by Jeffrey Ford
Vasthasha leaped to his feet and began running again. He cleared the edge of the forest and passed into the moonlight of a desert he would have to cross before the rising of the sun.
In the confines of the walls of Fort Vordor, a crow ripped the remaining flesh from Curaswani’s neck. It had come every day of the summer to feast on the remains of the soldiers, not knowing that their dead meat harbored a parasite that had already, very slowly, begun to sap its life.
Willa chopped wood with the stone ax out behind the cabin. The day was overcast, and a misty drizzle fell. Wood and Wraith lay on a blanket behind her. The child rolled over and pulled himself along, sliding on his stomach. When he reached the edge of the blanket, Wood lifted him by the back of the overalls his mother had sewn for him and returned him gently to the center of the large blue rectangle.
Shkchl had been at his work for days, setting bones, cauterizing arteries with the charges of electric eels, and everywhere probing the corpse with a three-pronged wand that he held with the ends of his antennae mustache. Wherever the triple points touched, a sudden torrent of bubbles erupted.
He retrieved from his store of implements a small snail shell. With the sharp tips of his webbed fingers, he dug into the shell and pulled out a wriggling yellow creature, like an inchworm, with delicate horns. Using his thumbnail, he made an incision across Cley’s exposed heart and shoved the creature inside the muscle. That done, he replaced the plug of bone into the sternum and welded it with the triton. Next, he applied the living clamps to the flaps of chest flesh, sealing shut the thoracic cavity.
When Cley was again in one piece, Shkchl cut the vines that held the body in place. Lifting the hunter under the arms, he swam with him up above the tall tubelike flowers. He chose one that would accommodate the measurements of the corpse and shoved Cley down inside the dark blossom. Then he gathered the top and wrapped and tied it with a piece of vine.
The Water Being’s work was done, but before gathering his tools, he looked up at the flower that now was a shroud and mentally calculated the rate of disintegration for the vine, the goo that covered the body, and the snail whose life, when it ebbed, would give life to Cley.
Shkchl shrugged. “Close enough,” he thought. As he collected his oyster-shell baggage, he wondered if the great serpent yet knew it was pregnant. He pictured the blue membrane that blocked entrance to the garden above, and with a directed thought turned it off. With this, he took to the underground waterways that led back to the inland ocean.
The old body scribe ambled through the oasis where Cley had first met Vasthasha. At the heart of the lush forest he found, in a clearing beneath a tree with wide leaves, the remains of a campfire. He knelt and brought his face within inches of the burned wood. In the charred pile, he smelled the word for Cley.
Bad dreams plagued the Beshanti. Misnotishul walked through the nightmares of too many warriors, spewing the poisonous drivel of Brisden. They decided to burn Fort Vordor and erase its existence from their memories.
On the other side of the desert, Vasthasha ran through the crumbling remains of an ancient city. The ruins of the buildings still gave evidence that they had been constructed in imitation of human heads—the mouths, the doorways; the eyes, the windows; the smoke tunnels, merely the tops of elaborate hats. When the wind blew, these rotting stone heads conversed in low murmurs, and the foliate believed they were discussing the fact that he would never make it to Paradise.
The fort burned, the crow flew north, Willa laughed out loud at Wraith’s baby language, and the body scribe passed along the seashore, looking at the wreck of an old ship foundering in the surf off a distant sandbar.
Cley heard a story, in all the languages of the Word at once, about the creation of the world. It was like an impossibly complex joke, involving a bird, a fish, a tree, a snake, a man and woman, and the punch line, he knew, although it was still an eternity away, had to do with the hatching of an egg.
The summer dozed in its own heat, sleepwalking through blue days and cool nights. Its lethargy slowed Vasthasha in his race, and the foliate felt as if he were running across the bottom of the inland ocean. He stopped one afternoon, for only a moment, to drink from a green pool, next to which lay the carcass of a dead deer. As he lifted himself to continue, water dripping from the leaves of his face, he smelled it—the first hint of summer’s demise.
Later that afternoon, he passed the mouth of a cave. If he had had the time to stop and explore, he would have found inside the remains of the adept, Scarfinati, who, in his self-imposed exile from humanity, had discovered the secret of immortality only to eventually choose suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.
Two turns of the vine that held the top of Cley’s shroud disintegrated from the nibbling of one-celled organisms and the inherent catalytic processes of water.
Shkchl, on his long return to the inland ocean, was swimming through a swiftly moving underground channel when he decided to stop for a moment’s rest. He wedged his webbed feet against an outcropping of rock and let the rush of water move around him. He had not been resting long when he was struck squarely in the back by a pointy piece of debris. Reaching out, he grabbed the projectile before it could be swept away.
“What is this?” he wondered as he studied it. He saw it was a man-made tool, strung with line, at the end of which was a dangerous hook. A round spool where the line was wound had rotted badly. “A pathetic human device,” he said to himself. “Pollution of the worst sort.” He let the fishing pole go on ahead of him in the flow. “May they all, every one of them, sit on one of these and spin,” he said, and his words flew away in bubbles that would not find air against which to break for days.
One night when Wraith would not sleep, Willa wrapped him in blankets and took him out of the bed to go sit by the fire. She threw on a few more large branches she had cut that day and settled down in the high-backed chair. The child was wide-awake, but not crying, only gurgling in baby language.
At the sound of Wraith’s voice, Wood woke up. He went into the other room and returned with the book cover.
Willa smiled upon seeing it, remembering the day at her old house when she had come in from a walk and found Cley reading to Wraith and the dog from the empty book. Wood set the leather cover in her lap and took his place at her feet, looking up. And so on this night, she began telling the story of her life: “I was born in the town of Belius in the western realm …” Wraith went quiet, and the dog was asleep before she finished describing her parents, but she continued on and got as far as her first day of school.
Although the days were still warm, the nights grew cold, and the leaves started to change at their tips from green to red. The great serpent sensed the seasons shifting as the clutch of eggs grew inside of her. Twenty replicas in hard white cases, twenty transmitters that would leave the cave and spread out to form a web that would widen the consciousness of the Beyond and then multiply every spring to expand it further until it knew, again, every inch of itself. Each of the tiny Sirimon was curled in its bubble like Cley, listening to tales of the wilderness.
The body scribe found the remains of the Olsens’ house. He stood amidst the ruins, the blackened wood reeking with the word that was Cley. Watching him from a distance were the Beshanti, who knew they dared not disturb him. Beneath the remains of a curious platform full of dirt still holding the brown-needled remains of two dwarfed trees, he found a pair of miniature wooden carvings in the shapes of young women. He took them in his hand and put them in a deerskin pouch he wore on a lanyard around his waist.
The leaves that were the foliate’s arms and legs would soon begin to change color. All of his blossoms had drifted away in his wake, and now violet berries began to show where the flowers had been. At night, bats sought him with flawless sonic precision, swooping out of the dark to steal this sweet fruit. During the day it was the sparrows that swarmed down upon him in migrating flocks. He ran through both night and day, beset by pecking, grasping scavengers, and
the pain of each theft was like the jab of a body scribe’s bone needle, the stab of a fishing pole carried by a rushing current.
The crow, whose eyesight was failing, whose beak was softening, and whose feathers shed as a result of the parasitic disease it had contracted from feasting on the flesh of Curaswani and his men, turned in its flight one morning and followed a path through the Beyond that defied time and distance.
It sailed into the wind of passing years and miles, above the heads of the other glowing creatures that were on their way somewhere far from where they had begun. In its flight, a feather came loose and fell. It drifted down like a bright idea and struck, on the head, Scarfinati, who years earlier had passed this way on his pilgrimage to the cave farther into the heart of the wilderness. Instantly the shining form of the adept shattered like fine glass beneath the tap of a hammer at the same moment that, years in the future, he pulled the razor across his throat. In the intervening time, he no longer existed.
The meadow lost its flowers, and the grass had turned from green to the color of wheat. In the late afternoon, when the sunlight broke through openings in the mountainous clouds above, streaming down in distinct shafts, the field, all the way to the lake and beyond, appeared a rippling sea of gold. A herd of six-legged shaggy behemoths with oblong heads, wide nostrils, and blunt faces ambled out of the forest to graze.
At first, Willa feared them for their size, but eventually it became evident that they were as afraid of her as she was of them. Wood took great pleasure in running among them and rounding them up into a tight group. The dog barked wildly, as if shouting orders to the lumbering creatures, and they responded with uncharacteristic speed to his commands.
The beasts lingered for a week, grouped together on the southern shore of the lake, and then one morning Willa woke to find them gone.
The underwater blossom that shrouded Cley’s body began to change. The large, soft petals stiffened; the soft plant matter became hard and coarse. The stalk that held it upright bent a little more with each passing day.
Vasthasha was pursued by troubling thoughts through a forest of tall trees whose leaves fell around him in a yellow blizzard. He could feel his energy diminishing. Each step took a conscious effort, but whenever he slowed, he felt the notion of failure nipping at the backs of his legs, and this served to spur him on. His own leaves had gone red at the tips, and one or two were singed brown. The vines that had made up his hair had already died and turned to short stubble.
“… and we went hand in hand out behind the town hall, the sound of the violin following us in the dark. We hid beneath the weeping willow that stood next to the bronze statue of the great horned God, Belius, and there, Christof, your father, first kissed me,” said Willa. She closed the empty book cover and sat, staring into the fire. The night was very cold, and she was feeling lonely. She thought about Cley, and decided that if he did not return, she would try to make it back to the seashore in the spring.
Before her emotions could get the better of her, she diverted her attention by making a mental list of all the chores that needed to be done the next day. Laundry, chopping wood, fetching water, sweeping the floor, preparing meals … She listened to the noise of the old crow that had taken lodging in a hole under the roof of the house. It wheezed when it breathed, and at night the sound was like a distant whistling. When she fell asleep, these respirations were transformed in her dreams into the music of a violin.
Cley, in his thoughts, walked with Arla Beaton along the night streets of Anamasobia. Bataldo waved hello from across the lane, and they passed the open doors of the tavern wherein Frod Geeble could be seen pouring drinks behind the bar.
“I heard that you were killed in the Beyond,” she said to him.
“Mere rumor,” said Cley, and when he looked at her she was now wearing the green veil.
“What exactly happened?” she asked.
Clay looked away. “I was trapped in a block of unmelting ice at the bottom of a ship,” he said. “No, wait, that wasn’t me.” When he turned to her this time, she had become Anotine. “That was you,” he said.
“No, Cley, it was me,” said Willa Olsen, who took him by the arm and led him out of town, into a meadow where a log house sat by a lake.
Shkchl reached the inland ocean and was greeted by his fellow Water Beings.
“Is there hope?” asked their leader.
The weary traveler lifted his shoulders and momentarily looked up to where the waves rolled a half-mile above. “Let’s eat,” he said.
And now the snow fell, a light flurry that powdered the meadow and left traces on the bare branches of the trees at the edge of the forest. The sight of it was beautiful, but it filled Willa with a paralyzing dread as if it were a sign that Death was on its way.
Vasthasha, brown-leafed and showing great patches of bare thatch, moved along, bent at the waist, traversing a glacier, the last obstacle to his destination.
The Sirimon slithered through the opening where the blue membrane had always been and curled itself into a coil defined by the edge of the pool. Over the course of three days, it fell into a heavy sleep that would last until spring.
The crow gathered berries and insects enough to last for weeks and huddled inside the hole beneath the roof in a nest made of dead meadow grass. Its mind was addled with disease and it believed that the small wooden object (a miniature carved man) it had found in the field was its young.
Vasthasha limped through the valley of Paradise at the heart of the Beyond. His right foot was missing; his left hand had cracked and fallen off. Both lay in a scatter of sticks out on the glacier that ringed the mythical place. Disembodied lights flew through the perfect trees. He wanted so desperately to lie down and sleep forever, but, after having traveled through the enchanted place all night, he saw with the first light of morning, the one true flower. Its blinding petals were spread outward in a vast radius from a center that was an eye of utter darkness. The stem that held the blossom was bent beneath its weight at a right angle to the ground. Its yawning middle appeared to the foliate to be a wide tunnel.
He gathered his strength, and even though he had only one foot, he attained the speed he had at the very beginning of his journey. As Vasthasha dashed toward the flower, dry and rotted branches flew from him. The flames in his eyes died out, and tiny streams of smoke whipped away from the empty eyeholes and trailed behind him. He leaped as his life left him, and while propelled through the air, he came apart in a rattling of dry vines and dead leaves. His head and neck flew forward into the open center of the blossom, and the tiny bubble of Cley descended into the womb of the plant.
There was a knocking at the door, and Willa screamed with the suddenness of it. She put the baby down and lifted the pistol, which she always kept loaded.
“Cley?” she called. “Cley?”
“A visitor,” said a strange voice.
Wood left Wraith and went to the door. He wagged his tail and barked.
“Who are you?” she called, thinking of the snow.
“A friend,” said the voice.
“Come in,” she said, and cocked the hammer.
The door opened, and the body scribe entered.
The wilderness slumbered inside its shell of snow and ice. Also asleep were the great serpent, the crow, the demons of the forest, and Cley. Even the Beshanti dreamt peacefully now. Misnotishul had made one last appearance during the mushroom ceremony in the last hours of autumn, and as his spirit hovered near the ceiling of the longhouse, he spoke only Beshanti. The tribe rejoiced that they had been able to save his soul.
From the moment she first saw the old man’s face she knew there was nothing to fear. He was a great help with Wraith, and though bent and slow-moving, he could hunt and did not seem to mind the bitter winds and deep snow. She was amazed that he spoke to her in the language of the realm. But what was more astonishing was that he also seemed capable of communicating with the baby in a babbling tongue and with the dog in a pattern of high-
pitched whines. Sometimes, when she saw him standing outside in the swirling powder, she believed he was talking to the very earth itself.
Each night after dinner he asked her to please read more of her life story from the empty book. At times he would amuse them all by tossing small pinches of powder from a little pouch he carried into the fireplace. Then smoke images trailed out of the flames and came to life in the room. On one night he produced a pink cat that engaged Wood in a wrestling match before dissipating into thin air. He had drawn the first true laughter out of the child, and eased Willa’s anxiety. She wanted to ask him about Cley, but she didn’t, afraid of what he would tell her.
The body scribe convinced Willa that it would be in the child’s best interest for him to tattoo Wraith’s forehead. When she finally nodded, he took out his tools and set to work. Even though blood ran in rivulets across the baby’s face, he smiled through the entire operation. When the work was done, there was a minute image of a crow in flight over the left eyebrow.
“Your boy will know the language of the birds,” he said when he was finished.
Snow blew in great gusts across the meadow. It covered over the charred remains of Fort Vordor and blocked the cave entrance wherein lay the great serpent. A long stretch of boring white underscored by the distant howling of the wind only momentarily interrupted by a glimpse of the one true flower in the heart of the Beyond. Then more white, on and on, until I almost lose the vision as the guard down the hall coughs and clears his throat. When I turn back, the snow has stopped, the wind now whispers, and there are patches of earth showing through the frozen crust. There, growing up through Curaswani’s rib cage, is a blade of grass, and I know that, in an instant, spring has come.
