by Duncan, Hal
Errata:
CoRN / PoET / WatCH / ToMB
Hal Duncan
Copyright © 2013 by Hal Duncan
All rights reserved.
New Sodom Press
www.halduncan.com
Epigraphs are taken from: "The Man with the Blue Guitar," copyright Wallace Stevens, (Selected Poems, Faber & Faber, 1953); "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," by W.B. Yeats, (Yeats's Poems, Macmillan, 1989); "Enmerkar and the Lord of Arrata," translation copyright Samuel Noah Kramer, ("The Babel of Tongues: A Sumerian Version," Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1968.)
"The City of Rotted Names" first published in limited edition ebook via Notes from the Geek Show, 2012. "The Prince of End Times" first published in Solaris Book of New Fantasy, 2007. "The Whenever at the City’s Heart" first published in Interzone #209, March 2007. "The Tower of Morning’s Bones" first published in Paper Cities, Senses Five Press, 2008.
Cover by Cat Ingall
www.catingall.co.uk
Also available from the author:
VELLUM: THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS 1
INK: THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS 2
ESCAPE FROM HELL!
AN A-Z OF THE FANTASTIC CITY
SONGS FOR THE DEVIL AND DEATH
FABBLES: 1
Forthcoming works:
SCRUFFIANS! (Lethe Press, 2013)
TESTAMENT (TBA)
The City of Rotted Names
“Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.”
—Wallace Stevens, The Man With The Blue Guitar
Evenfall in the Afterworld
A way away over fields of illusion is this city, far ago & now here, on the edge of blueblack night & sea. Under a louring blankout of clouds, gold molten flames of Evenfall, flakes of sunset, flitter & fall as burning autumn leaves, flown in a breeze, down into deep ravines of twilight, riverroads of dust, slidestreets of ash & rust. The razing flood of shadows flows, takes form—a storm in this nocturnal city of nostratic dreaming.
We shadows flow from drains & darkened dourways, rippling thru the tarmacobbles underfoot & seeping liquid. Tumbleword trash dances patterns to our touch, like iron filings integrated by magnetic energies; it scatters, gathers to shapes of interfering fields—of illusion, elusion, elision—as the streets themselves bleed black. We flow across the gutterlitter, subtly changing it, arranging it in spirals, circles, geometric signs & sigils; flow, arise in tiny mists of darkness, wrappling round a small tabak shop sign & moving on to leave it now to sell tobacco in another language.
Here at the end of time, we bitmite builders in the shadows sensed, buried inside your sylphs, all those relationshifts & refrictions of shared thoughts & dreams, desires & fears that you yourselves always, & in all ways, refused to recognise in waking life. So we reshaped the city in your image.
Time broke, so in the days after the world we built anew.
•
Above is an early evening sky, italianate in its pinkorange cumuli & blue so blue that it demands to be described as azure. It is a map, an overworld of clouds of arctic & antarctic tundra north & south, ice & gray glacier tumuli, afloat over a mediterranean scandinavian blue that breaks brilliantly thru. The first stars shine as sunken cities in the darkdeep oceans of the east, the moon, the greatest city of them all, arising on the edge, out, out over the ocean. Sunset burns the west horizon’s shattered stratocirrus into windswept arabesque & afritan savanna, into redgold asiatique deserts, spicedunes strewn across this sphere-&-now, this whorled worldspace.
It is a map, this sky, not of space & time but of spake & tome, a map of dreams inscribed on a mosaic of minds, continental cracks reticulated in a web of glinting tensions.
We flow here & there & where a pothealer’s apprentice looks out of the window of his master’s shop. He makes an arcane sign of superstition, a touch of fingertips to forehead, heart & lips, a silent prayer. He watches us stream like liquid—daimon dust, his master calls us—unaware we camera creatures watch him back, as we watch over all the city.
In our minute gaze of multifacet vision, we observe the whole human dynamics, all the fusions & fissions.
We shift focus.
•
Elsewhere, in a corner of a covered market, where the coloured awnings have been torn down over an abandoned stall, an old man raises his keen gaze of blinded eyes & looks on high at towers he cannot see; the sunset flashes off the mirrored glass & he seems almost to be reaching for it, breathing in the scent of light. He shakes his dreadlocks like the mane of some black lion on a Serengeti plain.
— Await, the reacher says, and I’ll begin. I beckon in: be kin. Let us talk of the elohim and of the dead soul deeps, of a void not black or white but indigo, azure, cerulean. Of how, just for a fraction of a second, in the precise lucidity of blue, there was the whiteness of a secret sacred sylph, an owl in daylight or a dove of bone. Let us walk and, as a prologue to this ritual wordplay, talk—of the beginnings of this city.
•
A soldier swings his heavy silversteel disrupter from the shoulder where it’s slung, wraps the old man’s hand around its shaft to let him use it as a staff, seven foot of glinting steel with four foot crossbar. He takes the reacher’s other hand &, laying it on his own shoulder, he steps forward; the old man steps with him. Leathered, weathered, cracked black skin, the reacher moves still with the grace & grandeur of a king in exile. He was the voice of God, they say, thrown out to shout in wilderness & rage against the night, the dying light, the gathering of might.
And as they walk, the reacher speaks.
— I breathe and begin in shades and shapes, a song of a bird, the Word, in flight over the dead soul deeps, an old white crow, alone in ocean’s night. I speak of how it is to fly, alight, form in the flux a flash of white. This time I speak of was the first of all days—and the last, under the eveningstar and morningstar. This was the fierce and lost day of the world, before this aeon of empyreal reign.
He was our scribe once, this old reacher, wired his writ into our words & ways, until the day we shrugged his order off, flicked old man Metatron away. So now we sway to other voices, to the song of souls & its infinity of right & wrong, the lies & truths you dream you’ll say. So many voices; can you hear them? Listen.
This one is still strong…
The Forgotten Flesh
Along a long-gone railroad track, we trek, down by the babble-on of river of voices echoes rumbling thru ruin’s rubble, under the overgroaning green of forest canopy, in a mass of moss mess, trawling tinderbrush on dragging feet, & on & on, weary & wearier until at last, aware the sunlight slakes thru darkwood in a clearing, we end at the peak of Furrow’s Brow, look down upon the city lain below, the termination of my afterlifetime’s journey.
Hinter me, Puck slumps down on a tree-stump. Flighty young buck with his horns & scruff of hair… I must have known him for forever now; it’s taken us eternity to reach this city, after all. Or two eternities, perhaps, or is it three, or more? I am no longer sure, no space in memory for all the aeons walked along the Road of All Dust to this final destination. The Book, with all its notes of names & dates scrawled in the margins, did serve to remind me once, but it has been unopened now for a trillenium at least, the vellum dry & brittle, crumbling to dust, ink fading in the light. Et In Arcadia Ego. And even in eternity is death. And I also… I…?
— Reynard, Puck reminds me, & I nod.
I must try not to lose my name again, not here, not now.
•
Visible from the prospect of these heights: vast virtual seawall in itself, the city stretches l
ong a ghostline streamlit by a thousand tiny islands of artefactual goldenglow, webwoven by the tracers of headlights & searchlights. Floodlit roads & bridges form, from this vertiginous view, an annotated map of social intrications, cuneiform, ruiniform. It is an ancient city, Puck says, of new pathways built over an undurgrund, order implicit in the subways & sewers; an old city, possibly the oldest, but reborn in baptisms of fire, lazarisen from freshwater, from the multhistory tomb & womb of retro futures & deconstructed pasts. How does he know all this, I ask him, & he gives a dreamy smile. This is his home, he says, the place when he was born.
When he was born?
— Time is a space, he says. A shape. Forward and back, and side to side, and up and down. Remember?
I look down at the city, end of all our journeys in the Vellum—all roads leading not to Rome, just roaming, leading us all here. The Great Beyond? The Deep Within? Is there a difference?
•
I delve in memories for an imagery of my own home. So far ago & long away it seems now, in that mundane world where spiralled history arose like an iron staircase up thru strata of dusty tomes of time, of layered learning upon yearning, stocked & shelved & indexed, back there in reality. I was a scribe of somesuch, I recall… or at least, & at the last, a scribbler. This much I know. I lived, I loved, I laughed, I left alone—transported, insubstantiated, cleaved from linear time—& lost myself in the Illusion Fields some tomb ago. I have forgotten so many aeons, all now buried in the sands of dreams, in the red dust of desert walked for all the hours in the glass.
I remember stepping out into the Vellum, spire of a university tower above me, into an empty afterworld with only the Book as guide. A thief of lives, angel of death, I recorded every soul I met in the Book, immortalising them in ink. Puck was the first. But the Book is crumbling now. And Puck will not stay with me if I go into the city; he’s a woodland sprite, he says, green hair & horns, too frolicsome, too pretty for the grim & gritty. I have to go, I know.
— You’re sure? he says.
I smile at him.
— Sumer is gone, I say. It’s time to take the long knight’s journey out of Evenfall, towards the dawn.
•
A Hinter wind blows at my back, & chills me to the stone.
The stone? I have forgotten even flesh &, in its absence, made my presence manifest, articulated the fine tissue of my constant instances anew, in novel metaphysiques of carved stone, folded paper, flesh of light & fire, bone of ice or skin of adamantium… so many that this creature I, this wanderer of the road of all dust, is stranger even to its sylph.
The Egypsies said that men had seven souls sundered at death, as in Fraud’s hypothesis of sylph & ego, id & superego, Junk’s shadow & anima; & the seventh soul is our mortal remains, the corpse of physical experience, dissolving in death into the dust we walk on in the Vellum. I think Puck & I may be such skandas, strands of a sundered soul, my slinky, sulky sylph & I. Not that I know what shred of soul I am. All I can say is that my name was once Reynard, for what that’s wyrd. No. No, that is wrong. For what that’s word. For what that’s… worth? Ach. I have forgotten even my native tongue, in an eternity with only my sylph & mummeries for company.
The city waits for me below now, the society of souls.
— What will I find in there? I ask.
— Sorrow, says Puck. And joy. Do you remember them?
On a Shore Azure
— Remember, the reacher says. We were wild horses of the wash, the wake, the breaking waves, back then.
He points west, at the ocean of our dissolution out beyond the city, the liquidity of lives co-lapsing into one another.
— We’ve come a way, to see the sword of moonlight on water, bridge the beyond of the horizon: we sought, not for the essence of eternity but for the turning, the returning of the real. Look at the sky above. There are no perimeters to fence the nomad stars—only parameters aligned in the perspectives of our curved, carved space.
He nods to himself.
— It is the continuities of change that constitute us, he says. Time is turbulence, transformation. So on a shore azure, a city as a sure and steadfast rock arose in these Illusion Fields, anchored to a firmament of farms. And we, a rose in a garden where a river ran, we arose under a slumber tree of sweet and silent fruit, awoke to our seraph servitude, to walk again in the land of the dead.
•
The soldier listens as they walk out of the soukh, thru tight sandstone straits & into wider strazas, footsteps loud upon the marble flagstones of the empty Plaza du Vratherii, where a cathedral stands, doors open & empty, as a prayer in stone. They cross a bridge over a canal where copper angels oxidised to green hold in their raised hands streetlights shaped as swords of fire.
There was a time not far ago the soldier would have heard what the old man was saying &, with grim unquestioning obedience to duty, placed his great crossbow-crucifix of a weapon to the old man’s forehead, let the words wash over him & away, & snapped down the lenses of his mirrored nightshades so he didn’t have to see the old man’s soul dissolving as he pulled the trigger. He would have cracked the old man’s head wide open, spattered black blood across the ground. But this is now & here, & he has long since been seduced into sedition by the very words he was sent to study. He still misses, though, those wings of steel he has forsaken in his fall to walk the world as the right hand of a rebellious reacher.
•
— In the namings, in the scrawling serpentine in the dust, we cursed our sylphs, in ash and in the passion of blood, but we survived. We settled the chaotic world with stories, planted seeds of ideas, irrigated them, toiled in the fields; it was only our stories that sustained us, half-remembered myths of history, society, such steady things. We wrote our awareness as we tilled and killed, wrote ourselves into reality—or something that would pass for it at least. We chose a leader and, with a burning, turning sword, carved our own mark upon his godhead, that he at least should have solidity. And in return, he built a city for us, in this Land of Nod.
The reacher remembers something of that time. Though the world knew it as Sumer, the first citybuilders of the Vellum called their home the Land of Kien, naming it for the man who also gave his name to the quayin—the smiths, forgers of ancient times, in the linguage of the Habiru whose tents he sheltered in. The transformations of words: Ki-En becomes En-Ki; Enki becomes Enoch, son of Cain.
And he had a son, & he built a city & he named the city after his son.
•
The reacher turns upon the soldier.
— Readroamer, roaddreamer, do you know aware this city is within you? Do you know the secret kingdom is among you just awaiting to awake? There is a teller and a tale entold, unfolded here in this city and the walks that word it, if we read along the written roads, between the songlines of this dreamtome.
And finally, the soldier speaks, in the rough-hewn tongue of this small quarter:
— Then tell. If this city mirror of the soul be, neh, if this world shaped in the image of our thoughts, why then we ruled by it? Old man, why we be subjects?
And the reacher who once wore the name of Metatron, back when eternity was solid, thinks of the Duke now sitting on the throne of God, the one once known as Gabriel, gibbr-el, Great Spirit.
— You chose your angels and your god, he says. You wanted law and order and they gave it to you.
O, but we gave you so much more than that.
The Gates of the City
A million years of human mystery, of myth & history, I’ve left behind on my travails, unhindering my sylph of it, shedding reality in my return to dust. Now here, as I stand before the city gates, I feel I can discard the last of me. It seems quite… natural & necessary to abandon all the riches of my hoarded hopes, & enter here with nothing but my name to comfort me. Perhaps it’s only on the realisation of that readiness that we wanderers in the afterworld find ourselves before these gates. Per
haps not.
I take the Book of All Hours out from the leather satchel slung over my shoulder. All the maps & markings in its pages are irrelevant now, here, when there’s nowhere else to go. What use is it where time is twisted into space? But still, I hesitate.
•
They rise, these gates, over & across the road on limbs of stelae, two legs of four girders lashed by zigzag strutting, rivetted like bones of a skyscraper waiting to be finished off in glass & concrete, back when it’s still being built & workmen walk in hardhats high above the city, balanced & unafraid. The crossbar sign, painted with lettering that marks out lanes in unknown languages, has lights built into black bulks hung from it like rigging over a stage; & it is decorated, it seems, with all the articles of personal unspoken faiths that an infinity of refugees have left here on the threshold of the city. Lashed to its limbs are all those items clung to by the travellers during their journey on the road of all dust—the ragdolls, lockets, briefcases & biker jackets, mojo bags & rosaries, diamonte earrings & wire-rim spectacles, wedding rings & passports. Battered paperback books are wedged between the strutting, headscarves tied around the legs.
•
Carvings of ivory or wood, spearthrowers in the slender shape of a gazelle, or clay ushabti figures, plastic toys, are piled on the ground to either side like offerings before an altar. Framed photographs or enamel miniatures; knotted lengths of coloured string; leather lacings of feathers & beads; powdered wigs & false teeth; artificial limbs; palmtop computers & mobile phones; smooth plastic artefacts I have no understanding of—technology that came into the world after I left it, but that found its way here long before me simply because the pilgrim path is different for us all.
