by Duncan, Hal
He looks at us now as we flutter around him, understanding a little of what we know, we bitmites who built the city for him, for all of them, human & unkin, here at the end of time: that as matter is just the sleek dark skin of light curled up into a ball, so the city is only a graving inked upon the Vellum, shifting with the rippling of the muscles underneath that skin; that chaos is the flesh & bones of our reality, order a dead skin to be sloughed; that we have dwelt, in this afterworld, in the articulated grace & glory of a dark & hidden power, death or dream, this final wakening to life our godless, merciless & mortal, terrible & beautiful—
DOOM.
The Tower of Morning’s Bones
“Once upon a time, the land of Shuber and Hamazi,
Many tongued Sumer, the great Land of princeship’s divine laws,
Uri, the land having all that is appropriate,
The land Martu, resting in security,
The whole universe, the people in unison,
To Enlil, in one tongue gave praise."
— Samuel N. Kramer (trans.), Enmerkar and The Lord of Aratta
Daybreak in the Underworld
Adream, astream, a babe asleep, alone by babbalong of riveron, past shimmer falls & hinter springs, we finned a wolfchild in invernal wildwoods—where?
See there? we say.
A marblous youth carved out in white & green of mirrormoon & veins of vines: a singer slain. Muses & furies dance around him in an Amazon of maize. The winged horse of his sylph sups at the water lapping, slapping, at his feet. Flowers & leaves form almost a blankout over him.
What is his name? we quiz. If we could kissper it in his ear, he might arise out of the night, into the mourning.
Away, we scoff at our others.
A way? A—wait! He is awakening.
•
Opium smoke on Lethe water drifts, gold with the touch of day’s first light. A wake of shifting serpents in his streams slaps up a wash of water over this narcotic drowned in hyacinths & lotus petals. Ah, he thinks in slow stir, rousen in his slumber, ah, to be an angel in the arms of others, gifting freely the communion of the cock. And now, in a wakening to sounds of rhapsody & rapture, of a piper at the gates of dawn, the songliner stirs in laze, takes in a breath of haze, & yawns. He notices the song & knows, as the sound fades, it is only an echo of a shadow, a reflection of a memory.
•
The wake & wash of amber & umber dreams recede with slumber, dying embers of the night’s ephemera, drifting from the young man’s dazing thoughts. He opens his eyes to glimmerings of dawn, & draws himself out of his dreams as he draws down the linen sheet.
His naked skin beaded with sweat, raking his fingers thru his cornblond hair, he tries in vain to hold on to the flesh of flux of what he knows he’s dreamt. But, O, the song… it was a song so sweet that to remember it would cause too great a sorrow, too deep a yearning for return.
•
Bleary, blinking in the gloam of daybreak, the songliner rolls in bed to face his lovers, still asleep, serene—in their own forest streams of dreams perhaps. He misses the moment already, but… they say the greatest gift the god of wilderness & music ever gave to our trapped animal souls was to forget each time we hear that song in sleep.
But there are always echoes.
He slopes out from beneath the sheets & goes cold barefoot, slapping skin on wooden floor, & over warmer, rich-patterned, Prosian rug, to the window where the city waits for him to wake it, make it rise.
The Answerers for Your Sins
Elsewhere in darkness, at the foot of sheer & ragged cliffs, in rock & concrete, cracked & broken by the crashing of milkwater, scoured by swash of black basalt sand & bound, wound round by chains & wires threading thru his dead flesh & woven into stone, his shattered ribcage torn by twisted steel, impaled in his eternal agony, a thief of fire rages at his binding. If he would only rest, his chains would rust away, but he must rage against his fate. Some day, he swears, some day the gods will pay. Some day.
•
Within the caverns of a mountain, a crippled smith hammers out the artifices of eternity in gold & tin, in copper & bronze, his broken body wracked with pain with every blow. He builds himself anew, his legs of brass, his hand of silver, eyes of mirrored chrome, steel teeth & iron heart. In the dark & fiery cave of shadows & reflections, some day soon, some day, the shell of an adamantine god, armoured & articulated, will be complete. And coldly, dispassionately, he will begin to forge himself a soul. Some day.
•
Calloused bloody claws, the hands of a fallen king slap stone & push. His arms strain, & his muscles, veins & sinews, stressed, stand out in sharp relief as, step by step, he heaves the great rock higher up the mountain, rough rubble skree under his sliding feet all crunch & scatter at his slips & struggles. Throat rasped by his parched & soundless scream, he will not break, he knows, even as the rock tears from his grasp & rumbles crashing to the bottom of the slope. He will not break, he knows, as he begins the task again, not knowing that it’s only when he breaks that then his rage will lift the stone above his shoulders & carry it up to the gates of the eternal city itself. Some day.
•
Myth is a burning man of wooden soul, clay skin carved with crimes & reckonings, titanic, tartarean, godlike & all too human. We have manufactured, in & from your myths, symbolic shabtis, men of stone & answerers for your sins.
Call it a hell or a hades, a sheol or a kur, this modern altjerinca is the landscape of the damned. We have no choice in this, we bitmites of the afterworld, gifting you only what you want: order, meaning.
Outside the twilight & beyond the pale, on the other side of our distinctions, in the dark, there are no definitions, no edges, only the internal horizons of your senseless souls. There is, it seems, no forbidden realm so dark you cannot envision it as torment for the forces that you fear. We have no choice but to make that vision flesh. And yet, for all their exile from reality, these myths refuse to recognise defeat. Some day, they say. Some day.
The Time of Dawn
The songliner lays his hand on slits of shutters on the windows, & unslants them with one smooth motion, letting light slice in, a grey glimpse of gloaming still too dull to be considered dawn. He stretches up on tiptoe, limbers arms behind his head & out far to the side. He roars another yawn. Sensing its master’s motion, somewhere a system swishes on to gild the walls, the rug, the bed, the folds of sheets, the curves of sleeping lovers, & the desk (where dog-eared scraps of paper with phrases of Heraclitus writ on them jut out from between the pages of an old Plato’s Morphology), to gild all this with flickerings of subtle-hued subdued light, reflected & refracted, shimmering simulations of a fire’s life.
•
That night, he’d dreamt of fire. He had dreamt of all the spirits of the crossroads, down the ages, hoarding their legacy in the stone underfoot, in the lost songs of the river & the roads of dust that were their books. Beneath the temple of the tree, they sat in council, ancestors, judges, dynasties of deified dead. Yes. He’d dreamt of a magic lantern play of shadows on the wall of a cave—eleusian & elysian, illusions of elusion—and of premythean valkans of stone & metal, giants of the Raucasus & the high Shimalayas, builders of mountain kurgans, asleep in vast cavernous dreamtombs, under Eastralasia & Cyberia. Even as he was waking from—and yet still walking in—his own sleep, he was dreaming that these brahman also sleep but will a wake, that, in their sleep, they dream this world—this old, old world—a new.
•
Outside, in the first grey light, a forest of stone creatures rises round itself in shapes of shadow in the morning mist of cloud & fog that rolls in from the ocean out there in the inchoate. Ghosts of creatures form out of the roiling cloud: wormlike, softbodied, proto-vertebrate Pikaia of the Mid-Cambrian; Mixopterus kjaeri, sea-scorpion of the late Silurian with the spiny cage of its front limbs; late Devonian extinctions; charcoal wraiths out of the Carboniferous. Out the
re, it is the dawn of time. Out there, the unawoken city drifts in limbo, in the emptiness of a Mid-Permian super-continental desert, world of the trilobites with eyestacking all-round vision, & great Acadoparadoxides sacheri. Out there, it is the time of dawn, the dawn of time, as it is every morning in the city at the world’s end.
•
Fire. He had dreamt of fire: a fierce firmament in the deep structure of the afterworld, a flux of flash in an ocean system of eddies & currents, waves & tides, splashes & ripples, the simple quarternity of colour complexified into chiaroscuro. He’d dreamt the word anounciation, adjected into the void, watched it refracture into a whole language of light, of elemental primes, a whole kaleidoscope, the turmoilance of seasons turning, wheeling destiny & fortune, as painted in the sworls of blue & white over a cornfield.
The songliner shakes the last slumberings of sleep’s nonsense from his head, clears his throat. It is his work to summon a more solid world with song, to sing reality into existence. The last thing that he needs is more weird words to make the world still wilder.
The Carter & the Stone
Over the sleek slate colouring of cobbles, curved smooth but still lumpen, limps the cart, rattling its bone wheels thru the ruins of the city, bringing in the dead. Built not of wood but out of stone, of ossified bone, built from the great petrific trees that grow out in the wilderness of limbo in the desert outside the city, the cart is solid & moves slow, methodical, a cold-blooded lizard of a vehicle, a bone-built automaton drawn by a tame chimaera. The carter flicks the reins—hie!—halts at a junction, looks first left then right, then rolls on—hie-hup!—thru the dark streets.
•
He glances over his shoulder at the cargo of stone, of bones & dust, the rubble of abandoned paradises & infernos salvaged from derelict eternities of the illusion fields, the crumbling wastes where all those other cities of the dead have long since risen & fallen, these worlds that had seemed—to those who left their lives behind to walk the long road of the crows & cornfields—to offer Havens in the Hinter where a wanderer might find an everlasting home with other warriors of valour, other pious pilgrims, places of revelry or rapture. It seems, from the wilds the carter travels, that there have been, once far ago, for every wanderer on the road, a city made for them alone, a hall within that city & a table in that hall where sits an empty chair, at the right hand of their divinity, waiting for them alone.
•
Even eternities die in time, collapse under their own weight. Glass flows from multicoloured windows, pouring down to mingle with the sands that scour the edges of these afterworlds. Souls sit in never-ending feasts slipped into drunken slumbers, & the echoes of the echoes of the laughter & the song reverberate on the stone walls, & the stone tables & the stone souls & the stone gods; but eventually even those echoes die.
And so they have come, they have all come, in the end, to this one city on the edge of everything, whether as refugees or relics: as souls still… active even though in their eternities they’ve long forgotten their original identity; or as souls long since surrendered to a dormant state, ossified & crumbling statues of themselves, splinters of bone, handfuls of dry red dust. So the carter travels out each night into the wilderness, to scavenge the soul cities for the stone, the sand, the lime, the constituents of the cement which holds this last great city of the dead together.
•
The chimaera creature switches its scorpion-sting from side to side, a lick of flame, a sword of fire. Scaleshimmers golden on its copper carapace where the fiery streetlights glint, its body speaks a language of its own, the articulation of its animal nature, lithe & powerful, muscles ribbed & rippling like the flanks of a horse, the shoulders of a cat. A beast of burden, unable to decipher all the civilisation around it, & in communion only with the sound & sweat, its great horned head belowers in threat or bondage, leonine mane framing a face androgynous, ambiguous like a virgin or a viper boy. It sniffs a snort of air, trying to scent something akin to its own sylph. A snort of steam comes from its nostrils, grey vapour blown into the mist of morning, dissipating into wisps. The very air that fills the streets, the carter thinks, might be the breath of such a beast.
The Beginning Breath
And as the singer, muezzin of myths, breathes in, breathes deep the air into his lungs & holds it, holds it to begin, the city stops, held in the moment. The wisping mists, caught in a sudden current, all align like smoke drawn back towards a smoker’s mouth, sucked back towards the source. If the carter & his beast were to follow the pale trail of time thru the streets they’d find the mouth of it all: unshuttered window in an old sandstone tenement in the Litan Quarter where the singer stands, in contrapposto crucifixion pose, his hands rested on the window frame, head slightly tilted, ribcage stretched, caught in the tension between muscles intercostal & extracostal, & lowered diaphragm. Breath fills the lungs that wing the singer’s heart. The city stops.
•
Elsewhere, elsewhen, a boy walks up onto a stage, surrounded by his family & friends, watched over by a priest, to read—to sing—from scripture, sing that today he is a man. He fills his lungs, with air & with fear, & touches a trembling finger on the script of arcane letters brought thru millennia of Empyre’s seasons, knowing that this moment in his life is shared with countless other young men.
On another stage, an actor pauses in his soliloquy, holding the moment for effect, letting his audience feel the tension, the anticipation of release.
•
Elsewhere, elsewhen, a priest enters the holiest of holies on the day allotted to an annual act of ritual recitation. He leaves behind him all the pomp & ceremony of the others, of his father & his brothers, as he walks alone behind the final veil to stand before the gilded chest, its solid secrets shielded by the great winged cherubim that face each other from either end. He is there to speak the secret name of God, an act forbidden but for this one moment, this one day in every year when God is to be called, the covenant remade, the world begun again. He feels the weight of his responsibility & the pride of it, in his dry mouth, in his cracked throat, & in his chest.
•
And as the singer sings a crystal note, beginning in wordless purity, elsewhere, elsewhen: the boy sings out the death of childhood & the birth of manhood; the priest invokes his hidden & formless deity, naming it, & thereby binding it into reality, into the world, into his world; & another priest, elsewhere, elsewhen, opens the mouth of his dead desiccated lord &, thru a curving pipe, blows breath into the dry lungs of the mummy, as the ceremony calls for, all the while thinking of the old tale, how the creator was himself created, how Ptah, the potter god, emerged out of the primal chaos, conceiving the great god Atum within his heart, & bringing him forth upon his tongue in the speaking of his Name.
In the back of his cart, the carter watches dust, raised in the rattling judder of wheels over cobbles, caught by the faint, distant vibration in the air, dancing.
The Architect of the Tower
The tower rises out of & over the old city’s sandstone streets, an obelisk in steel & silver sheen, mirroring the sky it scrapes, yet somehow, also, in the way the first light of the morning slices off its surfaces, seeming also to imprison darkness somewhere deep inside. Behind the modernism of its glass fa軋de, something in its structure suggests the same vision, the same voice, the same vast & ancient purpose as stands, still & solid, in all the monoliths of all millennia, its inner mysteries the silent architecture of a monotheist creation. And here, in the city on the edge of time, it is a singularity within a singularity, a monad in Monopolis.
But now, here, in the moment of time’s dawn, for all its still solidity a slight sound breaks the silence, a hum, a buzz. A resonance.
•
It is said, in the rumours that run rife among the babble of rabble in this city’s streets, that the architect who designed its geometric abstractions to seem this transcendent, so very absolute, is himself still studying it. L
ong ago, & of his own volition, so they say, he entered into his construction &, as he wandered, following the Fibonacci constants in the volutions of the inner corridors, he ceased in a way to see himself as separate from it; now, so the story says, he’s long since disappeared into its intricacies, spotted now & again across the abyss of its vast atrium, here or there, crouched on a ledge like some lost gargoyle born of it. Some say they’ve seen his face in stone reliefs, heard an echo of his voice in the acoustics of a hall.
•
This is the crux, perhaps: that his intent in its construction was that the building & what is beyond it should seem bounded by & binding each other, just as the world & the will of any creator are bound & bind. And so in his design he sought to capture the complexity of the relationship between creator & creation, describing it completely & consistently. It was only as the tower rose, however, manifest in steel & concrete, glass & plaster, light & matter, that he began to understand the resonances of its form. So, as he walked the curves of corridors, the reiterations of room, the shapes & spaces of it, tracing out its meanings with his feet, what he read in what he’d wrought was an intension, an internal tension, which tore the whole idea of creation as an act apart within his head, which spoke of the will & the world in a language as liquid & turbulent as the tower was solid & still. So he walks within it still, still designing it, redesigning it in his head. Sometimes, in the night, they say, when no one else is looking, walls shift & rooms realign, reflecting his schematics.
