Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  On his porch, as he called the place under the roof before his dwelling, Walksfar had made a small hearth of kiln stones where a few embers still glowed. Adam and Eve could guess that during the hours they had slept Mab must have sought him out and persuaded him to cross the river and meet the newcomers. He now stoked the fire back up and began to heat water in a container that looked to have been hammered out of a thin sheet of reddish metal. As he busied himself, Adam and Eve sat on a bench on the porch and gazed out over the central area of Camp. They knew themselves to be on a hilltop, but the trees and dwellings were so arranged as to block much of the view. Above them in the distance they could see Elkirk, but all views farther east were closed off by the ridge on which it stood. They did not miss seeing, or being seen by, the distant Palace of El. Mostly what they saw was Camp itself, and a few souls coming and going among its dwellings. Most had the general form of Eve, Adam, and Walksfar. “Those too must have come from the place you spoke of—First Town,” Eve remarked.

  “That they did,” Walksfar said. “Some others dwelled here even before First Town existed. For example Cairn, over yonder.”

  Walksfar seemed to be indicating a column of brownish-gray stone that was standing on the other side of Camp—and that seemed to have been there for a long time, judging from its shaggy pelt of moss. But then it altered its shape, collecting itself into a somewhat taller and narrower figure. It shook off a few days’ accumulation of leaves and advanced into the trees in a swaying, stomping gait that reminded Adam and Eve of how their hill had moved when it had strode across the plain to rescue them from the wolves.

  “Others here look more like trees or flowers,” Walksfar added, “and some go on four legs, though they prefer living in wilder places. But I, and others who spawned at about the same time, looked to Ward or others of the Pantheon for our shapes.”

  “What stories you must have of that age!” Eve exclaimed.

  “Only some of us. Many are forgettish. That woman there, carrying the bucket—she’s older than I but remembers less.”

  “If you are not forgettish, would you tell us the story of First Town and how Camp and Eltown came to be?” Eve asked.

  Walksfar by now was well advanced in some complex undertaking of heating water and throwing dried leaves into it, evidently with an eye toward later decanting it into three smaller containers. “Souls came into being as they do. None of this existed.”

  “Camp?”

  He shook his head. “The Land. The entire Land. In those days it was nothing more than a street lined with trees. The number of souls grew and Egdod came down from time to time and caused houses to come into being, where we lived.”

  “Did you know Egdod well?”

  Walksfar shook his head. “By the time of my spawning, he had raised walls about his abode, and, as is implied by his name, Ward was there to prevent the new souls of Town from wandering about the place. Egdod spent much time farther afield, in places we knew not of. We would see his great wings flapping away into the distance until he disappeared over the horizon. From this I conceived the idea that other places might exist, as worth seeing as First Town, and so one day I walked away, and kept walking. This was where I left off roaming. It suited me better than Town, which had become crowded.”

  “Did the wolves come for you?” Adam asked, at the same time as Eve was saying, “What did you eat?”

  “This was before eating, and before wolves,” Walksfar said. “All that came later. I came back to Town after a long sojourn to find everyone putting things into their mouths and shitting from the other end, which explained the smell I had noticed on the east wind several days out. I became an eater and a shitter myself. Later Spring made various creatures, including ones that were predisposed to eat us.”

  “Did you know Spring?” Eve asked.

  Walksfar shook his head. “No one did—save by her works. Spring never visited Town. At the time of the Fall, rumor had it that she was working on creating two-legged creatures, such as us. After that, of course, nothing further was heard of the Pantheon.”

  There was so much curious in what he had just said that Adam and Eve were unable to choose from among a diversity of questions. Walksfar poured hot brown stuff from the larger container into the small ones and indicated that they might partake if they wished. He treated his own serving with caution, as if it might bite him. The fire had put much heat into it.

  “The Fall?” Adam asked.

  “Of the Old Gods,” Walksfar said, and when this did not seem to register, added, “of Egdod and his Pantheon, when El came in glory with his host and threw them into the sky.” He eyed them for a few moments and risked a sip. “You two really are from some remote place if you have not heard some telling of that story.”

  Eve’s face reddened. “We are not so ignorant as all that. We know that El resides with his host in the Palace, high in the clouds above the humming soul hive. We know that Egdod and Spring and others of the Pantheon were there first, and were cast out by El, and seek to return.”

  “Do they, now?” Walksfar exclaimed. “How strange that you can speak with confidence of a thing as momentous as that would be, were it true, and yet of so many other matters you know nothing.”

  This brought them to an impasse for a time, and they took sips of the hot stuff.

  “The Fall,” Walksfar said finally, “is a matter of common knowledge, and I’ll not withhold what is easily learned. First Town changed into a kind of hive, which grew to rival Egdod’s Palace. A bright thunderbolt he flung, and brought it down. The survivors dispersed all over the Land, dividing up by their kind and the manner of their speech. I led a number of them hither, for it was a place I knew from my wanderings. We trekked across the sea of grass and down into the valley, where wolves came for us in the night; we fought them off with the weapons Thingor had taught us to make and we kept going. We ascended the east side of yonder ridge. We stopped for a time, as I had lost my way in those dark days of pursuit and struggle.

  “As I stood on the ridge looking west into the valley, I felt warmth on my back and saw the whole territory cast into shadow by a new light brighter than the sun. The others of my party were exclaiming. I turned around and saw in the far distance the brilliant form of El descending upon the top of the Pinnacle where it rose above the rubble of what had once been the Town and the hive. We saw flashes within that brightness as when the sun gleams on the surface of troubled water, and then saw the forms of Egdod and the Pantheon hurtling away into the sky; and they burned as they fell away from the Land that they had made, and did not leave off falling and burning until they struck the hard vault of heaven, and broke it, and set it aflame. It burns still and you can see it when the night sky is clear.”

  “The Red Web!” Eve exclaimed.

  “It goes by many names. That one is as good as any,” said Walksfar. His beverage had cooled sufficiently that he now took a long draught of it. “That was the Fall of the Old Gods. I turned my back upon the brightness of it, which some saw as glory, and descended into this valley with most of my party and here made Camp. But one of us, Honey by name—she had been my lover for a time—was enthralled by the glory of El, and chose to abide on the ridgetop where she could gaze across the sea of grass and adore him. She it was who built Elkirk. Many souls were drawn to it and made their way into the valley after they had forms. We of Camp showed them how to cut trees, build fires, smelt metal, bake bricks, and practice the many other crafts that had passed into our ken from Knotweave and Thingor. Thus Eltown.”

  His listeners considered it. “We did not encounter Honey at the kirk,” Adam said.

  Walksfar nodded. “Honey ceded Elkirk to priests whom she had raised and trained to that duty, and went into the east, crossing the sea of grass toward the Hive and the tower of El in the hopes that she could find some destiny there.”

  “How long ago was the Fall?” Eve asked. “How long has Camp been here—how many winters has it known?”

  Walksfar e
yed a man who was staggering across Camp with a log balanced on his shoulder. “Ask him and he’ll say it was just a few years, for he is forgettish. If you wanted a precise count, you would have to venture into the west and seek out Pestle, an old soul who has written down the chronicle of all that she has seen. I made no effort to count years until many of them had passed. Then I formed the habit of cutting a mark into the wall of my cabin every year when the great tree shed its leaves. I was just getting ready to make another such mark this morning when your companion, Mab, came and interrupted me. You may come inside and count the marks if it will serve as an answer.” Walksfar drew a steel knife from his belt as he said this, and tested its edge on his thumbnail. Then he got to his feet and opened the door of his abode and left it open behind him in case Adam and Eve wished to follow him inside.

  They did so, and saw little at first, for light came in only through two small openings. The walls were nothing more than the surfaces of the tree trunks that had been stacked up to make them. The logs were silver with age. As their eyes adjusted they saw many small vertical grooves cut into the wood, no farther apart than the width of a finger. Not all of the logs were so marked, but most were grooved from one end to the other. As they watched, Walksfar trailed his fingertip along one of the logs until he sensed the place where the marks left off. There he went to work with his knife. “Another year gone,” he remarked.

  Walksfar found them an old cabin in Camp where no one was dwelling, and over the next few weeks taught them the crafts of hewing logs and thatching roofs. They made good those parts of the cabin that had succumbed to rain and rot, and made a home of it for the winter. Eve’s belly continued to grow. Her appetite knew no bounds, and yet when she had eaten she preferred rest to work, or else would sit in the cabin practicing certain of those arts that Walksfar attributed to the member of the Pantheon called Knotweave. No longer did Adam and Eve go about clad in the pelts of animals but wore fitted and sewn garments of woven cloth. Eve had little contact during the next months with the folk of Eltown or even of Camp. Mab spent much time with her, imparting knowledge of crafts and other matters. Adam crossed and recrossed the river to fetch timbers, bricks, and the goods required by Eve; in exchange he toiled among the kilns and forges on the bank of the river, or joined expeditions that ranged up and down it.

  Three rivers joined into one some little distance upstream of the town. All had been explored and their banks logged for as far as a soul might walk in a day. Likewise downstream. In the early days of the town, when many fewer marks had existed on the walls of Walksfar’s cabin, getting logs had been much easier.

  Adam and Eve, of course, had been fortunate enough to get a dwelling of their own in Camp. But when Adam went back to the riverbank much later, he recognized souls there whom he and Eve had seen on their first day in Eltown, seemingly no closer to having their own dwellings. Some such joined together into parties that would venture down the river or across the western mountains in the hope of finding better places. Of those, some never came back, while others returned some time later, famished and telling tales of other towns where souls practiced outlandish ways and seemed to harbor exceedingly queer notions about El and other such topics.

  Adam made it his practice to sit with these when meals were served and to listen to their stories. For he and Eve had not lost sight of the goal that they had first spoken of in the Garden, namely to range across the Land in search of their mother, Spring. The tales told by those who had gone forth and returned gave him little cause for hope that Spring and the other Beta Gods would be easily found.

  The middle and the eastern forks of the river came together at the base of a hill, which had long since been logged, save for a single immense tree that now stood alone at its top and could be seen from a great distance. Wisps of rope still encircled the base of its trunk, for loggers of old had used it to anchor the lines that they made use of in their operations, and a long skid mark, gouged slightly deeper with every rain, still ran down from there to the riverfront, where they had bound the logs into rafts. The tree bore some axe scars where an effort to chop it down had been begun and abandoned.

  Adam did not work every day, but when he did, he would rise at dawn and walk down to the bank of the river and seek passage on one of the small boats that continually went back and forth across the river. The workers on the opposite bank could see him approaching. He was bigger than they and, once he had learned the art of axe swinging, could cut wood faster than any two of them. By the time he made it to the river’s eastern shore he commonly found himself being importuned by several souls who would begin shouting to him across the water as soon as they hoped they might be heard.

  One day, though, Adam came down from Camp to discover a boat waiting for him on the near side. It was the boat of a soul named Feller who lived in a wooden house of his own. Not content with that, he craved a larger house of burned bricks, and so went on cutting trees all the time. At great expense and trouble he had recently made this boat, the better to reach far logging sites, and was sometimes gone for days with his crew, which by and large comprised souls that had acquired more skills and had forms better suited for the work.

  “Many mornings,” said Feller, “I have looked across the river to this shore and seen you idle as you looked for a way across. It occurred to me that I had the means”—and he laid a hand on the gunwale of his boat—“to aid you.”

  “I thank you for your consideration,” said Adam, “though I cannot help noticing that your crew has also gone out of their way.” For six other souls were in the boat, axes across their laps.

  “No great matter,” said Feller, “but if you are as grateful as all that, perhaps you would consider joining us for the day. With my boat and my crew we can achieve more in that time than any of those feeble and forlorn souls over there can do in a week.”

  Feller’s words kindled a new emotion in Adam’s breast: pride in the fact that Feller deemed him more worthy than others of having a place in his crew. Feeling their eyes upon him and noting the excellence of the great axes they bore, he agreed and vaulted into the boat.

  He found himself seated across from Edger, a soul he had worked with before. This raised less agreeable feelings since Edger had a habit of glaring at Adam, and watching him closely as he worked, which Adam could happily do without. Edger was not unusually big or strong but she had become skilled in the craft of whetting blades, using an assortment of smooth rocks that she carried with her in a bag made of the skin of some dead animal. In consequence she could cut wood faster than most others. Seated next to her was Bluff, who had been the largest and strongest soul in Eltown until the arrival of Adam. Something in how these two related to each other gave Adam the idea that Edger and Bluff were lovers.

  Feller’s habit was to row upriver to one of the remote camps of the west fork. The current ran faster in that stream than in the other two, so it was more difficult to explore, and good trees could be reached by one such as Feller who had a nimble boat. They worked their way up past the first splitting of the river, where the lone tree stood on its hill, and then came to the place where the white water of the Western spilled into the slack water of the Middle. They diverted up the former. The stream sought to expel them as if possessed by a soul of its own. “Bluff and Adam,” said Feller, “it is time for weaker oarsmen to move aside and let you bend your strong backs to it.”

  Bluff arose and took the place of a smaller soul on the bench amidships that was reserved for those pulling on oars. He gripped one of the oars in his great hands and looked expectantly at Adam, who understood that he was supposed to do likewise. He was not accustomed to other souls directing his actions, but he could see plainly enough that this was the way of things. He took the seat on the bench next to Bluff and grabbed the other oar. “Pull,” said Feller. Bluff did so and the entire boat pivoted around. Adam was conscious of being looked on askance. “Pull!” Feller repeated, and this time Adam tried to do as Bluff did. Still the effect of B
luff’s oar was greater, though not as unequal as before. Feller directed Adam to pull alone, so as to straighten the boat’s course.

  “And put your back into it, big man!” said Edger, in a tone that reminded Adam of why he wished she were not on the boat.

  “Sharper tools and a duller tongue is what I desire from you, Edger,” responded Feller. “You have work of your own that I would have you attend to.” Adam was taken aback by his tone, for he had rarely heard any soul speak this way. But Edger seemed to accept the rebuke. She groped in her bag for a rock and then began to scrape it along the edge of an axe.

  The rowing was arduous, but whenever Adam slackened, Bluff seemed to sense it and to pull harder, causing the boat to swing broadside to the current. This only made it more difficult for Adam to straighten it, and as Feller pointed out several times, it caused them to lose time as the river pushed them back. So Adam learned to sense what Bluff was doing and to match him pull for pull. As the morning wore on Bluff seemed to tire and slackened his pace, and Adam did likewise so as to keep the boat straight.

  Before noon they arrived at a place where the stump lands gave way to forest, and there they drew the boat up on the bank, climbed out, and went to work with their axes. Or at least that was true of everyone except for Feller. He spent a while walking to and fro on the bank of the river, gazing intently at the ground. “Thunk and his lot have been here,” he said, “I see his big footprints.”

  Adam went to work cutting down a tree that seemed of a good size to him until Feller told him to attack a larger one instead. So into that one Adam began to swing his axe, but found it did not bite as well as it might have. Testing its edge he found that it was dull. Not far away Edger was making much speedier progress cutting down a smaller tree. Adam asked her whether he might have the use of a whetstone from her pouch. She invited him to wander at hazard into the deep forest and be eaten by wolves—a prospect that seemed to amuse her very much. So Adam went down to the bank of the river and found a suitable rock. Feller came over to him and inquired as to why he was not applying himself to his assigned task. Adam explained matters. Feller took the axe and tested its edge and was displeased. “Edger!” he shouted, despite knowing exactly where she was, for she was in plain sight not far away. But he continued to call her name until she had come over to him. Then he rebuked her. Adam was some distance off, whetting the tool with his river rock, and the sound of the rushing water made it difficult for him to understand the words they exchanged. But their tone could not be misunderstood. The discussion went on for some little while before Feller drew his arm across his body and then whipped it back, striking Edger on the cheek with such force that she spun away and fell to the ground.