Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  “A friend,” Sten said. “His name is Loren Casaubon. My best friend. He’s come to help.”

  The leo gazed at him a long time without speaking, and Loren allowed himself to be studied. He had often stood so, patiently, while some creature studied him, tried to make him out; it neither embarrassed nor provoked him. He stared back, beginning to learn the leo, fascinated by what he could see of his anatomy, inhaling his odor even as the leo inhaled his. Half-man, half-lion, the magazines and television always said. But Loren knew better, knew there are no such things as half-beasts: Painter was not half-anything, but wholly leo, as complete as a rose or a deer. An amazing thing for life to have thrown up; using man’s ceaseless curiosity and ingenuity, life had squared its own evolution. He almost laughed. Certainly he smiled: a grin of amazement and pure pleasure. The leo was, however he had come about, a beautiful animal.

  Painter rose up. His prison weakness had not quite left him; now, when he stood, a sudden blackness obtruded between him and the man who stood before him. For a brief moment he knew nothing; then found himself supported by Sten and Loren.

  “Why did you come here?” he said.

  “Reynard sent me. To help Sten.”

  The leo released himself from them. “Can you hunt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you use those?” He pointed to Loren’s old rabbit wires hung in a corner.

  “I made them,” Loren said.

  “We’ll live, then,” Painter said. He went to where the snares were hung and lifted them in his thick graceless fingers. Traps. Men were good at those. “Can you teach me?” he asked.

  “Teach you to be a trapper?” Loren smiled. “I think so.”

  “Good.” He looked at the two humans, who suddenly seemed far away, as though he looked down on them from a height.

  Since the moment in the dead city when he had seen that there was no escape from men, no place where their minds and plans and fingers couldn’t reach, a flame had seemed to start within him, a flame that was like a purpose, or a goal, but that seemed to exist within him independently of himself. It was in him but not of him. It had nearly guttered in the black prison, but it had flamed up brightly again when he had taken the man Barron in his grip. In the days he had lain with Caddie on the pallet here in the darkness he had begun to discern its shape. It was larger than he was; he was a portal for it only. Now when he looked at the men and saw them grow small and far-off, it flared up hotly, so hotly that it blew open the doors of his mouth, and he said to them, not quite knowing why or what he meant: “Make me a trapper. I will make you hunters of men.”

  Furious, Hawk broke his stoop and with a shriek of bitter rage flung himself toward the prongs of a dead tree. The rabbit struggling on the ground, hurt, helpless, had been the first edible creature he had seen all day. And just as he was diving to it with immense certainty, already tasting it, the big blond one had stamped out of the weeds with a shout.

  Hawk observed the intruder mantle over the rabbit. He roused, and his beak opened with frustrated desire. They were driving him off: from his home, from his livelihood. The wind, too, pressed him to go, creeping within his plated feathers and causing the ancient tree to creak. Unknown to him, a family of squirrels lay curled inside the tree, not far below where he sat, utterly still, nosing him, alert with fear. Hawk didn’t see the squirrels: there were no squirrels there.

  Painter slit the twitching rabbit’s throat neatly and then attempted to take it from the snare. He knew he must think, not pull. There was a plan to this. His unclever fingers moved with slow patience along the wire. He could learn this. He suggested that the man within him take a part: help him here.

  He gutted the rabbit, and slit its ankle at the tendon; then he slipped one foot through the slit he had made so that the rabbit could be carried. The hitch was neat, satisfying, clever. He wouldn’t have thought of it: the boy Sten had shown it to him.

  The long prison weakness was sloughing away from him; and even as his old strengths were knitting up in him, cables tempered somehow by loss, by imprisonment, he felt his being knitted together too, knitted into a new shape. Carrying the rabbit, enjoying the small triumph of the snare, he went up a low hill that gave him a view over the wide marshland. The feeble sunlight warmed him. He thought of his wives, far off somewhere; he thought of his dead son. He didn’t think anything about them; he came to no conclusions. He only thought of them. The thoughts filled him up as a vessel, and passed from him. He was emptied. Wind blew through him. Wind rushed through him, bright wind. Something brilliant, cold, utterly new filled him as with clear water. He knew, with a certainty as sudden as a wave, that he stood at the center of the universe. Somehow—by chance even, perhaps, probably, it didn’t matter—he had come to stand there, be there, be himself that center. He looked far over the winter-brown world, but farsighted as he was he couldn’t make out the shape of what lay at his frontiers, and didn’t attempt to. From all directions it would come to him. He thought: if I were raised up to a high place, I would draw all men to me.

  His wide gaze turned the world. He saw, far off, the dog, coming toward him, squirming through the reeds and mud. Even as he looked, the dog barked, calling to him.

  Sweets didn’t need to call again, he already lived within Painter; the dark shape far off on the hill was only the rich, imperious center of him, he extended infinitely out from it; Sweets had been drawn to him by only the faintest, the most tenuous, the farthest-extended atoms of his being. It had been enough. Now Sweets needed only to plunge into that center, taste it with his tongue, to forget that anything else existed.

  Painter waited on the hill, watching the dog hunching and leaping and struggling toward him.

  Winter deepened toward the death of the sun. On the eve of the solstice, Hawk could refuse the insistent summons no more. He had come back to his evening rest, but perceived as he approached it that there was someone there in the tower. He circled it for a time. He didn’t, anyway, want to rest; he wanted to fly, soar, beat away night with long wings. This world had grown old. He rose up in easy stages, seeking a quick current.

  As he went, Loren and Sten watched him, passing back and forth Loren’s binoculars.

  “The glint,” Sten said. “When the light catches it… See?”

  “Yes.”

  “His jesses. The grommets in them.”

  “It must be.”

  “It was Hawk.”

  “I think it was. I don’t know how.”

  “Next year, will he come back?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We could take him, take him up.”

  “No.” Loren had read the sign. “Not after he’s been free. There’s no caging him now. He’s nobody’s hawk now, Sten.” He didn’t say: and neither are you.

  He shifted the binoculars. Far off, something hovered: not a bird. It seemed to dart, searching, like a preying dragonfly. Then, moving straight toward them, swiftly: they could hear it.

  All of them in the tower heard it. Below, Mika looked out the slats of the windows; Sweets lifted his ears and growled deep in his throat, till Painter stilled him.

  “It’s coming here,” Mika said. “It’s black.”

  Like a hawk, it hung for a time thoughtfully overhead, moving only slightly, looking (they all felt it) down on prey it knew was there, however concealed. Then it dropped; its noise grew loud and its vortex hurtled away dead leaves and chaff, dust of weeds and winter detritus. Its blades slowed, but continued to slice air. Its bubble face was tinted, they couldn’t see anything within. Then it opened.

  The pilot leapt out. Without looking around him he began to haul out boxes, crates, stores. He threw them out anyhow; one box of shiny aluminum containers broke open and spilled its contents like treasure. He pulled out three long guns and added them to the pile. He put his head within the interior. He stood aside while his passenger, with some difficulty, got out; then he clambered quickly back in and closed the bubble. The blades roared; their visitor bent ov
er, closing his eyes against the machine’s rising, his cape snapping around him. Then he straightened, tidying himself.

  Reynard stood in the tower courtyard, leaning on a stick, waiting.

  They came slowly from their hiding places. Reynard nodded to them as they came forth, pointing to each one with his stick. “Mika,” he said. “And Caddie. Sten, and, and Loren. Where is the leo, Painter?”

  “You’re dead,” Caddie said, staying far from him. “I killed you.”

  “No,” he said. “Not dead.” He walked toward her, not limping now, and she retreated; he seemed brisk, young, almost gay.

  “I shot you.” She giggled, a mad, strangled laugh.

  “The one you shot,” Reynard said, “was my parent. I am his—child. In a sense. In another sense, I am he almost as much as he was.” He looked around at them. “It would be convenient for you to regard me as him.” He grinned, showing the points of yellow teeth. “How anyway could Reynard the Fox die?”

  Painter had come out of the shed, and Sweets, who curled his lip at the fox’s odor. Painter came across the yard to where the little figure awaited him.

  “Good evening, Counselor,” he said.

  “Hello, Painter.”

  “You’re supposed to have died.”

  “Well, so I did. It’s wrong, I know, for Judas to be the one to rise from the grave. But there it is.” He looked a long time up at the massive face he had so often heard described and seen in tapes, but had never confronted. Even in the first moments of encounter he saw his parent’s mistake, and wondered at it. “You shouldn’t feel cheated,” he said. “The one who betrayed you suffered death. But he wanted you to have his services still. My services. Forever.

  “You see,” he said, including them all, but looking at Painter intently, and at Sten, “I am sterile. Sexless, in fact. Therefore, in order to go on, I must be recreated—cloned—from a cell of my own. My parent understood the impasse he had come to, and saw that the only way out of it was his own death. I had been prepared to succeed him. My education was to have been longer, but I was released when he died.” He looked up at the wide sky. “It was a long wait.”

  Loren said: “He did that in secret? Matured a clone? And nobody knew?”

  “He was—I am—rich enough. There are men I pay well. Skilled. All that. I am immortal, if I’m careful.” He smiled again. “A less delightful prospect than you might imagine.”

  Sten said: “You know what he knows.”

  “I am he.”

  “You know his plans, then. Why we’re here.”

  “He had no plan.” Reynard’s voice had grown thin and almost inaudible. Small plumes of frost came from his nostrils. Evening—the longest of the year—had gathered by degrees around them.

  “No plan?”

  “No.” Slowly, as though crumpling, he sat. A tiny folded figure. “Men plan,” he said. “I’m not a man. The appearance is a deception. All lies. Talk.” He said the word like a tiny bark. “Talk.”

  Mika shivered violently. When she spoke, she felt her throat constricted. “You said Sten was to be a king.”

  “Yes? Well, so he is, I suppose.”

  Sten said: “What am I supposed to do?”

  “That’s up to you, isn’t it? If you are a king.”

  Caddie said: “You said Painter was King of Beasts.”

  “I did. How was I to know it was the truth? My parent died learning it.”

  They had come close, to hear his delicate, rasping, exhausted voice. “I make no plans,” he said. “I discern what is, and act accordingly. You can never trust me. I must act; it’s my nature. I’ll never stop. You. You make the future. You know yourselves. I will act in the world you make. It’s all up to you.” One by one, they sat or squatted around him, all but Painter, who still stood, remote, unmoving as an idol with eyes of jewel. It was still not yet night, though it had been twilight most of the day. They could still see one another’s faces, strange, matte, like the faces of people asleep. Tomorrow, the day would be imperceptibly longer. The sun would stir in his long sleep.

  “Whatever we are to do,” Reynard said, “we are at least all here. Everyone I know of. All but Meric. Well. He prepares the way. Some way.” He offered, with a tiny, long-wristed hand, a place in the circle to Painter. He waited while the leo sat. The dog crept in beside him.

  “Shall we begin?” Reynard said.

  ENGINE SUMMER

  For Lance Bird,

  who also thinks that the snake’s-hands

  in a story can be the best part.

  … a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables, you yourself would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.

  Another said: I bet that is also a parable.

  The first said: You have won.

  The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.

  The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  From “Parables and Paradoxes” by

  Franz Kafka. Reprinted by permission

  of Schocken Books, Inc.

  THE FIRST CRYSTAL

  MANY LIVES

  FIRST FACET

  Asleep?

  No. Awake. I was told to close my eyes. And wait, he said, till you’re asked to open them.

  Oh. You can open them now … What do you see?

  You.

  Am I …

  You’re like … a girl I know. Taller. Are all the angels tall?

  What else do you see?

  This grass we sit on. Is it grass?

  Like grass.

  I see the sky, Through your roof of glass, oh, angel, can it be?

  It is.

  I’m here, then. Here. He was right, that I could come here … Angel! I see the clouds below us!

  Yes.

  I’ve found you, then. I’ve found the greatest thing that was lost.

  Yes. We were lost and you found us. We were blind, and you made us see. Now. You can only—stay?a short time, so …

  What is it you want from me?

  Your story.

  That’s all I am, now, isn’t it: my story. Well, I’ll tell it. But it’s long. How can I tell it all?

  Begin at the beginning; go on till you reach the end. Then stop.

  The beginning…. If I am only a story now, I must have a beginning. Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning? I could begin with that silver glove you wear; that silver glove, and the ball … Yes, I will start with Little Belaire, and how I first heard of the glove and ball; and that way the beginning will be the ending too. I would have to start with Little Belaire anyway, because I started with Little Belaire, and I hope I end there. I am in Little Belaire somehow always. I was created there, its center is my center; when I say “me” I mean Little Belaire mostly. I can’t describe it to you, because it changed, as I changed; changed with me as I changed. But you’ll see Little Belaire if I tell you about me—or at least some of the ways it can be.

  I was born in my Mbaba’s room. My Mbaba is my mother’s mother, and it was with her mostly that I spent my baby years, as the custom is. I remember Mbaba’s room better than any other of Little Belaire’s thousand places; it was one that never changed, whose boundaries stayed the same, though it seemed to move from place to place as I grew up, because the walls and rooms around it were always being changed. It wasn’t one of the oldest rooms, the old warren built by St. Andy that is the center of Little Belaire (tiny rooms of porous-looking square-cut gray angelstone, the old rooms where all secrets are kept); nor yet was it one of the airy, nonexistent rooms of the outside, with light translucent walls that change every day and fade into the woods till Little Belaire ends without a sign and the world begins. Mbaba’s was on the Morning side, not far from Path, with walls of wood and a dirt floor covered with rugs, and many beetles and once a blacksnake that stayed nine days. And skylights that made it gleam in the mornings as though moist and fade slowly in the evening before the lamps were
lit. You can see Mbaba’s room from the outside, because it has a little dome, and on its sides red-painted vents that wave in the wind.

  It was afternoon, in late November, when I was born. Already nearly everyone had revolved back into the close warm insides of Little Belaire, and went out rarely; smoke and food had been laid up for the winter season. In my Mbaba’s room my mother sat with my Mbaba and Laugh Aloud, a gossip and a famous doctor too. They were eating walnuts and drinking red raspberry soda when I started to be born. That’s the story I have been told.

  The gossip named me Rush that Speaks. I was named for the rush that grows in water, that on winter days like the day I was born seems to speak when the wind goes through its dead hollow stem.

  My cord is Palm cord, the cord of St. Roy and St. Dean. A lot of Palm cord people have names about words and speaking. My mother’s name was Speak a Word; my Mbaba’s name was So Spoken. There are hand names too—the cord is Palm, after all—like Seven Hands and Thumb. Since I have always been Palm, the Little Belaire I can tell you of is Palm’s and is like my cord. But ask someone of Leaf cord or Bone cord and he’d tell you about a different place.

  The silver ball and glove. I was seven, and it was a day in November; I remember, because this was also the first day I was taken to see a gossip, as that happens in the time of year when you were born, when you’re seven.

  Inside Mbaba’s room, the vents in the little dome made a soft clack-clack-clack above my head. I watched Mbaba climb down the rope ladder that hung from a door set in the dome; she was coming back from feeding the birds. A sparrow flew in with her, fluttering noisily against the skylights and dropping white droppings on the rug below. It was cold this day I am telling you of, and Mbaba looked out from a thick shaggy shawl that ended in clicking tassels, though her feet wore only rings.