Through Caverns Measureless to Man

by D G Rose

  “Isn’t Christabel coming with us?” I asked, well aware that she wasn’t in the group but curious as to why.

  Neb waved a dismissive hand. “Christabel can’t be bothered by these kinds of things. It’s beneath her. Besides, her mother would kill me if I took her away again after she just arrived.” His voice held a small note of true fear. “What about you Nick, got any kids?”

  I shook my head. “No. No kids.”

  “Ah, yer a smart man.” And he nudged me in the ribs with a giant sharp elbow. “Don’t go getting me wrong. I love Christabel with all my heart. Best thing that that’s ever happened to me, that’s for sure. Except for her mother. But it’s hard to be a man with a daughter. Having a daughter is like having a string tied somewhere under your left rib, tightly knotted to a similar string in your child, and if something were to happen to your child, if the cord were to snap, then you’d take to bleeding internally. The need to protect them is so overwhelming it pretty much drives you crazy.”

  “I don’t know.” I interrupted. “Christabel seems pretty capable of protecting herself.”

  “Oh, sure, now.” He nodded. “It’s different now, although I still worry myself sick over her. Running about, getting involved in things. Needful things to be sure, but dangerous nonetheless. But when she was young, she was wild, just a little thing, 8 or 9 years old, always wandering off, missing for days at a time, always coming home full of scrapes and bruises. Climbing where she shouldn’t ought to climb, exploring where she shouldn’t ought to explorer. I tell you, from the time she was 8 until the time she turned 10, I didn’t sleep a single night. Then it was like a part of my brain, overused by fear, burned out and I worried less, and slept better. Ah, those were some blissful years.” Then he turned and looked at me with a hard look. “Then she turned 15.” And he hung his head in his hands. “Ah, what torture it is to be the father of a 15-year-old girl.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s so bad about a 15-year-old girl?”

  “15-year-old boys, of course. And 16-year-old boys and 17-year-old boys and 18-year-old boys and so on. So many of them, greater than Kubla Kahn’s horde it seemed at the time, all mooning around the Tower, each of them a pimply faced teenager eager to spew his juices all over my precious baby. So I stopped sleeping again, until, mercifully, another part of my brain must have burned out from overuse. It’s OK now. I won’t say it’s easy, but the ache is dull.”

  I decided not to mention our visit with the Great God Pan, who was basically a goat-god shaped bag of juices just waiting to spew, spewing, and already spewed. Since Christabel couldn’t be much older than seventeen or eighteen now, I figured the wound might still be fresh. I imagined ignorance was part of the treatment.

  I remember how I had been as a 15-year-old boy. And he was right. I’d been obsessed by the thought, the need to, as he so delicately put it, spew my juices all over some 15-year-old girl. I guess I should be grateful that my crippling fear of human contact had kept me from driving some poor father mad. Or maybe not. I’m sure no fathers were spared by my inability to participate in teenage mating rituals, there always being some other pimply faced teenage boy eager to step up to the spot I’d left vacant. In the end, I guess I was the only victim of my crippling fear of human contact. Me and my unspewed juices. Then an ugly thought crept in, maybe not for the first time, but for the loudest time. If I was the victim, who was the author of my crippling fear of human contact?

  “So, you? Why no kids?” Neb interrupted my reverie.

  “Oh, well, you know.” I began. “It’s actually something I’ve thought about and I decided I didn’t want to do it. I mean, having a child is a violence perpetrated on a victim who doesn't even have an opportunity to object. You can’t ask a kid if it wants to be born, and then it’s too late.”

  “Better never to have been born, eh?” He asked.

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that there can be no consent and I don’t want to force life on any potentially unwilling participant.”

  Neb laughed. “Spoken like a man who’s never had the choice!”

  Did my virginal status show on my face?

  “Anyway…” I segued. “You know Miranda.” It wasn’t a question, but I let my voice rise at the end.

  “I do indeed. Here, have a swig.” He handed me a leather skin and I took a deep drink. It definitely wasn’t water, as my hacking cough made clear. “If you spit that out, boy, I’ll have your head.” He might not have been joking. “That’s a Balvenie 40-year-old Single Malt Scotch. I import it special from the outside. Costs an arm and a leg and the other leg as well, but it’s worth it.” He took back the skin and took a drink. “Ah! That’s good! As I was saying. I know Miranda. About as well as anybody, except maybe Christabel.” He said with a wink. “She more or less grew up in and about the Tower. You might say she and Christabel were almost sisters and I was almost like her father. Course she doesn’t visit much as we’d like, now that she’s moved to Xanadu. Bah! Xanadu! Give me the Caverns anytime! Clean, open, we raise hard men here, hard women too. Christabel would never be the Dreamer’s Champion if she’d grown up soft in Xanadu. They look down on us, those Xanaduites, but they need us. Who’d guard the Tower if I wasn’t here? Not them!”

  “Why does the Tower need guarding? From who?” I asked.

  “Why from the kings, of course!” He roared.

  “But if you’re just a lord, don’t you… I don’t know… work for the kings?” I was confused. I’m no expert, but I was pretty sure that a king was the top of the royalty food chain.

  He laughed again. “Work for the kings!? Never! The Tower is outside any kingdom. No king has power here!”

  “So.” I pressed. “Why does the Tower need guarding?”

  “Well,” he began. “The legend says that a mighty king built the tower, climbed to heaven and deposed God. And ever since then at, more or less, regular intervals some king or other wants to try his hand at overthrowing God.”

  “And you stop them?” I asked.

  He laughed again. “Hell no! It’s ok with me! Fact is, it keeps the number of kings here below down to a manageable number and each new god, if there is any change, seems to be as bad as, but no worse, than the last.”

  “So, why are we going to the gate? If you’re just going to let them in, what’s the point?” I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the logic escaped me, pretty much everything here did.

  His face was suddenly very serious. “I’m Lord Protector of the Tower. I can’t have random kings and their armies riding through the Tower raping and pillaging. I need to protect my lands and my people. So when they show up, I ride out to give them an escort.”

  I looked around at the handful of men. “How can such a small group control an army meant to assail heaven?”

  “Oh! We can’t! Not in a million years!” He smiled and winked. “But nobody’s exactly sure what control I might have as Lord Protector of the Tower and rather than risk losing their chance at killing God, they tend to follow my rules; pay my toll. At least they always have. When you’re hunting elephant, you don’t want to anger a snake, as beneath your notice as it might be.”

  We camped for the night (there’s no better word for it) and some of Neb’s men built a fire and cooked dinner.

  After dinner, I sat alone watching the stars, even though I knew now there were in fact the windows of heaven, lit by the light of some tin-pot god-king, only waiting for some other tin-pot king to come along and overthrow him. My conversation with Ned had put me in an odd mood. I’d have to be particularly unobservant to not be able to see that my life was shit. No friends, no family, crap job, crap house. Just the guys down at the funeral home waiting for me to die. I was, in some way, no different than that god-king, just going through the motions, waiting for my downfall. And I’d have to be some special kind of stupid not to realize that it had all changed that day at the Fair.

  I’d woken up that day as a mo
re or less normal kid, probably heading for a more or less normal life, nothing spectacular, but at least my share of joy and pain, rather than this grey monotony, but I’d ended it broken, twisted, malformed and malfunctioning. Melted in the fire of her loss. Miranda.

  Miranda’s disappearance, Miranda’s death, were the touchstones, the milestones of my life and I’d been deformed by them. But if Miranda lives, if Miranda thrives, who am I? And if Miranda thrives, is this Miranda’s fault? Christabel seems to go back and forth with ease, hell, Neb is importing fancy scotch. Did Miranda have the choice to come back, to make everything better, and just chose not to? Because she liked her new family, her new almost sister, her new almost father, with the fancy Tower? Did Miranda make me? Did Miranda break me?

  Neb came up to me and dropped the skin of scotch in my lap. And seeing me looking at the stars, “The fireworks won’t start for a few days yet.”

  “You ever feel like you don’t know who you are?” I asked him, without preamble.

  He sat down next to me with a crack of knees and a heavy sigh. “I did. I do. Maybe everybody does. Soon after Amytis and I were married, she got pregnant. It was a happy time, in some ways the happiest. It was exactly what I wanted. Amytis and a bouncing baby and then I would be Lord Protector after my father and my children after me, in an unbroken chain down through the ages. But she lost the baby. Still-born was their euphemistic euphemism. My baby boy, dead in my bloodied hands, and my wife almost dead, too. And I felt, well, lost. Was this all there was to life? Pain and fighting and loss? It didn’t seem right. I wanted to run away. One day, after Amytis was mostly healed up, I told her that I was going to go out into the wide world and find myself. But you know what she told me? She told me that there was nothing to find. She told me that I was nobody, even though I would one day wear the circlet of the Lord Protector of the Tower, and that I would die one day and that it would be like I'd never even existed.” He sighed and took another swig. “Truest thing anybody ever said to me. How can you leave someone like that?”

  “It seems a strange thing for a religious man to say.” I remarked.

  “Who says I’m a religious man?” He asked, with a smile. “I am, of course. I’ve made the pilgrimage, I’ve sat at the foot of the Mad Dreamer and felt his power. I know as a fact, that we all swim in his Dreams. But here’s the thing, the thing that Amytis taught me: In the absence of God, meaning is impossible. But!” He took another long drink and passed me the skin. “But, in the presence of God it's still impossible, although, sometimes reward can masquerade as meaning. Even my potential immortality can’t wring meaning out of the meaningless of life.”

  He must have seen my raised eyebrow because he continued. “I know I’ll die. My parents died before me and my children will die after me, but while the Dreamer dreams, who can argue against the possibility, even the probability that the dreamed, me and mine, may be recycled, revived, renewed. But, the point is, even if I die and am reborn, at some later time to serve the Dreamer in some new purpose; that still can’t give meaning to my existence. All things, even the Dreamer, will one day pass, or failing to pass, fall victim to their own immortality. This is the thing that Amytis taught me, and that absence of meaning isn’t a flaw in creation, it’s a feature. So, I live my life as best I can, secure in the knowledge that, if there is no way to succeed, there is also no way to fail, taking joy in the unique pleasures of living, even the suffering, even the dying.”

  I’ll admit I didn’t really understand what he was talking about or how it related to what I wanted to talk about. But I guess like all of us, he had a story he wanted to tell and he shoehorned it into the first opportunity he saw. “The thing for me is,” I told him, trying to twist the conversation back my way. “I thought I knew exactly who I was. And I was dealing with it, as best I could. It wasn’t a good life, but it was a safe life, kept everyone safe. Now, I have no idea who I am? And nobody seems safe.”

  “I know your story, of course. Miranda told me, herself.” He got to his feet. “You did a selfish stupid thing. There’s no denying it. But maybe that’s not who you are.”

  It was like a slap, a shock, that he would just come right out and say it like that. But it was also like I’d been waiting 30 years for someone to just acknowledge it, that I was to blame. “Maybe it is.” I corrected him.

  He cleared his throat. “The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.” He said in a near perfect imitation of the sing-song voice that Christabel uses to indicate that she is quoting some important thing, some important thing that you know nothing about. He left me the skin of whiskey and I sat a while longer until I slept.

  We rode on in the morning and reached the gate a few hours later. A guard came out to greet Neb and ushered us to a high room from which we could see the assembled army, camped in front of the Tower gate. I don’t know much about these things, but it seemed like a big army to me, although maybe not quite big enough to attack God. Somehow, I’d assumed that the challengers always won, maybe because I’d seen the broken angel, but maybe the challengers always lost, or some mix.

  Neb stepped out onto a balcony and waited as a delegation broke off from the main body of the army and rode forward. When they were within speaking distance, Neb held up his hand and they stopped.

  “I am Nebuchadnezzar II, Lord Protector of the Great Tower. Who are you and why do you come here in force to camp outside my gates?” His official voice boomed just as you would expect from a man of his size.

  The best dressed of the soldiers pressed his horse to the front of the group. He stared insolently up at us. He had fight in his eyes. “I am Zedekiah, King of the Fallow Lands, Lord of the West Bank and Protector of the Sunless Sea. I come to climb the Tower, as is my right by ancient compact.”

  Neb nodded. “You have that right, as I have the right to exact my toll.” Then to me, he said behind his hand. “You pays your money, you takes your chances.”

  The king shouted up to Neb. “Name your price. I’ll pay it.”

  “Your kingly crown and your robe.” Neb began. “All your goods, except food and all the goods of your men. Your weapons and armor will be held in trust until you are ready to mount the stairs. In exchange you will be given lodging and such supplies as you need for three days. At the end of three days, you must either rise or fall or depart. Such is my toll.”

  The king spat in the dirt. “Bah! You’ve raised your prices usuriously! I’ll not pay!” Then gesturing behind him. “Your walls may be unbreakable, but perhaps not your gates. I’ll take your Tower and your head!” And his army gave a shout of support for their king.

  Neb gave a nod to his Capitan and shutters on the walls opened to reveal rows of men with bows and cross-bows and engines of war. “You’re about to trade your kingly crown for the crown of God, but you want to dicker about the price? Who among your men wants to die here at my walls, and forfeit the chance to rise to divinity? If a hundred of your men fall here, even ten, what if that means the difference between success and failure? Pay my price, husband your strength for the war to come.”

  The king spat again and wheeled his horse and rode off, followed by his advisors, but within an hour returned to agree.

  A small door was opened in the great gate and one by one the men entered, were stripped of their weapons and other belongings, and ushered into the tunnel beyond.

  “Once they have their weapons back, what’s to stop them attacking your men and taking back their things?” I asked Neb.

  “They won’t.” He said with a shrug. “When they’re ready to mount the stairs and climb to heaven, their minds, such as they are, are focused on things other than me and my Tower. They’ll be gripped by the fever of imagining their own godhood.”

  “And you?” I asked. “You’ve never thought about it for yourself? Never been tempted to try your hand at, as you say, godhood?”

  “Nah.” He swiped away the idea. “I grew up in the Tower. I’ve heard the screams
, seen the broken bodies, both angels and men. Nobody who’s ever mounted the stairs has come back. Nobody. Do they win? Do they die? Does it matter? I’ve no interest. It’s the gift the Tower offers to its people.”

  CHAPTER 14 - Now the violent death of a supernova.

  We led the disarmed army back through the tunnel. Neb showed King Zedekiah housing for his men and fields where they could harvest and prepare food.

  “We’ve brought enough supplies.” The king answered.

  Neb shook his head. “How can you know? How many floors are there between here and heaven?”

  The king didn’t answer but he did set men to the harvest. The king never seemed to stop complaining, so I fell back in the column, leaving Neb to suffer alone. I felt bad, but I also felt like it was a bit of revenge. Every time I asked anyone here about Miranda, they had a way of distracting me. Maybe it was also, partially, my fault. Maybe I was unwilling to press for fear of being answered. Still, I was annoyed and, well, there’s no better word for it, cranky.

  My crankiness fled in an instant when we arrived at the stairs and I found Amy out of bed, walking arm in arm with Christabel.

  I hopped down from my horse. Ok, I still wasn’t enough of a horseman to hop down, but I got down without falling in front of everyone, which I considered a great victory. I ran over to Amy and was about to throw my arms around her when I thought about her intestines slipping through my fingers and I held back for fear of injuring her. She must have seen my hesitation because she lifted her shirt and showed me her almost perfectly healed stomach, just a thin puckered line marking the path of so much past destruction.

  “They’ve got some kind of miracle cure!” She threw herself, gingerly, into my arms and held me for a long while. “I think it’s in the soup. Amytis says I’ll be ok to leave in a couple of days.”

  Christabel tapped her foot impatiently, waiting for us to separate. “Who told you that you could go off like that? I see that you’ve at least learned the basics of riding a horse.” Her faint praise was probably appropriate to my skills, but it still hurt.