Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “You know,” she had said to him, “nothing you say actually fits together. Shit, Finnan, can’t you even try to be consistent with your bullshit?”

  Thomas had laughed, brattishly superior as only an elder sibling can be.

  “Consistency,” he’d said. “Fuck consistency.”

  “It’s not about consistency,” Finnan had said. “Where the Cant is involved it’s not a matter of consistency. You can’t tell the full story, the complete story, and hope to be consistent. Best you can hope for is…coherent and comprehensive. And where the fucking unkin are involved you’re probably better off not bothering with either. Trust me, if they think you’ve figured out what it’s all about—as if there is any such thing as what it’s all about—they’ll be all over you like fucking crows on a battlefield. Because that’s what they want. A nice, simple answer to it all.”

  “And you don’t think there is one?” she’d said.

  He shook his head.

  “Even the book doesn’t have that, from what I hear.”

  “What book?”

  “The Book of All Hours.”

  “What’s the Book of All Hours?”

  “Ah,” said Finnan, “now that’s another story altogether.”

  A SLEEVE OF BLOOD AND BLACK

  She was born Ninanna Belili, in the last years of the twentieth century BC, daughter of a neolithic chieftain and his priestess wife whose cosmology was collapsing with the blossoming of new ideas, somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates. She grew up with farming and fishing, with ceramic pots and grainstores for all, and mathematics and writing, and men with sickles bringing corn in from the fields, the whole Sumerian revolution. She flirted with the shepherd boy, Dumuzi, asked him to sing of Enki in his abzu, deep under the earth, asked him with a dreamy passion that would make him stop and look at her and ask her where she was, what she was thinking.

  “Who am I?” asks the girl who used to be called Phreedom. The tattoo covers most of her arm now in a sleeve of blood and black, as if she’s thrust her arm deep into the flesh of something vast and sick to seize its heart, a warrior or a surgeon. She’s lost all track of time somewhere in all the involuted intricacy of the ink that webs her flesh, the swirling cyphers of another person’s memory and identity. Iris is talking to her, but Phreedom doesn’t hear her words. Inanna hears. Inanna listens now with Phreedom’s ears, and nods, replies, but the girl who once was Phreedom is now deaf and mute, trapped somewhere deep inside herself.

  What’s left of her is thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

  She was born Inanna, queen of heaven, priestess of the earth, in the last years of the twentieth world, daughter of a moon god and the mother earth whose tales were lost in the birth of new mythologies, somewhere between never and now. She grew up with fate and destiny, with epic heroes and archetypal roles for all, and history and law, and gods painted in ochre dragging the bodies of their titan forebears out of chaos, the whole subconscious genesis. She drank with the old god of wisdom, Enki, listening as he rambled on about the world of certainty that he was crafting for them all, scheming an ordered place, a time, a space. And when he had slumped, sodden with drink, into unconsciousness, she took his me, the plans of his grand scheme, the Gravings of Destiny, and slipped away into the night.

  “Audacity,” says Madame Iris. “If there’s one word that describes Inanna, little sister, it’s audacity. First goddess to step up and take on the patriarchs at their own game, Inanna was. I mean, motherhood, that’s an easy archetype for a female unkin to take on. Maid, mother and crone, right? Virgin princess, priestess-queen, witch-seeress. That’s the way it goes. Neat roles all nicely tied up into packages. Fates and furies, norns and muses, graces and graia. All very well, but those roles don’t offer much in the way of…character. But Inanna…Inanna wasn’t going to play that game. Inanna had her own plans. O, they can have their Covenant, they can write every man, woman and child into their book of life, and bind us all to their ideas of destiny, of fate. But once you’ve met your fate, the story that they’ve written for you is over. The dead are free.”

  Iris runs her fingers over the glossy eight-by-ten of the unkin mark and looks across at Phreedom’s arm…Inanna’s arm…whatever. It’s not her best work but it’ll have to do; it would be better if she had the original to work with but—she closes the ring binder—the copy will have to do.

  Errata

  The Book of Life

  The angel known as Metatron, the man once known as Enoch, the god once known as Enki, lays his hand on the hotel guest book that sits up on the counter, smiles at the clerk and whispers a word that drops the man like a stone, unconscious, to the ground. It’s a few years since he last had to use the language, but he hasn’t lost it, he’s glad to see. That’s as it should be, though. He is the voice of God, after all.

  The foyer is empty and out past the glass walls and the doors with their racks of tourist brochures for Little Switzerland and the Blue Ridge Parkway, the parking lot has only a couple of trucks and RVs. Even the Taco Bell across the way is empty, the employees in their cheap, garish uniforms sitting outside on the steps, gazing off into the distance and chatting.

  He flicks his black dreads back out of his face and flicks his long black leather coatflap back to pull out his little leatherbound palmtop from his jacket pocket, lays it up on the counter, on top of the guest book. He doesn’t have to hunt for a signature to know that they were both here, the little hatchling and her runaway brother. He knows the girl and her brother have a meeting somewhere, somewhen, not too far from here and now. It’s all in his book.

  That’s what worries him, actually; that’s why he’s here in person. Because according to the unkin who were sent to bring the boy in, Thomas Messenger died trying to escape from them. According to those same two unkin, Phreedom Messenger was left bleeding to death in a catatonic stupor, her soul more violated than her body. She’s out of the game, they’d said. Little birdy got her wings broke. End of story.

  Except that’s not the end. The angel Metatron knows this because the angel Metatron has his book of life, his records of assignations and interactions, crossed paths, interlocked fates, destinies decreed when this world was still a speck of dust under his fingernail. And if the book of life records a meeting between two unkin somewhere, somewhen, not too far from here, those unkin can’t be dead.

  The palmtop boots up into a screen of scrolling glyphs; it’s a bit outdated in these days of VR lenses and shimmering images, but he’s always been a little old-school in his methods. He likes the feel of weathered leatherbound books, smooth plastic keys under his fingers, dirt under his fingernails, dust on his boots. He is Lord Earth, after all—En Ki, as he once wrote his name with wedge-shaped reeds pressed into clay, when he was just a lowly scribe, laying his master’s laws and dictates down for all eternity. The rest of the unkin were all so quick to take the roles of warriors, heroes, kings, showing their lordship over the sky by calling down a storm.

  Thunder and lightning, he thinks. Hawks and eagles. Back in the old days you couldn’t walk a hundred miles without running into some self-appointed god of all the skies and heavens, god of air and grace, of airs and graces. For them the whole point of civilization was to take them further from the dirt that they were born in. For Enki, craftsman and technologist, father of irrigation and agriculture, civilization is made of dirt. Mathematics and writing began in shapes pressed into slick wet clay. Even now, now that he’s Metatron, with four thousand years between him and that previous life, the scribe in him still likes the feel of something in his hand.

  He frowns.

  The Tablets of Destiny

  The palmtop’s flickering display stops at a screen of curlicues and arabesques, pictograms that represent not things but forces, vectors, the motion of a snake’s tongue flicking out to taste the air, the tension in a lion’s shoulder muscles as it’s poised to leap, all tabulated into rows and columns like some child’s puzzle, waiting
for a circling pen to find the words spelled out forward and backward, upside-down, diagonally. In fact he reads it every way, this page of text, from left to right like English, right to left like Hebrew, top to bottom like Chinese, and spiraling inward to the central glyph like the Sumerian of his youth. The Arattan script can even be read diagonally, from the lower-left corner to the upper-right, or from right to left. But it’s not the original text. And no matter which way he reads it, it doesn’t make sense.

  He can smell the girl’s pain all round him. He can feel the boy’s signature burning its way through the thick pages of the guest book. The palmtop should be picking all this up, mapping the moment, catching the currents of it like yarrow stalks falling into hexagrams. Instead, there’s no sign of either of them in the text. It was clear enough two weeks ago, clear enough that he called the two gatherers in to question them for hours on what exactly they remembered. The boy was dead? The girl was as good as? They were certain?

  “This is the only thing that’s certain,” he had said, holding the book up in their faces.

  He looks at it now and frowns. Destiny doesn’t change.

  The language has an agglutinative grammar at its heart. It doesn’t need all the little joining words of English, all the ofs and tos and fors and bys. It doesn’t need all the grammatical exoskeleton of Latin prefixes and suffixes around the words. It’s just a matter of how you put the words together, one after the other after the other, except the block of text that’s on the screen is less a linear statement than a map of all its possible meanings; it’s not designed to be read in one direction, line by line, no more than you could understand a painting if you cut it into strips and scanned your eyes along each shred, reading the individual brushstrokes one by one and waiting for the meaning to emerge.

  Whatever form it takes, leatherbound book of life, clay tablets of destiny, or law carved in stone—whatever medium the me are coded in, by nature, has to be a little more structurally complex to capture the sheer density of meaning in the unkin language. Any statement carries its context, implicit in the space between the words. But in the Cant graved on the screen there are no spaces, and the meaning blossoms outward from the central glyph, around it and back in, the context as explicit as the text.

  It’s the machine code of reality. It has to be precise.

  And Metatron is worried, because for the first time in his long, long life, he doesn’t understand it.

  five

  THE FIELDS OF LOST DAYS

  CROSSROADS, 1937

  Alone crow rose out of the cornfield, wings flapping as it gave a ragged caw and flew up into a cloudless blue sky; and as the dry wind stripped the grain from the corn and whipped it into the air around him, he stepped out onto the cracked tarmac of the crossroads, unslung the blue guitar from back behind his shoulder, put his fingers to the right frets, to exactly the right frets, and struck a chord. Should be here soon, he thought, should be along real soon.

  From its first low growls in the Deep South of the Depression, the blues was born to make new legends for itself, with Robert Johnson standing tallest and proudest among them, like some Voudon loa caught for an instant of time in a grainy old black-and-white photograph, like the Lord Eleggua himself, standing at a crossroads in a dusty, gray three-piece suit and wide-brimmed fedora. The blues was always the dark side of gospel, the devil’s music, a music made of pain and hard, hard sorrows, with the bluesman as a hero of a kind, murderer, adulterer, searching for the lost chord, making pacts with the devil, hellhounds on his trail.

  There’s one story, one legend, says that if you take your guitar down to a crossroads and play it—play it good enough, that is—eventually the devil will come along behind you, tap you on the shoulder and take your guitar off of you. You don’t turn around to look at him—you don’t ever look the devil in the eyes—just take your guitar back when he’s done tuning it for you, and from then on you’ll play the bittersweetest blues was ever played…from that day on until the day you die and the demons come to drag your damned soul down into hell where it belongs.

  And so, on a hot and hellblown summer’s day, the man with the blue guitar took himself a long walk out of town, out through the cornfields, to the crossroads and the old tree heavy with the ghosts of all those who’d been hanged on it, like baubles on a Christmas tree, or strange golden apples. He walked out, as if to a date with the devil, or with whatever ancient African god—god of the crossroads, god of song—was wearing that Christian mask these days. That old soul deal, though, had already been made, a long, long time ago and far away. He wasn’t here to sell, today, only to play the blues and—one last time—to pay his dues, before the hellhounds that had followed him down through the centuries finally caught up with him.

  A lone crow rose out of the cornfield, circling over the seven men in sharp black suits who came now, from off of the road of all dust, shimmering in the liquid light that rippled around them like air over tarmac on a hot summer’s day.

  DOGS OF KINGSHIP

  1971.

  Thomas crouches in the bushes. He hears them crashing through the undergrowth around them, and he’s trying not to gasp, to grasp for air with his lungs, with the rain running down his face, into his mouth. He can’t afford to spit, to shake the rain out of his hair. He can’t afford to make a sound. He holds the dog tags like a rosary he’s praying by.

  Baseball bats crack branches, whack through sodden leaves, feet splash in puddles of mud, and dogs bark. There are seven of them, big men in body, small in heart, and mean as the German shepherds that they track him with. He should have known not to take the lift; he should have seen it in the eyes of the four of them sitting up in the back of the pickup truck, sodden with rain and drink and their own misery and looking for something, anything, to take it out on. The leering grin of the one who sat up in front between the driver and the passenger, as he leaned back to stare at him out of the rear windshield.

  What was his name again? Jack, was it? Fuck, but he’s hot.

  Scarcely had his sister spoken when Dumuzi cried:

  “My sister! Go! Quick! Run into the hills! Do not step slowly as a noble. Sister, run! The ugallu, who men both hate and fear, are on their boats. They come. They carry wooden stocks to trap the hands; they carry wooden stocks to trap the neck. Sister, run!”

  “You see them?” she said.

  “They are coming,” said Dumuzi’s friend. “The large ugallu, with the wooden stocks to bind the neck, are coming for you.”

  “Quickly, brother! Put your head down, in the grass. Your demons come for you!”

  “My sister, tell nobody where I’m hiding. My friend, tell nobody where I’m hiding. I will hide in the grass. I will hide among the bushes. I will hide among the trees. I will hide in the ditches of Arali.”

  “Dumuzi,” said his friend, “if we tell anybody where you’re hiding may your dogs devour us, your black dogs of shepherdship, the royal dogs of kingship, may your dogs devour us!”

  And Geshtinanna ran, fleeing the ugallu, up into the hills, and Dumuzi’s friend went with her.

  Another century entirely.

  Thomas crouches in the grass. He hears them crashing through the fields of corn toward him, and he’s trying not to gasp, to grasp for air with his lungs, with the sweat running down his face, into his mouth. The whipscars on his back are hurting real bad and he thinks they must be bleeding again, but he can’t afford to make a whimper. He holds the little wooden cross around his neck and prays to the Good Lord, but the Good Lord says salvation lies in suffering and Thomas surely knows his suffering, yes sir, he surely does, and the Master’s men are surely going to make him suffer like the Lord Himself, but Thomas doesn’t think there’s going to be any salvation for him. No sir, not for Thomas.

  Rifle butts crack cornstalks, thrash through green-gold leaves, feet kick up dust in the dry heat and dogs bark. There are seven of them, men big in power and small in kindness.

  “Come out here, boy. We gonna fin
d you.”

  The small ugallu spoke to the large ugallu.

  “You ugallu, with no father and no mother, you, who have no sister and no brother, wife or child, who fly across the skies and stalk the earth like guards, who stick to a man’s side, who show no mercy, know no good or evil, tell us, who has ever seen a coward’s soul living in peace? We should not seek Dumuzi in his friend’s house. We should not seek Dumuzi in his brother-in-law’s house. No. We should seek Dumuzi in his sister’s house, the house of Geshtinanna.”

  Sweet Little Pink Things