by Jeffrey Ford
“I have my own word for them,” said Cley, staring into the light captured by the crystal.
“They have marked you. That is unusual since you come from the other side of the demon forest. Through wearing the hat, I felt your sense of betrayal concerning them. They are trying to help you. Do not lose that stone.”
“Are they in league with Pa-ni-ta?” he asked.
“They were at one time her enemy, but things change. They obviously left you where you and I could find each other,” said the foliate, and then looked back overhead.
“Am I a word now to them?” asked the hunter.
“You are the word for you,” said Vasthasha.
Cley shook his head. “When I came to the Beyond, I thought I would be escaping such complications and convolutions. The farther I travel, the more complex and confusing it all becomes. Back in the demon forest, I understood—kill them before they kill you, find food, make fire.”
“The life of one termite here is more complex than all the history of your realm,” said Vasthasha. “Simplicity will be yours in the grave.”
“Comforting,” said Cley.
Then the foliate suddenly sat upright, the fires of his eyes flared, and the tendrils that were his hair straightened.
“What is it?” asked the hunter.
Wood got up instantly, reacting to Cley’s distress.
“It’s coming,” said Vasthasha.
Cley got onto his knees and reached for the bow. “A creature?” he asked.
“No, the autumn,” said the foliate. “It is close.”
The green man bowed his head and fell into silence. Cley watched the sky, waiting for Vasthasha to speak again, but he did not.
The waves of the ocean broke a hundred yards to their left. It was an overcast day, and a light drizzle was falling.
“There are demons in this forest,” said the foliate.
“Can we avoid it?” asked Cley.
“No, I want to show you something important at its heart,” said Vasthasha.
In among the trees, whose trunks were straight and tall, the sand of the beach gave way to a carpet of brown needles and leaves. Cley lifted the bow, and Wood hung back beside him as if understanding that danger might be close by.
They continued through the dim morning, Cley now recalling the terror engendered by demons. He tried to remember how he had found the courage to battle the creatures with such tenacity, and all he could dredge from his mind was his fear of them.
It was late afternoon and though the rain had tapered off the sun had still not burned through the mist. They stopped to rest and eat some roots and mushrooms. For Wood there was a piece of deer meat left from the previous night’s meal.
The large, round, orange heads of the fungus tasted like cooked apples and the roots like licorice. As the foliate split the last disk to share between them, Cley noticed that the small white flowers that had dotted the thatch of his green guide’s body had all turned brown as if singed at the edges. Then he saw, across Vasthasha’s chest, a pattern of red leaves mixed in with the usual emerald.
He was about to note the change to his companion when he was interrupted by the cry of a demon as it swooped from branch to branch above them. The hunter looked up and spotted three of the creatures in the tattered autumnal canopy overhead. He lunged for his bow as two of them dived, their wings outstretched.
Wood rose to the attack as if it was only yesterday that they had left their cave. Cley drew an arrow from his quiver, but fear made his hands tremble, and he fumbled in the act of nocking the shaft onto the string. In the next moment, he was flat on his back, with the weight of a demon upon him.
The creature reared back and opened its mouth to display long fangs. The hunter tried to reach for his knife, but his arms were pinned. He waited for the thing to sink its teeth into his face, but then saw a green vine twirling rapidly around his attacker’s throat. In the next instant, five sharp roots poked through its chest where its heart might be. Blood splattered, covering the hunter.
The demon fell backward onto the ground, dead, to reveal Vasthasha, whose fingers and hair were now growing back into themselves. Cley wasted no time, but loaded an arrow and looked to see where Wood was. The dog was running madly in circles, chased by two demons. The hunter fired at the larger of the monsters. The arrow pierced one side of its head and the tip of the shaft poked through the other. There was a shrill scream as the wounded demon fell into the arms of his brother. The unharmed creature lifted the dying one, flapped his wings, and ascended into the treetops.
They survived three demon attacks in as many days. Vasthasha proved to be a more than able warrior. On one occasion Cley watched as the foliate shoved his sharp root fingers into a demon’s back. A moment later, branches poked out of the creature’s eyes just before its skull literally exploded outward with the force of a spiked bush growing with incredible speed from within.
“I am invisible to them,” the foliate told him. “They think I am any plant or tree in the forest. Not being meat has its advantages here.”
They pushed on through the dangerous landscape, killing when they had to, running when they could. In the very hour of the particular day on which Cley began to question, to himself, the prudence of the course they were taking, they passed through a thicket of tall, white birch, and there, before them, across a large field, lay the ancient city of dripping spires that the hunter recognized from his dreams and mnemonic journey as the Palishize.
As they trod the winding, shell-cobbled streets, passing around the broad bases of the mounds, Cley half-expected to see the ghostly form of Bataldo hail him from one of the dark openings that riddled the sides of the crude structures.
“I have been here before in both my mind and that of Misrix’s, the demon,” Cley explained to Vasthasha.
“And now in the body,” said the foliate.
“Why does this deserted city figure so prominently in all that has to do with the Beyond?” he asked.
“This is not a city, Cley,” said the foliate. “The best I can describe it, using the words and ideas I gathered from your hat, is that it is an earth machine.”
“It is not a dwelling place for an ancient people from the sea? This is what I had gathered from my psychic and psychotic machinations,” said Cley.
“It was created by our enemy, the O, who were a people from beneath the surface of the inland ocean. Although they walked upright with the stature of men, like ourselves, they had long fish tails, webbed fingers and toes, a shimmering red, scaled flesh, and a sharp fin that ran from the forehead to the center of the back,” said the foliate.
Cley whistled to Wood, who was about to enter one of the dark holes at the base of a mound, the spire of which reached a good two hundred feet in the air.
“I know that the Palishize is laid out in a large spiral,” said the hunter.
“Yes, it draws and focuses the energy of the earth. Its presence disrupted the power of Pa-ni-ta. I and the other foliates were sent here to kill the O. They died easily when we could wrap our vines around their necks, but they were a shrewd people. They had many inventions, many strange and miraculous devices.”
“How many did you kill?” asked Cley.
“More than I can count,” said Vasthasha. “Then they infected my kind with a type of mite that caused us to be unable to regenerate each spring. When our raiding parties were hacked to pieces, they ceased to be. Pa-ni-ta saved me and carried my seed when she fled. One of their assassins overtook her as she was nearing the boundary of the Beyond. She had gone south in search of help.”
“There was the body of a fish-tailed creature in the burial chamber where I found her remains,” said the hunter.
“Yes, she and a small contingent of her people were wintering in that cave. Those who were not killed off through the autumn by the demons were slain by the O assassin. Pa-ni-ta’s ghost reached across the boundary of death to kill her murderer. She took him down in the burial chamber as he was layin
g the last of the children’s bodies next to hers,” said Vasthasha.
“And then, in the form of a seed, you waited to be reawakened?” asked Cley.
“In the sleep of the seed I was told to find one from outside the boundary of the wilderness. Only an outsider can reverse the treachery of the O,” said the foliate.
“And I am that outsider?” asked Cley.
“You will profit through helping by success in your journey,” said Vasthasha.
“What is the nature of my task?” asked the hunter.
“We will know this only in the spring,” said the foliate.
“What is at stake?”
“The very consciousness of the Beyond.”
On their second day within the walls of the Palishize, Vasthasha led Cley and the black dog into one of the openings. The tunnel ran through the center of the mound and then angled downward. They traveled through a pitch-black corridor for over an hour before a circle of light could be seen far in the distance. As they made their way slowly toward it, the foliate told Cley that the experience was like being reborn.
“But you could have told me the history as we walked along the shore, around the Palishize,” said Cley. “Why did we have to enter it?”
“The shoreline south of the structure is planted with a thousand traps and devices of death. This route is the only one through which I can ensure your safety. I remember, so long ago, the day Moissac and I discovered it. We took down five of the O in this very passage,” said Vasthasha.
An hour later, with Wood leading the way, they exited the dark catacomb beneath the Palishize and found the ocean lapping the wall that was built right at the edge of the sea. Luckily it was low tide, and they were able to make their way along the beach, in water only to their knees, before the waves grew and thundered in to smash against the foundation of the incredible structure.
The landscape north of the Palishize was composed of wooded hills rolling down to a mile-wide field of sand dunes that bordered the sea. Vasthasha insisted that they follow the beach as much as possible for it was a faster route than through the woods.
On those days when they had to cross the dunes in order to hunt in the forest, Cley noticed very readily that the season was changing. The leaves of the trees had turned orange and gold and fell in droves. At night, as they sat around a driftwood fire in the hollow of a large dune, the air was cold, and the hunter’s speech came forth in puffs of steam. Vasthasha had begun to move more slowly as the leaves of his body dropped off, a few each day, and were carried away on the wind. More of his viney thatch had gone brown, and the fires in his eyes were dimmer.
One night the foliate woke the hunter from his shivering sleep, and said to him, “If I should leave you soon, do not be alarmed. Continue along the shoreline, and you will come to a fort inhabited by people like yourself. They will take you in for the winter. In the spring I will find you, and we will do our work.”
Cley could only nod at the message, for the prospect of losing his new friend saddened him. He lay awake for a long time, staring at the full moon cast in a golden hue. It was so clear in the crisp air that he could make out its mountains and craters.
Wood found a leviathan stranded on the sand. He barked wildly at the amorphous black body, as the immense creature’s tentacles, each fifty yards long, weakly swept the air. The noise the thing made was like a soprano’s aria. Cley asked Vasthasha what the monster’s song meant.
“Help, I am drowning,” said the foliate.
They waited for the thing finally to die, and then Vasthasha instructed Cley in how to cut open its bulbous head and find the brain. They climbed upon the body of the leviathan and hacked away until, beneath its shiny black flesh, buried in a thick layer of fat, the hunter discovered a little red parcel amidst the oozing green blood.
That night they cooked the brain and ate it—the taste, something like oysters in chocolate sauce. Vasthasha claimed that the thought organ of the Wamlash, when devoured, was supposed to increase the clarity of one’s own thought process. He abstained. The hunter later dreamt of the civilization of the O deep beneath the waves of the inland ocean.
The violet sea was wild, huge waves breaking against the shore, and the wind blowing down from the north threatened to snatch Cley’s hat with every gust. The sun was high, but the day was very cold. They walked along a wide swath of beach, huge sand cliffs to their right. For the past two days, Vasthasha had been unable to keep pace with the hunter, and Cley found that he had to wait after every half mile or so for the foliate to catch up.
Above the crash of the surf, Cley heard Vasthasha’s voice yell to him, “Keep going.” When the hunter turned back to look, he saw the foliate pass into a small whirlwind of sand. In the blink of an eye, his vegetal friend came apart, everywhere at once, and existed for a moment as nothing but a swirl of dry, brown leaves. A gust blew from the north, and the makings of the foliate flew off on the wind, carried up over the cliffs toward the forest.
Cley ran back to where Vasthasha had stood moments before. All that remained were a few dry, brown lengths of branch and vine, a few rotten leaves, and the cover of the book. Wood whined as he lifted the leather binding between his jaws. The hunter felt the wind of the coming winter pass right through him. With an overwhelming sense of resignation, as if this lack of emotion was an emotion itself, he continued on along the shoreline.
It was in the middle of the following afternoon that Cley spotted, at a distance, a ship run aground on a sandbar. At first, he thought it was another enormous sea creature drowning in the cold air. Then he made out a scrap of tattered sail and the cracked spire that was the mainmast.
To get to it, he had to wade through an ankle-deep tidal pool of frigid water. Wood was reluctant to follow but did so after leaving the book cover on the beach. They walked out along the wide sandbar, the surf rolling in to their left. As they drew closer to the vessel, Cley spotted a gaping hole in the front end of the hull. The ship’s stern still sat in the surf, and the whole structure moved slightly from side to side as larger waves broke against it.
“A ruined ship of the explorers from the western realm?” Cley wondered. He hoped to find useful items to scavenge within the wreck.
As they drew up next to it, he saw how large the vessel really was. The deck towered above him, but he could still gain access where the hull had been staved in. As he approached the splintered opening, Wood hung back and barked as if in warning.
Cley climbed through the hole and looked inside the long, dark expanse of the innards of the ship. Enough light was let in behind him so that he could make out barrels and tools lying all around as if the ship had been lifted by the hand of a giant and shaken madly before being smashed down on the sandbar. Toward the back of the ship, the deck had rotted away and the sunlight beamed in to illuminate the chaos. Cley could still hear Wood barking outside as he stepped through two inches of bilge. There was the pervasive smell of the sea, everything encrusted with salt and barnacles.
Just after he found the remains of a dead sailor, who obviously had had his chest crushed by a flying keg, the fractured rib cage now a home for tiny crabs, the hunter noticed something standing in the sunlight at the far end of the hold. He took a few more steps toward this large block and saw that it was clear, like a man-sized cube of crystal or ice, and then he realized that the ship did not hail from the western realm.
This ship, he now knew, had sailed from a port called Merithae. Embedded in the heart of the block of unmelting ice was the naked form of a beautiful, dark-haired woman. He placed his open palms against the boundary that was as warm as the touch of a lover’s hand. The imprisoned woman stared out at him, and he sensed that she was still alive.
“Anotine,” he whispered, and the merest corner of her lip turned up. The past rushed back upon him and brought him to his knees in the stinking bilge. He did not leave the hold until the sun had set.
That night in the dunes, next to a crackling fire, the hunter held open the
covers of the missing book and recounted for Wood the story of his time with Anotine in the imagination of Drachton Below. Although the wind blew cold, he did not feel its sting, for he was heated from within by the constant feverish schemes to release his dream woman from the unmelting ice. Nothing was resolved, because he had no tools with which to work. Then he considered that the ship itself might hold an ax, a cask of gunpowder, that could be employed in her release. This blizzard of thought gave way to his trying to understand what it must be like for her, unable to move but still alive and seeing only the shadowy hold of the wrecked ship for years upon years.
He took the spirit of this frustration into his sleep, and the force of it shattered the ice. Anotine stepped forth, and he held his hand out to her.
“I dreamt of you,” she said to him.
“I dreamt of you,” he said, and when he put his arms around her, he woke suddenly to a cold, gray day. There was a light snow blowing down from the north.
Although he and the dog had eaten nothing, Cley headed immediately back to the beach. When he came over the last dune, he cried out in an anguished tone that might, itself, have drilled through ice. The sandbar had disappeared beneath the waves, and the wrecked ship, lying low in the water, was being drawn by an inexplicable current toward the horizon.
The snow fell in large, wet flakes and began to gather on the forest floor. The sound of the ocean was ever present, the crash of the waves like a distant summer thunder coming to them from over the field of dunes. The hunter and dog were exhausted and hungry, not having eaten for two days. Through the curtain of blowing white, Cley saw ahead the outline of a building—a large, white fort with parapets and a tall wooden door. He walked up to the structure and, slinging his bow over his shoulder, began pounding on the oaken barrier with his fist while Wood barked repeatedly.