by Стив Хиллард
With that thought, Ara stepped onto the broken and forked track that led away from her home. She walked south, watching a row of thunderheads illume and quiver against the distant mountains before being sucked away into the endless starry night.
Cadence put the manuscripts down. Exhausted, she took the blanket from the closet and flopped on the couch. Tomorrow would be tomorrow.
She met sleep halfway, and in the surreal, liquid seams of that union, her mind concocted a Technicolor dream. Intrepid Professor Tolkien, old and white-haired but all dressed up like some elderly Indiana Jones, and the Fearless Young Heroine, Ara. Armed and steadfast, they were surrounded by a lurching, drooling, moaning multitude of the Dark Lord’s zombie monsters.
The crazy scene froze mid-frame. Heartbeats passed. Any moment Tolkien’s face would mutate to something evil and he would be one of Them. Catchy synth bass notes would punch in, a great multitude of hands would clap in unison, and the Professor would break into the funky song and dance routine of Thriller. It was ordained; he had succumbed to the Dark Side! Ara and all the Heroines would be lost.
The dream fizzled out like a spent sparkler, closing with Ara defiantly sweeping forth her cutlass to confront them all.
Chapter 14
INKLINGS V
The recording of this meeting of the Inklings captured episodes of a competition to see who could read the famously bad prose of Amanda Ros for the longest without laughing. Toward the end of the evening the discussion turned to other matters.
“Charles, as a historian, you have lectured us about the tatters and fragments and competing versions of ‘truth’ that underlie what we today call the King James Bible. Despite that, is there not an essential truth to the varied tellings of the tales of Jesus?”
“I wish I could be of more comfort, but the truth is that many of the gospels, wildly variant in their accounts, were systematically tracked down and destroyed, especially, as we all know, after the Council of Nicea. The accounts fell prey, along with their followers and those who possessed the documents themselves. So what you are left with today, is not justified by its history. Only belief will carry one through …”
Part of the tape is lost here. It resumes with clanks and knockings on the table, perhaps a call for ale as the group huddled about in discussion. C.S. Lewis is talking.
“… I have a hero, modeled after Tollers here, who is in one of my books. Sort of a philologist-adventurer. A swashbuckling professor of ancient languages. He discovers things because he is not afraid to believe. What, Ian?”
“And where does this discovery occur? So often we speak of breakthroughs and journeys. Tollers speaks of hidden gates, you Jack, speak of passages through the doors of old wardrobes. Why such devices?”
“These are the stuff of tales not by literary convention, but because they mirror the way we form and test the very art of believing. Mark this: true belief arises only from a passage, after a long and perilous journey. The terrain may be of Fear, call it dragons or demons, or Despair, a desolate waste, but it must be traversed.”
“Speaking of journeys, and having duly ravaged poor Madame Ros, let us do justice to the true doers of heroic deeds, heroines.”
“Some might say we, all of us male prattlers of tales, do not do enough to acquit that justice.”
“But there is a void of the feminine heroic, is there not? In your ‘discovery’ of your myths, Tollers, you read to us little of heroines. Why so?”
“Speaking within those myths, I suspect many heroines existed, but were rooted out by censors with different agendas— none more persistent that the wizards, of all stripes and colors. And yet, there are intimations of one, a tale lost in the root and branch of many languages. A legend of which I am slowly seeing more. A saga that barely survived. A heroine that may have changed the entire course of history in a real place, a place I have seen only imperfectly from ruined foundations.”
“Well, so be it. I, for one, suspect that, if history be told straight and true, our heroes, and thus we, owe much to heroine counterparts. In fact, I would wager our fare tonight that …”
The tape grinds down to unintelligible drunken growl sounds, presumably as the battery ran down.
Chapter 15
OCTOBER 22. MORNING
Cadence awoke on the couch, stiff and groggy. The dream remnants of the Tolkien and Ara MTV video dissipated like strands of mist. She could hear traffic, the distant warble of a fire truck, the deep hum of the city imploring her that worrying over these documents was a delusion. She was on a fool’s errand, they said, maybe stumbling toward a precipice. Her body agreed. Fuzzy as she felt, her neck hairs, her heart, and her palms all forewarned of disaster.
She got up, rubbing her eyes, and went to the bathroom. She splashed water on her face. She came back to the bed fully awake and took a deep “start-over” breath. She surveyed the documents on the couch still in the rough groupings she had assembled. She picked through them, seeking a trail that had gone cold. Page after page of Elvish gibberish passed beneath her fingers. Finally, she went back to the small “readable” pile. The first page she picked out had long ago been ripped apart and reassembled with resinous glue. A rust-colored stain hung at one corner. It read:
The hawk, gray topside and mottled white on the bottom, stood one-legged in the middle of the road. One wing jutted out from its body, torn feathers splayed like fingers, a pitiful wave for help or possibly a giving of directions. It gave the lie to the latter as it jerked about, hopping left then right.
She looked about, the red and orange leafed hickory trees and yellow brush crowding flush to each fork of the pathway. A place for ambush? Her instincts said move on, head south and pass this place in haste.
The bird stopped and looked at her, eyes sharp and focused past a deeply curved beak. It balanced oddly, in compensation for the askew wing, and, as if in completion of its survey, hopped directly toward her.
Now Cadence rustled around for more clues. The readable pages definitely seemed like bits of a single story, told and retold over long expanses of time. She found another scrap of rough paper that had been folded many times. She guessed it was hidden for some part of its long history:
The halfling feared, deep down, that her choice had been wrong. The world had fallen and cracked like an earthen pot, and she was picking through the thousands of shards without ever having seen the pot whole. But of its dimensions and nature, she had a sense.
This she knew. Her Amon was the Bearer. The object he carried could only be destroyed at the place of its creation.
Perfect, Cadence thought, so they are a pair! Her eyes raced down the page:
If she knew him at all, she knew he would not part with it, nor would he abandon the journey to destroy it. She had seen the direction of the Dark Lands and a few other places on a map the Woodsman had briefly shown.
On that map, a great, purple-veined, granite mountain range called Everdivide ran east to west and severed north from south. This barrier she must somehow cross in order to follow his way.
She also knew that she was racing against a moon-clock, as certain as the pouring sands in the day-glass kept by her village elders. This run of the moon to bloated fullness, now well underway, measured the trap awaiting the Bearer. All else, the who and the how, was mere detail. She still had a choice — go forward, or go home. She could not bear the long, tedious hearthside wait for the unlikely return of her loved one. All her family were doers of the first order — on a scale impressive only to halflings perhaps, but “all’s the measure is what we have, so eat your porridge and go to work!” as her Mum would say.
She took stock of her meager kit. No provisions, only her cloak and a small knife handed down from her grandfather. She turned to the fish-catching hawk sitting on a log a few feet from the fire. She said to it, “You’re a long way from lake, stream or sea, my friend.”
It had hobbled to her on the road yesterday, and that had touched her heart so that she finally knelt and o
ffered her arm. She stared at those exquisitely sharp talons powered by strength that could stop a millwheel, and the quick, yellow beak that, in a flash, could render her blind. At that moment, the world closed down to her forearm fixed in the steady gaze of the raptor.
It stood uneasily on one leg, reached out, and slowly curved those terrible claws around her arm flesh. She belonged to it. It squeezed down hard, then deftly lifted the other leg and sat on her arm, gazing about rapidly in all directions.
The fire was now just embers, casting up lazy sparks. She stared into it knowing, as does anyone that has spent fireside nights in the wild, that in each small blaze lives the memory of all such fires.
Each an augury of the past and the unknown to come.
Above the unlikely fireside pair, the heavens twinkled madly in a riot of uncountable stars.
“Hafoc, I name you,” she said, looking at the hawk.
She travelled efficiently, equal to the most adept and durable of her kind. She was unheard and unseen, keeping to the brush-sides of trails and the stream edges as her furred feet travelled tirelessly across rocky plains and through shadow-banded days.
Always to the south.
Cadence took a long breath. So, Ara too felt the doubt, the disquiet of a blind advance toward a ledge. She had stayed her course.
Of course, the grinding city hum countered to Cadence, because she’s only a fairy-story.
She gathered up the documents and stuffed them in the valise. She buckled it up and got down on the floor and squirmed under the bed.
As she struggled among the dust-bunnies to wedge the valise in a hiding place behind the headboard, she reconsidered her doubts. Picking up the decades-old trail with Coats was a heartening break. She would stick with this, she would walk toward that ledge. A few more steps, she resolved. Just a few more. I want to unravel one more knot in this mystery. I want to see my grandfather.
Chapter 16
1970 AGAIN: SEPARATE, STILL AND SECRET
On his fifth and final day in America, Professor Tolkien was hunched over in the long aisle between tiers of steel shelves in the Teachers’ Archives section in the basement of the Butler Library. Looking over his shoulder every few seconds, he turned sideways to catch the tepid light from a bare electric bulb down the aisle. He had in his hands a pen and a few pieces of paper. At his feet sat a small cardboard letter box. He scribbled some more notes on his papers and surveyed his work.
As he corrected a word, he knew this moment, this trip, should be completed in even greater haste. His muse whispered: Hurry. Where the boundaries between realms meet, it is dangerous to tarry. The gates may shut and the lax be caught forever!
He started to put the pen in his pocket and hesitated. Ever the editor, he reviewed his note one last time:
To Whom May Follow:
Be warned! As a “spell” means both a story told and a power over men, so I write this note to close and bar a gate behind me. I am leaving a perilous realm not just of my imagining. Time now makes me blunt as a peddler late to his errands.
Take heed, because things of which we weave tales in fact are true, and exist independently of our minds and purposes. As I have imagined and written Elvish, there are Elves. As I have woven a mythology, it exists. It has a living form and color.
And it does not rest!
Like a changeling infant abandoned on my doorstep, a box of ancient documents was left on my threshold one day. Its heritage was anonymous and perhaps untraceable, save for the unease of having seen a sample of similar material before the war. In any case, I studied these documents, and from their depths grew rumors and a disquiet that would not leave. They stir, and like the moors and fen beyond the keep, they breed monsters that slouch and bellow just beyond my reach.
And yet, within this wreckage of ancient histories, there were fascinating tatters, fragments, and even full scrolls. Many of these were written, I no longer doubt, by Elvish hands, masterful hands now long departed from the world. These — precious (I will leave the word, yes) writings have a power of their own. They twist and turn and lead the mind down shifting paths as if they were the very essence of Mirkwood itself. Their language, vast and deep, makes my poor scratchings as but the work of whimsical ants before the soaring range of those mountains they call Everdivide. I have glimpsed this through the agency of a single document, a key that is like an Elfin guide through Mirkwood. I cannot bring myself to destroy it. It is hidden here with this note. May it long rest undisturbed in this musty graveyard of unwanted archives. To whoever may read this note, beware! The key is dangerous, for these phantoms sense its power.
For me, these vague monsters do not depart. They stalk me, and seek not only this trove, but to intervene even in the tales I would tell. Tales that have been unearthed, I thought, solely from my own imagination delving into the bedrock of myth.
The other documents have been sent away. As with these few papers I leave here, I could not be the author of their destruction. I have entrusted them to an itinerant who is fated to wander. These are actions I once held unthinkable.
Now I bury the last, push close the gate, and take my leave forever from this shore.
JRRT
P.S.: Other materials, fragments of Old English poetry, only slightly less disturbing, I have also included here.
He folded the paper and stooped, putting it in the letterbox that the library staff had already labeled with his name. He was nervous. His pipe fell from his coat pocket and scattered dottle and unburnt tobacco all about. He picked up the pipe, sealed the box with tape, lifted it to the dusty shelf, and squeezed it between other file boxes marked with other names and dates. Most were unreadable. Just another ossuary in the mausoleum, he thought. He studied his pocket watch in the dim light, knowing that the taxi to Idlewild would take two hours, cutting close his departure to Heathrow. His work here was done. It would be so good to be home.
He studied the location of the box, the burial ground of the Elvish key, one last time. He was confident that it would never be found. As for the rest of the documents, the sharpener of scissors who carries them was adrift where none could track him — carrying his burden into the untraceable byways of the Great American Night.
Chapter 17
OCTOBER 22. MIDDAY
As Coats foretold, Cadence found him again in the library. Alarmingly, he was already talking, and not necessarily to her. She sat down at the table without disturbing him; he continued.
“… and yes, this library, not quite the Bodlean at Oxford, but close enough, is the very lair of the beast that woos and confuses us all.” He pointed his finger down hard into the wood, as if this place were ground zero for all he feared. “Beware Learning! It is a dragon. It resides here, in this great book-barrow, and is wise with the hoarded lore of long and eventful ages. It places a spell on all who wander its labyrinth. If you are keen to its wiles, you can see its vestige here, in the smooth-rubbed trails as it heaves its swollen bulk along the well-worn pathways. Places like the Reading Room, the frequented places where students slave and worship its corpus of closely-catalogued wealth.”
He stopped and looked around in his suspicious way. He continued speaking as if she had been there all along. Cadence couldn’t help feeling dismayed. The last time they had met here, he had seemed relatively sane. Now he had reverted to the same overblown speech he used at the West End Bar. It was wasting her time. She made ready to leave, when he said something that got her attention.
“There are far finer riches it buries in the deeper places here! In hoard-rooms unvisited, you smell its presence in the dust and the air tinted with the scent of lost stories. Indeed, many a tale it hides from us, in the holes of extravagant, musty negligence that pocket this lore-locker. Listen and beware. It is cunning. It plays games and metes us just enough wisdom to cause us to desire more. It places no value on that which it hordes, save for the hording itself. The worm reveals truth in tiny, meager draughts so that it may yoke us to the quest. It lets us kn
ow, my dear Cadence …”
She was surprised he was aware of her presence. “… that we are mortal, that we have lost much and can find little. It infects us with a profound sadness. It gloats in its longevity and all-knowing power.”
She furrowed her brow and nodded solemnly, no idea what to say to such a sad crackpot.
“But … it has forgotten something.”
She tried to nudge him down this path.
“What?”
“In this immense lair are treasures wantonly piled in corners, troves outlandish and arcane that bear great value to one such as I. Thus do I humble myself to the keepers of this entranceway.” He looked directly at her. “Perhaps it holds the keys to the truth you seek. In the basement deep below where we now sit, the Professor’s Archives lie, all unguarded, save for the watching silence that enshrouds them. Are you prepared to go thieving for the truth, into the untended depths of this marble learning-vault?”
Now he seemed to be saying something useful. “Yes! Where are they?”
“Listen and I will guide you, though I cannot venture there again. An intruder who dares a second visit to that place double-dares the unrest of the dragon!”
This was at least amusing. She nodded a vigorous yes, set her mouth to a look of grim determination, and put both hands flat on the table. Then she leaned in and said “OK, I’m game. Tell me.”
“Fine. I will continue. This, our whispered conversation at this oaken table, is what our good Professor Tolkien called a ‘making.’ In ancient parlance, a ‘telling,’ a creation of words that are the foundry works of stories. You have, my child, made a crossing, stumbled into a story. You are embarking on a strange and dangerous journey.”
“Look, whoever you are, however you got here, you’re hopeless. Maybe we could just stick to facts and let the story part take care of itself. I just want to gather some information and then go back home and get on with life.”