by Jeffrey Ford
As they neared the huge rocks, Wood ran ahead, barking, and disappeared behind them. Cley stood a few yards back with the rifle aimed and ready for whatever was flushed out. He waited, but nothing bolted into the sunlight. The dog’s bark changed to a growl, and, bringing the gun down, the hunter ran around to the opposite side of the formation. He worried that Wood had cornered a snake. In their travels they had seen some large ones, all a startling bright yellow, slithering through the new grass.
What he found was not a snake, or not the snake he had envisioned. Wood crouched in his attack stance, the hair along the ridge of his back raised, his teeth bared, facing off against the skeletal remains of what had once been an enormous creature.
The skull itself was nearly as large as the dog, resembling a cow’s but with a much longer snout. Its mouth was open and filled with rows of perfectly preserved, needlelike teeth. The eye sockets were big enough for Cley to easily pass his fist through. Stretching out for fifteen feet behind the head was a body composed of a spine with pointed, half-circle ribs curving down and resting their tips on the ground. Both the length of the ribs and the width of the spine diminished toward the tail, which ended in a three-foot-long, tapered bone needle.
Cley circled the remains, rubbing his hand on the smooth, sun-bleached bones. He noticed the lack of legs or arms. “Sirimon,” he whispered, and the thought that one or more of these things might still be roaming the plain made him nervous.
“Just old bones,” he said to Wood. The dog relaxed somewhat, but was still visibly agitated by the skeleton. The hunter put the rifle butt to his shoulder, took aim, and, without hesitation, pulled the trigger. The gun’s report was like a violent explosion that, for a heartbeat, devoured the serenity of the plain. Smashing through the skull, chips of bone flying in its wake, the bullet lodged in a rib halfway to the pointed tail. Cley instantly regretted the reckless act.
He moved away quickly and whistled for Wood to follow. A few yards later, they both stopped in their tracks. The dog was silent. The hunter scanned the empty sky. “Where are the birds?” he asked. They hadn’t seen a rabbit or any other creature all morning. He squinted as if trying to see more keenly—no lizards, no ants, not even the gnats that had been their constant companions from the first day on the plain. Now, even the breeze had vanished.
“Where are the damn bugs?” he said.
At midafternoon, Cley sat up from where he had been trying to relax since their return from the boulders.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
He began quickly to gather the clothes and supplies laid out around the camp. Refilling the pack, he readied himself to resume the journey. His hands shook as he fixed the harness over Wood’s head and chest. Before they set out, he packed the bow and arrows on the sled and again lifted the rifle. Removing his pack, he rummaged through it for the box of shells and loaded the gun.
They moved away from the campsite at double their usual pace, and it didn’t take long for motion to alleviate the vague anxiety that had beset them more than the gnats ever had. He wondered if the problem was simply that they had broken their routine, but he continued to hold the rifle close with both hands. After the first mile, they slowed to their normal pace.
From a great distance, he saw them shining in the late-afternoon light, and knew from their reflection that they were not boulders. Although he meant to avoid them, for some reason he continued on a path leading directly into their midst. Three more skeletons of the Sirimon creature lay clustered together in the ankle-deep grass. Two of the specimens were perfectly preserved—tail, ribs, and skull intact. The third had broken apart, its skull lying on the ground with a purple wildflower growing up through the left eye socket. He did not stop to touch them. In fact, he increased his pace. When he looked back and saw Wood sniffing the remains, he yelled angrily for him to hurry. For the miles that followed into evening, the ground they crossed was littered with fragments of skull, short lengths of spinal column still supporting a rib or two, and even one sharp tail end, sticking straight up out of the dirt.
Night was upon them when they made camp in a spot that might have been any other at which they had stopped since entering the plain. He removed the harness from the dog and wondered, for the first time, if they would ever escape the flatland.
During the day’s march, they had seen and killed only one rabbit, and that they found sitting out in the open, shivering and confused. When Wood barked, the sorry creature did not even run but waited for Cley to remove the bow from the sled and nock an arrow into place. The ease with which he killed it made him suspicious, but there was no other meat.
“Like a painting,” he said, considering the stillness of the landscape.
The fire was built, and they ate the confused rabbit along with some roots of the kierce blossom he had collected on previous days. For all of his uneasiness about it, the food tasted fine. Wood moved up close to Cley after the meal, and they read a few pages about the energy in nature that linked all individual souls together. “What a poozle,” he said, and laughed in the midst of his reading. The dog growled quietly, as if to say, “Read on, you fool.”
When he bedded down beneath the open sky, his errant thoughts brought him images of the Sirimon, slithering through the grass. The night, though, was as static as the day. When he finally held in check his imagination and really listened, he heard nothing. Still, he drew the loaded rifle closer to his side.
While they slept, the half-moon that had cast a silver glow on the plain disappeared behind a bank of dark clouds that moved without a breeze, flying, as if of their own volition, in from the west. Eventually, the stars were also obliterated from view. Early in the morning, just before sunrise, a fine misty drizzle began to fall. Cley tossed and turned in the dampness, deep in a dream of Doralice, the prison island upon which he had once been incarcerated. He stood on the shore, close to the breakers, staring out to sea, and beside him was the monkey, Silencio. When the waves crashed, the spray washed over the pair, and this spray stood in for the soaking Cley took in reality from the weather of the Beyond. The monkey pointed out to sea at a ship in the distance, opened his mouth wide as if to scream, but instead there came an explosion that blasted the hunter into consciousness.
He cleared the water from his eyes in time to see a bolt of lightning tear the western sky. Thunder quickly followed, and, with it, the rain began to fall in torrents. He looked around for Wood and saw him already cowering in submission to the storm. Cley’s first thought was to pitch the tent he had made. They had used it only twice when first entering the plain and then not against rain but cold night winds. He felt well rested and wanted desperately to find a way out of the flatland. “We are going to get wet anyway,” he thought. “We might as well move on.”
They broke camp and started out just as a weak, diffused light began to spread across the sky. No sooner had they begun to walk than the wind that had been absent for nearly an entire day swept down from the northwest, driving the rain at an angle. Cley now carried the bow, having wrapped the rifle in a skin and stored it on the sled.
The ground had begun to turn to mud, and the rain gathered in puddles. Wood was having a hard time pulling the sled, its runners occasionally getting stuck in the soft earth. Cley got behind and pushed the contraption in order to get it going again. The downpour never tapered off, but constantly increased in strength until it was difficult for him to see more than a few feet ahead. Once, when trying to free the sled, Cley slipped and fell in the mud. He landed only a few inches from one of the nest mounds of the flightless bird. Discovering a clutch of half a dozen good-sized eggs, he carefully gathered them and put them in his pockets.
By the time they stopped to eat, it seemed that most of the plain was covered by an inch or two of water. In certain spots the puddles were deeper. He pitched the tent to allow them a few minutes of refuge from the storm and as a canopy beneath which he hoped to light a fire. It was difficult trying to get the demon-horn pegs to
hold in the wet earth, and he had to search for a time before finding a piece of ground that was a foot or so higher and still relatively dry. Once the pegs were fixed, he slid the willow sapling rods, which gave the thing its boxlike structure, into the sinew notches sewn to the deerskin cover. The shelter was tethered in place by ropes woven from vine. He and Wood sat beneath it and rested, safe from the persistent battering of the storm.
“If you shake the water off you in here, I’ll cut your other ear off,” Cley said with a grim laugh.
The dog moved over next to him and looked into his eyes.
Cley petted him on the head. “A little water,” he said. “How about some eggs?”
The hunter went outside and yanked up one of the bushes they burned nightly. Returning with it to the tent, he placed it inside to dry for a few minutes. Then he went through his pack and pulled out a small copper pot. Taking the pot, he walked a few yards away from the cover to where a deep puddle bubbled wildly beneath the driving rain. He was about to dip the pot into the water when he noticed something dark moving through the shallow pool. Leaning over, he looked more closely, past the agitation on the surface. There, swimming through the grass, was a school of tiny, black fish.
“Fish born of nothing;” he said. Knowing there wasn’t anything he could do about this miracle, he siphoned some water off the top of the puddle and returned to the tent.
“Fish in the puddles,” he told Wood.
The dog barely lifted his head at the news.
Cley took the stone knife out of his boot and used it to gouge a deep hole in the ground that was the floor of their shelter. He then hacked some choice branches off the bush and threw the remainder outside. Next, he dug through his pack and brought out the book.
“Sorry, Wood,” he said as he ripped out the first few pages.
The dog lifted his lip and gave an unconvincing snarl.
“We’ve read them already,” said the hunter. He replaced the book, then wadded up the loose paper into balls. Placing these at the bottom of the hole, he took the cut branches of the bush and built a pyramid structure around them. As good as he had become with the stones, it was obvious that this operation called for matches. He retrieved them from the pack, and in minutes the smoke was rising, streaming out of the sides of the tent. He hoped that the branches, though still damp, would dry enough as the paper burned to then ignite. The words concerning the nature of the soul wrinkled brown and vanished in the flames. A short time later, the eggs of the flightless bird rolled in the boiling water of the copper pot.
The respite from the storm was so welcome that Cley did not want to leave the shelter. He sat, listening to the rain battering the skin, its rhythm now almost comforting. Wood rested his head on his paws, his exhalations forming puffs of steam in the cold air. Eventually the water infiltrated their haven, lifted the scattered eggshells, and washed them away.
A fierce gale whipped around outside, tugging at the vines, and one by one the demon-horn pegs shot up out of the ground with the sound of buttons popping. The willow-sapling frame snapped and buckled in a dozen places. The deerskin cover flapped against the travelers like a giant wing closing over them, and then it was gone. Cley looked up and, in the sudden brightness of a flash of lightning, saw the tent being carried away like a sheet of brown paper on the wind. He acted quickly to save his hat from the same fate.
He stood, dripping wet, and surveyed the situation. The plain was clearly sinking beneath a lake of rainwater. On closer inspection, he saw it was not a lake but an immense shallow river. Now that the water was ankle-deep everywhere, he noticed that there was a slight current to it. He watched as the bush whose branches he hacked off to make the fire gained buoyancy and began moving, along with sticks and loose blades of grass, off toward the north.
It was with great distress that he left the sled behind. He knew it would put a strain on Wood, constantly bogging down and getting stuck in the deepening water. There was also the absurd consideration that eventually they might have to swim, and then it would put the dog in serious jeopardy. All he salvaged from it was the rifle. With the pack and bow slung on his back, he carried the gun, and they started slogging through the sinking landscape.
The drag of the water made every step like the weighted plodding of a nightmare. Cley thought the idea of drowning out on the flat-land totally insane, but as the hours and the miles passed by it seemed to become more and more a real possibility. In those instances when the lightning flashed, he searched desperately ahead of them for some kind of shelter, some sign that the plain had a boundary. They continued, mindlessly, the persistence of the rain drilling their reason until they proceeded in a state bordering on the unconscious.
Cley looked up and realized that they had walked all night and into the next day. He was shivering so badly, he had to stop for a moment, maneuver the gun into the crook of his arm, and put his hands under his armpits for warmth. The hat brim had wilted and hung low, almost covering his eyes. He turned and looked for Wood, but the rain was falling so heavily he couldn’t see two arm lengths in front of him. Then he heard the dog bark and staggered forward a few feet to find him sunk three-quarters of the way to his neck.
Somewhere in the day, they stopped to rest. There was nothing else to do but sit down in the flow. Cley found a small rock under the water and perched on it, with the ever-growing, lethargic river reaching to just beneath his chest. He positioned the gun across the back of his neck and slung his arms up over each end. Wood sat next to him, the water passing around his shoulders. Cley tried to think of a good excuse to continue, and did not move for a very long time.
The second night came on early since the day had been little more than a bright smudge on the horizon. The rain had slightly abated to what might be considered, in the realm south of the Beyond, merely an incredible downpour. It seemed as if they had been traveling through the sunken world for years. Cley wondered if he and the dog had wandered blindly into some quadrant of Purgatory. The only things that convinced him otherwise were the hunger and the fierce burning of every muscle in his body.
It didn’t seem possible that the sky could hold so much water and not, itself, fall from the sheer weight. Wood was swimming, and the waterline was nearing Cley’s waist. The hunter had a mad vision of them two days hence still traipsing slowly along the bottom of an ocean, a school of sea horses passing above in the lime-green water.
He stopped and peered into the dark. The lightning came again, but this time, a few hundred yards ahead, he saw, in the split second of diminishing brightness, a formation of boulders. The current had grown stronger, and it helped them along in their frantic charge for the safety of the granite island.
When they reached the rocks, Cley wasted no time, but threw the rifle, bow, quiver, and pack up onto the lowest one. Then he bent over and helped Wood scrabble up out of the water. The dog reached the top of the low, flat boulder. He did not stop there but jumped to the next highest one and then on to the most immense one in the clutch of six.
Cley reached his hands up and tried to hoist himself out of the water, but found that with the added drag of his wet clothes his arms didn’t have the strength. Wood barked again and again, and with the dog’s encouragement, the hunter took one last leap and barely managed to get his upper body high enough above the surface of the rock to lock his elbows beneath its weight. He grunted and struggled and kicked his feet, and, after a long battle against gravity, rolled forward onto the flat surface of stone.
Now, out of the water, he was energized enough to move the equipment to the next highest rock. From there, he reached each item up to where Wood was waiting for him. When he began to climb onto it himself, he slipped on the slick surface and hit his head. The concussion left him dizzy and nauseous, but he finally succeeded in scaling the boulder. Once there, he fell to his knees, then forward to lie flat against the cold surface. The sound of water falling, running, rushing was everywhere, and the world was spinning.
“All is
lost,” he whispered to the dog.
Wood moved closer and watched as Cley’s eyelids fluttered and closed.
It was still raining, though less fiercely, when the hunter woke, shivering. He reached over to where Wood lay and put his hand on the dog’s back. The wind had shifted and now came from the south, blowing steadily but warmer than before. His dreams had him trudging through deep water, but his head was clearer now. The blood had dried from the gash. He sat up and tried to look through the dark.
He and Wood were stranded more thoroughly than if they had been shipwrecked on a desert island. He had never conceived of the journey ending in this manner. Maybe one day, in a hundred years, a traveler might discover their skeletons perched atop the boulder and wonder as Cley had when finding the remains of Sirimon. Even in the demon forest, when things were most grim, he had managed to reserve a place in his thoughts for his success. Now, in searching his memory, he could no longer find the image of his being reunited with Arla and Ea in the true village of Wenau. His hope of handing the green veil to Arla Beaton had been dissolved by the rain.
He reached into his shirt pocket and took the veil in his hand. Laying it on the rock in front of him, he smoothed it out flat. Since there was little chance now of his ever delivering it, he decided to send it on alone. He stood and held the piece of green material by one threadbare corner above his head. The wind lifted it, and it fluttered as if eager to be released. He cursed once, then opened his fingers, and it was gone, soaring upward on the warm southern current.
For the remainder of the night, he sat recalling the long chain of events, like an enormous coiled serpent, that had brought him to this rock. He no longer noticed the wind or rain, and near dawn, as the clouds broke and the moon became partially visible, he paid no attention. “The shortcut to Paradise,” he murmured. By the time the eastern sky began to lighten, he had come to the end of his own story and fallen asleep sitting up, his arms locked around his bent knees.
