The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

by Kij Johnson

  Dawn departures. How many of these had there been in those years of far-travelling? And now, again.

  * * *

  Down was as wearying as up had been, but more quickly traversed. She looked out on what seemed an eternal, creamy sheet of clouds and above them the tessellate shell-forms and shingling scrolls of the louring sky, but after a while she descended into the clouds and saw nothing, emerging to observe that what had been a featureless sheet of cirrus from above was, from this side, no more than a single small puff capping Hatheg-Kla’s heights. Passing through the horn and ivory gates in late morning, she encountered no zoogs, but she had no wish to tempt her luck and left the forest by the most direct route. By the time she crossed its margin, the westward sun was settling into a cloud the color of dried blood. She moved out quickly onto a dry wasteland of stones and sand, scattered with patches of thorny shrub and dry grasses that scraped any exposed bare skin and raised tiny, stinging red lines.

  Just before dark, she found a place of trilithons and shadowy statues of inhuman form: a ruined temple complex to some unknown god blasted by its jealous master, or razed by some divine enemy, or trampled by great beasts, time, or circumstance. She settled on a ruined pavement cradled in the corner of a crumbling shrine wall, and built a fire from the branches of a dead thorn tree. The wood was dry and resinous, burning quickly with sweet-smelling green flames. Vellitt laid out her blanket, sighing a little, for her bones ached already in expectation of the hard bed, but when she laid back, it was with relief. The temple’s beds had been soft and the food excellent—the priests were not of an ascetic order—but the air seemed purer down here.

  She looked up. The gibbous moon seemed very low tonight—as though, were she still the young woman who had scaled Noton, it would be no great task to swing herself up onto its shining surface—but as she watched, it began to move, rounding to full as it sailed to the east.

  She thought of Randolph Carter. Not a tall man, but dark and handsome with excellent teeth: attractive in the way of all dreamers, but always with an essential, solitary coldness. In her far-travelling years, she had met five waking-world men (that she knew of), and they had all seemed to share this.

  She had never met a woman from the waking world. Once she asked Carter about it.

  “Women don’t dream large dreams,” he had said, dismissively. “It is all babies and housework. Tiny dreams.”

  Men said stupid things all the time, and it was perhaps no surprise that men of the waking world might do so as well, yet she was disappointed in Carter. Her dreams were large, of trains a mile long and ships that climbed to the stars, of learning the languages of squids and slime-molds, of crossing a chessboard the size of a city. That night and for years afterward, she had envisioned another dream land, built from the imaginings of powerful women dreamers. Perhaps it would have fewer gods, she thought as she watched the moon vanish over the horizon, leaving her in the darkness of the ninety-seven stars.

  From where she lay there were several routes to Ilek-Vad, but the fastest would be to go north by north-east and meet the Oonai-Sinara caravan road, which would take her eventually to the headwaters of the Xari. She could follow the river downstream, take passage in Sinara on a dhow to the Cerenarian Sea, and there find a ship sailing east, to the twilit ocean at the foot of the glass cliffs of Ilek-Vad. Between now and then, there would be weather: this was Sextilis; but with Septiver, autumn could come, and by Octaver, there would be the start of the winter seas. And beyond all that, distance in the dream lands shifted according to laws not the wisest geographer could understand, subject to the whims of the bickering gods. In all, it would take weeks, more likely months. So much time lost—and to be lost—and not even on a certainty.

  She fell asleep on her plans. She awoke once to an animal noise heard from afar, and felt the black cat’s paw touching her face. The air was the deep cold of desert nights, and she had curled into a ball to preserve her warmth. She made a small opening and the cat crept beneath the blanket and pressed its chilled body to her, where it warmed quickly. She laid her hand on its fur. It smelled of killing, for it had been hunting.

  * * *

  She travelled more quickly this time. Her aches changed each day, but she was growing stronger and the tricks of the road came back to her: how to tend to her feet at the end of a long walk; how to shape a hollow for sleeping in sandy soil; how to build a protective perimeter of shifting stones and noisy shrubs. Some skills had improved with age: she was silent now in ways she never had been at twenty-five, as though her bones themselves had grown lighter. Though she had matches and the electric torch still retained some charge, she took pleasure in using flint and steel and tinder to start her nightly fires.

  The caravan road was not so busy as it had been before the Five Oases had been turned to venom, but she saw occasional bands of traders on camelback, and she was passed once by a courier riding his zebra fast toward Oonai, leading two backup mounts. Wild places are emptier of large predators than any town-dweller imagines, and she saw nothing larger than an adolescent rock cat with the spots of infancy still fading from its flanks; but she heard the cough of a red-footed wamp and once, far away, the howling of a pack of the long-legged gray dogs that dwell in the deserts. The black cat of Ulthar grew still leaner and dustier. It hunted for its own food now, though it was happy to take bits of dried duck meat from her fingers when they paused in the middle of the day. It walked as much as it rode on her pack.

  The desert changed, sandy soil and shrubs to a dirty white sand flecked with low, flat succulents, then red-gold rocks and waist-high sagebrush. She climbed into woodland and junipers, and eventually came to the icy headwaters of the Xari, cradled in a cirque of quartzite that glittered in the midday sun. She followed the river as it danced northward down a succession of waterfalls and rapids past the first remote homesteads. She slept for the first time in a week upon a mattress, in a hamlet that had no name—no name, for they had decided centuries before that anonymity would make it harder for Elder Ones (or tax men) to find them; except that everyone came to call them the Unnamed Village, and so their plan failed, after all. Everyone seemed to chatter endlessly: talkative innkips, voluble bakers, garrulous farmers. She had grown silent in her days in the desert.

  She came to Sinara, where the Xari descended in a final sparkling cascade before settling into sedate middle age and a mannered progression down the Valley of Narthos. She booked passage on a dhow leaving in the morning. The trip to Xari-mouth would take between three and nine days—depending, the shipkip told her with a sour look as he made the Elder Sign: depending on wind and weather; depending on the ways the inconstant land might alter as they crossed it; depending on whether the attentions of the whimsical gods were drawn to the slim-hulled white boat.

  It was barely midday, so she took a room in an inn and called for a bath. As she undressed, she saw a stranger, taller-seeming because she was leaner than the woman in her mirror back in Ulthar; the coppery skin of her face and arms grown darker; her black-and-silver hair tangled into the elf-locks of a mad visionary. She looked—not younger than she had in Ulthar, but wilder, more powerful: more like the Veline Boe who had travelled in her clear-eyed youth as far as Lüchen, as far as Rinar. She ruefully shook her head and bathed, and walked into Sinara’s main town, to find a place that might clean the sand from her clothing and blankets, and into a shop where a woman did things to her hair until it fell in many tiny shining silver-black ropes about her face, and she looked less mad and more visionary. Also, it would be much easier to take care of, now that her quest had grown so much longer. But it was a slow process, and it was nearly dark when she emerged at last from the woman’s door.

  The dhow left at dawn. Because there were no other women, the shipkip had with reluctance given her a room to herself, a tiny berth behind the galley that smelled of onions and garlic—for the cook was from Asagehon. On the first day, the shipkip tried to have the black cat cast overboard. Vellitt objected and the
cat vanished into some hidden recess of the dhow; but the contretemps left her friendless, so she spent her days on deck watching the Valley of Narthos unspool itself, bright and heartbreakingly beautiful.

  Summer was ending, and the first gingkos flared brilliant yellow against the green of those garden lands. This was gentle country, comparatively free of great beasts, so the farms and orchards were large. The air that blew across the deck was rich with the smells of ripening fruit and grain. She had not come this way in years, but the landmarks came back to her: now a red-tiled riverside inn, now the acres of reedy backwater called Bakken, now the hillside orchards, a boatyard, a silver-walled temple, a misshapen oak tree isolated in a ploughed field and bound tightly in chains. But there were also differences: a swath of fields had been burnt to the ground and the soil scarred the dark blue that indicated divine fire; and the water downstream was for many miles stained black as tea.

  The passing of days concerned her, but in the end it was a quick sail. On the morning of the fourth day, the dhow docked at Cydathria’s riverside wharves. When she disembarked, the small black cat appeared as though conjured by a stage magician, and preceded her down the gangway. It was hard not to see the flick of its tail as an insolent farewell to the shipkip.

  * * *

  Vellitt Boe went immediately to the office of the harbormaster, who eyed her with contempt and tried to serve the man standing behind her first; but she had taught just such young men in her Topology lectures back at the University: it was an annoyance but no more to check his insolence and collect the information she needed. There were (he told her, his consonants as clipped as he could make them) five ships in Xari-mouth scheduled to set off in the next few days. Two were sailing to Ilek-Vad, with stops: a southern trireme without a name, and a three-masted thoti, the Medje Löic. Or (added the harbormaster, uninterested) she might wait. Another would come soon enough. Cydathria was always busy in the autumn as ships came for the products of the Narthos orchards.

  She walked along the great jetty to where she could see the oceangoing ships, some busy at the granite wharfs and others at anchor in the Throat, awaiting their turn. It was a sunlit day with a light wind that breathed salted air into her face.

  The trireme was loading, a black-hulled vessel with a single towering mast, and she recognized its type, and knew better than to take passage.

  She fell in love with the Medje Löic the minute she identified it, out in the Throat. The unladen thoti rode high, and the perfect proportions of its rigging and hull were clear. In an earlier decade, she would have taken passage on so graceful a ship without regard to destination; she would willingly have sailed off the world’s edge into the abyssal chaos if she could do so cradled among these flowing curves. Beauty, true beauty, had that power.

  She tracked down the Medje Löic’s captain in a dockside office, irrationally afraid that the man in line ahead of her might take the last berth or even that the captain might for some reason refuse her; but there were still berths, and her money was of course good. “The cat as well?” the captain asked, for it had followed her and was absorbed in examining the corners of the office. “We’ve a cat already, so yours’ll have to work it out with Finellio, but Medje’s a big boat. We’re scheduled into dock tomorrow night for loading. Stay at the Red Dog, and we’ll contact you there.”

  The rest of the day was spent in errands. She exchanged two of the letters of credit for more gold, grateful for the Bursar’s foresight, and walked up to Cydathria’s High Town to purchase the things she would need for a journey that had stretched from days to months. She showed her credentials at the scholarium and was admitted to their library, where she wrote to Gnesa. She found a narrow shop she knew of old and bought a quire of paper and new pens for the voyage, and returned late to the Red Dog.

  The next day, she took a ferry across Xari-mouth to Jaren, to see the home of her childhood. The town did not appear to have changed much, everything a smaller, stodgier version of Cydathria: the short granite wharfs for such boats as could brave the shallows on this side of the harbor; the warehouses, shops, and inns of Jaren-bas, crammed between the waterfront and the rosy cliff; the zigzag road and clever zebra-propelled funicular up to Jaren-haut: the smell, omnipresent, of the sea. In Jaren-haut, she walked along the High Street, past the shop where her mother had had her shoes made and the arcade where they had bought milk and vegetables and meat, though the flescher was gone, replaced by a man who sold green- and blue-veined cheeses. The confectionery was still there, and still smelled of buttercream and sugar and baking. Nothing inside had changed, not even the order in which the sweets were arranged, but she did not recognize the woman behind the counter.

  She took the right turn onto Lebië, a lane too steep for wheels. It had been possible to see Jaren’s wharves from the top of the maple tree at the end of Lebië, and each day, she and her brother had watched the ferries from Cydathria, to look for the tiny dark upright figure of their father. They knew to the minute how long it took for him to get to Jaren-haut, so they met him when he came off the funicular. He solemnly paid them a penny each to carry home his folio and any parcels there were.

  When she had been small, Vellitt had indulged the fantasy all children had, that these were not her parents, that someday an Elder One, kindly, wise, and handsome, would reclaim her. It had not been until after her father’s death that she realized the father-god of her imaginings was exactly like him.

  Their mother’s absences were harder to predict, for she had been a sometime sailor even after her marriage. This happened whenever she could find a ship that took women as crew, though there were few, mostly just hoppers shuttling between Cydathria and Hlanith; occasionally an oceangoing xebec. She had not returned from one of her rare blue-water trips, when her ship had been pulled underwater by something immeasurably vast and hungry. The news had come to Jaren in Vellitt’s sixteenth summer. Her father made her promise never to sail, but when he died in her nineteenth year (pneumonia; it had been a terrible winter), she bought passage on the first ship to leave after the funeral, a schooner running to Sarkmouth, where the dark marshes of Lomar met the Cerenarian Sea’s icy western reaches. Lomar was at all times grim, and in the month of Gamel it was also bitterly cold and windy, the air laced with acrid snow; but she responded to its bleakness as a reflection of her own sorrow. She did not come back to Jaren for five years. Her brother had in that time married a humorless woman and grown stern. He was gone now, as well.

  Their house remained, a tall, slim structure still painted blue-gray, but the shutters were vermilion now instead of green, and beneath the windows, the small pine trees in urns had been replaced by pots of ceramic nightflowers. After a time, she walked back down through Jaren, returning to Cydathria just as the sun set.

  There was a message awaiting her at the Red Dog: the Medje Löic was at the Sea-Eel Wharf, taking in cargo and supplies. Passengers were advised to report to the thoti in the morning.

  * * *

  The College had a triannual tradition of presenting a University play during Somar-term and Vellitt had occasionally assisted behind the scenes. The frenzied activity on the Medje Löic reminded her a little of that, the decks crammed with sailors and shore workers racing in interleaving patterns without collisions as they loaded the last cargo and stores.

  She watched from the upstairs parlor of the tavern at the end of the wharf—also called the Sea-Eel—where the passengers had been sent to keep them out of the way. They clustered at the windows or sat writing final letters: mostly solitary men in the carefully inconspicuous clothing that marked experienced travellers; but also a small party of traders from Kled unafraid to mark their wealth with the excellence of their jackets; a courier and his guard in green-and-yellow livery; and a chatty man who introduced himself to everyone, even her, claiming to be from Rinar. His accent and ornate layered tunics were not quite perfect, and she pegged him for the commoner sort of shipboard grifter, surprised that the captain had not seen throug
h him and barred passage. He must have paid well.

  One of the solitary men had the look to her of a far-traveller. She knew that expression, that posture: she had seen it in herself for years and learned to recognize it in others. When he looked at her, did he see it as well? No, she was settled: Professor of Maths at Ulthar: friends, a hobby of botany, her rooms. This cat, currently curled beneath one of the chairs watching everyone’s feet with an engaged, assessing air.

  She was the only woman, of course, but she was used to that. In her years of far-travelling, she had met a few others like her, though they usually wayfared with a husband—legal or common-law or false—for too many men misunderstood a woman who travelled alone. Sometimes she and Reon Atescre had pretended to be married as being easier for them both. So had she and Randolph Carter, though in that case there had been love, she thought. As a young woman, when she had been beautiful and had worn her hair short and her clothes loose to conceal that fact, she had known all the signs of men and read them well enough that she had been successfully robbed only three times and raped once; but none of those had burned from her the hunger for empty spaces, strange cities, new oceans.

  Final embarkation was in late afternoon. Her cabin was a near-perfect cube of teakwood scarce taller than she, with a built-in bunk, clipping hooks for clothing, a little folding desk, and, to her delight, a porthole, though it would not open. Vellitt unpacked quickly. Following her into the room, the cat assumed immediate possession of a yak-wool scarf she tossed for a moment upon the bunk. “I need that, cat,” she warned, but it only curled tighter and gazed up with bright eyes. In the end, the scarf remained there for the rest of the voyage.

  She visited the two public cabins assigned to passengers. The dining cabin’s single table was not quite large enough for them all to eat together—they were thirteen—and so, she was told, people if they chose might take their meals in the main cabin, apart from the others. The Kled traders had already claimed for themselves one of the main cabin’s tables, and had laid out the first arrangement of tiles for a game that she knew from experience would take days to complete. There were other tables and chairs, a selection of small stringed instruments, and a single cabinet crammed with the sorts of books people read on long voyages: lengthy biographies, mountaineering sagas, popular page-turners from twenty years back, a few classics of the sort that go unread unless there are no alternatives.