by Duncan, Hal
Puck leans against one of the posts, watching with worry, knowing I am to leave him here. But surely it’s right; all wanderers must enter the eternal city on their own, a childe come to the dark tower thru a land wounded & wild.
•
I kneel before one pile of grave goods, add my own lot to it, emptying my pockets of a set of keys, a silver fob-watch & a cigarette case. Ah yes. If I have missed anything in all this time, it’s been the breath of smoke drawn deep into the lungs, that paradoxical moment where tension & relaxation meet in the chest. I have often imagined an old man in the shadows sparking up a Zippo, touching the flame to tip of an unfiltered fag & sucking in a narcotising breath, to let it out in creaky, fucked-up voice, thru straining glottis, saying it quiet, tight: Let there be light. And then breathing out the swirling plumes of smoke that are our world. An unrepentant nicotine fiend, my only prayer before this altar is that they have tobacco in the city of the dead.
As for the Book… It is not mine to leave, I tell myself, this stolen map scribed with the sigils of the souls passed on my way. I tell myself my purpose was to bring it here, return it to the city, restore it to its place. Yes.
But I know—as I step forward thru the gates, Book in my hands—this is a lie. I simply cling to it as a last scrap of certainty.
The Mark of Civilisation
— In time, the reacher says, our city came to be more solid as the people of the books forgot and sought to divine their lives in disciplined devotions, dialectic dogma, bind the world into arraignments of divisions in calendric context, into seasons, months and days. And hours. Like the books of hours of medieval monarchs, our texts were intricate annotations of reality, feaster holydays, allmasses noted in the margins, our instructions for a righteous life.
He rests on the steps of a basilica, the bitmite shadows swirling round his boots. The soldier leans against a balustrade & gazes round him at the gathering of rebels in the square, uneasy voices murmuring dissent. The reacher stands, walks up the steps & turns, framed in the arching entrance of grand gilded oaken doors.
— Time told us what to do, he says, and every hour of our lives was ordered.
•
The shadows rise in images all round the blind black lion of a man as he speaks. The soldier watches a city rising on the edge of fields of golden corn that stretch as far in one direction as the ocean in another. A pragmatist, he still holds on to what was taught him—bitmites as nanite marvels of technology rather than magic, as much artifice as artificer—but he’s less sure now than he once was. In the time that he’s walked with the reacher—first as hostile watchman, dubious of the heretic he’d been assigned, & later, gradually becoming his protector, resigning his commision in his heart without ever actually confronting his superiors—he has heard this speech many a time & wondered at the way the bitmites answer it with images. Now, as before, he sees the conjured wraiths of architects & draftsmen planning with rules & compasses, inscribing straight white laserlines on blueprint paper the colour of the royal night. He sees symbols carved in the foundation stones & stained with blood, arcane, archaic. He watches the measuring & binding of the world.
•
— We followed formal Faustian maps of metaphysics, diagrammars of the Litan language, made connections, made corrections, and made guesses based upon the illustrations wired within the manuscripts. These texts were written by the hand of God himself, they said, or at the dictate of His voice. His will.
The reacher shakes his dreadlocked head.
— Such words as hand and voice and will are words of power—they carve an image in our hearts—but let me tell you of this God. Yes, let me tell you of a graving, an enscryption cut into perception, a conception of inception… a deception.
•
Now an image rises up, a shadow of the blind old man himself, but faceless, giant, towering above them all. Long, wild & matted hair covers his body like a beast’s hide. Chained, he stands, not struggling but not broken in his stance, just waiting for the right time, for the hour. A firebrand symbol burned upon his forehead, indecipherable graving in a long-lost tongue, something like a star, with six points & a sigil at its centre.
— There were seven of us bound the primal theos, took his hand, his voice, his will.
We follow tracks of sorrow in the tears that soak into the reacher’s wrinkles. This is pain to him, the deep ache of a spirit torn apart, a broken heart, a broken mind. He is not half the man he once was. No. Only a seventh.
Into the Plaza of the Shadow of Truth
The pothealer gently, one by one, brushes the dust from the ceramic shards that lay upon his work table. He reads, mouths silently, translating in the back of his head the glyphs imprinted on them. Then, running a slender plastic ballpoint stylus carefully around the edge of each shard, he bonds them, one by one, into their place within an old creation myth:
… an egg of inconceivable size filled with darkness & chaos… conceived from chaos.… Fed by the darkness… amid the formless mass… rushed thru the chaos… smashed the hard black shell… clarity & light… obscured for so long poured out of the egg & rose… the sky… everything that was muddy & dark fell… that the light & the dark would not collapse into the chaos from whence… & so he supported the heavens with his head & held the earth… with his feet… each year passed… grew further apart… in his knowledge that the world was safe… he collapsed from exhaustion & began to die. His final breath became the wind & the clouds, his voice… thunder, his left eye… the sun & his right eye… the moon… He offered his body to the world & when he died he also gave birth to all life… P’an Ku…
The pothealer’s apprentice, rolls the cracked patchwork ceramic egg in his open palm, a puzzled frown on his face.
— What do the marks mean?
•
— Is order is emerge from chaos, embedded in the forms of world.
A bell tolls Evenfall, & the pothealer wraps the egg in rags of velvet, places it into an oaken furlined box, clicklocks the lid shut with the snick of a bronze clasp.
— Is time you were away, boy.
— I’m no boy no more. Nteen today.
— Beh! Go. Away now, off home to your maum and pau. Return tomorn and it may be I show you more… or I just get you watch the counter, eh? Away.
The apprentice walks back to the doorway, looks out to the city. His Nama’s told him many times her simple theory of the great collapse: we once were giants on the face of the earth, she says; our cities stood, stood still and mighty; but we fell, you see, my little life, and time fell with us, burning, into an endless cycle of returning to begin again. In the world that we had settled, in our towns and cities, in our nations, we could only watch as, in that first great flood of shadows, our reality was swept away and we were left and lost to live in one wide land of wandering, in a land of one great coastline, one great river flowing from one mountain to one sea, and one road of dust that stretched for all eternity. So we came; we came from every remnant of our broken world, to found this one great city and to find—[she runs her fingers thru his auburn hair]—to find our sylphs. It took us eternity to get here, and it took us all eternity to build the city, and we have been here, in the city, for eternity. You don’t remember, my little life, because you were too young. You will always be too young.
•
The apprentice shucks his apron, grabs his longcoat, steps into the streets & stops to gaze into the window opposite, an old watchmaker’s abandoned shop wherein his clockwork model of the wheels of time still turns in seemingly perpetual motion. The proprieter disappeared some time ago, leaving behind him mystery & speculation… & a legacy of debts. The local legislature cried him Dues Absconder, struck his name & face from all accounts & ledgers of the district. But in the window of his untended shop, magnificent mechanics still go on.
The next shop down as the apprentice walks his way, the cartograver etches charts into elliptic copper p
lates with wax & ink & acid, prints them on rough newsheet paper, hangs them in his dark backroom to dry. He advertises them, in a hanging sign beside the door, as no mere Maps but, aye, Morphologies not only of the World but of the Will, aye, of the Mind as well. The Maps of All Halls, the Keys of All Havens, with such Works a Wanderer in the Streets of Souls might seek to know their very Involutions, reading in them not Proescriptions of what Is but rather the Discryption of what Might Be if one is willing to delve Deep into the ever-finer Details of Design. With such Charts, Lost Souls & Childhoods might be found.
The pothealer’s apprentice has no need of them, prefers to follow his own instincts, make his own path thru the whorled. He goes on.
•
He walks down the tarmacobbled streets, carefully not stepping on the crackweeds in the idle game of kids; he splashes the black of bitmites that is puddling already in the gutter, shakes them from his boots & carries on along a ways. Out onto the strazas & the plazas, walks he; kicking his heels & whistling, walks he; wheeling a corner, turning, under an arch between two buildings, & he comes into the plaza of the shadow of truth, where all the rebel crowd is standing.
— There is no must, the old blind man is saying. Words carved in whatever tongue, whatother medium, visual or aural, flow thru those media and are formed in flux. We try to talk of words in words, in this city of the Word, but meaning is not content alone; it has its import and its purpose also. There is no release from flesh of context; even the bitmites, even these artefacts of mechanistic metalanguage, artificers in the shadows, never free themselves from their own actuality to fly in thoughtspace as pure ideas. Definitions are the limitations of our words, proescriptions of descryptions.
— We must abandon them.
The Macromimicon
And, as the soldier gazes out over the crowd, looking at the curious faces of traders & craftsmen, sandminers with their scoured lines of rough skin, goggles on their foreheads, merchants in lush robes of scarlet & purple, dreampanderers in wide-brimmed hats with feathers, the pothealer boy with ochre clay smeared on his cheeks, & as he notes a stranger on the margins of the crowd—an obvious new arrival in the city given the red dust on his longcoat & the ragging of his hair & beard, a leather satchel thrown over his shoulder—as he searches the crowd for any signs of deeper scrutiny, of threat… the vision built up by the bitmites dissipates in black dust blowing in the evening’s breath.
•
The rebels wait. The old man bows his head, & slow, methodical, he reaches deep inside the leather of his coat, revealing skin made of the same thick leather, &, with fingernail prising a wrinkle to become a fold, finding an edge, a corner, he opens up his very self & reaches within, to deep inside his chest where vortices of shadows wheel; & he brings out a thing bound in the same black leather as his clothes, his face, his chest, & holds it up before them open. A book but not a book, a machine bound in leather, dark glass facing black keys where the pages should be, signs dancing across the screen. Green electric ink in the darkness.
•
— We bound the word into the flesh, into the world, to be our anchor, and we bind ourselves to it thru all the books of law, the tablets of our destinies. We studied and we made a science that inscribed us, mapped the ways that we use language, planned the ways that we make sense of word and world. The dynamics of our reckoning was ordered into formulae of mechanics, driven by imperiative rules that must not be challenged, so they tell us, all our judges and our lords. We have built a city, Empyre in our own souls, and bound ourselves into the pages of our books.
•
He shakes his head.
— I speak, he says, in a song both strange and simple, speak in rhythms, not in rules; the world will not be weighed with logic but instead demands to be spoken of with the warm fluidity of the golden, the precise lucidity of blue.
— I say there is a book, infinite in finity, that is the tome of all that ever or never was or will be symbolised in word or image by a human hand; inscribed in the living liquid language of the bitmite builders of this world, a holograph of hieroglyphs, it is a book of sacred secrets far beyond the mere genericons of moral tales, illustriations of bible stories and saintly sermonies composed for rich dukes and grand dons of this medieval world. It is the Book of All Hours… the very image of the macrocosm. It is the Macromimicon, and it is lost.
— But every book has copies, he says.
He opens it & passes it to the soldier, saying: Read.
The Clash of Symbols
And as I stand there, watching the strange prophet with his spearcarrier, catching the gaze of that grizzled military attendant at one point & seeing in it a hawkish intensity that speaks of dangers I know nothing of, I wonder what I’ve wandered into. After the wilds of the Illusion Fields, the dream-time sandscape of stone trees & whispering streams, the city is electric. The cacophony of the crowd is loud around me, filled with jumbled words I don’t understand. A clash of symbols. I wonder how stable this city of souls can be, how tenuous is that stability?
— The Macromimicon, the soldier reads aloud from the palmtop, is a freeform text composed of only the simplest, most basic wyrds and imagos but constructed so that the meaning of those symbols, the relationshifts of context and subtext, is fractal, infinitely deep and always apt to the reader’s randomly enquiring opening, apt and oracular with momentous precession. The genericons of tribes we form around, as fragments of this hologram, contain the whole implicit, but with only a single point of perspective in perfect focus, the rest vague if not distorted. The Macromimicon in contrast is the very map and key of Haven and Hall.
I hold the Book tight to my chest.
•
— Such genericons—the Toran, the Babel, the Korah—both revise and refuse their antecedant texts, seeking to express anew, clear and precise, the essence of the absolute that underlies existence, the Infinite Will that shapes the deus, the houri and the minutia; but each are mere translations of a single page of the Macromimicon, its golden leaves torn apart, crumpled and blown across the world. Still, each contains the whole implicit. Every book carries the Book of All Hours inside, seed of itself. This book is every book and every book this one, and in the reading of it empires, revolutions, rise or fall.
The reacher turns his blind gaze on the crowd & seems to scan it, seems to find me in it. It is a gaze that asks me questions I’ve no answer for. Who are you? Why are you here?
I feel a sudden panic, a swift urge to leave this plaza where the blind lion & the soldier hawk gather the curiosity of the city’s everymen. I feel a sense of something shifting in the twilight. In the gloaming there is a transition taking place. The fading light of early evening is still gold but all the shadows now are long & streetlights swish on down the roads that run from here, a deeper orange, volcanic. The strange dark smoke that billows round my feet sparks off a buried memory of burning, oilfields or oilcans, warzones & the homeless huddled underneath an overpass.
— All empires fall, the soldier reads. So the Eternal Empyre is forever falling.
•
And the reacher calls:
— We sweep our arms out, pointing, saying this and that, and sweep them wider to infinity and all. And for all this, we stand still on the point of here and now, precise and lucid moment of our golden fall. The Book of All Hours cannot be bound.
And something flits across the sky, a glimpse of scales or feathers, or of steel.
The pothealer’s apprentice scents the power on the air & breaths it deep to fill his lungs. The mass & shifting energies of the mob are gathering in the square. The bitmites flow across the marble tesselations underfoot & cractures move from symmetry to symmetry, complexifying by the tick & tock of the cathedral clock high overhead. He spots another bright thing moving on a rooftop & a man beside him points a finger.
— Out of a core of chaos came us, and into that core we will return, the soldier reads.
— Look.
He looks up, warning on his face.
A bell tolls Evenfall.
•
The reacher says:
— This is the shell of things! The slow, the cool, the dry of dust!
He spits the words, oblivious to the soldier’s hand upon his arm, the whisper in his ear.
Tranced by the sound of fury, the apprentice shoves thru, into the crowd, into the thick of things. Under his feet, pentagonal & pentacular marbled tiles spread out irregular & asymmetric, bluegreens veining them, impulsing, seeming alive. More voices now, rising in panic at the slightest sight. Something is coming.
It is the dusk. It is the break of night, & the apprentice raises up his head to it. Gold flashes on the rooftops & the black blood of the bitmites flows within the city’s veins. He brushes past that ragged man of dust, bearded & wild, a dusty book clutched to his chest. The man looks at him, gapes.
— You? he says.
He looks at the apprentice, at his book, the lad again.
— What are you doing here? I thought…?
And then the man is only looking up & past him.
A bell tolls Evenfall.
Dissent into Hail
