by Jeffrey Ford
The wagon was sturdy with huge wheels for traversing ditches and mounds, and the horses were not only bright but strong and fast Once they hit the plain, they started running, and I swore to myself that this would be absolutely my last time crossing that hellish tract of ground. I had Below’s whistle ever at the ready, but I saw no sign of the werewolves. It was important I stay aware of our progress as we sped toward Wenau, but all the time my mind was on Anotine.
31
It was I who brought the serpent to paradise. There were no needles in the crates of beauty, so I guessed at a dose and administered, orally, two drops of the concentrated formula to adults and one to children. The results, as in Below’s case, were remarkable. Within hours, the victims of the disease were up and walking around. By the time the sun went down, I had brought so many back from death’s door that I was actually beginning to feel I deserved all of the praise that was bestowed upon me. A great euphoria swept through Wenau, partially the thrill of resurrection, partially the hallucinatory effects of the drug.
I had to warn each of the victim’s families that the beauty was a serious narcotic and that their loved ones would experience visions and all manner of paranoid delusions. They accepted this as a small price to pay for a cure. I should have told them all about the brutally addictive effects also, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t that I forgot. I just couldn’t bring myself to take responsibility for the tragedy I knew would follow.
I used less than a quarter of one of the thirty cases on the wagon and ended my rounds late in the evening by the river, drinking field beer with Jensen and Roan, their wives, and some of my other neighbors. The night was cool, and the smell of the open air, the rushing water was so fresh after the stale atmosphere of the ruins. Someone lit a fire, and we gathered around it. One of the children carried over to me a letter of thanks from the entire settlement on blue paper that had been hastily scrawled for the event.
Then Jensen quieted everyone down, and said, “Cley, we are waiting to hear of your journey.”
I waved him off and said, “Talk will only cut into my drinking.”
“Now, now,” said another. “We want to know.”
“Is Below still alive?” asked Semla Hood.
“Below is dead,” I said.
A round of applause went up, and for some reason this saddened me. They pressed me for more details, and I began to cry uncontrollably. The group went silent around me and each of them looked away in order to spare me embarrassment. I was greatly relieved when conversations broke out around the circle, and I was no longer the focus of attention.
Miley Mac’s wife, Dorothea, told the woman next to her, “I never felt better then when I awoke from the sleep. The strangest thing happened. I saw a face on the wall of my bedroom. It was my brother, who had died in the destruction of the Well-Built City. Stranger yet, I had a conversation with him.”
More testimonies followed hers concerning the hallucinatory effects of the drug. Most of them were positive. But that is the way the beauty works. I remember it well. The first time it shows you what you most desire, but once it has you in its grasp, your will is no longer your own.
As these tales of visions were being related, I excused myself, climbed into the wagon, and headed away from the center of the village toward my home in the woods. I can’t describe to you the sense of relief I felt when I stepped across the threshold. The place was utterly quiet, and only then did it strike me how much I had been through in the past few days.
I had thought that it would be the finest feeling to again lie in my bed, but when I did, I could not fall asleep. Thoughts of Anotine rushed into my mind, and I tossed and turned with loneliness and desire. The loss of her was something I could not put behind me. Even when I finally dozed off from complete exhaustion, I had nightmares in which she came back to ask me why I had abandoned her.
The next day, I woke late, but did not get out of bed for hours. Instead of going into the forest to gather wild herbs and roots as was my routine, I lay there listlessly, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember the faces of Nunnly, Brisden, and the doctor. Though I remembered their names and their specialties, some of the things each of them had said to me, I couldn’t conjure a clear image of any one of them. This frightened me, and I crawled out of bed finally, telling myself, “Come on, Cley. You’ve got to get going.”
I dressed and went outside into the bright light of afternoon. The very first thing I noticed was that two of the crates of beauty were gone from the wagon. I counted them again and again, but there was no mistake. This was the first theft I had ever heard of in Wenau. The drug had already begun to work its will. Right then, I should have destroyed the stockpile and gone to the market to warn my neighbors, but I didn’t. The village I had worked so hard to help found had begun on a course of self-destruction. I knew I didn’t have it in me to stand in the path of that boulder rolling downhill. Instead, I hefted three crates inside my home.
Whereas I had administered two drops for the other adults of the village, I prescribed four for myself. Sitting at my table, facing the window that showed a lovely scene of silver-backed leaves shifting in the wind, I tasted sheer beauty, perhaps the most bitter substance known to man. I audibly groaned as it worked its way through my system, growing like a vine around my heart and mind. Then, everything became soft and slow.
I looked up and there was Anotine, sitting across from me. She was laughing as if I had just told her a joke. Her hair was down and she wore her yellow dress.
“I missed you,” I said to her.
“Don’t worry, Cley, I’ll be here for you now,” she said. She got up and stepped around the table in order to lean down and kiss me.
Two days passed, and every time she began to dissipate, I took more drops of the bitter liquid. I ate little and only went outside to relieve myself. By the end of the second day, I noticed that there was only one crate of the beauty left on the wagon.
Occasionally the drug did not bring me Anotine, but instead Below or the doctor or Misrix materialized to torture me with recriminations of one sort or another. One night, after having just made love to Anotine in my bed, I heard something creeping around the door of my house. The moment I leaped up, she vanished. I was suddenly frightened, thinking that someone had come to take the last of my store of the beauty. I knew that by this time, the entire village must be out of its mind, swinging between elation and craving. It was more than conceivable that someone would be willing to kill for a drop or two of the drug.
I fetched my stone knife, and creeping over to the door, swung it open quickly. There, sitting before me, was the black dog, Wood. When he saw me, he barked once, then trotted past me into the room. His ear had been torn off and there were nasty-looking wounds that had healed on his right shoulder. At first, the sight of him frightened me, as if he were a ghost. Then, he walked over to where I stood trembling, reared up on his hind legs, and threw himself against my chest. I put my arms around him and petted his fur. I had some dried, salted meat in my pantry, and I gave him a huge plate of it. He sat at my feet as I opened another vial of the beauty and took five drops. Anotine returned, and I told her all about the courage of the dog. When the sunrise turned the sky red out on the horizon, she vanished, but Wood remained. As the days passed, it became evident that he had really survived our ordeal on the fields of Harakun.
Semla Hood came to visit me one afternoon just after I had taken the drops. I saw her approaching out the window, but when she knocked, I tried to pretend I wasn’t in. To my horror, she was not put off by my silence, but opened the door and stepped into the house. The minute she saw me, she shook her head.
“I came to you for help, Cley, but I can see you are no better off than the others.”
“I’m sorry,” was the best I could do.
“That cure you brought has turned Wenau into a living hell,” she said. “There is thieving and there have been two murders over that witch’s brew. Men and women are acting like children, and th
ere are children who sit all day drooling, staring at the sun.”
I shook my head.
“There are a few of us who are trying to restore things to normal, but it seems impossible. You brought my husband back to me, but now I have lost him again.”
“What can I do?” I said. “I’m tired.”
“Well, I just wanted to tell you that Jensen Watt drowned yesterday, chasing a beautiful angel into the river.”
“You will have to leave,” I said to her, because I could see Anotine materializing in the kitchen. I turned away and heard the door slam behind me.
That night Wood woke me with his barking. I rolled out of bed and grabbed the stone knife. Crouching behind my chair, I waited to see if I was being robbed. There came a knocking at the door.
“Who is it?” I called.
The dog growled.
“It’s me,” said a deep voice.
“Go away,” I said. “I have a knife.”
The door suddenly burst open with so much force, I fell back onto my rear end. The demon stepped through the entrance. His eyes burned with a yellow fire, and his tail was snapping the air. I put my hands up to protect myself as he came forward. He reached down with a massive hand, and his claws passed right through the material of my shirt without cutting my chest. Lifting me off the ground, he said, “I’ve been watching you, Cley,” and with this, backhanded me into unconsciousness for the third time.
I woke the next morning tied to the posts of my bed and saw Misrix standing by the table across the room. He was lifting the remaining vials one by one out of the crate before him and crushing them in his hands.
“It’s time to wake up,” he said.
The withdrawal nearly killed me. It took a solid week before I could get out of bed and move around on my own. I can’t bring myself to tell you the depths to which I sank in the midst of my craving. The pain was so intense I thought my head would split open. There were entire days of shivering and sweating and endless tears. I derided the demon with the worst curses and disparagements my insane mind could conjure. I told him he was responsible for his father’s death, and that he was nothing but an animal that had been tricked into thinking he was human. Through it all, Misrix’s only reaction was to laugh. He made me soups out of plants he gathered in the forest while I was sleeping. Wood and he became fast friends as they watched over my return to life.
Finally the day came when he untied my hands and feet, and told me, “You are finished with it now, Cley. Don’t worry about trying to find more; I have destroyed the last of it.”
He led me out into the forest to a pool and made me wash. When we returned to my home, and I had dressed in fresh clothes, he said, “I have something for you.”
Holding out his hand, he opened it slowly to reveal the green veil. “Don’t worry,” he said, laughing, “I washed it.”
With the veil returned to me, I felt whole again. My body began to rejuvenate from the ravages of the beauty. My mind began to clear, and I knew I had to leave Wenau.
“Where will you go?” asked Misrix when I told him of my plan.
“I don’t know. Somewhere far away from here.”
“Travel with me to the Beyond,” he said. “I am going back. This humanity does not suit me well. I want to lose myself in the forest again. I want to fly above the Palishize and hunt like the creature I truly am. I have thought far too much for a demon.”
I pictured the Beyond, its boundless tracts of undiscovered territory. “Paradise is there,” I said. “I tried to reach it once, but I failed.”
“You’ve got to keep trying,” he said.
We made our plans. Misrix flew back to the ruins of the city to gather the supplies we would need for our journey. During the days of our preparation, I wrote this testament for you, good people of Wenau. It is an explanation, a warning. It is a love story. I hope it can somehow cure the evil I had no choice but to loose upon you. Embrace your memories, but be wary. The truth lies in them.
In the small hours of the morning, I will lay these pages on the doorstep of Semla Hood’s home, and then Misrix and I and the black dog will strike out for the Beyond, where the demon hopes to forget his humanity and I hope to remember mine.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Well-Built City Trilogy
the world’s imagination
I have read that some believe the world is a sentient being, a massive head spinning in space. The oceans are its blood, the wind, its breath, the earth, its flesh, the forests, its hair, and all the creatures that crawl upon it, swim through it, soar above it, are its eyes and the agents of its will. If this is so, then the Beyond, that immense wilderness, stretching from the northern edge of the realm thousands of miles to the frozen pole and east and west as far as belief will follow, is certainly, in its danger, its wonder, its secrets, and absence of reason, nothing less than the world’s imagination.
I know this to be true, because, I, Misrix, now one-quarter proud monster and three-quarters sniveling man, was born there. If I had not been kidnapped into the world of men, trapped by their language, and logic, I might still be the demon I once was, swooping down from a tree perch with perfect, unquestioning grace to disembowel a white deer. A man of great genius, Drachton Below, changed all that, and now, though I still have wings, claws, fur, horns, and the eyes of a serpent, I sip tea from a china cup, eat nothing but plant meat, and am moved to tears by sheets of paper covered with wiggles of ink that tell a story about the death of love or a hero fallen in his quest.
Below awakened me to this deception long ago in an attempt to create an heir for himself. I was a dutiful child and even wore a pair of spectacles to try to appear the intellectual progeny he so desperately wanted (now I wear them simply to see, for my eyes have grown weak from too much reading). His love did not abide because it was born of selfishness, and my transformation was incomplete, cursed by his failure to go beyond himself. I am here now, stuck like too large a grain of sand in the neck of an hourglass, between Heaven and Hell, the only resident of a fallen city that had once been my father’s kingdom.
Some years ago, after Below’s death, I resolved to return to the Beyond and shed my humanity. I dreamt every night of the freedoms of a boundless country without conscience, where the necessary pleasure of the hunt and kill did not require an apology or carry with it the millstone of guilt. In these nightly visions, I acted with no prerequisite of thought. I wore no spectacles, and yet my vision was crystal clear, always in the moment, unhampered by shadows of the past or future. And so, I set out one morning for the Beyond with two companions—one, a black dog, the other, a man named Cley, who hoped to find salvation for himself.
It took the better part of a month to reach the boundary of the forbidding forests that marked the end of man’s influence. There at the edge were the charred remains of a town. Cley told me it had been called Anamasobia, and he confessed that he had been largely responsible for its destruction. We rummaged through its ruins and managed to find supplies we would need. Cley gathered weapons that he could use to protect himself against the unknown and, more important, to hunt his food.
The day finally came when we plunged into the Beyond. Beneath immense, barren trees, more ancient than the earliest history of the realm, we shuffled through the yellow and orange leaves of autumn. Like brothers, Cley and I bolstered each other’s courage against the overwhelming spirit of fear that pervaded the place. We both had to learn how to hunt. My tools were my strength, my claws, and the power of flight. He practiced with the rifle he had found in the ashes of Anamasobia. Our apprenticeship in the Beyond was brief and brutal.
On the third day, we stopped to rest by a stream and were attacked by four of my brother demons. Believe me, these fellows weren’t wearing spectacles; they had not come to discuss philosophy. The battle was fierce and if not for the tenacity of the black dog, Wood, we probably could not have got the better of them. When it was over, I was pleased to be alive, but it struck me as I surveyed the co
rpses of the fallen creatures that they had never recognized me as one of their own. To them, I was a man. Something in their odor disturbed me. Even when we had left the scene and were traveling deeper into the forest, that aroma stayed with me, drawing an occasional, involuntary animal squeal from deep within my chest. I thought I felt myself begin to change then.
As the days passed, I became swifter, more powerful, more acrobatic in my movement from tree branch to tree branch. There were moments when I caught myself thinking absolutely nothing. Cley was also changing. He lost his original nervous verbosity and as he did his shot became truer. His often droll sense of humor receded and was slowly replaced with a kind of grim determination to survive. We moved through the forest in near-perfect silence, and he and I and the dog learned to communicate by no more than a look or a nod.
One night I woke from a dream of the kill with the overwhelming urge to take my companion’s blood. I could smell its sweetness pulsing through him just below his flesh. The trees and the wind and the moon shining down through the bare branches coaxed me to it. He was asleep on the ground, and I approached with all of the stealth I had recently learned. As I leaned down over him, the black dog stirred and barked. In one fluid motion, Cley drew the stone knife he kept in his boot, grabbed me by my pigtail beard, and stuck the point of his weapon against my throat. His action brought me back to my senses, and realizing what I had nearly done, I began to weep.
“I suppose it is time we split up,” he said with a hollow laugh, releasing me.
I nodded. “I must, again, become one with the Beyond,” I whispered.
He tugged on my left horn. “Tomorrow,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t eat me.”
The following day, we parted. We stood in a clearing amidst a stand of immense oaks, and I put my arms around him and hugged him to me.