Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  She looks over to her left, at another gruesome sight. A host of horsemen watch them from the other side of a deep ditch of a gutter in full flow, flooded with a golden liquid that smells like—that has to be—a mix of piss and beer. The riders are all one eyed, known through these lands as Ahriman’s Spies. The story is that when they gouge one eye out there’s another vision looks out through the empty socket, through the eye that isn’t there, that they become like cameras for their…controller sitting in a dark room somewhere, surrounded by a thousand screens.

  “I tell ye, Phree,” Finnan had said, “there’s dangers in the Vellum that ye can’t fookin imagine. But here…”

  And he’d tailed off, shaking his head. He couldn’t persuade her not to go, of course. She belonged with the monsters now. She’d head out into the Vellum, as far away from the Covenant as she could get, and she’d be safe. She and Jack would be safe.

  “Maybe,” he’d said. “How far are you willing to go?”

  “All the way,” she’d said.

  “There is a city, Canopy,” he says, “last of a distant land and near the fountains of the sun, inhabited by a dark race. You’ll find it by the ether’s open river, by the broad banks and the wide mouth of the River Nill, where it sends down its sweet and sacred stream, down from the mountains, babbling.”

  They creep down the river’s steep bank, feet skidding under the scree of the steep incline, digging their ruptors in as staffs to keep from losing their footing. In the distance she can hear the rumble of the great waterfall beyond the city where the Nill crashes down over the cliffs and into…nothing. Above them on the ridges of the ravine, the lights of the city glitter against the dark sky, amongst the silhouettes of minarets and domes. Great iron bridges span the gulf here. Farther down the ravine widens, the gradient lessens and the buildings crawl down the slopes to meet. The river itself becomes shallower and splits off into streams that disappear into grated sewers under the city streets, the whole construction built over the delta of the Nill. Canopy they call it and that’s sort of what it is, closing over the branching river and roofing it in vaults of stone, plugging the mouth of the ravine like a great dam. Somewhere under the city, the streams reunite though and she knows that, on the far edge of the city, like a Trevi Fountain built by God, it thunders out through an enormous sluice gate, falling down forever into empty eternity. The city at the end of the world.

  She looks behind her at the ragtag mob now following them, her progeny of sorts, her colony. There’s fifty of them in all, and every one of them no more than a girl, every one of them in silk shifts and with perfumed hair, and some of them crying because their feet hurt; they don’t have the shoes for this terrain, only soft slippers like a ballerina’s, like a bride’s. They don’t look capable of it, she thinks. Not one of them could you look at and picture the vengeance and the bodies, war’s welcome in a marriage bed, those girlish hands wrapped in a husband’s hair and round a two-edged dagger cutting the man’s throat, such a picture of divine brutality, a dove splattered with blood. But she knows better. Cousins, she thinks. What kind of man would sell his daughters to his brother’s sons?

  “Their laws don’t bind us, Princess,” Arkos had said, sitting corpulent and complacent in his tent, as his nephews died in silence and darkness, and she stood there with her ruptor trained on him, Don outside keeping watch. “The great pharaohs practiced incest,” he had said. “To build a dynasty of pure-bred unkin—think of it—with not a drop of human blood to soil their veins. The purity. I don’t care if they’re…unwilling. They will bear my royal race.”

  And then the ruptor in her hand was hot and Arkos was a pile of ash.

  It wasn’t her plan—it never is—just another case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, where a young girl could come to her, tell her that she had to help them, that she had to. I know your real name, she had said. I know your real name, Phreedom.

  She looks behind her at them all, scattered, scrambling down the slope. Only one of them, fifth back from Don, couldn’t bring herself to do the deed, wavering at the last minute, whether it was from fear or love or just not wanting to be stained with blood.

  And not far behind these doves now she can see the hawks, Arkos’s men, his brother and his sole surviving son. Don follows her gaze, turning around. He looks at her, at their pursuers, back at her and raises his disruptor.

  “Go,” he says.

  Go, thinks MacChuill. Just go. Now, before you change your mind. Before Henderson decides to chase you out here and drag you back into that bloody travesty of an interrogation. Just get the fuck out of here and go. Aye, but where? he thinks.

  He closes his eyes and leans back against the wall of the slaughterhouse, feeling the sun warm on his face and soaking it up. The red and orange and golden glow of it through his eyelids seems full of indistinguishable patterns, wheeling things that almost resolve into regular shapes—spirals, mandalas—but never quite make that much sense. And it’s what he feels like. Like he’s just one of those wee bits of things that’s moving in circles around and around as part of a pattern that he cannae bloody well make head nor tail of.

  He opens his eyes and it takes him a while before he can distinguish the dots floating, distant in the sky, from the afterimages of sunlight broken up and filtered by his own thin skin and veins, before he can make out the circling birds of prey. And it looks that ordered, too. It looks like they’re patrolling the skies with purpose, with a plan, the whole flock of them going round and round the way soldiers patrol the perimeter of a camp, in a jungle somewhere, green and lush like this mountainous part of Mexico. He remembers watching men in uniforms the same color as his bamboo cage and the bamboo splinters that go under the fingernails. Going round and round.

  The tips of his fingers are still numb from touching the Irishman’s soul, and he flexes them, rubs his hands together.

  But of course the birds only look like they’ve got a purpose, so he’s told. In truth, they don’t know where they’re going; they’re just following each other, keeping close enough together, far enough apart, to feel comfortable with their situation. That’s what flocking is, this—what’s the word?—emergent behavior, that seems ordered but is really chaos. So he’s told. MacChuill still has problems adjusting to this new world with its new ideas and new wars. New enemies. He wishes things were as simple as they used to be, when he was a lad, whenever that was.

  This isnae your fight, he thinks. No, if it’s a fight that means torturing some poor bastard, some poor sad bastard that never done anyone any harm except for in the foolishness of being in pain. No. He cannae conscience this. He cannae.

  Seamus Finnan, he thinks. Where do I know that name from? And somewhere in the back of his head he finds a memory of a wee pub in Glasgow and a folk musician sitting in a corner singing a song. How did the chorus go again?

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

  MacChuill makes a decision.

  He’s got no idea of where he’s going, but looking around him at the empty loading bay he knows that he’s got to get the fuck away from here right now. Maybe somewhere there’s a fight that’s right for this old soldier of an empire on which the sun, they said, would never set, but it’s not here, not now.

  Don glances up one last time at the buzzards and starts walking.

  WAKING THE GIANT

  “It was a wise man,” Anna says, “who weighed things in his mind, and said it first, that marrying according to one’s station is the best.”

  Not being just a laborer, a menial, he thinks bitterly, with hands too dirty, sure, to woo those who’re so clean, so pure with wealth and fookin breeding, so fookin pristine. I hope yer fookin happy with yer fookin officer, whatever his fookin name is. But the defeat in him is like a lead weight in his heart, an anchor dragging him down into the
cold Atlantic that he stares out into, and part of it’s because he knows she won’t be happy. He can hear it in the tremble of her voice, that it’s herself she’s trying to convince with her old man’s words. Sure and does she really have a choice in the matter?

  He slides off the rock and walks out across the beach, crouches down to pick up a flat stone. It skims across the gray water, bouncing, bouncing, one splash, two, three, then it disappears. Would she run away with him, he wonders. Is that what she’s really here for? Not to kick him when he’s down, poor crazy Seamus Finnan locked up in a looney-bin that’s passing for a War Hospital, not just for the horrid cruelty of it, but in the hope that he’ll say what she’s too afraid to say herself, maybe even too afraid to think. Sure and he doesn’t want to see her in this state, unhappy with the wrong man, in a foolish marriage that’s half love, half hate.

  Her eyes wander with distress from here to there, from driftwood to seaweed to his face, her own hands. Her confused words crash over him, salt waves of woe on an impervious rock.

  “Seamus, I feel wretched about this, though. If a marriage is of equals there’s nothing to fear, is there, O, but if it’s not though…?”

  “All I know,” says Phreedom, “all I know is that I want to be as far away from the Covenant as I can get. Out of sight and out of mind. I don’t know. Shit, Finnan, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me out there. Sometimes it seems there’s no escape from it at all—their plans, their war. But…I’ve got to try.”

  He reaches across to the bedside cabinet for his softpack of Camels, knocks them off the wooden surface with a curse. He slides his legs off of the bed and rolls upright, leans down to pick the pack of cigarettes up. Takes one out. A match from the book that’s sitting in the ashtray. A flame. A draw. Phreedom reaches out a hand and he goes to pass the Camel to her, then stops. Raises an eyebrow.

  “Right,” she says, running her hand across her belly. “Fuck it, I shouldn’t, should I?”

  She slides up beside him. Outside a police siren wails, an ambulance behind it. For a second he can’t place what’s wrong, then he realizes that neither of the sounds belong here. They’re sirens from another time, another place, not the long mournful wails, rising and falling, of twenty-first-century America, but the frantic mee-maw-mee-maw he remembers from decades ago, on the other side of the Atlantic. Back when the police had truncheons instead of tear gas.

  “Christ,” he says, trying to put a light tone in his voice. “Maybe you don’t have to go into the Vellum. I think it’s coming to us.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she says. “Come with me. You’d make a good father.”

  He laughs out loud. She has to be kidding.

  So they just sit there for most of the night, talking about the past and the future, what the Covenant are up to—what the bitmites might be up to they can only guess. She feels it different now she says, the Cant. It used to be a song, the liquid resonance of everything; and now it’s spasms in her gut and madness burning in her brain, the sting of arrows that flames never touched, the bites of flies. She talks about her heart pounding inside her chest, the way she finds herself pacing, and her darting gaze, the constant whirling round and round, like a caged animal, snorting mad breath, part fear, part fury. Sometimes she can’t control her tongue, another self rising out of her depths to curse the little trailer-girl that couldn’t cut it in her role as queen of heaven. Standing in front of the mirror, swearing at herself in ancient Sumerian.

  “If I don’t get out of here…” she says, the sentence drifting off.

  Someday, he says, she’ll find her sanity again, with a gentle hand stroking and touching her, touching her beautiful freckled skin.

  In the morning he wakes up to find her gone and, hungover, hungry, he wanders back to his little church around the corner, dragging his feet through the cold New York snow.

  “Named for the Duke that sired him,” Finnan says. “Famed for his bow.”

  He’s almost pure Prometheus now. He speaks in low, threatening tones just loud enough for the bitmites to hear, and all the time with eyes that glare out from beneath the hair that falls across his bloody face. He stares at Henderson, a look of utter hate.

  “That’s right,” he says. “This little hatchling’s going to bear the brave who’ll free me from these bonds, because, me little bitmite mates, all that yer fookin master’s sown, I’m telling ye, the dark ape of his seed will reap. He’ll plow the whole wide land that’s watered by the Nill’s broad flow. Jack Flash. I saw him once, ye know.”

  And it’s 1936 and Seamus Padraig Finnan is looking in the mirror at a face that hasn’t changed for the last twenty years, not so’s ye’d notice it at all. It’s strange it is, uncanny, but there’s a lot that’s strange and uncanny in Seamus Finnan’s life, full as it is of voices and visions, the whole babbling confusion of them such that sometimes he’s not sure if he’s awake or dreaming. It makes him a little distant from everyone around him, but then sure and he sort of prefers it that way. No one to hurt ye or be hurt by ye. And it makes it easier to do what he has to do now, being without a family and all, no wife and children to worry for him, to beg him not to go, no, not to be so daft. Let Spain sort its own problems out, they’d say. Ye’ve got mouths to feed here, bread to put on the table here, without going off to wave yer red rag flag at the fascist bull. No, Seamus doesn’t have a family like that. Just…maybe just…a brotherhood of sorts.

  “Sure and the Dukes, though proud now,” Finnan says, “shall soon be brought down by a marriage they’ve already made, one that will end with them cast down from power, down from their high thrones, thrown from their grand ivory towers. And then the curse of those who wore the crown before—the curse they swore in their own fall from those same ancient seats—will be fulfilled.”

  Henderson is turning, as if hearing the madman’s rantings for the first time. Finnan cocks his grin, blows him a kiss and shouts it:

  “Aye, ye fookin cunts. The Covenant will fall.”

  Glasgow to London by bus, the seven of them, smoking cigarettes the whole journey and looking out the window at the dreary gray scenery. And then it’s Party headquarters and the comrade there giving Seamus the money for all of their tickets onward—returns, though God knows why; they’ll not be coming back any time soon. So they land in France (and it’s strange being back, going back to France and back to war, the way he swore he never would) and head straight to Paris for a night in a wee pension. By train to Perpignan the next day, down close by the border. They cross the Pyrenees on foot, and there’s a French border guard on patrol, but he just stands out on the hillside looking the other way as they sneak past, and whistling the Internationale. From the frontier town Figueras, where the Yugoslav Tito’s in charge, to the Karl Marx Barracks in Barcelona and finally, at last, to Albacete, headquarters of the International Brigade.

  “I’ll tell ye this,” says Finnan. “There’s none but I can show them shelter from the storm to come. I know these things, how things will go. So let them sit, thinking they’re safe and sound and feeling bold with swords of fire in their hands, surrounded by the high-flown sounds of unkin words of power; it will not stop their fall from grace to ground.”

  The training isn’t so much basic as bloody elementary. There’s no butts, no machine guns when they arrive and half the boys have never even handled a rifle before, so Seamus somehow ends up showing them the ropes, drilling them and such. Open order, advance by sections, fire a few rounds. Equipment, munitions, is precious, rare, arriving in dribs and drabs; a couple of old Lewis guns for firing at aircraft, French Chauchats that Seamus views with cold contempt, and the rifles that they get at first, well, ye have to put the butt on the fookin ground and use yer boot to get the bolt out ’cause sure and ye can’t fookin get it out with yer hand. What he wouldn’t give for a Lee Enfield.

  Chinchon, the 11th of February. They get twelve hours training on the Russian water-cooled Maxim machine gun and the next morning they’re sent
up the line to the Jarama Valley, into the Jarama, fifteen thousand men in four brigades against thirty thousand Germans, Italians and Moors all fitted out with the best kit that Hitler and Mussolini can provide. But they have something that those fookin fascists and conscripts and mercenaries don’t. They have a cause worth fighting for in a Republic to defend and in a brotherhood of clenched fists raised against fascist salutes.

  Mucho fuerte, the Spaniards say. Mucho fuerte.

  “Ye see,” he says, “the fighter they now train against themselves, this prodigy, is one that nothing can withstand. Ye hear me? Nothing.”

  Henderson stands at the circle’s edge, the toe of one boot touching salt, staying, for all his unkin might, on the safe side of Finnan’s binding where the Cant can’t touch him, where the words are just words, so he thinks. Not quite.

  “His flame will put the fookin lightning flash to shame,” snarls Finnan. “Son, his roar’ll make the thunder of the skies sound tame, and shatter Tridents in the sea.”

  He strains against the cutting wires, Finnan does. Blood trickles down over his hands.

  “These gods, these new lords of the world,” Finnan says, “they have the power to make the earth shake. But as ye’ll come to understand, ye fookin angel cunt, he has the power to make the sleeping giant wake.”

  And stumbling into their ruin, Finnan thinks, like fools, they’ll learn how different it is to serve humanity than to rule.

  He shakes his head, a hoary giant, the heart of Seamus Finnan, of Prometheus, beating inside him like a drum.

  “Against my foes may such titanic themes and cyphers come—”