by Geoff Ryman
She heard the music just over her head, like an empty mechanical contraption. She felt a giant claw grab her, felt its reptilian scales under her hands. “Enough!” commanded a voice inside her head. She felt warm feathers, and a sudden weightiness in her stomach as she was hauled upwards. Her head drooped weakly and she saw the square below, suddenly so small, with its little cake of a temple, with a line of little black insects, so shallow and insubstantial, on the walls all around it. The only real thing there was the Tree.
“That,” said the shadows, the deluded Galu, “is for us!”
There was a sparking of orange light from their fingertips, and fire—solid, livid jets of orange flame—leapt out of them, joined into one, and poured into the square, filling it to the brim. All the bloody snow on the pavement billowed up, hissing, as steam, rising up through the fire, flickering pink and ochre on its roiling underside. The falling snow turned into feathery streaks of vapour as it hit the heat. In the middle of it, the fire and the steam, the Tree stood, untouched and steady with light. No soldiers had been left behind.
“We didn’t kill them,” said Cara.
Asu Kweetar hugged her to his breast. Like a fire her mind seemed to flicker and go dim.
“No, we didn’t, Little One. We didn’t,” said the beast. He was weeping.
When the Dragon
Wakes, We Will
See Him Together,
Each of You, and Me
Cara awoke, because there was no movement. The beast beneath her was still. Her head was in Stefile’s lap, who was tugging at her hair, untangling it. Cara’s body was caked in black, icy blood, and she felt weak and shivery, feverish. She groaned and sat up.
The light of the Flower filled a chilly mist, all around them, blue-white, in wisps and wafts. All around them, on the roof and down the ramp, knelt the Galu, in serried ranks. Their eyes were wide and unblinking, streaming with tears. Cara stumbled down from the warmth of Asu Kweetar’s neck. Dazed, she moved among the Galu, towards the Tree. Stefile followed anxiously, silently.
“It was all joy,” said Cara in confusion. “Why does it feel like sorrow now?”
“Cara, I thought you’d gone mad,” said Stefile with relief and took her hand.
“I . . .” Cara began and couldn’t finish. It hadn’t been madness, but what had overcome her? She only very dimly remembered the dancing and what had happened to the Loyal Dogs. What she did remember, heart-stricken, was the light, and the snow like bells, and the sound of the magic. Everything seemed very dull now, and ghostly. She felt as if something had been broken inside her. “I was being carried,” she said, and walked on, towards the Tree.
The silver leaves rustled as she approached them. She reached up, almost absent-mindedly, and picked one of the Flowers. Holding it in her puffy, baby arm, she pulled off one of its petals with her older hand, and held it out towards the nearest Galu. She knew his face.
“Hello, Galo,” she said. “You wanted this.” His eyes were upon her as she moved the petal towards his mouth. He opened it.
Then suddenly from out of that face, from all the other faces around them, shuddering out from under the skin of their faces came a single, gigantic voice. It roared, harsh with anger. “All right!” it said. “You’ve won!”
The face in front of Cara began to blister and swell, crispening, bubbles of oil seething under the skin. Then very suddenly, it burst, spraying Cara. There was a split down its forehead and nose, black liquor welling out of it. The flesh on the shoulders began to bruise, blacken, and to peel off in strips, falling away from the bone. The bones charred and crumbled. Something was destroying the Galu, in rage.
“Serpent,” said Cara, weakly. She didn’t want to see him again.
The Galu collapsed, their flesh tumbling on to the stone. The flesh flapped, like carpets by a door with a draft blowing under them, belching out dust and ash. Their black blood trickled in streams down the ramp. The streams joined together, winding and sinuous, flowing up and over the uninhabited flesh, slipping over the edge of the ramp, drooping down into the square, gliding across the pavements. The darkness cohered into a dark pool.
The pool heaved in place, and shivered, and with a sudden leap, like pieces falling into place, he rose up, the Serpent, in the Land of the Living, and he tossed his head from side to side.
“No! No! No! No!” the Serpent wailed, thrashing. He looked more human now, his scaly disguise dropped, a skin-coloured column of flesh, on fleshy coils. His blunt, round head had a human face, a white beard and ruby lips. He filled the square.
“You destroyed them, not us,” whispered Cara, fearfully.
“I’m going to have to take it back!” the Serpent cried, and shrugged himself forward. “I’m going to have to take it back!”
“Leave it to us. Leave us Life,” begged Cara, beginning to weep. “Hadam? Father? Don’t hate us. Why do you hate us?”
The Serpent simply howled. He lunged forward, his vast bulk and heavy head shooting up the ramp, knocking Cara and Stefile aside. He was cold, like a block of ice, and his breath was chilly vapour. He opened his human lips, bloated and red, and closed them about the trunk of the Tree of Life.
Asu Kweetar shrieked, and sprang forward. He lanced out the Serpent’s eye with his beak, and there was a bursting outward of clouded jelly. The Serpent hissed, and turned, and Asu Kweetar leapt back, and clambered up on the Serpent’s hide, which was creased in folds. The beast scrambled up the Serpent’s head, and leaned over his face, and snapped his beak shut across the black circle of the Serpent’s other eye, ripping out its clear covering.
The Serpent was blinded. The blue and yellow backs of his eyes were illuminated, in empty sockets. He screeched and tossed his head, and Asu Kweetar was flung. The beast rolled across the stone, and there was a crack. The coils of the Serpent rose up all around the temple, and dropped, lumbering on to the top of it, groping blindly. Asu Kweetar hobbled out of their path as they fell like fleshy trunks of trees. The beast dragged one wing, broken. He stood on his hind legs and charged again, claws outstretched to gouge at the Serpent’s exposed throat. He slashed at it deeply, red blood spurting over white feathers. The Serpent knew then where he was. The coils looped, and arched and gripped.
He lifted Asu Kweetar up, and beat him against the stone, hammering him up and down, the coils crushing and twisting the beast with a sound of snapping wood, but it was the Serpent who was shrieking in pain.
“You won’t have him, God!” the Serpent cried, jerking his head up blindly towards the sky. “You won’t have him anymore.” He stretched the beast out, gripping him by the legs. The Serpent placed his lips, like a kiss, on Asu Kweetar’s belly. The Most Noble Beast squirmed, and turned his head, and snapped on empty air. The Serpent’s teeth, great flat plates as long as Cara’s arm, closed, scooping out all the inner workings of the beast’s stomach. Asu Kweetar squealed like a pig. The Serpent pulled back, hauling out strands with him, tore them free, and then spat. The Serpent shuddered, and threw Asu Kweetar from him.
Then with the speed of a whip, the coils wrapped themselves around the Tree, and as he touched it, the Serpent howled as though burnt. The Serpent clenched, and the Tree buckled, and then broke, like glass, cutting his sides, and light burst forth, crazy light, sweeping through the mingled steam and ash like searchlights. The Serpent heaved himself backwards, and the temple shook as the Tree was uprooted, and the air seemed to open with a gasp so cold, it seemed to slice through Cara’s heart, and stop it for a moment, immortal as it was. Cara saw the Tree and the light retreat, as the Serpent, rigid with pain, threw himself back and forth amid the light. Then the air seemed to fall shut like a curtain, and the Serpent, and the Tree were gone.
Stefile was already beside the Wordy Beast. The animal’s heart and lungs had been left to him, but out of the crater of his belly, fountains of blood gushed out, slapping the pavement with rich red droplets. He lay gasping on his back, his claws still fighting, feebly.
�
��Oh no,” said Stefile in a tiny, wounded voice. “Oh, Wordy Beast, oh no.”
Asu Kweetar was a beast, long-lived beyond understanding, but they understood then that he could die. He was dying. His silver eyes stared, growing dim and dry, and his beak hung open, sideways. Stefile knelt and moved her hands towards his stomach, as if to close the arteries as thick as her fingers, through which life splattered, wasted. The ruin was too great.
“Pity God, whose work is spoiled,” they heard a dim whisper from his mind. Then, a promise. “When the Dragon wakes.” Then Asu Kweetar tried to stand. He lifted up his head, with its dim eyes, and his claws tried to close, and his one whole wing thumped against the stone. They saw into his mind.
He thought he had stood. They saw how, deluded in his death dream, he thought he had risen, and was flying, free in the air. They felt his heart beating, and the surge of warm air in his lungs, all delusion, and the wind ripple across his wings, white and firm and strong, and he screeched with delight. At last, he was away from the ground! He soared fast, into wafting white cloud, higher, higher, until the water turned into drifting crystals of ice, where the thunder boomed.
They seemed to hear something else through him, something warm and welcoming and infinitely sad, that enfolded him, that was steady and wordless and flowing, like a human voice singing, that was somewhere ahead in the white, white cloud. Then it all faded.
Stefile burrowed her face into the feathers that were still stiff and clean and warm. “Oh Wordy Beast,” she pleaded. “Don’t die. Please don’t die.”
Cara felt something throb, in a tiny hand.
“Stef!” she screeched suddenly, and pulled her out of the way, on to the stone.
In her new, raw, infant arm, still clenched, was the Flower she had plucked from the Tree. “Dear God, if you love anything make me not too late!” she prayed, plunging her good arm down through the open beak, deep into the beast’s gullet, past the stiffening tiny blade of a tongue.
“Cara!” cried Stefile, jumping up, grabbing her. “Cara, Cara, Cara!”
They watched in silence. The beast was still. “Too late,” sobbed Cara, the words rattling with the shudder of her breath. “Too late.”
A strand of flesh, as thin as a thread, leapt across the great wound. Very quickly, as if on a loom, threads of flesh crossed and recrossed each other. The torn edges plumpened and reached out. “Help to close the stomach, eh?” whispered Cara, and they knelt, and tried to ease the wound shut, as a net of white was woven with blinding speed. They had to pull their fingers clear of it. Cara’s severed arm reached across to help. And a third pair of hands joined to help them. The Baked Man knelt with them, and Stefile gave him a silent nod of thanks. Under their hands, they could feel the stomach fill, flooding with the organs of life. Suddenly there was a rasping of breath, and the white chest rose up, heaving. The flesh about the dim eyes strained to blink, and finally did, and the eyes freshly moistened, gleamed. The beast lolled his head, and sighed, and then, limply, rolled on to his side.
Stefile whooped with joy, and jumped up and down, and swung Cara about, and hugged the Baked Man. “Jarwe! Jarwe, Jarwe, Hallu!” she cried.
“Oh! I saw!” They felt the beast’s mind brush theirs with wonder. Then, disappointed, “I was flying.”
“Where is some water? Where is some water?” demanded Stefile, weeping.
“Can you hear it? Can you?” asked Asu Kweetar, raising his head and looking all around him.
“No,” whispered Cara, stroking his feathers, making him lie down again. The snow had stopped, and in the East the sky was silver, like his eyes.
They each knew, of course, what Cara had done. If she had kept only one petal of it behind . . . But none of them spoke of it. It was enough. They saw Asu Kweetar fly again. He rose up white as a cloud, and slightly pink with the dawn. He circled over their heads, making high and wild sounds.
“When the Dragon wakes,” he promised them, “we will see him together, each of you, and me.”
It was a long, slow walk out of the City. The Dogs wandered through it, dazed, their faces covered in ash, their minds somehow wounded. “What do we do now?” one of them asked Cara.
Cara was moved to pity. “Go home, back to your villages. Live there. Forget this,” she told them.
Beyond the City was a wide, marshy plain. The bogs were black with ash. They found a charred wooden barge and used that to find the river. The Baked Man went with them, playing jolly marching soldier songs on a small pipe. It was many days before they saw another human face. The face, a young fisherman’s, fell in amazement to see, floating in the air behind them, a human arm.
The Baked Man said goodbye to them at the Lower Falls, to see his people. It was he who sung the songs that told of what had happened. They were largely disbelieved, save for the fact that their singer resolutely refused to die.
After Magic
Life returned to what it had been, neither better nor worse. The next spring, the reeds began to grow again along the banks of the marshes. Villagers who lived beyond the reach of the consuming Fire fearfully took canoes through the expanses of waste. The rich farmlands were singed black and deserted. Younger sons with no inheritance and some courage began to resettle them. How the fire had started, where the Galu had gone, no one knew. God, it was said, had destroyed them. Hapira Izamu Pa was shunned, and given a new name. Da Nata, it was called, which meant Emptiness, or Ruin.
In the Village by Long Water, a warrior and his supposed bride were suddenly seen to be living in the Important House. Liri Kerig, who had left the house, would not say why she accepted them, or who they were. The Old Women tapped their noses. “A tale there,” they said, and nodded. “Given only to us to understand.” Then they told their tale and no one believed them. Four months after the outlandish people came, when the last spring began to turn into summer, a child was born.
Aunt Liri was its midwife, and Cal Cara Kerig, the true daughter of the house, watched and waited in the hushed and familiar rooms that were candlelit and warm. The child shrugged its way headfirst into the world, already with fine, lank hair, and a wise and wizened face. It looked about it blinking, and coughed to clear its throat.
“Hello, Mother,” it said to Cara, in a high-pitched piping voice. Then it arched its head back, and looked over its pink and red shoulder. “Hello, Mother,” it said again. Then it pulled, and wriggled, and stepped out, walking, still attached by the cord. They saw then that it was a daughter.
Gently, Cara lifted her up. The child had a pleased, amused expression, like a wry old woman being carried on a sedan. Cara placed her on Stefile’s soft stomach. “I have waited such a long time to be born,” she said in a bird-like voice, and rubbed the moisture and buttery grease from her eyes.
They tried to call her Wisdom, or Knowledge, but Our Tongue was too crude and simple. The word, Sykantata, also meant magic, and sometimes, sex.
At three days old the child called Knowledge, or Magic could run. She ran flapping her arms, keening, naked, up and down the stone steps that led to the house.
“She can run. Let her,” shrugged Stefile, through teeth that held her pipe. Faced with the facts of it, Stefile found that she was not a mother to worry. The severed arm faithfully followed the child, lowering her down the highest steps, carrying her over boulders. “There, see? All right,” said Stefile. The child swung on the arm as though it were a branch, and walked by the river, holding its hand.
Cara spent her days at the foot of the cliff, digging the grey, baked earth. Somewhere, she knew, her father was trying to dig ground that would not break. “I’m here, Ata,” she would whisper. Syki and the arm would help, pushing flowers into the ground.
“There is a white horse in the garden,” Syki said once, climbing onto Cara’s lap. “No one can see it but me. It is standing there with big black eyes and it weeps.”
“The flowers are for her, too,” Cara said, and kissed the top of Syki’s head. She turned and looked up at Cara, smi
ling, shaking her head in tolerance, as if her parent had much to learn.
A week after she was born, Sykantata disappeared for a whole day. The arm returned alone, disconsolate, dragging its hand, shrugging when asked questions. Stefile marched up and down the irrigations, hugging herself, her face closed against pain, haggard and steely. It was Cara who saw the child’s return, at dusk.
A magpie glided into the hollowed-out courtyard by the doorway, and in a flurry of beautiful black and grey landed in the window of the winter stable.
“I have been all the way out of the canyon!” piped the magpie. “Down the river! I flew! I saw a very large place with three big buildings. Was that the City?”
“Syki!” exclaimed Cara, and stepped forward, and then stopped, frightened suddenly that she might scare the bird away. “Is that just your voice?” The magpie let out a joyful, mischievous chuckle and leapt down into the stable. Sykantata came running out of its dark doorway, her cheeks bulging, her eyes grinning. She spat out a single purple amethyst at Cara’s feet.
“A present!” the child exclaimed. “Magpies always bring presents. Did I see the City, Cara?”
“No. It was Canyon’s End, not the city.”
“Then I will fly even farther tomorrow. I will be a cormorant. They fly farthest of all.”
“Why do you want to go so far away?” Cara asked, wounded somehow that they had created such a prodigy, another wonder. She reached out for her, and the child laughed, and ducked away.