Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  It had been Black Harrah who, ten years before, partly as a useful diplomacy, partly as a tool for his own use, and partly as a joke on the tiny weak-headed King, had brought back from the fastness of the Outlands, the hulking, black-eyed girl, chieftain’s daughter in a thousand brass spangles. Her bride-price, her own vast weight in precious metals, had made her father a rich man indeed.

  And now Black Harrah is dead, slain she is sure by the Reds; and she, from ceaseless chase and fight, has miscarried his child in anguish: though none yet knows it. So at sunset near the Little Lake, those dark eyes look out on a thin line of Red horse and foot, Redhand’s, Red Senlin’s Son’s; she thinks of them slain, and her armed feet in their blood.

  Her enemies had come together at the crossroads beyond Senlinsdown. There they made a crown for Red Senlin’s Son, a circle of gold riveted to his helmet, and Redhand put it on his head, and their two armies made a cheer muffled in Drumwind and cold; and they mounted again and rode for the Little Lake. At sunset they flew down the Harran road through the still, white Downs, Redhand’s fast horsemen the vanguard, and Red Senlin’s younger son Sennred fierce with grief. Lights were being lit in the last few cottages snowed in amid the folded land; sheep stamped and steamed, and ran huddling quick to their byres as they passed.

  They came down between the milestones onto the frozen Drum again as the sun began to move into the smoky Deep ahead; the Queen, expecting them, had drawn up in the crisp snow before the Little Lake, and set her trophy there. When his sons see it, it is a week frozen, the flesh picked at by wind, the jaw fallen away.

  They look toward each other there, and the scouts and captains point out which is which. The Queen on her stallion. Kyr, her cold Outland chief. Red Senlin’s Son, tallest of his army. There, by the Dog banner, Sennred small and bent. Redhand—yes, she knows Redhand. Red Senlin’s Son looks for someone, some banner, doesn’t find it. They look a long time. The last sun makes them pieces in a game: the Queen’s a black silhouette army, the King Red Senlin’s Son’s touched with crimson. They turn away.

  The game is set. The first moves come at dawn.

  How the word moved, that brought to a wind-licked flat above the battle plain so many of the brown sisterhood, the Endwives, none knows but they. But they have come; in the morning they are there, they have walked through the night or driven their two-wheeled carts or long tent-wagons; and they have come in numbers. For as long as any alive remembers, war with the Just has been harry and feint, chase and evade, search and skirmish, and tangle only at the last bitter moment. Now the Endwives look down through the misty dawn at two armies, Protectors and Defenders and all their banners, hundreds to a side, flanked by snowbound cavalry, pushing through the drifts toward each other as though to all embrace.

  “Who is that so huge on a cart horse, sister?”

  “The Queen. Her enemy’s head is her standard. See how she comes to the front…”

  Redhand would not have the Visitor near him. Fauconred, knowing nothing better to do, has sent him to the Endwives to help. He stands with them, watching, listening.

  “It’ll snow again soon. It’s darker now than at dawn.”

  “The wind blows toward the Queen.”

  “Whose is the Dog banner? They fall back from him.”

  “Sennred, the new King’s stoop-shouldered brother… Ay, the murder they make.”

  Toward noon the snow does begin; the wind is Outward, blowing toward the Queen, who must fall back. The shifting line of their embrace wavers, moves toward the lake, then away, then closer; then the Queen’s ranks part, here, there, and many are forced into the black water. If she had hoped fear of that frozen lake would keep her army from breaking, she was wrong; it looks a cruel gamble to the sisters; but then the wind and snow darken the field, put out the sun, and the Endwives listen, silent, to screams, cries, and the clash of metal so continuous as to be a steady whisper, drowned out when the wind cries or the Drum speaks with horse-sortie.

  “Feed the fires, sisters. Keep torches dry. They make a long night for us here.”

  “Fall back!” And they do fall back, released from the maelstrom by his harsh croak, echoed by his captains; only Sennred and his wing hesitate, Sennred still eager. But they fall back.

  “Regroup!” They force their panting mounts into a semblance of order behind him, the twisting hooves throwing up great clots of muddy snow. His red-palm banner is obscure in the snowy dark; but they see his snow-washed sword. His arm feels like an arm of stone: that numb, that obdurate. “Now on! Strike! Fall on them there!” and the force, in a churning, swirling storm of mud, beat the Drum.

  He is outpaced by Sennred, is cut off by a flanking movement of near-spent horse, the stone arm flails with a stone will of its own; he can hear nothing but a great roar and the screaming of his own breath. Then the Black horses part, shattered, and fall away. The tireless snowstorm parts also, and the field grows for a moment ghastly bright, and he sees, amid the broken, fleeing Black cavalry, the Queen, shuffling away on her big horse, slim sword in her great mailed hand.

  He shouts forward whoever is around him; the sight of her lashes through him, an icy restorative. Horror and hate, he would smash her like a great bug if he could. He flings from his path with a kind of joy some household people of hers, sees her glance back at him and his men, sees her urge the horse into a massive trot: does not see, in his single purpose, her man Kyr and his Outland spear racing for him. Someone shouts behind him; he wheels, suddenly breathless with the shock of collision; his horse screams under him, for the stone arm with its own eye has seen and struck, throwing the spear’s point into his horse’s breast. She leaps, turns in air spurting blood, catapulting Kyr away by the spear driven in her, falls, is overrun by Kyr’s maddened horse, whose hooves trample her screaming head, trample her master, Redhand. He is kicked free, falls face down. His flung sword, plunged in mud, waves, trembles, is still. Redhand is still.

  Blood frozen quickly stays as bright as when shed.

  The Endwives, intent as carrion birds, move among the fallen, choosing work, turning over the dead to find the living caught beneath.

  The Visitor’s manufacture keeps him from weariness, but not from horror. He hears its cries in his ears, he stumbles over it half buried in bloody snow. His eyes grow wide with it.

  His difficulty is in telling the living from the dead. Some still moving he sees the sisters examine and leave; others who are unmoving they minister to. This one: face down, arm twisted grotesquely… the Visitor turns him gently with more than man’s strength, holds his torch near to see. “You’re dead.” A guess. The eyes look up at him unseeing. “Are you dead?” He wipes pink snow from the face: it is the man Redhand, who begins to breathe stertorously, and blows a blood-bubble from his gray lips. The Visitor considers this sufficient and lifts him easily in his arms, turning this way and that to decide what next. Redhand’s breath grows less labored; he clings to the Visitor almost like a child in nurse’s arms, his numb fingers clutching, the brown cloak. Fauconred’s tent: he sees its Cup banner far off as someone passes it with a torch. Even when it disappears into darkness again, he moves unerringly toward it, through that trampled, screaming field: and each separate cry is separately engraved on a deathless, forgetless memory.

  Fauconred starts to see him. His day has been full of terrible things, but somehow, now, the Visitor’s face seems most terrible: what had seemed changeless and blank has altered, the eyes are wide and deep-shadowed, the mouth thin and down-drawn.

  “It’s he, Redhand.” The smooth, cool voice has not changed. “Help me. Tell me if he’s dead. Tell me… He mustn’t be dead. He mustn’t be. He must live.”

  TWO

  SECRETARY

  1

  An image of Caermon: a man, crowned with leaves, holding in one hand a bunch of twigs, and seated on a stone.

  He found that though he came no closer to any Reason or Direction in his being, his understanding of his faculties grew, chiefly throug
h the amazement of others. Fauconred had first noticed his hearing, in the Throat; his strength in lifting and carrying wounded Redhand had amazed the Endwives. Now Learned Redhand had observed him learn to read the modern and ancient languages in mere weeks—and remember everything he learned in them.

  An image of Shen: a woman, weeping, seated in a cart drawn by dogs, wearing a crown.

  The Visitor measured his growth in more subtle things: when he saw the King Red Senlin’s Son, his head low, sword across his lap, attention elsewhere, he felt still the strength in him, no less than on the field. It gave him an odd thrill of continuity, a pleasurable sense of understanding: the King on the battlefield or here at his ease is one King. When the Visitor tried to describe the experience to Learned Redhand, the Gray failed to grasp what was marvelous in it. He found it much more compelling that the Visitor could cause a stone thrown into the air to float slowly to his own hand rather than fall on its natural course. The Visitor in turn was embarrassed not to be able to understand the Gray’s explanation of why what he had done was impossible.

  An image of Doth: a man carrying a lamp or pot of fire, old and ragged, leaning on a staff.

  Learned Redhand’s head was beginning to ache. Perhaps he really hadn’t done it at all… This Visitor and the mystery of him grew quickly more exacerbating than intriguing, like an answerless riddle. Even in the bright winter light of the Harbor solarium, the Visitor made a kind of darkness, as though the thick ambiguity of the far past, leaking like a gas from the ancient writings he pored over, clouded him.

  “These images,” the Visitor said, marking his place with a careful finger before looking up, “they’re all of men or women. Why is that?”

  “Well,” Learned began, “the process of symbol-making…”

  “I mean, for the names of weeks, it would seem one at least would be, oh, a sheaf of wheat, a horse, a cloud…”

  “The ancient mind…”

  “Is it possible that these names were once truly the names of real men and women?”

  “Well… what men and women?” The Gray idea of the past, formulated like their simple, stern moral fables out of long experience with the rule of men’s minds, was simply that before a certain time there were no acts, men were too unformed or mindless to have performed any that could be memorialized, and that therefore, having left no monuments, the distant past was utterly unknowable. Time began, the Grays said, when men invented it, and left records to mark it by; before then, it didn’t exist. To attempt to probe that darkness, especially through pre-Gray manuscripts that claimed to articulate beginnings by unintelligible “first images” and “mottoes” and “shadows of first things,” was fruitless certainly, and probably heretical. “No,” he went on, “aids to memory I think merely, however foolishly elaborate.”

  The Visitor looked at Learned’s smooth, gracious face a moment, and returned to his reading.

  An image of Barnol carries this motto: Spread sails to catch the light of Suns.

  An image of Athenol carries this motto: Leviathan.

  “Leviathan,” the Visitor said softly.

  “An imaginary god or monster,” said Learned. To the rational Gray mind the two were one.

  Suddenly a servant stood in the solarium archway. The hall floors had been hushed with straw since Redhand had been brought home near dead; the servants moved like ghosts. “The Protector,” he whispered, indicating the Visitor, “wishes to see you.”

  Leviathan…

  The Visitor rose, nodded to Learned, went out behind the man and down twisting, straw-carpeted corridors.

  Leviathan. It was as though the name had taken his hand in a darkness where he had thought himself alone. Taken his hand, and then slipped away. Gently, blindly he probed his darkness, seeking for its fearful touch again.

  Redhand had grown older. He sat propped on pillows within a curtained bed; old, knowing servants made infusions and compresses, and the medicinal odor filled the high room. A large fire gave fierce heat, roaring steadily in the dim hush. Redhand’s dark-circled eyes found the Visitor and guided him to the bed; he patted the rich coverlet and the Visitor sat.

  “Do you have a name?” The Visitor could see in Redhand’s face the unreasoning fear he had first seen in the forest; he could see too the broken body he had saved. Both were Redhand.

  “They say—Visitor,” he answered.

  “That’s…”

  “It’s sufficient.”

  “Fauconred has told me… incredible things. Which he apparently believes.” His eyes hadn’t left the Visitor. “I don’t.”

  There was a gesture the Visitor had seen, had practiced privately when he had learned its vague but useful meaning. He made it now: a quick lift of shoulders and eyebrows, and return to passivity.

  “You saved my life.”

  “I…”

  “I want to… reward you, or… Is there anything you need?”

  Everything. Could he understand that?

  “There is a new King in the world. I have made him. Perhaps… it was wrong in me. Surely I have lost by it.” Take care, his father had said.Watch well. “But there it is. I am made great now in the world, and…” He moved his knitting body carefully on the pillows. “Learned tells me you learn quickly.”

  “He tells me so too.”

  “Hm. Well. Learn, then. As long as you like. Anything you require… my house, servants are at your disposal.” He tried to smile. “I will draw on your learning, if I may.”

  A silence, filled with the fire’s voice. Already, it seemed to the Visitor, Redhand’s thoughts were elsewhere. It was odd: he felt he had come a great distance, from somewhere no man had been, and carried, though he could not speak it, wisdom they could never here learn but from him. Yet they drifted off always into their own concerns… “You were at Redsdown,” Redhand said. “You saw my lady there. She was well? Hospitable?” He looked away. “Did she… speak of me?”

  “Often.”

  “She wrote me of you. This… airy talk.”

  The Visitor said nothing.

  “I must regard you as a man.”

  “It’s all I wish.”

  Redhand’s eyes returned to him; it seemed they were again the eyes that had looked on him in horror in the Throat: alert with fear, yet dreaming.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Forgetful.

  The Protectorate had built Forgetful as they had Old Watcher far away on the sunrise edge of the Drum, in the days after they had despaired of conquering the fierce, elusive tribes of the Outlands; built it to ensure that, if they could not conquer, at least they would not be conquered. The huge piles, strongly garrisoned, had made a semblance of diplomacy possible with the Outland chieftains; they had eventually accepted a king’s lieutenant as their nominal ruler and only occasionally tried to murder him. Red Senlin had been one such; and before him, Black Harrah. The post at the moment remained unbestowed; but probably, Young Harrah thought, it will go to Younger Redhand for his infinite damned patience…

  In Shensweek Young Harrah sat within the sweating, undressed stones of Forgetful, wrapped in a fur robe; completely safe, of course, but trapped in fact: it came to the same thing. With a lot of Outlanders for company, with spring coming but no help.

  “Capitulate,” he said.

  “I don’t see it,” said the fat-cheeked captain he had taught to play War in Heaven—or at least move the pieces. The Outlander’s thick fingers toyed with two sky-blue stones, moved them hesitantly amid the constellations pictured on the board. “Maybe you should capitulate.”

  “Move.” Red Senlin’s Son played at King in the City; the fat Queen, his father’s whore, licked her wounds somewhere in the Outland bogs, whispering with the braid-beards who adored her; and Redhand’s mastiff brother hung on here for life and would not be shaken. It had been for a while amusing to watch them out there, to make them endure a little privation before they took their ugly and useless prize, this castle. The game was no longer amusing. The
Son played at King in the City… there was the game. The Outlander picked up the seven-stone, bit his lower lip, and set it down in the same place. Young Harrah sighed.

  “Now, now,” said the Outlander. “Now, now.” At length he saw the trap and finessed gleefully. Young Harrah tapped his foot, his mind elsewhere, and threw a red stone across the sky without deliberating.

  It was, of course, a struggle to the death. The Queen believed Black Harrah slain by the Reds. For sure she had slain Red Senlin the new King’s father, and Old Redhand too. There could be no forgiveness for that. They must, he must, struggle with the King Red Senlin’s Son till Rizna called a halt. Yes. And he could think of none else he would rather struggle with than the King’s blond limbs… With one long-toed foot he overturned the War in Heaven in a clatter of stones. The Outlander looked up. Young Harrah combed his blond hair with his hand and said, “Surrender.”

  Along the wind-scoured Drumsedge, sterile land where the broken mountains began a long slide toward the low Outlands, it was winter still. The snow was a bitter demon that filled the wagon ruts, made in mud and frozen now, and blew out again like sand. Cloak-muffled guards paced with pikes, horsemen grimly exercised their mounts on the beaten ground. The wind snapped the pennons on their staves, snatched the barks of the camp dogs from their mouths—and carried from Forgetful’s walls suddenly the war viol’s surrender song, and blew it around the camp with strange alteration.