Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  The tale told children would relate how with his architects he had worked in rain and by torchlight on the great Harran Stone and caught a fatal chill. It would not mention the traitor-god Blem, or the leaves called Sleep that he inhaled, or the violence of his lovers against him. It made no difference. Beneath the Stone he slept awhile and was no more; nor Harrah either. The Stone remained.

  They woke him from a thick, feverish sleep, men masked in armor, whom he at first did not recognize.

  “They are a mile out on the Drum,” said one, his voice muffled by steel.

  “Fifty watchfires. Stronger than we thought.”

  The King stared at them, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Redhand.”

  They looked one to another.

  “This is all his work,” the King said dully. “His crime.”

  They said nothing for a moment. Then: “The Queen is there too,” one said.

  He only looked at them. There were waves of familiar, enervating pain in him, and his limbs were cold. What had they said? “Bring me the drawings.”

  “Will you ride out?” one of them said. “See them there, see your army?”

  “It would do them good to see you armed,” the other said.

  “Bring me the drawings,” the King said. “Where is my brother?”

  They surrendered then; one of them brought to him a wide, shallow wooden case stained with ink. The other stood at the tent door a moment, slapping one heavy glove into the other gloved hand, then turned and left.

  The King fumbled with the lock, got it open; he turned up the lamp and spread out the drawings of the Harran Stone.

  It was all there, from the first crude imagining in smudged charcoal to the final details of every carved figure cross-hatched in pale brown ink. He would never cease wondering at its calm, perfect volumes, its changeful expression of grief, strength, pride, quiet, solitude. How had they achieved it, through what magic? Behind it some of the drawings showed the old rotunda, a deadweight, gross, pig-eyed, with the chaotic towers of a thousand reigns bristling on its backside.

  That must come down. He would see to it.

  Down in the heart of that poised monument, down where every line drew the eye and every finger pointed, lay the Stone that covered Black Harrah. And here were drawn the carvings that covered that stone.

  But how, the King thought for the thousandth time, how will he breathe there, beneath the stone? He felt his own breath constricted. “Redhand,” he said again. He turned to the armed presence he felt hovering behind him. “Bring me my armor…”

  He was alone in the tent.

  He turned back slowly to the drawings, the thought of Redhand already leaking away from him. He turned the crackling, yellow sheets.

  Down in the corner of a drawing that showed a mechanism for lifting stones, the architect had made another little sketch, a strange thing, something that had nothing to do with stones, it seemed. There was a diminutive figure, a man, strapped into a device of gears and pedals. Radiating out from the center of the device, made of struts and fabric, were the wings of a bird. A bird the size of a man.

  For a long time the King stared at it. It would disappear in a cloud of pain and then appear again, still in its impossible flight.

  How large is the world? the King thought, tracing the manwings with a trembling finger. How high up is the sky?

  From the windows of his locked carriage the Arbiter could look out either side at the army that toiled Inward, gathering strength, through days that darkened toward winter.

  It was not like one beast, as he had often thought an army would be, marching in time and with fierce purpose. No, men only; some hung back, contingents were lost, there were deserters and quarrels daily—especially in this army of new, uneasy allies. The whole parade was slung over a mile of Drumskin in an order that perhaps the captains understood, though he doubted it.

  On a windy, cloud-striated day his carriage was stopped longer than usual in a stretch of country more desolate than usual. Perhaps another carriage had lost a wheel ahead; perhaps his brother and the Queen had had a falling-out…

  Toward evening, a cheerless Barnolsweek evening, Fauconred came to his tent, unlocked its locks with some embarrassment.

  “How is your war?” Learned asked.

  “Not long now, Learned,” Fauconred said gruffly. “We take up our positions here.”

  “And…”

  “Wait for the King. It will not be long.”

  “Uncle,” Learned said (and Fauconred lowered his eyes, though Red-hand children had always called him that), “Uncle, will you give this to Redhand?” It was a folded paper, sealed with his ring.

  “Is this…” Fauconred began, turning it in his hands.

  “No. Only a task I could do, a will. Witness him signing it, and have it sent to Inviolable with this message.” He gave Fauconred another paper. Fauconred looked doubtful, and Learned took his old hand. “I won’t betray you. I can’t help, but I won’t betray.”

  Fauconred looked at him for a moment as though seeking something, some word that would extricate them all from this; not finding it, he tapped the papers against his hand and turned away.

  Learned watched him go, and wondered if he would, in his leather heart, rather win or lose against the King.

  On Barnolsweek Eve the King Red Senlin’s Son’s battle came out of the Downs.

  Learned Redhand, allowed to walk a ridge above the Queen’s army within sight of a guard, watched as through the day they arranged themselves there, a thousand strong, perhaps more. Tents were raised and banners raised above them, some the same banners that flew above the tents of Redhand’s army. Families had been divided; the warriors of the King’s father stood against the King; the sons of those who had fought Red Senlin stood beside his son.

  He did not see the Son. He saw a royal tent pitched and no one enter it; no banner was raised above it. When it was pitched, Redhand and the Queen came out to see, but no one came forth, and they retired to their separate tents. Learned wondered why they did not mass their army suddenly, and like some swift dagger stab into the King’s army while it was in chaos. It was what he would have done. They intended to wait, apparently, like boxers, like the players of a game, wait for their opponents to settle themselves and the contest to begin. Odd…

  At evening, from his vantage, he saw something that no one else seemed to notice. Off beyond the King’s left wing, taking advantage of any cover, any patch of desiccated bush or rain-cut ravine, a young man made his way across the distance of gray heath that separated the two armies. Learned watched him, losing sight of him off and on, and looking away too so that no one would see what he looked at: he did not know this one’s business, and like an Endwife wanted not to. He had made his last moves in this quarrel; in the silence of his confinement he had made his farewells to his brothers, had done what he had not before truly done: divested himself of his family. Like a trapped animal, he had escaped by gnawing away a part of himself. He had nothing further to do; but he watched this creeping one till clouded darkness cut him off, and wondered: what if all the noise and clamor and great numbers were so much show, and this one held the game, and, like the single shot of a Gun, could resolve it?

  When Redhand later found this boy hidden in the shadows of his tent, dark-hooded, his face smeared with ashes, he made a motion to call guards; but the boy laid a finger on his lips, and gave Redhand a folded paper.

  There is a peat-cutter’s house, the paper said, less than five miles from us, along the edge of the Downs, on this side of a bog called Dreaded, by where the Harran Road comes out On the night after you have this, come there. Come alone, or send only one other ahead to assure yourself there is no danger. Tell no one, most especially the Queen. I will be there, alone. I swear by our friendship no harm will come to you; I trust our friendship none will come to me. Redhand, there is much you should know that you do not.

  Sennred

  “This is lies,” Redhand said, folding it caref
ully.

  The boy said nothing.

  “Sennred is prisoner in the City.”

  “I don’t know his face,” the boy said. “Only that he who gave that to me was a little man, dark, and one of his shoulders was higher than the other. And he said he was Sennred.”

  “Did he tell you,” Redhand said, “that you will be hanged, and cut apart, and your body strewn before your army, to answer this?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Why you? How were you chosen? Are you a man of Sennred’s that he chose you?”

  “I’m… no one. They asked for a volunteer. I chose myself.”

  “Whose household are you?”

  “I come from Fennsdown.”

  Redhand read the letter again and fed it thoughtfully to the brazier. “How will you return? Have you thought of that?”

  “I will not. Only allow me to escape, and I will go Outward. There are no sentries there.”

  “And what will he tell me in this house?”

  “I can’t read,” the boy said. “I don’t know what’s written there.”

  An ash of the letter rose from the brazier and settled again like a bird. “Step back,” Redhand said, striking the gong beside him, “back behind the curtains there.”

  A red-jacketed man entered as the boy hid himself.

  “Go to the Defender Fauconred,” Redhand said. “Send him to me.” The guard turned to go. “Listen. Speak only to Fauconred. Tell him to come when the watch changes. Tell no one else.”

  When they were alone again, the boy came from behind the curtain. He had pulled back his hood to show short, blond hair and fair skin above the ashes smeared on his face.

  “The watch will be changing,” Redhand said. “Go now.”

  Unhooded, the boy reminded him of someone; he could not remember who, nor in what scene in his life; perhaps in a dream only. “You’re brave,” he said. “Will they reward you?”

  The war-viols sounded. The boy hooded himself, turned into the shadows, lifted the edge of Redhand’s tent and was gone.

  In armor but without weapons, wrapped to their eyes in dark cloaks that blew as their horses’ manes and tails blew, Fauconred and Redhand looked down at evening from a swell of Drumskin onto a thick-set peat-cutter’s hovel. Dull light spilled from its single window into the little yard; its gate swung in the wind.

  Fauconred pulled the cloak from around his mouth. “I’ll go down.”

  Redhand looked behind him the way they had come; no one had followed.

  “Wait here,” Fauconred said. “Wait till I signal.” He spurred his horse into a gentle trot and rode carefully down on the hut. At the yard he dismounted, led his horse around the turn of the wall out of sight.

  Redhand’s horse stamped, and the clash of his trappings was loud in the stillness.

  The great gray heath, patent though glum by day, had grown moody and secretive as evening came on. There were glimmers and ripples of light somewhere at the edge of vision, that were not there when Redhand turned to look at them; evening light only, perhaps, changeful in the wind-combed grass. There were pockets of dark that bred fogs like dim slow beasts; there was the bog, Dreaded, prostrate beyond the little house; out there rotting things lit hooded candles that moved like conspirators, moved on him…

  No. He was alone, utterly alone. For a moment he could even believe he was the only man alive anywhere.

  Fauconred finished his inspection, came around the house and waved to him. As Redhand approached him, a cloaked ghost in the last light wary by the low door, he thought: what if he… in league with them… His hair stood on end. The idiot notion passed almost as it was born, but Redhand felt himself trembling faintly as he dismounted.

  “No one,” Fauconred said. “No one here but the Folk.”

  “Watch,” Redhand said; he gave his reins to Fauconred and stooped to enter the little round doorway.

  Two women cowled in shawls sat by a peat fire; they looked up when he entered, their faces minted into bright coins by the firelight. “Protector,” said one, and they looked away. There was a movement in the house’s only other room; Redhand turned, the wide boards of the floor cried out faintly; he could see someone, sick or asleep, in a loft in that room.

  “Do you have a lamp?” he asked.

  “There’s the fire,” the younger woman said. And the other quoted: “There’s no lamp the foolish can see better by.”

  He sat then, in an old reed chair that groaned familiarly. Everything here spoke; the wind, twisted by a crack at the window, cried out in a little voice, the sleeping one stirred, sighed, the women sang: If Barnol wets the Drum with rain, then Caermon brings the Downs the same; if Caermon wets the Downs with rain, the Hub will not be dry till Fain brings the New Year round again; new year old year still the same…

  At first Redhand started at every noise; but then the fire began to melt the chill of the Drum from him, and loosen too something tight that had held him. He sighed, inhaling the dark odor of the cottage.

  There was a sentiment, among court poets, that this little life, cottage life, was the only true and happy one; filled up with small cares but without real burdens, and rich with the immortality of changelessness. Redhand had never felt so, had never envied the poor, surely not the peat-cutters and cottagers. No, there were no young people here, and Redhand knew why—they had escaped, probably to take up some untenanted farm, glad enough to get a piece of land, a share of the world, and to see their children then buy or inherit more, become owners, and their grandchildren perhaps Defenders, and so on and on till the descendants of these women singing the seasons entered the topmost spiral of the world and were flung Outward into pride, and war, and the Guns.

  Two parents, Learned had said, four grandparents, eight great-grand-parents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred and twenty-eight… We three, he had said, are part of it. Redhand, Learned, Younger.

  Brothers. Well, that was easy, then; not every man needed all those ancestors, he shared them with others. Was that the solution? It wasn’t sufficient; still the number of ancestors must be multiplied as you stepped back through the generations, how many thousands of them, each doubling the last, till the vast population needed to begin the world spilled over its edges into the Deep. It was mad…

  It came to him as a sounding clarity, a benign understanding that made the close cottage order itself before his eyes and smile.

  All those millions were dead; and when the Fifty-two began the world, the millions weren’t yet born.

  Yes, their shades crowded the edges of the world; yes, there were uncountable numbers of them. But they weren’t alive, had never been alive all at once; they were simply all the people that had ever been, added up as though a farmer were to reckon his harvest by counting all the grain from all the seed he had ever sowed. Absurd that he could have been tricked into thinking that they needed all to live at once. Gratefully, the world closed up within him to a little place, a place of few; a handful at a time, who must give way to those who would come after.

  Give way…

  The structure of the burning peat was like a thousand tiny cities in flames. It held him; he watched ramparts crumble, towers fall, maddened populaces. Hung above the fire was a fat black kettle he hadn’t noticed before. It had begun to boil; thick coils of steam rose from it. Now and again, the younger of the women took from within her clothes a handful of something, seeds or spices, and threw them in. The pot boiled more furiously each time she did so, frothing to its edges. The old one was anxious, cried out each time the pot began to seethe.

  “Protector,” she said, “help us here, or the pot will overflow.”

  “Why does she do that?” Redhand asked. “Let it subside.”

  “I must, I must,” the younger said, and threw in more; a trickle of the froth this time ran over the kettle’s edge and sizzled with an acrid odor. The old one gasped as though in pain. “Protector,” she said, “remember your vows. Help the Fol
k.”

  He got up, not certain what he must do. Within the kettle a mass of stuff seethed and roiled; the younger woman flung in her seed, the stuff rose as though in helpless rage. Calmly then, with their eyes on him, he bent his head to the kettle to drink the boiling excess.

  He started awake.

  There was a horse in the courtyard. A man was dismounting. Fauconred threw open the door. “Sennred,” he said. “Alone.”

  There was no kettle… The two women hurried away timidly into the other room when Sennred came in. His face, never youthful, looked old in the firelight. “I would have come sooner,” he said, “only I wanted not to be followed.” He held out his hand to Redhand, who hesitated, still addled with his dream. He got up slowly and took Sennred’s hand.

  “Does the King,” he said, “know of this meeting?”

  Almost imperceptibly, Sennred shook his head.

  “Has he forgiven you?”

  “I hope he has.”

  “He released you from prison.”

  “I broke from prison.” He undid the cloak he wore, let it fall. He touched Redhand, gently, to pass by him, and sat heavily in the single chair. “I broke from prison with little Black.”

  “With him?”

  “He showed me the way out. We became… great friends in prison.” A faint smile faded quickly; he cradled his pale forehead in his hand and went on, not looking at Redhand. “We climbed to the roof of our prison. And then down. At a certain point… at a certain point, Black fell…”

  “Lies.” With a sudden fierce anger, Redhand saw the story. “Lies.”

  “I grasped his cloak as he fell,” Sennred went on, in the same tone, as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “But the cloak wouldn’t hold. He fell. I saw it.”

  “Who wrote this tale?” Redhand growled. “One of the King’s urnings? And did you practice it then?”

  “Redhand…”

  “No. Sennred. It’s a poor trick.” But his neck thrilled; Sennred’s look was steady, with an eerie tenderness; he didn’t go on—it seemed inconsequential to him whether Redhand believed him or not. “Why,” Redhand said, and swallowed, “why is the King not here then? Why is this done in secret? Shout it out to my army, to the Queen…”