The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Wraiths,” said the hunter.

  “Welcome to Fort Vordor,” said the captain, and gave a mocking salute.

  Curaswani showed Cley around the inside of the compound. His quarters were in a low building that was separated from a larger structure housing the barracks and the rest of the living quarters. There were also two outhouses positioned at the southeast corner and the northwest corner of the rectangle. All of this was surrounded by a high wall that had but one egress, the tall oaken doors that were now barred by three thick wooden beams. Along the top of the perimeter wall there was a catwalk on which five or six soldiers stood guard. The two structures and the entirety of the wall had been coated in whitewash.

  The captain carried a long-barreled pistol in his belt and a short sword at his side. He limped across the snow-laden enclosure at a weary pace, followed by the hunter and Wood. At the midway point between his quarters and the larger structure, he stopped and called out, “Attention.” Those on the walls and the others in yellow uniforms passing to and fro turned to face him.

  “This is Mr. Cley. He will be staying with us for the winter. And his dog, Wood,” said the captain.

  From the battlements, the soldiers called down greetings, and the hunter waved to them.

  “Back to it,” called Curaswani. The men above turned around to face again the wilderness, while those on the ground continued on their errands.

  The captain led Cley into the larger of the structures, a two-story building without windows. They entered a wide room lined with sleeping cots under which were stored the soldiers’ individual trunks. Hanging on one wall were a rack of rifles and a rack of pistols. In the back corner there was a small kitchen and a long table for meals.

  Passing through the barracks area, they entered a hall with a stairway off to the left. They ascended the steps and entered another dim hallway lined with rooms. The captain opened the first door on his left.

  “Here you go,” he said. “It’s not exactly comfortable, but when the wind really starts to bite, I think you’ll find it better than that cave.”

  Cley thanked the captain as he put his bow, the quiver of arrows, and the empty book cover on the bed and sat down. “I haven’t slept on a mattress in over a year,” he said.

  “Come down in a little while. They will be serving dinner. You’ll smell it cooking. Let’s hope the aroma cannot be mistaken for anything else. I will issue you a coat and a weapon. You can stand guard tonight,” said Curaswani.

  “Yes,” said Cley.

  “Can you shoot a rifle?” asked the captain.

  “I can drill a swooping demon at a hundred yards,” said the hunter.

  “The demons are, luckily, in hibernation now,” said the captain. “Can you drill a ghost at a hundred yards? That seems to be the question.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said Cley.

  “Very good. Since you are an experienced hunter, I’m going to need you to lead a party out into the wilderness for game from time to time.”

  “As you wish,” said Cley.

  The captain bent over and patted Wood on the head. “If we make it until the spring, it will be something of a miracle. But you, Cley, strike me as one who has witnessed miracles.”

  “Indeed, I have,” said the hunter.

  Dinner was a venison stew, biscuits, and beer. The soldiers sitting around Cley at the table struck him as being no more than boys. He doubted that some of them had begun shaving yet. Still, the lot of them seemed energetic, strong, and good-natured. They had many questions for the hunter about his experiences in the wilderness, about his strange tattoo. He could sense that he was quite an enigma to them—someone who had thrived in a place that, from their limited vantage point, seemed impossible to survive in for any length of time. They were also taken with Wood, calling to him, petting him, and slipping him chunks of meat under the table.

  When asked about his earlier life, Cley told them that he had been a midwife in his village before entering the Beyond, and they all laughed good-naturedly at the idea of it. “From one harrowing occupation, staring into the wilderness, to another,” he said.

  They asked a hundred questions about the demons they had heard existed to the south, the strange flora and fauna, natural wonders he might have witnessed.

  “It seems like a place from a fantastic storybook,” said one fellow, whose name was Weems. He was a tall, blond youth with wide shoulders and biceps that stretched the sleeves of his undershirt.

  Perhaps from having lived so long away from people, Cley was reluctant to tell too much about himself. He was sly in his method of turning the questions back upon the soldiers and finding out about their lives.

  “We heard that the Well-Built City had been destroyed in the east,” said another young man.

  “Yes,” said Cley. “It succumbed to its own gravity.”

  The soldiers weren’t sure what he was talking about, but in order to be polite, they nodded as if it were a foregone conclusion.

  “How did your ship get to the inland ocean? We were unaware of its very existence back in the eastern realm,” said the hunter.

  “There are channels through deep gorges, very dangerous to navigate, that lead from the oceans of our world to this one,” said the soldier to Cley’s left. Although he was not yet a man, he bore a wicked scar across his left cheek and an eye patch on the left side. The others called him Dat.

  “How long is the voyage?” asked Cley.

  “Four months,” said Dat. “The inland ocean is enormous, with many strange beasts, leviathans, and krakens, and more. I was pleased to set foot on solid ground.”

  “But the strangest, Cley, was the ghost ship we found floating low in the water and wrecked as if it had met its fate in a typhoon. Some of the sailors boarded it and said they saw in the hold a block of ice with a naked woman trapped inside,” said Weems.

  “They said she was beautiful,” said the largest of all the young men, a fellow named Knuckle. “I could see from their expressions when they returned to our ship just how beautiful she must have been. From that moment, they seemed to be lost in a daydream for the rest of the trip.”

  “And do you have wives and girlfriends back home?” asked Cley to change the subject.

  Many nodded quietly and appeared to be daydreaming, themselves, in response to his question.

  “And what of the Wraiths?” asked the hunter.

  “We don’t talk about them if we don’t have to, Mr. Cley,” said Weems. “Better not to dwell on them, says the captain. He says he doesn’t want us going mad.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “After you see what they can do, you’ll be as scared as we are,” said Knuckle.

  It was midnight, and Cley stood on the narrow catwalk of the northern wall of the fort, staring out across the moonlit field of new snow at the dark tree line of the forest two hundred yards away. It was cold, and he huddled inside the large, yellow army coat they had given him. The rifle he carried was of inferior quality to those manufactured in the Well-Built City. It was a single-shot weapon with a double barrel, so that it held only two shells at a time. They had, though, given him a pocketful of shells. The western realm had never been known for its technology.

  The hunter still basked in the afterglow of the pleasant time spent conversing at the dinner table. His humanity had been revived somewhat from its desolation through the months wandering in the Beyond. He was very pleased with his new home and his status among the soldiers. It was a certainty that the captain could use his skills as a hunter. With a place to rest and a job to do, he looked forward, without dread, to the winter months.

  He turned and peered back down inside the fort to see that all was well. Wood sat on the ground beneath the catwalk, watching Cley’s every move. On each of the other three walls there was a soldier at sentry duty. In the yard within the compound there were another four men making their rounds. The hunter tried to picture the slaughter the recruits must have faced when first they ar
rived at Vordor. A brief scene of butchered corpses flashed through his mind. He remembered one of the young men telling him that they had spent the first week at the fort digging graves out in the earth fifty yards off the western wall.

  He looked back over the field and spotted a deer moving. Although he soon became weary, he occupied his mind with thoughts of Anotine sailing haplessly from ocean to ocean, forever frozen in Time. He wondered now if she was the sign that Vasthasha had told him Pa-ni-ta had predicted he would find. “Could there be such a coincidence? The world is too large to grant such a meeting,” he thought to himself. “But then, as the foliate had assured me, it is also too complex not to.”

  Wood quietly growled and Cley woke to the darkness of his new room. It seemed to him that he had only minutes ago come in from his watch. He heard the door opening slowly, and with that sound reached for his knife, which was hidden beneath the pillow. “Wraiths,” he thought, but then a familiar voice sounded. It was that of Captain Curaswani.

  “Cley,” he said, and the door opened all the way. The hunter saw the light from a candle that the captain was holding. “Get dressed. I need your expertise.”

  The hunter was fully dressed, still not having had the time to shed his habits from a life in the wilderness. He slipped into his boots and was on his feet in a moment.

  “What is it?” he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “An emergency,” said Curaswani.

  “A Wraith?” asked Cley.

  “Even that might be preferable at this juncture,” said the captain.

  He led Cley and Wood down the hallway, speaking over his shoulder in whispers.

  “There are only three of the settlers left living in the fort,” he said. “Two of them are women, and one, now a widow since her husband was separated from his head by a Wraith, a Mrs. Olsen, is inconveniently with child. Private Dat has informed me that you had been a midwife or something close to it in your previous life. I’m ordering you to deliver the child in question, if you don’t mind.”

  The captain stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway. From behind it, Cley could hear sounds of heavy breathing and muffled cries of pain as if someone was screaming into a pillow. Curaswani turned and patted Cley on the shoulder.

  “Pull this off, and I’ll see to it that you are awarded an honorary medal of honor in the armed forces of the western realm.” He saluted the hunter, then retreated back down the hall as fast as he could manage on his bad leg.

  The room was cramped and very warm. The flames of the two candles sitting on the night table next to the bed guttered with the heavy breathing of the expectant mother. Shadows danced, a rocker creaked behind the hunter, and he turned quickly to see an old woman sitting with a bottle of spirits in her hand.

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked in a cracked voice.

  “Cley. I know something about delivering babies,” he told her.

  “Good, because as much as I know about it, you could fit in a flea’s ass,” she said, and took a pull at the bottle.

  “What is the mother’s name?” he asked.

  “Willa Olsen,” said the old woman, whose hair was done up in a silver pile atop her head. She was wearing a high-necked, green-velvet dress. Although the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes testified to her age, in the shifting shadows of the candlelight she appeared to him alternately beautiful and haggard.

  “And what is your name?” asked the hunter.

  “Morgana,” she said.

  “Will you help me?” he asked.

  The old woman rocked the chair forward, and in one fluid motion, stood and rested the bottle on the table.

  “I may need something to sew with, a needle and strong thread, and they must be boiled so they are sterile,” he said.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “The wilderness,” he said. “Now hurry. I don’t think we have much time.”

  “I’m already gone,” she said, and passed through the open doorway.

  Cley watched her leave, and saw her sidle nervously past Wood out in the hallway. Then he turned back and lifted one of the candleholders off the nightstand. He brought it up close to the face of the woman in the bed. His patient was sweating and breathing heavily in between quiet moans. At times her mouth opened wide, and he was reminded of the captain’s pipe bowl. Her body was pitching back and forth. The face he saw gave him some trepidation about the delivery. Willa Olsen was not in the prime of youth—only a few years younger than Cley, himself. Advanced age was one of the factors, he remembered, that often gave rise to odd birth positions, anomalies, stillbirths.

  “Willa,” he called loudly to her. “My name is Cley. I have delivered a score of children, and I am going to deliver yours. You can help me by not moving so much. Regulate your breathing; you are wasting too much energy. It will make the pain worse. Above all, don’t push until I tell you to. Do you understand all of this?” he asked.

  For the first time, the woman in the bed opened her eyes and looked at him. Her breathing grew more regular, and she nodded.

  “I am going to have to uncover you, touch you. It is the only way I can help your baby. Do you understand?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Cley reached down and lifted the covers off the woman. Amazingly enough, she was fully clothed. He slipped the stone knife out of his boot, and with a smooth maneuver that harkened back to his scalpel work as Physiognomist, he slit through three layers of fabric, baring her body. Besides her swollen stomach, she was somewhat plump, with wide hips, and Cley took this to be a good sign.

  When the hunter put his hands on her stomach, she cried out and twisted in the bed.

  “I am just feeling to see if the child is in the proper position,” he said. “And it is. You have never given birth before, I suppose?”

  She shook her head.

  He breathed deeply and began to pry apart her knees.

  In all, the delivery had been routine. The old woman, Morgana, was snoring in the rocker, the empty bottle lying in her lap. The mother was resting peacefully, with the child asleep between her breasts. It was a boy. Cley tried to remember now if he was ahead on boys or girls, and decided the score was perfectly even.

  He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, studying the features of the sleeping Willa Olsen. “This hour,” he thought, “might be the last free of strife that she will have for some time. Her husband dead, on her own with a new baby in the wilderness in a fort that is under deadly attack …”

  For a brief moment, he gave himself over to a casual Physiognomy, trying to predict from her sleeping visage if she had what it would take to survive. Her face was round and neither homely nor pretty, but plain in a way that could not be described. Her straight brown hair was chopped short, obviously in haste, as if it had been gathered into a tail and hacked with a knife blade. He tried to find some distinguishing feature, perhaps the nose or chin, that would give him a clue, but he ended by shaking his head.

  The hunter put the knife back in his boot and blew out the one candle that had burned nearly to its base. He knew his work was done, and what would happen now was up to the new mother and the will of the Beyond. He closed the door gently as he left. Then, stepping carefully so that his boots did not tap the floor, he headed back for his room, with Wood following close behind.

  Cley grew accustomed to life at Fort Vordor in the days that followed. Although the captain did not require him to perform any functions other than guard duty and hunting for game, he readily volunteered to help in all chores from keeping the weapons cleaned and oiled to peeling potatoes for dinner. There was a welcome monotony to the routine, and the work was by no means demanding. There was plenty of time to get to know the soldiers. The hunter had great respect for Curaswani, who knew how to balance authority and humanity, tempering both with a dry sense of humor. In the late afternoons, before dinner, he usually met the captain in his quarters for a drink of whiskey an
d a half-hour of conversation. The old man lent him one of his pipes, and they would toke up a minor squall in the small office.

  Beneath this idyllic life, there ran, constantly, an undercurrent of fear. The Wraiths had not struck for a full month and everyone knew they were due. In the course of building a cradle for the new baby one morning, the hunter realized that he could be the next victim. “I must not lose sight of the fact that this is only a short stop in my journey,” he told himself.

  He took some time out of each day to leave the compound and search the nearby forest for game. Unlike the demon forest, this stand of woods seemed to retain its deer population through the winter. They were not the white variety, but tawny brown and larger than their cousins to the south. Dat, the one-eyed, scarred soldier, usually accompanied him and Wood on these hunting forays. For having one eye, Dat proved himself an excellent shot. Occasionally, on their way back to the fort, if they had been lucky and were returning early, they engaged in a marksmen’s competition, aiming at some twig or rock in the distance. The young man always won, and Cley laughed with the pleasure of his loss.

  The hunter inquired as to the health of the new child as often as he could. He worried that the mother might be too inexperienced, too distraught with recent events to help the baby thrive. Willa Olsen had not shown herself in the compound since the delivery, so Cley questioned Morgana. The old woman reported that the nursing was going well and that the mother was keeping her sanity and health together. Her only concern was that Willa had not named her son yet. Through her cursing, drinking bravado, he caught glimpses of the duenna’s concern for the mother and child and soldiers. She made the rounds daily, joking with the men. At night, from his guard post, Cley saw her stroll nonchalantly, with head down, across the compound to slip inside the captain’s quarters. She told the hunter that someday she would read his fortune.