The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  Even without the assistance of the scouts, Makemin picks out the confused footprints of booted feet in the cindery dust around the top of the cleft. Here, perhaps shielded from the wind by the irregularity of the surface, we can still make out footprints the blackbirds left behind them.

  The taling heap is loose as gravel; the men come down slowly, waving their arms, half-crouched to keep their balance. The pack animals have to be led down, and this takes time; then the carts are unloaded, their contents portaged down; finally the carts themselves are lowered, restrained by ropes the men above let out hand over hand. By the time we are assembled on the ground at the base of the crag, the dim sky darkens to black within a few minutes. It feels less like the onset of night than being suddenly engulfed in smoke.

  There’s a small building made of metal plates down by the base of the crag, mostly buried in the talings. I wander in as the carts are being let down. A steel implement a little like a can opener hangs from a peg on the wall trembling in the wind without stopping, still glinting. A skeleton lies on the floor. I brush dust from a long bone uncertainly. Do I cover it up, or uncover it? The metal implement taps irregularly on the wall as I think ...

  Makemin has already ordered camp to be set, but he paces up and down, hands behind his back, at the far edge of the circle of light thrown up by our fires, barely able to contain his impatience to go on. The night is completely silent, but there’s no peace in it.

  I see Pepedora preparing the charm, filling the bottle with lymph from his sores—but that’s all right, the charm works.

  The next day I am jangled awake by Silichieh’s hand on my shoulder. My head feels lead heavy. I can barely drag myself upright, blinking in pain at the insipid, fog-watered light. Silichieh tells me we are two hours past dawn. And here the light is no more intense than in the wan blush before sunrise. Everyone is oversleeping. I can hear Makemin snapping at someone somewhere.

  *

  We move along a stretch of bare white land, and there in front of us is a wall of trees, a little arched with the rise of the land. The treeline stalks out of the fog, which is thin lower to the ground but smotheringly heavy overhead. The column slows, cowed by the sight. The trees are uniformly huge, thrown up in a black wall across our path, but there is a break ahead and to the right like a colossal, shallow furrow gouged across the woods, its mouth angled away from us. The trees resume on the far side, across the oblique opening. I know what’s coming, so I head off to mime urination in a knot of bracken a few dozen yards from the column, take the opportunity to consult Pepedora’s charm. It points toward the gap.

  As we close on the furrow, a long white regularity becomes visible inside it, raising at an angle into the air. It’s something like a huge stone rail, flat and broad, maybe fifty feet across. To our right, it vanishes into the mound displaced by the furrow dug for it; to our left, it vanishes in the distance, driving a straight line through the trees like a wide avenue. While its course is straight, the rail isn’t level—it looks as though a great hand had pushed the far side down deeper into the ground, tilting the near side up. It is however not so slanted we couldn’t use it as a road. Makemin peers out at the black woods. Then, with a sharp draw of breath he turns and gives the order, walking away calling out instructions.

  We make our way up the mound, pushing the carts, and then down onto the very point at which the white abutment is first exposed to the air. Setting foot on it I feel a flutter in my chest that makes me sigh, like a heart palpitation. There’s a crisp, snapping feeling this substance imparts to me when I step—I crouch to run my fingers across it. A fine-grained smooth material, like ceramic or unpolished marble, without veins or glints, opaque and a little dingy, like dusty snow. Everything tells me it is older than the Limiters, but no one seems inclined to ask about that. I notice Silichieh rubbing it, too. He sees me, and points to the upraised edge.

  “Still perfect,” he says wonderingly, and I feel his curiosity is noble and saving.

  The column slows, quietens, and we listen ... a sound like the clap of a horseshoed hoof on a cobblestone street, but without that rhythm. It comes from no fixed location, knocking here and there at random. We consult together—I have no opportunity to check my charm, but I feel we are still safe, and that the noise is natural and not threatening. Makemin sends the scouts ahead, and we continue. The woods seem to envelop us swiftly, in one gulp.

  I feel vertigo, looking out into the trees, trees endlessly succeeding each other. The soil is white. Completely bare of brush, only the inky trunks of the trees emerge from soil like fine ash, and only the blue shadows of the trees darken the white ground.

  The trees are huge, funereal, with heavy branches and peaked crowns. I can see the metal-colored bark is scored in a regular way, almost a grid, and glistens as though it were oozing grease. Each trunk is sheathed in amber, of a dim, barely-discernable blue color.

  The hoof sound comes from all around us—it is the noise of these heavy, mineral branches knocking together, and now and then there is a chiming of glass in among the leaves, tingling. It sounds like a headache.

  *

  It’s the middle of a silent, suffocating afternoon. I follow pointing fingers—off to our right, something massive droops above the tops of the trees. It looks a little like a wheat sheaf made out of badly rusted iron rods, melted together at the top into an uncouthly shapeless globule. Slowly its scale becomes clear to me as shreds of mist drift in front of it; I have to raise my head a little to see the top, and it must be at least a mile away.

  Late afternoon. A droning knell, like the muffled reverberation of a bell, pitched almost too low to hear. The sound is continuous, but with the pulse of a slightly higher tone going through it.

  I recognize it; I’ve certainly heard it before. Where, I don’t know.

  The drone comes from a towering structure that rises to the left of the path. The structure is round, drawing in as it sweeps upward, flaring at the top to make a platform. Below this platform, a sort of mast protrudes out over the treetops, and attached to it is a cubical object. This object is ochre colored and streaked with what looks like verdigris, studded with frozen bubbles and big granules. These streaks form stalagtites that hang down like frost from the cube, which has a few square openings in its sides, and seems very solidly mounted.

  I find it hard to understand what I see at the top of the tower, something like a flat wedge. A slot opens along this wedge, and one side erupts in an irregular fan, smooth like the inside of an oyster shell, and stained a dull green. This fan must be thirty or forty feet high, and it looks strange coming out of the top of this structure, like an ear growing out of a pyramid. The tower looks like a bottle that has been attacked with a hot torch, and partially melted.

  As we draw nearer, I begin to see a lead-colored urn or something inside the slot. Some of the soldiers around me are walking faster, craning their necks. One of them suddenly gives a long moan and drops straight to the ground. I have his slack face in my hands and my thumbs on his eyelids—his glistening eyes roll and focus on my face, and he mumbles in confusion. Bad breath, a shrivelled-looking beard around the lips. I help him to his feet again.

  Now I turn and look. My eyes make out the urn, the rolled-up thing—a weak sizzling feeling around my eyes, my head swims. The back of my head hurts, and now, unaccountably, I am lying on my back, and faces are peering down at me. I rub my temples. There’s a garbage taste in my mouth.

  “Don’t look at the tower!” I groan. “Don’t look at the top of the tower.”

  Some men have fainted. Others mill around, unsure what to do. Suddenly afraid, I check the charm, keeping it hidden inside my tunic. Not broken. I let my breath out. It still points down the abutment.

  Makemin is giving orders. “We need to get a look over these trees. I want someone to climb up there,” he says, pointing to the cube. “You should be all right if you don’t look at the top.”

  The Captain asks reasonably, “Are you sure? It c
ould get worse the closer you get to it.”

  “I tell you we need to know if the enemy is near and where he is.”

  “Still, in that case, we wouldn’t want to lose a man.”

  Makemin’s mouth tightens. In a voice straining to retain its even tone he says “We will put a rope around him, put it over the top of the box, and he will not fall if he faints. Who will go?”

  He turns suddenly to the rest of us. At once, Thrushchurl raises his hand.

  “I’ll climb it,” he says, grins and nods,. “Only let the rope be tightly cinched and I’ll gladly climb, and look for you.”

  We stand strung out on the abutment, watching Thrushchurl climb the secure rope. The sides of the tower are decorated with a mosaic of diamond- and disc-shaped tiles, all grey in heavy dark borders, all a little dissolved, and blackened strands with fossilized bubbles frothed into them run down from the tiles in long blisters. Silichieh stands at the base, keeping the ropes taut, and staring in a kind of rapt amazement at the tower. There’s no telling how long ago it was built.

  Thrushchurl dextrously climbs the sides; he clambers up onto the top in a few lunges and vanishes from sight. That ditty of his still drips from his lips. Cats have got their lice. With a moan of complaining iron, three ribbons of reddish-brown liquid spew down from the side of the box opposite the road, but the box and its arm have not altered position or relation. The fluid stinks—it’s as if the box had been precariously balanced and filled to slopping with a broth of fluid corruption, steeped decomposing bodies, and Thrushchurl’s weight has tipped some of it out.

  The stuff runs out and the ribbons turn to rags. A rumbling exhalation breathes from the top of the tower, a new, even drone that rises and falls, filling space above the trees, wafting up between us and the sky.

  Now Thrushchurl lowers himself hand over hand, still smiling, down to us.

  “There are ruins just up ahead there,” he says, pointing off to the left, “and a clearing further up, within a mile or so. I could see persons milling there, and rows of white bumps on the ground, all in a peculiar, lovely sort of dim light from the ruins.”

  Saskia suddenly looks very animated.

  “No, no, no,” Thrushchurl says quickly, “they’re not blackbirds, I’m sure of that.”

  “Sure of it? How can you be sure of it?” Makemin snaps.

  “They—they ...” Makemin is making Thrushchurl nervous, his grin pulls up in the center and down at the edges in a volatile grimace, “They’re all quite naked, sir, and appear to be starving.”

  “Does this—” Makemin waves at the abutment, “continue much further?”

  “As far as I could see, sir,” Thrushchurl says. “Dense as the fog is, I would say it goes on for two or three miles yet from here.”

  “How far away are these people you saw?”

  “Less than a mile, sir.”

  Makemin glances up at the sky, lifting his chin. The tower chants its great note above us.

  We march, putting the sound slowly behind us. After twenty minutes, Makemin orders us to halt again. We are to divide into groups, some to go along the abutment, others to go into the woods to the left and make our way toward the clearing, so as to have two sides open just in case. I don’t want us to leave the abutment and say so, but I still haven’t been forgiven my true warning about the storm.

  Angrily I follow my patrol into the woods, jumping down with them from the high edge of the abutment and landing in the gravel, which bounces away from our feet as spongily as bits of dough. Keeping the weird ivory flank of the abutment in view, we slip in through the trees that seem to pour heavy, aching silence down on top of us. The tower drone is gone. Where have I heard it? I am off to one end of the line.

  Then with a start I realize I’m hearing a new sound. A hum. The noise draws me. I see ahead of me some one crawling along the ground, draped in a churning mantle of flies. A livid patch of skin is exposed for a brief instant as the flies swarm and cloud the air, making a spinning column above the crawling figure, and alighting again. It’s their hum I heard, like but not quite the same as the drone from the tower. Pictures flash in my head of those fly-infested lips coning out to articulate speech; I rush forward but the hum is growing farther away. The crawling figure is disappeareing. I want to hear the words she breathes in exhalations of flies. I see her again, crawling painfully, one arm stretching out every few heartbeats toward some absent object.

  Now she’s gone. I’m alone—no one followed me. I call out and rush back in what I think is the road’s direction. I don’t find it.

  I stop calling. The woods seem to grow even more silent, so that I yearn after that irritating clopping noise. Figures are crossing between the trunks; the trees are thinner, the light brighter, in the direction they’re taking. They are so lean they look elongated, and walk barely moving their bodies, shuffling, heads thrown back, swaying, shadowy stiff and lean they look like wooden figures broken loose from the trees. As I begin to move in the direction they’re taking, parallel to them, they disappear in the confusion of thin dark trunks slipping by me. I wonder if these trees were once people like them, who simply stood still too long in one spot.

  A clearing, like a scar in the forest. I stop at the tree line. Completely bare ground, with a ravine running through it. Here and there, emaciated people, naked or with a handful of rags at most, stumble from the forest near me, hair dishevilled, bodies withered, charred-looking but bloodlessly pale, faces and chests streaked with fluid. Near me, a woman stalks in a circle on sticklike legs, her arms wrapped around her stark ribs. Her buttocks are two knobs at the base of her pelvis. A wizened child sits by the edge of a brackish puddle, angrily striking the mud with his fists. Now and then I hear a growl or some other sound of anger and irritation, or a sob of pain, or the gagging noise as another one vomits. The ground is spattered everywhere with thin streaks of vomit; every one of them is vomiting intermittently. The stale air is permeated with a thin, acidic reek of vomit.

  Some lie in exhaustion, chins and chests spattered. Others sit among the rocks, many convulsively kneading at their heads from time to time. The noise of the trees is back, and it seems to grating on their nerves. It takes me a long time to realize that an arresting object—it looks like a brown leather sack, glossy and hard as lacquer, with many odd ridges and an angularly kinked set of straps—is the shrivelled corpse of a woman lying on her stomach not ten feet from where I stand.

  Moving quietly, I make my way around inside the tree line to a higher piece of ground, where there’s a confined space bordered by stones and bracken I can use as a blind. A harsh rasp of breath from my right makes me lunge to the left, turning my face toward the sound. A tattered man in a black uniform is staring at me from the other side.

  Simultaneously our eyes fly to each other’s holsters. His is empty. I hear his frightened breathing. Reflexively I put out my hand and address him in Laschlache. His eyes open wider and he leans toward me. I see the insignia on his armband. It’s the same. A narrator, like me.

  *

  He was cut off from his unit a few days ago. He says he hasn’t kept the time attentively, and he seems wilder and farther gone than he should be after only a few days. The qualifiers he uses are strange, and make me second guess my grasp of the grammar. The details of his account seem to flash up at me randomly; he describes closely things that seem incidental to me, and omits what I would have assumed were crucially important points, but I can’t strictly make out what his criteria of importance is.

  There was a fight further in, past the end of the abutment; howling men flew at them out of the trees.

  “Do you know who attacked first?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, clutching at the front of his uniform where the buttons have all been ripped away, leaving ragged, angular holes. I can’t understand the expression on his face, but it suggests he thinks this is not an important question.

  “There all of a sudden was just corrupt noise, and then they were on al
l sides of us ... My friend right next to me was killed; we all started, only just started, running doggedly back toward the marble-semiprecious abutment. I was the only one who was reaching it. They purposefully didn’t follow me.”

  I pat my pockets, looking for something to give him, but I have no food on me. I offer him water from my canteen. He eyes it glassily, but won’t drink. With blue fingers dry as twigs he pinches at the rock in front of him.

  “I didn’t go immediately back. Not being sure I could find them again was the cause of that, if I left. I had only the marble-semiprecious abutment to guide me, but I didn’t dare to try to walk even with caution because we knew on it that after us would come you. So I took to the stone woods, and stopped here myself.

  “That we came here at all,” and here his voice grows bitter. “Without the moment of uncertainty, but flew here by the straightest of ways, shows that we also are as insane.”

  “Were you trying to reach the cemetery, too? The spirits?”

  Now he stares pale blue eyes at me, light lashes in blanched face.

  “They’re utterly insane,” he says quietly. “They think the disembodied spirits will give them an invincibility.”

  The expression on his face seeps around and alongside his features like a vibration, blurring them.

  “Your bloodthirsty men have had that very dream themselves.” His voice seems to come from deep underground, humming up a long dulling tube.

  Something subsides, caves in, inside me. “How do they know where to—”

  The narrator’s face coils in a brief, mirthless smile. Bending toward me, his hand unerringly seeks out and thumps the charm through my tunic.

  “Pepedora?” I ask. “He gave you one?”

  He moves his head, and his face droops again. He sighs, so that his head drops and stays lower than it has been.

  “They set great store by it,” he says.