Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He bundles Tamuz and the Prussian toward the larger of the thopters, taps the wooden box and mouths the words Curzon and Basra. Reinhardt points to the sky, to the zeppelins moving slowly toward them, almost overhead now. Jack nods. I know. He points at the other thopter, the Eagle painted on its fuselage. Interference. Reinhardt gives him a thumbs-up, swings himself up to clamber into the cockpit, reaches a hand down to pull Tamuz after him. Tamuz looks at Jack, shakes his head.

  No, Jack.

  Go.

  A pause. A tear running down a cheek. A kiss. A goodbye.

  Tamuz grabs a strut and clambers up onto the wing, reaches for Reinhardt's hand. Jack turns away, swallowing his emotions. The two-man thopter isn't designed for vertical takeoff, doesn't have the wingspan to just beat its pinions and flurry into the sky as a lighter fighter aircraft would—it needs a run to get the wind beneath its wings—so, as von Strann buckles himself into the pilot seat and Tamuz slides into the seat in front of him, Jack runs round the front to crank the propeller on the nose. He's just pulling the chocks from the wheels when he feels—he doesn't hear but feels—Tamuz's cry.

  Anat flies backward through the air, a full backflip, the disrupter flying from her hand. The boy is already out of the thopter and on the ground, Jack grabbing him by the arm. He struggles, flails against Jack's grip, his embrace. The angel of death, Azazel, leaps from his perch, a hawk diving for its prey, but Anat is rolling, up on one knee, her hand gloved in ink extended as she curses, slams the fucker back with a word. He hits the stonework of the wall, and she's up and running at him now, charging in to close-quartered combat.

  Go! Jack screams soundlessly at Tamuz.

  Above his head, their thopter banks east toward the blue sky over the desert, its wings beating hell-for-leather as Reinhardt and Tamuz race away from the Russian fleet, away from Tell el-Kharnain, and away from the swirling storm of ink, of bitmites, of we dead souls buried in millennia of dust, crushed down and transformed by the weight of dead realities into the oil of humanity's lost souls.

  We rise, erupt out of the earth, spewing as a geyser of desire and fear, of joy and sorrow, all the power and glory of the human spirit compacted tight and black. Matter is light, coiled in a ball, hoarding its heat in the heart of it, dark only because the fire is trapped inside; let it loose and you can level cities. So, too, we dead seem as ink in our darkness, locked off from the living, but, oh in the skin and bone that rots, in the sand and the stone, in the air, in every atom of us, information is encoded, lives recorded in reality itself, the pattern of it only lost, only faded, never utterly destroyed. We are the palimpsest of the past on which you write your present and your future, the substructure of your world revealed by X-rays, microscopes, the focus of photons fired into our depths, the ricochet of bullets of light. We are laid open to your scrutiny by the scalpel vision of those willing to look so deep.

  And now, as in the chamber of a particle accelerator, we react to Pechorin's impact. We spray up into the air, the darkness unlocking into light, brilliant greens, bright blues, burning orange and red and yellow. We pick zeppelins from the sky. We prick gasbags, snarl propellers. They fight back, dropping bombs on the Ink Wells below them, building a wall of flame that sweeps forward as they move inexorably toward Tell el-Kharnain, sweeps in out of the desert and across the new city, across the airfields. But Jack is in the air now, in the fighter thopter, pulling gears and joysticks as the metal machine spirals up into the sky, over the wasted city and around. Blossoms of gray smoke explode in the air around him as the Prussian war machines try to bring him down, but he wheels the machine, turning it in a widening gyre, soaring up and up and up. He spirals up over the city, over the bombs and the guns.

  The thopter hangs in the air for a second.

  Then, disrupter lashed to the side of the cockpit, he screams Cant and obscenities together, swooping down on the enemy thopters swarming out now from among the zeppelins and banking east to pursue Reinhardt and Tamuz. He swoops down over the city, rolling the machine as he strafes, glancing down as he flies over the Jericho Gate and sees—

  The blast hits MacChuill full-on. The man's head whips round to the side and back, neck cracking, and his legs snap backward under him; Christ, his spine must be shattered—it's like some giant hand just clamped and crushed him, folding him in ways no man could survive. The Scotsman's song dies in a short last scream, and he falls like a rag doll dropped in the dust. As Jack zooms overhead, Michael rises from his crouch on his perch on his pillar and turns his gaze slowly to the east, where Reinhardt and Tamuz are headed straight out into the desert, pursued by a score of Russian thopters.

  Michael leaps into the air, his great wings extending as the angel of ice sets out after the Book. His words of fire strafe the air around Jack's thopter and Jack rolls the machine, dodges left and right, weaving through the shattering sky. He pulls back a joystick, spins a wheel, and the thopter arcs upward. Wings in, it turns like a ballet dancer en pointe, and then the pinions are thrown wide again and he's heading straight for the angel of ice, seeing past him to the Jericho Gate where, under the very archway of it, Anat and Azazel are locked in combat, wrestling, Azazel's hands clamped round her throat, her fist jammed in his mouth, their muffled Cant burning the air around them, raining stone and sand, cracking the earth.

  Anat goes limp. Her hand falls from the angel's mouth, and he holds her there by her crushed throat, dangling. Throws her body to the side. And raises his cold gaze toward Jack, who's looking up at the angel Michael now, the angel of ice he's on a collision course with, getting closer, closer, as the fucker's words explode around him, left and right, above and below. Even if the bastard hits him now he'll fucking well take the angel down with him.

  Azazel, the angel of death, spreads his wings, looks to the east.

  Jack can't take them both down, though. Christ, fuck, he can't take them both down.

  So we come, a crack in the earth straight from the impact crater in the Ink Wells, splitting the ground along the fault line that runs down this valley of salt, cracking it wide and pouring up and out of the crack, we buried and forgotten dead of worlds long gone, and at the head of us a sixfold soul that was once Joseph Pechorin, murderer of dreams. He comes out of the darkness clothed in the iridescent armor of our ink, hitting Azazel with all his strength and speed, slamming into him and carrying them both through the angel's field of binding and into the city of Sodom.

  As Jack's thopter hits the angel Michael, and wings snap, and metal buckles, and the two of them hurtle as a spinning ball of crumpling chaos through the air and down.

  INK, HAL DUNCAN (2007)

  Jack hangs in the wreckage of the ornithopter, caught up in a jumble of torn clothing, torn canvas and torn flesh, suspended like a corpse in an Indian burial. A sharp twist of metal spears his right thigh. Shreds of leather wing snarl his left hand. The smell of blood and steel, burning meat and fuel, the smell of war, fills his nostrils; is that his flesh burning, the archangel Michael's, both? He twists his head but all he can see is the shattered arch of the Jericho Gate, the path of burning destruction gouged through pillars of salt now shattered, drifting on the wind. Beyond the Gate, the cigar shapes of the Futurist zeppelins move in from the north; they'll reach the city in a few minutes now.

  The sky above, through the smoke of the burning thopter, is dark green with the storm of ink, swirls like a forest pool thick with algae, dotted with burst of brilliant color like one of Monet's lily ponds. The ink swarms around the airships, bringing down this one and that, but it's an inchoate attack, and the Ink Wells are burning now. If these creatures cannot be destroyed they can be … disrupted, scattered into confusion like a soul stripped apart at death, into skan-das, strands of identity.

  Et in Arcadia ego, thinks Jack. Even in Arcadia, I am.

  A low moan comes from somewhere behind; he can't twist his head to look, but he knows it must be Michael. Fuck. Jack twists his right hand, scraping it free from the two metal shards i
t's trapped between with a yell of pain. He unravels the leather wound around his left hand, grimaces as in turning to reach he presses skin against blistering-hot fuselage. The smoke is billowing up from that side, though he can't see the flames; the metal is too hot even for him to use it as the leverage he needs to tear his thigh off its spear. He tears at the leather until he has enough to wrap around one hand. Places it—tentatively at first—on the jagged edge where the windshield was, and pulls at his thigh with the other. His pain drowns out the sucking feel of flesh coming free from steel.

  He slides up and out, grabs a broken strut and tumbles over and through the wreckage, out onto sand. He can see the fire now and he rolls himself clear of it, drags himself up and away from the ruined thopter. His disrupter lies, torn from the machine's side, a few yards toward the Gate and he drags himself to it, pulls it up and swings himself round to train it on the smoldering wreck. He can't see the angel, but he can hear the fucker moaning. The noise is wordless, but there's enough Cant in it to make him sick to his stomach. He digs the butt of the disrupter into the ground and pulls himself up onto one leg.

  Starts to limp round to the other side of the wreck.

  Impaled on and embedded in the wreckage of the ornithopter, Michael tries to reach toward him, screaming soundlessly and clawing ineffectually at warped steel and wound cloth. Fire licks around his legs, twisted round in away that says he'll never walk again. Never walk into a city, sure and certain of his duty to destroy it. The angel moans again and his mouth gouts blood—tongue bitten off, Jack would guess.

  “Let the fucker bleed to death.”

  Jack turns.

  It's Pechorin. He recognizes the man instantly, couldn't fail to, but he also knows it's not his Pechorin but another, the Pechorin of another time, another place, another fold, just as cold in some ways, just as cruel, but in some strange binding of sympathies, of understandings, a friend. Looking at the black tear painted under his right eye, Jack just knows that this is less his antagonist than his … complement.

  Pechorin holds the head of Azazel by its dreadlocks.

  Jack reaches down into the pocket of his trousers, feels the soft smooth texture of the folded page of vellum, the almost imperceptible warmth of still-living tissue. He pulls it out. He keeps Pechorin in his peripheral vision—just to be safe—as he limps over and holds it out toward Michael, just out of his grasp. The creature goes berserk, scrabbling at the metal, trying to tear itself apart to get to him, its manicured fingernails breaking and bleeding.

  “You want this?” says Jack. “You want to bind God into this” [he nods at Pechorin] “anointed of yours. This slaughterer of angels.”

  And he drops it into the flames that lick around the angel's feet, watches the fucker trying to reach into the fire, trying to rip its own arm out of its socket so it can save the last page of the Book of All Hours, which slowly ignites, burning and blackening and crackling to ash as white as salt.

  “The rest of the Book is already gone,” says Jack. “See that head over there, your mate's? Blame him. He burned it when he tried to wipe me out of existence because I had the fucking audacity to call him the cunt he was.”

  Jack smiles, thinking of a wooden box full of tattered scraps. Not the Book of All Hours, but Hobbsbaum's notes, journals, selected translations from the tome that he'd switched, slipped into his leather satchel as he crouched up on the rock looking out over the city at the angel of death and wondered how they could possibly get out of this alive, any of them. How he could get Tamuz out of this alive.

  A leather satchel with the Book of All Hours in it, held up as a sacrifice and as a shield against the wrath of self-righteous, murderous bastards.

  “The Book is gone,” he says. “Story's over. No more destinies. No more gods with any luck. We're free. That was the last page of the final edition.”

  “I wonder what Reinhardt will think when he opens the box,” says Jack.

  “Knowing Fox,” says Pechorin, “he'll probably appreciate the trick.”

  The angel's scream dies into a gurgle of blood as they walk away, walk toward the Gate and the approaching zeppelins, the host of war machines coming clear of the ink storm now, almost directly overhead, all set for their pointless razing of an already devastated city. Up in the cockpits, captains and commanders, bombardiers and gunners will be looking down and probably wondering what happened, why and how and whether they really need to be here. But mostly they'll just shrug and carry out their orders.

  Jack looks at Pechorin. The Russian steps out past the Gate and picks up the disrupter dropped by MacChuill, tosses it to Jack. Then walks over to retrieve Anat's disrupter for himself.

  Down where Anat's body lies sprawled on the dry ground, a stalk of wild-grass grows out of a crack of soil, somehow shooting up green-gold and vigorous in this valley of salt. This region has plants evolved to survive in even such a hostile climate, and Jack has a sudden image of the fields outside the city, to the north, fields fertilized by ash and blood, covered in olive and orange and fig and pomegranate trees, trees twisting up out of the soil, gnarled and branching, the intricate fractal scribblings of nature. Even the most arid region can be irrigated. That's how civilization began.

  The city behind them is in ruins, devastated. There's not a man, woman or child left alive in it. There's nothing to fight for, nothing to save, except perhaps its memory, which could be wiped out forever or held fast against all those who'd like to write its liberal, libertine, licentious beauty out of history. And even if they fail?

  Jack leans on one disrupter as a staff, a crutch, raises the other to aim.

  Fuck it.

  A city, like a soul, can be rebuilt.

  epilogue

  DAWN, A WOODLAND, NOW

  Happy Ever Never

  very epic, I used to think, should end with the hero's death. Picture it: Two rows of crucified slave-rebels, Spartacus on his cross, his right hand pointing down the long road to a city of death; El Cid riding out of the gates of that city, riding out against the Moors, a dead man strapped to his horse; among the dust of stomping hooves, Achilles stumbling as the arrow strikes his heel. Ancient poets even added an encounter between the hero Gilgamesh and the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu to the first recorded epic, one step away from having them meet again, at the end of all adventures on the threshold of the house of no return.

  It is as if the story is seeking its own form. And for all that it's easy, for all that it's obvious, there's something just so right about that end.

  “Bollocks, mate,” Jack would have said. “Give ‘em a fucking happy-ever-after. Fuck that tragic-ending shit.”

  “What are you working on now?” asks Anna, chin on my shoulder, one hand tracing along my forearm to the gripped pen, folding fingers round my fist.

  “A happy-ever-after,” I say. “Or a happy-ever-before, I guess, would be more accurate.”

  Feel of my own brows furrowing, face rumpling into a well, that's not quite right. A tap of pen on paper.

  “No,” I say. “Ahappy-ever-never.”

  I turn my head toward her wrinkling, freckled nose. Her red hair slides over my triceps, tickles a nipple, as she twists to smooch my cheek with a peck of top of the morningtoyou. Angled enough, I can just see that she's wearing my boxer shorts.

  “I'm doing a cut-up-and- fold-in of a couple of Virgil's eclogues,” I say, “sort of a rural, pastoral thing to try and tie up the Songs with an epilogue.”

  I wonder if, somewhere in the back of my head, that's why I suggested this log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a break for the three of us. I'd talked of good hunting for her, of teaching Joshua constellations and cosmologies, flora and fauna, and of quietude in which to finish my epic cycle of poems. But it's entirely possible that Jack and Puck just wanted to cavort naked in the hills, in my imagination.

  In Virgil's Latin and my annotated English, on the page in front of me, I fold two eclogues into one: a goatherd and a shepherd shift from singing co
ntest through to celebration of the deified Daphnis; the Roman poet's characters Menalcus and Damoetus blur, become Menalcus and now Mopsus, shift again; I think of them as Mainsail and Dampseat, Mainsail and Moppet. A flash of white piracy on the high seas. Green combats dark with dew on the butt. A grinning Jack with Puck in headlock, scruffling his hair:

  “My little moppet,” Jack would josh.

  “Geroff me!” Puck would protest.

  That's my names for the idyll's id and the sylvan self, the kid and the lamb of these evers and nevers, from Gilgamesh down to my own metamorphoses, byway of Virgil: Jack and Puck, I call them. I based a little of Puck on what Anna's told me of her brother Thomas, invented Jack out of whole cloth. But both of them, I think, are as much creations of the idiom itself. They're not really mine, not mine alone.

  I know my Jack and Puck don't really exist, never really existed, but the Jack and Puck who're more than mine… they've been around forever.

  “Orange juice?” she says. “Pancakes? Bacon? Maple syrup? We had a deal, you remember. Me hunter-gatherer woman bring venison and rabbit; you stay-at-home medicine man make strange scribbles. Make breakfast in bed, more to the point.”

  She drums her fingers on the table.

  “I was on my way to the stove,” I say. “I just… I realized how the book should end, had to act on it, you know, get it down on paper before … before the coffee and the crumpled bedsheets and the two of us licking each other's sticky fingers and…”

  I nuzzle her cheek.

  It has to end in elegy, I'd realized, and that means it has to end in idyll. The idyll and the elegy are two sides of one pastoral form, each idyll shaded with an elegiac sorrow for what's lost, for what will never be again, and every elegy lit up with the idyllic joy of what was found, of what will ever be, again and again and again, each time the song is sung.