Yet it was an insubstantial thing like the ghosts in the reeds, a shape of smoke. The voices of the oarsmen were muted, the throbbing of the pace-setter’s drum like the failing thunder of a distant, dying storm. The stars shone through the hull and sail, and the foam of the oars was a phantom thing, the water around me still black and smooth and silent.
This was a wonder, but no mystery, for the Great River co-exists with the River of the Dead, for all that they flow in different directions. Sometimes the rivermen fleetingly glimpse the traffic of the dark current, faint shapes in the night. When they do, they reckon it a bad omen and make sacrifices to soothe the anger of whatever god might have been offended.
Now I, on the River of the Dead, saw the living as phantoms. The trireme loomed up, and then my boat passed through it. For a moment I was among the oarsmen and I could smell the reek of their laborings. Then a richly-furnished cabin swam around me. A great lord feasted, surrounded by his followers. I think it was the Satrap of Reedland himself. One lady of his company paused, cup in hand. Our eyes met. She looked more startled than afraid. She poured out a little of her wine, as if to make a libation to me.
Then the trireme was gone, and I lay back again, the coins on my eyes, my father’s sword clutched against my chest.
I slept once more and dreamt once more, but my dream was only a confusion, shapes in the darkness, and sounds I could not make out. I awoke parched and famished, and took another sip from my water bottle, and ate a little of the food in the leather bag.
It was as I ate that I realized that the river was no longer flowing. The boat lay absolutely motionless in the middle of a black, endless, dead marsh beneath the grey stars. Even the evatim and the ghosts were gone.
I was truly afraid. I thought I would be left there forever. No, somehow I was certain of it. Somehow the Devouring God had tricked me, and the Land of the Dead would not accept me while I yet lived.
I forced down one last bite of bread, then closed the bag and called out, half sobbing: “Sybil! Help me! I’ve lost my way!”
And the sky began to lighten. I saw not merely reeds, but huge trees rising out of the marsh, stark and barren like ruined stone pillars.
Some of the stars began to fade. I thought the Moon was rising—how strange that I should be able to see the Moon here!—but instead the face of the Sybil drifted into the sky, pale and round and huge as the full Moon. She gazed down on me for a time in silence and I was afraid to speak to her. Then her face rippled, as a reflection does when a pebble is dropped into a still pool, and she was gone, but her voice came rattling through the reeds.
“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you have called on me foolishly and have wasted one summoning. You are near to your goal and could have found your own way. Nevertheless, if you think you need a guide, reach down into the water and draw one up.”
“Into the water?” I said. For an instant I was terrified that I had wasted a second summoning with that question. But the Sybil did not reply.
I reached down into the frigid water, wary of lurking evatim. I groped around, swinging my arm from side to side, my fingers outstretched. For an instant I lay there, half out of the boat, wondering if this were another of the Sybil’s riddles. Then the water suddenly stirred, as if something were rising, and my fingers closed on something stringy and slippery like an underwater weed, and I pulled.
A hand broke the surface, then another. I let go of what I had been holding and scrambled back. The hands caught hold of the side of the boat and the boat rocked beneath the weight of that which climbed aboard. There was a sudden, overwelming stench of decay, or rotted flesh. Long, muddy hair fell across a face that was more bone than anything else.
I screamed then, and kept on screaming when the thing opened its eyes and began to speak and I knew that it was my mother.
“Sekenre—”
I covered my face with my hands and merely sobbed, trying to remember her as she had been once, so very long ago.
“Sekenre—” She took hold of my wrists and gently drew my hands away from my face. Her touch was as cold as the Sybil’s kiss.
I turned from her.
“Mother, I did not expect—” I could not say more, and broke into tears again.
“Son, I did not expect to see you in this place either. Truly, it is a terrible thing.”
She pulled me forward and I did not resist, until I lay with my face in her lap, my cheek against her wet, muddy gown, while she gently stroked my forehead with a bony finger. I told her all that had happened then, of Father’s own death, and his return for Hamakina.
“I am your father’s sin, returning to him at last,” she said.
“Did he—?”
“Murder me? Yes, he did. But that is the least part of his offense. He has sinned more against you, Sekenre, and also against the gods.”
“I don’t think he meant to do wrong,” I said. “He says he loves me still.”
“He probably does. Nevertheless, he has done great wrong.”
“Mother, what shall I do?”
Her cold, sharp finger drew a circle around the mark on my forehead.
“It is time for us to resume our journey. The boat has served its purpose now. You must leave it.”
I looked at the black water with ever-increasing dread.
“I don’t understand. Are we to…swim?”
“No, beloved son. We are to walk. Get out of the boat now, and walk.”
I slipped one leg over the side, one foot in the frigid water. I looked back at her uncertainly.
“Go on. Do you doubt this one small miracle, after all you have seen?”
“Mother, I—”
“Go on.”
I obeyed her and stood upon the water. It felt like cold glass beneath my feet. Then she stood next to me, and the boat drifted slowly away. I turned to watch it go, but she took me by the hand and led me in a different direction.
Her touch was like the Sybil’s, a touch of living, frigid iron.
The channel widened, and the evatim were waiting for us. Here the water flowed almost swiftly, making silent waves and eddies and whirlpools behind the dead trees. Many ghosts waded in the shallows, but they did not call out to us. They merely stood there, turning as we passed. One of them was a man in full, gleaming armor, holding his severed head in his hands.
Then there were other boats around us, black and solid and silent, not phantoms of the living, but other funeral boats. We came alongside a long, sleek barge, its pointed ends rising high above the water, a lantern flickering inside its square cabin. The evatim crawled into this cabin and the barge rocked. I could hear them thrashing in there.
At last something huge and dark loomed before us, like a mountain, blotting out the stars. On every side I saw drifting funeral boats following our course, some of them twisting and turning among reeds. One caught on something, or else the evatim tipped it over. A mummy slipped into the water and drifted by, bandages trailing, so close I could have reached out and touched it.
The darkness closed around us very suddenly, shutting out the stars. I heard water rushing, and boats creaking and banging against one another.
“Mother!” I whispered. I reached forward and tugged at her gown. A piece of it came away in my hand. “Is this it? Is this the mouth of Surat-Kemad?”
“No, child,” she said softly. “We have been in the belly of the beast for some time now.”
And that, somehow, was even more terrifying.
IV
Nothing was clear any more, the whole adventure no more than an endless continuity of dream and waking, stark images and featureless mist, pain and terror and dull discomfort.
I had been on the river I knew not how long—hours, days, weeks—and at times it seemed I was inexpressibly weary, and at others that I was back home in my bed, asleep, that all of this was some crazed nightmare. But then I reached out, turning and stretching as one does when awakening—and I touched my mother’s cold, wet, ruined body.
&nb
sp; And the stench of decay was gone from her, and she smelled only of the river mud, like some long-sunken bundle of sticks and rags.
Sometimes there were herons all around us, glowing dimly in the utter darkness like smoldering embers, their faces the faces of men and women, all of them whispering to us, imploring, speaking names—and their voices blended together like a gentle, indistinguishable rustle of wind.
Mostly, we just walked in the darkness, alone. I felt the cold surface of the river beneath my feet, but there was no sense of motion, for all my legs moved endlessly.
Mother spoke. Her voice was soft, coming from the darkness like something remembered in a dream.
I don’t think she was even addressing me. She was merely talking, her memories, her whole life rising into words like sluggish bubbles: scraps of unfinished conversations from her childhood, and, too, much about my father, and me, and Hamakina. For what might have been a very long time or only a few minutes, she sang a lullaby, as if rocking me—or perhaps Hamakina—to sleep.
Then she was silent. I reached out to assure myself that she was still there, and her bony hand found mine and squeezed gently. I asked her what she had learned about the Land of the Dead since she had come here, and she replied softly, “I have learned that I am forever an exile, without a place prepared for me, since I have come unprepared and unannounced into Surat-Kemad’s domain. My place of exile is the river, along which I must wander until the gods die and the worlds are unmade.”
I wept for her then, and asked if this was Father’s doing, and she said that it was.
Then she asked me suddenly, “Sekenre, do you hate him?”
I had been so confident just then that I did, but I could not find an answer.
“I don’t think he meant to do any harm—”
“My son, you must sort out your feelings toward him. That is where you have lost your way, not on the river.”
Again we walked for a long time, still in utter darkness, and all the while I thought of my father and remembered my mother as she had once been. What I wanted, more than anything else, was merely for everything to be restored—Father, Mother, Hamakina, and myself, in our house by the edge of the City of Reeds, as all had been when I was small. Yet, if I had learned any lesson in life thus far, it was that you can’t go back, that our days flow on as relentlessly as the Great River, and what is lost is never restored. I was not wise. I understood very little. But I knew that much.
The father I longed for was merely gone. Perhaps he, too, longed to be restored. I wondered if he knew it was impossible.
I tried to hate him.
The darkness and the silence of the river gave a sense of being in a tunnel, far underground, but were we not more than underground, deep in the belly of Surat-Kemad? We passed from darkness into darkness, always beginning, as if through countless anterooms without ever finding the main hall.
So with our days. So with our strivings, I thought. Whatever we seek to understand yields only a glimmer, and a vast mystery.
So with my father—
Very suddenly, Mother took both my hands in hers and said, “I may only guide you a little way, my son, and we have come that little way. I cannot go where an exile is not welcome, where there is no place prepared—”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“I am not permitted into the god’s house. I must leave you at the doorstep.”
“But you said—”
“That we have been deep within his belly for some time. Yet we are at the doorstep of his house—”
She let go of me. I groped frantically for her, then found her again.
“Mother!”
She kissed both my hands very gently, and her lips, like the Sybil’s, were so cold they burned.
“But you are a hero, my son, and you may take the next step, and the next. That is what it is to be brave, you know, merely to take the next step. I have always known that you were brave.”
“Mother, I—”
Then she sank down into the water. I clung to her. I tried to hold her up, but she sank like a thing of stone, and I lost my grip. At the very last I found myself crawling absurdly about on the cold surface of the river, sliding my hands from side to side like a blind child who has lost marbles on a smooth floor.
I stood up, suddenly shivering, rubbing my arms with my hands.
She was wrong, I told myself. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t brave. I merely had no choice. The Sybil had seen that much.
Yet I never once thought of turning back. The road behind me was impassable, in more ways than one.
I wanted to call on the Sybil again, to tell her I had once more lost my way. In the darkness, without any point of reference except the sensation in my feet to tell me which way was down, I couldn’t even tell if I was facing the way I was supposed to be going, or the way I had come.
In the end, it did not matter. I don’t think direction is a physical thing in the belly of a god. Instead, it is a matter of degree.
Things began to happen swiftly once more. Lights rose around me, like lanterns drifting up from the surface of the water, then above me like stars. The water itself rippled, frigid, oily waves washing over my feet.
I started to run, afraid that whatever magic had held me up was leaving me, now that Mother had. Nothing, it seemed, could be more horrible than to be immersed in that river, there, in the belly of Surat-Kemad.
I ran, and the points of light moved with me, turning as I turned, swirling about me like burning motes on the wind. There was a sound. I thought it was indeed the wind, but then I realized that it was breathing, spittle hissing through teeth, and the lights were eyes, not reflecting light as a dog’s will by a campfire, but actually glowing, like living coals.
The darkness lessened and I saw that I had indeed emerged from a tunnel. Jagged, fissured cliffs loomed on either side of the river, towering to unknowable heights. Far above, the grey stars of the deadlands shone once more.
And the evatim stood around me by the thousands, on the river, scrambling up the cliffs, some of them just standing at the water’s edge, staring. By the light of their eyes and by the pale stars, I could see that I had come at last to the place where the Great River ended and truly began, a vast lake where the white-bodied, crocodile-headed ones paced back and forth, ankle-deep in thick grey mist, their long jaws bobbing up and down.
The evatim bore long hooks on poles, like boathooks, and as I watched one of them would occasionally pause, then reach down with his hook and draw up a human corpse, heave it onto his shoulder and depart, or just stand there, holding the dead in a lover’s embrace.
I realized to my horror that I was standing on a vast sea of corpses. I looked down and I could make them out dimly beneath the water’s surface, inches below my feet: faces, arms, bobbing chests and backs and buttocks jostling slowly in the black water like numberless fish in a net. I jumped back in revulsion, but there was nowhere to jump to.
I started to run again. Somehow, miraculously, the evatim seemed too busy with their tasks to notice me.
For the first time my footfalls made a sound, a heavy splashing and sucking, as if I were running through mud.
Truly this was the place I had read of in the Books of the Dead that Velachronos and I had copied, where the bodies and souls of the dead and the unborn are sorted out by the evatim, who are the thoughts and servants of the terrible god, and each person is judged, and carried to his rightful place, or cast out, or devoured.
I despaired then, for I knew that if Hamakina were here, I would surely never find her.
Yet I took the next step, and the next, and the next, slowing to a fast walk. If that is what it is to be brave, then I was. I continued. The mist swirled around my shins.
I seemed to be nearing the shallows. Reeds rose around me like bare iron rods. I passed one sunken funeral boat, then another, then a long stretch of boards and debris but no corpses or evatim.
A beach spread before me like a pale band on the horiz
on, like a white sunrise. The evatim struggled across it in an endless procession, dragging their burdens from the water.
I stood among the reeds and watched them for a time. Then I took a step forward, and cold water splashed around my knees. I gasped involuntarily at the sudden shock of no longer walking on the water, but in it. There was mud and sand beneath my feet.
I neared the beach, crouched down, trying to conceal myself among the last of the reeds. Gradually I could make out three huge doorways in the cliff-face beyond the end of the white sand. The crocodile-headed ones labored toward them, bearing their burdens through the doorways.
I didn’t doubt that each doorway led to a different place, and that here the final judgement of the god was made. Yes, I was on Surat-Kemad’s doorstep, in the anteroom of his great hall, forever beginning my quest.
But I didn’t know which of the three doors to go through. Surely my Father waited beyond…one of them.
I took the next step, and the next, freely mingling with the evatim, who took no notice of me. We crowded toward one of the doors. I was hemmed in by cold, hard bodies. I let the movement of the great mass of them determine my direction.
The empty face of an old woman bobbed in front of my face, her corpse slung over the shoulder of her bearer, her open mouth black, frozen as if perpetually about to shout or kiss or devour.
Once more the cliffs rose around me. Once more some of the evatim scrambled up the jagged stones, their glowing eyes seeming to rise into the sky like stars. Those who had climbed, I saw, set their burdens down on ledges and began to feast.
I turned away quickly and stared at the ground, and at the almost luminously pale feet and legs of the evatim.
The sides of the great doorway were carven smooth, its iron gates flung wide. The gates resembled, more than anything else, enormous, gaping jaws.
I tried to peer ahead again, but I could not see over the mass of the evatim. I jumped up. I turned and looked back, but only masses of crocodile-faces stared back at me, like a swirling shifting cloud filled with burning eyes.
The Weird Fiction Megapack Page 7