by Jeffrey Ford
From the barracks came Willa, carrying Wraith in her arms and a pack on her back. Morgana walked with them, her arm wrapped around the new mother’s shoulders. They moved next to Cley in the middle of the compound.
Once his men were in place, the captain approached the hunter and women.
“Cley,” he said, “if I were you, I’d head east to where the settlers had their homes. I believe a few of those structures are still standing. Finish the winter out in one of them and then move on if you must in the spring. It seems you are immune from the Beshanti ire thanks to your marking. Perhaps they will not change their minds and will leave you alone until the weather gets better. If I can, I will send some men in the spring to check up on you and fetch back Mrs. Olsen.”
The hunter nodded. He was about to speak, when one of the men up on the eastern catwalk shouted, “Beshanti at the tree line.”
“How many?” asked Curaswani.
“I can’t count them, sir,” came the reply.
Then, from each of the walls came the same news, “Beshanti at the tree line.”
The captain handed Morgana a pistol, and yelled, “Open the door.”
Weems pulled the timbers back, unlocking the oak barrier.
The captain reached down and petted Wood on the head as Morgana leaned over and kissed the baby.
“Good-bye, Cley,” said Curaswani.
“I’ll see you in the spring,” said the hunter.
“To be sure,” said the captain.
The sun had begun to rise as Cley and Willa walked through the entrance of Fort Vordor. Wood took up the lead. They moved quickly, saying nothing, across the field toward the eastern tree line. Ahead of them, at two hundred yards, there was gathered a veritable sea of Beshanti warriors. Cley leveled the rifle in front of him in case he needed to fire it. When they reached the middle of the field he put his free arm around Willa as a sign to the natives that she was part of him.
As they approached the vast war party, Wood ran forward and the warriors fled from him with shouts of fear as if he was some kind of evil spirit. This created an opening in their ranks. Cley whispered to Willa, “Don’t look at them. Just keep walking.”
The hunter was overwhelmed by the great number of men he continued to pass, even though they had made the tree line and were now moving into the forest. Finally, after another fifty yards, they were alone among the birches.
Minutes later, there suddenly arose from behind them a deafening shout, like the very shout of the earth. Wraith woke and screamed at the noise. Soon after, there was the sound of gunfire in the distance. Cley made for a hill he had often seen from the eastern catwalk of the fort, peering over the tops of the forest trees. He and Willa and the dog climbed the gentle slope. When they reached its peak, they turned and look back.
The fort was under attack. There was the distant report of rifle fire, and the hunter saw puffs of smoke appearing everywhere along the battlements. Dozens of bodies lay strewn on the field between the tree line and the walls of Vordor. Some of the Beshanti were scaling the walls with long ladders made of tree branches. He looked for Curaswani and found him on the catwalk, his sword blade catching the sunlight, his white hair and beard making him look at that great distance like the image of Father Time.
“Enough,” said Willa. She took Cley by the hand and pulled him toward the other side of the hill. As he descended back into the Beyond, he felt himself leaving behind a great sorrow. He remembered how much he truly was a man of the wilderness. As the sounds of the battle faded, a new emotion grew inside of him. It was neither joy nor grief. He could not describe it, and he was content that he had no word for it.
the knife
Tomorrow I return to Wenau under dubious circumstances, and because I have been too busy in recent weeks to revisit my vision of the Beyond, I feel I had better take this time tonight to recount another chapter in Cley’s journey. The future, it seems, a phenomenon which had for so long been a certainty of dusty books and quiet, solitary contemplation, has become an empty page, itself waiting to be marked by those events that have yet to transpire. Its perfect blankness fills me with trepidation and at the same time pleases me with its enigmatic possibilities. I go to town as a sign of good faith in my humanity and hope to find, in return, a similar sign from the citizens there. As the beauty slowly percolates my mind toward transcendence, I will explain.
After my initial visit to the schoolhouse, word had apparently gotten around that I was not such an angry monster as had been advertised for so long. Those who had been present that night, Feskin and his friends, had obviously convinced more of their neighbors that I was to be trusted. Because of this, as soon as two days following, I began to receive guests at the ruins. On the first day, there were only a few, but I was pleased to find that these folks were not among those I had met at the schoolhouse. Yes, they also brought their weapons in order to ameliorate their fears, but they came in good humor and were inquisitive and friendly. I led them around the ruins and entertained them with snatches of historical, architectural, and technological information.
Every day following, more and more visitors came, on foot, on horseback, in wagons. As the days progressed, they did not bother with the weapons. They conversed with me openly without fear and told jokes, and I came to see that it was a mark of status for those who could engage me in conversation or make me laugh out loud. That part of me that loves myself grew beyond all measure with this realization, causing me to act more flamboyantly the role of scholar and raconteur. It also dawned on both myself and the visitors that the ruins were a large part of their lives, too—the shattered remains of the eggshell that had given birth to their present culture and community. The distance of time now allowed them to look upon the Well-Built City with more curiosity than dread.
Each day, I improved the tour I would give and honed my store of anecdotes. Instead of writing at night, I spent my time wandering the ruins in search of more and more interesting locations to which I might guide my visitors. Early on, I added a trip through the underground, which culminated at the site of the wrecked dome of the false paradise. I also no longer hesitated to show them the corpse of Greta Sykes, Below’s original werewolf. Having dispatched her with my bare hands years ago when ridding the ruins of those onerous creatures, I had had the wherewithal to preserve her carcass in a glass vat of formaldehyde in a laboratory on the remaining second-floor structure of the Ministry of Science.
Since many of those who came for the tour were interested in Cley and his role in the downfall of the city, I took pains to include a visit to his office. Although the building that housed his living quarters was now in too dangerous a state of disrepair, the front having been torn completely away and the staircase leading up to his rooms having been obliterated, I would offer to fly anyone who wanted to see it up to the height of the rooms and let them gaze in upon where their hero had spent his domestic hours.
One evening, I gathered all of the remaining intact blue spire statues, which had once been living miners in Anamasobia and were brought to the city by Below, together in one room in the remaining quadrant of the Ministry of Education. They made a powerful display, at the site of which I had an opportunity to wax philosophical on the dehumanizing tendency of a state-run economy. I fatuously enjoyed my own speech, but I believe the tourists preferred the spectacle of intricate beard stubble turned to stone. I could hardly blame them.
Every tour ended at my own Museum of the Ruins. This had become the highlight of the visit, and many would ask me anxiously at the beginning if they would get a chance to see it. How could I refuse to show them? They walked among the shelves and gaped in awe, for through that collection one could really get a sense of both the social complexity and technological prowess of the once mighty metropolis.
The only time that the hordes of visitors diminished instead of grew was last Thursday when it rained hard. On that day, I had only a small party show up. In fact, it was but two people; an old woman and her son, a
large hulking fellow with dim affect. They had made the trip from Wenau in a wagon. When I greeted them at the walls of the ruins, the woman nodded curtly but did not offer her hand in greeting. The young man never changed his expression throughout the entire visit, but presented the same bland, bowl-of-cremat face, no matter what wonder I revealed to him and his mother. The woman, on the other hand, made many different faces, all seemingly disapproving. I did my best to be gregarious at every turn, but her nose remained constantly wrinkled back as if she were smelling something noxious. As I remember, she did a good deal of head shaking, as if saying a silent “No” to everything I told her. Dressed completely in black and wearing a black hat and gloves, she had become, for me, by the end of the tour, like a sick shadow of guilt I could not escape.
I did not bother taking her into the underground, and since she seemed repulsed by the remains of the monkey who had written “I am not a monkey” five hundred times, I also passed on a viewing of the wolf-girl’s corpse. Finally, we arrived at the Museum of the Ruins, and I gladly left her and her dullard son to look around on their own while I went off to make myself a cup of shudder.
I did not stay away long, and when I returned to escort them back to the wall, I found that they were gone. The rain had increased, but I took the initiative to fly over the ruins. I spotted them in their wagon, moving as if fleeing across the fields of Harakun. “Strange,” I thought, and then, “Good riddance.” She was one neighbor I felt I could certainly live without.
It was not until that afternoon, when I returned to the room housing my museum, that I smelled the absence of an object from one of the displays. The woman had taken something, I was sure of it, but although I made a cursory inspection of the shelves, I could not ascertain what it was. Thievery was an aspect of the human condition I had never pondered too deeply. Its implications gave me much food for thought. I, myself, had stolen cigarettes from the villages, and that fact prevented me from becoming too self-righteous over the incident.
The following day, the sun was once more bright, the sky blue, and the number of visitors was again what it had been. Then, as the days that led into this week passed, the numbers of people began to diminish, and then trickled down to nothing. I wondered if I had done something offensive, searching my memory for a situation that could have been construed as lacking in taste. I decided that it must have been Greta Sykes’s remains that put the tourists off. “Maybe I recounted the tale of dispatching her with too much relish,” I said to myself. “Perhaps, in my eyes, as I spoke about her, they could somehow see that I had once made love to her.”
Two days passed without even a visit from Emilia, who had come twice in as many weeks. I was a wreck, admonishing myself for my crudeness. I then wondered if the fly to my pants had been unbuttoned at one of the tours, and I kept walking around in solitude, checking the buttons every minute or so. Putting my hand to my mouth, I tried to smell my own breath. I stared into the mirror for hours on end, searching for the clue to my undoing in my own physiognomy.
Luckily, Feskin showed up on the third day and ended my miserable self-torture. He roused me from a nap on that makeshift coral chair at the pinnacle of a pile of rubble. I woke to the sound of his voice calling me and flew down to greet him.
“Misrix,” he said, and put out his hand in as friendly a manner as ever.
I was happy to have him there and told him so. “I was beginning to think that I had offended your people in some way to make them stop coming to see me.”
“There is a problem,” he said, pushing his spectacles up his nose. I unthinkingly did the same.
“No,” I said.
“Yes, but I think we can use it to our advantage,” he told me.
“Was it Greta Sykes?” I asked. “The fly of my trousers?”
He laughed. “Not exactly.”
“What then? I must know,” I said.
“Well, do you remember a woman coming to visit you a few days back? I believe it was on the day that it rained,” he said.
“Less than pleasant,” I said, and shook my head as she had done.
“You don’t have to convince me,” he said. “She is Semla Hood. It was to her that Cley left his second manuscript about your adventures in Below’s mind. She knew Cley well, and her husband Roan was a close friend of his in Wenau. Her husband was one of the casualties of the beauty. He had been cured of the sleeping disease with it, and then when the supplies of it ran out, his addiction had caused him to take his life because he could not conceive of an existence without it.”
“But I did nothing to her,” I told him.
“That doesn’t matter,” said Feskin. “She does not trust anything that has any relationship at all to the ruins or Below. And I’m afraid she automatically puts you in that category. Anyway, when she came to visit here, it was not with the best of intentions. She wanted to find some piece of evidence to in some way damn you. I think she was hoping you might eat her son or maybe bite her on the forehead.”
“My appetite does not run to dust or mold,” I said.
Feskin laughed. “What she brought back from the ruins, an item she had taken from your museum, was a stone knife that she claims was Cley’s. She said that it was given to him by Ea, the traveler, and that Cley would not part with it unless he was dead. With this flimsy circumstantial evidence, she believes that you, yourself, have murdered Cley.”
I was not, at first, able to grasp the enormity of what the schoolteacher was telling me. Then, as it slowly dawned on me, I shouted, “Absurd! Cley and I were the best of friends.”
“Listen, I know this is true. I read his account of how you saved him from the sheer beauty, but this is what she is saying, planting new seeds of doubt in everyone’s mind. She has taken the knife to the constable and said she wants a full investigation. Do you remember the circumstances in which you found the artifact or what its history is?” asked Feskin.
“I don’t even remember it being in the museum. I must have picked it up somewhere among the ruins and tossed it mindlessly onto one of the shelves,” I said.
“She said she knows it was Cley’s because it has on the handle an insignia of a coiled snake,” he said.
“Now I will lose the trust of all of the new friends I have made,” I said, and could feel tears welling in my eyes.
“I don’t think so,” said Feskin. “The constable is not about to launch an investigation based on one piece of evidence, but I do think you should come to Wenau and answer the charges of your detractors. I truly believe that if you were to do this, of your own volition, it would be proof of your honesty. I will represent you in your meeting with the constable. He is not an unreasonable fellow. You will be cleared, and it might be just the trick to convince the rest of the community who have not met you that you have a good heart and the best of intentions.”
I did not think twice about his plan, knowing that if I did not take some action, I would soon return to my lonely life haunting the ruins. I could not let this hag take away my bid for humanity. “Yes,” I said. “I will come to Wenau.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I will make arrangements for a place for you to stay. I will expect you at the schoolhouse two days from now in the evening, at the same time you last arrived.”
I chatted then with Feskin for a while about how we might present my side of the story. He told me to try to remember where the knife had come from. Then I walked with him to the edge of the ruins, but hung back when he left so as not to disturb his horse.
Since then I have been searching my memory for a clue as to the origin of the primitive blade. I think I found it one day in the wreckage of the Ministry of the Territory. Yes, I believe I might remember vividly the morning I came upon it, sticking out of the coral wall as if someone had been using it to hang his coat on.
In my thoughts, I now pull that knife from the wall, pink granules of coral drifting to the floor like flakes of the snow flurry falling outside the window of warped glass. A baby is crying in a b
ack room, a woman is singing softly, a fire is crackling in the fireplace, a black dog is curled up on the rug, and a man is sitting in a chair with a loaded pistol in his lap, waiting for the first sign of spring.
a ghost story
A month had passed since the fall of Fort Vordor, which marked the end of the incursion of the western realm into the Beyond. Although there had been light snow twice in this time, there had been much more rain. The hard-packed shell of white that had covered the landscape was now slowly vanishing. It was obvious that the weather was getting warmer and that spring was very close.
Cley and Willa and Wraith and the black dog had taken refuge in what had once been the Olsens’ log house. It sat fifteen miles east of the fort in a stand of birches at the edge of a lake. The dwelling was small but had two rooms, a fireplace, and the glass of both of its windows was still intact. The very existence of the place was, to the hunter, a miracle since on their journey to it they had passed at least three other similar structures that had been burned to the ground by the Beshanti.
Life at the edge of the lake was like a ghost story without a ghost—the rain-sodden hours, the lingering grief of the death of Curaswani and the others, the unnerving silence of Willa Olsen, and the sudden, piercing cries of the baby. Cley spent his days in the birch forest, hunting and reflecting on the tumult of events that had brought him to this place. Wood, although content to be out on the hunt when he must, had become Wraith’s second guardian and spent all of his time while indoors standing sentry at the entrance to that second room, where the child slept.
It was evening, and Cley cooked some fresh-killed deer meat on the flames of the fireplace. As the house had been untouched, so were the barrels of supplies, and in them the hunter had discovered dry rice, flour, and a few potatoes with which he augmented the venison, partridge, wild goose, or rabbit he felled each day. Willa accepted her meal from him with a quiet “Thank you,” in return. They sat in silence at the small table in the corner and ate together. When the hunter inquired as to the child’s health, the mother simply nodded. For the most part, she did not look up. This gave Cley ample opportunity to study her. He noticed that there was always a slight trembling in her hands. She had been greatly abused by life, but still she showed signs of a certain strength in her determination to care for Wraith. If not for the child, Cley believed she would open the door and walk straight into the lake.
