The Black Dream

by Col Buchanan

  Low to the west, one of the moons hung like a lantern as it dropped away from the approach of day. Its light struck a few weary lookouts stationed at the rail of the foredeck watching ahead, and the shadowy form of the pilot far back on the quarterdeck, standing slouched over the wheel with the red coals of his pipe glowing dimly. Above the deck’s stillness, the great gas loft of silk rippled and snapped in the wind, sheathed in a fine netting of ropes and struts of wood. The only thing holding them up; a miracle of faith as much as invention.

  Wrapped in a heavy cloak, Ash sat cross-legged on the foredeck of the Falcon in his early-morning meditation, thinking of nothing as he mindfully observed the inflow and outflow of his deep breathing, both his belly and chest slowly rising and falling. His right hand lay cradled in the left one and his eyes stayed opened as slits, just enough to allow the light of the remaining fading stars to enter his mind.

  Just then it came to him, in that way in which revelations revealed themselves during moments of stillness: he was sitting on the very spot where Nico too had once squatted in meditation, when Ash had first tried to teach him how to be still during their flight to Cheem, not so long ago.

  ‘What’s the point of all this?’ came the young man’s voice from the past, and Ash opened his eyes a fraction further to stare down at the stained wooden planking of the deck before him, as though it still contained a trace of his apprentice.

  ‘A mind that is forever busy is sick. A mind that is still flows with the Dao. When you flow with the Dao, you act in accordance with all things. This is what the Great Fool teaches us.’

  The boy had tried to sit as instructed, attentively and without moving, though it had clearly proven an effort for him, even for the first five minutes. His nose had twitched with an itch. His thumbs had fiddled in his lap. When the ship’s bell had rung out Ash had taken pity on him, sensing the turmoil of his inner boredom.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Calm,’ Nico had replied, nodding with gravitas. ‘Very still.’

  Ash’s eyes had lit with humour. Once more he had been reminded of his lost son.

  The ship’s bell was ringing out again in the present moment, calling the turning of the hour. Taking it as a sign, the farlander bowed his head as he made the gesture of sami then rose to his feet, his lower back suddenly protesting.

  A few coughs sounded from beneath the decking, the odd clattering of boots; crewmen stirring for their shifts down below. The farlander sniffed and wrapped the cloak tighter about himself. It was the fading moonlight that drew him to the starboard rail, where one of the lookouts straightened from an eyeglass mounted there, that old invention from his native Honshu.

  ‘You mind?’ Ash asked him with a nod to the glass.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  The lone moon was close to the horizon now, a pale blue orb cupped in darkness. The Sister of Longing, many called her in the Midèrēs. Squinting, Ash adjusted the focus until the moon shone full and clear in the eyepiece, trembling a little as though he held it in his hand.

  In marvellous clarity the small world filled his eye. White clouds wrapped the moon hanging there in the sky of Erēs, clouds gathering into the swirl of an equatorial storm. Cracks and pools of brilliant blue shone through from the ocean below them, seemed to reflect against a halo of light that girded the entire globe.

  With his usual boyish fascination, Ash’s gaze flickered to the black sliver of shadow cupping the moon, where in the past, if conditions were just right, he had sometimes been able to spot the lights.

  Hard to see though in the increasing auroral glow of the coming sunrise. He looked partly away from the darkened side. Glimpsed two dim dots of white light in his peripheral vision.

  Once as a boy Ash had counted five of those tell-tale pinpricks on the moon’s nearly complete shadow, peering through an eyeglass owned by Semo, the ancient monk of his village, who had taken pleasure in showing the marvels of the night sky to anyone with interest. There were even more lights than that, old Semo had told them; though the monk had merely shrugged with a smile when they asked him what they were. Who knows?

  Amazing to think what they might be. Signs of intelligent life even, as Ash sometimes believed; cities beyond his imagining, shining into the night like the gas-lit Mannian capital of Q’os from the air.

  Or nothing more than lakes covered with ice and containing glowing algae, as some tried to claim, or crystal mountains which captured the daylight only to emit it again by night, or the perpetually burning fires of volcanoes.

  Who knows?

  It was growing noticeably brighter now as the sun rose and spilled across the eastern horizon. Below the prow of the ship the highlands rolled onwards, snowy hills sweeping as far as he could see, like white flames bent over by the wind. To the south, somewhere beyond them, lay the beginnings of the Great Hush, a largely uncharted continent where they would find the rift valley known as the Edge, home of the kree.

  Footsteps beside him, stirring Ash from his musings. It was the longhunter himself stepping up to the rail. Cole rested his mug of chee on the rail while the cat settled down between them, then he nodded a greeting, something curious in his stare as he studied Ash.

  The moon was vanishing now in the flourishing light, early bird-song rising from the hills below. Ash squinted, seeing smoke hanging in the air ahead. Thinking to see a native camp, he took a look through the eyeglass and frowned in puzzlement.

  There seemed to be animals running around on fire down there, trailing ribbons of black smoke.

  ‘Fire elk,’ the longhunter Cole declared from the scope of the neighbouring lookout position.

  ‘Yes, I have heard of them.’

  ‘Look closer. You see the two bulls clashing on that island of rock?’

  Ash peered hard through the lens, discerning more detail the longer he looked. On the rocky crest of a hill, two stags were locking antlers which flamed and smoked above their heads.

  ‘Those two will have been fighting all night in the moonlight. Their antlers cause sparks whenever they strike together. When the antlers are chipped in a fight and a flake comes away, the exposed bone is oily and flammable. A single spark and it’s burning.’

  ‘Yes, I can see. Magnificent!’

  ‘You should see it in full darkness, close enough to hear the cracks and crackles. Nothing like it.’

  Ash whistled through his teeth while Cole poked a thin roll-up into his mouth. Something sparked in his hand and he held up a flame to light it. A metal lighter, Ash saw.

  ‘Look, over there.’ Cole gestured with his mug to another column of smoke rising to the west, a column that blew towards them and obscured whatever lay below. ‘Fort Hunger, you see it?’

  ‘I see something.’

  ‘Wildest town in the world. Base camp for every expedition going to the Edge. A big trading hub for the natives too. Lots of Blackscar and Brave Ones strutting around.’ The longhunter tapped the rail lightly as though in regret, then smiled down at the cat. ‘Not today, eh?’

  ‘You like this work, Cole? Longhunting, I mean?’

  ‘I like to ride.’

  Ash thought the man was joking, but Cole’s expression remained the same.

  ‘It seems poor country for it.’

  ‘Wait until we’re in the Hush. There isn’t open country in all the Midèrēs that comes close to it.’ And as he spoke, the man gazed south as though his salvation lay that way.

  ‘Those kree warrens though . . .’

  A muscle right under the longhunter’s eye flinched. Cole inhaled and looked out at the brightening sky, filling his lungs deep like a man who knows what it is to drown. During the crossing of the mountains he had spent little time in his cramped cabin below decks, even during the worst of the storm, preferring instead to stay up above where he was confined by nothing. A man who sought open spaces.

  ‘Seems dangerous, doing it on your own.’

  ‘It’s dangerous whatever way you cut it. As dangerous as your own
line of work, I’d imagine.’

  Inwardly, it was Ash’s turn to flinch.

  ‘Who told you, Meer?’

  ‘No, your friend Kosh, last night when he was drinking. That’s some line of work you’re in, since we’re on the subject. You people are Rōshun?’

  ‘That is something I cannot speak about.’

  ‘What, killing people for money?’

  ‘There is a little more to it than that.’

  ‘You mean, how you kill people because you like it?’

  Ash frowned in puzzlement.

  ‘Kosh mentioned how they call you inshasha in your order, king killer. How you like to wage vendetta against people who rule over others. How you like to kill kings and god emperors most of all.’

  Harder still the farlander chewed the dulce leaves in his mouth, his breath visible in the cold air, spurting faster now from his nostrils. The juice was rushing to his head this morning, loosening his tongue and provoking memories of a different life, a different person from the one standing here now.

  He found himself trying to resist the effects, and then he wondered why.

  Relax, Ash told himself. Soon you will be gone from all of this, and then what will be left of you but your presence in the minds of others?

  ‘Let me tell you of one day lived beneath the heel of the overlords back in my homeland. Perhaps then, you will understand what we speak of now.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I come from a mountainous region in northern Honshu, as does your new best friend Kosh. I was fourteen when the soldiers of the overlords’ Coalition came to our mountain village. The overlords had sent them into the highlands to pacify a rebellion simmering further to the south, but on the way through they were making an example of every village they passed, peaceful or otherwise.

  ‘When they stopped in our village they raided the meat cellars and the local drinking house for liquor. Their officers became drunk, while outside on the road some of their soldiers forced the village men to erect a new . . . how do I say it? A Law Pole, right where the old one had been burned down.’ Ash paused, grasping for a better description. ‘Think of a column of stained tiq, carved with the images of the overlords and with the laws and castes set below them, and everything that is outlawed at the very bottom. One of the men . . . when they were finished, the soldiers dashed his skull in against the pole, as a random punishment for the destruction of the old one. My cousin, married only a week.

  ‘When the people saw what had happened they started to protest. Wives had to stop their husbands from picking up what weapons they had. But we were outnumbered and surrounded. With impunity the soldiers began to round up the village zels, and whatever young men they could find for conscription, even the boys.

  ‘They were lowlanders, most of them, though I hardly understood it at the time. Worshippers of a newly inspired god that was both King and Judge of a rigid caste system, which happened to place us somewhere near the bottom. While we highlanders followed the Way, treating each other as brethren. They hated our kind, thought we were dogs and vermin, and that day they made it clear to us. Fathers were kicked out of the way. Weeping mothers too. Old Semo the village monk tried to intercede on behalf of the youngest ones they were trying to conscript. He called out for mercy. At first he used words and gestures. When they shoved him away, he grabbed out at the arm of one of the soldiers. That was all it took. They beat the monk to the ground with their batons and they kept on beating him, even as he sat there with his hands over his head and the men of the village shouting for them to stop, my father even, who was near blind by then, who rarely even left his bed.

  ‘I liked old Semo. We all did. He had been kind to me over the years, not like the village monk before him. Kinder than my own father ever was. When the soldiers came for me too, I ran around them and joined the monk where he knelt on the ground, and threw my arms over his head to protect him from the blows. My two younger brothers rushed over to join me. There we huddled together, taking the blows. My head was split open. I heard my brother’s arm snap. Old Semo’s face was covered in blood. The few teeth he had were bared under his arm like he was riding out a gale.

  ‘And then more soldiers gathered round us in a mob, and they took their time with us. They joked to each other, and with us, even as they struck and kicked out. They enjoyed it. That was the worse thing of all. They got pleasure from what they were doing, from breaking the bones of an old monk and a few boys. I can still remember the stink of them. The scuff of their boots before my face. The chalky lines of grit on the ground from their soles. They were raining sweat on us. Spitting on us. Old Semo tried to put his own arms over our heads but they were both broken by then. I saw death in his eyes, a man who knew he was about to die.

  ‘It was the first time I had ever felt real terror. The first and last time I ever allowed myself to feel it. Too much for a young mind to take in. Too real. When the terror passed all I felt was numbness inside, and the blows of the beating that went on for so long that the numbness grew into a kind of boredom, an impatience for it to be over with. My lips were busted open. My scalp hung in a flap over my ear. The soldiers were shouting. The villagers were shouting. I blinked through the legs around me, saw my father taking them on blindly with his fists. They were carrying my sister Lodi away, carrying her like she was nothing but captured prey.

  ‘But I was gone by then. I just sat there while I felt someone prise an arm away. And then I glimpsed an officer leaning over us with a butcher’s knife, working away with it casually, like he was cutting through a steak. But he was cutting through the monk’s neck, even as Semo was still blinking and gasping with life. The blade was halfway through his neck. The scent of his blood was on my tongue. I could taste it. I didn’t believe what I was seeing. The soldiers were still joking as though nothing was happening. I watched the officer cut off his head and lift it up to them. I looked over the ravaged stump and met the eyes of my brothers Alosh and Grin. They were crying like I’d never seen them cry before. We all were, the whole village.

  ‘After that my brothers were spared because of their broken arms, and I was taken instead as a conscript in their army. I was enslaved, is the truth of it. For the next three years they tried to break me down so I would become what they wanted of me, a monster without compassion, and in this they almost succeeded. I will not speak of that time.

  ‘But I escaped, eventually. I made my way back to my family, and found that they had raped my sister that day, and that later she had taken her own life, and my father too was long gone. When I finally joined the revolution to overthrow the overlords, I was willing to give my life for the cause. With all the justice in the world on our side, I did not believe we could be beaten. Yet here I am.’

  ‘And so they call you inshasha,’ Cole breathed in the cold air.

  Ash stared at him with eyes aflame.

  ‘Because sometimes, when I rid the world of one more bloody tyrant, one more oppressor, it feels good right down in my bones.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Great Hush

  In a layer of wind they flew southwards off the highlands and out across the open plains of the Great Hush, with the ship’s tubes burning brightly the entire way.

  As the days rolled on the sun arched noticeably higher in the sky, and soon the air grew warm enough for crewmen and passengers to remove the heaviest of their cold weather gear, so that they worked and lounged in open shirts even as their moods grew more sullen. Colourful bandanas and wide-brimmed hats became common sights, along with sungoggles to shield the eyes from the glare.

  Ever vigilant, the lookouts watched the plains of the Great Hush rolling below, where the shadow of the Falcon wriggled across endless corrugations of land sporting herds of bison, zels and other creatures they had never seen before, causing bickering over their correct names.

  The strange boli trees of the region could be seen everywhere in small isolated stands upon the crowns of hillocks; thick trunks supporting upturned p
alms of branches fingering skywards. Some stands of boli trees were covered in umber leaves with undersides of silver, so that in sudden gusts they reminded the watcher of sunshine cast across water, but other stands were even more remarkable than that, for their crowns were aflame and smoking like clusters of candles. A natural occurrence, the longhunter Cole explained to them. Shedding their ageing leaves through fire.

  All of this, yet still no sign of the kree.

  If nothing else, Ash had expected the Great Hush to have been quiet. Yet birds screeched and flapped as they always do. Animals bellowed and roared and chattered with abandon.

  Perhaps on the ground it might have been a different story, where contours and range would stretch out these noises into unexpected eruptions of an otherwise quiet day, but up here, flying across it all at a tremendous clip, the sounds came varied and often enough that they were a constant backdrop to their journey.

  Cole had smiled when Ash had voiced these observations aloud, how noisy it all was in the Great Hush.

  ‘Wait until we get closer to the Edge,’ the longhunter had replied, with a crazy glint in his eye.

  All the while, through the lengthening days and the shortening nights, the Falcon’s tubes roared on full thrust so that the sound was always in their ears too, leaving behind the ship an inky trail that smeared across the sky in the high winds; the Falcon eating the laqs as fast as she must have been eating through her supplies of white powder.

  They crossed a vast marshland submerged in a recent flood, where lines of animals trekked across the silvery waters. Later came a desert surrounded by a crescent of mountains shining brightly in the sun; peaks which glowed brightly behind them by night. Crystal mountains, Cole had explained, reminding Ash of the lights on the moon again, how some claimed they were only a phenomenon such as this one.

  After that they passed on into grasslands where the herds appeared less in size and regularity than before, the land emptier, almost desolate. The land of the kree proper.