know where he found the strength to hold back the werewolf.

  “Let us go, Below,” I said. “There’s no reason to harm us any longer.”

  He looked absentmindedly at the ground for a moment. “I can’t be bothered with you, Cley. I haven’t the time. There is so much work to do. Last night, I had another dream. A magnificent vision,” he said. With this, he turned and hobbled back into his City.

  When we were clear of the wall and out in the meadow beyond it, Ea touched my shoulder and pointed up in the sky over the smoking ruins. There I saw what I took to be a giant bird, circling.

  “A vulture?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “The demon has found a home
,” he said.

  30

  Those who escaped the destruction of the city settled in a valley about fifty miles west of Latrobia where two rivers crisscross. We all refer to it as Wenau, though it is not the Earthly Paradise. People still die here, fall ill, meet with misfortune, but there is a natural beauty to the place and a kindness among its inhabitants that sometimes makes it seem divine.

  I am here now, writing these final words to you. I have a small place with a garden in back. Ea showed me how to hunt with a bow and how to gather berries and roots. I am far from the pompous fool I was when I first went to Anamasobia. For one thing, I no longer fear the dark, and sleep most peacefully with the candles snuffed. I am, perhaps, a fool in different ways, exuberant beyond all reason at the warmth of the sun and the smell of the earth. It is not important anymore to have a title, an exalted position, though in certain ways I feel I have them in being a simple member of this village.

  We have all helped one another to survive and grow. Because of the memory of Below, we have no government, so to speak, no people of power. Disputes somehow manage to get settled without bloodshed and trade takes place. We are suspicious, to a fault probably, of devices that will make our lives easier, remembering how much freedom one must forsake for their comfort. Who knows if this will continue into the future?

  After we arrived here, I saw Arla every so often across the fields, working in her own garden. She and the Traveler had settled fairly close to me and raised her boy. His name is Jarek, and sometimes in the afternoon, he ran across the fields and sneaked into my room and talked to me when I was trying to write. Eventually I had to get up and go for a walk with him in the woods or go fishing down by the river.

  He asked me all sorts of questions, and I did the same of him. Ea had taught him some of the ancient ways of the Beyond, and already he was well versed in the use of plants and trees to cure illness and induce visions. Ea had told him that I was a man of great learning, but I felt the most I could offer him was my silent reassurance that he was a remarkable fellow. Though my paper supply—which I purchased from the Minister of the Treasury’s wife in exchange for my old topcoat—was quickly dwindling, the boy and I used it for drawing pictures of the frogs and rabbits and other denizens of the field.

  Arla had nothing to do with me. I saw her passing on the path, and I said hello, but her veil did not so much as stir. It was a great effort for me to prevent these moments from crippling the pleasure of my new life, but how, in good conscience, could I have expected more? Ea stopped and chatted sometimes, and I quizzed him about paradise. He laughed and told me about the time before his long sleep. His stories about the Beyond were always designed to show me that the real Wenau was, itself, less than perfect.

  One day I asked him, “Is there really a paradise on earth?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  “Where is it?” I asked. “What is it like?”

  He rested his bow against the ground and put his hand on my shoulder. “We are journeying toward it,” he said. “It is everything you thought it would be.”

  From then on, when I saw him across the field, he called to me, “We are close, Cley. We are almost there.” That went on for years and finally became our joke. Many a morning, I came out onto the steps of my home and found an animal for cooking or an armload of fruit freshly gathered from the fields, and I knew he had been there.

  Then one night, very late, about three years ago, the boy came to my house. It was raining and there was thunder and lightning. He pounded on my door and called, “Cley, Cley!”

  When I answered the door, he was standing there drenched. He looked scared and was shaking.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “My father is away hunting, and the baby wants to come out,” he said. “Mother is calling for help.”

  We raced across the field. Inside their cottage, I found Arla lying in bed, writhing in pain. I still remembered my physiology and my anatomy from my days as a professional man. Childbirth was one of the things we studied at the academy, since it was at this point, it was believed, that your physiognomy was formed.

  I threw the covers off Arla and looked down to see a tiny foot sticking out from between her legs. “Get me a knife,” I told the boy. He brought me one immediately, one of his father’s stone ones. The thing was as sharp as one of my scalpels. Holding the implement in my hand, knowing what I intended to do, filled me with great doubt. I had never believed in religion, but in that moment I truly prayed that I would not butcher her again.

  She must have come around just then as I stood there holding the weapon, and she began to scream. The green veil was moving like a curtain in a windstorm. I told the boy to hold her arms down, and though he looked warily at me, he trusted me and did what I said. I walked over and shoved the blade of the knife into the fire and let it heat up for a second or two to sterilize it. As soon as it was somewhat cool, I made the incision across her stomach. From that opening, I was able to retrieve the infant—a dark-skinned girl with her father’s beauty and her mother’s disposition. I had to use catgut Ea had made from one of the animals he had taken to sew Arla back up.

  I tell you, it was the most useful I had ever felt in my life, as if with all of the harrowing adventures I had been through, all the pain and misery I had survived, I had finally come to the moment that defined my reason for ever having been born at all. That child was called Cyn, a name her father had come up with. She was a special child, for after having given birth to her, Arla’s face slowly, miraculously, began to change. By the next year, all of those mutilations I had inflicted on her had disappeared, and she no longer needed the veil to protect others. Still, she said nothing to me. When we met at the outdoor market by the river, she simply lowered her gaze and passed by.

  Ea, on the other hand, often visited me with Jarek and Cyn. He let me hold the baby, and there were times when he smiled that caused me to wonder if he had not gone hunting that particular night for a reason. Whenever this notion cropped up, I quickly dismissed it as a dangerous delusion. It was during one of these visits that he told me they were leaving the next day to travel into the Beyond.

  The news made me weak, and I had to hand his daughter back to him before sitting down. “Why?” was all I could say.

  “We will return,” he said “but it is necessary that I explain myself to my people.”

  “But you’re a criminal there,” I said. “You said so yourself.”

  He nodded and reached down to place his hand on my shoulder. “Things have to change, Cley,” was the last thing he said to me before leaving and heading out across the field. I watched them through the open doorway with tears in my eyes. Before they were out of sight, the boy turned and waved good-bye to me.

  That afternoon and evening I spent trying to alleviate the loneliness I felt by finishing off the two bottles of Rose Ear Sweet I had bartered for years back when we had first settled by the crisscrossing rivers. They did their job, and I passed out somewhere late into the night.

  My troubled dreams eventually took me back to the ice floe, where I, instead of Beaton, kneeled on the frozen surface next to a dying Moissac. His branch of a hand wrapped weakly around my wrist as the wind howled, stinging my face. Through his touch, he told me to cut his chest and take the seed from it. A knife appeared in my hand. After the life left his eyes, I hacked away at the thick foliage above where his heart would have been. When I had broken a sufficient opening in him, I cried out above the fury of the storm and plunged my hand into the hedge … only to come fully awake in that instant to the vague echo of a door having been shut. Sunlight was shining in through the one window of my home, and I could hear the birds singing. I sat upright on my bed and brought my clenched fist into view. The nightmare had been so intense, it took great concentration to pry open my fingers, but when I did, I found within, the green veil, gathered up like a dream seed on my palm.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Well-Built City Trilogy

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  In the years since completing a written account of the fall of the Well-Built City, which told of my personal transformation from Physiognomist to humble citizen and the inception of this once idyllic settlement of Wenau, I never again thought it would be necessary to put pen to paper, but after what has occurred in the past few weeks, I must warn my unsuspecting neighbors. There is a demon loose in paradise—one that beguiles by resurrecting the past. Its victims grow cold to the world, desiring only yesterday, as their souls dissipate for want of exercise in the here and now. Memories swarm about me, every bit as real as the day, and I will attempt to trap them here in this manuscript, like slapping shut the lid on a box full of bees. Then I’ll flee northward in order to lose myself in the vast wilderness of the Beyond. It would be a false assumption to think that because I write this with my own hand, in the past tense, that I came through these adventures in possession of my life. Death, it seems, has many definitions.

  It was not long after the settlement was founded that the marketplace at Wenau developed into quite a bustling center of trade. The citizens of our new community no longer merely bartered among themselves but also attracted farmers from Latrobia, which lay a considerable distance to the east. River people from as far south as the villages at Constance occasionally arrived on their barques loaded with hand-woven cloth, spices, homemade fishing gear, which they hoped to deal for fresh game and vegetables. Our people became adept at gathering and harvesting food, but the items the outsiders wanted more than any others were those mementos of technology we had taken away with us from the destruction of the Well-Built City.

  Something as useless as a single brass gear could be traded for a blanket of the highest quality. The river people wore these remnants as amulets of power on cords around their necks. Little did they know how pleased we were to be rid of them. Everything balanced in the end, though, and there were no squabbles or accusations of thievery. The outsiders, having lived closer to the land for longer, were much rougher than we, but they adopted our peaceful ways. This location we chose for our settlement, nestled between two crisscrossing rivers, engendered its own spell of calm.