I send you all my love, and many many ardent embraces, many kisses—how hard it is to stop writing! Do write to me as soon as you can, you cannot know how I thirst for even a word from you! How well, how like paradise, it will be when you return—do think of it, it will be the very summit of joy for both of us!
Time will not wait—
cruel!
All, all my love to you—
your own, adoring,
Ohra
What I smell sifting up from the page makes my head spin. It’s insane. I can’t smell that smell while I see what I see around me—I feel like I’m in a dream as it starts to dissolve.
At the bottom of the page, I find what look like hastily added words, a little smeared, the letters less perfectly formed—
“please please you mustn’t believe what they say about me”
*
The Spirit Eaters and Clappers are still at it, and the day is wearing on and on. I’m outside the tent with the others, not really listening to what Silichieh says to me.
“He’s not listening,” Jil Punkinflake calls nastily to my turned back. “He’s just had his first love letter from the Cannibal Queen.”
Waves of fatigue billow over and anger me. Without a word I cross to Jil Punkinflake seize the front of his uniform and pitch him to the ground. I don’t know why everyone assumes I’m weak; as if a man could spend his life climbing rocks and hauling bags of books in the thin air of high mountain roads and not have some strength to show for it.
Jil Punkinflake tumbles down laughing, smiles up at me from the ground.
“All right all right,” he chuckles. “No tapping Low’s sore spot.”
“He gets grumpy when he’s tired, doesn’t he?” Silichieh asks.
Jil Punkinflake’s death’s-head moth flutters around my head and settles again on the lapel of his uniform. Where has he been keeping it?
Now a group of the Spirit Eaters approaches Makemin and Wormpig, and I hear them say, in clear, clipped tones,
“Now we should consult the Oracle.”
Wormpig translates that one. Four of the Spirit Eaters guide us out to a listing wooden tower with a badly cowlicked thatched roof and warped clapboard siding, to which are clinging a few intransigent, colorless scraps of paint. The Spirit Eaters gather in front of the tower, facing us, with dark expressions on their faces; disapproval, distaste, indicating to me that we are in the presence of some kind of delinquency. One of the eldest points at the gaping front doorway, in which a black rag curtain is currently floating, looking nearly into the eyes of a few of us in a row. He also mutters something I don’t catch—“In there” most likely.
Makemin dashes the curtain aside with a bold gesture, disappearing at once into the building; I hear a cry within almost immediately. A clear tenor, alarmed.
Now a crouched man comes barrelling through the curtain, across the porch and tumbling, nearly falling, down the steps. The Spirit Eaters fastidiously recoil to avoid colliding with him, and the man stops himself short and straightens, just as Makemin, who pushed him, emerges from the doorway. The man is surprisingly young, dressed like the rest of them in a sack suit. Short golden stubble covers his head; his wan face looks as though it had been carved out of an enormous scallop: white, cold, wet, and rubbery. He has a cleft chin and large, blue eyes, and he wants to escape, looking desperately from face to face. The Spirit Eater who pointed at the door takes hold of him by the collar and shoves him forward on the path, and the others cuff his head as he darts past with his chin down. We begin walking together; the Spirit Eaters keep close to the man and hold him in place with their censorious presences. Their hostility seems more or less formal; I don’t get the impression this man in particular has done anything to merit it.
The path takes us further into the foothills, through sparse foliage and rocks. We climb a ridge and move among many low peaks. Before us opens a broad arid space perhaps a hundred feet across and surrounded by steep slopes. The flat space is not marked by anything but its bareness; obviously all rocks have been cleared away. The path collides with and spreads along the circular rim of the space without touching it, forming a random, roughly triangular region between the circle and the slopes, with stones arranged in rows and sheared off across the top to serve as seats. We gather as indicated in these rows, although there are more of us than there are seats, and Thrushchurl, Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake and I end up standing in a milling bunch of other soldiers and tag-alongs, craning to see. Opposite us and a bit to the right what I take to be a natural channel extends across the slope and then breaks, sending water tumbling down a many-forked notch, in the form of many waterfalls, some frothing and some clear sheets, all collecting in a stony basin half-hidden from view on the far side of the circle.
The young man is standing despondently by the ring’s edge. I can glimpse him through the crowd, his shoulders rising and falling. A hand shoves him in the center of his back, and he half-turns thrashing the air with his forearms, anger and fear in his look. His lower lip protrudes a little, and as he turns back to the ring I know he is picking his moment to enter it.
Finally he steps deliberately in, walking toward the center briskly, in a businesslike way. Hush. He walks loosely, turning his soles up toward us, and swinging his hands past his hips. He passes the center of the circle and slows, then stops; I can’t see what’s happening to him. He drops onto his knees, and then, after a moment, forward onto his hands. Now he just stays that way, on all fours. Our mutter begins to return as time passes, and I wonder if the oracle will come out of that muttering, and not out of the empty circle at all. The light of the day is irregular with the drifting clouds, and now it grows brighter, as though a blind were being lifted in a corner. It shines on the falls and makes them sparkle, brighter, brighter, and brighter still. The water is dappled over with lights that turn as they gleam like gems, and now like stars, and now like suns—
—your enemy has landed—
—they’re here—
—they are coming through the mountains toward Cuttquisqui—
—as though a blind were lowered, the light goes. I have a rock at my back trickling grit onto me, and Thrushchurl is to my left, his hands pressed to his ears and his teeth chattering. Jil Punkinflake stands down the path with shock all over his face. He ran a little, I guess. We all did, or something waved us back. Silichieh is peering intently into the circle with pursed lips and his brow screwed down. The shamans, Makemin, Saskia, Nikhinoch, and other soldiers walk past us, heading down the path, discussing. Makemin turns halfway between me and Jil Punkinflake and calls out sternly to us—
“Hey! No dawdling!”
—and Nikhinoch nods, peering at us one by one.
We straggle together and begin heading back, in a mixed silence. Some of us are rattling more than we might, maybe trying to stir up some familiar sound, and there’s nervous laughter. I glance back through the men and get a glimpse of the oracle, sitting on the ground, his head bent on his knees. We are going to go meet the enemy. Silichieh is telling us hoarsely about Cuttquisqui.
He clears his throat.
“They worked a silver vein there, a while ago, until an influence came out from a ... mineshaft and made people sick, killed them. So they said a god had come there, and they left.”
The voice of the oracle hadn’t been so loud in his body, in his open mouth—the instant it flashed from his mouth, it spread in the air, like a pinch of dust dropped on to the surface of some water. I could feel my cold heart beating against the heat of my muscles. A deafening voice in a brittle sheet of sound, sweep and break over me again and again. Thrushchurl giggles vapidly. What language was that? I turn my eyes out over the ground to the side of the path, and I can hear the churning of waves, although the surf is miles away.
*
Clapper racket in our ears we begin our march to Cuttquisqui, which it has taken me most of the morning to discover is a little less than ten miles away. We have each received a kerch
ief of a dirty white color, peculiarly dingy and shiny at once, to put around our necks. These have been specially prepared, boiled in something that has made them stiff but imparted no smell to them, to protect us against “the influence.” It is likely the enemy have these as well—they have spells of their own.
Practically no horses to speak of on the island, in the end we are all, even Makemin, going on foot. Here and there we encounter rough spots where rock slides have cluttered the road with stones, but the route is mostly clear. An advance party of Specialists falls in with us two or three miles into the foothills, swelling our number to a little over a hundred, drifting down in sociable groups from a stand of trees where an elbow in the hills makes a shaded nook by the road. Silichieh immediately takes up with a pair of aristocratic officers who seem to float along in the dust, coming down arm in arm to meet us. The captain is an elfin man with tow curls and an excessively refined pink face. The lieutenant is more ruggedly built, with straight limbs and a broad flat body; he has brown curls and a slightly sallow complexion. Between these newcomers and Silichieh there is an insubstantial familiarity of incomplete acquaintance; they have served together, but had not had the opportunity then to become friends, so perhaps they will take another now. They converse in their own language, which I understand only imperfectly.
I can’t hear anything but the sounds we make ourselves. A sick, frightened feeling begins to seep into me. We march through silence, a smell of wet green plants, and something fainter beneath, like rust. The grass and scrub grows thinner as we proceed, and now we are in a place where there are only solitary trees, although the slopes are acrid with rich-looking black earth, packed firm. Where the soil is torn open, pale limestone curds bulge into the air like warts, but the exposed rocks along the path are ferrous, sparsely spotted with lichens and abrasive to touch.
“I wish we had a bit of a breeze. I’m starting to feel stifled,” Jil Punkinflake says.
“As long as it didn’t blow any of this grit into our faces,” I say, and Silichieh nods sagely at me. This brings me back into the circle of his companions, and as I look at them I keep seeing them coming down the declivity to us, kicking out their elegant legs, their heads flung grandly back.
The captain resumes his conversation with Silichieh, now speaking Alak. The lieutenant meanwhile has been asking Thrushchurl something, and now I hear him say “It’s the interior they’re really scared of.”
Thrushchurl turns his head in that direction, away from me. “The interior ...” he says softly.
“What have you heard about it?” Silichieh asks.
“That’s where all the ruins are, and the wilderness and the war. Something else there too, like gods, are there. No one goes in there. The people in town are frightened all this—” the lieutenant makes a vague gesture including us, the war, “—will elicit an answer from it. There’s already stirring inside, and any killing will stir it up more.”
“You really think so?”
“Oh sure,” he says. “How could that not attract attention?”
A cloying, flavorless dampness fills my nostrils. Only now do I notice the fog, dark as twilight, erasing the land. It’s so thick I can’t make out the end of our party.
“I have a riddle,” the lieutenant says. “Want to hear it?”
“I’d like to,” I say.
He bends a little forward, past Silichieh, to have a look at me.
“All right,” he says. He is smirking a little, and now this expands into a proper smile that suits him better. He holds out his hands to the road, and raises his eyes brightly up.
“There is nothing in this world you love like you love me. You would part with everything else you have before you part with me, though you need never worry I will ever forsake you. More than love, more than life, more than death, you love most of all. What am I?”
“Can I ask questions?”
“Until I say stop!”
“All right. Are you always with me?”
“Always, though you don’t always know me.”
“Are you a part of me?”
“You are a part of me, and I am someone else.”
“Are you a spirit?”
“I am a spirit, but all spirits are part of me. And gods.”
The captain rolls his eyes, grins at Silichieh.
“You’re not time?” I ask.
“I grow with time, and time often strengthens me.”
“Are you beauty?”
“I think I’m beautiful, but that’s not my name.”
“Virtue?”
“... That is not my name.” Very grand the way he refuses the contraction there.
“Honor?”
“All wise people do me honor. But I’m not wisdom, either—and you’re just running down a list, so stop now.”
“I give up.”
“My name is fear.”
*
Rattle of our gear against the quiet; Thrushchurl’s anthem, and unsmelly smell of the fog, not a trace of salt air in it, and suppressed under it is the smell of cakey black earth. The swaying shapes of marching soldiers, blue shadows against a low ceiling of fog and the dark crescent of the hillside above me. The captain, speaking in a clear ringing but not loud voice, is describing his great patriotic epic to me. Sounds awful.
“A complex book,” he says, “a sorcerer’s-apprentice book. A book of loneliness,” he adds with a wistful note. “It’s about a young man who is sent far away to a sanitarium in the mountains; he must learn there how to cure the plague that is destroying the people back in his home.”
He lapses into his original language, addressing himself to Silichieh, and then runs out of words. None of us has much attention to spare. We are less and less able to combat our awe in this still country. Even the loonies are. Thrushchurl’s singing has retreated under his breath.
Our muffled noise. An extensive white swatch of dim scales on the slopes ahead, looking like splashes of spilled milk. Presently we draw near, and the patches of white come down to the brink of the path. Even close up, the white is confused by the cloud of fog we’re engulfed in, so I have to step to the edge and stoop. Suddenly I can see clearly—tiny, incredibly regular flowers, growing low to the ground, each with six diamond-shaped petals. They aren’t white, finally, but a colorless, mother-of-pearl silver, like polished chips of fog. The petals are inflexibly hard, and when I reach to pick one, the thin stem bends stiffly in my fingers like wire, and won’t break.
“What’s that?” Jil Punkinflake knocks my back and points up the slope at something dark tumbling in among the flowers. I peer through the fog, and I can see a little almond-shaped head up there, and a few others besides.
“Those are hares,” I say.
“I’ve never seen one,” he says.
I wonder if, and if so how, they eat these mineral flowers.
“Look there!” and no sooner has he said this and pointed than Jil Punkinflake darts from the path, following the rocky bed of a shallow brook. Thrushchurl follows him avidly on his long legs. I hadn’t seen the brook at all, and now I can hardly believe it’s there. It flows without making a noise.
A rounded arm lies in the stream, the water bulging around it. The dog stands attentively beside me. Jil Punkinflake says something I don’t catch, facing away from me and still advancing toward the arm, then repeats it over his shoulder.
“It doesn’t look real,” he says.
They both bend and loom in, faces first. Jil Punkinflake picks up the arm, and then stands, holding it by the elbow.
“It’s fake,” he says in a loud voice, looking back at us.
Thrushchurl, grinning or squinting, looks to us and echoes his words. “It’s fake.”
Jil Punkinflake shows me the arm. The flesh is spongy stuff over a hard core, neatly sectioned at the shoulder, with a white bulb of bone protruding. The bulb has four identical, deep grooves cut into it. I turn the hand over and examine it. The slender, womanly fingers close on mine and hold me with
gentle pressure, frigid from the icy water of the stream that still trembles in droplets on the blue milk skin. The sensation shakes me. There’s something frighteningly enticing about it, and at the same time I want to drop the arm or fling it away from me.
Silichieh begins looking at its articulations.
Ahead, Makemin’s voice, flat and strict.
“Come on. Leave it.”
“I think they used to put artificial people near crossroads markers,” Silichieh says, and his voice seems to plummet in strength during the brief journey from his diaphragm to his mouth. “We should look for markers.”
Makemin nods and turns into dark fog. Scouts are sent probing around in the silence ahead. The road here is vague in the shallow breadth of a dip between hills and it isn’t entirely clear which way in the fog to go.
Hooting from one of the scouts, an asylum man. Silichieh dashes forward to examine a small shrine that stands above a V in the ground as thin and meager as a fold in a linen top sheet—the fork in the road, it seems. The shrine is a metal cage on a squat, undulating pillar of the same material, about three feet high. The cage is square, with flat bars, and topped with an acute dome. Inside the cage a polished steel ball rolls back and forth in a groove with pinched-up sides, making a grating stone scraping sound. Why hadn’t we heard that? Makemin bids me look for writing. I find none. Silichieh is fascinated by the movement of the ball. He thinks it is not perennial, but starts when someone approaches, and that its movement or sound are articulate in some way. Drawing a knife from the pocket of his sweater, Silichieh tries to probe at the ball, but his knife point stops with a click in between the slats. He taps there twice.
“Glass—so clear I couldn’t see it at all,” he says.
I’m the last to take my turn peering into the cage. When I look at the ball, which is clouded over with a scoring of fine scratches, but still reflective, I don’t see my face. The ball reflects the hills, the landscape behind me, but there is no face staring where mine ought to be. There is no one on the road.
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