by Geoff Ryman
“It’s only a man!” sighed one of their more world-hardened sisters in the van. She shook her head and stepped neatly out of the carriage.
“And he says he used to be a woman,” added her sister. She turned to Cara, looking almost unfriendly. “We’ll deliver your letter. Wait here.” The two sisters walked off together, very precisely, as though plucking a musical instrument with their feet.
The Yahstranavski was sandwiched between two walls of damp rock. The carriage sat, Cara saw, on what used to be the roof. Other buildings, grey, mottled with lichen, had been built on it, with towers of their own. Alleyways of steps ran between them, leading to other buildings higher up the slope. Beyond all of them, clinging to the sides of the rock, was a maze of small huts and stairways and vegetable gardens under nets.
Stefile wandered to the edge of the roof and sat down. She peered at her feet that dangled over the bulk of the fortress below them, the sheer wall of windows and the bark tile roofs of the extensions. She spat, to watch it fall. Patterns of forest and open ground stretched out to the horizon, lost in haze, and above where the horizon should have been, more mountains rose up, clear, above the clouds.
“Are you really a great sorcerer?” Stefile asked.
Cara sat behind her, hands on her shoulders. “I think so.”
“Will you be in songs and stories, then?”
Cara smiled. “If the Great Mother lets me in,” she answered. “Yes.”
To Cara’s surprise, the Great Mother did.
Cara and Stefile were led down, not up, into the fortress. The interior was caked with gold, on the pillars and walls and across the high ceilings; gold in the shape of the clothes that icons of the great sisters wore, gold as in rays about their varnished faces. Gold lamps hung on gold chains; candles blazed all around them. High warbling voices gargled out strange noises, spells in chants that scented the air, that kept Cara and Stefile on the right path, and that prevented them from touching the gold.
They came to a corridor, lit by windows. The thin light of day seemed suddenly wan and pale. A row of women sat on stools, shelling peas. The sister who led Cara and Stefile nodded, and without a word, one of the women stood and strode with a light step to a door. She insinuated herself through it, sideways, so that the strangers could not see what was beyond it. The woman did not come out again, but the door opened by itself, and smiling, the Great Mother stood within it, hands clasped in front of her. Her name was Epesu, which meant simply Work.
“Come in, come in!” she said, sounding genuinely pleased to see them. She was very young, ruddy-cheeked with fine-grained skin. Her sleeves were rolled up and she wore homely slippers made of string, and a black apron with embroidered flowers. “This is my day room,” she said. “I’m weaving.” There were many windows in the room, but almost no furniture. There was a loom in the corner and a mat of parchment, and ink and a brush, and piles of paper pressed between blocks of wood. Otherwise the floor was bare, polished wood. The room was icy cold.
Cara and Stefile stepped in, and the entire room groaned with their weight. There was a knothole through the floor, and Cara saw daylight through it, and, refocusing, rocks a very great distance below.
“Hold this for me, please,” said Mother Work, casually, holding out a spindle while searching her apron pocket for something. Cara took the spindle. “Wonowonownoahowah,” droned the Great Mother, and Cara found she could not move. Her arms dropped to her side, and she sagged at the knee, barely able to stand. The only thing that did not loosen was her grip on the spindle. Epesu turned her bright eyes on them again.
“This is the Spell of No Wind in the Branches,” she explained. “You won’t be able to do anything unless I will it. You will answer questions and be able to tell only the truth. Don’t take the spindle girl! Or the spell will fall on you, and I will have to use more brutal means to control him.” Easily, the sorceress flung herself into the air, and it held her, and she sat, sprawled and comfortable in it. “You must admit, girl, I have a right to worry about an armed sorcerer who has forced my daughters to take him into our home.”
She was beautiful, but the face was somehow too sharp, with flared nostrils and a mouth like a knife. “You will allow me that?” she asked Stefile almost winsomely, amused and requesting. Her manner was graceful and patrician, her voice modulated by power and education.
“Yes, Mistress,” replied Stefile, casting her eyes down with shame. Guilt makes hatred of the self; shame makes hatred of others. Stefile’s eyes flared up again, full of rage.
“Thank you,” replied Epesu, and turned again to Cara. She asked, almost caressingly, “Now. Tell me. Are you Wensenara?”
Cara was only able to jerk her head backwards, to answer yes. Epesu’s eyebrows rose in acknowledgement. “You are a very powerful sorceress. Do you know, you bested our most implacable spell of banishment with the Spell of Sitting in Air? But do not mistake, Blossom. Magic is the interaction of the powerful one and the world in which she lives. The magic exists between them. The same person can move mountains one day, and not lift a stone the next. The magic must be right. The world must want it. You are being carried by something very powerful indeed. That is why you are here. Not because of that . . .” Mother Work chuckled tolerantly, “silly letter. You keep talking about a plague in it, and don’t tell me what it is. Tell me now.”
Cara tried to explain what the Galu were. The words were slurred, as though they were feet to be dragged. It seemed to her that she cast them, like a long cord from a boat to the bank and that she watched them arch, and sometimes miss. It took a very long time. Epesu was patient.
When Cara was done, she asked, “Why didn’t you want to tell me, your Mother, what it was?” She sounded surprised, almost hurt.
Cara did not want to tell her. The words seemed to come out of her gullet by themselves, like bubbles. “You might be a part of it. Their name. It’s the same. As ours, the Wensenara. The Secret Rose.”
There was a flicker, a sudden startled blinking, in the eyes of Mother Work. “Ah,” she said, and worked her hands. “Well, if there is a connection, I don’t know of it. I know nothing of these creatures who look like men. Why should we help you?”
The reason seemed so overwhelmingly obvious that Cara’s weighted mind could not put a name to it. “I can’t think,” she plainted, heart-stricken, frightened by her haziness of mind. This was what it was like to be stupid. She felt a sudden panic that the spell would never be lifted, that she would be slow forever.
“You mean that you cannot invent a reason. That is because of the spell. If there were a truthful reason, it would come to you lightly. You are like those people down there.” Mother Work stood, and put both her hands on the small of her back and stretched. “They think that just because we have power, we must use it to help them. They come when it is easiest for them, just after harvest when we are busiest, cooking and preserving for the winter.” Epesu went to the window and leaned on its sill, looking out. “They want us to curse a neighbour, or to cure an abscess of the jaw. You mentioned our name, Blossom. You don’t even know what it means. The Secret Rose refers to the secret that everything contains. Every word is really another word that is being used in a different sense. Every action is also many other actions. A spell for good often does harm, because it disrupts the world. A spell to do harm often does good. We try to learn these secrets, and leave the world as we found it. Now. Again. Why should we help you?”
“Because . . .” The reason came to Cara, and went.
“I think you had better go,” the Mother smiled.
“No!” Cara shook her head, her mouth hanging open. A line of spittle was flung out of it. There was a plot she had, a scheme, buried deep, a reason, something to offer,what was it?
“Because it will give you more power!” she was finally able to blurt out.
“Really?” Epesu sounded pleased. “It would seem to me, daughter, kind-heartedness aside, that if I wanted to preserve and expand the power of t
he Secret Rose, I had best join with these Galu.” The smile was sweet, absolutely delicious.
“No,” moaned Cara, near tears. “Let me tell you. Let me think!”
Stefile stepped forward and snatched the spindle from out of Cara’s grasp. The spell fell on her.
“Oh,” said Epesu, as if she had stepped in something unpleasant. “Love. Let me warn you, warrior, you move towards me, and you shall crack and blister in spells the like of which no one knows but me.”
It was like a fog blown in a wind, very quickly swirling away; Cara’s mind was clear. She said very briskly, “I want you to send me into the Land of the Dead. If you do that, I promise to bring back to you the Apple that Hawwah ate, that gives Knowledge. You could learn more secrets then.”
The mother laughed, a beautiful, musical laugh, and shook her head, and seemed to look on Cara with endearment. “Dear daughter!What makes you think I can send you to the Land of the Dead?”
“Keekamis Haliki rode there on a white horse. I have seen a white horse in a vision.”
“Oh,child!” said Epesu, and suddenly her eyes were round and angry. “Keekamis Haliki lies! He lies most poisonously, he lies about everything! To send you to the Land of the Dead, I would have to kill you. And I could not be sure of bringing you back. Books! Books, books, books, and dreams. Do you know what the Land of the Dead is? It is the Secret Rose of the Land of Life. It is everything terrible and awful and sad and bad. There is no beauty, there is no hope, there is no change, there is no growth, and at its heart is the Serpent. Prise apart the fresh, sweet, plump petals of life, and there is the mite, and the destruction it has gnawed. You want to face that? Go home, child, go home to your books!”
“Is that what it was like when you were there?” Cara asked simply. The woman’s haunted eyes had told her.
Mother Work stopped, and then chuckled, darkly, conspiratorially. “Good. Very good. Yes,” she answered.
“So there is a way.”
“By murder. Or suicide. Go home, child, and read your precious Haliki. He will tell you that the spoils of the Serpent can be won by neither man nor woman.” The moment she said it, Epesu’s face froze.
“Which am I?” asked Cara. “Man or woman?”
Epesu was trying to disguise a certain shaking of her hands. “I could kill you, and bring you back,” she said. “The risks are obvious.” It was after all, an offer.
“If you do not bring me back, you will not get the Apple.”
“If you do not get the Apple, then I will not bring you back,” whispered Mother Work, and smiled, and did a curtsey. “And, if there is any trouble when you return, there is always this girl, to keep you to your word.” She inclined her head towards Stefile without looking for her.
“She must be left out,” said Cara. “You have enough of a hold on me, I think.”
“You might return and decide that the Apple is too precious to be surrendered. You have nothing to fear, if you give me the Apple. I certainly don’t want her for anything.”
“Agreed,” said Cara, quietly.
“No,” moaned Stefile, and shook her head. “No.”
“Can you do it now?” Cara asked, softly.
The Great Mother sniffed. “I suppose these things are best done quickly.” She drew a small, very shiny dagger from the pocket of her apron, and inspected it. “You’d best make farewells in case anything goes wrong.” Cara looked at Stefile, and shook her head with the hopelessness of finding the words to say. “Goodbye.”
“Ca-ra,” Stefile said in a small voice, as if calling it from very far away.
“Bare your neck,” said the Great Mother. “You might as well take your armour off. It won’t go with you.”
“It will,” Cara answered her. It had not escaped her notice that Epesu had not asked why she wanted to go to the Land of the Dead. Cara cursed herself for mentioning Keekamis Haliki, who tried to carry back the Flower. Epesu would know that the Flower was what she sought, and had not mentioned it. That meant Epesu wanted the Flower too.
Epesu came towards her with the knife.
“What about the blood?” Cara found herself asking.
“Oh, it seeps out through the floorboards,” shrugged Mother Work.
A few moments later, she was surprised to see that the armour was gone. It too had travelled.
Cara awoke on her back, at the foot of the cliff, listening to a sound that was only something like the sound of wind. It was bitterly cold, the kind of cold that seems to gnaw at the tips of the fingers. Cara felt it, but in a curiously muffled way, as if she were only remembering the pain. She wondered if she wanted to open her eyes, if there was any reason to. Finally she did.
Cara thought at first that it had snowed. There were no colours, no greens, no blues. The world was still there, the cliff rising up above her, but the sky and the rocks were a dazzling white. The shadows were black and hard-edged. There was no shading of grey.
“I’m dead,” Cara said aloud. Her whole body, lying on its back on the gravel slope, felt as still as ice. So did her mind. She saw no reason at all to move.
Then something leaned over her, defined only by the shadows of its face, the rest of it merging with the white of the sky.
“Cara. Cal Cara,” it said with a sadness. It nudged her gently with its muzzle. “Come, Cara, up. You have work to do.”
“The Flower,” Cara remembered, in a hollow voice. “The Apple.” She did not want to stand at all. She wanted to rest on her back, lay down the magic and the thing she had to do. The white horse moved her hair tenderly, with its upper lip, coaxing her. Finally, wearily, Cara stood.
The camp about the base of the cliff was gone, except for the ash from the fires, and the people who had died there. They sat around the cold fires, staring, still waiting.
“Cara? Cal Cara?” asked the horse, its great head pressed gently against hers, asking her a heartfelt question. Cara knew who it was, she knew whose soul had wished itself into this shape before dying, taken this shape for Cara’s sake, to carry her. Cara knew and didn’t care. She felt no love. She was no longer capable of it.
“Do you know the way?” Cara asked, coldly.
“Yes,” said the horse, pulling back.
“You will carry me?”
“I have carried you before,” said the horse, its eyes even blacker than before. “I hope, Cara, that you have made all your plans before coming here, because this is the Land Where Nothing Changes. You will not be able to think of anything new here.”
“Take me to the Flower and the Apple,” was all that Cara said. As single-minded as an infant in the womb, she climbed on the horse’s back, and kicked it to make it move.
Head bowed, the horse picked its way down the slope, the rocks underfoot rattling and clinking like broken pottery. Halfway down the slope, a searing heat passed through Cara and the horse. It burned Cara’s legs and made her heart jump as if it were alive, wafted through and across her, and Cara saw it, a ghostly image, roiling, and seething, made of a million dancing particles, full of glorious subtleties of light and shade and possibility, and Cara caught a snatch of its voice, rising and falling on waves of feeling that seemed to carry Cara up and down with them, a tumble of love and weariness and despair. “They’ll hear us tomorrow,” the voice said, still hoping.
It half-pulled Cara off the horse as it passed, crowding her head with a tumult of emotions that confused and hurt her. She opened her mouth to call after it. Then it was gone, and even that desire faded. Everything faded.
“Life passes through us, and we cannot touch it,” said the white horse. Cara did not reply. She was already beginning to forget it.
They rode through a denuded valley without trees or grass, past lakes that were still and hard, like glass, unchanging. There were buildings, every building that had ever been in the valley, some of them standing in the midst of each other, in the same place, like layers of curtain. There were no pathways to them and their windows were blacker than night. There
were houses in the ground, one on top of the other.
Dead men sat fishing without lines, staring ahead, unblinking. Dead children stood in the middle of the road, waiting for their mothers; old women knitted without yarn. A middle-aged man, scowling slightly, walked up and down a rock field, calling “Sara? Sara, where are you?” A plump woman in all her finery, jewellery clinging to her ears and nostrils like insects, crawled on the stone on her hands and knees. “Oh how silly,” she said. “It was just here. I seem to have lost it. Oh how silly. It was just here. I seem to have lost it.”
There were lovers who held each other in the embrace they gave when they finally met again. A hanged man twitched and kicked and gagged in mid-air, without gallows or rope, and farmhands tilled fields without grain because they could think of nothing else to do. Cara asked no questions about the things she saw. There were no questions to ask.
They travelled back across the mountains through the Unwanted Way. The mountain river did not roar; there was no day or night. The horse stepped over butchered bodies that the Unwanted had killed and robbed. They snored, thinking they were still asleep. A young man writhed on the ground like a worm, wailing “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me,” forever being murdered.
They came down out of the hills. The horse rode on the unchanging surface of the great river, through the canyon, to Cara’s house.
It was full of other people who had lived there, the people in the frescos in Cara’s room. Amid the rock of the garden, where her mother’s flowers had been, Cara’s father was trying to dig with a shovel that could not pierce or change the ground. He was younger and stronger than the last time Cara had seen him. “Oh Cara, there you are,” he said, not particularly surprised. “Tikki’s calling for you. He’s by the river.” Cara’s father had his arms and his legs and his boots, but not the pair that Cara had killed for him.
