By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  The sound of a sword swishing through the air. The sound of a head rolling in the dirt. Please, Gally.

  Galahad breathes violently. The trees sway and hem him in. He reaches for his sword. He’ll fight them, he’ll kill them all!

  ‘Hush,’ the crawler says. They pause.

  ‘There should be a clearing ahead, if it hasn’t moved,’ Gawain says. ‘It’s usually a stable point, but the Zone seems unusually active for this time of year, this close to the perimeter.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Galahad says. The branch of a tree brushes his shoulder and he jumps.

  ‘Follow on my signal,’ the crawler says. Then he vanishes in the trees ahead.

  Galahad stands there. They’d parted from Merlin on the outside. There was a way station or an observation post, something the wizard must have dreamed up years ago. Really it was just a shack of wood and crumbling stone. Two ancient knights manned it, two men with long grey beards and weak watery eyes and sandals. They barely spoke.

  ‘What have you seen in all this time?’ Merlin demanded.

  Their faces were as slack as idiot children’s.

  ‘Nothing,’ they said.

  Gawain, Lancelot and Galahad went ahead. In the daytime the sky above the Zone looked blue and peaceful, with nary a white cloud in sight. There was nothing to distinguish the crossing. They had been walking for some time over cracked earth when Gawain said, ‘We’re in.’

  Galahad turned and looked back but everything looked the same, and he felt vaguely disappointed. There were some trees ahead, but that was it.

  He’d half figured it was all a con even back in Camelot. Some scheme of Merlin’s that he cooked up. Some such nonsense.

  Then a thing like a blue giant crab crawled out of the ground beside him and tried to take his fucking leg off.

  Galahad swore and stomped and stomped again and the creature’s shell burst and some sort of light burst out of the creature and then Gawain was there, pushing him away as the light turned into liquid and just missed the place where Galahad had been. It hissed when it touched the ground.

  ‘Don’t touch anything!’ Gawain said.

  Then they went into the trees.

  Now he hears Gawain’s low whistle. He follows the man and really does emerge into a clearing. There are signs that people have been here before, and recently. A dead fire in a ring of stones, and when he squats to feel them the stones are still warm. There’s an old oak tree with a hollow, and Gawain reaches inside and brings out a leather satchel. The leather had been treated with beeswax. When Gawain opens it they find cheese, cured meats, cucumbers pickled in the Roman way, even a small jar of fermented fish sauce. The sight of these familiar food items makes Galahad ache suddenly for Camelot. He’d give anything to be back there, anything.

  But Gawain meanwhile is muttering to himself. He stares at the foods sitting there on the leather.

  ‘…Too fresh.’

  ‘What? Come on, man. Let’s dig in,’ Galahad says.

  ‘Hello, what’s this?’ Gawain’s attention is turned on some spot on the leather.

  ‘What is it, man!’ Galahad says. He ambles over, kneels – ‘Why, it’s just a pretty ladybug.’

  ‘Ladybugs aren’t a bright blue,’ Gawain says. ‘And the food I left here last was sealed, and there was no—’

  The bug bursts into the air with a shudder of wings. It hits Galahad in the eye and he screams. The creature crawls on his cornea – he can feel those tiny feet on his eye – and then it crawls under his freaking eyelid – he can feel it burrowing inside – he can feel it moving! – and then there’s nothing, and he blinks.

  He can see now the illusion of the food parcel. The cucumbers crawl out of their clay jar and wriggle on the short grass. Galahad can see them raise small antennae, open tiny black eyes. The cheese explodes into a nest of maggots that wriggle and spread rapidly outwards. The meat rots and larvae emerges.

  ‘The spot’s contaminated,’ Gawain says. ‘I worried this might happen.’ He turns to the others. ‘Quick. We’ll go north. The next stable point should be just past the Big Water. If we get separated, look for three burned trees in a row. Something happened there, a long time ago. Something bad. But it’s stopped the Zone, in that place.’

  Galahad savagely stomps on the maggots. They screech in horrid high-pitched voices as they die.

  ‘Someone came past here, and recently,’ Lancelot said.

  ‘Don’t be fooled by the fire,’ Gawain says. ‘For all I know none of this was even here an hour ago. Now hurry. They’re growing.’

  Galahad stares: the tiny blind grubs are expanding, the green cucumber worms swell up, exposing round, teeth-filled mouths. Gawain vanishes ahead and Lancelot moves in step behind him. Galahad hurries after them but his vision’s worse now, everything seems double, and he can see faces trapped inside the trees, pale human forms with lips that move ceaselessly in speech that is at times a curse and others a prayer. They call to him. The branches reach out to him. The leaves stroke his face and arms. He can feel the bug wriggling deeper into his brain.

  Galahad screams.

  *

  ‘Where is that useless fool!’ Lancelot says.

  Then they hear the scream.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake—’ Lancelot starts. Gawain silences him.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you seem far too comfortable here so far,’ he says.

  Lancelot shrugs. ‘It’s not exactly what I expected, but…’

  ‘You will tell me later. Follow me.’

  ‘Whatever you saw, crawler.’

  He follows Gawain through the trees. They can hear Galahad throwing a tantrum somewhere in the distance. So predictable. Those knights of the Round Table, Lancelot thinks, are provincial thugs with no imagination. Useless cunts the lot of them.

  He looks a little uneasily around him. The swaying branches like the slender arms of dancing maidens. The brightly coloured insects like gaudy jewels. The master had never mentioned anything like this in all his talk of the grail. It was as though the grail, by its very being, somehow manipulated reality around itself. Lancelot can feel the hidden energies that go into maintaining this illusion. A word comes into his mind: camouflage.

  But what is it all in purpose of? What is the Zone hiding?

  ‘Motherfucking cocksucking Jesus of Judea and all his shitting disciples!’ Galahad screams. He’s close. They burst through the trees and see him just ahead, beside a curiously sloping bit of ground and a violet shrub with agitated, limb-like fronds. Galahad’s face is red and Lancelot could swear there’s something, some bulge moving under the man’s skin.

  ‘God damned cunt fucking shit jizzing wank b—’

  Galahad stumbles and the ground suddenly vanishes and Galahad falls—

  ‘…ast…’

  Lancelot waits.

  ‘…ards…’

  Lancelot waits.

  ‘…Fuck!’

  But Gawain is already moving. He unspools a thick rope off his belt and throws it into the hole that had opened in the ground. He tosses the other end to Lancelot, who catches it easily. ‘Loop it securely.’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir,’ Lancelot says, but the crawler pays him no attention and Lancelot, with a sigh, ties the rope to the nearest tree. He stares at the tree with a little suspicion. So much around him is not what it seems. But the tree seems solid enough – for the moment, at least.

  ‘Is it secure?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Lancelot says.

  ‘Is it secure!’

  ‘How the fuck should I know!’

  They stare at each other. Gawain’s eyes are a disconcerting dark blue, like the sky before the stars appear. How has he not noticed them before?

  ‘Listen, knight,’ Gawain says. ‘All I am trying to do is keep you two fools alive long enough for you to get through whatever idiotic mission you are on. You understand? The Zone’s awake, now. The Zone’s active. And it likes newcomers. It’s like a new flavour that suddenly enters t
he mouth and rests on the tongue. You understand? Me, it knows. But you… you make it curious.’

  ‘You talk as though the Zone’s alive,’ Lancelot says.

  The crawler shrugs. ‘I don’t know what it is or why it does what it does. Do you?’

  ‘I have some ideas.’

  ‘Is that so, knight of the Round Table?’

  ‘My name is Lancelot!’

  ‘It’s a stupid name.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  They stare at each other.

  ‘Help! Hel—’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Galahad.’

  Gawain reaches for the rope. Tests that it holds. Turns back, says, ‘Well? Are you coming?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Lancelot says again, but without malice. The crawler grins, and then he’s gone in a flash, feet-first down the hole. Lancelot whistles, some tune half-remembered from childhood, and he grabs hold of the rope and follows suit.

  Down and down and down into the belly of the Earth.

  *

  They fall a surprisingly long way. Lancelot holds on to the rope and kicks against the sides of the borehole. Clumps of dirt come loose and fall down on Gawain. At last they land. Lancelot falls gracefully and assumes the forward stance; the flying sword, Secace, is drawn and in his hand.

  ‘Put that away,’ Gawain says. Lancelot straightens. They are in a small cavity in the Earth and there’s no sign of Galahad. Just ahead he can see a strangely octagonal opening.

  ‘What is this place?’

  Gawain shrugs. They walk ahead and through the opening. Dim lights materialise all around them. Lancelot touches the walls. They’re warm.

  ‘Metal,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  It is a small room, hot and stuffy, with the smell of faded incense for some reason. The signs of violent struggle are evident. Lancelot sees unfamiliar instruments pinned to the wall, rows and rows of them. They put him in mind of astrolabes and Ptolemaic quadrants. He sees a star chart caught in glass, recognises the Pleiades, Ursa Minor and the star Rastaban, in the Draco constellation. And he thinks Ptolemy would have loved the mystery of this room.

  In the centre of the room is a chair. The chair is long and wide and it reclines curiously. Sitting in the chair is a skeleton. It is far taller than an ordinary man, and the skull is elongated, and it has but four long fingers on each hand. The skull grins up at Lancelot as though to say, I’ve lived and died, and you will never know the things I’ve seen, and one day you will be as I am now, and who’s to say who will disturb your bones in their own hidden grave?

  ‘What is this thing? What is this place?’ Lancelot says.

  The crawler shrugs. ‘It’s of the Zone.’

  But Lancelot’s senses are tuned to something deeper. It feels real to him, and sad, somehow.

  He says, ‘Where’s Galahad?’

  ‘I do not know, in truth.’

  Lancelot steps out of that octagonal doorway. The walls of earth are sealed around that little cavity and yet he has the sense that something came and snatched the man and vanished through. But if that is so then the walls have sealed themselves back around the puncture, and wherever Galahad is now…

  ‘Leave him,’ Lancelot says. ‘It doesn’t matter. A casualty was not unexpected.’

  The crawler emerges out of that metal room and stares at him levelly.

  ‘You do not seem surprised. Or upset.’

  Lancelot traces fingers on the walls. ‘I wonder…’ he says.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What is it, man of Camelot?’

  Lancelot has the sense of something beyond the walls, watching, listening…

  ‘It’s only,’ he says, ‘that little shit has a habit of surviving.’

  His hand drops.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says again. ‘We press on.’

  ‘On where?’ Gawain says. ‘What is it you really seek? How much do you know?’

  Lancelot smiles unpleasantly. ‘I know you have a way of making it into the inner sections,’ he says.

  Gawain does not reply, but he returns to the rope and pulls it. It holds, still, and he begins to climb. Lancelot follows, and they traverse that shaft back up to sky and sunlight.

  When Lancelot emerges at last out of the hole he sees the trees are gone, and they are standing in a clearing. The rope he had been climbing is loosely held in Gawain’s hands, unfastened.

  He looks at the crawler, a question in his eyes.

  ‘Then how?’

  The crawler shakes his head. ‘The Zone’s the Zone,’ he says. ‘Come on.’

  Lancelot follows mutely.

  They wend their way deeper inside.

  64

  ‘You’re not from around here?’ the crawler says, with genuine curiosity.

  Lancelot shakes his head. He stirs the embers of the fire with a stick.

  ‘Judea,’ he says.

  They’re sitting under the stars. Overhead the green wraiths of lights chase each other in a mute display. Somewhere, an owl hoots. Something small skitters under leaves. It’s strangely peaceful.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Gawain says. ‘I’ve never been much farther than Wormwood. Ain’t never even seen Camelot or Londinium.’

  ‘It’s different,’ Lancelot says. ‘Warmer…’ He barks a short, surprised laugh. ‘I don’t often think about it anymore.’

  ‘Do you ever miss it?’

  ‘I try not to miss things in the past. It’s a place you can’t get back to.’

  The crawler stares at him with that same curiosity. ‘So what brought you here?’

  Lancelot shrugs. ‘I forget,’ he says.

  ‘This?’ Gawain gestures at the world around them. He catches Lancelot by surprise.

  ‘You guessed?’

  ‘You have a look about you,’ Gawain says. ‘You’re not the first to come here and ask for passage. I’m a crawler, what I do is go into the Zone. Bring stuff out. Take people in. People like you. Drawn here, for whatever reason. You have the same look.’

  ‘What look is that?’

  ‘Fatal curiosity,’ the crawler says. ‘It’s the mystery that gets them, every time. Well, the mystery and, eventually, one of the traps.’

  ‘Yet you survive.’

  ‘I just have the knack for it, I guess.’

  Lancelot laughs. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, crawler. I know what the Zone is. I’ve been searching for it all my adult life. Not by choice, you see. My master was convinced it, or something like it, must exist. He spent his life searching for it, across places you cannot even imagine – Smyrna, Arabia, Punt. But he never found it. And I never cared to, before.’

  ‘Then why now?’

  ‘Unfinished business, I guess. And the king wants whatever’s here for his war against the Angles and the Saxons.’

  Gawain shakes his head. ‘It will serve him not.’

  ‘Well, my job is to find out for sure. Besides, you must think me an even greater fool if you think I believe you when you chalk up your survival to dumb luck.’

  ‘Then what, man of Judea?’

  Lancelot stirs the embers and sparks fly into the air.

  ‘You’re of it,’ he says softly. ‘You do not trespass. You belong.’

  Gawain stiffens. But he does not reply. Crickets chirp in the undergrowth. It all sounds so normal, Lancelot thinks. As though this really was a peaceful field in Britain. As though this was all as it should be.

  ‘What do you think it is, then?’ Gawain says at last.

  ‘Do you know, I trained under Joseph of Arimathea,’ Lancelot says. ‘In his young days he was quite the soldier. Trained with the legions, he once told me, what was left of them anyway. Followed the land road to India, went even further than that. Knew the five point palm exploding heart technique, or so he claimed, at any rate. Never taught it to me. But regardless. When he came back his obsession for the thing we call the grail meant he was often in need of financing. His particular skills l
ent themselves to a particular kind of job. When Iblis and I came on board—’

  ‘Iblis?’

  Lancelot stirs. ‘An old friend,’ he says. ‘Forget about her.’

  ‘Sorry. Go on.’

  It’s so still. As though the Zone itself is listening.

  ‘When we came on board he trained us to be assassins.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It is not a glamorous or respectable job,’ Lancelot said. ‘And it pays less than you’d think. Regardless. We were very good at it.’

  ‘As fascinating as this is, I fail to see how it answers my question—’

  ‘We could spend days tracking our target,’ Lancelot said, ignoring him. ‘In an urban area like Rome we could be disguised as beggars or a member of the fire watch, an apple seller or a passing senator. Each environment requires adaptation. In the countryside we learned to track by always staying hidden. We liked the bow and arrow for long-range work. I’d lie on a hill disguised in earth and leaves, and you could pass right by me and never guess that I was there.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘You know, when my master spoke of the grail, I am not honestly sure what it is he had in his mind. When I first became aware of the dragon or star stone and heard the stories – there’s, um, there’s a lady in court who has seen it for herself—’

  ‘A lady in the court? Pray tell!’

  ‘No, I mean… Forget it. I just meant, I heard the stories. But Merlin said what they had witnessed there was only a minor crash site, where a piece of the star stone came loose. I listened to their stories and charted their path and I thought the mutatio and so on were but a natural phenomenon of the poisonous metals the fallen stone must have carried.’

  ‘I am not sure I follow.’

  ‘Aristotle, on observing the octopus, said that it “seeks its prey by so changing its colour as to render it like the colour of the stones adjacent to it. It does so also when alarmed.” The master quoted him often. He was very fond of Aristotle’s Historia animalium.’

  The crawler looks levelly at Lancelot.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Lancelot stares at the dying fire. He listens to the night. An owl hoots. Above the Zone the green wraiths chase the starlight.