The Last Legends of Earth

by A. A. Attanasio

  Rividius dragged Jess down the forest trail, around the well, and along the red slate avenue. People were up and about by the time the two of them came down the hillside, and several of the men on their way to the terrace fields helped carry the litter to Riv’s house.

  “Not like you to be dragging strangers out of the hills,” one of the men noted as they laid the boy on the verandah where the ragheads had devoured the angel. The ragheads were gone and only a smudge remained where they had feasted.

  “Goll, he’s no stranger. This is one of my own from an earlier wife. You ask Pao about my third wife and you’ll hear more’n you want to know. He’s come from the north to try his hand in my field.”

  Leaf listened impassively to her husband’s lies until the rising light called the men off to their day’s work on the terraces. When Jess finally opened his eyes at Riv’s word, she almost shrieked. “Mugna! He’s a voor!”

  “He’ll be a corpse soon if we don’t brew that anti-venom syrup right now. A fire snake hit him in the night. We’ve got maybe six hours before the paralysis locks in.”

  “But, Riv, he’s a voor.”

  “A voor I found. I’m not having him die on my hands.”

  “I didn’t know you were gentle on voors.”

  “Me neither. But now that we know, let’s not waste any time.”

  Leaf set her young girl to boiling water, and she gathered the necessary herbs from the root cellar for the antitoxin, while Riv administered what they had of it in their cupboard.

  The larding they had planned to do did not get done that day, but the voor did not die. Three days later he walked about, helping with the chores. Rividius had him wear dyed goggles that he had bought years before from a wandering tinker. The goggles let people scrutinize auras, and Riv had used them to amuse his friends. When Pao asked, he explained that his kin had eye trouble. But already people were getting suspicious. Riv’s third wife had died in a flash plague a century ago, and no one had heard anything about survivors other than Riv.

  “You must come with me,” Jess insisted as he had from the first day they took him in. “I will lead you through the Overworld to safety—to a world ...”

  “Where the land is fertile and my family will prosper,” Rividius completed for him. “I know you mean well, Jess, but you’d best go ahead without us. This town has been my home for too long now. My roots are too tangled to just pull them up. You’re strong enough now to go on your own.”

  “What happened to me at the tarn could happen again,” the voor said.

  “Not with the boots I’ve given you. A raghead would get a jaw cramp biting through them steel studs. You go on now.”

  “But some other trouble may befall me. You know these woods. I was reared in the north caverns. If the Saor-priests had not slaughtered my clan, if the nearest lynk did not point in this direction, I would not be here now. What has brought us together must carry us forth.”

  “Why ever? You just go ahead. The lynk you want is three valleys over. No one lives there. People are afraid of it. So you won’t have any trouble with us humans once you clear this valley and the next. Just keep to the high trails. And keep those goggles in place.”

  “But these worlds are dying.”

  “Not in my lifetime, Jess.”

  “But your children’s and theirs. You must think of their future—or there will be none for them.”

  Rividius declined. The fact was, Leaf would not budge, though Riv would have been happy indeed to leave the life of hardship in the hamlet for a world of fertile soil easy to work. When the voor realized that his benefactor would not go, he prepared to leave—but even as he buckled his boots a knock resounded from the front door and it opened before anyone could answer it.

  Pao entered, stooped and shriveled as the stump of a gnarly tree, her thrust-jawed face swinging from side to side so her one good eye could take in the whole room. She wore her gossip-twisted smile, the one she had never used on Riv and Leaf before because she had had nothing on them. Now she looked as if she had just discovered that grin. “Your kin Jess going somewhere?” she asked through a cackle.

  “Just up to my field, Pao—if that’s any business of yours.”

  Jess kept his back to the crone until he had retrieved his goggles from the wash bucket, dried them, and put them on.

  “Bright day today, Jess,” she said, and cackled again. “No need for them goggles.”

  “The light hurts my eyes,” he answered.

  “I’ll bet that’s so,” Pao said, edging into the room and waving Riv back to his seat at the kitchen table when he moved to rise. “I’ll bet that’s so.”

  Leaf and Kaina had been outside digging in the vegetable patch when Pao arrived, and they did not know she was there when the young girl rushed in blurting with news: “Pa—there’s priests coming down the road! The bald men are here!”

  Riv lunged to his feet and went to the front window. Sure enough, half a dozen Saor-priests arrived at the far end of the street, strolling his way, blessing the people who had gathered to greet them.

  “I went and invited them to bless your kin now that he’s moved in with you,” Pao announced, showing all the brown pegs of her teeth. “Saor loves those who acknowledge him, so they say.”

  “Kind of you, Mother Pao,” Riv adjudged. “But Jess and us won’t be waiting for them. Our faith is in our work and we have enough of that on the terraces. Leaf, take Kaina out.”

  Riv turned to get his rifle, leaning in the kitchen corner, but Pao scuttled toward it faster than he had ever seen her move. In a flash, she had the gun trained on them. “Don’t any of you budge a smidge or I will certainly use this.” The iron clamp of her jaw assured them that she would, and they stood very still. “Oh, you righteous people who hide your shadows, you think you will never be found out. But I found you out. This Jess is not your kin, Rividius. Take those goggles off, child, and let us see who you really are.” She aimed the gun at the young boy. “I said take them off.”

  Jess complied. And when the crone faced his depthful gaze, her cackle sizzled like lightning. “I knew it. I knew it at once. He’s a voor!”

  “Pao,” Rividius pleaded. “We never caused you any trouble. We take your milk even when it’s sour. I’ve been elbow to elbow with your kin in the fields many, many a year now. So you let us go.”

  “And lose the bounty on a voor?” Her weathered face narrowed maliciously. “Rividius, you sit back down and take what fate you’ve earned.”

  Rividius did not sit; in fact, he edged forward. He could not bear to live to see his family killed—and that, he knew, must be the Saor-priests’ judgment before they killed him. Better to die now and spare himself that horror.

  At that instant, the voor leaped for the old woman. He never had a chance to reach her before she fired. Old and one-eyed, she was nevertheless too alert with the excitement of her triumph to be taken off guard. She fired the rifle—and the rusty old weapon exploded in her hands, kicking her against the kitchen wall and dropping her lifeless to the floor.

  The explosion brought the Saor-priests running. But when they burst into the house and found the crone dead, her bowels spilled in her lap, the others had departed. The priests rushed into the back yard, and by then the family they had called on to inspect had fled into the woods. The priests gave chase. Far into the forest they pursued them and found no one. Rividius knew this forest better than anyone except the crone who lay dead in the kitchen, and the voor with him could sense hunters long before they came into sight. Between the two of them, there was no chance of the family’s capture.

  Four days later, wearied and scraggly from hard running and short naps in the forest, Rividius, Leaf, Kaina, and Jess arrived at a lynk shining blue in a dark grove of old trees spangled with rain. They paused briefly before the lynk and stared up at mauve ploughlands of clouds.

  “Will the world where we are going be as beautiful?” Kaina asked the voor.

  Jess smiled and lowered his sea
rchless eyes from the mumped clouds and vaporous stars to the humans who had cared for him. “We will make it so.”

  Valdëmiraën

  At land’s edge, under the shrieking gulls and diamond brightness of the galaxy, the Vanoi danced. The women, in ankle-length silk dresses and long hair piled atop their heads, leaned back into the strong arms of their fishermen and kicked bare feet at the sky. The men, hair spiked with sea-kelp pomade, brass buttons on their brown velvet jackets shining with starlight, lifted their women high and hooted to harp and fife music. The weekly Strand Dance frolicked to the height of its star-kick frenzy when the tambourine girls, who were supposed to dash along the surf’s margin and find starfish and periwinkles for the candy prizes, came screaming back. A dead man had rolled in on the curling waves.

  The women threw their shawls about the girls and bustled them behind the orchestra while the men and boys sloshed into the shallows and dragged the naked, kelp-strewn man to shore. He was not dead, but neither did he rouse to life immediately. The biggest of the men sat on his chest and bounced until the drowned man spit water and gasped awake. The Vanoi men propped him upright and covered his nakedness in the sand until a blanket was brought from the dunes picnic. The whole village gathered as they lifted the man in a locked-arm grasp and carried him to the driftwood fire.

  Cucumber brandy revived the man somewhat, and he gawked with great bewilderment at the townsfolk. A striking human specimen, tall, long-boned, with skin pale as a seashell, he possessed a beardless face like a statue’s. No one recognized him, though anyone who had seen him even once would not have forgotten him. He understood their concerned questions and answered, or tried to. His language recalled an archaic version of their own, and the village teacher, Widow Tacci, who had studied history in the Archives of the Western Limb, understood him best. Her questions revealed that he did not know who he was or how he had come to be near-drowned in the Bay of Frascatorious under mewling gulls of the Silver Sea.

  The Vanoi called him Red for his coppery-bright hair, which he wore cropped in a strange fashion, shorn at the temples, crested on top and longer at the back. Once fully revived, he lay in a sand-sled, and they carried him among the dunes to their littoral village beneath the giant east wall of seacliffs called Dreadfully High. There Widow Tacci housed him in her husband’s abandoned net-shop, which had been given over to the dune crabs and seeping sand after he had died in a boating accident six years earlier.

  Red’s old-fashioned way of talking and his pulchritude won the affection of the Vanoi, and they eagerly helped him find a place among them. Widow Tacci gave him her husband’s clothes, which had to be let out to fit his larger frame. The local apparel granted him a distinguished appearance, the humble net-weaver’s slacks and singlet contrasting boldly with his noble features. He proved almost inept in the dinghies the village used for fishing, his body too large for the small, spry boats; and he clumsily wove nets. However, he willingly lent his strength to the plough and served usefully in the fields. An uncomplaining worker, virtually silent, he got along easily with the laconic field-workers who accepted him as one of their own.

  All the women strove for his attention, gracing him with garments and baked goods and urging their men to invite him to their households for dinner. He seemed remote from affairs of the heart, though the village’s most beautiful women, married and not, offered him every opportunity to exercise his passion. Even he did not understand the obscure sadness that misted through him when women brushed against him and invited him for garden walks. The men, who had ascertained that he was a whole man when they had retrieved him from the sea, jibed him for not availing himself of this amorous bounty among the women and men. He joked back that, along with his name and history, he had also forgotten his heart.

  This proved not entirely true, for one young woman in the village stirred a mysterious, sad joy in him. The town’s imp, childlike and mischievous, tying her skirts up like trousers, laughing noisily during solemn prayer sessions before the weekly Strand Dance, she exposed herself to schoolchildren, sometimes sitting catatonic in the middle of the cobbled wharf road when the fish-catchers came back. She ate when hungry, anything that pleased her, and she slept wherever she desired, at any time.

  The village tolerated the Imp, but mostly they simply ignored her. A wandering lens-grinder claimed that brain disorders commonly afflicted people with sight problems. From him, the Imp’s parents purchased a lengthy eye-exam and finally spectacles for her, which she received with much pride and care.

  Red, fascinated by the Imp, tried to talk with her, and, to the astonishment of the Vanoi, she listened without leering or drooling. She identified with Red’s difference from the others, and in his presence she behaved as demurely as other young women. After his attentions began, she dressed better, stopped barking at the children, and no longer fell into sit-down trances. Her enormously grateful parents had Red to dinner most nights and gave their blessing to the long beachcombing strolls he took with their daughter.

  With the Imp, whom everyone now called by her given name, Maretta, a peacefulness pervaded Red. They swam together in the Bay of Frascatorious after Red’s long day in the fields, then lay on a sandbank staring up at pounding stars and the slim horns of planets. They talked very little, but they laughed a lot together—at the antics of the bright eels that ate the peas they threw for them, at the sidewise dances of crabs avoiding the screaming gulls, at each other’s goofiness among the waves. And when their play was done and the galaxy’s last arm lowered toward night, he would meticulously clean her wireframe glasses with his shirt and put them on her carefully.

  Yet something was wrong. She had sensed this from the very first. She understood that she was not right for him or for anyone. But for a while, for the time that he regarded her as a whole woman, worthy of care, she acted the role for him—though that was not easy for her. The irascible urges to shout during the silence of prayers, to make the children shriek and the adults groan, still thrived in her—and, worse, the sleepiness that claimed her at odd moments still swelled in her blood with its own tides. But knowing Red cared for her and for her alone, she did not give in to it. And the sleepiness built up in her. It mounted like a floodtide, until, one day, she knew she would succumb. She could pretend no more. Neither could she bear to disappoint the one man who recognized her as a person. During the night rains, with an onshore wind driving the warm torrent across peaked roofs and along cobbled streets, she marched victoriously to the Bay of Frascatorious; fully clothed, she swam through the breakers, swam hard toward the Silver Sea, driving all the strength out of her body, leaving only sleepiness to offer the dark depths.

  Red wept like a child when the fish-catchers brought her bloated body to shore the next day. After setting her death barge ablaze and adrift beyond the breakwater, Red departed the Vanoi. He wandered inland, wanting to go far from his grief. Widow Tacci followed and caught up with him on the slopes of Dreadfully High. “You do not want to go that way,” she called to him where he stood on a boulder-strewn path etched into the cliff-face. “That leads to Darkhole. Those who go there always get sick and die. The ancient city of N’ym once stood there. It left behind all its illness before giving itself to the night.”

  Widow Tacci’s words struck through Red’s grief to a deeper loneliness. He picked his way down from the narrow path and confronted her. “N’ym.” His blue stare brightened. “That name. I’ve heard it before.”

  “It is famous in legend.”

  “The City of the Sky.”

  “Yes.” She called up all her memories of N’ym from her time in the Archives. “The people who lived there were—”

  “Aesirai,” Red answered for her. He turned quickly and stared hard into the teetering heights. “The City of the Sky perched there, on the first plateau. Down here were the hamlets, where workers lived. The Vanoi must be descended from those people.”

  “You speak as though you know.”

  Red frowned, trying to f
eel more. “I don’t know. I—” He gazed up again, then beyond to the mists on the farthest cliffs. “Up there, there is something I must see. I don’t know what it is. But I must go.”

  “It is dangerous, Red. The Darkhole sends winds along the cliffs that sicken people and kill them. Their hair falls out, and they die retching.”

  “Radiation sickness. Fusion charges severed N’ym’s pylons so its ramstat engines could thrust it starward.”

  “I don’t understand,” Widow Tacci admitted but recognized the truth in his words from the clarity of his features. He was remembering.

  “I am Aesirai,” he affirmed, and the thunder of his voice nearly collapsed him. The memories rose—he could see the glassy spires and minarets, the broad plazas, park glades, and hillside houses with their hanging gardens—but they connected with emptiness.

  Widow Tacci thought Red would swoon. His lids fluttered, mouth hung open. Then the muteness of unknowing returned. “Come back to the Vanoi with me, Red. There, we will figure this all out.”

  “No. Maretta is dead. I can’t bear to go back.” He swung his gaze along the broken wall of cliffs. “I will go that way, away from N’ym, yet upward. My memory, if it is anywhere, awaits me up there.”

  Widow Tacci let him go, seeing no point in following him. He told the truth, a strange and wholly unbelievable truth. He was Aesirai, a legend washed up out of the Silver Sea from the far past. Better to let him go, like all myths, to find his own way to his own reckoning.

  *

  Chan-ti Beppu returned to the Eyelands on Valdëmiraën. Buie led her there through the lynks with Pahang, Nila, and Worm. Pahang retained some of the temporal torque that he had picked up from his travels with Ned O’Tennis, and Buie used him to core the group so that they would stay together in the timerush through the Overworld. They arrived in the Eyelands five hundred years after Ned had died, in time for the seventh and last return of Know-Where-to-Go to Chalco-Doror.