by Jeffrey Ford
The taste of that candy now mingles with the intoxicating warmth of the beauty. What was once an iceball behind my eyes is now a ripe orange, dripping its sweetness into my bloodstream. I see the Beyond, and the late-summer sun hanging in the sky. There is the hunter, alone with only the black dog for companionship. I begin to write, knowing I have fared better than he with the natives of my own respective wilderness.
empty book of the soul
It was dark, unmercifully hot, and he could feel a flat surface pressing upon his face. The first clear thought that came to him was that the Silent Ones had buried him alive. In reaction to the fear of suffocation, he tried to sit up. When he did, the hard leather cover of the book, now empty of all of its pages, slid from his face down into his lap, and the bright sun suddenly blinded him.
Although he was relieved that he had not been entombed, he was sweating profusely, and his head ached. There was an infernal itching at the center of his forehead, and he scratched it. He sat quietly with his eyes closed for a few minutes and worked to compose himself and regulate his erratic heartbeat. Slowly, he opened his lids against the harsh light and saw Wood lying in front of him, tongue drooping down, panting wildly.
Beyond Wood, there was a landscape composed of nothing but pink sand. He turned to the right and left, and saw everywhere tall dunes without so much as a single weed growing among them. To his left, there lay on the ground a bulging waterskin. To his right were heaped his bow and quiver of arrows, his striking stones to make fire, his hat and knife. His pack was missing.
“At the bottom of the waterfall with the rifle, no doubt,” he thought. Staring straight ahead at the horizon where reality rippled in the intense heat, it slowly dawned on him that he had been abandoned in the middle of a desert.
“So much for my friends, the Silent Ones, and so much for their silence,” he thought as he recalled the chorus of derisive laughter—the last sound to grace his hearing before the drug had done its work.
“Pa-ni-ta,” he said in a whisper, repeating the queen’s message. “It most likely means ‘Fools will burn.’”
Then, at once, the weight of what had happened descended upon him, and he felt all the bitterness of betrayal. A mournful sound came, unexpectedly, from deep within. His body heaved, and he cried without tears. He was alone, left to perish by the very people he thought would teach him to survive in the Beyond. Grabbing the corner of the empty book of the soul, he tossed it away onto the sand. The dog stood with great effort, as if the heat had in some way increased gravity, and moved slowly up next to the hunter.
“I can’t go on,” Cley told his companion. “We are more lost than ever and not an inch closer to our destination.” He had no desire to stand and decided simply to sit where he was, letting the sun bake him into unconsciousness and then death. As he reached for the waterskin in order to allow Wood to drink, he heard the distinct sound of a birdcall from behind him. At first he believed the heat had cooked his mind, but then he heard the sound again, and, from a different location, another bird answered the first.
Curiosity finally won out over his depression, and he slowly, unsteadily, stood and turned to see what type of heat-generated illusion was croaking at his ill fate. He was dizzy from getting up, and the sight his eyes fixed upon made him dizzier still. There, lying a hundred yards away, was a huge oasis, a veritable city of lush vegetation, like a green jewel set in the burning pink sand. He cleared his eyes with his hands, unsure if what he was seeing wasn’t a mirage. After blinking repeatedly, turning around and then back three times, the swaying trees, the fan-leafed ferns, the bright red and purple blossoms, static explosions of color amidst the undergrowth, were still there. A bird, a flying rainbow, with an exceedingly long tail and wings that rolled like waves, lit into the sky and disappeared among the trees.
This forest was like none other that he had encountered. All of the vegetation, from the boughs of almond-shaped leaves to the tangled riot of brush beneath, was a resilient green. It was as if the force of the desert’s heat had compressed the very possibility of life into a circular area of two hundred acres. “Another island of sorts,” thought Cley as he pushed the ferns and thick, dangling vines aside with his elbows. Above, the ceiling of lush growth was teeming with birds while all around him was the whir and buzz of insect life. He wondered what other creatures might dwell in such a magical place and kept the bow, arrow in place, at the ready in front of him.
As he brushed past a certain branch, its many leaves came to life in a storm of butterflies. The backs of their wings were dull, but now they revealed the powder blue shade of the fronts. They swarmed upward, all together, twisting and looping, sharing one mind, and when Wood barked at their sudden flight, the sound dispersed them, and they were like a shattered pane of clear summer sky. Cley watched as they joined together again on a single branch, turning back into the drab leaves they had begun as.
A shiny black hard-shelled insect, as big as a rat, with twitching antennae and vicious-looking mandibles, scuttled up the partitioned trunk of a tree that bent toward the ground beneath the weight of its prickly, yellow fruit.
In a clearing, the floor of which was made up of pink sand that reminded Cley of coral dust swirling through the ruins of the Well-Built City, they discovered a half-dozen man-sized mounds of varying heights. Moving between them, around them, and into them were red ants engaged in a hundred single-file parades. At the peak of one anthill, a cluster of workers struggled to fit the eyeball of some unfortunate creature down an opening they could not seem to grasp was too small.
When it screamed at him, drawing his attention, Cley took aim and fired an arrow at what at first appeared to be a disembodied female head hanging by its hair from a thick vine that had grown horizontally between two trees. The shot hit its mark, and when the hunter and the dog inspected their prey, it became clear that it was a bat, whose strange markings, when upside down, wings folded, looked for all the world like a human face with wide eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth. Although the arrows were precious, he did not retrieve this one. The false visage reminded him too much of another from a false world.
They passed through a thicket of plants with stems that reached four feet above the top of the hunter’s hat. Drooping down were prodigious white blossoms, the width of which he measured against his outstretched arms and found his reach inadequate by a few inches on either side. The petals overlapped and spiraled toward the center of the blossom, where a black circle oozed a clear viscous fluid. Every so often a droplet of this sap fell, and, in its descent, hardened into a small pebble before hitting the sand. These floral diamonds did not last for long, though. Before a minute could pass, they evaporated into a thin trail of white smoke that carried the scent of citrus.
Cley washed his face in the pond. Kneeling on a bed of moss, he leaned out over the still water and cupped some into his hand to drink. He told Wood it tasted clean, and the dog joined him. When Cley was finished drinking, he removed his hat and brought up another draught of water to splash on his head. The coolness of it quelled the headache he had had since waking in the desert.
As he hunched over the pond, letting the water drip from his face, he peered down at his own reflection. He had not seen himself for a very long time, since well before his hair had grown long enough to tie back and the beard had grown in. The man below, looking up, momentarily startled him. Now he knew the person that the Silent Ones knew, and he wondered if his frightful aspect had made them ill at ease. He looked every bit a man of the wilderness.
Bringing his hand up, he touched the scar on his cheek where the demon had drawn blood with its barbed tail. It was while inspecting this feature of his face that he saw another. Upon noticing it, he could not believe he had not spotted it sooner. In the center of his forehead, directly above his eyes, there was a design. He leaned closer to the water and now could make out clearly the image of a thin blue snake coiled eight times around a central point that was its head. The final loop came half
way around the spiral, and the end of the tail bent, pointing due north.
Just before nightfall, they reached the opposite end of the oasis and stared out on more pink dunes rolling off toward the setting sun. It was as he had expected it would be. Still feeling the wound of his betrayal by the Silent Ones, he did not have the will to continue north. He decided to stay in this new forest for a few days of rest before starting his journey across the sands.
They left the edge of the desert and returned a quarter of a mile into the green island to a clearing Cley had noticed earlier. It was difficult finding firewood, because everything was so alive and full of sap. Eventually they came upon a lone tree that had died of some disease, and the hunter hacked its branches off easily with the stone knife. By the time he managed to get a spark to leap from the stones and set the kindling going, night had come, and the area around their camp was made fantastic by the intermittent blinking of fireflies.
In addition to the flying squirrel Cley roasted for Wood, he had collected a variety of the different types of fruit that grew plentifully in every quadrant of the oasis. Some of them he had already tried, and although a few specimens were bitter to the point of being inedible, many more proved to be sweet and full of juicy pulp.
As the dog ate the charred strips of squirrel and Cley worked away at one last white plum, a refreshing breeze began to blow through the forest. Yellow moths circled the fire, a few giving their lives to be one with the flames.
“What do you say?” the hunter asked the dog. “Is this the Earthly Paradise?”
Wood looked at him. He rose and began moving around the area as if searching for something.
Cley laughed. “We left it in the desert,” he said, yawning.
The dog whined and finally came to rest by his side.
“There were no more pages. They were all devoured by our hosts,” he told his companion.
Wood continued to complain.
“I’ll tell you a story,” he said, and pretended he was opening a large book.
The dog closed his eyes and rested his head on his front paws as Cley began speaking.
“Once there was a man, who woke one day to find a blue snake tattooed on his forehead. He wondered where it had come from and why it was there. ‘What can this mean?’ he asked his friend, the dog, but the dog had never heard of such foolishness, and wasn’t about to start. The blue snake twirled around itself in a spiral whose center was its head. At first the man wondered if it was there, between his eyes, to help him focus. Then he wondered if this snake was supposed to be the snake, Kiftash, in The Legend of the Alluring Woman of Constance and Her Last Wish, or just meant to represent a circle without end. Some snakes, as you know, are poisonous, and yet sometimes this poison can be made into a medicine to cure the sick. Perhaps this was a snake that rattled its tail or danced to music or, being blue, was discovered curled up in a rock in the heart of Mount Gronus. Snakes have always been treacherous fellows, but …”
Cley stopped speaking and listened to the crackling of the dying fire. One lone moth still circled the flame. Wood lifted his head, then returned to sleep. The night wind moved among the trees and carried the scent of blossoms. Something was creeping through the underbrush, and Cley thought to himself, “I need my knife,” but in the process of acting on that thought, he forgot about it, and his eyelids closed.
Perhaps a butterfly, a falling leaf, a blossom on the breeze brushed against the hunter’s right cheek, and he brought his hand up to swat it away. In his slowly rousing consciousness his last thought from the night before fired like a spark in his mind. He sat up quickly, reaching for his knife, and opened his eyes on a new day.
Wood was still asleep, which was unusual. Now Cley noticed that lying on the sand in front of the dog was the empty leather binding from the book of the soul.
“So much for my stories,” Cley whispered to himself. He pictured the dog, sneaking away from the camp, tearing through the forest at night and then breaking free of the trees onto the pink sand illuminated by moonlight.
“That flinking book is a curse for sure,” he said, then poked Wood in the rear end with the toe of his boot.
The dog woke immediately.
“Let’s hunt,” Cley said.
Wood rose and stretched, his front legs forward, his back in the air, while Cley looked around for where he had laid his hat. He remembered taking it off just before they had sat down to eat dinner, but now it was nowhere in sight. He was about to question the dog, suspecting retribution for having left the book out in the desert, but then he noticed something in the sand.
The hunter dropped to his knees and spread his arms for support, bringing his head down close to the ground. The dog came up next to him and also looked at the ground. Cley traced the outline of it with his index finger as if to validate the discovery.
It was a footprint, not an imprint of one of the soles of his boots but a large vague outline of what appeared to be a human foot. He looked up at another spot in the sand. There were more, leading off into the forest.
A scream came suddenly from behind them. Cley reached for his knife and spun around on his knees with the blade pointing out just in time to see the yellow bird in the branch overhead scream again. He looked back at Wood and motioned with his hand to his mouth—their sign to stay quiet. The hunter stood, and with the distinct sensation that he was being watched, turned slowly, peering into the tangle of growth.
They followed the shaggy footprints west through the oasis toward an area they had not yet explored. Cley wondered if the hat thief might be one of the Silent Ones left behind to spy and play tricks on him. “Who else would be about in such a far-flung place?” he asked himself. He ruled out the apparition of the eyeless woman, since she left no prints when he had encountered her in the demon forest. Then he had a sudden memory of the face that was inscribed in blue outline on the queen’s backside. He saw it again in his mind’s eye, and realized where he knew it from. “Brisden,” he said, and stopped walking. Wood held up and waited for him to continue following the trail.
“I’ll be damned if it wasn’t Brisden, that tub of words,” he said. He thought back to his journey through Drachton Below’s memory and recalled the corpulent philosopher, who had saved the dream woman, Anotine, and himself from death at the hands of the Delicate. It seemed like another lifetime when last Cley had known him as the symbolic representation of a concept in the mnemonic world. As he later learned, all of those he had met in that reality had antecedents in this one, in real life. How could the queen have Brisden’s portrait on her left buttock if he had never been or was not in the Beyond? Perhaps the Silent Ones had brought Cley to meet the man, since he was also pale-skinned and had obviously at one time been a subject of the realm like Cley. “But what are the chances?” the hunter asked himself. “And why would he steal my hat?”
Late in the morning, just before Cley was about to stop and pick some fruit, he and Wood passed a shallow pond covered with lily pads. From each of the round leaf bases grew a violet flower whose petals were sharp spikes. Half-submerged in the water and surrounded by the floating blossoms was the skeleton of a Sirimon—the bones gone green and the left horn cracked off. The sight of its sharp teeth startled the hunter, and he raised the bow in self-defense before he knew what he was doing. At the last moment, he held the arrow back.
Sitting beneath an overhanging frond, surrounded by the gnawed cores of red fruit, Cley and Wood dozed in the afternoon heat. They had searched for hours and eventually lost the trail of prints in the sand. The western end of the oasis seemed much like the area they had traversed the previous day. The hunter had killed a small wild pig for dinner, which was lying next to the waterskin. He kept his bow close by and the knife in his hand should anyone or anything try to steal another of his meager belongings.
He began to doubt that what they saw that morning in their camp were human footprints. The possibility that some other creature could have made them seemed all the more likel
y. He remembered his ruminations about meeting Brisden in the heart of the Beyond and laughed quietly to himself.
“Madness,” he thought, and as the notion passed from his mind, his hat passed along over the tops of a stand of tall ferns that lay across the sandy clearing before him.
The hunter sat upright and watched as the black, broad-brimmed shape sailed by. “Wood,” he called quietly to the dog. His companion looked up and saw the hat moving off into the forest. In seconds, they were on their feet. Cley grabbed the bow and arrows and was off after the thief. They broke through the ferns and saw in the distance, through the mesh of tree trunks, vines, and tall ferns, a vague figure disappearing into the green. Cley began running, and the dog was soon bounding ahead of him.
For the remainder of the afternoon the hat led them on a chase through the exotic forest of the oasis. They stumbled past tranquil pools, gigantic flowers, birds with the most outlandish plumage, a million insect wonders, but noticed none of it, their sights fixed firmly on the quarry which seemed always to stay at the same distance—close enough for them to make out the black lid but far enough away so as to keep its wearer’s identity a mystery.
Near dusk, they realized that they had not seen the hat for an hour and were running blindly with no purpose. Cley called Wood to him, and they turned back, the hunter trying to remember the direction toward the spot where he hoped the pig he had killed would not have been set upon by scavengers.
As they made their way around the undergrowth and between the trees in the failing light, Cley was no longer nervous about the stranger, who was obviously much more afraid than he and Wood were. In fact, he desired a confrontation, his curiosity now ablaze.