Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Adam for his part was beginning to see wisdom, or at least cunning, in Feller’s suggestion that they ought to stay close together, and so it was with a certain sense of relief that he strode full into the clearing to close ranks with the other members of his crew. Feller noted this in the corner of his eye, and Thunk risked turning his head to give Adam a look.

  “So it is true what was rumored,” said Thunk, “that you have brought into your service one of the ancient souls of First Town.”

  “That I have,” said Feller. “He is loyal and will do as I say, and if that means bringing harm to you, then the harm will be as great as his shoulders are broad.”

  “Someday I would hear the sad story of how one of the great souls of the First Age was brought so low,” Thunk remarked. It seemed from his aura and from the tone of his voice that he was not merely bandying words but sincerely disappointed to see one such as Adam reduced to so mean an estate.

  Having grown used to the cleverly calculated speech that issued at all times from the lips of Feller, Adam was struck hard by the words of Thunk precisely because they were so plainly spoken. His head swam for a moment with shame and he was obliged to shift his footing in order to stay well rooted on the uneven ground.

  “Adam is smarter than he looks,” retorted Feller, “and will not be swayed by your poisoned words.” And he looked briefly Adam’s way, as if unsure of this.

  Adam was now thoroughly confused, as it had never before entered his mind that his appearance was such as to convey the impression that he was dim-witted; and moreover Thunk’s words had struck him as anything but poisoned, and so he was now wondering whether he, Adam, was not smart enough—whatever that might mean—clearly to perceive Thunk’s true nature.

  With so much clouding his mind, Adam scarcely heard the next part of the conversation. But he was vaguely aware of Feller proclaiming that only he, Feller, had the “right” to cut trees here and of Thunk denying that this was so and asserting that the Old Gods had put trees in such places just so that any souls who had need of them could come and chop them down.

  What finally dislodged Adam from this reverie was the sound of sudden movement in the trees behind him. He turned around just in time to see an axe flying through the air in his direction, its handle spinning wildly around its bright head. It made a thrum in the air as it whipped past him, and traveled several more yards before clattering off a tree stump near Feller and falling to the ground. Both Feller and Thunk watched it fall, and there were a few moments of silence.

  Then Feller and Bluff both came for Thunk.

  At first Adam thought Thunk in a bad spot, since he was standing with his back to a felled tree that was still being held up off the ground by its boughs, so that its trunk was at the level of Thunk’s waist. But Thunk knew just where it was and leapt to the top of it with ease. “It’s on!” he shouted, then jumped down to the ground on the other side and ran toward the edge of the clearing, moving away from the river as if meaning to retreat into the deep woods.

  Feller and Bluff were delayed in getting over the log, and the distance separating them from Thunk grew large. A shout, followed by a shower of missiles, came from the trees all around. Adam was struck in the back by a rock, which taught him to face the trees and look out for his own welfare. More projectiles came his way, prompting him to back toward the middle of the clearing until he sensed that his fellows were nearby. There were more people in the woods than Adam had suspected. Their earlier retreat had been merely for show; they had quietly doubled back during the argument between Feller and Thunk. The tall woman stepped into the open, moving one hand in a tight circle. Her pieces of cord whirled about her hand so fast that they could be seen only as a blur. Then from the blur a rock flew out, making a hum as it cut through the air, and struck one of Feller’s crew with such force that it knocked him off his feet.

  Feller, seeing a few axmen come into the open, cried, “Let’s get them!” and ran at the foes holding high his iron rod. He was followed closely by Bluff. The rest, including Adam, took up the rear, less out of a desire to “get them” than from fear of being left behind. Reaching the site of the melee, Adam was nearly struck by an iron rod as Bluff swung it back to bring it down upon the head of a smaller woodcutter who was crumpled on the ground with his crushed hands splayed uselessly atop a skull that had gone all misshapen; his head had cracked open and the aura was pouring out of it, reverting to chaos. To strike again seemed unnecessary but Bluff was doing so, his rod dripping with blood and fizzing with aura. Another woodcutter came at Bluff from behind, raising an axe above his head to strike. In his rage he seemed not to notice Adam, who merely extended his axe handle and laid it across that of the attacker, stopping his strike before there was much force in it. Frozen in position with both hands above his head, this man was assailed by Edger, who seemed to punch him in the stomach. But blood spurted out where the punch landed, and when she drew back her hand Adam saw that it was gripping a long knife, as sharp as only Edger could make it.

  Adam was nearly as transfixed by this as the man she had stabbed, until another member of the crew called Adam’s name.

  Following his gaze Adam turned to see a foe rushing at him from behind. Without any thought he extended the axe handle to push this fellow back. It caught him a glancing blow to the face that was enough to spoil his balance. As that man fell, Bluff’s rod came down on his head.

  Those moments were the crisis of the fight. It then declined into a series of sporadic brawls as they made their way back toward the river. Feller was keen on getting back to the boat, and would have run straight to it, but the projectiles still hurtling their way from all directions obliged them to retreat in a more deliberate style, walking backward much of the way, alert to the hum of the slings that their foes used to hurl rocks.

  As they drew closer to the bank of the river and the cries of their attackers diminished, they became conscious of a distant, repetitive sound, growing more distinct: the thunk, thunk of an axe biting deep into wood. It was a sound that filled their days and to which they were well accustomed. But this had a hollow booming character to it, different from the sound of a tree being felled. When they came in view of the riverbank, they understood why: Thunk had got there well ahead of them and flipped Feller’s boat upside down to expose its belly. He was standing on its hull swinging his sharp axe down into its keel. A distant splintering noise told them that he had broken all the way through it. As Feller sprinted toward him howling like a wild beast, Thunk watched him and coolly struck a few more blows through its thinner hull planking before stepping back and dropping into the river. A few steps took him out into the current, which bore him away. Feller, mounting to the top of his ruined boat, hefted his rod as if making ready to hurl it at Thunk; but then he thought better of doing so.

  They turned the ruined boat back over to find that Thunk’s crew had pilfered their axes and other goods. They did not even have enough rope to lash the available logs together into a raft that could bear them downstream, and so instead they walked back to Eltown: a journey that would have taken them but an hour rowing downstream but that on foot consumed the remainder of the day. Of Thunk and his crew they saw no more, though at first every shifting tree branch or scurrying beast caused them to twitch about and unlimber their iron rods.

  As the day drew on, however, and weariness and cold and hunger overtook them, they all became less concerned about Thunk and more about getting back to the fires of Eltown. The bank of the river seemed endless. In the early part of the day they were traversing country that had been logged but recently. The undergrowth was scant and the going easy enough. But as they advanced into parts that had been denuded of trees longer, they encountered dense thickets of wild brambles, made of thorny shafts that were stiff enough to impede their movement and yet flexible enough that when struck by their iron rods they seemed to dodge the blow and then spring back in counterattack. Steep sections of bank obliged them to climb inland away from the stream, addi
ng miles to the trek.

  Roper—the member of the crew who had saved Adam, earlier, by calling out his name—became especially despondent. It had always been in his nature to take a gloomy view of things and to require encouragement from his fellows and chastisement from the boss. “It cannot possibly be so far to Eltown,” he moaned. “Surely we have got lost and are going down some other river now, taking us to strange places where people, if there are any, speak in gibberish.”

  “That makes no sense,” Adam pointed out. “There is but one river; we have kept it to our left the whole time and never been out of the hearing of it.”

  “Do not be so sure,” said Bluff.

  “Water runs downhill,” insisted Adam. “We may have strayed now and then from the bank, but we cannot have crossed over into some other streambed.”

  “That may be true where you come from,” growled Feller, “but you forget that Eltown was founded by cursed souls who came here to escape El’s wrath. Honey saw El’s light and adored it, building her white tower above, but the others slunk into this dark vale to be out of El’s sight, and made their habitation in places they knew to be infested with wild souls who would not even obey Egdod, to say nothing of El. This river may be one such, for all we know. I have always sensed something uncanny about it. It hates us for what we have done to the forests along its banks and it would not surprise me if it had switched its course when we were not looking, so as to lead us into despair and danger.”

  “That is a mad notion,” Adam muttered.

  “Still it is easier going down than up, and so down it is,” Feller answered. “To wherever this cursed river would have us end.”

  More such cheerful predictions followed from Roper, until Edger began to mock him. In the blessed silence that followed they soon heard rapids, and hastened toward the sound to the place where the West Fork rushed into the more placid Middle Fork. “Finally we are rid of that cursed river,” Feller said, though the fact that it had taken them here seemed to prove it was not cursed at all.

  Downstream of that place the water roamed to and fro over a floodplain and the going was somewhat easier, though still impeded by brush. The range of mountains that hemmed in the valley to the west made for an early sunset, and they walked in shadow for some while even though the land across the river was still sunlit. The white tower of Elkirk came into view briefly, then was hidden again for a long while. But they had all seen it and there was no further talk of wicked ancient souls haunting the land.

  Or so Adam assumed until they came around a bend and looked far downriver to the place where the East Fork flowed in. Just beyond there was the beginning of Eltown, whose towers of smoke caught the red light of the nearly set sun. And just before it, plainly in view, was the hill that stood above the junction of the rivers. Its denuded, stump-stubbled lower reaches were in shadow, but its crown was still lit, as if by a dying fire, and the great tree’s scarred trunk rose up above that, its winter-bare branches raised up into the sky as if grasping at the last traces of the day’s light.

  “You have mocked me for the last time, old one,” said Feller.

  It took Adam some few moments to understand that he was addressing the tree.

  “If my boat is no more, why then so be it. We shall seek what is nearer to hand. Tonight our iron bars we will reforge into axe heads ready to be made keen by Edger, and tomorrow we will come for you.”

  46

  The plan of Feller was much slower in coming to pass than he had first imagined. His crew were too exhausted to do anything at all the next day, and the day after that they awoke thinking of the complications that would be entailed, not just in cutting down the big tree, but in reducing its carcass to pieces small enough to be got down to the river. Adam had little interest in the plan and correspondingly little knowledge of its particulars, but when he crossed the river a few days later, everyone in Eltown seemed to know about it and to have become somehow involved—or to be claiming, at any rate, that Feller had entrusted them with this or that aspect of the preparations. Axe heads were being forged just as Feller had promised, but as well there was rope to be twisted, splitting wedges to be made, and supplies to be laid in for the encampment that Feller imagined he would bring into being around the tree. The project was seen as requiring a month’s work. Feller’s ambitions soon grew to include the creation of a new town on the site, and this brought further delays.

  It also entailed docking the log piles of Adam and the other members of the crew. Feller did this when no one was present to raise objections, and later explained it as a necessary investment that would be repaid manyfold when the big tree came down.

  Not wishing to make any further investments in a plan that troubled him in more than one way, Adam traded some of his remaining logs for cloth and other items that were required by the children, then devoted some days to rafting the remaining ones together and floating them across the river to the shore beneath Camp. This was a large enough task that he had to adopt the ways of Feller, at least for a time, and hire other souls to help him. It seemed a reasonable plan at the outset but became more trouble than it was worth as the members of his crew found every possible way of doing things wrong; and when not doing things wrong, they fell to arguments, which they assumed must be as momentous to Adam as they were to them, and which Adam was somehow responsible for settling; and none was ever pleased with how they were resolved. As little as Adam liked Feller, he came quickly to understand why Feller dealt with his crew as he did.

  Adam had worked for Feller in order to get what he needed to make a bigger dwelling for him and Eve and the children, but it almost immediately became obvious that his labors were at once too little and too much. Too little because the children grew so rapidly that Adam could never have cut down trees and expanded the cabin quickly enough to keep pace with them, and too much because they soon were given accommodations in other buildings around Camp. Adam’s log pile, when it finally made its way up the hill, dwindled and disappeared in a matter of days as the wood was used to shore up various structures that had fallen into disrepair as their builders wandered away or became forgettish.

  Walksfar had spoken of other old souls who had accompanied him on the Trek, Cairn being one such, but for the most part they had not been in evidence. This changed as the twelve little ones grew and word of them somehow spread into the remote places into which those old souls had strayed during the many years that Walksfar had been drinking tea and carving marks on his wall. For the most part those were not as outlandish in their forms as Cairn; most were closer to Walksfar’s shape. But one had been dwelling among beasts for so long that he had begun to resemble a bear, and there was another soul that possessed no physical form at all but was embodied solely in movements of the air, made visible by entrained dust. Beast and Dusty seemed to favor each other’s company and were frequently seen together, the former sitting naked and hairy on the ground while the latter swirled about him in the form of a dust devil. Such was the community of souls in which the twelve children learned to crawl, then walk and talk. By the time they could go about on two feet they were already half as tall as Adam.

  The existence of twelve large new souls could not be hid from the people of Eltown. Adam was glad to have moved his logs and concluded his dealings with those people, for on the occasions when he did cross the river to fetch something, he always found himself at the center of a crowd of excited souls demanding to know just what was going on over in Camp. Some there were who had seen Messenger of El descend into Camp but not depart, and knowledge of that had become widespread and given rise to rumors of such a far-fetched nature that Adam could not believe his ears when they were presented to him—always with a demand for confirmation or denial. The truth of what had happened that night was, of course, not one that he wished to be known. Walksfar went down into the town with Adam, and settled the people down by explaining that Camp had always been a place of queer folk and queer doings and that there was little gain to be had in co
ncerning oneself overmuch about it.

  One morning Mab awoke them with the news that, in the forested valley to the east—the place of the wolves that divided Elkirk from the sea of grass—many campfires were alight. Adam crossed the river to Eltown, where later that day word reached them that Honey had at last returned to Elkirk, and that she was in the company of a host of souls, unlike any in Eltown or even in Camp. They had come across the grass from El’s Palace, moving at unusual speed because they had learned to bestride large animals: four-legged beasts of a kind not before seen in the Land, perfectly adapted to the task of carrying two-legged souls on their backs while subsisting on the grass itself.