*
I put the roll in the tray.
“That’s my end.”
He pulls it toward him on a cord, so that the tray rolls on the loose kernels without disrupting their perfect distribution. His hand shakes in the light.
“Don’t look at it all at once. That’s advice I would give anyone.” I add in Alak, “Did you take the treatment?”
“Yes,” he says, in Alak, reaching for the roll.
“Then don’t look at more than the first character. I set it on a line by itself. You can’t be all that strong yet.”
I hear the roll open. Then silence, for a long time.
At last, I hear a long, irregular exhalation. I don’t ask whether or not the work is satisfactory.
Pepedora sets the charm bottle on the tray, and now it’s my turn to pull it across the floor. The glass is warm in my hand. I can see the tiny, carved figurine of a capering man floating in the viscous stuff that fills it. I turn the bottle this way and that, but the figurine always turns away from me. I can’t get to see its face.
“How do I use it?”
Pepedora seems to have slumped back against a timber, the roll in one hand, the other hand empty on the floor. I repeat my question. His voice, when it comes, seems to emanate from a far away place.
“The outstretched arm will point the right direction. Hold it up, thumb on bottom ... index on top ... right-handed. Hide it away carefully. Tell no one about it. Never turn it upside down. Never tamper.”
Now the voice grows stronger again.
“Never disobey.”
I don’t want to think of anything that might soften me.
*
Makemin, Nikhinoch, the Captain, Saskia, Silichieh, and I go together. The path here is all a dead grey dust, with a wall of black rocks on our right. We pass a black granite stele marked over with characters all blurred by weathering, turning round the stele. A platform house of unpainted grey wood, with a nearly flat slate roof, appears before us, some chickens pecking in front of it in silence. There’s a little smoke coming from behind the house and it sags in the air blowing back the way we came. A huge, malodorous puddle reflects it. Flies tumble in the air over the water and sometimes land on it, dimpling its scum with their claws. I’m breathing hard, feeling stifled again; my face seems to burn against the chilly air.
The front wall of the house, inside the veranda, is rolled aside on rails, and there are a number of old men sitting on the benches that line its walls. Their chins are bare. They wear colorless wool jackets and vests. A murmur comes from them, punctuated by coughing and throat clearing. We are not, it seems, meant to go in, but to stand out here and wait to be addressed. The musty atmosphere in there is not inviting. But, gradually I become aware that the one furthest from us, sitting in the middle of the bench against the wall opposite the opening through which we look in at them, is addressing us, and has been ever since we arrived.
He sits in the obscurity, leaning a little forward, his eyes closed, head a little back, speaking without pausing. It’s a series of admonitions about the interior. I begin to translate: don’t drink any water that isn’t clear and that means perfectly clear, don’t cut or burn green wood, don’t trust anything seen from a distance, only fruit from plants with white blossoms is safe to eat, don’t catch or eat game, don’t in any way molest any hares we might see, no fires bigger than a few feet across and never set one before dusk ... a bewildering stream of mumbled advice coming out too fast for me to catch it all. The recitation is relentless, the speaker and the others, who continue to mutter amongst themselves, seem bored. Perhaps they don’t believe we’ll venture to go after all. Or they might set so little store on our chances that they don’t think there’s much point in concerning themselves with our safety. The effort of hearing and translating drains me quickly, and I begin to feel so tired I want to plop forward onto the steps. I can’t possibly catch everything I hear.
Saskia shakes my shoulder nearly knocking me down.
“You’re babbling!” she says with a jab of her head.
... Further down the road, the column has gathered. Another group of Clappers appears as we rejoin the other soldiers. They have a cart filled with long rolls, one for each of us. They’re thick leather bags, big enough to hold a man.
“What are these?” Makemin asks incredulously.
One of the locals seems appointed to speak to us, introduces himself to me and gives Mushwit as his name. I translate.
“You will need them. We have that on the word of the last one to come back.”
“Someone came back?” Makemin’s eyes harden, looking first to me and then to the other. “Who? Where is he?”
Mushwit’s face alters in slight surprise as I relay the question. “I heard he strangled himself—didn’t he?” He turns to his companions. They nod slowly.
“Did he say anything else?”
“No, not that I remember.” Again Mushwit looks to the others, who remain long-facedly silent. “He didn’t speak much to anyone when he got back.”
Makemin seems uncertain, looks at me. He gathers his mouth up.
“They’re not heavy. All right. Silichieh, see to it everyone gets one.”
I take mine, watch Silichieh dole out the others. These preparations for what we’re about to do only make it more unreal. The early morning light, my lack of sleep, my hatred for Makemin, seem to flay me. Last night I dreamt of her round arms again—a woman I never knew. I am gazing into soft eyes through a veil.
Now we’re marching again, and the grey men by the house are watching us go with blank baffled faces. I think of the story I was told, and I don’t believe they get it right when they say the Pepecaui left war behind to go into the interior. Perhaps it was different then.
I feel as though I’m going toward war, that towers vastly above around and behind its pawns, the enemy soldiers, and us. War fashioned the interior. The war story is waiting to be lived again and to make all of us into its own characters. We will step into our places while the overture plays a medley of themes that will play out in full and in order later on. It’s magic, because I do what I don’t want to do, and there’s no power that I can feel being brought to bear on me. If a hand had me by the collar, and I were being dragged away, I could struggle. If Makemin or Saskia would only point at me, order the others to catch or kill me, or even only threaten me, I could run. But there is no power here to resist. I simply go along. Hating, and rebelling at heart. Something like the sweeping power of the tides sets everything all too smoothly in motion. I feel war’s unreal presence, like blank mindless insanity shining happily from these rocks, watching us bring ourselves to it, for its delectation. We’re going to kill and die at war’s fiat in this beautiful place, nothing more.
My eyes cling to what they see around me. Everything says to me, “you will never see us again.”
I am trying not to clutch at the charm, seeming to want to squeeze it into the flesh of my hand and absorb its powers, if it really has any. In a flash I see Pepedora scheming with Wacagan to get rid of us, set me up with this charm of his. But how does that make sense? Leave his town open to invasion? I shake my head—this is foolish thinking. Makemin is the one dragging us into the interior, against the orders of the Predicanten; Pepedora had nothing to do with that.
Our standard is wobbling in the air. Jil Punkinflake struggles forward, and his dog is there at his heels, tripping him up. It takes the tails of his tunic in its jaws, braces its legs, and pulls him back. He curses and kicks at the dog. We are stealing in between the slopes. The land is still—you can hear the air move through it. Silichieh marching with his head flung back, a look of exaltation on his face. He and Thrushchurl are walking together for the first time, and I can see wild expectancy flicker across Thrushchurl’s features. They both want to see the magic for themselves, no matter what. Thrushchurl in particular seems completely at home, even a little oblivious, as though it were already entirely familiar to him.
Wh
ite vapor sifts in the air on the trail ahead. The ground is spotted with mirror puddles that reflect the sky. There’s the white passage up there. The wind goes through me as though I’m not there. Thrushchurl gazes at the passage and says “Death.” I hear a shot and the entire column jerks—Jil Punkinflake stands over the body of his dog with the standard in one hand, pennant shaft end braced against his hip, then holsters his pistol.
Cinnamon ground, the powdery earth here is saturated with rust. The passage takes us high into the mountains, the time goes with the passage and we are threading along a rocky course. Glance back and I can make out the remote, crumpled form of the dog where he died on the path behind us. The sounds we make, our voices, are muffled. Makemin stops us and sends a man up a shingled incline toward a house standing alone there against the rock. It seems to suck the breath out of my lungs; the house seems to stand outside time. It is plainly as it always was, an octagonal brick house with small-paned windows. The man comes loping back down to the column breathing hard. He explains that the house is on the far side of a chasm that runs down out of sight, hidden behind this mound of shingle. He saw signs there was a stone span there once, but the house is now completely inaccessible. He called to it, but there was no answer. A light burned in the window. Makemin strides up the slope to see for himself, and returns quickly, his face pale. With a terse order we are set in motion again.
As the sun sets, we come to a rise and get our first clear look at the interior. The land below us is flooded with dark purple dusk, while the pink and orange light of the setting sun still shines around us up here. Above the duskline the sun shines between me and the ground, sheeting it, so that the light hides the ground on its far side. Makemin’s face is coated with a shock of sunset light, like a transparent, hot mask of glowing red gelatin. The sun is setting closer than the horizon, looks like a dome protruding from the clouds; the cloudline to the north is a long grey sabre blade with its keen side to the indigo of the upper sky.
We camp along the path, before dimming blue dome and a cloud floor. No moon rises. We crouch in the fluttering air, wind thrashing soundlessly in our clothes, and eat sullenly. The stars come out. The clouds below erupt in a distant flash that brings Makemin to his feet not far from me. There is no noise of thunder and so it takes a while to realize we are seeing lightning below the stars. Makemin stalks back to his letters, weighted down by rocks on his portable writing desk. His little fume light burns behind me, projecting his shadow past me and out into the air over the valley below. I fall asleep with white violet and blue spots flickering in the grey in front of me.
*
Our descent, the next day, is steady and swift. We make our way down the slope toward a foaming ocean of clouds. By midday we are already on gently declining land, the foothills, and the tepid, seeping fog has covered us over. The ground is littered with lumps of broken mortar, evenly laced with fine slivers of rusted metal like long grains of red rice. We pass something like a massive stump, but, examining it, I find it’s the severed end of a cable, ten feet across, protruding from the ground. Hairlike wires festoon the disrupted earth at its base, as if they had sprouted and grown down into the soil like vines.
A wind blows back the fog. While it hangs in a sheer wall ahead of us, the sky over and behind us is clear, silky blue. Again I see the rare sun, slipping along the edge of that cloud wall, wisps passing invisibly between us causing its light all but imperceptibly to vary. The ground is levelling out more and more, and we are approaching a low flat space that is weirdly colored, all pale green with a little blue, and glinting sharply. It’s like a field of translucent, thin-hued gems. We will have to cross it.
Now it’s only a few hundred yards away and the words of the man in the house begin spelling out in my head just what there is to be frightened of as I get a smell of something rancid. The charm seems a very distinct shape in my pocket. For a moment I clutch it surreptitiously, and then nearly drop it, afraid to crush it, afraid to drop it. I peek at it hastily, a feeling of unaccountable terror welling up in me because I can sense yawning beside me the empty forsakenness I will feel if it’s a cheat—but the small man inside turns and points away, very deliberately, back toward the road. As if it understood my confusion and wanted to explain, the figure turns and points to the east. I follow its pointer, and for an instant I see a remote cloud of churning, shimmering motes, which fades at once. The air formed a lens there for a moment. Now the pointer again turns to point away up the road where we came. Shaking, breathing with gratitude, I hide the charm and run up to Makemin. I repeat what I was told, as though I were the man who spoke.
“After the mountains you will come to the Lake of Broken Glass. There’s only one path through, and its location changes with each storm—without warning, terrible winds gush down from the mountains and stir up a blizzard of glass shards that can mince a man bones and all in the blink of an eye.”
Then I revert to my own voice again.
“Sir, there’s a storm coming,” I point to the east. “We must pull back until it passes.”
Makemin peers at me as if I’d run up to wish him a happy birthday. He glances at the glittering field.
“There’s no wind. Return to your place.”
“I’m not guessing and I’m not being nervous,” I say levelly. “I know the signs. The wind is already on its way down the mountains.”
“I see no storm.”
“No one sees them!” I say sternly.
The loonies’ eyes are trained on me. Their heads rise like a field of heavy blossoms in a breeze. They’re listen to me.
Makemin pulls down his goggles and turns.
“Show me, then!”
I point to the spot where the motes had been.
“I see nothing.”
“Look!”
“I see nothing.” He pulls down on the lensed visor and releases it—it chunks back up into his helmet. “We advance.”
“I won’t go.”
“Then we’ll drag you,” he sneers, turns to two of the men standing near. “If he won’t walk, carry him—and keep his mouth shut!”
I am starting to shout, dropping onto the ground, trying to warn the others, when a blast of wind thuds against the column and a scintillating cloud shoots up into the sky like a snapped sheet. It tinkles and crashes with a demon noise. Makemin is stock still between me and a hurtling wave of glass.
“Get into the bags—the leather bags!” he screams.
I am released—already I can feel stings, hear cries—I pull my bag from my pack unroll it and scramble in headfirst, trying to gather it around my boots, the way they showed us. I turn my back to the wind, pulling up my legs and lying on my side. The bag is pitch black, hot and stinking—I feel the wind battering me, stings on my uppermost arm and leg, I can feel the leather flap, catch, pluck loose, but it’s very thick. There was a welter of voices, screams and shouting, as I climbed into the bag—but now I hear nothing but the roar of the wind, the tinging and crashing of glass ...
Gradually the wind dies. The bag is stifling, but I don’t want to leave it. I am rebreathing my own breath, sweltering in my own heat, but I can’t move.
A hand shakes my shoulder loosely through the stiff leather. I am the medic.
I crawl backwards out of the bag, pushing the soil back with my boots so as not to crawl too much on glass. I don’t look up. The soil before my face has no glass at all in it. I turn my head warily to one side and the other without raising it too much, and see no glass on the ground anywhere. Now I am hearing groans. Despite myself I look up, see a soldier a few feet away sobbing, bent over a livid, tranquil-faced head. The body attached to the head dribbles away along the ground, churned to a red morass. I blink at the soldier.
“I told you so,” I say, “I told you so.”
*
“There was nothing to see. How did you see?” Makemin staring me in the eye.
I stare back at him. My hatred for him, my contempt of his opinion, are giving
me strength, weight, steadiness. “I don’t know,” I say.
Makemin and Saskia glare at me almost with outrage.
“How could you have known?” Makemin asks.
“I saw it,” I say bluntly.
Makemin grimaces and, with a glance up at the descending sun, turns abruptly. “Up! We march!”
Saskia shambles out among them, where they crouch or stand shivering in groups. She lumbers, bellows like a bear, gesturing to them to stand. Jil Punkinflake walks behind her, accentuating her gestures with his own, face like a ghost’s. He’s perpetually at her side now, and she seems to tolerate him. His eyes are like smouldered out holes in his head; they gleam like the glint of fish scales deep in a well. The soldiers are rising to their feet now.
Silichieh passes me on some errand, with no expression.
“This wind blew all bits of glass away again. There must be something that keeps it from dispersing in all these windstorms.”
That’s the kind of thinking he relies on.
The land on the far side of the Lake of Broken Glass is split by a ragged, turf-lipped crag. The exposed chalk wall bends acutely down to barren white ground dotted with small clumps of brush. The fog is denser before us, and nothing of the land beyond can be seen. It seals us in behind as well. Not far from the point at which we approach the brink, one of the scouts finds a subsidance, where the ground seems simply to have lost cohesion and melted apart. A cleft in the crag opens like a harelip, its mineral filling lies in an oddly neat, conical heap, the tip trailing from the cleft’s base. We can employ this as a ramp.
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