* * * *
Ringard’s tale was ended, and so was the wine. The servants had long since gone to bed, but I took him up to the room they had prepared. The candles had burned out; it surprised me to see that the glowing sky made them unnecessary. The forest beyond the window nevertheless looked very dark.
“If you find him,” I said, “what do you propose to do?”
“Listen to his voice—although it’s been a very long time since I last heard the voices of trees, I may have an ear for that of my own son.” He flashed his unpleasant smile. “If not, perhaps I’ll merely sit for a while in his shade.”
I left him, and in the morning he was gone.
* * * *
Several days later I heard that the Snake Man had fallen afoul of the Sons of Cludd. Anyone with a good word to say for an accused witch becomes a suspect, but I felt that the man had a claim on me. And I was curious to learn if any trees had spoken to him.
The smell of burning wood, burning flesh and righteously unbathed bodies led me inerrantly to the Holy Soldiers’ encampment. Easing my horse through a mob draped in white robes and droning dissonant hymns, I bitterly regretted the good old days when my father would set the hounds on Cluddite preachers. Now they were more numerous than those hounds’ fleas, and not even a lord of the House of Sleith would dare to throw one down the stairs if he came calling.
They had transported much of the forest to their camp, stripped the trees of branches, set them in rigid ranks, and decorated each with an unlucky victim. Some were already choking on the smoke of their feet as it rose to their nostrils, but I was not too late. The pyre around the distinctive figure of Ringard lay unlighted.
“Take heart!” I called to him when I came near enough to be heard. “Your nephew is here, Lord Fariel.”
They hadn’t quelled his wit. “I wouldn’t boast of our connection in this company, if I were you.”
Before leaving to seek someone in authority, I asked, “Did you find him? Dendrard?”
“No, fortunately. They would have liked him even less than his father.”
Talking to the victims was forbidden, I learned from the men who rushed up to unhorse me and hustle me before their captain. He was in a good mood—he didn’t smile, of course, they consider that a sin, but he didn’t tie me to a stake—but that was all I could gather from his barbarous accent and Zaxoin turns of phrase, some of which, I believe, he made up as he went along to confuse an unbelieving outlander like me. I did pick the words “talk” and “tree” out of his rapturous gabble, but even if he speaks perfect Frothen, it’s hard to concentrate on the words of a man whose sleeves are decorated with the dried tongues of blasphemers and ears of heretics.
“Wroken word on writhen tree spoken, burn on broken tree witch writhen!” he bawled, winding up his spittle-spraying harangue in fine Cluddite style and gesturing toward the stake where Ringard hung.
I cursed, I wept, I took it less nobly than Ringard himself when the torch dipped and his pyre blossomed up to contain him like a crystal cup. His head twisted, probably to deny these zealots the sight of one more tortured face, but it seemed to me that he was pressing his ear to the stake in an effort to hear a last message from the medium he had loved so much.
Then he turned back toward us, and that face, crawling with unknown flora, held an expression of such torment that it must have gratified even the most jaded of the Holy Soldiers. Yet his words, when they rang across the distance and over the roar of the bonfire, were absurd: “Not the stake! No, no, not the stake!”
It was over quickly enough, although the victim’s sense of time may have differed from mine. The black stake bore a black gnarl, and it was all so much indistinguishable charcoal. The sudden reports that made me cry out were only the eruptions of boiling sap, or marrow.
His last words had puzzled me. He was no imbecile, he had been alert to the end, he had known what they meant to do, so why had he protested against the stake? Trying not just to examine my memory but to relive the moment just past, to catch the words still ringing in my ears, I convinced myself that I had misunderstood him.
A prudent man would have made his exit, but I was so distraught that I seized the chief fanatic and demanded, “What was it he said? Did you hear the man’s last words?”
“’Deafen your ears to the words of wisdom, and to fine phrases be as stone,’” the captain quoted quite clearly from The Book of Cludd, and the import of his hard stare was even clearer.
There was much I would have asked him, but I had outworn my welcome. They kept my horse, my weapons and my clothing to further their good works, and I was forced to pick my cold and painful way through the sighing and creaking forest far longer after dark than I would have liked. Countryman though I am, I had never noticed that the riffle of leaves and clitter of loose bark can sound exactly like human conversations, whispered with earnest intensity. I paused often to listen, but I could identify no single, coherent word, with the doubtful but disturbing exception of my Tribal name: Sleith.
In the days that followed I noticed, too, that certain leaves, when they flashed their pale sides to the bright sun, could suggest hair the color of rain; and that the slim grace of some trees, the firm molding of others, the quality that I can only describe as the joyful nature of still others, stirred memories of a girl who had once romped with me and the hounds when she should have been counting her jewels. If Ringard had been mad, his madness had been metaphorically apt.
And he had surely been mad. The Cluddites had felled hundreds of trees and burned hundreds of victims. Coincidence can be stretched only so far. Yet I had convinced myself that his last words, after he had listened to a cry from the tree they had randomly chosen for him, had not been, “Not the stake!,” but, “Not this stake!”
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The Throne of Bones
“Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better had they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition.”
—H.P.Lovecraft: “The Tomb.”
I
Lord Glyphtard’s Tale
You’re moving good,
But you just fell down;
You’re moving good,
But you’re thrashing round;
You’re moving good,
But you’re spewing gore;
You’re moving good,
But not no more.
—“Song of the Graveyard
Watchmen”
As a child I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery, but it was hard to determine where our overgrown garden blended with the overgrown fringe of Dreamers’ Hill. I had found skulls that clearly lay on our property. If Mother permitted me to collect them, although she would shudder and urge me to find a healthier pastime, why shouldn’t I pick up skulls that lay in plain sight a few steps farther on? If it was right to uncover relics with the toe of my boot when I glimpsed them protruding from the earth, why was it wrong to seek them out actively with shovel and crowbar? The inability to make such fine distinctions has forever been my undoing.
I once believed that my graveyard rambles were the first steps to a career in science. Our home lay under the massive cliff of the Anatomical Institute on River Avenue, where scholars were not only encouraged to give the closest scrutiny to such beguilements as skeletons and naked bodies, but were also held in the highest respect for doing it by everyone but Mother, who called them lechers and necrophiliacs.
The students of art and medicine were a more than usually high-spirited bunch, it’s true, and it’s true that they sometimes trespassed through our property with suspicious bundles or vomited on our front steps, but Mother, as she did against so many things, had a special grievance against the Institute. The building that blocked our sunlight until midday and disgorged rowdy trespassers at all hours was formerly the palace of the Glyphts, and she was a Glypht.
Unless you come from Crotalorn you have probably never heard of that tribe, but whenever I mentioned
my name to a stranger in my native city, it provoked a look of thwarted recognition, usually succeeded by one of embarrassment. Nobody said, “Oh, you’re the fellow whose family was massacred by an unknown intruder when you were a baby, aren’t you? As I recall, only you and your mother were spared, unless she was the one who did it. I myself am inclined to think your father was guilty, for who but a moron would believe that his body was carried off by the killer?” Gossip, even more than the crime itself, may have caused Mother’s mild unhingement.
I am called Glyphtard Fand, my late or absent father having been associated with a much-decayed branch of that truly Great House, but Mother was correct when introducing me, to my embarrassment, as Lord Glyphtard. The title derived from her great-grandfather, who was governor of Orocrondel, a post that in those days meant being a broker for pirates. It was he who built the palace, but his son gave it away, and we lived in what was formerly the gardener’s lodge. Although a queer statue of her grandfather dominated the lobby of the Institute, the students surely remembered his philanthropy far less often in their prayers than Mother did in her daily maledictions. To hear her talk, you’d think he had left his heirs naked in a thatched hut, but the gardener of the original estate had been an important man, marshaling an army of slaves and artisans, and he had lived in fine style in a mansion with twenty spacious rooms. Real lords from the Houses of Crondren or Vogg, dwelth teammates whom I have brought home from time to time, have seemed impressed by the magnificence of our lodge.
It was a faded magnificence. The roof leaked all the way down through four floors to the cellar. Opening any one of the thousands of volumes from our library, you would find inside the covers a wet wadding like cheese curds. The smell of rotting carpets and soggy wood filled the house, for we couldn’t afford to repair the chimneys and burn off the damp. The half-dozen or so servants who remained were really pensioners: if one of them spent a full day doddering through a dimly remembered pantomime of household chores, Mother would have to spend the next week nursing her.
I learned at an early age that we had little money, but money was a subject discussed only by the sort of louts who came around to bang on our door and demand it. I thought my fortune lay in science, not realizing then that it was just a pastime for unworldly cranks. If knowledge was power, as the cranks maintained, and if power was money, which was self-evident, then knowledge should bring money. The gentlemanly education I enjoyed, parsing classics and stressing penults with a series of cheap tutors, hadn’t equipped me to untangle that syllogism.
So I collected skulls, delighting especially in those that were malformed in odd ways or had been pierced by weapons, measuring them and labeling them and entering jejune speculations on them in notebooks. Rarest of all were perfect specimens, since almost all that I found had been gnawed by animals, as my tutors said, or by ghouls, as Mother and the servants insisted.
“I won’t have that thing in my house,” Mother said when she saw one that had been furrowed especially deeply by fangs. “What if the ghoul that gnawed it developed a taste for it? What if he comes back looking for it? ‘Where’s my skull?’” she creaked in a singularly hideous whisper, “’Where’s the boy that stole my nice, tasty skulllll?’”
Mother could be fun when she wasn’t lamenting all her grievances, but she was quite put out when I laughed at her performance. She didn’t realize that she had succeeded in scaring me, but that I enjoyed being scared. I didn’t laugh from disrespect, but from delight in my fear and from appreciation of her talent. Unfortunately I didn’t have the words to explain that when I was twelve, and my reaction enraged her. My entire collection was shoveled into the trash; whence I retrieved it and transferred it secretly to the loft of a disused stable. She would never have entered such a dark, cobweb-draped refuge, and it was far beyond the range of our most robust servant’s totter.
I had seen plenty of rats and dogs on my expeditions, and I carried a stout stick for protection against them on my tours of the necropolis, but I longed to see ghouls. I took to haunting the most desolate and ominous sections, even sneaking out at night to do so, without finding a trace of one—with the possible exception of a broken tusk that, according to one of the scientists at the Institute to whom I excitedly brought it, came from a wild boar. He was not impressed by my argument that some few people had claimed to see ghouls, but no one had ever claimed to see a wild boar within the city limits of Crotalorn.
“You want to talk to Dr. Porfat,” he said with a dismissive contempt that convinced me Porfat probably knew more about it than he did, but I was never able to find that scholar in his office.
* * * *
Necropolis, city of the dead, is not too fancy a word for Dreamers’ Hill. Thousands upon thousands have been buried there, and its upper slopes are very like a city. Elaborately rendered in miniature, palaces and temples line streets that would take days to explore and years to appreciate.
Even if those buildings were not cubicles for moldering corpses, if they carried no morbid associations whatever, but had been erected through artistic whim, their effect would be disquieting. The place is like a bad dream, in that it is so like real life but so arbitrarily different. Space has been compressed, the distance we expect between one house and another is missing, for the dead have no need to take the sun in their gardens, they have no use for privies or stables or servants’ quarters or any of the other clutter that surrounds a home.
At night, when I took to wandering those streets, there were no idle strollers, either, and few human sounds but my own footsteps among the still little buildings. I heard strange noises that I ascribed to night birds, to contentious cats or curiously articulate dogs, and some that I could ascribe to nothing on earth, but what frightened me more than any sound was the unnatural scale of the houses and the insane perspective of every vista. Surrounded by so much unreality, how could I believe in a real world to which I might return?
Under the circumstances it was ironic that I should sometimes have been jerked back from the brink of panic by the tramping of the watchmen and their raucous bawling of tasteless songs:
Got a bone for a head, got a bone for a dick,
Got worms in my bed, and I’m feeling damned sick,
I’m dead.
Under the circumstances, I say, because I had become one of those for whom the watchmen watched; or, more accurately, whom they tried to scare off with their noise. My passion for collecting had expanded to include desiccated corpses in their entirety, those which struck my fancy either through freakishness, through some dim hint of former beauty, or through mad contortions suggesting the horror of untimely entombment. Now that my collection numbered more than five hundred specimens, I was very particular in my selection; and if I found no human relic worth taking, I would justify my time and trouble by gathering up a necklace or a few rings. By the age of eighteen, I, Lord Glyphtard, had become a grave-robber.
Mother encouraged me, but it would be unfair to say that she meant to. She had once been beautiful, or so she often told me, the child of her middle years, and she was still absurdly vain. She gadded about in outfits that would have been thought frivolous or immodest on a woman thirty years younger. She was childishly fond of jewelry, and her delight in any cheap trinket I gave her could transfigure her for a day. Since giving her such gifts seemed to be the only way I could please her, I regretted that I could do it so seldom.
So my first harvests of the tombs went to Mother: gold rings, a ruby brooch, a silver necklace, all in a heavy, antique style that appealed equally to her love of glitter and her sense of whimsy. I would tell her I’d found them, and although she never questioned this, the explanation sounded increasingly thin to my own ears. I began selling gold plates and silver statuettes to sly shops near Ashclamith Square, where no questions were asked. There I would pick up anklets and amulets of porphyry and chrysoprase for Mother, telling her I had won bets on dwelth matches.
I never needed a better lie, not even when I had the roo
f fixed and the chimneys swept, or bought a fine horse and some pretty slaves, for she knew that I played dwelth with people who wagered enormous sums. She had fretted over my playing, fearing broken bones and even death, but I had sung back her favorite song to her, the one about “doing something healthier than moping in the graveyard and playing with skulls,” and what could be healthier than dashing around a field all day in the open air, kicking other young noblemen and bashing them with a club?
We believe whatever suits us, and it suited her to believe in my unlikely luck in order to pursue one of her obsessions with a clear conscience. Even more than the house we lived in, she wanted to prettify her father’s tomb. It was one of the mansions on the upper slopes, weirder to me than most of them because it was an exact miniature of the Institute I saw every day from our windows. My grandparents were the only occupants, earlier ancestors having been buried in a crypt beneath the real palace, and it more than met their needs, but Mother had always lamented that it held none of the luxuries that the fashionable corpse requires. Hardly a week passed that she didn’t ask for a staggering sum to buy the sort of gold toothpicks or toenail-clippers that I was busily stealing from other people’s tombs. It would have been more economical to take her shopping-list with me to the cemetery, but such mean calculation would have made me feel like a thief, and I lacked the honesty to admit to myself that I was one. I preferred giving her the money and posing as a sporting genius.
I was curious how she was spending my money, so one night I entered the miniature Institute. I no longer needed a crowbar. I had taken a few sample locks home for a scientific study of their mechanisms, and now I could open almost any door without a key. I shut this one firmly behind me: of a piece with other nonsense about the afterlife, it was meant to open from the inside.
Entering the miniature palace and lighting a lamp, I found not a tiny lobby dominated by a figurine of my great grandfather, as some warped edge of my mind expected, but a parlor of cozy but normal proportions. Only the marble panels in the wall where windows might have been suggested that I was not intruding on a richly furnished home. In anyone else’s tomb I would have rejoiced in the dyed garments out of Lesdom, the ivory elbow-scrapers inlaid with lapis lazuli, but here I could only grumble at the extravagance. My grandparents watched me disapprovingly, two of those realistic funeral busts that follow you everywhere with their eyes of polished gemstone. Grandfather, with his thrusting chin and craggy brow, looked even odder than his own father in the statue at the Institute, but I had to admit that I shared his vaguely canine cast of features.
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