by Geoff Ryman
“Only if they are very young, and tender, and have made no choices. They are enough like my cubs then.”
“Oh!” breathed out Stefile in wonder. Transfixed, she stepped around the trunk, and on to the branch, hand outstretched to touch the beast.
“Stef, come back,” said Cara in fear.
“Do not touch my beak,” warned Asu Kweetar. “I snap.” His beak was much longer than a man’s forearm. Stefile withdrew her hand, but her face still glazed at the beast, with a half-smile. She sat on the branch, legs around it, to see it better. “I would not mean harm,” Asu Kweetar continued. “But I am a beast.”
“Why are you here?” asked Cara, pressing the shield closer, unable to hide the Flower, even in daylight.
“I am here to carry you, over the mountains, to the City. The Dead are below. The Dead, and all the animals of these mountains. They spread out from this tree, all along the Dragon’s Back. The Flower shines. It is seen for miles all around, like a star. There are caravans of gypsies coming here, and all the people of the hills, and the farmers who first saw the Flower at the base of the Wensenari. You will never carry the Flower through them. That is why I am here. To carry you over, and to hold and protect the Flower, until you decide how it should be used.”
“Is that the only reason?” Cara asked. The beast was silent. His massive tail twitched. “How can we be sure that you won’t take the Flower for yourself?”
“AS YOU HAVE?” roared Asu Kweetar, in silence, booming only in their heads, and covered the distance between them in one forward lunge, tearing off a shower of needles and small branches with its wings, his back legs staying in place. The entire tree dipped and swayed; Stefile gave an involuntary cry, and grabbed the branch. The head of the beast was just in front of her, longer than a man was tall, his eyes depths in which to fall. “Do you not think that if I wanted the Flower, I could not take it?”
The tree still rocked. “Do you not?” Asu Kweetar demanded again.
“Yes,” replied Cara, only whispering. “Yes, I think you could.”
“The Flower is nothing to me,” said the beast, settling back on its haunches. “I already have what it can give. I am the beast that talks to God.”
“It was a question that had to be asked.”
“And it has been answered.” The beast began to preen its neck feathers with his beak.
“If . . . if you speak to God,” began Cara, faltering, “can you tell me, Asu Kweetar, if the Galu are as terrible as I think?”
“They are. I hear their minds at work. They are rigid like clocks, regular with hatred. I do not think they are quite alive.”
“Was I right to take the Flower?”
For some reason the beast was suddenly possessed by a sneeze. It made him toss his head, and hiss through holes in his beak. As he sneezed, his unspoken voice replied, “You are a human being. Your race has taken the fruit of Knowledge; only you know about right and wrong. I am a beast. I cannot make choices. I am very glad of that.” The beast’s eyes were suddenly full on Cara, like lamps.
Cara found she could not look him in the face. “Carry us then, Asu Kweetar,” she said. “Carry our thanks as well.”
“Sit on my neck, not my back,” said the beast, “or my tail will lash and brush you away. Hold on to my necklace. Not to my feathers, or you will pull them out, and I will turn and bite off your legs.” Then he lowered his head towards them, on the branch.
Stefile and Cara looked at each other, and Cara nodded for Stefile to go on ahead of her. Stefile stepped over its beak, holding up her skirt, and crawled up the flat of his head. The feathers were stiff and clean, like fresh sheets, and as Cara climbed round behind her, the light of the Flower glinted on the fibres, refracting for the first time, as if in a waterfall, arches and swirls of rainbow.
“Cara,” said Stefile, her head bowed, glancing over her shoulder, speaking while there was still time. “I never knew my mother. Can you understand? She was killed just after I was born; she left me to run away. I don’t know what a mother is supposed to be like. I don’t know what a mother is supposed to do.”
“Neither do I,” Cara smiled gratefully, relieved, kindly. “We’ll each learn, Stef, eh?” Stefile did not look sure. Cara hugged her from behind, pressed her face up against the side of her neck, and breathed in the smell of her hair.
“Duck low,” the beast advised them. “Hold on to the necklace. Do not look up until I tell you.” Carefully, he turned on the branch, one white paw crossing over the other. He stood still for a moment, and shrugged his wings.
Then he began to run.
The giant branch plunged down and sprang back with each ponderous stride of the beast, flinging even it up into the air. Cara and Stefile felt the smooth surge of muscle; their stomachs dipped and rose; they buried their faces in the feathers of the beast’s neck, and felt branches scrape over them and the showers of bark thrown up by the beast’s claws. There was a sudden crackling, a series of loud retorts behind them. The branch dropped away beneath them. It and half the broken tree had peeled away from the trunk and, held by wrist-thick strands of wood, had swung back into the main body of the tree, crashing through all the foliage around it. The beast was in the air.
Cara and Stefile felt Asu Kweetar droop in the air, sag with their extra weight lower and lower, felt the fierce beating of its wings, and his breath rippling down its throat, under their legs, and heard his lungs like bellows. “Now,” the beast told them, and they sat up, felt the wind slam into their faces and slice through their layers of fur, and saw themselves soar between the ragged tops of the trees. The beast’s beak opened wide and he let out a piercing shriek of triumph.
He turned in the air, leaning, and Cara and Stefile saw below them, covering the land, clinging to the trunks of the trees, all the animals together: the mountain goats and mountain lions; bears and fawns; worms and birds; eels and even fish that had crawled out of the streams on their fins, silver and half dead on the land. There were tortoises, necks straining out of their shells, and squirrels moving in brisk little flickers of alertness. Standing among them, still like morning mist, were the Dead. All of them, beast and spirit, craned their necks and turned their heads, following the Flower as it departed. All of them together moaned or bellowed or roared or chattered or bleated or lowed in dismay. A cloud of birds, roused at last from the calm the Flower had spread among them, rose up. Bees and flies and butterflies; geese; and two large swans, mated for life, their long necks held straight out and their wings whistling; squirrels leaping from tree to tree; they followed Asu Kweetar. Asu Kweetar was faster. The beasts of the land tried to follow, loping along the forest floor, or running with long, hungry, elegant strides. The Dead opened their mouths to cry out, but no sound came. They took each other’s hands, and gazed into the shadowed pockets of each other’s eyes. When the Flower, like a star, dipped below the horizon, the last of its power was cut off from them. Its light no longer held them in the Land of the Living. It was as if they were burned away by the sun.
The wolves saw the goats and remembered their empty bellies, and ripped life out of the herbivores’ throats until blood drenched the needles that carpeted the ground. The order of this life, such as it was, had returned.
Cara and Stefile passed over mountains so high that there was only rock and ice beneath them. They howled with the cold and clutched each other, as Asu Kweetar’s breath billowed over them like thick smoke. “We will drop lower soon,” the beast promised them, “unless the Dragon wakes.”
“Drop low, soon, then, Most Noble Beast,” said Cara.
“When I can, little brother. I am cold too. You will learn to believe that cold can no longer damage you. You are immortals.” The feathers of his neck were puffed out, soft white down underneath. Put your hands there. Do not pull them out by mistake. If you find a tick, oblige me by exposing it to the cold. They let go, then.”
“Do—do you really talk to God?” Stefile stammered with the cold.
“Yes,” replied the beast.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I can hear God, all around me, in the high air, when I fly. I am a thinking beast, and next to humankind, I am most beloved by God. I ease God’s pain.”
“God’s pain?”
“God loves. Could you love this world and not feel pain?”
“What—what does God say?”
There was a long silence, full only of the roaring of air in their ears. “I cannot tell you,” said the beast. “Do not misunderstand. It is not given to me to be able to tell you. Besides, I am only a beast of the air, as you are of the land. I do not understand myself. It is like music that you cannot remember.”
They passed over the mountains, and swooped low, as Asu Kweetar had promised, over marshy bogland.
“We are extremely hungry, Most Noble Beast,” said Cara after a time. Without speaking, Asu Kweetar grabbed his bow with his front paw, and pulled it over his own and his passenger’s heads. He reached behind and slipped an arrow from its quiver. “I am a beast of the air. I do not like the ground. I cannot eat what is of the ground,” he said.
Asu Kweetar swung low over the reeds, and mallards hidden in them. He chased the birds over the surface of the marsh until they rose up high into the air, flying as if in migration. Then, in the air, he pulled back the string of his bow, and loosed an arrow. Its shaft was curved. It swooped low, coming up below the fowl, driving up through its stomach. The arrow arched up and over in the air, carrying the mallard with it, back towards Asu Kweetar. He caught it in his beak, mumbled it in his mouth, and spat out the arrow. The arrow flared into flame in mid-air, carried on as a sheet of fire for just a moment, then disappeared, dribbling away through the air as ash. The beast passed the bird back to Cara and Stefile. It was black with burn, and hot and cooked inside.
“I am brother to the Dragon, who is the Earth, rock and fire,” Asu Kweetar explained. “I will be there when he awakes, and rears up, the Earth uncoiling.”
Cara and Stefile ate, as the beast hunted for himself. Stefile noticed, as Cara pressed against her, that the armour, pink and flecked with white, was warm and seemed to throb very slightly. It occurred to her that Cara’s armour was always warm.
They passed into Cara’s country, along the river, over the watery lands of decayed irrigation, to the heart of the state, and it was all in ruins.
The City from the
Better Times
It was night. Over Hapira Izamu Pa, no light from lamps or celebration fires was reflected on the low clouds. The City from the Better Times was silent and dark. The land all around it was black, with smoke rippling up in thin trails from mounds of ash. The reeds were gone from along the banks of the river and marshland. So were the floating villages that had hidden within them. Ash floated on the water. Bodies of men were splayed on the banks, bleached and swollen.
In the light of the Flower, those bodies began to stir, to shudder and sigh.
“How?” wondered Cara in dismay. “It has only been a season, from the end of summer to the end of autumn, how could they do so much evil?”
“There are many more of them than you think, and they have many more powers than you think, almost as many as you. Their time is ripe. They are about to march. They know you are coming. Do you want me to come with you?” Asu Kweetar stood on the tips of the claws of his hind legs, trembling, wings aloft, holding himself aloof from the ground. He lived at the Top of the World, where everything was made of ice and air.
“No,” said Cara, scowling. “No. It is better that you keep the Flower safe until we know. Stef?”
“I come with you,” said Stefile firmly.
“Then pick your way carefully to the gate, and beyond,” said the beast. “Beware of serpents and flies. They are the servants of the Galu, and live in their throats and ears. It causes me distress, as if a cub has died, that I cannot answer your most important question. But not even the Galu themselves know the answer to that. I will be near, and know when you need me, and return.”
“Thanks. Our thanks,” said Cara.
“I am a beast. I have no choice. I do not need thanks,” replied Asu Kweetar.
“We have need to give them,” said Stefile.
Asu Kweetar turned, the Flower shining through his front claws. He ran a few steps only, on his hind legs, and launched himself powerfully into the air. He hung there, legs drawn up, his wings beating, billows of ash mushrooming up around him. Slowly he began to rise, then faster, almost straight up, the Flower shining out through his back, as if it were a glowing heart. It seemed to rejoin the stars.
The blistered bodies on the bank fell still, covered in darkness. Cara and Stefile took each other’s hand, and walked across the ruined earth.
Underfoot there was a grinding of ash and bone. Tiny, harmless creatures, hamsters and hedgehogs and ground squirrels lay smouldering. Where grass had been, puffs of soft grey ash spurted out from under their boots.
In front of the City gates was a crowd of people, raised up in a mound where they had fallen. Their arms, light and crisp, were still pushing against the gates, melded to the wood, as if admittance to the City could have saved them. The gates themselves were charcoal, and gnawed away completely along the top by fire. The tiles of the walls had gone yellow, or black, or had finally fallen. The tips of someone’s fingers still burned like candles, with a blue flame.
Cara and Stefile had to march up and over the dead, to the gates, their legs suddenly sinking through layers of matted cloth. They too pushed against the gates, grinding the charcoal first onto their hands, and then onto their shoulders. There was a screeching of metal as the hinges broke away from the heat-crumbled stone, and there was a shower of mortar. “Get back!” shouted Cara. The gates began to fall inward.
Behind the gates, more of the dead were heaped into another pyre that was smaller, more thoroughly consumed than the first. The gates fell on it, balanced on it like a see-saw, the bottom edge rearing up into the air, scooping up Cara and Stefile, throwing them from their feet. The gates fell, and rose again, like a sigh, the bindings that held the logs bursting. The great cedar trunks settled separately, cushioned by the dead, with a muffled rumble and belchings of ash.
Cara and Stefile lay still for a moment. The logs covered the inward mound of bodies like a ramp. Unsteadily they stood, and walked down it, through the silence, into what was left of the Better Times.
It was like a city on the moon. Soft dust covered everything. The buildings were dark, without doors. Nothing moved. They waded through the dust, through what had once been the main market square. In the tiny, domed shops that lined it, the fabled wares of the merchants remained, as if in bitter caricature. The famous glass had burst apart in a shower of icy slivers that glittered in a glimpse of moonlight. The metalwork had melted and warped. The brass statue of a girl was still lithe and graceful in form, though burned rough, her copper robes an exfoliating, creamy green. Loaves of bread and cake were lined up in the ash, the shelves underneath them having burnt completely away. The trellis work that sheltered the market, from which passersby could pick grapes (always mindful, lately, of the serpents) had utterly disappeared. Cara and Stefile came upon the remains of a horse, still standing in front of a collapsed cart. All the water in its body had boiled away; its flesh was brittle and latticed.
“The Spell of Fire,” said Cara, standing before the horse. “The first and simplest of the spells.” She began to weep. “They used it, Stef. Used it to burn everything. The air. The birds would have fallen, burning. There would be no air to breathe; a great wind would blow through the streets. The soil itself would turn to ash. Basements into ovens, flesh into bread. There will be a great scar, Stef, even in the Land of the Dead.” They left the horse, no ears, its eyes as hollow as a sad question, waiting as if life or its master could return to it.
Cara and Stefile walked on into the streets where people had lived. There were ghostly rooms in the houses, with blackened tabl
es that could barely balance upright, with cracked and yellow plates still waiting for dinner. There were burnt beds, with children still asleep in them. A woman, like a loaf of black sugar, huddled over a bundle to protect it. A dog had lain next to a man, peacefully it seemed, its head on its paws. The air was sharp and bitter, and there was grit between Cara’s and Stefile’s teeth.
Beyond the mud brick houses of the ordinary people were the houses of the rich, with many floors on wooden beams, that had fallen in. Cara and Stefile had to climb over piles of broken stone that had sprawled across the streets. In places only the corners, and the stalwart chimneys still stood.
They came to the common ground. The beautiful trees had been burnt into coral shapes. The grass was gone, only dust was left. A goat, still enchained, lay bald and half buried in a drift of it. In the centre of the square was a long low building with royal crenellations along its roof.
“The Library,” groaned Cara. “Oh, Stef. The Library.”
They walked over dunes of ash towards it. The Library had belonged to the greatest of the ancient kings, who had given it and its parklands to the City. Its door had been burned through in its middle. The doorkeeper sat in his box, one shoulder wrenched above his ear, his lips burnt into a perpetual smile. Beyond him, in a corridor, a Librarian lay face down, a bucket in his hand with the bottom burnt through. The scrolls of the kings were gone, the wonder stories and the sacred texts. Their silver caps lay scattered about the floor, half eaten away. There were no shelves left, anywhere, in any of the chambers. The clay tablets lay in rows, like dominoes, some of them shattered, others baked into a smooth, almost glazed-looking brick. Cara knelt before one of them, and picked it up. It was still warm.
“Perception in his heart, command on his lips,” the tablet said. “The river arises from the grotto under his sandals. His soul is Mu, his heart is called Tefmut. He is Hakarati, who is in heaven. His right eye is day, his left eye is night. The warmth of him is breath for every nostril . . .”