Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “It’ll be hard,” he says. “To be on your own, sure. You with an infant son and all.”

  But what has she got to live for here, in a land where an unmarried mother is half expected just to throw herself from the nearest cliff into the sea? That’s what they do, isn’t it, drown themselves for the release? And then it’s what a pity and the poor, poor girl but secretly it’s maybe it’s better for every one, her to just die once and for all, than suffer evil all her days and there’s the child to think of after all; they never need to know the shame now. Bollocks, he thinks.

  “It’ll be hard,” he says, “but if…”

  He tries to find the words. If you want, I’ll come with you.

  “If…”

  If you want me, I’ll come with you.

  “If…”

  She shakes her head.

  “It’s different now, Seamus. It’s not you and me, anymore. It’s not you and me and Thomas in between us as…something we used to have. All that matters now is Jack.”

  “A new beginning,” he says. “Ah, lass, sure and sometimes fairy tales come true. I’m sure of it.”

  He hopes so. He prays so. Sure and he doesn’t want to believe that God Himself is just another fookin tyrant lord like all the rest and brutal in everything He does, in all the bitter twists of fate He throws into their paths. He thinks, he hopes, that maybe it’s all just the thoughtlessness of…of a dashing, young hero urging his sweetheart to just give him this one thing before he’s sent back to the front, not thinking what might happen, how it might drive his sweetheart out to wanderings in the wilderness. Maybe that was how the angel Gabriel came to Holy Mary, he thinks, as a soldier with his dog tags round his neck just looking for a simple night of love before going back to fight the serpent, not thinking of all the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt, or a poor boy on a cross and his mother weeping for him.

  If only there was anything he could give to soothe her.

  “A bitter wooer did you find,” he says, ”O virgin, for your marriage. For the words you have now heard are only the beginning.”

  “What’s that?” she says.

  He looks embarrassed.

  “It’s from something I’ve been reading. Ye’d be proud of me, Anna, sure ye would. And Thomas, why he’d be laughing his socks off at the thought of it, me reading the classics and all. But that Maclean. He was a schoolteacher before, ye know? It’s all about education, he says. Learning. Words. Ideas. That’s where the power is.”

  She shakes her head and heaves a smiling sigh.

  “Seamus Padraig Finnan. Man of books.”

  They laugh, and he lets her finish laughing, tension draining out from between them.

  “But, see, the reason I thought of it is, well, it’s from a play by this Greek fellow, Aeschylus, about this Titan, Prometheus. D’ye know the story, like? How he fought for Zeus against his tyrant father, then went against him to give fire to humanity and got punished for it, chained up on a mountain with the vultures pecking at his insides.”

  “Eagle,” she says. “Wasn’t it an eagle?”

  “So ye know it, then?”

  “Sharing a house with Thomas? Sure and how could I not know all the stuff and nonsense of myths and legends and whatnot? Did you ever know him to shut up about—O, Jesus, Finnan—if it wasn’t modern art, it was the Greeks this and the Greeks that and—yes, I know the story.”

  And he looks into her eyes and suddenly has this quiet realization that there’s something healed in both of them that they can look back now with fondness and laughter like they would’ve done at the wake they never had—even if it is just for a moment and with the sadness still there behind it.

  PROMETHEUS’S SECRET

  “But listen,” he says, “ye know how in the play there’s these three folks that come to visit Prometheus on the rock? There’s an old soldier, the titan Ocean, who fought beside him in the War against old Cronos. And at the end of it, there’s Hermes sent from Zeus to try and get Prometheus to spill the beans, because Prometheus knows something, ye see, he knows who’s going to overthrow Zeus the way Zeus toppled his own father from the throne. But that’s not the point, or it is, but it’s not the point I want to make, sure. Because the other person, who comes between Ocean and Hermes, right in the middle of the play, in the center of it, ye know, is this lass called Io. And she’s this poor wee girl what Zeus himself took a fancy to and came to her in the dead of the night as sure and that lecherous old bastard was always doing, and of course it’s her that suffers for it in the end, sent out to wander to the ends of the earth, kicked out of her house and home for it. A poor girl, shamed for giving herself to something that seemed…shining and true.”

  She takes his hand.

  “But it’s her,” he says. “It’s her Prometheus tells his secret to because she’s a victim like himself of Zeus. Sure and the way he sees it, what he says, is she doesn’t have half the troubles that he has, so she doesn’t, ’cause she can always kill herself and he…well, he doesn’t have that luxury, none of that mercy for Prometheus, sure, just pointless suffering going on and on without an end in sight.”

  Seamus grins at her, a wee wink in his eye.

  “Sure and he makes a bit of a song and dance about it, and it’s not really fair to be saying to someone that, well, OK, so you got turned into a cow and sent to wander all across the earth but look at me here getting me liver pecked out by the fookin vultures. That’s hardly what ye’d call tactful now, is it? But it is a play after all, so ye can forgive him for being a bit overdramatic. We all tend to get carried away with our own problems and forget that others have their own.

  “The point is that he says to her, I’ll grant you one of two tales, so he says. Which will it be? D’ye want to hear about the end of your pain or the end of mine? Is it possible, she says, for either of us? Well, if one day the King of the Gods were to kinda sorta fall from power with a wee shove from behind, says he. But is it possible, she asks, and it’s a nice idea, he says, ye’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? How could I not, says she, after what the fooker’s done to us, and he says, well, ye can be sure of it. And who will destroy him? Zeus himself, he says, by his own ignorance and stupidity. And how? Because there’s some young girl out there, some slip of a girl who doesn’t seem like anybody and ye’d never know it to look at her maybe, just a girl as she is, but maybe just a little special in a way that kings and gods will never see, but special, because any son of hers, ye see, any son of hers will be much greater than his father ever could be.

  “So he tells her, ye see. He tells her that the only one who knows who this girl is, is him, Prometheus, and he’s never going to tell. And Zeus will just go on his way, acting the same as ever and seducing poor young girls and then discarding them after he’s done, with nobody to take the fooker to task about it. Until one day…One day…And Prometheus, he knows it, but his lips are sealed. O, no, they can torture him and chain him up for all eternity but he’s never going to give it up because he knows, and he tells her, ye see, he tells Io, that it’s her descendant, one of her descendants who he knows will free him.”

  “O, Seamus, but ye’ve got it all mixed up.”

  “How’s that?” he says.

  “I know the story, but it’s Achilles, Seamus. It’s his mother is the one who’ll have a son who’s greater than his father, in the stories, in the myth, and so he is. But Zeus never touches her. Io’s completely different, and—ye’re getting everything mixed up and running two different stories together that don’t belong together, Seamus.”

  “No,” he says. “I mean, sure and I know ye’re right. I’m sure ye’re right, like, strictly speaking and all. But is that what matters? I mean, does it matter if it’s Io’s child that breaks Prometheus’s chains, or the child of her child, or three or ten generations down the line? Does it matter if it’s not the same child as overthrows the high and mighty Zeus, even if the two things are the same really, at heart, freeing the ole rebel
and toppling the ole tyrant? Does it matter if some other Greek storyteller, some blind storyteller sitting on a street-corner, decides to make Achilles the son who’s greater than his father because it makes his own story grander?”

  He leans closer.

  “Anna, there’s a truth in it I think I see. I think I know Prometheus’s secret, Anna, and it’s one that just makes sense in a way that prophecies and stories about gods and heroes and all that fookin shite—pardon me French—just don’t. Because that’s all nonsense. It’s all just stories.”

  He shakes his head.

  “So what if it’s Achilles’ mother who can have a son that’s greater than its father? What if it’s Io, too? What if it’s any girl, every girl? Any woman? Every woman, Anna. Sure and can’t any son be greater than his father? Isn’t that what it’s all about, what makes us all go on? Ye can’t look at the sheer bloody-minded defiance of a wee babe screaming its lungs out at the terrible injustice of the world and not have hope. Every generation of us, all born kicking up a racket, rebels every one of us. So who’s the son—the child—that’s greater than its father? I’ll tell ye who it is, Anna.

  “Humanity.”

  THE BALLAD OF SEAMUS FINNAN

  “Tell her,” the bitmites whisper in his ear. “Consent to do her this one favor; tell her all that still remains of wandering. And give the other tale to us. Don’t deem us undeserving of your words. We desire only this: tell us who will release you. How and by what means?”

  Hush now, he thinks.

  “If I tried to explain such wisdom as me dear old mother told it to me we’d be here forever, and there’d still be nothing learned. Ye couldn’t fookin understand it even if I told you straight. If yer in earnest, if ye really are sincere, I’ll not refuse to tell ye all ye want to know. But Seamus Finnan’s sat here in this chair, remember, on the rock and in the wire, and only half of him is Seamus now, the other half the fookin ancient thief of fire.”

  He wonders how the first of the unkin ever dealt with this. Sure and it’s madness, so it is, sitting and talking to the girl who was once yer sweetheart back in 1922 but with the vision of what’s to come so clear—as clear as a memory—that ye don’t know what now is, if yer in the future living the dead past again, or in the past remembering the future before it happens. Time in the Vellum, he thinks.

  He can feel her kidskin glove warm in his hand, and he can feel the wire cutting into his wrist and he can feel the cold Caucasian rock at his back.

  “These are the proofs of what you say,” the bitmites hiss, “the proofs to us of your intelligence, that it sees more than the visible.”

  But that’s the rub, of course, thinks Seamus Shamash Padraig Prometheus Foresight Forsythe Four Scythes Finnan Finn the giant of Ireland and the giant of the world half-awake and half-asleep under the dreamings of humanity, a creature of the Vellum as much as a man of life and love and flesh. Does he take these bitmites for minions only out to do their master’s bidding, using poor Seamus like a bucket down a well, drawing up the secrets of the future from the depths of his own past? Or does he take them for free agents that want only what we all do, just the understanding of ourselves and what we’re doing here?

  She sits at the foot of his rock, Anna, Phreedom, Io, in her long white dress, her long, dark hair blown in the cold wind, and is it Inchgillan, or is it the Caucasus? She holds his hand where it’s chained against the rock—Jesus, but the wires cut deep—and the way she looks at him he somehow knows it doesn’t matter if she’s a phantom, if she’s just a form adopted by the bitmites trying to communicate with him through the media of his memories.

  “To you first, Io, then,” he says, “I’ll tell the wanderings that will vex you. Engrave them on the tablets of the heart, because ye know, ye know that what I say is true. I’ll tell what you’ll endure, and if ye give me just a little time I’ll reach the point, and take ye to the very limit of your wanderings. I’ll tell ye all, and if there’s any of it unintelligible to you, or just difficult to understand, ask all ye want. I’ll try to make it clear; I have more time to kill than I would like. I’ll give you all you want to take.”

  “Give us a song, then, Tam. Come on. The Ballad of Seamus Finnan, eh?”

  She turns her head, watches the man as he strums his guitar and starts.

  “Well there was a young man, Seamus Finnan by name, who went off to the war, O, to play the great game. Now it wasn’t the blood and it wasn’t the fire, but his heart it was broke by a night on the wire.”

  She’s heard them sing about her. She’s heard the whole term of her travels told in epic verse, her past and future, what will happen when she comes to the molasses land, close to the speaking oaks up in the mountains of the New Dordogne, where all these protean Dukes sit on their thrones as oracles; now more than ever it’s as if they’re only following upon the tracks of words spoken a long, long time ago. She’s heard the tales of Jack too, the prodigy, the prodigal, and clearly, and without enigma, those who sing these songs want her to be the famed fiancée of a deus. It’s strange the way things change here in the Vellum, as if the more mutable the world is, the more the people in it seek to put it into simple terms. And now she sits in the tavern listening to the “Ballad of Seamus Finnan,” a folk song about this young Irishman who goes off to fight in the First World War. Finnan never really was one to talk about his past, but as she listens to the song, a shiver runs down her spine.

  “Well, it wasn’t for Belgium, it wasn’t for France. It wasn’t for England he entered that dance. It was all for the love of a sweet Irish lass, that he marched through the muck and the guns and the gas.”

  “See, Anna his sweet had a brother called Tom, and he tapped his feet to the beat of the drum. With his Trinity pals he got wild in the pub. And they took the King’s Shilling and signed with the Dub’s.”

  The tavern—no, this is more of a pub—is Finnan through and through, with the stag’s heads on the wall and the wooden Indian boy, the papier-mâché effigy of a ruler hated for her cruelty and called the Iron Lady, depicted with the savage, beaked nose and beady eyes of a political cartoon. Hundreds of different whiskies line the walls behind the bar. Men sit in a corner, on wooden pews taken from some old church, playing guitar, fiddle and bodhran. The pub itself is called the Uisge Beatha. Water of Life, explains Don. Outside, the waters of the Gulf of Rear are chopped up in the same storm that tossed their little vessel back and forth all the way along the coast. Waves crash over the seawall of Nova Iona and in the wildwinds of Evenfall only the odd maniac can be seen now and again through the bubbled glass of the window, struggling along in a yellow waxed coat, one step forward, two steps back, flapping a hand to drive away the gray maelstrom of mechanical, magical midges, the bitmites that they can’t escape, no matter how far they travel. She never visited Scotland or Ireland back in the world before this afterworld, but this seems to be a little piece of Celtic geography in the depths of the Vellum, an expatriate archipelago. She imagines ancient Ionian sailors blown here through tears in reality and returning home with tales of the strange Western Islands, the Hebrides.

  “Now Seamus was hurt to see Anna so sad, so he swore to her then to look after the lad. And he picked up his kit and he followed young Tom. Yes he followed the boy all the way to the Somme.”

  Three or four of the others around the table all join in with the chorus.

  “Tis a hard thing is life, tis a hard thing indeed. And it’s easy to die, ’cause it’s sorer to bleed. But tis hardest of all for the last man to stand, looking down at yer pals all across No Man’s Land.”

  THERE IS A CITY

  “If anything is left to tell,” the bitmites chorus, “speak of her sad journey. Speak of what’s to come or what is past. But if you’re done, give us the favor which we ask. Remember.”

  So Prometheus, he says to Io:

  “When ye’ve traveled through the tumult of the flood,” he says, “across the boundary of continents, toward the burning oriental sun, su
re and ye’ll reach a great plain of gargantuan cisterns, deep wells in the earth where neither sunbeams shine nor moonlight falls at evening or night…”

  They guide their horses carefully across the pitted land, night-vision goggles scouring the land in front of them, alert for all the dangers of the terrain, and alert for all the dangers of its inhabitants. The shantytown stretches for miles around them, tents and shacks of corrugated iron and wooden board that make her think of the outskirts of Mexico City. Stumps of dead volcanoes rise out of the mass of unpaved streets lit up by burning oilcans around which the denizens of this wounded land huddle, staring up at them as they pass. A boy drawing water up from one of the natural wells stops to look at them, rope in hand, eyes shining as they track the silver crucifix crossbow of the disruptor slung over Don’s back. Farther on an old man merely shrugs and pours a bucket of filth down one of the other holes, drops a sheet of corrugated iron back over the cesspit. She wonders if the smell is worse now than when the lava field was still active and sulfurous fumes bubbled up through molten rock, creating the unstable land of pits and thin bridges that could collapse at any moment.

  Don whistles as they ride on.

  “All the way,” she’d said.

  Three old toothless hags with necks stretched up by hoops of ivory, white like swans in the moonlight, sit on a rug outside a tent, their scarred faces with only one eye between the three of them, lit by what looks to be a shining boar’s tusk that they sit around; it’s brighter than the moon. Inside a shack, glimpsed through the open door, she sees three women all tattooed with iridescent dragon scales over their bodies, naked but for the veils on their faces and the long hair, braided and beaded like snakes, that falls down their backs and over their shoulders. One of them stretches her black wings out wide as she and Don ride past. A scent of incense wafts out of the shack, something sweet and rotten at the same time, a delicate poison, almonds and corrupted fruit, yeast and burning plastic. Creatures somewhere between the size of cats and dogs circle and sniff amongst deep heaps of garbage, rib cages showing through their golden fur, beaks picking silently at scraps, wings flapping as they claim this chunk or that as theirs. Graia, gorgons and gryphons.