Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Baking more bread?” Prim asked. For it seemed that Edda had baked more than enough of it yesterday.

  “Hardtack,” Edda corrected her. “To sustain us on the road.”

  49

  Two days’ easy walking took them to the place where the river emptied into a broad bend of the Shiver that formed Calla’s northeastern coast. From there, across several miles of open water, they could see a solitary mountain guarded by ranges of foothills. It was not evident from here, but Prim knew from maps that this was a separate Bit unto itself, with another Shiver cutting around its backside and separating it from the much larger Bit that lay off to its east. Formerly all three landmasses had been one huge Bit, but the solitary mountain had drawn to itself all the wildest and most fractious old souls that still dwelled in the Land, and the place had become so unmanageable that, like a nail driven into a block of brittle old wood, it had snapped the big island in half and found itself standing alone in the midst of a newly formed Shiver. The waters girding it and the air above were infamously fickle and hazardous. Reaching this harbor, as beautiful and placid as it seemed, was therefore considered too dangerous to be attempted by sea. This did much to explain why Edda had been able to enjoy such isolation in her valley, for one end could only be entered by going over the pass, and the other was, to all intents and purposes, barred to mariners by the wild souls on the Bit opposite. But there was a village at the river’s mouth where a few doughty souls lived from fish that they caught along the nearer shore. This was notched with little coves where they could take refuge when air and water were raging. One of these, a man named Robst, agreed to take the party as passengers on his boat, Firkin, if they would pull on oars, and perform other tasks, when needed.

  It took no time at all to agree on this plan, but Prim was surprised by how long it took to embark and get under way. She was not accustomed to boats and watery doings; she was taken aback by how many lines and knots were involved. Robst had a lot to say on the subject of ballast.

  “We traveled too light,” Mard explained to her.

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Prim replied. “My pack felt heavy to me!”

  Mard nodded. “Yes, we all carried as much as we could. But Brindle, you’ll recall, said from the very beginning that we mustn’t use mounts . . .”

  “Because we would only have to abandon them when we reached the water and boarded ship,” Prim recalled. “Of course, it’s a different story with Edda’s.”

  She nodded at two mounts who were standing on the shore near the dock, taking a very dim view indeed of the crests of incoming waves. Edda had laden them with baggage for the trip down, so that the rest of the party could walk free of their heavy packs. The beasts had now been unloaded, and Edda had let them know that they were free to leave. They didn’t seem to like the waves at all, and so kept edging back from the shore. But they liked Edda quite a bit, and were reluctant to part from her.

  For all the toil that had gone into transporting them to this place, the bags did indeed look like not very much when they were all piled up on the strand. “Firkin is made to carry lots of heavy stuff,” Mard said. “Just now the hold is empty, and it is riding very high in the water.”

  “It is?” Prim asked. To her it just looked like a boat.

  “Bobbing like a cork,” Mard confirmed. Bufrects, dwelling on the coast, knew more about such things than Calladons in general. In fact Lyne had already boarded the vessel and was clambering around familiarizing himself with how it all worked. “Not safe to sail. Our baggage weighs nothing compared to what that boat could carry, and so Robst is going to have to put more stuff into it just to make it ride lower in the water.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Rocks,” Mard said with a shrug.

  “Ugh, rocks again!”

  Edda pulled her modest bag from the pile and slung it over her shoulder. She went up to each of the mounts in turn for a sweet face-to-face conversation and a goodbye kiss, then turned her back and stepped up onto the pier, which ran out into the harbor on a series of boulders and pounded-in tree trunks. Firkin was tied up at its end. When she stepped aboard, it settled much lower in the water, as if tons of rocks had just been deposited in its hold. The mounts turned tail and walked off, following the bank of the river back up in the direction of Edda’s cottage.

  Robst—who had been engaged in a detailed conversation with Brindle on the topic of rocks—stood still for a long time, gazing at his boat as if he were expecting it to bob back up again. It did not, however, and so after a while he shrugged and walked down the dock to board it and continue his preparations. He struck a deal with two younger kinsmen and a local woman; these would provide him with a skeleton crew so that he could sail Firkin home after discharging the passengers. A short while later they were under way.

  Using sails when they could and oars when they had to, they proceeded north up the Shiver in a furtive way, hewing close to the near shore until the mountain of the wild souls was well behind them. Then they ventured out into the middle of the channel, which was many miles broad this far north. They passed out of the Eternal Veil of Mist that surrounded Calla and came out into full sunlight. They caught a stiff west wind that was sluicing down another Shiver that delineated the north coast of Calla. This drove them eastward at a good clip. Prim’s home island fell away aft. At some point Prim realized that she could not see Calla—or, to be precise, the Eternal Veil—anymore, and wondered when or if she would ever see it again. They were navigating now generally eastward between Bits that seemed on the whole darker, colder, and less welcoming. It was because they were covered mostly in trees—the greenish-black trees of far north and high mountain—with only rare patches of farm and pasture.

  Four days’ voyaging took them round the south cape of another Bit. As soon as they’d cleared it, they hooked northward into the First Shiver, which in these parts was so broad as to be more of an inland sea than a channel. The coast opposite was not always visible, but they could see hills rising above it. And so this was how Prim got her first look at the Land proper. From the deck of this boat, it looked no different from another Bit in the distance. But Prim could not help gazing on it and thinking about the fact that once you set foot on it you could reach all the places on the big map: not just the Lake Land, which was the nearest part, but the Knot, the Fastness, the Hive, the Palace, and the teeming lands surrounding the great river as it flowed down to the far eastern sea.

  Soon visible off to their left was their destination: West Cloven. This port had a sister city, unsurprisingly known as East Cloven, just opposite on the shore of the mainland. In the old days they had been one town straddling a river that drained part of the Lake Land. Like Eltown and Toravithranax farther south, it had been settled in the time after Egdod had thrown down the first Hive, and the souls who had dwelled in it had dispersed to all corners of the Land.

  Their home island of Calla had been settled by souls who had begun their journey around Camp, across from Old Eltown, and made their way north and west, following trails laid down by migrating giants. So the speech of the Calladons and Bufrects was a dialect of what was still spoken around Secondeltown. But different folk altogether had created the town that later became Cloven. Its two halves, East and West, had been separated long enough by the gradually broadening Shiver that a different dialect was spoken in each. At the opposite end of the First Shiver, many days’ journey to the south, the people of Toravithranax spoke yet another entirely different language. Of all of these places, Secondeltown, being closest to El’s Palace, and indeed having a direct view of the Palace from the vast and magnificent Temple, Basilica, School, and Monastery of Elkirk looming above it, spoke a language thought to be closest to that of First Town in the Before Times. A simple version of that language—Townish—had come into use up and down the length of the First Shiver as the common tongue of mariners and traders. It was close enough to what the Bufrects and Calladons spoke that with a little practice, and by prun
ing their sentences, they could make themselves understood around the docks in West Cloven. Or so they were assured by Robst as he piloted them safe into the old harbor after a reasonably uneventful journey. It was not the biggest town they’d ever seen—Farth, the capital of Calla, was bigger and certainly nicer to look at—but it was a considerable town. Much larger vessels than theirs were moored all about, unloading cargo from the Lake Land across the First Shiver. In its place the produce of many Bits was transferred into vacated holds: honey, wax, timber, fish, grains, and fibers.

  Robst knew where to go, but even still they’d have been lost without Corvus. Yesterday the giant talking raven had flown away without explanation as soon as the back side of this Bit had hove into view. Today he had appeared high above them as they rowed into the harbor. “He’ll not perch anywhere that his size will draw attention,” Brindle predicted. “Not all folk are as easygoing as we Calladons in the presence of such creatures.”

  But one other soul had apparently been keeping an eye on Corvus’s movements, for when they at last found a mooring place, he was standing on the shore waiting for them. Corvus, apparently satisfied the connection had been made, flapped away toward some nearby cliffs topped with dark trees.

  The moorage here was makeshift, with smaller craft simply hauled up on the beach. Robst had everyone pull on the oars for a few moments while aiming Firkin at an empty patch of sand, and ran it up just far enough to stick. Lyne scampered up onto the prow and cast a rope down to the soul who was waiting for them. Thus was Edda able to disembark without causing the boat to bob back up in a way that might have attracted notice. For many hereabouts seemed to have a lot of time on their hands, which they whiled away by staring at newcomers. Edda, the moment she touched down, wrapped herself in a long cloak of simple nubby stuff that was nothing to look at—literally nothing, since, once she had pulled it up to cover her, it concealed every bit of the engrossing complexity in her form. Save, of course, the irises. But one had to stand close to see those.

  “My name is Ferhuul,” said the man on the beach, extending his hand in peace, “and I would be bowing in token of my respect if I did not wish to avoid drawing attention to your arrival, my lady.” He averted his gaze, perhaps not wanting to become lost in hers, and clasped her hand briefly. Then he likewise greeted the others, guessing their names correctly, though Mard and Lyne required a little straightening out. He spoke Townish with the accent of Cloven, which was presumably his native tongue. “If you will please follow me,” he said, “I know of a place where all of us can talk in comfort.” He cast a wary look at Burr, but the man-at-arms had had the common sense to leave all of his weapons, save a belt knife, aboard Firkin, where Robst and his three crewmates could keep an eye on them. Satisfied of that, Ferhuul led the party on a stroll up streets that were flat and straight at first, winding and even zigzagging later as they climbed up out of the harbor flats.

  “Try to act like you have been here before,” Brindle told Prim, “or at least to some place like it.”

  Prim nodded and, for a little while, fixed her gaze on the cobblestones coming and going under her feet.

  Practically all of the souls Prim had ever met in her life had been Sprung: descendants of Adam and Eve, which meant that they had come into being within the bodies of mothers who had been impregnated by fathers. As was proved, or at least claimed, by the great family tree on the wall of the Calladons’ hall, every such soul could trace his or her ancestry back to Adam and Eve. Though they each looked a little different, all such souls shared a common form that, according to their legends, had been preordained by Spring in the Before Times.

  Spawned, on the other hand, had not been born of a woman but had simply appeared here or there, first as inchoate glimmers of near-chaos. From those beginnings they had developed forms. It had been thus in the Before Times, when many such had developed at hazard into wild souls of outlandish shapes and powers. Even in the days of First Town, though, they had tended to shape themselves into two-legged, two-armed, one-headed creatures of a common size. Egdod’s casting down of the hive and the destruction of First Town had dispersed such souls to all parts of the Land, where they had clumped together into new communities. There were variants characteristic of certain regions, the best known being Beedles, who spawned in the vicinity of Secondeltown and were shaped to be the servants and soldiers of the Autochthons. And souls who spawned in very remote areas could still take on unusual forms. But for the most part, Spawned were indistinguishable from adult Sprung. The only difference that mattered was that Spawned could not have children.

  Spawned were rarely seen in the middle of Calla, where Prim had lived her whole life, but they were all over the place here. Children ran and played in the streets—these were obviously descendants of Eve. But those of finished, adult form might be either Spawned or Sprung. Prim was naturally curious to see whether she could tell them apart; Brindle had noted her gaze lingering too long on strangers’ forms and faces and given her a gentle warning. Farth, the only other town of any size she’d spent time in, was a friendlier sort of place where everyone knew each other. Cloven felt altogether chillier and less welcoming.

  “Souls of all kinds come here from the Bits, the Lake Land, the whole length of the First Shiver. Even from as far south as the Asking and as far east as the communities lining the Hive-Way,” Brindle explained. “So it’s not at all like Farth. They don’t all speak the same languages or observe the same customs. You might even see the odd Beedle scuttling up out of the hold of a cargo ship from Secondeltown. In places like that”—and he nodded at the open door of a tavern, full of souls having a common look and speaking a language Prim had never heard—“they may be warm and sociable, but the streets and wharves are a different matter and you’d do well to bridle your curiosity.”

  Their destination turned out to be an old stone house at the end of a street where it ran smack into the base of a cliff. A stone wall enclosed the house and its court. The place was heavily worn around the edges but well kept where it mattered. Ferhuul explained that it belonged to a man and woman of his acquaintance who owned more than one vessel and were currently out to sea aboard one such. “The stairs and the ground floor are stone all the way down,” he said to Edda. “The upper story—mere wood.”

  Edda nodded and sat down on the top of the low stone wall that ran along one edge of the courtyard. Prim understood that Ferhuul had been warning the giantess that the floors upstairs might not bear her weight.

  Edda let the cloak fall from her head but kept it snug around her body. Others sat on wooden chairs and benches at a table nearby. Weaver had been silent for some days as sea travel did not agree with her, but now tuned her harp and sang a song that Edda had been teaching her, verse by verse. Dusk fell, somewhat concealing the approach of Corvus, who swooped down from the cliff top and perched on a long and extraordinarily massive tree bough stretched out above.

  Corvus seemed uncharacteristically content to sit and listen to the song. Prim reflected that the giant talking raven had been in the Land for but one year, and though he had flown far and seen much, he could not have learned but a fraction of the tales known to the likes of Edda and Weaver.

  The song was written in a very old poetic style, with many allusions to other songs and myths. But the basic story was familiar to anyone who had grown up around books. So Prim climbed up into the tree—which was easy, even though she had stopped being a girl and turned into a full-grown woman—and sat on the bough next to Corvus and whispered explanations at him so that the story would make better sense.

  The story went that Egdod and Spring, who were lovers, found themselves separated after the Fall. She was tied to the Land, which was where all of her creations—soon including Adam and Eve—had their homes. He had been exiled to the Firmament. Again and again Egdod sought to return, beating his great black wings to soar across the void separating Firmament from Land. But again and again his approach, be it never so stealthy, was detected by El
’s watchful angels, and he was flung back. For El in his wisdom had woven an invisible net about the Land, which could detect Egdod’s approach no matter how craftily he disguised himself. The Red Web grew as crater after crater was added. Finally Egdod learned from Sophia—a member of the Pantheon who was privy to mystic lore from another plane of existence—the truth: El’s magic would always see through his deceptions and disguises. The only way for him to return to the Land was to give up his very self: to die and to grow again from nothing. Now, Sophia in her way was the most terrible of all the Pantheon, for she held the power of life and death over every soul. Even Egdod. He requested that she sever the thread of his life and she consented. With that Egdod fell dead. But his dying made it possible for him to begin again, as a new soul in the Land. Slowly he returned to life, and, in the chaos beneath the Fastness, he made a form for himself. He went out into the Land, hiding himself in the humble guise of an insect or a worm, and sought out those dear to him. Spring he could not find anywhere, for she roamed at will and in many guises, but Adam and Eve were confined to a garden and easily found. In that garden and other places he made mischief and thereby incurred the wrath of El, who could not fathom how the Old One had slipped through his net. Again and again El in his fury struck down any creature whom he suspected of being Egdod in some new guise. Again and again Egdod returned, patiently creating new forms in which he roamed about the Land: sometimes a cloaked wanderer, sometimes a bird or a wolf or even a gust of wind. Yet always Spring eluded him.

  At length El came to understand that it was in the Fastness where Egdod found sanctuary whenever he was struck down, and where each time he wove a new form about his naked soul. It was in the library of that great fortress where he taught himself to read, and learned his own story, and pored over maps, and came to understand who and what he was and what he must do. It was there in Knotweave’s spinning room where he would make clothes, and Thingor’s forge where he would fashion tools and weapons, that he would not venture out into the Land naked and unarmed. That was when El and certain of his high angels ventured to Toravithranax and went to the high atelier of Pestle and demanded any accounts she might have concerning the Fastness, particularly diagrams of the fortress and maps of the Knot in which it was embedded; but they were frustrated when they came at length to understand that the Knot could not be mapped, for it did not make any kind of sense that could be reduced to ink on a page. So El sent his angels to go and look at the place. But they could not penetrate the storm, and several did not return.