by Lavie Tidhar
But where it landed…
Merlin sees trees. A forest grows where a forest has always grown. The trees are dense together and the canopy hides whatever there may be within. The only giveaway is the curious display of light which dances overhead: ghostly, wraith-like ebbs and flows that glow unnaturally in the sky.
The bird scowls, if birds can be said to scowl. The bird watches.
Merlin has done his due diligence. To go within the site is a risky proposition. Many have gone in; only a few have come back.
They would need a specialist.
He waits and watches.
Sees a posse of armed men ride out.
They spread out. They wait.
For what?
The bird scowls. The bird watches.
Sees, at last, a small human figure emerge out of that place and into the world.
*
They finally catch up with Gawain, the outlaw, on the very edge of the Zone.
There are seven of them. Rough bearded men on horseback, with nasty old swords that they barely even know how to use. But there are seven of them, and there’s one of him, and they look pissed off.
‘There he is!’
‘There’s the crawler!’
‘Halt where you are!’
‘Fuck off!’ Gawain calls. He calculates escape. He could make a run back to the Zone – but even as he thinks that he sees three more men emerge at his back, blocking the route.
Fuck.
It’s a fucking ambush.
He doesn’t try to work out how they knew which way he’d come out. He thinks he could take three of them easy. Maybe four. Make a dash for it when they least expect it. He spurs his horse.
‘Get him, boys!’
Fucking peasants! he thinks. He pulls out a sword and as the first man comes riding at him the sword flashes and the man’s head flies off his shoulders and bounces on the hard dry ground. For just a moment, the eyes blink. Something small and black and hard tunnels up from the ground and crawls to the head and burrows. This close to the Zone, there are often extrusions.
Two others converge on Gawain with screams of rage. He ducks a blow, stabs one through the chest, hacks an arm off the other. Blood spurts and catches him in the face, hot and sticky, and he curses again. He tries to wipe his eyes and spurs his horse, which gallops towards the distant hills – to freedom, Gawain thinks.
Then he sees the rest of the posse, further back. They had anticipated this, he realises. How many men had they sent for him? Why?
In desperation he pulls out one of the artefacts. It is a round grey-green thing, shaped like an onion, cool at first to the touch. The longer you hold it, however, the hotter it gets, until you have no choice but to throw it.
Gawain waits, bites his lips through the pain until the heat is too strong to bear, and then he tosses it. It arcs through the air and the men fall back when they see it, for they have lived on the edge of the Zone for many years now, and they know its dangers.
For a moment nothing happens. Then the artefact unfurls. The grey-green slates of its mysterious composition peel away like the layers of a scarf, almost languidly, and a burst of terrible fire blows out.
Gawain hears their screams and he curses them for making it happen this way. His hand is burned and blood dries on his face. He turns the horse and tries to flee east. The horse is fast and Gawain is desperate, but now there are men pursuing him from all sides, until the air fills with the thunder of hooves and the screams of the burning men, and the dust churns into the air and makes everything vanish.
For one glorious moment he thinks he’s made it.
Then a small shape on a horse darts in through the haze of dust and something hard smashes against the side of his head and the pain is like the peal of a clear enormous bell.
Gawain sways on his horse and then feels himself falling.
And then, mercifully, there is nothing for a time.
*
When he wakes up there’s a rope around his neck.
*
Everything hurts. They must have worked him over real bad while he was out. He’s pretty sure there’s a rib broken, and he can’t see out of one eye.
What he can see kind of makes him wish he was still out cold.
Or dead.
Which he will be, soon, anyway.
He’s standing on a log with a rope around his neck and the rope’s looped over the thick branch of an oak. The men stand around him in a semi-circle. It’s getting dark and they’re holding torches. A horse whinnies softly and paws the ground. In the distance, eldritch lights chase each other across the fading skies over the Zone.
‘What’s this all about, then, anyway?’ Gawain says. He feels so tired, and he needs a piss.
One of the men spits. ‘You killed Edward,’ he says. ‘He didn’t deserve it.’
‘Which one was Edward?’
‘You took his head clean off!’
‘Oh, him,’ Gawain says.
‘And you stabbed Brian real bad. He died not an hour ago, in great pain. And the others all burned! I will hear their screams in my dreams for months to come.’
‘Life is pain,’ Gawain says philosophically.
‘Fuck you, crawler!’
‘What’s this about, Gaius? I didn’t see you complain when I brought out the witch mud that cured your girl Delphine, did I? And you, Crispin, when I caught that starfish in the Zone for you, the one that glows in the night with the light of a thousand stars for your poor old eyes, was I just a crawler then? The Zone’s been forbidden for twenty years, but now you suddenly feel the need to uphold the law?’
The men, he notices, look at each other a little sheepishly.
‘Maybe we should let him go,’ someone says, but quietly.
‘Shut your mouth, Edwin.’
‘We was supposed to take him to the man from Ca—’
‘Shut your mouth, Edwin!’
Gaius clears his throat. He unrolls a piece of parchment.
‘Gawain of Gwyar, you stand condemned for the crimes of robbery and murder; trespassing into the forbidden Zone; dealing in retrieved artefacts; trading in leprechaun gold; engaging in unnatural activities and being in communication with such things as live beyond the demarcation line. You are accused of being a thief, a killer, and a crawler of some twenty years standing, and you are herefore condemned to hang by the neck until dead, and may the gods have mercy on your soul. Proceed!’
Gawain spits out blood and stares at the men with hatred. The shifting flames of the makeshift torches bathe their faces in an unhealthy pallor, and the shadows crawl on their skin. He laughs at them.
‘You’re already dead,’ he says. ‘You just don’t know it.’
The men shift, and some curse, but they pull on the rope and he feels the air being choked out of him and he kicks and flails with his hands tied behind his back. The darkness he had just visited creeps back upon his mind as thought flees, but still he fights, and through his one good eye he sees something that, surely, must be a vision of approaching death – only Gawain’s been a crawler too long, and he had seen too many impossible things to mistake the real for illusion.
He sees a young, slim figure on a horse. A pale man with the stench of Elfland on him, and cold pale eyes, who smiles at him and raises a hand in greeting.
What the fuck? Gawain thinks, as the world turns dark. Gawain chokes, he chokes, he cannot breathe.
Then the young man extends his hand and whispers something, and a flame shoots out and flies over the hanging mob’s heads.
It hits the rope, which hisses.
Gawain twists and turns.
The rope breaks.
Gawain falls in a heap onto the dry, hard ground.
*
‘Motherfuckers,’ the man says, ‘we had a deal.’
‘He killed my men!’
‘I’m sure I don’t care.’
‘He deserves to die!’
‘And he will. Eventually. Now shut your fucking
gob and drive the cart.’
When Gawain wakes up he’s trussed up again, and lying in the back of a cart that still smells of overripe cabbage. His throat is raw. His rib’s still broken. He thinks, it doesn’t feel so good to be alive.
It feels great.
The young pale man’s sitting on a crate and watches him. He’s got some sort of bulbous clay thing in his mouth and, for some reason Gawain cannot, right now, quite fathom, he seems to be exhaling smoke.
It’s all very peculiar.
‘This?’ the man says. ‘Habit I picked up off a visiting Scythian. I’m Merlin. You must be Gawain.’
Gawain tries to speak but just ends up coughing. The Merlin smiles at him kindly and without any warmth.
‘Spare your breath,’ he says.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘I told you, I’m Merlin.’ He smiles and blows smoke.
Into Gawain’s perplexed expression: ‘I’m the man from Camelot.’
Ahhh…
Gawain hawks phlegm and blood. His head’s pounding, but at least he’s still, improbably, alive. The life of a crawler is one of improbable survival. Men have little to offer him in fear compared to the things he’s encountered in the Zone.
‘What has… Camelot… got to do with me?’
Merlin blows smoke. Doesn’t answer. ‘So, you’re a crawler?’ he says instead.
Ahhh…
‘You can’t… prove it.’
‘Come, come, Sir Gawain.’
Merlin reaches in his pocket. He takes out a pair of thin, odd gloves. They are transparent, and Gawain thinks they must be made out of some animal’s intestines. Merlin puts them on very carefully before reaching for Gawain’s bag and opening it.
Gawain stares as all the loot he’s brought back from the Zone tumbles out. Gold goblets and strange glass shapes and curious coins and receptacles for samples.
‘F… found it,’ Gawain says. The Merlin only smiles. And Gawain suddenly has the realisation there is no talking his way out of this one.
‘They say you’re the best.’
Gawain gives this statement all the reply it deserves – which is none. Merlin rummages through the finds.
‘What’s this?’ he says, holding up a cloth bag.
‘Witch… Witch mud,’ Gawain says. Giving up. What difference does it make, anyway?
‘Witch mud?’
‘It’s mud found in… in certain parts of the Zone, near certain… streams. It has… healing properties.’
‘Good for the skin? That sort of thing?’
‘They say it can mend… bones. Cure fever. That sort of… thing.’
He notices his voice is growing stronger. The night is very quiet. All he can hear is the clip-clop-clop of the horse’s hooves, the squeaking of the cart wheels, his own harsh breathing.
‘Bet you could use some right now,’ the Merlin says, and dumps the bag. He picks an object that resembles a half-wheel, with strange hollow spokes emerging from the rim. It looks like a child’s toy, it is made, if it is made at all, for small hands.
‘And this?’
‘We call it a ghost wheel,’ Gawain says unwillingly.
‘What does it do?’
‘Don’t turn it… widdershins twice when the stars are out and there is no moon!’ Gawain says, alarmed. The Merlin quickly lays the ghost wheel down.
‘Why?’
‘It does… No one’s sure what it does, exactly. It… changes depending on certain conditions in the firmaments of the heavens.’
‘You believe the sky is a solid dome, and the stars are lights fastened to it?’
‘You have a… better idea?’
‘I do not know,’ the Merlin says. ‘These mysteries are hidden even from me. But if the sky is a dome, then what is beyond it, crawler? And if it be breached, then what may fall through?’
Gawain stares at the man from Camelot; and some suspicions, at least, have just been confirmed.
‘You want to go into the Zone,’ he says.
The Merlin just stares. ‘We can discuss that later,’ he says.
‘Why does Camelot suddenly take an interest?’ Gawain says. ‘You’ve had twenty years.’
‘I meant to,’ Merlin says. ‘But it turns out consolidating a kingdom takes some doing. It is my fault, perhaps, that this has been allowed to go on for so long. By the time I could drag my attention back to events beyond the Pict’s Wall, things had changed more than I’d realised.’
He sighs, unwraps the gloves and disposes of them over the side of the cart. He picks up his smoking apparatus once more.
‘I should grow a beard,’ he says. ‘People respect you more when you have a beard.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Gawain says, taken aback.
‘Don’t be,’ Merlin says. ‘You’ll have plenty of opportunity yet.’
61
They rock into Wormwood as tendrils of sunlight begin to crawl their way across the skies. Gawain wakes from an uneasy sleep. Merlin’s sat where he was, stares expressionless at the passing terrain. Gawain sees the crude wooden sign stuck into the earth outside the gates of the town.
Wormwood. Pop. 971 853.
All these years and he’s still only in Wormwood.
They pass through the gates unhindered, the watchmen jumping to attention at their approach. The cart moves slowly on the pebbled main road. The last of the drunks stumbles out of a brothel, stares at them in the early dawn light, yawns, takes his dick out and pisses.
‘Quite a town,’ Merlin says.
‘It’s a shithole.’
Merlin nods.
‘You got family?’ he says. ‘Children?’
Shit, Gawain thinks, but doesn’t say.
‘You?’ he says instead.
‘Mostly aunts,’ Merlin says. ‘No kids that I know of.’
‘Well, same here.’
‘Hmmm.’
Gawain keeps his face impassive. Could he warn Helena? He’d told the girl to leave town for a while before he went, but she never listened to him. She rarely indicated she could even understand him when he talked. She was always playing with the artefacts and, once, he’d caught her spinning a ghost wheel and every item in the room began to shudder and sing, for just a moment it was as though a hole had been punched in the world as he knew it and the music of God came through.
‘Ah, here we are,’ Merlin says.
The cart stops outside the Toadstool. It is one of the last houses before you abruptly hit the end of Wormwood, a combination inn and brothel often frequented by crawlers. Merlin hops off the cart, nimbly, and two of the posse men who followed them on horseback grab Gawain and dump him on the ground. Merlin kneels by him, a small sharp knife in his hand.
‘You won’t try to run, will you?’ he says.
‘Fuck,’ Gawain said, ‘if that’s what you were worried about you could have untied me hours ago.’
‘I know. I just didn’t want to.’
Merlin slices the rope. Blood rushes back, painfully, to Gawain’s wrists.
‘Come on in,’ Merlin says.
He dismisses the other men; though Gawain notices they linger outside, and that their swords are drawn. There’s no getting out for him, not yet at any rate.
But a realisation materialises: whatever it is they’re planning, and whoever these people really are… They need him.
It’s dim inside. The windows are shuttered and fat candles flicker and shudder on the low tables. A long lanky man sits in one corner with his feet up on the table, chewing on a toothpick. He raises his head when Gawain comes in but says nothing, and his eyes are keen.
A second man sits by the abandoned musicians’ station, holding a lyre. He plucks the strings, looks up at Gawain, goes back to strumming.
Merlin perches on a stool and pours himself a drink. Something pale and colourless. He downs it in one and his tongue darts out and licks his lips.
‘Sit down,’ he says.
Gawain pulls up a chair.
‘
Get you anything? Food, something to drink?’
The man with the lyre stirs. ‘There’s half a cooked chicken somewhere,’ he says. ‘And some bread and apples and that.’
The man by the window chews on his toothpick.
‘Yes,’ Gawain says.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Food. Drink.’
Merlin looks at the man with the lyre. ‘Well, Galahad?’
‘Oh, alright.’ He puts aside the instrument and goes to the back and returns with a tray. He dumps it on the table.
Gawain doesn’t wait. He tears a chunk of bread and stuffs it in his mouth. He shoves his hands in the chicken carcass and tears out meat and skin with greasy fingers.
The man by the window raises his head and stares.
‘This is the crawler?’ he says.
‘That it is, Lancelot.’
‘He doesn’t look like much.’
Gawain ignores him. He’s learned to eat when he can. There’s no pride here. Inside the Zone food is scarce and it is always dangerous to take it. On shorter excursions he makes sure to bring his own supplies, and over the years he had left several dead drops on the more charted routes to hold emergency provisions. But the geography inside shifts abruptly, and anything left there long enough corrupts in strange ways.
On longer excursions he’s had no choice but to forage within. He supposes he, too, is a part of the Zone now, in some small way. This might explain the growths on his skin, and as for Helena…
‘Tell me about the Zone,’ Lancelot says abruptly.
Gawain stares. He chews and swallows.
‘Excuse me?’
‘What is it like, inside?’
‘It… It changes.’
Lancelot frowns. ‘Changes?’
Merlin, with a roll of parchment and a pen before him, stares intently.
‘Our reports do indicate the terrain is subject to spatial metamorphosis,’ he says encouragingly.
Back with the lyre, Galahad plays a note. ‘That’s a big word,’ he complains.
‘Shut up.’
Gawain stares at them, wonders what it is they are doing here, what it is they really want. He says, ‘It is unpredictable. It’s like…’ He tries to think. Figures he may as well give them the same spiel crawlers always give civilians when they ask.