by Jeffrey Ford
I landed with a spectacular but unnecessary fluttering that lifted the coral dust off the plaza and sent her hair up over her head. The last thing that I expected was that she would point at me and laugh. At first I was wounded by her reaction, but the sound of her joy was infectious, and I could barely restrain myself from joining her.
“Do I amuse you?” I asked.
“The spectacles,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand. “When they draw you in the newspaper at Wenau, they make you a fierce monster.”
I had to smile.
“You’re not, though, are you?” she said quietly.
“If only you knew, my dear,” I said.
“Do you remember the river?” she asked.
I nodded. “Was it four years ago?”
“Six,” she said. “I was seven then.”
“Very good,” I told her, and then didn’t know what else to say.
“Those boys were frightened of you. The one with the hat is my brother, Caine. The other one is our friend, Remmel. My name is Emilia.” She held her hand out to me.
Those long fingers, that thin arm, looked too delicate for me to touch. I bowed slightly instead, and said, “Misrix.”
“I’ve come to tell you that not everyone in Wenau is afraid of you. Many have read the books of Cley and know that you helped him and us. Many don’t believe the Physiognomist and think you are a wild animal. Those in the church say you are the spirit of evil,” she said as if performing a speech she had memorized.
“It is likely that they are all in some part correct,” I said.
“Because you pulled me from the river, I knew you were gentle. You will not hurt me, will you?” Her eyes went wide, and she lightly touched a locket that hung from a chain around her neck.
“That would never do,” I said. “You are my first guest. Would you like me to show you the ruins?”
“Yes,” she said.
I started walking, and she followed me. This was an opportunity I had long waited for—someone to whom I could explain the ruins. Throughout the long, lonely years, I had become a kind of archeologist, digging artifacts out of the chaos, researching the lives and lifestyles of its citizens, reading the histories in the library, poring over surviving documents from each of the ministries. Now that I had the chance to expound, I was tongue-tied by the youth and honesty of the only one ever interested in listening.
We had walked a hundred yards in silence, and I was beginning to sweat, when she said, “Can I touch your wings?”
“Of course,” I told her.
She came close to me and reached out her left index finger, running it along one bone and then down across the membrane.
“Not as smooth as I thought,” she said.
“Smooth is not my specialty,” I told her.
“Tell me about this place, Misrix,” she said.
So I began, and although she was only a child, I decided to be as honest with her as possible. “All of this you see around you,” I said, “all of this destruction, this coral mess, and the metal and human remains that lie amidst it, when added together, combine to tell a story. A great, grand story. A tragedy for sure, a cautionary tale, but a love story nonetheless …”
I showed her the laboratory with its miniature lighthouse that still projected the forms and sounds of songbirds, the only remaining complete statue of a miner, in blue spire, brought here from Anamasobia, those sections of remaining architecture that might give an idea of the original grandeur of the place, the electric elevator that once led to the Top of the City but now only traveled four floors, the underground passages, and the blasted shell of the false paradise. There was, of course, much more. She was a great listener, only speaking when she had a question that could not wait. I appreciated her silence, her focused attention, her mere presence.
I ended the tour after two hours in my room, where I house the Museum of the Ruins, my own natural history installation of those objects I believe to hold an integral part of the essence of the Well-Built City. We strolled up and down the rows, and I showed her the head of the mechanical gladiator, the old shudder cups, etc. When we came to the back row, I took down the core of the fruit of Paradise that Cley, himself, had eaten, and let her smell it.
“I see a beautiful garden surrounded by ice,” she said as I held the core up to her nose. For some reason, the look on her face almost made me weep.
From the museum, we went down the hall to the library, and I showed her the volumes and my writing desk with the pen in its holder and the pages from my previous night’s work neatly piled.
“What are you writing?” she asked.
“About Cley,” I said. “I’m trying to find him with words.”
“People who believed Cley’s writings in Wenau gathered money and sent an expedition a few months ago to the Beyond to also find him,” she said.
“A mistake,” I told her. “I wish them well, but I’m afraid what they will find there is death.”
“They took a lot of guns,” she said.
I could not help but laugh.
She was unfazed by my reaction. “Cley has become a hero for them,” she said.
“I wish them well,” I repeated.
Then she pointed to my desk, at the jeweled box I keep in the corner of it. It is fixed with red stones and fake gold—just a trinket, but something that I have always liked since finding it underground by the site of the false paradise.
“What is that for?” she asked.
“Nothing,” was the real answer, and I was going to give it to her, but at the last moment, I had an idea. After our tour through the ruins, she knew most everything about them, but I thought as long as there was some element of mystery here, she might return again.
“That box holds a powerful secret,” I told her, knowing by her obvious intelligence that she would be susceptible to wonder. “I’m not ready to show it to anyone,” I said. “I would have to know that person very well indeed.”
I thought she would ask me to open it for her, but she didn’t. All she said was, “I understand; I have a box like that at home, myself.”
“And at home, they do not mind that you and your brother have run off to the ruins?” I asked.
She looked away from me, down one of the long aisles of the library, as she spoke. “We were supposed to be going to Latrobia to visit relatives. I made the boys follow me to the ruins by telling them they were cowards if they didn’t come.”
“How were you traveling?” I asked.
“On horseback. We had two horses—Caine and I on one and Remmel on the other. I know they have probably taken them and gone back to Wenau to tell my mother that I have become lunch for the demon,” she said.
“Come quickly,” I said. “We will easily beat them to the village.”
As it turned out, I flew her home. I cannot recount the details of that journey because as I now fly in my memory, I do not pass over the fields of Harakun, but instead, move at the speed of thought over the flat land of the Beyond. The beauty has me in its arms, and I am empty-handed, searching for Cley. Below, the wilderness is shaking off the spell of winter.
the hunter is hunted
Wildflowers sprouted, and the grass came up so quickly that the hunter could swear he heard it growing in the stillness of the night. Every day was deep blue, warm sun, and a soft breeze blowing from the north. In the late afternoons, the light shone down in golden shafts through billowing white clouds. The plain appeared endless in all directions, perfectly flat and treeless. An ancient glacier had, in its retreat, deposited smooth, oblong boulders here and there, and Cley thought of them as giant loaves of bread. He and Wood were like ants traversing the dinner table of the Beyond. Through the winter, the nights had seemed to last for weeks, but now, it was the days that were near-infinite.
Fresh water was plentiful, for there were streams that crisscrossed the land. They hunted, always with the bow, small game—rabbits, diminutive hogs with bushy tails, a tasty red lizard that ran o
n two legs, and a tall, flightless bird of beautiful green plumage. This same awkward creature’s eggs made good breakfast food. Its nests were so easily discovered, small mounds of mud and twigs, that Cley wondered how the species has been able to survive. It was a disappointment not to find the herds of deer he had hoped for, but he was more than willing to trade them for the absence of demons.
Wood pulled the tree-branch sled, which glided over the new grass as effortlessly as a boat on water. It carried the tent, the rifle, and Cley’s winter clothes. The hunter hefted his own pack and carried the bow slung over his left shoulder, the quiver, over his right. The dog’s chest and shoulders had thickened with the daily exercise, and Cley’s calf muscles had swelled to make his pant legs tight at the bottoms. Although he wore the wide-brimmed hat every day, he removed it at the noontime break to let the sun penetrate his head and melt away the memories of slaughter. With this practice, his face tanned to the same deep brown as his arms.
Nights were still cool, but the hunter had perfected his use of the stones in building a fire. For fuel, he used a type of gnarled bush that, when given one tug, pulled right up out of the earth. These grew everywhere, and to Cley’s surprise never put out leaves or flowers. They burned very slowly, their branches filled with a thick, aromatic resin that when lit gave off a scent not unlike jasmine.
No longer in the forest, beneath the demon-haunted canopy or in the darkness of the cave, Cley viewed the night sky in its entirety. There were so many stars—bright dust scattered as if by a maniac’s hand. He often thought, while lying on his back and staring straight up, that he was gazing into a kind of ocean. His mind wandered out past the moon, diving like a swimmer into the spiraled depths of the universe. Its immensity no longer frightened him as it had during his first night on the plain. One moment he was flying toward the constellation of Sirimon, the serpent from whose womb, mythology told, the world was born, the next, he felt the sun on his face and Wood tugging at his boot to continue the journey.
On the second day of the fifth week of their trek across the flat-land, Cley decided that they had put enough distance between themselves and the demons. It took Wood well into the morning to comprehend that it was a day of rest and that they would not be starting out, as usual, toward the north. The dog pulled at the hunter’s boot and barked. He trotted a few yards off and then looked back and growled. Cley brought out the book to divert the dog’s attention from the demands of routine.
Breakfast was eggs and hog steaks. Cley checked all of the joints of the sled to see if they were secure. He inventoried his pack to remind himself of what he had and what he had used. When he came across the last box of shells for the rifle, he took one out and held it in his hand. He had not fired the weapon in more than a month.
By the side of a stream, he trimmed his hair and beard with the stone knife while whistling the tune of “That Soft Eclipse,” a love song he remembered from his days in the Well-Built City. Then he washed himself, his underwear, his socks, and set the laundry out to dry in the sun. It was in the midst of this task that he got a strong urge to fire the rifle. “It would be a wonderful thing,” he thought, “to hear the report of the gun split the silence of the plain.”
After lunch, he took the weapon off the sled. He knew it was wasteful to fire it for the sake of hearing the noise, so he decided to at least go in search of a rabbit. When the dog saw the rifle, he started bounding around the hunter. They left the camp, heading in a westward direction toward a pile of boulders that looked, from a distance, like the form of a sleeping giant.
Not so much as a lizard showed itself. Cley scanned the sky for crows or buzzards. It was perfectly blue and empty all the way to the horizon. Since natural cover was so scarce on the plain, he held out hope that something would be hiding in the shadow of the boulders.
As they neared the huge rocks, Wood ran ahead, barking, and disappeared behind them. Cley stood a few yards back with the rifle aimed and ready for whatever was flushed out. He waited, but nothing bolted into the sunlight. The dog’s bark changed to a growl, and, bringing the gun down, the hunter ran around to the opposite side of the formation. He worried that Wood had cornered a snake. In their travels they had seen some large ones, all a startling bright yellow, slithering through the new grass.
What he found was not a snake, or not the snake he had envisioned. Wood crouched in his attack stance, the hair along the ridge of his back raised, his teeth bared, facing off against the skeletal remains of what had once been an enormous creature.
The skull itself was nearly as large as the dog, resembling a cow’s but with a much longer snout. Its mouth was open and filled with rows of perfectly preserved, needlelike teeth. The eye sockets were big enough for Cley to easily pass his fist through. Stretching out for fifteen feet behind the head was a body composed of a spine with pointed, half-circle ribs curving down and resting their tips on the ground. Both the length of the ribs and the width of the spine diminished toward the tail, which ended in a three-foot-long, tapered bone needle.
Cley circled the remains, rubbing his hand on the smooth, sun-bleached bones. He noticed the lack of legs or arms. “Sirimon,” he whispered, and the thought that one or more of these things might still be roaming the plain made him nervous.
“Just old bones,” he said to Wood. The dog relaxed somewhat, but was still visibly agitated by the skeleton. The hunter put the rifle butt to his shoulder, took aim, and, without hesitation, pulled the trigger. The gun’s report was like a violent explosion that, for a heartbeat, devoured the serenity of the plain. Smashing through the skull, chips of bone flying in its wake, the bullet lodged in a rib halfway to the pointed tail. Cley instantly regretted the reckless act.
He moved away quickly and whistled for Wood to follow. A few yards later, they both stopped in their tracks. The dog was silent. The hunter scanned the empty sky. “Where are the birds?” he asked. They hadn’t seen a rabbit or any other creature all morning. He squinted as if trying to see more keenly—no lizards, no ants, not even the gnats that had been their constant companions from the first day on the plain. Now, even the breeze had vanished.
“Where are the damn bugs?” he said.
At midafternoon, Cley sat up from where he had been trying to relax since their return from the boulders.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
He began quickly to gather the clothes and supplies laid out around the camp. Refilling the pack, he readied himself to resume the journey. His hands shook as he fixed the harness over Wood’s head and chest. Before they set out, he packed the bow and arrows on the sled and again lifted the rifle. Removing his pack, he rummaged through it for the box of shells and loaded the gun.
They moved away from the campsite at double their usual pace, and it didn’t take long for motion to alleviate the vague anxiety that had beset them more than the gnats ever had. He wondered if the problem was simply that they had broken their routine, but he continued to hold the rifle close with both hands. After the first mile, they slowed to their normal pace.
From a great distance, he saw them shining in the late-afternoon light, and knew from their reflection that they were not boulders. Although he meant to avoid them, for some reason he continued on a path leading directly into their midst. Three more skeletons of the Sirimon creature lay clustered together in the ankle-deep grass. Two of the specimens were perfectly preserved—tail, ribs, and skull intact. The third had broken apart, its skull lying on the ground with a purple wildflower growing up through the left eye socket. He did not stop to touch them. In fact, he increased his pace. When he looked back and saw Wood sniffing the remains, he yelled angrily for him to hurry. For the miles that followed into evening, the ground they crossed was littered with fragments of skull, short lengths of spinal column still supporting a rib or two, and even one sharp tail end, sticking straight up out of the dirt.
Night was upon them when they made camp in a spot that might have been any other at which they had stoppe
d since entering the plain. He removed the harness from the dog and wondered, for the first time, if they would ever escape the flatland.
During the day’s march, they had seen and killed only one rabbit, and that they found sitting out in the open, shivering and confused. When Wood barked, the sorry creature did not even run but waited for Cley to remove the bow from the sled and nock an arrow into place. The ease with which he killed it made him suspicious, but there was no other meat.
“Like a painting,” he said, considering the stillness of the landscape.
The fire was built, and they ate the confused rabbit along with some roots of the kierce blossom he had collected on previous days. For all of his uneasiness about it, the food tasted fine. Wood moved up close to Cley after the meal, and they read a few pages about the energy in nature that linked all individual souls together. “What a poozle,” he said, and laughed in the midst of his reading. The dog growled quietly, as if to say, “Read on, you fool.”
When he bedded down beneath the open sky, his errant thoughts brought him images of the Sirimon, slithering through the grass. The night, though, was as static as the day. When he finally held in check his imagination and really listened, he heard nothing. Still, he drew the loaded rifle closer to his side.
While they slept, the half-moon that had cast a silver glow on the plain disappeared behind a bank of dark clouds that moved without a breeze, flying, as if of their own volition, in from the west. Eventually, the stars were also obliterated from view. Early in the morning, just before sunrise, a fine misty drizzle began to fall. Cley tossed and turned in the dampness, deep in a dream of Doralice, the prison island upon which he had once been incarcerated. He stood on the shore, close to the breakers, staring out to sea, and beside him was the monkey, Silencio. When the waves crashed, the spray washed over the pair, and this spray stood in for the soaking Cley took in reality from the weather of the Beyond. The monkey pointed out to sea at a ship in the distance, opened his mouth wide as if to scream, but instead there came an explosion that blasted the hunter into consciousness.