by Jay Lake
THE FLOTILLA of canoes and rafts put out into the brown flood accompanied by little banana-leaf boats filled with flowers, spice, and even tiny oil wicks aflame. Hethor sat near the back of the largest canoe, a steersman behind him, six paddlers before him, his feet overrun with blossoms. He held the golden tablet upon his lap, but today there was no nonsense of worship or chanting. Various of the correct people had bowed to it, or him, loading up their boats, but all the ceremony of his first days among them had given way to an almost anarchic sense of informality.
Most importantly, Arellya sat just before him, her hips buried in the flowers. Hethor had lost that argument before it ever started. She had simply looked at him and said, “You follow the message. I follow the Messenger.”
Hethor was relieved that old Kalker hadn’t thrown himself into the canoe as well. “Someone here is sane,” he had grumbled on boarding, but Kalker had just shaken his head, mimicking one of Hethor’s gestures.
“Old age is not sanity.”
With that, they had pushed away.
Now the sun was high, morning already lost to their journey in the course of Hethor’s early vacillations and late decision. The water road was more humid and miserable and insect-ridden than even the jungle, making Hethor wonder what it was he had seen in this place.
The little banana-leaf boats made more sense now, their odors of fruit and spice drawing some insects away from the travelers, while the trails of guttering oil smoke drove others off from the area. But the little boats spun away on every whim of the current, so their utility was limited.
Still, it was a proud flotilla that headed downstream to the dip of paddles and the ragged airs of singing and drumming on hulls. Hethor might have lost his sense of profound happiness, but this was no mean substitute.
He took the golden tablet from beneath its bed of flowers and studied it, trying to hear the language of Heaven beneath the clattering gears of all the world in the same manner that he had managed to hear Arellya’s language.
The difference was, he feared, that Arellya had wanted him to understand, and the tablet was at best indifferent to him.
Spirit-magic, Kalker had said.
Hethor only wished he had such a thing, to ease his path and make him a happier man every day.
THAT NIGHT they did not stop to camp as Hethor expected. Rather, Arellya called the boats together with a series of nonsense cries that must have been some code Hethor did not yet understand through the secret of his spirit-magic, or the gift of divine hearing, or whatever he had been blessed with. Slowly, almost effortlessly, the flotilla drew together, closing up to a sort of floating island of wood and bark. A surprising number of the little banana-leaf boats were still with them.
Lines made of dried and woven vines were drawn through little knots in the wood, or even oarlocks, though Chief al-Wazir would have been appalled at both the indifferent discipline of the flotilla’s sailors and the almost aggressively random result of their labors. The thought of al-Wazir brought Hethor’s mind whirling back to Bassett.
Who among the ship’s company yet lived? Did they realize that Gordon’s expeditionary force had met ruin in the landslide, even while the poor bastards were already falling at the hands of the crystal automata? Hethor wondered if he had been memorialized with some impassioned speech, the way the other dead and missing were.
Or perhaps Smallwood had exercised the only sensible judgment and turned his course from the impossible, overwhelming vastness of the Wall and sailed for England, away from tumbling death and monsters out of legend. Somehow, Hethor doubted that pleasant outcome.
He sent a moment’s good thought to al-Wazir and the others who had favored him, then returned from his contemplation to watch the correct people finishing their bivouac on the water road.
Young males now swarmed over the lashed-together craft, butting spears down to make poles, stringing yet more vines, arranging the shelter of woven reeds and even bolts of colored cloth—the first such that Hethor had seen among the correct people. Soon the mass of boats had more the air of a village market in the summertime. It was almost festive, with the floating equivalent of stalls and booths, the people swarming back and forth to trade gossip, or hugs, or share songs they had perhaps invented that day.
Hethor found that he was happy again. The sense of belonging amid the rising mists of the river at dusk, the songs of the correct people singing the night into its rightful place as the foetid scent of the river gave way to a sudden and unexpected freshet. Hethor roused himself to pound some waxy white root in a little bowl. Fruit juice of various colors was added, after which he passed something red and spiky to a young male with a flint knife who diced it and shared the results out, one fresh-cut sliver at a time.
It was a different kind of feast, quieter than others, prepared and eaten cold, in the spirit of the place and the moment. Absent flame on the wooden boats, the correct people sang up the moon, greeted the glimmering trails of the orbital tracks of both Earth and her satellite, and laughed their way to sleep.
Hethor soon followed. He found himself trapped in dreams of William of Ghent wielding a silver feather large as a broadsword, cutting slices from Hethor’s flesh just as the young male had cut the red fruit, so that the gobbets might be served out to the viceroy’s court in Boston. The clattering music of midnight woke him, audible as always to his inner ear, but also to his outer hearing. Though they were not so close to the Wall, it was perfectly visible from the river, looming over the roof of the jungle on the north bank.
The sounds were four seconds late.
Midnight’s mechanical call, so familiar, brought Hethor past Bassett all the way back to New Haven. He found himself assaulted by a bout of homesickness. Not that Master Bodean’s attic was anything to cry for, but he was so utterly lost to anything familiar, anything he had known in his younger life. Floating down a brown river on a bed of canoes surrounded by tiny, hairy people was beyond any sense he’d ever had of himself.
Arellya’s fingers found his in the dark. She twined their hands together, humming a soothing little song that returned Hethor to his rest.
AT DAWN some of the young males fought off a crocodile longer than Hethor’s great canoe, managing even to kill it. There was a terrific hooting and yelling, followed by a decision to make land and slaughter the catch.
“Such a wealth of meat and skin is not to be wasted,” Arellya explained to Hethor.
After his dreams and wakefulness of the night before, Hethor was less forgiving than his normal wont. “We were all in a hurry to follow the word of God, now we stop to kill lizards?”
She just smiled, an expression he’d learned to interpret as sweet. “Each travels his own road. You can go on alone if you wish. But not every step of yours has been hurried before now. Do not begrudge us this.”
So they spent a day on the riverbank. The correct people exchanged thrown rocks and mud with monkeys. They snuck up on great overhanging trees of a type Hethor had not seen before, like green castles with twiggy battlements, in order to startle scarlet-plumed birds from the endlessly ramified branches. Between mischiefs they foraged for fruits. An enormous snake was caught, thick around as Hethor’s thigh and longer than he could guess at, which was gutted and sliced for roasting with the croc, as bacon might be placed with a turkey in the oven.
Hethor intended to study his golden tablet again that day. He thought to commit each sigil to memory in the hopes of once more reaching that evanescent place within his mind where the wheels and gears of the universe had meshed for him. Instead he found himself constantly drawn off into small adventures and chores—most of the latter more than a little bloody, given the nature of the flotilla’s distractions.
After fighting with his sense of duty for several hours, Hethor finally gave in and spent the balance of the day playing with the young males. He lent his strength, and even once or twice his practical experience, to the game that they made of every duty and needful thing.
It
was a different kind of happiness, he realized, to be at play in the jungles of the world.
That night they lit another bonfire on a bar in the middle of the river. The correct people chanted and sang and roasted the great chunks of meat coiled in the flames, so that even the smoke was delicious. The world’s problems seemed far away. Late in the evening, as he listened to the travelers trade stories about the Snake That Ate the World, and the Great Tapir, and other heroes, the trees around them began to sway with a vigor far in excess of the night’s wind. The correct people fell silent as Hethor cocked his ear to the music of Creation and heard discord, a stuttering like a gear with a burr in need of filing, hanging up inside some precision mechanism. Though the ground they sat on felt little different, the river slopped its banks as the day birds awoke screaming to take whirring flight in the dark.
After a time the earthquake passed, the river quieted, and the birds returned grumbling and calling to their roosts. The correct people all looked to Hethor, the Messenger, for some comfort.
“I do not know,” he said slowly, “stories like yours of the Snake or the Great Tapir or your other heroes and challengers. But I can tell you of the Student, the Master, and the Angel.”
Hethor wiped his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to find a way to make his experience sensible to them.
“Once,” Hethor continued, “there lived a Student. He was poor and without aunties or fellow males or a headman to advise him in his life. With his last few gourds and flints, he bargained for a place in the clan of a great … a great headman of a kind. Only this headman was a master of things of metal, not of a clan of people.
“The Student called this man Master. He lived among the Master’s groves and game trails, taking meat that the Master gave him, and warming himself by the Master’s fire. The Student gave to the Master all of his time and effort in service, doing as the Master bid, laboring as the Master saw fit.
“In return, the Master taught the Student the lore of things of metal, their making and their keeping. Things of metal were important in the place where the Student dwelt. They were prized by all the people. The things the Master made and kept, and traded away, were meant to count the motion of the heavens so that a man might always know the day and moment in which he dwelt. These were among the things of metal most prized, so the Student had promise of great success if he were ever to become a Master of his own.
“One day, an Angel came to the Student while he slept in a dirty corner of the Master’s grove. The Angel said, ‘Be the Messenger, and pursue the word of God to the place where the world has a hurt. There you must stanch that hurt.’ When the Student told the Master of the Angel’s words, the Master’s sons were jealous, and called him liar and thief, and cast him out. The Student became the Messenger, and wanders God’s world seeking to stanch its hurt, which causes the world to twitch in pain.”
There was silence for a while, and the crackling of the fire. One of the young males finally spoke up.
“A question, Messenger. Why would anyone need to ask the day and moment from a thing of metal, when the sky freely tells this to anyone with eyes to lift upward?”
“I don’t know,” said Hethor with a smile. “Once, I could answer that question, but the correct people have taught me that I was wrong.”
This answer pleased them, and a murmur ran among the hairy men.
Another spoke. “Why did the Student place himself beneath the Master? No person needs to be other than what he is.”
“Another question I can no longer answer,” Hethor said, “except to say that you are wiser than my old Master and all my teachers together.”
They laughed then, and began to trickle away to sleep, each spitting in the fire to douse their little part of it. Hethor sat until the flames reduced themselves to embers, listening to the whirr of bats and thinking about his own story.
THE NEXT day the flotilla resumed its trip down the river. The bloody-damp snakeskin coiled over two rafts, while the crocodile had been sectioned out among those who had slain it. Dragonflies appeared on the water, with wings longer than the span of Hethor’s open hands. The trees grew denser and darker.
The character of both the jungle and the river was changing.
Hethor sat among fresh-cut leaves with the golden tablet balanced on his knees, but it was the deepening shadows of the daytime jungle that caught his eye.
“What does it mean?” he finally asked Arellya, waving one hand toward the changing foliage.
“Kalker warned me that our water road eventually comes to the Great Salt River. In that water a correct person would swim, or even merely drink, in fear of their life. Perhaps these are the first encroachments of the Salt.”
“That is the sea,” said Hethor, “and I have sailed over it in a boat of the air. Like a wooden bird with woven wings. It may be safely swum in, at least when the sun is bright and the air is calm, but Kalker is right about never drinking it.”
Saltwater marshes, then, he thought, and turned his attentions back to the tablet.
It was different somehow, this day. The word he suspected of being the Tetragrammaton was more familiar, possessing something of an aura of holiness about it. Hethor had no sounds for it, so he simply said, in English, “God.”
Three times, then: God, God, God.
He traced his fingers over the words. His fingertips felt the tiny clattering hum of the gears within the gears within the gears—that same sense he’d had the night of the festival-rite, when the tongue of the correct people had come to him.
This was the word of God. God’s words spoke of Him.
What did God have to say? This message must concern the world—that was, after all, Gabriel’s errand for him.
“World” leapt out at him, an echo of bird-screaming jungles and the cold air high atop the Wall mixed together in the touch of Hethor’s fingertips on the metal. God … world, then God, then God … world again.
He was almost willing to believe Kalker now, that there was such a thing as spirit-magic. Hethor closed his eyes, tablet still in hand, and prayed. He sought not the arrogant, intellectual God of Pryce Bodean, but rather the God whose voice Hethor had heard echo through the world during the correct people’s festival-rite.
You are there, he prayed, in the ticking of every clock, in every spring that coils to store energy for the further powering of Creation. Every leaf is a spring storing the sunlight; every fruit stores the tree. The soul of man stores You, doesn’t it? You are—
Then the canoe tilted as the paddlers shrieked and Arellya shouted his name. Tumbling backward, Hethor saw water above his head, and jaws longer than his legs. Raddled teeth in lengthy rows aiming for his face. Scarlet gobbets already clung to them as the steersman bobbed in two surprised, bloody halves in the water.
Hethor slid into the jaws, his legs splashing into the river. The mouth around his chest was pale and mottled with gray, the stench of the crocodile’s breath appalling almost beyond measure.
I die, Hethor thought, taken by a bandit on the water road.
His hands flew of their own accord to flip the tablet upward and snag it between the teeth to his right, near to the back of the jaws. The crocodile’s mouth closed with a creak until it caught on the tablet, which wedged between upper and lower teeth, stopping the bite. Definitely plated, some detached part of himself observed. Real gold was too soft to take such strain. There was still pressure on Hethor’s solar plexus, and death perilously close to his neck. He remained trapped but whole.
“Messenger!” someone shouted in the speech of the correct people as the crocodile thrashed.
He was not dead yet, but escape was denied to him. The crocodile slid backward into the stinking water, pulling Hethor down.
The music, he thought, hearing the music of Creation. Change the gearing. Help me, God.
Hethor reached for that sense of hearing everything at once. The water in his mouth and nose distracted him, as did the thrashing of the beast that still held hi
m in its jaws.
He closed his eyes, thought of the midnight clatter he’d always heard, reached from that to a sense of the crocodile as a made thing of gears and springs. Air pounded in his chest, his lungs going hot and sour, while his mouth fought to hold back the river, every reflex screaming for a gasp on the very slightest chance that air might come with it.
Something bit his feet. Hethor’s concentration shattered, he screamed; the water rushed in along with his comprehension of failure.
I am dead.
Something else struck his head. Not the crocodile, but another combatant in the river. Hethor tried to hit back, but his arm was seized. He grabbed hold of the golden tablet with his free hand, determined to die with the words of God close by.
Then there was propulsion, a sense almost of being thrown. Hethor leapt from the water, breaking the air like a fish striking at dawn’s first flight of insects only to fall back down again and be caught by the hands of the correct people.
They pulled him onto a raft. He vomited river water and fear, the tablet still in his hands. Hethor was afraid to look at his feet, afraid to see what might be missing at the end of his legs. The misery in his lungs and head was sufficient distraction.
“Messenger!” someone shouted in his ear. “Do you live?”
He threw up again, gasped, and managed a “yes” in English. Hethor rolled onto his back, opened his eyes, and said, “I have no spirit-magic.”
“Life is magic,” someone said, sounding much like Kalker. Hethor became lost in a maze of coughing and wheezing and fighting for air as a white bird flew close by overhead, just at the edge of his sight.
HE CAME to sensibility sometime later, still clutching the tablet, curled on the deck of one of the largest rafts. Arellya sat next to him. Her left arm was wrapped in leaves, while her free hand trailed through his hair.
“Of course you live,” she said softly when she saw his eyes focus on her.