Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  Far off, a sharp sound broke the night, echoed, was gone. Redhand and his Secretary looked out, could see nothing but starlight moving through the grass. No further sound came to their hiding-place but the blowing of their spent horses. There was no pursuit.

  Redhand knew many such places in the wide angle of grass and Drumskin that was in his Protection; had to know them, because the Just did, and from them at any time outlaws might attack.

  Outlaws. Murderers of the Protectorate, hidden in holes.

  He laughed, rolled on his back. Somehow Redhand felt cleansed, free. Young Harrah lay at Redsdown: of all the murder he had done, and it was much, he knew that that one face at least would not return to look at him in dreams.

  Above him the floor of heaven was strewn with changeless stars. The Wanderers, gracious, benevolent, made procession through them.

  “You were born there,” Redhand said to his Secretary. It was a night to entertain such thoughts.

  “Not born,” the Secretary said. “Made.”

  “In a star?”

  “No. In an… engine, set in heaven, set to circle like the Wanderers. I think.”

  Redhand pillowed his head on his hands. On so clear a night the stars seemed to proceed, if you stared at them, ever so slowly closer. Yet never came near.

  “What did it look like from there? Could you see the City?”

  “No.” The Secretary turned from his watching to look upward with Redhand. “There were no windows, or I was blind, I forget…” Then the stars seemed to make a sudden, harmonious sound together, loud, yet far distant… He sat bolt upright.

  “What is it? Do you hear pursuit?”

  “No.”

  “Then what…”

  “I did see it. I remembered, suddenly. Once. Many times, maybe, but it seems once. I saw it.”

  “And?”

  So clear it was to him suddenly, as though it were his original thought, the ground of his being: “The world,” he said, “is founded on a pillar, which is founded on the Deep.”

  “Yes,” Redhand said. “So it is.”

  The Secretary watched the precious memory unfold within him; it seemed to make a sound, harmonious, loud yet far distant…

  A chaos of dull darkness, unrelieved except by storms of brightness within it. Then a sense of thinning toward the top of view, and clarity. And then a few stars rose from the darkness, sparkling on a clear black of infinite dark sky.

  “You arose from the Deep at morning,” Redhand said.

  Then there came far off a light, brighter than any star, rising up out of the dark and chaos, which seemed now to flow beneath him.

  “Yes,” Redhand said. “The sun, rising too out of the Deep.”

  The sun. It moved, rose up from the Deep blinding bright, cast lights down to the Deep below him. “Yes,” Redhand said.

  And there came the world. Merely a bright line at first, on the darkness of the horizon where the Deep met the black sky; then widening to an ellipse. The world, flat and round and glittering, like a coin flung on the face of the Deep. It came closer, or he grew closer to it—the sun crossing above it cast changing light upon it, and he watched it change, like a jewel, blue to white to green to veined and shadowed like marble. Only it, in all the Deep that surrounded it, all the infinity of dense darkness, only it glowed: a circle of Something in a sea of nothing.

  And when he drew close enough he could see that the disc of the world rested on a fat stalk which held it up out of the nothingness, a pillar which for an instant he could see went down, down, endlessly down into the Deep, how far… but then the world was full beneath him, cloudy, milky green and blue, like a dish the arm and hand of an infinite Servant held up.

  “Yes,” Redhand said. “Just so.”

  The stars went by above, went their incomprehensible ways.

  “Only,” Redhand said, “you saw nothing of the Deep’s beings.”

  “Beings?”

  “Beneath the world. Oh, one’s tail they say, the Just say, reaches around the pillar that holds up the world, and so he clings on, like ivy.”

  “I saw no such one.”

  “His name,” Redhand said, “is Leviathan.” His horse made a sound, and opened its nostrils to the night wind. Redhand turned to look across the Downs.

  And how, the Secretary thought, am I to come to him then, beneath the world? And why has he summoned me?

  “Riders,” Redhand whispered.

  They were a smudge only against the sky that lightened toward dawn; it could not be seen how many of them there were, but they moved slowly, searching; now two or three separated, went off, returned. Always they grew closer.

  Redhand’s horse stamped, jingling its trappings. They watched, motionless, ready to ride and flee, hopeless though that seemed. One rider, nearer to them than the rest, stopped, facing them. For a long moment he stood; then they could see his heels kick, and the horse ambled toward them. Stopped. And then faster, more deliberately, came for them.

  Suddenly the Secretary was on his feet, running toward the rider, his domino picked up by wind, red as a beacon. The rider pushed into a canter.

  “Stop!” Redhand cried.

  “Fauconred!” the Secretary called.

  “Redhand!” called Fauconred. He dismounted at a run and barreled into the Secretary, then came sliding hallooing down the slope of Red-hand’s hiding-place.

  “Fauconred!”

  “We’ve found you first, then! I think the King’s men have given up. Are you unhurt?”

  “The others…” They were gathering now, and he could see the red leathers of Fauconred’s men, and the men on farm horses with rakes, the boys with scythes, the kitchen folk with cutlery. At Fauconred’s ordering, they arranged themselves into a rude troop.

  “Caredd…” Redhand said.

  “They thought to take some action,” Fauconred said.

  “They dared not,” one from the House said. “Not with the Arbiter there.”

  “She is in his protection.”

  “The King rages mad with this,” said another.

  “There are many of our people slain,” Fauconred said. “The King’s men hold the house and grounds. He’ll be following, with an army. Already men have gone to raise his friends near here.”

  Redhand looked far away down the dawn, but he could see nothing of his home; only some few stragglers hurrying across the Downs to join them.

  “Now,” Fauconred said.

  “Now.” Redhand mounted. “Outward.”

  “Outward?”

  “To Forgetful.”

  They followed him, his outlaw army; soldiers, cooks, farmboys.

  And one who just then joined them, a boyish figure in a cloak of no color, riding a fine black horse.

  4

  There was a single window in the room where they had prisoned Caredd the Protector Redhand’s wife and Sennred the King’s brother. It was a blue hole pierced in the sheer curtain wall. The bricks of the wall were roughly masoned and a skillful man might crawl down, with a rope, a rope made of bedclothes… Sennred leaned far out and looked down, felt a weird fear grip his knees and pull him back. He hated high places, and hated his fear of them.

  Below, in the dawn light of the courtyard of Redsdown, a knot of frightened servants was herded from the house by soldiers. Faintly he could hear pleas, orders. He turned from the window.

  Caredd had ceased weeping.

  She sat on the bed, eyes on the floor, hands resting in her lap.

  “Lady,” he said.

  “Have they brought him back?” she asked, tonelessly.

  “No,” he said. “No, they have not.”

  He did not like to impose by sitting with her on the bed; he felt too implicated in her grief. So he had stood much of the night, trying in a helpless way to help, attempting lame answers to her unanswerable questions. Almost, at times, for her sake, he wished he had prevented what had happened in the banquet hall.

  “Will they burn the house?” she ask
ed.

  “Never,” he said, with almost too great conviction. “Never while the Arbiter is in it.”

  “And if he leaves?”

  “He will not. Not till your safety is promised him.”

  They were silent awhile. The blue window brightened imperceptibly.

  “What will they do to you?” she asked.

  “I am the King’s brother. Will you sleep, lady? No harm will come to you.”

  She had hardly looked at him, hadn’t spoken except to question him; he could not tell if she hated him. For Young Harrah he had spared no thoughts. For himself he cared little. The thought that Redhand’s lady suffered, because of him… her quiet weeping, nightlong, had been as knives to him.

  “I think,” she said quietly, “you must have done as you did… partly, at least… for his sake.”

  “I did,” he said earnestly. “I did as I thought he wished me to, then.” Was it so? “Perhaps I did wrong.”

  She looked up at him where he stood by the window. “I hope they will not harm you.”

  Perhaps the night’s exhaustion, he didn’t know, but suddenly he felt a rush of hot tears to his own eyes. He turned again to the window.

  A troop of King’s men were riding slowly up the road from the Downs. One man held the reins of a horse who plodded on, head down; over its back was flung a burden… “No!” he cried out, and then bit his lip in regret. But she had heard, and ran to the window beside him.

  “They have brought him home,” she whispered.

  “Brought someone home.”

  “He was unarmed. There was no way he could have…”

  “Lady, he was resourceful. And brave.”

  “Was. Oh, gods…”

  “Is that his horse?”

  “His? No, not any I know…”

  “Where is his Secretary? Fled?”

  “He would not have.”

  “He is not there.”

  She had taken Sennred’s hand, perhaps not knowing it; gripped it tight. “They must let me see him!”

  “They…”

  “No! I will not! I couldn’t…”

  The troop entered the courtyard. What was now clearly a body swayed will-less on the nag’s back. Caredd stared wide-eyed, mouth down-drawn. A boot dropped from one lifeless foot, a green and cuffed boot, a fashionable tasseled boot. Caredd cried out: “That isn’t his!”

  “Not his boot?”

  She laughed, or sobbed. “Never. Never would he wear such a thing.”

  Sennred leaned far out the window, calling and gesticulating. “Who is it? Who is the dead man?”

  A soldier looked up. “It is Farin’s bastard son.”

  “Who?” Caredd asked.

  “Farin’s bastard,” Sennred exulted.

  “Shot with a Gun,” the soldier called.

  “A Gun! Where is Redhand?”

  “Fled. Fled Outward with his people.”

  “Fauconred!” Caredd said. She began to slump forward. Sennred caught her around the waist and helped her to the bed.

  “A Gun,” he marveled. “The lout! Strikes out to find a murderer, and finds one. Of all nights in the year, flushes out such game! The idiot! I should have realized it from the first! He had a habit of drooling; he is well out of his miserable life… and tripping on his boots…”

  “His green boots,” Caredd said. “With the ridiculous cuffs.”

  “And tassels.”

  She laughed. She laughed with relief, with amazement, with grief, a long and rich and lovely laugh, without any edge of hysteria or exhaustion; her whole body laughed, and her laughter poured over Sennred like cool water.

  The bar on their door slid back with a grating sound.

  There was the Arbiter, and ten or twelve guards, and two of the King’s young favorites.

  “Sennred,” the Arbiter said. “They will take you to the City.”

  “I will speak to the King.”

  “The King will not see you,” said one of the young Defenders.

  “I will go nowhere without a word with the King.”

  “Sennred,” Learned said, “I have taken a liberty. I have promised them your good conduct in exchange for the Lady Caredd’s safety.”

  “And the house’s safety,” Sennred said. It had been mostly what she talked of through the night.

  “He will guarantee nothing beyond…”

  “Listen to me,” Sennred said to the King’s men. “Listen to me and tell the King. I am his heir. He will have no other. If ever I am King and I find that any part of this house, or any hair of this lady’s head has been harmed, I will spend my life and my crown and all its powers to avenge it. Avenge it most terribly.”

  He looked once at Caredd, sitting shyly on the bed; he heard an echo of her laughter.

  “And now. We will go to the City.”

  It was Rennsweek of the vine flowers, strange brief instant when all the world was summer, even the dun country far Outward.

  The broken rock walls of the Edge were bearded with yellow-green; the ravines and crevasses, just for this one moment, ran with water; tiny sun-colored flowers nodded in the dry winds that would soon desiccate them. The few who lived this far Outward, solitary people, gem hunters, ore smelters, people dun-colored as the earth, smiled their one smile of the year this week, it seemed.

  The watch-castle Forgetful seemed to grow out of the dull earth, made as it was of the same stone, undressed, undecorated, rectangular indeed, but hardly more so than the split and shattered cliffs of the Edge it guarded. It had few windows, fewer doors; blind and mute. Only now, in this week, the endless scrollwork of vines which lashed Forgetful to the earth flowered bright orange briefly, so orange that anciently the flower’s and the color’s name were one word; and bees were drawn up from the Outland valleys to feed on the nectar that dripped from the fat blossoms as from mouths. And Forgetful in this one week seemed rightly named: Forgetful old tyrant with vine leaves in his hair, drunk on honey wine and Forgetful of a life of sin.

  A tent and cave village squatted at the fortress’s feet, serving the soldiers with all that soldiers have always been served with; a few of its low buildings, in parody of their master, were covered too with vine flowers. Two soldiers, on this day in Rennsweek, climbed up the stone way that led back to Forgetful from the village.

  “Is he as bad, then?” the ostler asked.

  “Worse than he was,” the quartermaster said.

  “Didn’t the Endwife say spring would bring him round, and…”

  “She said it was a melancholy.”

  “A soldier’s malady.”

  “And if it weren’t that, would she know?”

  They paused for breath. The perfume of the vine flowers was thick. Forgetful motioned to them, almost gaily, with its fingers of vine leaves.

  “He has ordered,” the quartermaster said, “more stone on the… in the courtyard. And belts and spikes.”

  “To hold down the stones,” the ostler said.

  “Hasn’t slept these three days.”

  “Dreams while he’s awake, then.”

  The quartermaster shuddered. “I wouldn’t have his dreams,” he said. “Not for the wealth of Tintinnar.”

  Far above their heads, the war viols called alarm from the battlements. The two scrambled up the rock walls to where they could see. Inward, Inward, the song called, and they looked Inward.

  It could be no army; it had no wagons, no advance guard, no banners. It trailed out over the boulder-strewn plain in twos and threes; yet the ones in front wore red, and now as they looked a small detachment broke off and rode hard for Forgetful, unfurling as they rode a banner with a red open palm on it.

  “Redhand.”

  “Come to pay his brother a visit.”

  “What are those weapons? A hoe?”

  “A rake. Perhaps…”

  “What?” the quartermaster said.

  The ostler slid down from the rock. “Perhaps he’s gone mad too. It should be a merry meeting.”
/>   In Forgetful’s courtyard goats bleated, cookfires showed pale in the sun, curious soldiers lounged at doorways and looked down from parapets at the Army and Household of the Great Protector Redhand.

  In Forgetful’s courtyard, in the midst of this, there was a pile of stones half as high as a man. Over and through some of the stones ran leather straps and straw ropes, which were tied tight to stakes. The dung seemed weirdly purposeful, devised by a logic alien to the rest of the courtyard, the cooks, the goats, the soldiers, yet the center of all, like the altar of an ignorant, powerful cult.

  Redhand’s horse turned and turned in the wide sunstruck yard. They had opened the gates for him, but none had greeted him. His little crowd looked around themselves, silent, waiting for an order.

  “You.” Redhand called a grizzled man who stared openly at him. “Call your captain.”

  “Indisposed.”

  “How, indisposed?”

  The soldier only stared at Redhand, grinning with sunlight, or at a private joke; chewing on a sliver of bone. Then he turned and went to climb worn stairs toward the slit of a doorway. Even as he approached it a man came from the darkness within, armed, helmeted.

  “Younger!” Redhand dismounted, went to meet his brother. Younger came toward him down the stairs, unsmiling; his eyes had the blank, inward look of a child just wakened from a nightmare. Without a word he embraced his brother, clung to him tightly. In the grip of his embrace, Redhand felt fear.

  He pulled himself away, experimented with a friendly smile, a slap on the shoulder, a laugh of greeting. Younger reacted to the slap as though stung, and the laugh died in Redhand’s throat.

  He turned to Fauconred. “Can you…” He waited for Fauconred to pull his gaze from Younger’s face. “Can you find lodging, stabling? You’ll get no help, I think.” Fauconred nodded, glanced once at Younger, and began to shout orders to the men behind him.

  Redhand put an arm tentatively, gently around Younger’s shoulders. “Brother,” he said. “Brother.” Younger made no response, only sheltered himself, as he ever had in his great griefs, within the circle of Redhand’s arm. “Come inside.”

  He walked with Younger toward the door he had come out of. All around them the garrison and its hangers-on looked on, some grinning, some fearful. His brother had been baited, Redhand knew. It had been so before; and always Redhand had hit out at them, beaten at their grinning, stupid faces, so much more mad-seeming than his brother’s. And he would again, he vowed, memorizing the mockers, unappeased by his knowledge that they knew no better.