by Robert Reed
A team of workmen bearing hammers and chisels enlarged the old room, with the compliments of the local Archon. An oval hole has been cut through the thick brown bark, and two sheets of transparent coral glass have been set inside the new window, tiny bars of the best steel lending strength to that very expensive indulgence.
The three children play near the window. Seldom likes board games with complicated rules that he knows better than anyone else. Elata is fond of puzzles and reading stories. “No better friends could exist,” Haddi often tells him. Diamond understands comfort and happiness when just the three of them are sharing his fine new room. He likes his classmates and always tries to be pleasant, getting along with them and everyone else too. But sometimes Diamond’s hand makes a foolish move before letting go of the wooden disc or the coral warship. His turn is over and those are the rules, except he hears himself asking Seldom for a second chance. He’ll claim that he didn’t mean to do what he did or he doesn’t understand the rules yet. His complaining doesn’t sound like complaining, and he has a big smile, and if Seldom ever says, “No,” then the matter will end. But Seldom never tells Diamond, “No. Now it’s my turn.” He always lets his friend pull the piece back, and sometimes he even coaches by throwing his eyes in an important direction.
Seldom never gives Elata second chances, and noticing as much, she sits on her hands, saying nothing.
Sometimes Diamond complains while playing with the girl’s puzzles, using a tone that isn’t angry but isn’t nice either, convincing Elata maybe half of the time to give him what he wants.
Games are wrapped inside games, and Diamond wages these little battles just to win thin, unnamed prizes.
His attitudes are less subtle when a big group shares the landing. Bodies run and climb, balls flying and the guards standing safely to one side. Diamond invents a new flourish to the current game—something he can do better than anyone else. Explaining himself in a few words, he usually wins allies and believers. But sometimes the other children don’t want to play that way. One or two of them might even insult their host, claiming he isn’t being fair. There have been days when this good boy with his strange life and his various mysteries will walk up to the guards and ask politely that so-and-so be sent home now, and if they can’t learn how to play nicely, maybe that name should be sliced off the friends-list.
Small moments like these are always noticed.
Children and the guards see them. It’s possible to find an alarming trend at work. Or maybe underneath the oddness, he is an ordinary, immature boy.
But people are watching.
Marduk is one tree hanging inside a vast forest. Every tree is covered with apartments and windows, and there are people wielding telescopes, staring at this one house with the corona on the curtain and the boy that nobody can explain. Even indoors, playing with his two great friends, several sets of eyes are fixed Diamond, reading lips and guessing his thoughts. Then night rises and the household falls asleep, and peering into the darkness, magnifying the last glows of lights and candles, these same watchers study the prize as it settles into sleep and dreams.
Every soldier wears a name and a rich life full of exploits that the boy can summon at will. Every soldier has died multiple times, always as a hero, and Diamond sits on the varnished blackwood floor with those gangly legs trying to make a knot, stunted toes curling as he talks, replaying the killing blows from swords and bullets and arrows and gigantic bombs. He doesn’t remember every game played—his mind isn’t that relentless. But death should be memorable and tens of thousands of good deaths beg to be shared, and it is easy to forget that even best friends don’t have feelings for chips of wood and these elaborate stories.
Elata bores first, and she’s first to complain.
“Let’s do something more, anything else,” she says. “Or we can do nothing, maybe. Nothing can be fun too, if you do it right.”
Seldom wants to be patient, and where he can, he wants to uncover whatever proves fun. Nobody in the world has such a friend, and sitting in this one room, feeling bored, is an honor that can’t just be thrown away. So he listens to the soldiers’ names and the battle names. Seldom is smart but doesn’t wield this kind of memory. When he concentrates, the play-fight becomes crisp loud images living inside his head, and with a boy’s instinct for violence and heroism, he listens as Diamond moves hundreds of men across a complicated landscape that doesn’t resemble any part of the world.
Nobody else has the honor to be bored and mesmerized in exactly this way.
One day, listening to the history of a pretend war fought five hundred days ago, a good new thought finds Seldom:
Diamond is a puzzle.
Their friend is huge and intricate and maybe without answers, and those various puzzle parts are set inside a human-shaped box.
They are talking to a box, and the box talks to them.
Except now Elata and Seldom and the box are snacking on finger-dabs, and thirty-seven soldiers have been charged with defending a fortress built from armor and white light.
The enemy is a monstrous giant marching its way up the long hill.
“What does that mean?” asks Elata. “What is a hill?”
She is interested, but only a little bit.
Diamond stops talking. He doesn’t want to stop, but he can’t let the question go unanswered. “ ‘Hill’ is a papio word. The ground of the world rises to one high point.”
But that’s not quite how the papio use it.
Elata squints. “What, like on the reef? At the edge of the world?”
Diamond pauses, considering.
“That’s where this is, on the reef,” says Seldom, and he bends forward, wanting the story to continue.
But Diamond says, “No, it isn’t on the reef. I’m talking about a different hill.”
Seldom is wrong, which makes him uncomfortable.
Diamond uses hands and words to describe what he imagines—a cone resting on a flat surface. There are few trees in this place and they grow in the wrong direction, rising up instead of dangling down. And the cone is a tall important place on this impossible terrain, and so it must be defended to the last man.
“I don’t understand,” Elata complains.
Seldom doesn’t understand either. But he won’t say it.
“Did you imagine this after our visit to the reef?” Elata asks.
Diamond shakes his head. “This game was from before. This is one of the first big battles that I ever thought up.”
“It’s just a game,” Seldom says.
Elata shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
The three of them sit quietly, each working with the problem.
“I’ve asked this already,” says Elata. “But what do you remember from before? Before you were living with your folks and us, I mean.”
The boy closes his eyes.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Inside the corona,” she says.
Diamond shakes his head.
Then Seldom sees what has always wanted to be noticed. Leaning forward, he says, “The cone and fort . . . maybe they’re leftover from your life before . . . ”
Diamond thinks for a moment. “Maybe,” is all he can say.
“Maybe you were a soldier once,” Elata says, “and you battled the monsters in the same way.”
“I don’t think so,” Diamond says.
The day is getting old. The evening meal is coming, and two of them will have to hurry home.
“But your memory is so good,” Seldom says. “How can you forget everything from before?”
“Maybe there wasn’t any ‘before,’ ” Elata says.
“I don’t know how long I was inside the corona,” Diamond says.
The finger-dabs have made Seldom hungry. He stands and waits for Elata to stand, ready to walk out together.
But she doesn’t get up.
“I don’t think you were a soldier either,” she says.
“You said he was,” Seldom
says.
“I was wrong,” she says. “He was just a baby, and the game came with him from somewhere else.”
She gets up, and Seldom moves toward the door.
“Monsters,” she says.
The boys look at her, each with a serious face.
“I hope your monsters don’t come here looking for you,” she says.
Then both friends hurry out the room’s door and the house’s door, past the waiting guards, running hard and not just because their stomachs are complaining.
Dream has a longer reach than memory.
The boy sleeps, putting him in a realm where the ordinary dances with the fantastic. This is the nature of dream. But there are faces that he sees while he sleeps—reliable, familiar faces—that look so much like his face. The same few voices whisper to him and sing to him in a dense quick language that has never been heard in this Creation. Yet Diamond understands every word. He must understand them because when they talk, he laughs, and then they talk again and he cries. Those known faces are smiling and weeping as they deliver some vital last instruction—shaking him to help him remember—and he tries hard to remember, pulling his limp body out of the sleep, back into the room that he knows better than any other.
Diamond is awake, and what did the dreams tell him?
Quite a lot, but all he remembers is the warm touch of familiar hands.
Good sleeps at his feet, chirping as his dreaming legs twitch. The boy sits up in bed, measuring the darkness, deciding that the night is in no mood to leave. Slipping out from under the sheets, he tiptoes through the bedroom and past the kitchen, entering the tiny closet where a polished coral bowl waits for his urine.
His pee smells different from other people’s pee.
Finished with the chore, he continues touring home, passing his parents’ bedroom where a curtain hangs and two different chests breathe and growl, his mother muttering wet words about being quick and careful.
It seems that everybody is caught up in dreams tonight.
The next turn delivers him to the front of the house. His father’s gray work clothes used to hang inside the one large closet there, but he doesn’t hunt coronas anymore. As a testament to his age and skill, or maybe because his son misses him when he is gone, Merit has been made into a teacher. He works at the Ivory Station on Hanner, when he works. His clothes are normal now. Only one uniform remains—armored fabric closer to white than black and dark goggles and boots designed to protect careless feet—and those items hang at the back of the closet, clean enough to appear new and barely smelling of corona blood and guts.
Diamond likes to stare at the uniform, letting his mind be fooled into seeing a person dangling against the black wall.
The outside door is always locked at night. Steel and choice woods are stronger than the tree. On the other side of that door, on this side of the curtain, sits one of the guards. His stool is tall and easy to tip. The guard is never supposed to sleep. That’s why Diamond uses knuckles to hit the door, and he steps back and counts the moments before his protector thumps at the wood with an elbow, saying hello.
Then the boy returns to his room.
Good stirs long enough to lift his fierce head, staring at the half-naked shape that approaches his nest.
“Sleep,” says Diamond.
“Sleep,” the monkey agrees, curling into a fetal tuck and lost again.
But the other inhabitant is too alert to climb back into bed, much less try to rest. Instead he picks soldiers from the shelves and arranges them in a half-circle, every blind face pointing at their owner, their general.
Nothing about the moment feels special.
Many nights stretch too long, and the boy often wakes early and sits near one of the night lights, playing quietly, waiting for fatigue to claim him.
If he is patient, sometimes the dreams reveal themselves.
But this is not one of those nights.
Diamond moves the soldiers into a perfect circle, every face looking outwards, and he leaves them, walking to the window. A greater richer darkness sits beyond the reinforced panes. The landing juts far out into the air, and the net is a popular perch for the glowing insects and buzzing insects that don’t exist in the day. With an ear to the glass, he listens to the rasping, chittering songs. Sitting to his right is a second guard, barely in view, feet up and eyes plainly closed and the boy wondering what he could throw at the window that would scare the man.
A heavy rubber ball sits inside a toy box, waiting to be used.
Diamond follows his memory to the box and opens the lid, reaching inside with his free hand, memory closing his fingers. The ball is black, but everything is black in the darkness. Remembering the wooden soldiers, Diamond crosses the room again, passing the ball to the other hand and back again, never looking where his bare feet touch.
One of the soldiers isn’t where he expects it to be.
The boy has never been bigger, never heavier, and the heel of his left foot pushes hard against the bayonet and then the helmeted head.
Pain is quick, but he is too distracted to notice.
The soldier fights bravely, jabbing the fake blade into the giant’s foot, but the pressure is enormous and an ancient flaw in the wood reveals itself with a bright sharp crack that makes a monkey jump to his feet.
Diamond drops the ball and then his body. The sharpest piece of tantalize wood is buried inside him, and it hurts no worse than a nuisance. Mostly he is angry and sorry, unsure how the toy was somewhere it didn’t belonged. Two pieces of the body are on the floor, and he yanks the third from his heel, the blood already retreating inside the torn skin while the entire foot warms even more than normal.
The soldier might be repaired.
If Diamond asks, Father will do that.
But the questions of glue and craftsmanship fall away. The burly monkey stands at the edge of the bed, his head cocked to one side while the black eyes gaze at nothing. Maybe he can hear something. That’s why Diamond listens, following Good’s example. And maybe he hears something too. But when it happens and even afterwards, the sensation isn’t so much like a voice or any other sound. No. It is as if the little sounds of the world cease. The endless play of tree trunks bending and winds drifting, insects celebrating the dark while fifty million souls mutter in their collective sleep—all of these noises suddenly fall away.
Silence finds Diamond.
And the silence has shape and color, and it has meanings as deep and true as any word, and this misplaced boy suddenly hears what can only be a warning.
“Be wary,” says the presence, the Other.
Diamond isn’t breathing, and he might never breathe again.
“Danger is everywhere,” it says.
In the quietest fashion, Diamond whispers, “Monsters.”
“There are no monsters,” says the voice.
Diamond fumbles with words, with concepts. Then to the invisible agent, he says, “But there are evil ones.”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is no evil,” the voice warns. “Everything is good, and that is the ruin of All . . . !”
ONE
Wind came before the sun.
Nothing changed and nothing changed, night holding tight to the world, and then wet hot masses of angry air rose in a thousand places, suddenly punching their way through the demon floor far below the vast tree canopy.
Shifting pressures were felt. Every ear heard portentous rumblings from below. Leaves twisted in response, ready to let the wind pass, while nocturnal insects found hiding places and sleeping birds instinctively clung to prized perches. The empty air between the demon floor and canopy was crossed in a few recitations. The first impacts lifted small limbs while broad strong branches creaked and moaned but refused to bend, fighting the rising wind until the atmosphere turned furious, and then the entire canopy groaned with wrenching voices, the first touch of the day driving itself up where the great trees hung from the roof of the
world.
Hundreds of thousands of nights had ended exactly this way, and Marduk had endured each of those mornings. Strong dead heartwood and the vigorous sapwood formed a single column encased inside bark and walkways and landings and homes. Every airship was in its berth, securely tethered. Bright electric lights blazed in the gloom, along with luminescent panels and forgotten candles. Rope lifts and elevators were shut down, and the few people who found themselves outdoors felt the tree shiver and heard the wind’s roar pressing close, and buttoning down whatever raingear was in reach, they either dropped low and grabbed hold of any likely handle, or they took a different measure of the danger, walking to the edge of a landing, watching the gale come straight up into their grinning faces.
Good and Diamond were awake and maybe they had been for a little while. Each yawned, and the boy sat up in bed as the first spray of rain swept across the window, and the monkey jumped to the floor and shuffled over to the old chamber pot, efficiently doing his business.
On the floor beneath the bed was a fancy metronome—a recent gift from his Archon, from Prima. Diamond pulled it out. Eight hundred recitations was the count—a short night. But he had guessed twelve hundred, judging by how hard he slept and how rested he felt and no residue of dreams.
Good helped himself to the bakebear fruit left from last night. Picking up the chamber pot, Diamond walked down the hallway, dumping the pot and using the toilet and then washing his hands with the hard soap that smelled like bride-witch flowers. By the time he returned to his room, the wind was screaming and there was as much water as there was air outside. The monkey was back on the bed, napping on Diamond’s warm pillow. Diamond pushed his face against the reinforced glass. An electric security light rocked above the locked gate. Two guards were huddled beside the gate, one inside and one out, each wearing a rubber poncho blacker than the rest of the world, resembling lumpy globs of corona fat, faceless and unwilling to move. But the third guard had abandoned his post at the house doorway, standing at the far end of the landing instead. Wearing a long poncho, the figure was perched on the brink of the open air, both hands on the railing and the feet apart, short strong legs and the stronger shoulders able to fend off the gusts and the sprays of water and every reasonable urge to stay safe and dry.
