by Lavie Tidhar
“You must not trespass,” he translated. “This is no place for that which was lost.”
“What does that mean?” Bill complained. Davide and Esther communicated silently, or so it seemed to Mathieu.
“It’s the fish,” he said. “I think.”
“All we want is to find our way back to the Thickening and sell the damn thing,” someone else said. But the clowns would not move, the road ahead blocked to the trespassers, and the clochards turned and left the forest the way they’d come, and the clowns shadowed them silently until they were far away from that place.
They came upon a river that snaked between the mountains and followed it instead. There were no maps and they were running low on substance and Sticks, and that other place was no longer there for them to imagine. There was only the Escapement, and the snow-capped mountains which resembled stone giants, and the loons that cried by the riverbanks in low lingering moans, and the flurries of snow and the harsh shadows shed by the sun. Rise and fall, rise and fall, and they carried their burden onwards until they came at last upon an old bridge that spun the river, the first sign that they had seen of human intervention in the landscape.
Onwards they went with a giddy sense now that their sojourn in the Thinning was over. Stones flaked from the bridge like scales and fell down to the river far below, and the fish’s belly made a screeching sound as it was dragged along the rails, but they persevered. On the other side of the bridge they came upon an old rail terminal, and Mathieu thought that it had been long abandoned. It must have once been a part of the Thickening, some inlet of human habitation deep into the Escapement, but for whatever reason that excursion by humans had failed.
There was a small ghost town on the other side of the bridge. The loose assortment of buildings was assembled with sheets of metal hammered together, wooden poles that were stuck into the ground. Tears of rust ran down the walls, and the paths that wound between them were as black and barren as the exposed roots of burnt trees. Who had lived there, Mathieu could not tell. He pushed open the door of one such dwelling. A rough-hewn table sat in the middle of the house. The table was set with a meal for four. Food that had long ago rotted into gunk smeared black spots on the plates. Colonies of mould prospered in the enclosed space and the air smelled fetid and worn out. The chairs had been pushed back, as though whoever had sat here, long ago, had merely got up at an interruption, and never returned. On the otherwise bare wall hung the ikon of a Harlequin. Its eyes mocked Mathieu.
A giant banyan tree grew in the centre of that town, and it was under its canopy that they put the fish. That night they built a bonfire out of rotted old wood and fence posts and they danced in its light and their shadows danced beside them, all but the shadows of Davide and Esther. Those crept over the town and over the old homes and they nestled in the cracks. There was familiarity there.
By the side of the tracks was an old engineer’s shop and it was there that they found the kalamazoos. There were five of them, and still in good working order, large flat handcars with manual pumps, and these they set back on the tracks. They placed the fish in the middle cart and Mathieu and Bill took the front kalamazoo and Davide and Esther took the rear. Their shadows flowed after them like wide-winged birds of prey. They went slowly, operating the arm, seesaw, seesaw, up and down and up and down. It was back-breaking labour.
In this way they departed that nameless town by the bridge and followed the tracks. They looped and curved through the mountain pass. It was hard going and with no Sticks, and what little food they had was all but gone. Overhead the sky became a blank window. Far ahead Mathieu thought he could hear gulls. They drove the handcars over a last bridge spanning the river between two mountains. The distant smell of salt and tar, and he felt a longing awake in him, a desire to one last time see the sea. The handcars creaked across the chasm, see-saw, eew-aww, the gears creaking, the wheels sliding, a shower of sparks.
Thunder overhead, and Mathieu looked up to see a mountain wake, an icy rock face like a torso, a snow-capped head, shaking.
“Hurry! Hurry!”
And faster and faster they went, the avalanche overhead gathering, a rain of stones beginning to fall, slowly, so slowly, an inexorable decline.
“Quick! Quick!” Bent double like the old and the infirm they went, clochards, with their golden treasure. A falling rock caught Mikhel, tossed him off the trolley like a rag doll. Down, down into the depths, a splash of foam like a white question mark his only tombstone.
“Hurry, damn it, hurry!”
He risked a glance back. Behind him, the shadows of Davide and Esther spread giant wings of ink. Shadow battles stone. He heard inhuman laughter. Falling rocks. The opening of a tunnel in the mountain straight ahead. He looked only forward.
They’d made it. Somehow they were through, into the safety of the tunnel. Dark, dark. They worked the trollies till their hands bled and their breath dribbled out of their bodies. Onwards. Until they were through, and on the other side, and into sunlight, and for just one moment, he saw the sea.
It was easier after that. A gentle slope down into farmland, and the smoke rising from chimneys, and neat roads, and the railway tracks were new and gleamed in the sunlight. In the first town they came to they found a bar and proceeded to get so drunk that the Escapement disappeared entire, and for one long glorious day he explored the streets of his old neighbourhood, with posters on the walls warning residents to keep decent, and once he went past the cemetery with the pointed stars on the tombstones but he did not go in.
After that they hopped a junk car, going deep.
Clown’s Gulch, Stark’s Holborn, Grieblingsburg, Skelton’s Landing, Blackstone, Geller’s Bend, Balducci’s Levitation, Downtown Wagon, Freak Alley, Mud Show, Pitchman’s Stand . . . the small hamlets and towns fled by as the slow cargo train went past them, past checkerboard fields and tidy orchards, bubbling streams and sleeping beehives. The sights evoked in Mathieu a nameless longing, for all that could have been and wasn’t, for a homestead, for a home. For children playing in the yard, their laughter. There was nothing more pure and more holy in all the worlds, he thought, than the sound of children laughing.
Bells pealed as they went past chantries and chancels and clown missions. Whitewashed walls and good black earth and flowers growing in profusion. The smoke of foundries and trains, and herds of cows in the distance. The fish like an intimation of things to come. Something external, something that had a purpose all its own.
In this manner they traversed the Thickening, until at last they saw the famed walls of Jericho rise ahead of them in the distance. He felt like a sailor in a crow’s nest, sighting land.
The city came upon them and they passed through, and it swallowed them, it swallowed them whole, and they passed from sight of the world.
EIGHT:
THE FALL OF JERICHO
“The peace has held for a thousand thousand years,” the petit Pierrot said. He—if it was a he—tugged nervously at his bells. They made no sound, or rather, they made an absence of sound, a peal of silence that spread outwards from the diminutive Pierrot. “No, not years. Time didn’t mean the same then as it does now. And no, not peace. What is the word I am searching for? Ah, yes. Stalemate. The stalemate held for a long period of untime. Until people came to the Escapement.”
The Conjurer hid a yawn. He sat at the table of the dimly lit Bull Tub, drinking moonshine. He was a great believer in moonshine, and hogswallop, and bunkum. If you could drink it, the Conjurer believed in it. He was most devout, in that regard.
He wore his beautiful white gloves, and his beautiful black top hat. He was very tall and very thin. The top button was open on his pristine white shirt. There were thumb-tips and Svengali and Bicycle cards in his jacket; invisible thread and elastic eggs and cut-and-restore ropes and linking rings; silk handkerchiefs and cups-and-balls and all manner of cut and restored papers which, frankly
, he’d forgotten about and could no longer remember what they had been for. On his hips he bore twin six-shooter handguns with silver-plated handles.
The Conjurer liked conjuring. He always said you had to be good at at least three things in this world to have a happy life, and he was good at exactly three: conjuring, drinking, and killing people. Now he pulled out a small brown cheroot, struck a match on the sole of his boot, and lit it. He drew in breath, and blew out three perfect smoke rings in succession. He stared at the pitiful little Pierrot.
“Well?” he said.
“There’d been . . . consciousnesses here before,” the Pierrot said.
“Ah, yes,” the Conjurer said. “Whoever left those fucking dream machines scattered about.”
“Yes, perhaps,” the Pierrot said, though he didn’t seem sure. “But anyway, sooner or later, they all went away.”
“So?”
“The p . . . the stalemate held, for a thousand thousand—”
“Yes, yes, you already did that part. You need to work on your patter, friend.”
“May I?”
The little Pierrot gestured beseechingly at the bottle of moonshine. The Conjurer sighed, conjured a tumbler, and poured one exact measure for the little creature. Jericho, he thought. It used to be the flotsam and jetsam of the Escapement kept well away or, anyway, hid themselves thoroughly in the nooks and crannies of that weird old city. Now they seemed much more . . . visible. As though they knew something the Conjurer, as yet, did not.
The Conjurer did not like that particular feeling. Knowing things other people didn’t was his business.
The Pierrot drank. His little white hands held the tumbler like an offering.
“Well?” the Conjurer demanded.
“A thousand th—ah, yes. Sorry.” He coughed. “But when the people came, the balance shifted. It seemed the stalemate could be broken, with the right tools.”
“The right tools being . . . ?”
“People,” the Pierrot said, surprised at the question.
“Forgive me. Of course.”
“Shadow battles stone; the lizard scuttles from the glare of the sun.”
“Indeed.”
“And so the . . . opponents, they began to, err . . .”
“Recruit?”
“That’s right. That was the word.”
The Conjurer wondered how old the little Pierrot was. Those creatures weren’t like people, not exactly. He wondered how far back the creature’s memory went. He wondered if he remembered the Battle of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. The Conjurer was old, and he remembered that one, though he’d elected, then, not to take part. He had merely been a . . . a witness. That, if he recalled, was the last time that the pupae umbrarum and the Colossi had attempted to redress the balance.
The result had been a massacre.
“So what’s changed?” he said.
“Eh?”
“What’s changed? Now?”
“Ah,” the little Pierrot said, and he tapped his nose, and winked, or tried to, his features didn’t quite work right. Then the Conjurer’s gun was in his hand and the muzzle was pressed to the small creature’s deathly pale face.
“Yes?”
“That which was lost is believed to be found!” the Pierrot said.
“What?”
“That which was l—”
“I heard you the first time,” the Conjurer said. The Pierrot made another beseeching motion at the bottle. He seemed unfazed by the gun to his face.
“Tell me first.”
“Doom! Doom! Doom cometh to Jericho, and Jericho must—”
“Fall?”
“Fall!”
“Piss off, you little twerp,” the Conjurer said. He kicked the stool from under the Pierrot and the little creature fell, but nimbly enough.
“No drink?”
“No drink.”
The Pierrot shrugged. He wended his way to the next table, where a couple of grizzled ex-miners sat half-slumped over Sticks.
“The peace has held for a thousand thousand y—” he began.
The Conjurer sighed.
He sat there for a long time, sipping his drink. It had been years since he’d last visited Jericho, that oldest and grandest of all human settlements on the Escapement. It was a strange old stone town, filled with narrow cobblestoned alleyways that took twisting turns, and tall, narrow houses that obscured sunlight, and it was surrounded by sturdy stone walls, which had withstood numerous attacks over the centuries. It was a solid place. One very seldom caught even a glimpse of that other place, and even drinking Sticks, one found it hard to penetrate the veil of shadows and into that other, more mundane existence. Though the Conjurer had no use for that other place. He was firm in who and what he was.
He was, first and foremost, a conjurer.
The Conjurer had been born into the great Boreal Circus on the outskirts of the Désert de Soleil, a thousand years before. He could have been as young as twenty or as old as a hundred, and he distinctly remembered at certain times being much older, and at others very young. He had grown up by the great salt marshes that lie on the very outskirts of the inhabited world, and beyond which lie the Pillars of Nisir, which are inhabited by fearful serpents, and are, or so it is said, the gateway to the Mountains of Darkness.
The Boreal travelled slowly along the Thinning and the Thickening of the Escapement, performing less for an audience than for the sake of performing, and it laid down train tracks ahead of itself and removed them again after the great lumbering cars passed, and in this fashion it traversed the edges of the desert.
The sun shone very brightly there. He remembered it, still, a huge ball of fire in a cloudless sky, and the heat, and the haze over the Great Salt Lakes, and that smell of bromine. And the tracks being laid and pulled out again, and the Big Top erected over inhospitable land, and the elephants shitting in great steaming piles, and the hunters coming back cursing and grumbling, for there was no meat to be had.
Still there were others living in that distant and inhospitable land. As a child, the boy who would become the Conjurer was fascinated by the ancient ruins that could be found in the lonely places of the Escapement. He had made a friend in Professor Federico, the Magnificent, whose dazzling displays of alchemical marvels were in truth nothing much more than fizzy potions made with water, vinegar and baking soda.
The Professor was a short, stocky man with thinning black hair and a thick moustache, and when he spoke he spoke with an accent that came from that other place. He let the boy accompany him on his excursions, and it was thus that the boy first saw the great broken pillars of the dead Colossi.
The first dead Colossus he saw lay in a valley crusted with salt seams in the walls. The Colossus had fallen on its side, and its body broke into many parts, and trees and desert shrubs grew on its scalp and in its ears and sprouted out of its nose. Its pelvis was shattered, and its fingers had broken into many smaller pieces, and the Professor said, “A great violence had been perpetrated here.”
The boy stood on the heights and looked down on the Colossus. From above, one could see its overall shape, and there was something sad, even noble, about the stone. When they descended, it was impossible to discern that image: the Colossus broke into fragments of vision, so all that one saw were curiously-shaped rocks.
“Who did this?” he had asked. The Professor puffed on a pipe which merely produced soap bubbles, and the boy watched the bubbles rise high into the sky. They broke the sunlight into rainbows.
“Us, I think,” he said.
“Us?”
“People. We carry our violence within ourselves.”
The boy did not understand the answer; not then. The Professor showed him how history was often erased and rewritten in the flesh of the Escapement. How where once the maps said was a river was now a part of the
plains, or how hills became mountains, how paths disappeared. He showed him the old ghost roads, which came and went on the Escapement, but it was when one appeared, more often than not, that an old place would be revealed nearby, and it was in this way, too, that the boy saw the first of las máquinas. You saw it long before you reached it, if you ever did. It rose out of the hard, dry ground and seemed to travel up for miles, an ovoid shape of metal and glass that reflected the sun out of cubic mirrors that could have been windows and could have been eyes.
It could have been a luxury liner, or the egg of some giant, flaming bird.
“Now these,” the Professor said. “These truly are intriguing. Las máquinas. Organic or machine? Are they even real? Are they natural structures of the Escapement, or are they of an alien origin to it? Some say, you know, that the Escapement had been colonised at different times by a different peoples—a different species, perhaps? That each successive immigration reawakens the dormancy of the Escapement, and in the interaction changes it, shapes it to that race’s perception. What do you think, boy?”
“Me?” the boy said, surprised. “I don’t know, Professor. I was born here, to me this is as real as . . .” Words failed him.
“As that other place is to some of us, you mean?” Professor Federico, the Magnificent, said.
“I suppose . . .” the boy said, mumbling a little, for he did not understand what that other place was, and why some people went there.
“Which begs the question,” the Professor said. “Are you real, boy?”
“Am I?” the boy said. It was then, perhaps, that he first began to consider the nature of reality itself, and how our perceptions, and that which is perceived, may not match. Which is to say, it was when he first got on the long road to becoming a conjurer. A conjurer fools perception, after all. That is his job, and his joy. And in such a manner, perhaps, he therefore acts as a minor agent of the Escapement, in which all manner of Fools, and of fooling, proliferate.
