Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  He folded the letters separately, the ordinary and the preposterous, took wax, lit it in the lamp, and with his chin in his hand let the wax clot in bright crimson drops like blood on the fold of each. He pressed his ring, which showed a hand lifting a cup, into the glittering clots and watched them dry hard and perfect. He shook his head, and with a grunt pulled himself from his chair.

  The Visitor still stood motionless, looking out over the gray evening heath. The wind had increased, and plucked at the brown cloak that the younger Endwife had wrapped him in; that was his disguise, for now, and Fauconred felt his sexlessness strongly seeing him in it.

  “The herdsmen have returned,” the Visitor said.

  “Yes,” said Fauconred.

  They sat their ponies gracefully, wrapped to their eyes in dark windings that fluttered around them like bannerets. They moved the quick herd before them with flicks of long slim lashes and cries that, wind-borne, came up strangely enlarged to where Fauconred and the Visitor stood. Beyond, Old Watcher was lost in thick storm clouds that were moving over fast. The storm was the color of new iron, and trailed a skirt of rain; it was lit within by dull yellow lightnings. The roans and whites and painteds thundered before it, eyes panicky; the Drumskin’s thunder as they ran was answered by the storm’s drums, mocked by the chuckle of Fauconred’s tent-cloths rippling.

  “Beyond,” said the Visitor, lifting his gentle voice against the noise. “Farther than Old Watcher. What’s there?”

  “The Outlands,” said Fauconred. “Swamps, marshes, desolation.”

  “And beyond that?”

  “Beyond that? Nothing.”

  “How, nothing?”

  “The world has to end eventually,” said Fauconred. “And so it does. They say there’s an edge, a lip. As on a tray, you know. And then nothing.”

  “There can’t be nothing,” said the Visitor simply.

  “Well, it’s not the world,” said Fauconred. He held out a lined palm. “The world is like this. Beyond the world is like beyond my hand. Nothing.”

  The Visitor shook his head. Fauconred, with an impatient sigh, waved and shouted to a knot of red-jacketed horsemen below. One detached himself from the group and started up the long rise. Fauconred turned and ducked back inside his tent.

  He returned with the two letters under his arm, peering into a tiny goatskin-bound book, licking a thick thumb to turn its fine figured pages. He found his place, and turned the book into the light to read. The Visitor bent close to him to hear over the wind and the hooves. Carefully Fauconred made out words:

  “The world is founded on a pillar which is founded on the Deep.

  “Of the world, it is a great circle; its center is the lake island called the Hub and its margins are waste and desolate.

  “Of the pillar, it is of adamant. Its width is nearly the width of the world, and no man knows its length for it is founded on the Deep. The pillar supports the world like the arm and hand of an infinite Servant holding a platter up.”

  He turned the page and with a finger held down its snapping corner. “The sky is the Deep above,” he went on, “and as the Deep is heavy, so the sky is light. Each day the sun rises from the Deep, passes overhead, and falls again within the Deep; each night it passes under the Deep and hastens to the place where it arose. Between the world and the sun travel seven Wanderers, which likewise arise and descend into the Deep, but with an irregular motion…”

  He closed the book. Up the rise came the red-jacketed man he had summoned. The rider pulled up, his horse snorted, and Fauconred took the bridle.

  “It’s possible,” said the Visitor.

  “Possible?” Fauconred shouted. “Possible?” He handed up the two letters to the beardless redjacket. “To the Protector Redhand, at his father’s house, in the City.”

  The wind had begun to scream. “Tell the Protector,” Fauconred shouted over the wind’s voice. The boy leaned down to him. “Tell the Protector I bring him a… a visitor.”

  2

  There are seven windows in the Queen’s bedroom in the Citadel that is the center of the City that is on the lake island called the Hub in the middle of the world.

  Two of the seven windows face the tower stones and are dark; two overlook inner courtyards; two face the complex lanes that wind between the high, blank-faced mansions of the Protectorate; and the seventh, facing the steep Street of Birdsellers and, beyond, a crack in the ring of mountains across the lake, is always filled at night with stars. When wind speaks in the mountains, it whispers in this window, and makes the fine brown bed hangings dance.

  Because the Queen likes light to make love by, there is a tiny lamp lit within the bed hangings. Black Harrah, the Queen’s lover of old, dislikes the light; it makes him think as much of discovery as of love. But then, one is not the Queen’s lover solely at one’s own pleasure.

  If there were now a discoverer near, say on the balcony over the double door, or in the curtained corridor that leads to the servants’ stairs, he would see the great bed, lit darkly from within. He would see the great, thick body of the Queen struggling impatiently against Black Harrah’s old lean one, and hear their cries rise and subside. He might, well-hidden, stay to watch them cease, separate, lie somnolent; might hear shameful things spoken; and later, if he has waited, hear them consider their realm’s affairs, these two, the Queen and her man, the Great Protector Black Harrah.

  “No, no,” Black Harrah answers to some question.

  “I fear,” says the Queen.

  “There are ascendancies,” says Black Harrah sleepily. “Binding rules, oaths sworn. Fixed as stars.”

  “New stars are born. The Grays have found one.”

  “Please. One thing at a time.”

  “I fear Red Senlin.”

  “He is no new star. If ever a man were bound by oaths…”

  “He hates me.”

  “Yes,” Harrah says.

  “He would be King.”

  “No.”

  “If he…”

  “I will kill him.”

  “If he kills you…?”

  “My son will kill him. If his sons kill my son, my son’s sons will kill his. Enough?”

  Silence. The watcher (for indeed he is there, on the balcony over the half-open double door, huddled into a black, watching pile, motionless) nods his head in tiny approving nods, well pleased.

  The Queen starts up, clutching the bedclothes around her.

  “What is it?” Black Harrah asks.

  “A noise.”

  “Where?”

  “There. On the stair. Footsteps.”

  “No.”

  “Yes!”

  Feet grow loud without. Shouts of the Queen’s guards, commands, clash of arms. Feet run. Suddenly, swinging like a monkey from the balcony, grasping handholds and dropping to the floor, the watcher, a tiny man all in black. Crying shrilly, he forces the great door shut and casts the bolt just as armed red-coated men approach without. The clash of the bolt is still echoing when armed fists pound from the other side:

  “Open! In the name of the Great Protector Red Senlin!”

  The watcher now clings to the bolt as though his little arms could aid it and screams: “Leave! Go away! I order you!”

  “We seek the traitor Black Harrah, for imprisonment in the King’s name…”

  “Fool! Go! It is I who command you, I, your King, and as you truly owe me, leave!”

  The noise without ceases for a moment. The King Little Black turns to the bed. Black Harrah is gone. The King’s wife stands upright on the bed, huge and naked.

  “Fly!” the King shouts. She stands unmoving, staring; then with a boom the door is hammered on with breaking tools. The Queen turns, takes up a cloak, and runs away down the servants’ corridor, her screaming maidservants after her. The door behind the King begins to crack.

  Because the island City lies within a great deep cup, whose sides are mountains, dawn comes late there and evening early. And even when the high spires
of the Citadel, which is at the top of the high-piled City, are touched with light filtering through the blue-green forests, and then the High City around it and then the old-fashioned mansions mostly shuttered are touched, and then the old inns and markets, and the narrow streets of the craftsmen, and then the winding water-stairs, piles, piers, ramparts, esplanades and wharfs—even then the still lake, which has no name, is black. Mist rises from its depths like chill breath, obscuring the flat surface so that it seems no lake but a hole pierced through the fabric of the world, and the shadowy, broad-nosed craft that ride its margins—and the City itself—seem suspended above the Deep.

  But when the first light does strike the Citadel, the whole world knows it’s high morning; and though the watermen can still see only stars, they are about their business. The Protectorate has ever feared a great bridge over the lake that couldn’t be cut down at need, and so the four bridges that hang like swaying ribbons from the High City gates are useless for anything but walkers or single riders. The watermen’s business is therefore large, and necessary; they are a close clan, paid like servants yet not servants, owing none, singing their endless, tuneless songs, exchanging their jokes that no one else laughs at.

  It was the watermen in their oiled goatskins who first saw that Red Senlin had returned from the Outlands, because it was they who carried him and his armed riders and his fierce Outland captains into the City. The watermen didn’t care if Red Senlin wanted to be King; it’s well-known that the watermen, “neither Folk nor not,” care only for the fee.

  Fauconred had put the Visitor on early watch, to make some use of him; but when the first chill beams silvered the Drum fog he woke, shivered with premonition, and went to find the Visitor.

  He was still watching. Impervious apparently to loneliness, weariness, cold, he still looked out over the quadrant assigned to him.

  “Quit now,” Fauconred said to him hoarsely, taking his elbow. “Your watch is long over.” The man (if man he was) turned from his watch and went with Fauconred, without question or complaint.

  “But—what,” he asked when they sat by Fauconred’s fire, “was I to watch for?”

  “Well, the Just,” Fauconred said. “They can be anywhere.” He leaned toward the Visitor, as though he might even here be overheard, and the Visitor bent close to hear. “They draw lots by some means, among themselves. So I hear. And each of them then has a Protector, or Defender, that he is pledged to murder. Secretly, if possible. And so you see, since it’s by lots, and nothing personal, you’ll never know the man. You can come face to face with him; he seems a cottager or… or anyone. You talk. The place is lonely. Suddenly, there is the Gun.”

  The Visitor considered this, touching the place on his head where he had been hurt. “Then how could I watch for one?” he asked.

  Fauconred, confused, tossed sticks angrily into the fire, but made no other answer. Day brightened. Ahead lay the Downs at last…

  It was a waterside inn.

  “Secretly,” the cloaked man said. “And quickly.”

  “You are…”

  “A… merchant. Yes. What does it matter?” His old, lean hand drew a bag from within a shapeless, hooded traveler’s cloak. It made a solid sound on the inn table.

  The girl he spoke to was a waterman’s daughter. Her long neck was bare; her blond, almost white hair cut off short like a boy’s. She turned, looked out a tiny window that pierced the gray slatting of the inn wall. Above the mountains the sky had grown pale; below, far below, the lake was dark.

  “The bridges?” she asked.

  “Closed. Red Senlin has returned.”

  “Yes.”

  “His mob has closed the bridges.”

  “Then it must be illegal to ferry.”

  The other, after a moment, added a second bag to the table. The girl regarded neither. “Get me,” the traveler said, “three days’ food. A sword. And get your father to take me to the mountain road before daybreak. I’ll double that.”

  The girl sat staring a moment, and then rose quickly, picking up the two bags. “I’ll take you,” she said, and turned away into the darkness of the inn. The traveler watched her go; then sat turning this way and that, looking ever out the tiny window at the pre-dawn sky. Around him a dark crowd of watermen sat; he heard bits of muttered conversation.

  “There were oaths sworn.”

  Someone spat disgustedly.

  “He’s rightful King.”

  “Yes. Much as any.”

  “Black Harrah will hang him.”

  “Or maybe just hang.”

  Laughter. Then: “Where is Redhand?”

  “Redhand. Redhand knows.”

  “Yes. Much as any.”

  Suddenly the girl was before him. Her long neck rose columnlike out of a thick cloak she had wrapped over her oiled goatskins—and over a bundle which she held before her.

  “The sword?” he whispered.

  “Come,” she said.

  There was a dank, endless stairway within the warren of the inn that gave out finally onto an esplanade still hooded in dark and fog. He followed her close, starting at noises and shapes.

  “The sword,” he whispered at her ghostly back. “Now.”

  “Here, the water-stairs. Down.”

  She turned sharply around the vast foot of pillar that supported waterfront lodges above, and started down the ringing stone stairway faster than he could follow. In a moment she was gone; he stumbled quickly after her, alone now, as though there were no other thing in the world than this descent, no other guide but the sound of her footsteps ahead.

  Then her footsteps ceased. He stopped. There was a lapping of water somewhere.

  “Stop,” he said.

  “I have,” she answered.

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  The last step gave out on a gravelly bit of shingle, barely walking space. He could see nothing ahead at first; took three timid steps and saw her, a tall blank ghost, indistinct, just ahead.

  “Oh. There.”

  “Yes.”

  He crept forward. Her figure grew clearer: the paleness of her white head, the dark cloak, in her hand the…

  In her hand the Gun.

  “Black Harrah,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Justice,” she said.

  The Gun she held in both hands was half as long as an arm, and its great bore was like a mouth; it clicked when she fired it, hissed white smoke, and exploded like all rage and hatred. The stone ball shattered Black Harrah; without a cry he fell, thrown against the stairs, wrapped in a shower of his own blood.

  High above, on the opposite side of the City, by the gate called Goforth from which a long tongue of bridge came out, a young man commanded other men for the first time; a dark, small man destined by birth so to command; who felt sure now, as dawn began to silhouette the mountains against the sky, that he was in fact fitted for the work, and whose hand began to ease at last his nervous grip on his sword handle. He sighed deeply. There would be no Black reprisals. His men began to slouch against the ancient bridge pilings. One laughed. Day had come, and they were all alive.

  The young man’s name was Sennred; he was the younger of the two sons of Red Senlin, he who had come out of exile in the Outlands to reclaim his rightful place at the King’s side by whatever means necessary.

  That the Great Protector Red Senlin had been unjustly kept away from King Little Black’s side by Black Harrah; that he came now to help the King throw off Black Harrah’s tyranny; that his whole desire was to cleanse odiousness and scandal from the Citadel (and if that meant Black Harrah’s arrest, so be it)—all this the young Sennred had by heart and would have argued fiercely to any who suspected his father’s motives; but at the same time, as many can who are young and quick and loyal, Sennred could hold a very different view of things…

  A century almost to the day before this pregnant dawn, a crime had torn the ancient and closely woven fabric of this world: a Great Prote
ctor, half-brother of King Ban, had seized from King Ban’s heir the iron crown. King Ban’s heir was the son of King Red. The Great Protector’s name was Black. To the family Red and all its branches, allies, dependents, it mattered nothing that King Red’s son was a foul cripple; a tyrannous boy in love with blood; he was Ban’s heir. To the family Black and its equally extensive connections what mattered was that the crown had fitted Black’s head, that the great legal fraternity, the Grays, had confirmed him, and his son, and his son’s son. There had been uprisings, rebellions; lately there had been a brief battle at Senlinsdown, and King Little Black, childless, had accepted Red Senlin as his heir. So there had been no war—not quite; only, the world had divided itself further into factions, the factions had eaten up the unaligned, had grown paid armies each to protect itself from the other; the factions now waited, poised.

  Red Senlin was King Red’s true heir. He had learned that as a boy. He had never for a moment forgotten it.

  And his younger son Sennred knew in his heart who was truly the King, and why Red Senlin had come back from the Outlands.

  Around him, above him, the great City houses of the Protectorate had begun to awaken, such as were used; many were empty. There was, he knew, one sleeping army in the City large enough to decide, before noon, whether or not the world would change today; it was housed in and around that dark pile where now lamplight glimmered in tiny windows—die Harbor, the house of the family Redhand.

  The Redhands would be waking to a new world, Sennred thought; and his hand tightened again on his sword handle.

  At the head table in the great hall smoky with torches and loud with the noise of half a hundred Redhand dependents breaking their fast, Old Redhand sat with his three sons.

  There was Redhand, the eldest, his big warrior’s hands tearing bread he didn’t eat, a black beard around his mouth.

  There was the Gray brother, Learned, beside him. The gray that Learned Redhand wore was dark, darker than the robes of Grays far older than himself, dark and convoluted as a thundercloud, and not lightened by a bit of red ribbon pinned within its folds.