Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  Against his will, she’s telling them, forced by these forecasts of judgmental stares like fiery thunderbolts, forced by the never-ending reign of high society’s earls and dames, he drove her out, for shame, he threw her out from her own home, as if her very form and mind were changed to some horned beast. Anna, the cow. Anna, the rutting, sweating, filthy sow, unmarried mother, slave to her desire as much as any creature lusting and fucking in the barn.

  “Now here I am before you,” Anna says, “driven by the lash of sharp tongues, words that bite like flies, and stung from land to land.”

  The hall is quiet. There are some here and there, as Seamus looks around, that look uncomfortable. They may be socialists, they may believe in the struggle of the working classes and in the kindred souls of others oppressed around the world, the Irish, and the Negroes of America, and woman’s suffrage, sure, but there’s still the matter of decency and taste. A lad has to sow his wild oats, sure, but the lass he plants them in, she’s still disgraced. These are still men who, well, they think a woman should have the vote, but sure and her place is in the home, it is, and these are still women who’d tut and tsk about the wee lassie down the road who let her boyfriend get her up the duff. But the hall is quiet. Sure and it’s altogether a different story when yer face-to-face with a young girl put out of her own home with an infant son and with nowhere else to go but on the streets.

  Ah, Jesus wept, thinks Seamus. How can a gentle shepherd have such a violent temper, or is it not Himself that’s watching over our every step, dead as He is? The bitmites whisper in his ear of “Argus-eyed humanity and peacock pride” and quietly, unnoticed by the others in the hall, he slips a hip flask from his pocket, takes a wee sip from it. He still remembers his own reaction when she told him, how his mind leapt frantically with her tumbling words across a century’s stream of dreams it seems, of what they had and what they could have had, before it all went wrong, before poor Thomas died, before the war, before her bloody English officer, before his illness, back to spring in Lerna.

  Spring in Lerna. Summer in the Somme. It’s autumn now, outside the hall, autumn in Glasgow, all brown and red and orange and yellow leaves looking golden in the setting sun of Evenfall.

  “And…that’s my story,” Anna says.

  “O Seamus, speak to me,” she said as he stared off into the ocean. “If you have anything to say, just say it. Speak to me. I don’t care if it hurts me; I deserve it, Seamus. Please just say something.”

  She reached out and he felt the calfskin of her glove touching the back of his hand.

  “It’s not comfort I’m looking for, Seamus. It’s not false words and empty pity. It’s just…You’ve never lied to me. You never lied.”

  He could see what she wanted in her eyes, hear it in what she didn’t say. What’s going to happen to me, Seamus?

  “Lies are the cruelest ill of all,” she said.

  In His Black Pinpoint Pupils

  “Ah, no. Enough, alas.”

  The air in the hall seems to vibrate and Seamus Finnan watches Anna on the stage dissolve, and Pankhurst and Maclean, until there’s nothing but the velvet curtain at their back, the banner welcoming the speakers and the red flag and the Union Jack at each side. The audience shimmers, a mirage in a desert, the air over tarmac on a hot, summer road.

  “We never thought we’d hear a tale so full of cruelty,” the bitmites whisper, such ugly and intolerable hurts, such sufferings.

  He pushes through the ghost images of his memory until he’s standing in the center of the room. There’s only one chair now, one of the folding metal chairs—with a circle of white salt around it on the floor—and as he lays his hand on the backrest, he feels it biting cold under his skin. His breath steams, white and swirling in the air in front of him. He sits down in the chair, closes his eyes.

  “Your love,” the voices whisper, “is a two-edged sword. It chills our souls.”

  He opens his eyes and the abattoir is crisp and clear. A cold reality. Ah, Christ, thinks Finnan. He hadn’t thought of Anna for years, for decades even.

  Henderson stands at the doorway with its plastic strips swaying like folds of curtains and Henderson himself turned away, speaking quietly to some absent underling or superior by link, one hand up to his earpiece; he catches snippets of phrases—making progress, physically stable, yes, no, MacChuill, needs to be watched, I can assure you, maybe you should, can’t depend on him, under control. There’s an edginess in his tone and stance, Finnan thinks.

  “You’re sure?” he hears the man say, saying it slow and clear, the way you do when you’re looking for clarity in return. “This…situation with the bitmites couldn’t affect us here?”

  He glances over his shoulder and Finnan drops his eyes, mumbles like a man lost in delirium. Henderson turns away again.

  “OK. Yes sir,” he says, “I think he’s nearly ready for you.”

  Metatron, thinks Finnan. If the Covenant is behind this—and Henderson is so fucking Covenant it makes you sick—then it has to be Metatron pulling the strings here. Last he heard, the other big guns were all tied up in the War. Angels with swords of fire walking through Jerusalem. A Sovereign’s compound in Fallujah wiped out in an explosion. An earthquake in Iran. A nuclear accident in North Korea. The angel war isn’t two armies facing each other across a battlefield. No, it’s a correspondent in a fawn flak jacket and webbed helmet talking straight to the camera—and Finnan had swallowed as he looked into the man’s eyes and saw the unkin mark in his black pinpoint pupils, because even over the fuzz of a link disrupted by extremist jammers, Finnan had read the name in his blank gaze. Azazel, angel of death. Jesus, the birdman had stared out at his VR audience, smooth as a milk shake, and shown his soul to the world deliberately, so that anyone out there with the knowledge to read it, any unkin out there, Covenant or otherwise, would get the message. We’re in charge now.

  So, it’s pretty clear what Gabriel and Michael and Azazel and all their little minions, all their little Hendersons, are up to these days. Hunting Sovereigns. But Metatron isn’t a field agent, not like them. Information and analysis. Intel and intercept. Bitmites. This is his operation. He looks down at his open chest, wondering why they’ve given him this respite, this chance to get his thoughts clear.

  “Alas, a lass’s fate,” the bitmites hiss. “We shudder, seeing Anna’s state. If we were flesh all we would pray is that our fates should never bring us any husband from the heavens, never see us share the bed of Dukes.”

  Again the sympathetic words. Sure and with a bit of practice they might even come close to passing a Turing Test, but he’s not fooled for a minute by their fucking crocodile tears. He’s willing to concede that maybe Metatron’s little machines are fancy enough to have developed some sort of…curiosity. But empathy? No, he thinks. It’s all part of Metatron’s plan. Peel him open, strip him down and soften him up. Anna is just a wound they want reopened.

  “Your tears and fears are premature,” he says. “Wait till you hear the rest.”

  “Tell us,” they say.

  “Why do you want to know?” he says “Why should I tell you anything?”

  “It’s sweeter to the sick to know the suffering to come.”

  The little bastards must have learned the unkin art of never giving a straight answer, he thinks. Talk in riddles. Never give yourself away. Never give the enemy something to use against you.

  “Our former wish we got from you with ease,” they say, “for first we asked to learn from her relating her own trials. Now we would hear the rest, what sufferings it is necessary this young woman should endure from here.”

  “Anna?” he says. “What business is my past to you? What’s done is done.”

  “Time in the Vellum isn’t that simple.”

  The phrase sparks off a memory, something someone said to him; he can’t put his finger on it for a second, then it clicks. Phreedom in the church after she’d gone to Asheville after Thomas, after she’d gone to Eresh, gone to Hell
and come back with—

  The bitmites scrawl across his chest and he looks at them closer now, at the patterns within patterns in the ever-changing chaos. The ragged open wound looks like a Mandelbrot set given a couple of new dimensions.

  What do you get if you cross the queen of the dead’s blood with the ink of God’s scribe, Metatron’s bitmites and the magic in Eresh’s little glass jars? What you get, thinks Finnan, is something that might have been alive once but so long ago that it’s forgotten what it’s like, or something that was never alive and suddenly here it’s finding itself thinking, trying to understand the strange world of humanity with its wars and revolutions. And, caught somewhere between the Covenant protocols of its programming and the dark compulsions of all things afraid of death, sure and maybe Enoch’s babies might have found some sort of empathy after all. Or maybe, at least, they might just learn.

  “Tell us,” they say.

  “Then listen up,” he says, “and take these words to heart. I’ll tell you where the journey ends.”

  Or where the journey starts.

  THE DAWN OF TIME

  She turns toward the rising sun. Rose tints of early-morning light wash over a vast tract of the same uncultivated lands that they’ve been traveling these last few years, the lands of people who call themselves the nomads of the scythes and live in carts with wicker roofs, who fire bows at them from afar. It’s a primitive place, this part of the Vellum, but that makes it a lot more stable than some of the worlds they’ve been in—no cities in flames, no looted shops, no traffic jams of people in flight, no ducking into doorways as an angel passes overhead, its silver wings spread wide, disruptor swinging as it strafes the crowd to dust.

  “What’s up?” says Don, stopping his horse at her side. Jesus, but she misses her bike; horses are so fucking uncomfortable. Don seems to have taken to the whole New Archaic thing like a duck to water, though.

  “Watch out,” she says. “Caliphs on the left hand.”

  He slips his ruptor from his shoulder, scans the horizon. To their right, the cliffs drop to the echoing boom of sea. Ahead of them the narrow trail around the headland opens up to the wide and empty plain lit by the low sun shrouded in its pink striated clouds. To their left, the rocks rise into moss and undergrowth, and here and there the odd caliph is visible. She calls them that for their weird turban-like headdresses and pointed beards, but they’re a pretty savage people. Basic Iron Age technology and not exactly believers in the law of hospitality.

  “Just be careful,” she says.

  “Just be careful,” says Don.

  She looks down at the River of Hubris, winding its way through the gorge below—well-named, she thinks, given the idiotic pride it takes to try and cross its swollen stream in full flood on a rickety rope bridge creaking and swaying under your feet. She takes another tentative step forward, foot flat on the board all slick and slippery from the spray of a tiny waterfall spurting out somewhere above them in a little stream, no more than a shower really—like rainwater gathered on a cathedral roof and pouring down to spout out of some gargoyle’s mouth—no more than a faucet left running, but enough to soak the wood and have the two of them worrying about rotten planks and feet sliding on algae. The water falls and falls, tumbling in sprinkling glitters down. She’s glad she’s not afraid of heights. Above them and across the chasm, the carcass of the mountain towers gray and white, scattered with other spattering rivulets running down and darkening its rockface. Meltwater from its white peak. It’s like a giant risen from the sea, the water pouring down its broad rhino-hide back.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she says.

  A week to pass over the summit, she reckons, partly from the maps they have and partly from experience of this kind of terrain. She doesn’t mind; there’s a part of her that’s always liked being up in the hills and mountains, up here among the stars where the air is thin and clear. They’re headed south after this though, into a region labeled on the maps as The Mascara—for some reason she pictures a jungle filled with armies of man-hating Amazons—and down along the Thermidor to Psalmydeus. It’s a rough town, perched upon a ragged coast of jagged jaws where the sea crashes its wild welcome on the walls of stone for any sailors brave enough to risk this city known as the wicked stepmother of ships.

  “You still think Psalmydeus is a good idea?” she calls to Don. “What if these people are as hostile as the rest?”

  “Well then,” he says, “I’m sure they’ll gladly send us on our way.”

  “I’m glad we’re finally on our way again,” she says.

  Behind them the Chimaeran Isthmus rises as a wall, a rough drystone wall where the two headlands that it joins reach out to almost touch each other but not quite. It’s not a natural formation, more like a causeway that wants to be a dam but with a narrow arching gateway giving passage from the great lake beyond into the waters that they now sail. Actually, whether it’s even called an isthmus depends on who you talk to; the cold lake behind, the warm sea they move in now, and the two lands that separate them like curtains drawn not quite shut—none of these have their boundaries marked on any of the maps. For all they know the waters might surround the lands; two giant islands or two great saltwater lakes joined at a pinpoint like the loops of an infinity symbol or a figure eight, on the maps the coasts are only marked as a huge, rough X that carves the territory into quarters, water to the north and south, land to the east and west. So while the shellcarvers from whom they got their maps refer to the Chimaeran Isthmus, on the navigation charts of the wavers in their little merchant steamships—like the one they travel on now—the area is marked as the Maeostoso Straits, the treacherous shallows that it takes a stout heart to sail through.

  All along the walls of Phosphorus behind them, the city built along the isthmus like the shops and houses on a medieval bridge in London or Firenze, the people are still standing, cheering, and she wonders how long the fame of their passage will last. Even before they left, Don said he’d heard some children in the street singing a nursery rhyme about the soldier and the princess who set off to find the dawn of time. Princess, she thinks, with more than a little irony. From trailer-trash Phreedom to Princess Anesthesia. But these people probably couldn’t even imagine a world with somewhere like Slab City in it, and in the fishwife cultures of the shellcarvers and the wavers any woman with her independent bearing, she supposes, has to be a princess. Don grumbles about it, of course—they think I’m your fucking bodyguard. So she smiles at him and winks and says, Aren’t you?

  But she wonders about the dawn of time thing, how that rumor started. It seems to be traveling ahead of them now, the story of their journey actually preceding them. Some places they’ve arrived to a hero’s welcome, festivals in their honor. The people of Europa’s Plain wish you the best of luck in your quest. The Continent of Ash is that way.

  “Aren’t you going to join the celebrations?” asks Don.

  He sits down at the table beside her, beckoning out at the festivities in the hall. A group of young men dancing in a ring chant their devotion to the sun, the bridegroom crowned in a golden garland, while the women spin like dervishes around them, scattering flower petals, laughing. The older generation, the already-married, stand in a wider circle all around, clapping in rhythm to the tom-tom and the thrum of something like a double bass. The band onstage in their white skirted tunics and red scarves and silk belts, the exuberant whirling of tradition, round and round, and whooping, crying, everything about it makes her think of Gypsies, Jews and Greeks. They even smash things here, not plates or glass but wooden toys, the bride’s and bridegroom’s childhood playthings caught up in a revel of destruction, old lives broken underfoot to start anew in adulthood, in marriage. She looks at the mangled wreck of a toy sat on the table in front of her, a little wooden drummer boy puppet, legs and arms and head all broken off but still tied up together in the tangle of strings that they once dangled from. It’s part of the tradition. Guests all get to take away one of the
broken toys as a memento of the marriage, a memento of the childhood now abandoned.

  “What’s the matter?” says Don. “Anna?”

  She shakes her head. Her drink—some sort of local fermented milk drink—sits beside the toy, untouched.

  “The truth?” she says. “I don’t know.”

  But she does. She knows that it doesn’t really matter if Jack was Finnan’s son, or the Covenant angel’s, or just the son of one of the many johns she fucked for money just to get by when she was lost and had nothing; he was hers. She should never have let them take him away from her.

  A FAIRY TALE OF NEW YORK

  “I’m not going to let them take him away from me, Seamus. I’ll go away, far away, Seamus, O, I’ll go to America. Can you imagine it, Seamus? New York. They say it’s so magnificent, with the towers of glass stretching all up to the sky; we’ll go there, me and Jack, and I’ll tell everyone that I’m a widow, I’ll wear black, I will, Seamus, that’s what I’ll do. And he won’t have the shame on him, he won’t.”

  She smiles sadly.

  “Towers of glass and a poor widow with a boy called Jack. It sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it?”

  They sit on the edge of the stage, the hall empty now. Christ, but it took some courage for him not to run, not to hide in the crowd and duck and weave out the doorway afterward, out of sight and away, away. But to wait there until the crowd cleared and she saw him and they stood there looking at each other and not knowing what to say.

  He thinks of her sailing off toward New York across the stormy sea of her own sorrow, and there’s a bit of him that wants to keep her here, that wants to be saying, Is it mad ye are? And what will ye do all on yer own with no one to look after ye? And have ye no idea of all the trials and tribulations that yer sailing straight for, like a great iceberg of yer suffering waiting in yer path? Ye can’t just run away.