Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “I had given very little thought to it,” said Corvus.

  “Well you see, that does concern me a little,” said the man. “For some directions are more hazardous than others; and if you should happen to pick the wrong one, why, you will only get farther away from your destination with each beat of your wings.”

  Corvus meditated upon these words. “Very well,” he said, “I’ll be back.” He began to flap his wings but had some difficulty getting clear of the apple tree’s impossibly gnarled branches.

  “There is carrion out back of the kitchen,” said a younger man with hair on his upper lip. “It might give you greater strength if you ate some.”

  Standing next to that man was a woman with yellow hair. “And the greater your strength, the farther you can fly . . . from here,” she added helpfully.

  “If you go south or east,” said Prim, “stay high—because of arrows.”

  “North or west, low—eagles,” added the man who had spoken first.

  Thus advised, Corvus worked free of the tree’s grasp and flew over behind the hall, to a little yard where someone was tossing food out of an open door onto the ground. There it was being fought over by various low-to-the-ground creatures. Wanting no part in their squabbles, Corvus flew in through the door and found a piece of a dead animal lying on a slab of wood. He picked this up in his talons. The woman who had been throwing the food took exception and hurled a metal container at him, but it did not strike him, so he flew into the Hall, carrying the piece of the dead animal, and went up to a high exposed piece of dead tree that seemed to be playing a part in holding the roof up. There he bided for a while, tearing the “carrion” into shreds small enough to swallow. As had been promised, the building’s walls, below the windows, were adorned with images. Some were made by the weaving together of colored fiber, others by applying colored stuff to flat things. At first these made little sense to him, but as his stomach filled with carrion, his powers of understanding grew and he saw that all of these were ways of tricking the eye to make it see things that were not actually present. Apparently the figures shown were Calladons. Or at least some of them were. The handsome ones astride four-legged beasts—probably Calladons. The ugly misshapen ones they were depicted as killing—probably something else.

  Prim had made passing reference to a giant who was asleep. It could be guessed that the very large biped made of rocks, prominently featured in one of the larger pictures, was the very same—though, during the events shown, most definitely awake.

  Stringing all of these pictures together into a story looked to be an all-day project, but Corvus didn’t have to go to all that trouble to get the drift: Calladons and other suchlike persons had come here a long time ago as part of an epic adventure featuring not only giants but floods, avalanches, packs of ravening beasts, flying bipeds with bright swords, and diverse other entities that did not look much like them. Strange-looking cities had been visited, caught on fire, fled. This had at some point given way to a more settled way of life in circumstances that were nicer but, on the whole, colder. Crops and orchards had been planted, animals husbanded, babies made, buildings raised. Efforts, apparently successful, had been made to defend all of that through the systematic application of violence. These doings accounted for most of the pictures. But there were a few that did not fit into that general scheme, in which extraordinarily good-looking individuals—at a guess, Calladons—went to outlandish places to fight odd-looking critters and/or collect peculiar objects. Which confirmed in the mind of Corvus that these “queer folk” would make adequate Quest material.

  Thus nourished with an agreeable “breakfast” of carrion and historical imagery, Corvus flew out through an open window and soared high into the air above the hill on which the Calladons had built their house. The place was shrouded in mist and cloud; but once he had flown for some distance and ascended to a greater height, he turned into the east, and saw the Land stretched out before him.

  He was back a year later. “My notions have firmed up,” he announced. “I know roughly where to go, and several ways to get there, and why some of those ways are preferable to others. What your mounts eat and how much it costs, how far arrows fly, why certain kinds of people automatically try to kill you. All this and more is known to me. Let us be on our way.”

  A lengthy silence ensued. No one got up. The Calladons were seated at a long table out of doors, in a courtyard next to the Hall, whence food and drink were being brought out to them by persons whom Corvus now understood to be servants. Some of them Corvus recognized from a year ago, others were visitors (as could be guessed from the tired mounts and dusty carts scattered about the premises). The man with the beard was seated at one end of the table; Corvus had learned that his name was Brindle Calladon. At the opposite end, facing Brindle, was a woman who seemed to be the most senior and respected of the visitors; she was called Paralonda Bufrect. Along the sides of the table, Calladons and Bufrects were commingled. Corvus had perched on a sort of wrought-iron tree erected in the middle of the table to support many candles. None of these had been lit yet because the sun had not finished going down. Diners seated near it had scooted back as he had come in for a landing, and some had gripped their eating knives in a not altogether welcoming style, reminding Corvus that he had grown into what was probably the largest raven any of them had ever seen.

  “That is the largest raven I have ever seen,” said one of the visitors.

  “I found tremendous size useful,” Corvus explained, “when traversing eagle country.”

  “And it talks,” said another. Which to Corvus seemed as if it ought to have been fairly obvious by now. But Corvus was aware of his own limitations. He had roamed over much of the Land and knew more of it than any of these persons possibly could. But he had been to almost no dinner parties and so was ignorant of practices. Perhaps saying incredibly obvious things was customary. “I am an enormous sentient talking raven who has just interrupted your dinner party—”

  “And shat on the centerpiece,” observed a woman sitting nearby.

  “—and my name is—”

  “Corvus!” exclaimed a woman seated down at the end near Brindle. It was Prim. Corvus had not recognized her immediately, for her form and dress had altered during his absence. She stood up and clasped her hands together. “As you can see, I am more nearly ready to take part in a Quest now than when you last saw me. I have grown bigger and stronger and learned map reading and riding and archery and other things as well.”

  Corvus clucked approvingly. But in truth Prim was the least of his concerns, for he had always somehow known that she would turn out fine. He was distracted by the sheer variety of reactions that his arrival had elicited from the guests. A surprisingly large number of them—more so among the visitors than the Calladons—seemed never to have encountered a sentient, talking animal in their whole lives. Those could be divided among:

  Those who had considered such a thing impossible

  . . . and who still persisted in thinking so and were therefore doubting the evidence of their senses . . .

  . . . because of too much drink taken

  . . . or adulterants in the food

  . . . deliberately and maliciously introduced

  . . . or put in by accident

  . . . or because it was all a dream

  Those who believed that such creatures had existed long ago but were strictly things of the past, subdivided into

  . . . those doubting the evidence of their senses (as above)

  . . . those who found the sudden arrival of a fairy-tale creature

  . . . fascinating and charming

  . . . or evil/loathsome/dire

  Those who had known all along that such creatures existed and who were not greatly surprised to encounter one at dinner, divided into

  . . . one who rather liked him (Prim)

  . . . those calmly reserving judgment (e.g., Brindle)

  . . . those who hated him (the yellow-haired woman and the man
with the hair on his upper lip)

  At any rate the total number of persons at the table was not enormously larger than the number of categories, meaning that nearly everyone present was reacting in an altogether different way, and in most cases doing so rather strongly, leading to a pandemonium of fainting, screaming, knife waving, malicious glaring, furious remonstration, hand-clapping delight, dismay, judicious beard stroking, etc. to say nothing of secondary interactions, as when a knife waver collided with a screamer. Corvus, accustomed to soaring alone, found himself frankly quite overwhelmed and thought it best to fly away. He did not go off to any great remove but, from their point of view, probably vanished into the darkening sky, touching off a resurgence of the doubting-the-evidence-of-their-own-senses crowd.

  The dinner seemed to have been terminated. At least half of them went into the hall, many pausing on the threshold to cast suspicious looks over their shoulders. But when it seemed things had settled down, Corvus descended and perched on the back of a chair that had been vacated. Still present were Brindle, Prim, Paralonda (though she had taken advantage of the upset to pick up her goblet and move closer), and half a dozen or so mixed Calladons and Bufrects. The latter seemed generally in the astonished-but-agreeably-fascinated camp, whereas Calladons, being queer folk, seemed more likely to view talking animals as part of the natural order of things.

  This was the moment when a human would have apologized for having ruined the dinner party, but one of the liberties that went along with being a raven was never being sorry for anything.

  “Can you say anything more about the nature of your Quest?” asked Brindle. “You mentioned that you knew which direction to go in, and that is certainly an improvement upon how matters stood a year ago. But what do you expect to find at journey’s end, and what do you envision doing once you have found it?”

  While Corvus was thinking about this—and to be quite honest, he was thinking about it for the first time ever—the man with the hair on his lip and the woman with the yellow hair emerged from the Hall. They moved with more haste than grace in a straight line for Prim. “Merville,” said Brindle. “Felora. Would you care to sit with us? There is no lack of empty chairs.” But it seemed that Merville and Felora preferred standing behind Brindle and Prim to sitting just a tiny bit farther away. “What I don’t get is this,” Merville announced. “This creature is quite obviously capable of flight—which we are not. It can go anywhere it pleases, any time it chooses. Why then does it not simply go to wherever this Quest is to be—culminated, or whatever—and do whatever needs doing?”

  After a short pause, Felora spoke. “I’ll tell you why not. It must be that the completion of the Quest requires humans. The raven can’t get it done without us. And what are humans good at that ravens are not? Well, fighting and all that goes with it in the way of getting hurt and maimed and dying and so on.” And she rested a hand on Prim’s shoulder. This made Prim twitch, but she did just manage to control an impulse to shrug or slap Felora’s hand away.

  “Huge talking ravens actually can fight,” Corvus pointed out, “and I have scars to prove it.”

  “And this is supposed to reassure us?” asked Merville in an incredulous tone.

  “I can’t shake the notion that the Quest will somehow involve going underground,” Corvus said, “or at any rate into some sort of structure so deep and convoluted that it might as well be underground, and perhaps that is why I have been absolutely certain from the beginning that humans must be part of it.”

  “Again,” said Merville, “if the intent of these statements is to reassure us as to the nature of the planned activities—or, for that matter, whether you have even the vaguest notion as to what those activities are to consist of—then you might wish to fly away again and stay away for a good deal longer and come back with a plan.”

  “Or better yet, find some other family to pester,” put in Felora.

  “I have pestered several. Yours is best,” said Corvus. “Look, the nature of the Quest far transcends ordinary concerns of day-to-day existence, such as eating, drinking, staying warm, and not getting maimed or whatever. It has to do with the fundamental nature of reality—the Land of whose existence your mind convinces you from one moment to the next whenever you are awake. People who actually bother to think about this—which is, as far as I can tell, not very many of them—come up with various overarching stories about it that seem more or less convincing depending on what strikes one’s fancy, story-wise. Just ask anyone you meet what they believe about El, Egdod, and all that. For my own part, I know it to be the case that I came into this world under unusual circumstances and with certain powers, instincts, and predispositions already built in. That cannot be denied even if I lack clear memories as to how it came about. I think it reasonable to assume that I was sent hither on a one-way trip from another plane of existence whose exact nature will forever remain mysterious to us. But the powers of that world know about us and care about us and have plans, or at least hopes, for us, and it is their desire and their intention that we should come into possession of certain knowledge that will give us power to affect the Land for the better. The nature of that knowledge is mysterious, but it awaits us at the end of the Quest. Even if going there and getting it were within the powers of a solitary giant talking raven—which I do not believe to be the case—doing so would be beside the point since the Quest’s purpose, as preordained by the mysterious powers in the world from which I was sent, is not just to make everything perfect for one raven but rather to effect a transformation in your souls. We leave at first light.”

  Rather a lot of arguing and discussion ensued, very little of which seemed to require the presence or participation of Corvus—who, in any case, had already told these people everything he knew. People came and went between this outdoor table and the Hall in greater or lesser states of furor. As they did, Corvus hopped sideways from chair-back to chair-back until he was almost down to the far end. Then he flew off into the night and soon found a comfortable perch on a tree branch near the Hall. From it, he was able to see through open windows to the interior, which was lit up by burning things. He reviewed the tapestries and paintings that he had seen a year ago. These made more sense now that he had actually been to some of the places depicted (albeit not very realistically) and laid eyes on some of the categories of souls shown.

  One item had made no sense at all to him when he had first seen it, but now he understood what it was. This was ostensibly a painting of a very large tree, but curiously bedizened with little pictures of people who appeared to be attached to its branches like apples. The pictures were labeled with words. He now knew how to read these, because he had visited the Tower of the Ink Grinders in the fair city of Toravithranax and perched in the window of the high atelier where Pestle herself taught her students the Three Runic and the Eleven Scribal Alphabets as well as two completely different and incompatible systems of writing said to be used by strange people in the Teemings of the far east. Two different alphabets from three discernible epochs were represented among the names on this tree.

  Reclining naked against the tree’s trunk were a man and a woman labeled in very old script as ADAM and EVE. Below them, shown underground, were roots labeled EGDOD and SPRING. Other queer old names such as “Ward” and “Longregard” were scattered about on other rootlets; Thingor and Knotweave toiled in little subterranean cavelets, making things. Above them, standing on the ground to one side of the tree and bathing everything in white light, was El. Scattered about was an assortment of souls: to El’s side of the tree, winged angels and mounted Autochthons and hunched scuttling Beedles. To the other side, bipedal rock piles, animated whirlwinds, and other oddments.

  Low down, the trunk of the tree pushed out an ungainly side branch that looked as if it really ought to have been pruned off for starters. Chiseled into its bark in one of the Runic Alphabets were the number 12 and a word that meant something like “Great Ones” or perhaps “Giants.” It forked in two; its lowe
r fork had six branches all labeled with names that sounded masculine, and its upper fork six that were more feminine seeming. The former were all dead ends, but the latter produced various subbranches. Meanwhile the tree’s main trunk went straight up for a bit, throwing out eight major side boughs. The eight boughs likewise sported an even mix of male and female names, and most of them forked and reforked profusely, so that the total number of little branches, out at the periphery, must have numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands. But unlike a real tree, this one included countless places where twigs from different branches came back together. To Corvus of a year ago this had made no sense, as real tree branches never did this, but he now understood that this was not a tree. It was a way of explaining how the descendants of Adam and Eve had recombined to populate the Land. And so in a case where, for example, the second son of Adam and Eve had mated with their third daughter to produce a child, it was necessary for those branches to bend together and merge in a distinctly non-treelike manner. More than two or three generations along, these had become impossible for the artists to keep doing and so beyond that point they had resorted to drawing lines between widely separated branches or simply duplicating names. This did not make the tree any easier to make sense of. Once Corvus got the overall gist of it he began to feel that the more he stared at it, the less he knew. But one good big patch of it was labeled PEOPLE BEYOND THE FIRST SHIVER, and right in the middle of that was CALLADON and not far away was BUFRECT, which Corvus gathered was the family name shared by most of the visitors. In relatively clean, fresh paint, BRINDLE was assigned a leaf of his own, but no one seemed to have got round to filling in any more recent arrivals. Likewise the most recent addition to the Bufrect family was PARALONDA, which was the name of the lady who had been seated at the other end of the table from Brindle.