Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Anvellyne was ahead of her at the moment. For he and Mardellian tended to grow bored, and dawdle and fall behind, whereupon Burr would grow stormy-looking and Brindle, noting as much, would yell at them, and then they would come racing down pell-mell and run on ahead until Burr and Brindle checked them. Lyne turned half around and said, “According to Weaver’s stories, Pluto didn’t make all of this anyway!”

  Weaver got the hunched, furtive look she always did when someone was trying to draw her into the conversation, and scuttled on ahead, leaving Prim to answer: “Of course he did!”

  “What I’m saying,” Lyne replied, “is that in those stories this all snapped off and got redone after Pluto and the rest had been flung into the sky and got rid of. So maybe if you don’t like the way these rocks are set down you should complain to Edda. When and if we actually see her.”

  “No soul went to the trouble to shape these rocks one by one, as a baker’s hand shapes a loaf,” Corvus ruled, banking slowly over their heads on a cool breeze coming up the valley.

  “Then how did they come to be here,” Prim asked, “with the shapes that they have?”

  “Why, when you step wrong, do you fall down?” Corvus replied. “The Land is so constituted that it has laws, which all things heed without the need for souls to observe, think, act, and do other soul-like things. So everything falls. Fall simply is. And besides fall there are other such laws and tendencies. Hill-giants maybe are aware of the slow forces that splinter cliffs and shape rocks, but not the likes of us.”

  “So maybe Edda will have something to say about it!” Mard put in. He was only joking, as Prim could tell from the look he threw Lyne. But if Corvus understood it as a jest, he had no patience for it. “If I see one more of you ground-pounders craning your necks and scanning the skyline for a glimpse of her kneecap, I’ll croak!” he exclaimed. “Attend to the rocks. It won’t be much longer.”

  But it was much longer, and so after a while Prim took up the theme again. She had a hidden motive; these debates made the time go by faster, and kept Lyne and Mard nearer the rest of the group.

  Prim required further convincing. “I have not seen the Palace,” she began.

  “I have,” said Corvus.

  “But I have seen many depictions of it, and heard it described in the songs of Weaver, and if there is any truth in those, it perches on a spire of rock that is so tall and slender it cannot answer to the same laws that, according to you, govern . . . this.” And after a brief pause to be sure of her footing she looked up and spread her arms to indicate the cliffs all round them.

  “It is an exception, to be sure,” Corvus admitted.

  “It was so shaped in the Before Times,” Weaver assured them, “when there were many such prodigies that could never be brought into being today. It was the last such, and some say that in making it Egdod spent his powers and made himself too weak to overcome . . . the Usurper.” This last word she spoke quietly, in confidence to Prim, for it was a forbidden word, not safe to say aloud in certain company. But Prim took no note. For as she had raised her gaze just now from the next rock and the next, she had spied, around the next bend in the valley, a patch of blue sky above a field of green.

  “You have to understand,” Corvus remarked, as the party lengthened its strides into Edda’s valley, “that being a giant, or a giantess, is not about being giant—or even large. That’s just a common misconception.”

  Mard and Lyne turned back to gawp at him. They simply could not believe the things Corvus said sometimes.

  “People have got impossibly confused,” Corvus went on, “because of hill-giants and other wild souls—who actually are unbelievably enormous. Edda has a form like ours.”

  Lyne was beyond exasperated—ready to turn on his heel and walk home, it seemed. “Then why denote her as a giantess?” He threw a look at Weaver, as if it were her fault. “F’relsake, can’t we come up with a different term?”

  “The First Children of Eve are known by many names, if you only listen with care to the old songs,” said Weaver. “Angel Eaters, Adam’s Woe, Cairn’s Care . . .”

  “Fine!” Lyne snapped. “All better names than ‘giantess.’”

  Burr had stopped a few hundred paces short of a cottage that they had all, without discussing it, been heading for since it had hove into view. Until recently they had been traversing wolfish country, where even the creatures that weren’t wolves tended to come equipped with a remarkable array of horns, tusks, and claws. In such places Burr liked to advance to the head of the group. Brindle liked to bring up the rear. Remarks he’d made along the way suggested he was afraid of being attacked from behind by unspecified creatures who—or so it could be guessed—were extraordinarily quiet in their movements and patient in their approach to hunting. But there hadn’t been much excitement so far. Everything that had come at them had done so from the front and found itself on the wrong end of Burr’s spear. A few times Prim had taken up her bow and nocked an arrow, just in case, but not let any fly.

  At no point during even the most thrilling encounters had Burr actually shown signs of excitement, or exhibited the least reluctance to keep forging ahead, and so it was strange that he now stopped, in an open space with no wild beasts of any kind in evidence, and no obstructions. A stone’s throw away, off to their left, a couple of mounts were eating grass, bending their necks to crop it from the ground and then bobbing back up to eye them curiously as they chewed.

  “No walls, really,” Burr pointed out. “No weapons. Livestock out in plain sight, unafraid.”

  “Yes indeed,” Mard said, “it seems very safe.”

  “Why?” Brindle asked. Rhetorically. “That’s what Burr is asking himself.”

  Mardellian hadn’t considered that angle. Neither had Prim.

  “Well,” Mard guessed, “you know, we haven’t seen what’s inside the cottage yet.”

  “Bread baking, to judge from the fragrance,” Prim said.

  “It could be full of armed Autochthons.”

  “It’s not,” said Brindle, and nodded at Burr. The man-at-arms, after giving the cottage only a quick look, had turned his back on it and was now surveying the sweep of dark hills that enclosed the valley and the pair of snowcapped peaks at its head, between which they had passed yesterday.

  “You see—” Brindle began.

  But Lyne, impatient with the lesson, cut him off. “We’ve been making our way through her defenses ever since we came down the pass and spotted that wolf up on the ridgeline, staring at us.”

  “We’re . . . surrounded?” Mardellian asked.

  Burr reversed his grip on the spear so that it became more walking stick than weapon. The party spread out to stroll across the pasture seven abreast: On the left flank, the young men Anvellyne and Mardellian, on loan from the clan Bufrect. Then Weaver, who seemed to be vaguely attached to House Calladon. Brindle, its patriarch, walked in the middle. To his right was Prim. Well off to the right was Burr, who preferred keeping his spear arm free of flesh-and-blood obstructions. In the open space between him and Prim, Corvus hopped along, occasionally flying for short bursts when he fell behind or needed to clear one of the stone walls that divided the pastures.

  In spite of Corvus’s words, Prim had been holding out for something in a gigantic vein. But as they drew closer to the cottage it became undeniable that it was in no way of unusual size. Not cramped, for certain, and of a somewhat rambling character, as bits had been added on from time to time. One could make out foundation stones of wings that did not exist anymore. These erupted from the ground like rows of teeth from gums. Those must have been relics of ancient sections of the cottage that Edda had built, lived in for a time, and got rid of—or simply allowed to disintegrate with the passage of time.

  She wasn’t tiny, at least. She opened the door to greet them and was revealed to be about as tall as Burr. Her hair was white, full and long, braided down her back. She wore an apron streaked with flour, which she took this opportunity to give
a brisk shake. The breeze caught the loose flour and bore it gently away. The flour caught the light as it drifted, and beguiled Prim’s eye, for the shape that it took and the manner of its movement was just like that of clouds in the sky when they drifted overhead on a summer’s day. This impression was so strong that it seized her mind entirely for a few moments, during which she could think of nothing save various times in her past life when she had gazed out her window or lain in the grass looking up at clouds.

  She did not entirely return to the here and now until she found herself some moments later standing, along with the others, right in the forecourt of the cottage, gazing up at the face of Edda. Or actually not gazing up, since Edda wasn’t that tall; yet it felt up. Corvus, perched on the roof over the door, was doing the introducing, poking his long beak at each of them in turn and squawking out their name. Edda favored each of them with a look and—not a smile exactly, but an openness about the face that put one at ease somewhat as a pure and unfeigned smile might. “Primula,” she said, as if she’d heard of Prim.

  “How do you do,” Prim said back up to her—but again, not really up. She got lost then in the striations in the iris of Edda’s left eye. These were immensely complex, and of all colors, having about them the same balance of order and wildness as exposed tree roots, tendrils of smoke in the wind, tongues of wild flame, the swirling of water where rivers came together. Prim wondered if the striations in her own irises were anywhere near as complicated. She guessed that the answer was probably no, and then wondered how such things got shaped in the first place—were you just born with them or did they grow in complexity over time? Or was it different, when you were a giantess? Had Edda consciously worked on hers, or had they just taken form on their own?

  “Weaver!” Edda said. Somehow they’d all entered the cottage and found seats around a table. A loaf of warm bread was there. They’d been tearing hunks from it and eating heartily, but there was plenty of bread remaining. Prim had got lost staring into the structure of a bread hunk, somewhat as she’d once sat for hours staring at the map of the Land. There was a lot to this bread, and biting chunks out of it only exposed more. Steam escaped from the tiny round cavities and came together in roiling cloudlets shaped like flowers, men, and monsters—until she began to notice them, whereupon they undid themselves and became invisible currents of scent.

  Weaver had been lost in admiration of the tabletop, which was an enormous slab of polished stone, a hand span in thickness, supported at the ends by boulders founded in the earth—the floorboards, unable to bear such weight, had been carefully cut around them. The stone had complex patterns, and you could see some distance into it, as if it were part crystal. Hearing her name spoken, Weaver tore her gaze from this only to get distracted by Edda’s braid, which the giantess had flipped to the front so that it trailed down over her bosom. There was a lot more to it than just a simple three-strand braid.

  “Yes, my lady?”

  “I have not had the pleasure of your company since two hundred and thirty-seven years ago, when you sat just where you are sitting now, and I taught you the Lay of Valeskara and Blair.”

  Prim remembered that vaguely: two lovers who, as a side effect of a war between a hill-giant and a troop of angels, had found themselves on opposite sides of a freshly made Shiver. Before they could find a way across, Blair had become embroiled in a fight with some Beedles, who had put him in chains and taken him away to a castle or something, where Autochthons put him in a dungeon. Valeskara still walked on the cliff top awaiting his return. So that, at least, was familiar. But Weaver’s being at least two and a half centuries old was news to her—and apparently to Brindle.

  Evidently it was even news to Weaver. “That may very well be, my lady, but . . .”

  “But you have no recollection of it, for you must have passed on at least once since then.”

  “One would think so!” said Weaver.

  Lyne raised his face out of his bread hunk just long enough to gaze across the table at Mard, with a look that said, No wonder she knows so many fucking songs.

  “Before you leave, I shall teach you more,” Edda promised.

  “That would be a high honor—”

  “Not going to happen,” Corvus announced from his perch on the sill of a window that Edda, perhaps unadvisedly, had left wide open. “There’s to be no ‘leaving.’ You’re coming with us.”

  For the first time, Edda smiled. She turned her attention to Brindle and Prim, who were seated next to each other.

  “You two are as father and daughter,” she observed, “but that is not so?”

  Brindle shook his head. “Her mother and father passed on, more than likely. Oh, it happened some time ago—she chose to remain a girl for many years, and I saw no point in rushing her along.”

  “Wise,” Edda said. “Dough given more time to rise makes a finer loaf.” Then, to Prim: “You make a fine young woman, which means you chose correctly.”

  Prim blushed and fell into a reverie, listening to the tones of Edda’s voice but not at all following the words. Her voice was as complex as her braid, and its strands were flutes, birdsong, and the lapping of waves on a lakeshore in the still of the evening.

  Brindle was squeezing her arm under the table. She looked at him. He inclined his head toward their hostess, whose last sentence rushed into her mind all at once: the giantess had said, “I see from the calluses on your fingers that you like archery; I could teach you what little I know of flint knapping.”

  “That is most generous,” Prim said. “The heads of my arrows are all forged.”

  “Much more practical,” Edda said, “but stone ones have their uses too.”

  “Learning that will burn weeks,” Corvus protested. “Think hours.”

  Edda didn’t seem to hear the giant talking raven. She turned her attention to the others, each in their turn. She remembered Burr as a warrior who had once passed on gloriously in single combat with an angel. This revelation certainly caused Lyne and Mard to look at the spearman in a new light.

  Those two Bufrect boys came in for examination next. Their clan lived round the edges of a steep rocky peninsula projecting from the southern end of Calla. It pointed into a broad, short Shiver that connected straight to the ocean. So they were seagoing folk. They’d joined the Quest on a lark, not without one or two swift kicks in the arse from their matriarch Paralonda. Since then, during wetter, colder, duller moments, they’d made no secret of regretting it. But by the time Edda was done talking to them it was clear there’d be no more second thoughts.

  “You make Questing sound grand,” Corvus pointed out. “Perhaps setting foot out of this valley every few centuries would do you good!”

  Brindle was the only one of the visitors Edda had not chatted with yet, and so it seemed natural he’d be next. But instead he and Edda merely looked at each other, arriving at some wordless understanding.

  Food had made them all sleepy and so at Edda’s invitation they spread out into various rooms of the cottage. For a small place, it had an extraordinary number of nooks and, as it were, backwaters, always surprising the visitor as she came round a corner. Before long Prim had found the perfect one for her, curled up in it, and fallen asleep. She rose once in the middle of the night to go outside and empty her bladder, and as she went in and out she overheard Edda and Brindle conversing in low tones, but could make out only a single word, which was “Spring.” After that she slept very soundly.

  She had a dream in which radiant light was shining down from the Palace, and she could not escape its glare, which penetrated even her closed eyelids. She was down on the ground far below, prostrate, but through the earth she could feel, more than hear, a deep grinding, as though the underpinnings of the Land itself were being invisibly reshaped. This was not the pick-and-shovel work of Beedles toiling under the lash, but something that hearkened to the Before Times and the doings of Thingor. Standing up and turning her back to the light, she found herself gazing up into mountains,
black at the base, white with snow above that, but hidden at the top behind storm clouds that reached up into the sky as high as El’s Pinnacle, wreathed at the top with blue lightning.

  She opened her eyes and flung out a hand to brace herself. In her dream she had been standing on a grassy plain but in fact she was lying on her side, back turned to the light of the morning, which was cutting in under the clouds and coming in straight through a window. That had been real, at least. The Pinnacle and the storm had been dream figments but that deep grinding sound was certainly there, pervading the cottage and coming up into her bones through the floor.

  She got up. The sound had a directionless quality that made finding its source no easy task. But soon enough she found her way into the kitchen. At the other end, by the door to a pantry that looked bigger than the rest of the house put together, a stone rested atop another stone. Both were round and flat, like thick coins, or slices of a sausage. Their diameter was about the length of a person’s arm. The one on top had a hole in its center, which was full of golden grain. Edda was standing next to it, one hand resting on the upper stone, and she was pushing it round and round. Flour trickled from a hole in the lower stone and collected in a bowl on the floor. This was, in other words, a mill like any other, save it lacked the waterwheel or the team of beasts that would normally be required to budge anything so heavy. Edda moved it as easily as if it were a spinning wheel.

  “Is there . . . some way I could help?” Prim asked.

  “It is about time to empty the bowl,” Edda pointed out, and nodded at a large table in the middle of the kitchen, on which a considerable heap of flour already stood. Prim stepped in, picked up the bowl, and carried it to the table, where she dumped it out atop what was already there. Then she paused for a few moments, for the shape of the heap was strikingly like that of the mountain in her dream, and the cloud of loose airborne flour still swirling above it was like the thunderhead that obscured the heights.

  But she knew that the flour was spilling out onto the floor by the mill, so she hurried over and reinstated the bowl. While she was there kneeling at Edda’s feet, she scooped up loose flour in her hands and transferred it into the bowl. The scent of flour was everywhere, of course, but so was the scent of Edda, which was faint but bottomless.