The Wine of Violence

by James Morrow

  Late afternoon found him on the mountaintop, calves throbbing, lungs feeling scraped. In the distance lay his reward, a sun-boggled glimpse of Cuz’s pyramids. Spanned by a footbridge, a chasm yawned in fierce prologue to the snowbound metropolis. A footbridge—perfect! There he would wait.

  He stacked his firemoss on the ground, brought a lit match near. Iztac-green flames shot high, then settled into a pulsating glow. He looked west. Peeking between each pair of mountains, the wall-cum-temple weaved along its sacred river. Snow crowned the gateway of the Northern Drawbridge.

  Francis lay down. The thought of having come so far warmed him no less than the firemoss. He had earned his nap twice over.

  THICK SHADOWS CLUTCHED the mountains when Francis awoke. A northern aura spoke of abundant fuel in Cuz. He looked toward the low sun, saw another, more compacted aura near the timberline. Tez’s campfire? He blinked. No, it was too large. He blinked again. A cottage.

  Squalls of snow followed him down the mountain. His oil lantern forged a clear bright path to the lipoca’s tree. But there was no lipoca. Wrong tree? Blue drifts rushed toward him like lava.

  Holding the lantern aloft, he inspected the trunk. Stiff with frozen saliva, a length of tether shot forward, ending in a mass of teethmarks.

  The storm laughed howlingly at Francis. Setting down the lantern, he used both palms to push his collar tight against his hurting ears. Gradually they got warm. Food gone, pack gone, it would be madness to head straight for Cuz. Where was that damn cottage? Northwest? He marched into the screaming night.

  For two hours Francis fought the lashing, tentacled blue. His teeth chattered beyond his capacity to stop them. The wind carved him up.

  Suddenly, wonderfully, the cottage was there, beaming through the storm like a huge friendly jack-o’-lantern. Heedless of the wind, Francis began to run, kicking the drifts apart before they could suck him down. He reached a squat oak door and slammed it with his palm.

  The plump woman who answered was exactly what Francis needed, all smiles and cheer and you’re-just-in-time-for-tea. She was well past forty and didn’t seem to mind.

  “I’m going to Cuz,” said Francis.

  “Not tonight you aren’t. It’ll be a blizzard before it’s done.” She led him through a negligible parlor to a kitchen boasting roominess and a firemoss stove. “Have a seat. Tea?”

  “Yes.” Francis killed his lantern and flopped into a leather chair. On the table, an open handbound copy of Tales from the Id prompted him to assume that the woman had been reading when he knocked.

  “There’s also hot chocolate.”

  “Tea is fine.” As soon as he said this, he knew his preference was hot chocolate. But he also knew that, had he requested hot chocolate, he would have wanted tea. He laughed at himself. It was good to be here.

  She pranced to the stove and unhooked two cups. “Going home for the holidays?”

  “I’m Francis Lostwax. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “It means they made fun of you at school.” Steam hissed out of her little kettle. She plopped two tea bags into their respective cups, flooded one bag with hot water.

  “On Nearth it’s not a silly name.”

  “Nearth! God of the brain—the spaceman! That name gives you away. Why don’t you call yourself Talo Cies like I do? It’s a privilege to serve you tea, Dr. Lostwax. Are you sick of answering questions about your planet? The twins will pester you.”

  “I’m tracking a neurovore.”

  Talo froze while filling the second cup, and the water went all over. “Sorry,” she said, recovering. “That word…”

  “Ummm,” said Francis knowingly.

  “Many days ago I dreamed of violence. A murder in Tepec.”

  “There have been others since then. I believe she—it—is headed for Cuz.”

  Still unnerved, Talo piloted the steaming teacup over to Francis. She gestured broadly. “We’ll put you here in the kitchen. The bedroll snuggles right between the stove and the wall. Warmest spot on the planet.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “God of the sun, I’ve got to take care of you…I mean, you’re the only one who…the Brain Eater could eventually kill us all.”

  “That’s something of an exaggeration.”

  “This happened once before. You saved us then, too.” She was back at the stove, replenishing the kettle from a cistern.

  “No, it was Burne Newman. And please don’t assume I’m going to save you. I’m merely…looking into the matter.”

  “Oh, but you must save us,” she said, mingling sweetness and urgency. “If not you, then Dr. Newman.”

  “Burne’s in the Hospital of Chimec.”

  “A war wound?”

  “Yes. He’ll recover.” The wind pounded brutally on the door. It seemed to be at this cottage and no place else.

  “Our son was in the war.”

  “How did he like it?” The minute the words were out, Francis felt inept.

  “Actually it made him vomit,” said Talo matter-of-factly. “Minnix has gone to Aca. Plans to tell the governor a thing or two.”

  Without warning, an icy rod of fear pushed into Francis. He thought: Think fast, Lostwax. “I…I believe I may have seen your son in Aca.” He had to know, had to. “What does he look like?”

  Across the room drawers rattled, and Talo was soon displaying a small portrait. Francis’s hand closed around it.

  The brainless corpse at the crossroads had a large, ungainly nose. Minnix’s was stately and thin. The corpse had ballooning cheeks. Minnix’s plunged. Still, the face seemed familiar. Then he remembered: Minnix Cies was the fiery Antistasist who had encouraged his party to join the war. Reality, evidently, had altered his views.

  Francis reported that he hadn’t seen Minnix after all. “You mentioned twins.”

  “They’re hibernating upstairs with Father Cies. Everybody had a gruesome day delivering firemoss in Cuz.” She pointed to an opowood ladder affixed beside the doorframe, then swung suddenly into the parlor.

  Francis’s tea-warmed voice followed her. “Any trouble in the city?”

  She called: “If there were, do you think we’d be so tranquil now? And a lucky thing we are, because tomorrow night Iztac visits and nobody gets much sleep.”

  “Iztac?”

  Talo returned, a large bedroll bulking before her like a pregnancy. “That’s what the children believe. It’s a tradition. You don’t have Legend Eve on Nearth?”

  Francis made an O of his mouth, drew up tea. “No. We have Halloween. This sounds better.”

  “Iztac—that is, Father Cies and I—Iztac builds a Light City in the parlor. Too bad you can’t stay.” She unfurled the bedding. It was voluptuously inviting.

  “Will you wake me at dawn?” asked Francis. Talo nodded. “And one more thing. If anybody else knocks on your door tonight, let me answer it.”

  FRANCIS STAYED AFTER ALL. He awoke to find the blizzard at a peak of rage, rattling the cottage to its core. In Talo’s words, “If you leave now and the wind hurls you over a cliff, the neurovore wins by default.”

  Seeing Talo with her husband, Francis thought of bookends. Aras Cies’s fat places, like his wife’s, did not strike the observer as unconsidered superfluities: they were necessary components of a design. He sang while he made breakfast, Talo providing the choruses.

  The eminent odor of cured meat on flame brought Lix and Lapca down the ladder and across the kitchen. On Nearth the holovision industry would have instantly seized upon these two charmers and used them to sell something. Not quite nine years old, whirling toward adolescence like bright sturdy tops, the boys reminded Francis of his own Barry. Surely Barry would have become like Lix and Lapca, all smart and eager, even with that damn disease. Francis struggled to change his thoughts, decided to ponder the usual questions about twins. Which was the more talented? Which the more assertive? Which the more envied?

  As the morning wore cozily on, it became clear that these problems
resisted one-word answers. Lix was garrulous and engaging enough, but when Lapca spoke a touch of profundity hung delicately in the air. Lix played the flute and knew five epic poems by heart, but Lapca could think six chess moves ahead. Lix was prone to a precocious cynicism and had difficulty speaking his true mind. Lapca was always losing things around the cottage and grew forlorn without good reasons.

  The afternoon found Francis trying to answer the twins’ questions about Nearth and the rest of the solar system. He kept wishing he were a salty raconteur, not so much because his ego needed a spellbound audience but because it would be a nice treat for these kids, whose lives were so totally barren of kinepix and holovision and other slick diversions. He spoke of Halloween and roller coasters, blasterball trading cards and cloying robot toys—the whole mountain of Fudge—and of bigger things. Planet Arete. Planet Kritonia, with its morgs churning through silent seas. As the session ended, Lapca said, “That was very entertaining, Dr. Lostwax.” He said it with such guileless enthusiasm that Francis wanted to hug him and cry.

  During dinner the twins announced that in their recent and unanimous opinion Iztac would not be descending from the sky this night. In fact, the whole holiday was an illusion, all right for little children but not for them. This particular Legend Eve, Lix and Lapca fully intended to assist their parents in the construction of the Light City. They’d even drawn up plans.

  Aras leaned back from his porkchops, carrying a teacup with him. “Talo, it would appear that our sons are growing up.”

  She tut-tutted in mock solemnity. “And we always said, ‘It can’t happen here.’”

  “We don’t reject the legend,” said Lix. “It’s still…how did you put it last night, Lapca?”

  Lapca smiled an elf’s smile. “It’s still of profound allegorical significance.”

  “I don’t understand anything I’ve heard for the last twenty minutes,” said Francis, spearing a potato.

  Lix began to explain, his family supplying details and digressions.

  The boy told of a bygone age when Planet Luta harbored Light People, beings of pure energy, greatest and grandest of whom was Iztac. For the Light People, pure matter was as abstract and elusive a reality as pure consciousness would be for humans. But gradually, under Iztac’s spell, the Light People exercised their science and achieved a tentative hold on the tangible. They wrought a vast soaring city upon Luta, a city half of substance and half of thought, half of particles and half of waves. A City of Light.

  One day Luta spoke to Iztac, warning her of an imminent destiny. The present age was ending. Matter was the dawning truth. Soon the Light People would be frozen in time and banished to the sky, there to become stars, while rocks, then animals, then sentient animals claimed the planet.

  Iztac grew despondent at the thought of losing her city.

  “I can offer you one consolation,” said Luta. “When you are thrown outward, I shall try to catch you and hold you near. Then, once a year, while the humans sleep, you can return, rebuild your city, and invite your people in. Once again pure energy will walk your milky avenues and lodge in your glass palaces. But by the following night your city must be gone, and you must all return to the sky.”

  Iztac agreed, and ever since then, on Legend Eve…

  AS RECONSTRUCTED in the parlors of Quetzalia, Light Cities owed their existence to a sweet-smelling, transparent substance called zarc, a distillation from the hearts of eels. When heated to two hundred degrees Celsius, zarc acquired a host of uncanny properties. Francis watched in awe as Talo, Aras, and the children stabbed the steaming pots with hollow reeds, then dueled the air to make the gossamer batter splash outward in great dripping sheets. Solidifying as it cooled, zarc assumed whatever strange geometry the reeds had traced.

  Aras erected the city’s walls while Lix, following his blueprints, poured the principal highways. Lapca blew into his reed and out flew a smooth conical tower. Talo tried a circular motion, spinning a fat castle. She handed the reed to her guest. Delighted, eager to experiment, Francis jammed the northwest quarter with an approximation of a Nearth roller coaster. By midnight the city had grown clear to the ceiling and taken over most of the parlor.

  Now the Light People came out, fifty candles stuck behind windows and strung along avenues. The oil lamps were extinguished, and the city’s crystalline luminosity suffused the cottage. Most wonderful were the shadows, intricate patterns flicking across ceilings, spiderwebbing down walls, changing as the tiny flames winked.

  Everybody just watched.

  In the gathering quiet Francis realized that the once hysterical blizzard had fallen to a low, intermittent moan. Opening the door, he was momentarily surprised to see that the Light People had not really abandoned the sky. Below the stars a great rolling blueness stretched into the frigid dark. The snow no longer fell.

  “I should go,” Francis said somberly.

  “Rotten idea.” Talo was at his side. “With those drifts—you take a wrong step and it’s just like quicksand. Wait for morning.”

  Francis lingered by the door, petting the nailed-up fur that served as insulation. “All right, I’ll leave at sunup. An hour before sunup.”

  With these words the Cies family scattered to assorted nooks around the cottage, returning behind piles of happily ribboned packages. Like pilgrims seeking entrance, gifts accumulated before the city’s waxy gates.

  Aras reached forward, drew out a red cylinder, passed it smilingly to Francis. “This one’s for you.”

  “May I open it now?” The package was heavy.

  “Open it!” said Lix.

  “We want to see!” said Lapca.

  Francis pulled at the paper and a blade appeared, shiny and perfect even by candlelight. “It’s a firemoss knife,” Aras explained. “It cuts fuel.”

  “Tomorrow night you’ll have a splendid fire,” said Lapca.

  Francis balanced the knife on his index finger. The handle, alive with intricate and fantastic animals, brought a sad memory of Tez’s obsidian scalpel. “I don’t have anything for you,” he said, distressed.

  “Just deliver us from neurovores,” said Talo.

  At midnight Aras went to the kitchen and returned with two tureens, a white broth sloshing over their rims. Mugs were distributed, and everybody dipped in and drank. Francis learned the broth’s name—rizka—and it was hot and thick and sinfully sugared.

  Lix brought out his flute, and soon the family was happily bleating madrigals of some sort. For the first time in his life, Francis experienced no self-consciousness about holding back from a songfest. He sat listening to the music, enjoying it, feeling fine except when the thought of Tez would suddenly drill into him and he had to spend a minute getting it out. The rizka helped—not because it was intoxicating but because it wasn’t intoxicating. Rizka was so damn agreeable in its lack of alcohol that it made you drunk. He thought perhaps he would lift his ban on souvenirs and take the recipe back to Nearth.

  BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP that night, Francis flipped over on his stomach and peered through the open kitchen doorway toward the radiant metropolis. He stared fixedly at its fragile towers, its high yolky walls, its brilliant tapered citizens. The candles were not noticeably lower and the gift-mound retained its gay spectrum. There is a bewildering goodness, here, he thought, a goodness that must survive. Quetzalians share tea with perfect strangers and through kind surprises send them off feeling not a little loved.

  He had no belief that the Cies family envisioned him stabbing flesh as well as firemoss. For Francis the knife was nothing more nor less than his very first Legend Eve present.

  26

  ALWAYS HER DREAM was the same. In a vast tide the river made of hate surged from its bed and spilled across the land, leaving a trail of demolished cities and immaculate bones. Millions fled before the juggernaut—but not Tez. She stood her ground, shaking angry fists as a quicksilver wave leaped toward her. Then, suddenly, in midair the noctus froze solid as a mountain of coal.

  F
rom within came a tap-tapping. Something was pecking its way into the world.

  Instantly an enormous human foetus, tall as a rearing lipoca, stood wet and round amid the chips of gall. Great blue eyes darted beneath a forehead bulging with infinite neurons. The mouth was moving. “Father killed me,” said the foetus in a dull rasp. It raised a glistening finger. “It wasn’t you.”

  Here the dream would end. Of Tez’s five victims, only the aborted foetus returned at night. The others—the surly priest, the sniveling little scritch, the ugly wagon driver near Hostya, the vain troubadour at the crossroads—waited for day, and when their memory came Tez stood screaming across the snowdrifts.

  On Legend Eve the dream attacked twice, after which she awoke to find an early sun, uncommonly warm for Timlath, splashing across the cave floor. An odd appetite rose within her. It was not an appetite for food—not quite. Last night she had gorged herself on a stray lipoca. This appetite, seemingly unnameable, somehow concerned…a city? Yes! She was hungry for Cuz. Even in winter, Cuz harbored ten thousand lives.

  Outside the cave, pack crooking her back, she got ready to resume her prowlings. Sniffing the frail gases that at these heights passed for atmosphere, she marched forward and sank to her waist in the soft remains of last night’s blizzard. She cursed, conjectured: With luck I shall reach Cuz before sunset.

  As morning became noon, Iztac’s power grew. Everywhere the snowdrifts dissolved into bright rushing creeks. The trees, thick with icicles, drizzled steadily as any rainstorm. Another hour of this, Tez mused, and I may even see mud.

  She saw no mud that day, only the monotonous grandeur of ice-glazed timber. The branches looked sealed in glass. Repeatedly she pondered the essential absurdity of weather. Very well, if crystalline flakes can fall from above, paralyzing all human commerce, then why doesn’t the earth spit stones into the air? It occurred to her that she was no longer functioning as a scientist.

  SPANNING THE CHASM like a huge grin, the footbridge to Cuz swayed in the winter wind. Forty meters below, a stream of melted snow shone and gurgled as it poured its way toward the Temple of Tolca. With raindrop delicacy a tracery of cord rose from the deck, securing the planks to bowed cables anchored at each end by stone towers. Beyond, the mountain city pushed its untempled pyramids into the sun.