Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  It was a word Adam had not heard before, but as he saw the souls swarming on the hill he understood it to mean something like El’s host. Hundreds of souls were on the hill. Most of them were down along the riverfront unloading boats and stacking various types of supplies, but some were roaming about the slopes above driving in stakes with crisp hammer strokes that could be heard clearly across the river, and stretching lines this way and that.

  Near the top of the hill, just a little below the trunk of the great tree, was a large open space, devoid of souls, stakes, and ropes, at the center of which stood a stack of rocks about the height of a man. For the moment it was not moving, but Adam could see from the trail of deep footsteps leading up to it that Cairn had simply walked to this place in a straight line across the bottom of the river. En route he seemed to have destroyed some of Feller’s preparations by walking through them as if they were not there, but in his wake repairs were already being made.

  “Friend of yours?” Whirr asked. Then she laughed. “His trudge up the hill made for enjoyable watching.”

  “He has dwelled in Camp for a long time, and knew the wild souls hereabouts when the Land was young and it was possible to roam across it for a whole season and never encounter another soul,” Walksfar said.

  “Too bad for him,” said Thunk, “that he found himself in the midst of so many neighbors.”

  “I blame myself,” Walksfar said, “for welcoming new souls to town and allowing them to proliferate and to spread. I assumed that they would acquire wisdom. Instead there seems no end to their straying.”

  Whirr turned her back to the river and directed her gaze into the north and the west, where high mountains could be seen, white with snow. “There are other places,” she said, “where souls could live and be left alone, at least for a good long span of years.”

  “Sooner or later the same thing would happen as happened here,” Thunk demurred, “unless measures were taken to prevent new souls from drifting in willy-nilly and establishing the same habits and practices.”

  Walksfar nodded. “I should have foreseen as much long ago, but I was too comfortable alone in my cabin to trouble myself with the doings of the new ones.”

  “What business do you suppose the cairn that walks might have today on the hill?” asked Whirr, now turning back to look that way.

  “We had all hoped to go yesterday,” said Adam, “and ascertain whether those ancient souls are still of a mind to engage in conversations. But the boatmen refused to take us. Therefore Cairn went alone. I would suppose that he is talking, in his own way, and listening for any answers that might be forthcoming.”

  “Supposing he makes himself understood,” said Thunk, “and conveys the information that the tree is in danger, what of it? If I warn a member of my band that a stone from Whirr’s sling is headed for him, he can duck out of the way, and he is not altered by having moved. But once a tree or a hill has created a form for itself and put down roots into everything and dwelled there for many years, can it move out of harm’s way? And supposing it could, would it still then be the same tree? Or would the act of moving change it into something else, so that it was as dead as if it had been chopped down?”

  “All good questions,” said Walksfar, “to which I lack answers at present.”

  Adam for his part thought back to the fight between Thunk’s and Feller’s crews. He remembered in particular the man whom Bluff had so mercilessly beaten with his iron rod, utterly destroying his form so that the aura spilled forth and reverted to chaos. And in the same vein he thought of Messenger of El, likewise splattered, in such a way that he had not been able to form himself again. Could the same fate befall any soul? Even, perhaps, Egdod himself when El had come for him? Did the soul then go away and cease to exist forever, or could it spawn again and begin the slow process of re-forming itself?

  Cairn stood there for most of the day, then suddenly went into movement again, shambling back down toward the river in a gait somewhere between a walk and a minor landslide. En route he touched off some secondary disturbances on the unstable slope and picked up a long train of ropes and canvas that got tangled about him. Some of the souls working on preparations seemed offended. Three of them seemed to embolden one another to the point of action, and approached Cairn, and threw rocks at him. The folly of throwing rocks at a pile of rocks seemed never to have entered their minds. Thunk, Whirr, Walksfar, and Adam laughed at them. This—the fact that they had all seen humor in the same thing at the same time—seemed to establish a friendship among them, such that without needing to speak of it they then parted on amicable terms.

  Adam and Walksfar hiked back to Camp and found Cairn standing in the middle of it, sporting a few new rocks. Around him played the twelve children of Adam and Eve. These were now almost as tall as many of the souls who dwelled in Eltown.

  Adam went and sought out Eve in their cabin. She could see in his aura that some change had come over him and so they went out and walked in the woods together. “Changes are in the offing,” Adam said, “and I believe that we must prepare for a journey.”

  “Camp has been a good place for us,” said Eve, “but staying here has not brought us any nearer to our goal of finding our mother, Spring, and so it is time for us to leave.”

  “There will be hardships,” Adam warned her, thinking of what it would be like to travel with the twelve children.

  “I know that better than you,” Eve returned. Adam looked away, ashamed. Eve shrugged. “Perhaps some of our new friends will come with us, and ease our burdens.”

  Later that evening, when the air had gone calm, they heard the distant sound of axes striking into wood, and a cheer went up from the river.

  Adam and Eve walked the next day to a vantage point from which they could see the work in progress. A hundred souls were up in the branches of the tree, hacking off its boughs so that the trunk could be brought down more easily; these crashed to earth every so often, each as great as a large tree in its own right. Workers tied ropes to these so that they could be dragged down the slope. Many more ropes had been made fast to the trunk itself; these all pulled in the same direction, being attached at their lower ends to old stumps or to thick stakes driven deep. Hacking away at the base of the trunk was not just a single woodcutter but several teams of them, each gnawing away at a different spot.

  As that day, and the day after, went by, their excavations merged into a single notch, large enough that twenty souls could stand upright inside of it and swing axes. By that point the tree was entirely limbless, just a bare pole projecting from the top of the hill, beginning to list in the direction that the ropes were pulling. It seemed for a while that it might not come down in a single moment but rather just lean farther and farther until it came gently to rest. But in the middle of the third day there was a crack, immensely loud, which was heard everywhere and then echoed from all of the surrounding slopes. The trunk toppled slowly. Or so it seemed from a distance. But the frantic scurrying of souls all around it hinted at the true speed and violence of its fall. A spume of aura shot up into the air from its stump, as when the lid is removed from a boiling pot, and dissipated into the sky. From the souls on the hillside a cheer went up.

  Then it turned into a scream as the hill shrugged.

  That was the extent of its movement, as it seemed from afar: a slow heaving, as when a sleeping beast inhales deeply and then heaves out a great shivering sigh.

  A disturbance flowed from the hill’s apex downward, like wind blowing over grass, gathering strength rather than dissipating as it propagated down toward the riverfront. On a closer look this consisted of souls, and all the stuff that they had brought with them. Like crumbs being shaken from a cloth they tumbled into the rivers on either side of the hill, cluttering the water for some moments with all sorts of stuff and detritus.

  A moment later they were all buried under a second, darker and heavier tide that had been shrugged off of the hill by a stronger convulsion. This was the hillside itsel
f: all the earth that had clothed it and all the stumps that had been rooted in that earth. It fell upon the souls in the river and buried them. And it fell too upon the water of the rivers.

  The two rivers burst out from under the avalanche, forming up into white waves. Seen from downriver, these waves—one in each of the two forks—unfurled like angels’ wings, spreading across each of the streams and rebounding from the banks opposite, throwing up spumes of dirty foam as the displaced water piled up into a fluid hill. The water acted as if it had a soul of its own, and the soul was confused; but after some moments it determined that the way out was down in the direction of Eltown. There was further confusion as the two mounds of water came together and clashed at the junction, just at the foot of the hill—or what had been the hill a minute ago. Now it had shed its cloak of earth to reveal a skeleton of boulders, resembling a much larger version of Cairn.

  Which on any other day would have commanded their full attention. But now they could not stop watching the slow relentless marshaling of the waters. These settled into a step: a clear and straight cliff that stretched from one bank to the other and marched downstream at a pace that looked stately until one compared it to the movements of a few terrified souls running full-tilt along the banks.

  The wave spread across Eltown, inundating it all, toppling its buildings and snuffing its fires, the graves of which were thereafter marked by columns of steam. It spread thence over the new walls and across the green fields of the Autochthons, strewing them with flotsam picked up from the ruined structures of the town. The farther it spread, the slower it went, and at the end it was no more than knee- or ankle-deep on the legs of the Autochthons and their mounts. They seemed only a little inconvenienced by the flood. Their fields were left speckled with flat puddles and strewn with wreckage. Damage was much greater in town, where many structures had been knocked flat and some, paradoxically, were burning.

  Concerned as they were with trying to help souls trapped in wreckage, or salvaging their belongings, the people of Eltown had eyes only for what was close to hand. A similar state of affairs prevailed in the smaller settlement down below Camp, which had likewise been inundated. But the higher ground of Camp was unaffected. From there Adam and Eve and the other souls were able to look up the valley to the place where the river forked. Formerly they would have said “to the hill with the great tree” but those were both gone now.

  Standing there was a pile of boulders, each bigger than a house. The shape of it changed slowly; it grew taller and narrower. It was already as tall as the hill and the tree combined. It changed at the slow but steady pace of shadows shifting across the ground over the course of an afternoon; looked on directly it did not seem to move.

  “We should go down there and help those people,” said Eve, fetching an axe from a hook above the door. She turned to go down the hill. Then, noting that Adam showed little inclination to go with her, she pulled up short and looked at him curiously.

  “Yes, we should,” Adam said, “and we shall. But we should do it with one eye toward leaving this place. Possibly in some haste.”

  “Why?” asked Eve.

  “They are going to turn on us,” said Adam.

  “That would make no sense!”

  “I have spent much time among them,” said Adam, “and I regret to say that they do things that make no sense more often than they show wisdom. They are ruled by emotion and rumor. Even though we had nothing to do with the cutting down of the great tree, they will look at that”—he stretched out his arm to indicate the pile of boulders—“and note its likeness to Cairn, and they will say that all of us, even our twelve children, are of a shared kind, which is responsible for what has just occurred and for every other imperfection in the world besides. They will come for us and they will try to do to us what Cairn did to Messenger of El and what Feller and his crew just did to the great tree.”

  Until then Adam had not been known for wisdom and forethought, being more apt to find surprises in the events of each new day. But all came to pass as he had said. He and Eve went down to the riverfront and bent their strong backs to digging out souls trapped in structures that had fallen over, and passing buckets of water to ones that were burning. Many were grateful but others looked on them darkly and spoke to one another in confidence.

  Boats began to come across the river from the ruins of Eltown. Some carried refugees. Others brought assistance in the form of Autochthons come to bend their backs. All, during the passage over the river, gazed upstream toward the place where the hill had once stood. The column of boulders now towered over the joining of the rivers and began to look vaguely two-legged, with an especially large boulder at the top.

  The same townspeople who glared suspiciously at Adam and Eve, even when receiving their help, adored the Autochthons for rendering just the same sort of assistance. Matters gradually advanced to the point where some of the townspeople were saying that now that the Autochthons were on the scene, Adam and Eve’s assistance was neither needed nor wanted. Others were gathered in a ragged ring around the Captain of the Autochthons giving vent to any feelings that crossed their minds, provided that they were feelings of a fearful or vengeful nature. Eve met Adam’s eye and they wordlessly agreed it was time to go back to Camp.

  They reached it only a few minutes ahead of a crowd of souls who had noted their departure and come up the hill with axes and iron bars. Nothing prevented them from entering Camp and moving freely among the old dwellings half-buried among the trees. They did so now and it became possible to hear cracking and splintering noises as they attacked the cabins, tearing them apart for their logs and their bricks. But around the clearing at the top of the hill, the people of Camp, some months ago, had made a barrier of branches, living and dead, woven together to prevent the twelve little ones from straying. It would not stop the townspeople for long if they came for it with iron and fire, but it did bring them up short, and caused the flood of invaders to divert around it.

  The gate was nothing more than a panel of woven sticks. The defenders did not even bother closing it. But Cairn stood nearby, and Walksfar and Adam as well, in a vigilant posture that sufficed to deter the curious.

  Thus matters remained at a stand. Captain came up the hill at the head of a score of Autochthons. He rode in through the gate and pulled up in the clearing, for Walksfar had stepped forth to block his path. Adam stood to one side and Cairn to the other. More Autochthons came in and filled the space behind their Captain, and townspeople came in as well, milling around among the riders’ mounts.

  “We see how it is,” said Walksfar, “and we prepare to abandon this place where some of us have dwelled in peace since the end of the First Age.”

  Captain shrugged. “Ages come and go. Yours has gone.”

  “It is a lesson you would do well to study,” Walksfar remarked. “In the meantime, since the souls of Eltown seem to respect your authority, perhaps you could ask them to withdraw from Camp and leave us in peace while we gather our things and depart in good order. There will be time enough to sack the place after we have gone.”

  “Depart for where?” asked Captain. “You departed once before, from First Town, and came to this place, and now look what has happened. Now it seems you are of a mind to repeat the same mistakes in some new setting.”

  “Have you some other recommendation?” asked Walksfar irritably.

  “Stay,” said Captain, “and submit to the wisdom of El, and shape your lives in accordance with the new way of doing things. I will see to it that Camp is not molested and that the damage done to it is made good.”

  Hearing those words Adam felt his resolve falter as he thought of how their life would be, were they to submit as Captain was proposing. He and Eve and their children would live peaceably in Camp among their friends, making marks on the wall of their cabin with each fall of the leaves. It would not be so very different from dwelling in the Garden behind El’s palace. He sensed Eve’s aura as she came up behind him, and felt her
hand as she clasped his.

  He came to his senses then and remembered the night of the knife. With his free hand he grasped for it, not to draw it out of its sheath but just to confirm that it was there and to remind himself that it had not been a dream. He spoke to Captain, loudly enough that all in Camp could hear his words: “When Messenger of El came here, Eve and I learned just what would be entailed in ordering our lives as you suggest!” Letting go of Eve’s hand, he reached around behind her back and drew her to his side. “What Messenger of El did that night, and what was done to him, cannot be undone,” he continued. “We will go out into the world and be no worse off than when we were ejected from the Garden.” He turned to look at Cairn, Dusty, and the other souls of Camp, and noted that they were being joined by Thunk and Whirr and other members of their band, who were entering into the compound from the direction of the forest. Adam concluded, “I hold no authority over these other souls, many of whom are much older and wiser than me and Eve, and so I leave them to their own counsel.”

  He supposed that Walksfar or one of the others might now have something to say in return. Instead he was distracted by a sudden movement of Eve, who first shrank against him and then ducked under his arm so as to move back. For a thin tendril of aura had reached out from Captain to grope at Eve’s belly, and his gaze was fixed upon her. Seeing that she did not like being probed in this way, Adam sidestepped to interpose himself between her and the Captain, and waved his arm back and forth in an effort to disrupt the aura. But Captain had already learned Eve’s secret. “Again you are with child!” he said. “The first time, you made new souls innocently and were blameless. But after the events Adam just spoke of, there can be no doubt in your minds that such doings are in defiance of El’s will. This must not be allowed to continue!” Captain made his mount step forward.

  But then he and all the others were dazzled by a flare of light, bright as the sun, as Walksfar drew the sword from its dark scabbard.