The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

by Kij Johnson

  The Medje Löic left the wharf at dusk, picking its way to an anchorage in the Throat. Vellitt stood on deck for a time, watching the torch lights of Jaren and the gas-jet glow of Cydathria, then slept soundly in her narrow, rocking bed. She did not dream, nor did she feel the first living swell of the sea along the thoti’s hull as it weighed anchor and began its voyage.

  * * *

  The Medje Löic was a beautiful sailor; and with the wind in a fair quarter, the air cool, and the days Septiver-bright, Vellitt spent much of her time on the aft deck, watching the land pass, or else gazing up through the layered, complex geometries of the wine-colored lateen and settee sails to the foliant sky beyond. The man she had identified as another far-traveller also preferred the aft deck, and they spoke occasionally, as when he pointed out the flying city Serranian, so far to port and so high that she could barely see the pink-marble towers against pillaring cumulus clouds. Tir Lesh Witren was his name.

  This was shore-hopping, the land always in sight to starboard. They passed the jungles of Kled, league after league of rolling hills above rocky shoreline, cloaked entirely in a surprising lush green, for the trees of Kled did not lose their leaves in winter. The air was rich with spices and flowers, and she took in great lungsful. At night she saw scatterings of light ashore, as of towns lit by gaslight or even electricity.

  At first, she ate in the crowded dining cabin, but the other passengers had little to say to her and she found their conversation (all of trade and card games) dull, so she began to take her meals in the main cabin, reading books she found on the crowded shelves, or content in her thoughts. She was joined sometimes by Tir Lesh Witren, or one or two of the others. The most frequent was the youngest of the Klethi traders, who eyed her with a certain awed fascination, and spoke with her as if she were eighty instead of fifty-five, asking questions about events of ancient history as though she might have been a witness: loudly, slowly, and with great courtesy.

  On the fourth day, they rounded a cape and there was a single pinnacle of pure labradorite rising a hundred feet above the waves. In the Septiver midafternoon sun, it was striated purple and gray and blue, like the wing of a grackle; but her memories of other voyages overlaid the view: a stormy midmorning a year after her father’s death when the stone had seemed to shine with an inner violet light; a summer afternoon when the pinnacle looked nearly lavender; a night when she had stood on the ship’s deck with a man, and the pinnacle had been a spear of platinum aimed at the full moon resting overhead. But she remembered the kiss more than the rock.

  On the morning of the eighth day, the thoti tided into the port of Hlanith. Passengers and cargo were to be exchanged, but the captain was eager for a fast return to the sea. “Twenty-four hours,” he told Vellitt: “I’ll sail with or without you.”

  Hlanith had much the look of Ulthar but sturdier—as indeed it had to be, a port town facing north. Contact was frequent between the towns along a pikeway through the Karthian Hills, and since becoming a professor, she had visited more than once in her Somar-term ramblings. It took no time to locate the last few oddments she needed for the voyage. She stopped for tiffin at a little tea house she remembered from years past—it would be weeks before she ate greens again. She wrote and posted yet another letter to the Dean. It felt repetitive, tedious to write—on my way, still going; yes, indeed, another day travelling—but it needed to be done to keep Gnesa and the College informed. More than that, it anchored her to her mission and her home; for as the miles of her journey multiplied, Ulthar was becoming remote, distant, in the past.

  She was wandering toward the harbor and considering Clarie Jurat, wondering whether she was also walking along a busy street and where, when she felt herself jostled. She did not think anything, only spun on her heel and grasped the arm of the man who had touched her, and found his hand just leaving the outer pocket of her jacket, empty. He twisted away and fled: a tall man, pale as winter hay. She leaned against a wall waiting for her sudden shaking to subside. It was good to know she was still no easy prey, but it took a long time to calm her hurried heartbeat.

  * * *

  Of the passengers, only Tir Lesh Witren and the four traders from Kled remained. The five new passengers were tough-looking men: couriers, an accomptant with documents for Ilek-Vad, and a reeve representing a man with international interests. There was a harder edge to the crew, as well, for after this they would leave the comparative safety of the coast. It would be blue-water sailing until they got to the Eastlands.

  Two priests came aboard as the Medje Loïc prepared to cast off from Hlanith, attired in layered robes of blue and black wool richly embroidered with silver thread. Their faces were concealed behind panels of silver mesh. They moved clumsily, bulkily; and water pooled beneath them on the scoured teakwood deck. Since the blue-water rituals were forbidden to landsmen, Vellitt found herself banned to her cabin. When she came on deck again, the thoti was at sea. By morning they were out of sight of land.

  Distance in the dream lands was never constant, and the seas were even less stable. Randolph Carter had once made the passage from Hlanith to Celephaïs in three days—a feat that was legend—but three weeks’ sailing between the two was more usual and even six weeks or more not uncommon; and the Medje’s destination, Ograthan, was farther than Celephaïs. And then back, if all went well and Randolph Carter gave her the key. She counted the days over in her mind, an unhappy arithmetic. Could the College conceal Clarie Jurat’s absence so long? Did the University know yet; were steps being taken to suspend or close the College? Or had the mad, mindless god that was her grandfather already awakened, found her gone, and lashed out—Ulthar a dark poisoned rubble across the ground? The town was hundreds of leagues away, but sometimes she couldn’t help but scan the southern horizon for fire and smoke.

  Septiver turned to Octaver, and the days grew colder, until she lamented the yak-wool scarf on her bunk. Vellitt paced the decks and distracted herself with the complex topologies of the wind-filled sails, and the sky, so low that it seemed the mainmast might snag on its vague ungeometries, weighty as a tent roof pregnant with captured rain on the brink of squeezing through the canvas. There was little else to see. The Medje Löic sailed alone in a circle of sea twenty leagues across. Only once did they see another ship, a caravel that revealed itself as a pirate when it pursued them for an entire light-winded day in a leisurely chase that ended with darkness. Another day, there was whale spume on the horizon; and once, miles to the north, a calm gall on the water as long as the Medje Loïc, which was (she was told) a kraken’s tentacle-club floating just beneath the surface.

  There were nights when the elapsing time chewed at her, and she could not sleep. Tir Lesh Witren and the reeve who had boarded in Hlanith were often awake into the late watches, so she joined them sometimes in the main cabin, stepping into their endless games of chess, but neither of them were a match for her. And Tir Lesh made her uncomfortable. He watched her, his eyes too steady. He asked too many questions: about her past, about her destination. Had she been twenty instead of fifty-five, she might have assumed it was desire, or a mere opportunistic gauging of his chances, or even imagined, illusory love; but there were twenty-five years between them and it was impossible to suppose any of these drove him. So perhaps it was only curiosity; but she avoided him when she could, and when she could not she offered a bland, damping, slightly chilling civility she had honed across a lifetime.

  Many nights she chose to walk on deck: the lowered voices of the watch at their work, the softly glowing wake. The moon was often gone, so she watched the seething sky behind the ninety-seven stars, daytime’s blues replaced with a thousand blacks: black touched with red, with brown, with a poisonous green so dark it was almost undetectable, all tumbled together in churning boils the size of planets.

  When she had been younger and her eyes fresher, she had seen it better. Randolph Carter had told her once that the waking world’s sky was not like this. “It’s just empty,” he had said. �
��No patterns, no changing, except clouds and the time of day.”

  They had been camped in Implan’s bonny hills that night, three days out from Oonai along the trade route that led to Hatheg-town. They had set no fire.

  She shook her head, a little impatient. “I know, you showed me that picture. But beyond the atmosphere. Behind the air.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “After the atmosphere of Earth, you are in space, which is vacuum. Well, there are stars—billions, I suppose—and nebulae and gas clouds, but they exist in the infinity of space. I’m no astronomer.”

  “So many stars,” she mused. “Do they all have gods? How do they not annihilate one another?”

  “It’s not the same in the real world.” By real, he meant Earth.

  She tried to picture it. “If the sky is infinite, why would you come here? With so many stars of your own?”

  “Our world has no sweep, no scale,” Carter said. “No dark poetry. We can’t get to the stars, and even the moon is hundreds of thousands of miles away. There is no meaning to any of it.”

  “Do stars have to mean anything?” she asked, but he reached across and kissed her, and that had ended that conversation, as it had ended so many others.

  She remembered Clarie Jurat’s letter: He says there are millions of stars. She was presumably on Earth by now, with her waking-world lover. She would have seen his sky. Perhaps he had taken her to his home. Stephan Heller was a great dreamer here; surely he must be as powerful in his own place. He would have a palace, an estate of some sort. And she, with the charm of a god’s granddaughter—he could hardly fail to love her utterly. He would marry her and she would become chatelaine of whatever lands were his, rich, respected, and adored. It was a pity she could not be left there.

  But at other times, Vellitt thought of Clarie’s father, Davell Jurat. She had met him often enough; the Trustees of Ulthar Women’s College were invited to Incepts and Last-nights, holiday dinners, the College’s annual report, and the alumnae Moot, and Davell took his duties seriously. He was already a widower when Vellitt first came to teach, but Senior Day Room gossip said that his wife had been truly beautiful—“a Ling’troh sculpture,” Gnesa Petso had once said with a sigh, for her tastes ran to such. Some people had wondered at their marriage, for Davell was a short man with a crooked jaw and a pugged nose; but Davell’s humor and glowing charm were extraordinary, even shadowed by the loss of his wife and the accumulating weight of years. Vellitt saw Davell and Clarie Jurat together at her Incept. His expression as he watched her take student robes for the first time had been a complex mixture of love, pride, and a terrible tender fear that made Vellitt look away, it was so strong. It must be ten thousand times worse for him now.

  If Ulthar still stood. And then, frustrated with her circling thoughts, she would distract herself by watching the luminescent, wavering chevrons of their wake fade back to darkness, or by gazing at the mysterious glowing disks clustering in the ocean’s depths.

  * * *

  The disks intrigued her, and night after night she watched them: patches of indistinct phosphorescence, roughly circular and no larger than her hand, she thought. She imagined they might be jellyfish, but when she asked a crew member, he only made the Elder Sign and spat over the railing; later, the captain came to her where she stood at the aft rail and ordered her never to speak of them again. His voice was harsher than she had ever heard it, even to his crewmembers, so she complied and thereafter kept to herself her observations of how they moved, changed size, overlapped, and absorbed one another.

  There was a half-mooned night nineteen days into the blue-water passage when she saw the little glowing circles scatter as though fleeing from some unseen predator. One grew larger and then larger still, and she realized that it was not small but had been instead very, very far away, beneath hundreds of fathoms of winter-clear water. It grew and grew, a wheeling diatom that increased in clarity and complexity until it was the size of a house, the size of a galleon, the size of a city filling the ocean beneath them from horizon to horizon. She observed details now, glowing windowless towers and five-sided structures—giant pentangular basins everywhere blazing with cold bioluminescence—the radial lines broadening until she could see countless smaller shapes streaming along them like platelets in a capillary under a microscope, or men racing in a panic along a crowded street.

  It seemed certain that the Medje Löic would be shipwrecked, beached among whatever strange entities raced along those radial roads, but it sheared to starboard as it rose—larger and then larger still—until miles away it broke the surface with a sound like a hurricane, and wheeled up into the sky, high enough to occlude the gibbous moon; and its phosphorescence died in the air so that nothing more could be seen of the things that lived in that place.

  It crashed back into the water, faster than gravity could pull. It was only then that Vellitt remembered that this diatom-city had been fleeing something. And it had not escaped; an unseen maw, immeasurably vast and hungry, had sucked it back down the way the carp had sucked the dead bird into its scarlet mouth, back on the Reffle so long ago.

  It took minutes for the chaos of jumbled water to get to them, ample time for the captain and his crew to turn the thoti into the waves; and a quarter of an hour more for the bursting seas to settle at last.

  It took much longer for Vellitt to stop thinking of her mother’s death. Had her father imagined this?

  * * *

  Vellitt Boe awoke one day to cheers and singing and came on deck to see green shoreline far to starboard. It was the Eastlands at last, the Tanarian Hills and above them Mount Aran, green and grey, white-peaked with early-autumn snow. The Medje Loïc had crossed in twenty-three days with no losses. The crew celebrated with a day-long party: flutes, recorders, a cornet, fiddles, and drums; the men in their best, dancing quick-stepped hornpipes and flickering jigs. She watched and sang and drank watered grog, all barriers erased for the day. When one of the sailors, a grizzled foremast-man with waist-length braids ringing a dome of bare scalp, invited her to dance the scharplin with him, she did so—and surprised them all, for she had learned the tricky, stumbling steps in her youth when sailing to Mnar, and they came back quickly. For the last days of the voyage, the crew treated her with delighted affection, as though she were a pet one of them had brought on board and tamed to become a mascot. Perhaps she should have danced the scharplin earlier.

  After that the ship was never out of sight of shore, and the leagues spun out beneath the thoti’s hull steadily. Three days later, they landed at the nephrite wharves of Ograthan.

  The docks of all towns are the same—wharves and warehouses, men shouting, wood and rope creaking: the smells of dead fish, creosote, and salt. On a promontory above all this stood Ograthan proper, fortified with titanic walls against the sea and what lived in it. But it had been long centuries since anything had threatened them; the city had grown well out into the green country beyond, and the thick walls had been pierced in a hundred places by tunnels, curious little hatchways, and entire windowless rooms, dug out stone by cautious stone. The wall in its immensity did not seem affected by these invasions, except that sometimes it groaned, and siftings of dust would appear in unexpected places. But someday it would fall, and Ograthan vanish beneath its stones.

  The passengers dispersed for the day. Vellitt ascended a broad street, with terraces in place of stairs and shops that grew in luxury as she approached the town. She ate berries in yak’s milk for breakfast, as being the thing farthest from shipboard food she could find. She had heard of the honeycombed walls of Ograthan and deciding to explore, she penetrated farther into town. The streets grew narrow and choked with trash, the houses dirtier until they vanished and were replaced by slum-like buildings fronted with grimy taverns. Hard-faced men sat on tumbled stones smoking tobacco laced with ghenty. She saw one man asprawl in the dust of an alley, his greasy head lolling against the stained stones of the giant wall. Even vile as he was, he had the sheen that meant he w
as a dreamer, a man of the waking world. She tried to speak with him but he only pushed her away and folded forward as though unboned, to vomit into his lap.

  At one point, she saw Tir Lesh Witren duck under an archway: recognizing him by his jacket, as familiar to her as her own coat after their long passage. There was no reason he might not also be here, but for reasons she could not articulate she felt uneasy, and turned to go back the way she came. Returning to the ship, she was relieved to learn that he had in fact disembarked, his room taken by a man hastening to Ilek-Vad on the wings of bad news, hoping to arrive before his father’s death.

  The Medje Loïc left the next day, and after that to starboard there was Timnar, Exquerye, the Hills of Hap. Every sight was new to her, for she had never come so far east. They were sailing into the twilight lands now, and the sky dimmed until the sun became an umber disk she could look at directly. The sea changed into something darker, though still clear. When she looked down into the shadowy water, she saw walls, roads, and movement. It felt as though she were coming to the rim of reality. Her restiveness grew. She nearly wept with relief when she saw the glass cliffs of Ilek-Vad.

  * * *

  Vellitt Boe and the black cat left the Medje Loïc with regret, on Vellitt’s part at least. She took a room in a portside inn and immediately wrote to the king of Ilek-Vad, the dreamer Randolph Carter, reminding him of their long acquaintance and asking for an audience. It was an awkward letter, since they had been lovers and she had no idea what he thought of that now, so she kept it as short as she in courtesy could. She hired the innkip’s daughter, a fleet-footed girl of fifteen whose restless mannerisms reminded her a bit of her own young self, to take it to the castle. It would take an hour or more for the girl to climb the steep road up the cliff, and longer still before she would receive a response (if there were one) and return. Well enough: Vellitt had other things to do.