Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Corvus was tired and desirous of sleep, but before his eyes closed he devoted some effort to tracing the branches backward from Brindle and Paralonda, working his way down the tree. Finally he traced the connection he was searching for, all the way back to the root, and then traced it back outward again, confirming that it led to the people who had built this Hall. Then his eyes closed and he slept, lulled by the dull roar of arguing Sprung. For in most of the Land, that was the term for souls who were descended from Adam and Eve.

  “Quests are a thing that we do; it is a point of pride with us, in fact,” Brindle told him a week later.

  They had attained the high point of a pass through the mountains. Weather was good for a change; though, on Calla, this only meant that the clouds were higher than the tops of the mountains. So, at the suggestion of Corvus, Brindle had scrambled up to the summit of a nearby peak whence a better view could be had. Much of this Bit (as islands were called in this part of the world) could be surveyed from here. Directly below them was the stopping-place where the other members of the party were resting their legs, drying out their clothes, and making tea over a little fire. Looking to the south they could see the winding valley up which they had been toiling for the last several days; somewhat hazed-over in the greater distance was the rolling green country where the Calladons’ house stood. Turning about and looking then to the north, they could see another ridge, and another one after that. Brindle knew from maps, and Corvus knew from actually having been there, that those eventually gave way and dropped into a green valley where the going would be much easier, all the way down to the sea.

  Brindle went on: “Some people, however, would have gone around the mountains instead of directly through them. I wonder if your ability to fly might have impaired your judgment as regards route finding.”

  “There is a road,” Corvus pointed out. “We have been following it.”

  “At its best—when it is traversing a well-drained meadow, for example—it is better described as a path or trail. At its more frequently seen worst, on the other hand—”

  “It all connects up. I have followed it from one end of this Bit to the other.”

  “There is also a road—a true road—that circumvents the mountains on their eastern flank. And the Bufrects have ships that could take us up the western coast. Oh, I’m not complaining, yet. As I said, we are Questing folk, and this feels quite a bit more Questlike than lounging on the deck of some boat. But if you don’t mind—”

  “How many Quests have you performed?” Corvus asked.

  Brindle sighed. “When I was a boy, I sailed across the First Shiver to the mainland, and rode with my father from our house to the ford of the river Thoss, a journey of several days. There I bade him farewell, never to see him again—though of course I did not know that at the time. Then I went home. There were wolves, and a scuffle with some rough characters.” He glanced in the direction of a heaving mound of skins and furs with a spear next to it. Somewhere under that was a rough character named Burr.

  “And . . . ?”

  “That is all.”

  “No Quests for you, other than that?”

  “That is correct.”

  “So when you say, Brindle, that you are Questing folk—”

  “I am saying that it is how we define ourselves. The tales we tell, the pictures we hang on the wall. But it has been a long time since any Calladon has taken part in a Quest worthy of being so called. This has weighed on my mind for many years. I am trying to tell you, Corvus, that I consented to place myself and my friends and family at hazard not so much because I find you convincing, but because the mere fact of going on a Quest is its own reward. And so cutting directly across the mountainous center of Calla, instead of scurrying around the edge, isn’t the worst thing in the world. But if you continue to make perverse choices in route finding, and we in consequence run out of food, or get hurt, questions will begin to be raised; and at that point I shall need to have a better answer than ‘Oh, going on Quests builds character’ and you shall have to have something better than strange talk about the fundamental nature of reality and how you fancy you were sent here from some other plane of existence that you cannot actually remember.”

  “Well, the way we are taught it is this,” Prim was saying. It could be guessed from the looks on the others’ faces, and from subtleties about their posture, that some sort of disagreement had arisen while Brindle and Corvus had been up above. The glance that Prim now threw Brindle’s way as much as proved it. He had been enlisted on her side of a dispute he knew nothing of.

  The topic seemed to be an old map that had been unrolled and spread flat to dry. They carried their maps in a tube that had got soaked by the rains, and several were scattered about. This particular one purported to show the entire Land. It had been painted, inked, embroidered, and gilded onto the skin of a large animal, and it had quite a lot to say. When she’d been younger, Prim had stared at it for hours. It appeared that one of the Bufrects had somewhat rashly ventured an opinion and that Prim was summoning all of her self-restraint to remain civil while setting him straight. Brindle, having arrived a little too late to finesse the situation, was helpless to do anything but stand by and nod as Prim launched into it, thus: “The Land was shaped long before El came into it, and it was shaped by Egdod. He started here, in what is now the middle, where El’s Palace now stands atop its pillar—perhaps this is why you are confused—and flew generally east.”

  “Following the great river?”

  “Creating it as he went, more like, until it had grown so wide that he felt it ought to empty into something. He marked that place with an enormous rock on the south bank and then began to fly north, keeping the sea to his right and creating the shore to his left. About here”—Prim pulled an arrow from her quiver and used it to point to a broad steady curve that formed the northeastern extremity of the Land—“Egdod thought better of making the Land any more enormous than it already was and swept gradually round until he was flying west. Which he did for a long time. Which is why the generally straight-ish northern coast of the Land, which stretches on for such a vast distance, is known as the Backhaul.”

  “Oh, hmm,” said Mardellian Bufrect. “To me that was always just a word. It never crossed my mind that it was based on anything. Back-haul.” He cleared his throat and blushed slightly. Then, in what he apparently thought was a more authoritative voice, he added, “Pray continue.” He exchanged a glance with his kinsman Anvellyne. “With your entertaining tale.” Mard and Lyne (as they were generally called) grinned at each other, a detail Prim did not notice, as she was shifting round to the map’s northwest corner. Weaver, sitting on a rock nearby going through her damp things, shot her most peevish look at the two young men. Burr still appeared to be sleeping. Corvus was hopping about the place showing his usual complete lack of interest in what the humans were talking about.

  If the map was considered the splayed skin of a dead animal, with its butt end pointed due east, then Prim had come round to its right foreleg—the northwest quadrant. “Lacking any means of judging distance,” she continued, “Egdod overshot the Palace considerably, which is why as much of the Land lies to the west of it as to the east. The Second Bending, hereabouts, is where he decided to turn south again.”

  “It doesn’t look the least bit like the First Bending,” pointed out Lyne, in a tone of voice meant to indicate he was having none of it and just humoring Prim as a sort of private game with Mardellian. “It’s just a mess of islands with channels between them.”

  “That mess of islands—the Bits and Shivers—is your home, and Calla is the largest of the Bits!” Prim scolded him. “And it wasn’t thus when Egdod made it. It, and the First Bending, used to be as symmetrical as a pair of shoulders!”

  Mardellian seized on this pretext to gaze at Prim’s shoulders—as if he needed a flesh-and-blood model in order to fully grasp her meaning.

  “The whole region west of the river—west of where Secondeltown n
ow sits, here—snapped off.”

  “Snapped off?”

  “Gradually, as big things move slowly,” said Prim, sensing a bit of weakness in her own position. “So the big channel here—the First Shiver, which used to be a river—is the widest, and you can’t see all the way across it except in some places. This whole chunk that broke off just happened to contain most of the wild souls and the giants.”

  Lyne sighed. “So much talk of giants, in all the old stories—yet I have never seen one.”

  “You see them all the time.”

  “You will see one tomorrow,” croaked Corvus, “if you will only shut up and accept your fate as a two-footed thing, namely, to walk.”

  Brindle broke the awkward silence. “A game we used to play, looking at this map, was to think of all of the little islands among the Shivers as if they were shards of a broken pot. Then try to mentally imagine how they could be reassembled.”

  Anvellyne and Mardellian exchanged a look. They seemed uneasy with Brindle’s proposing that any activity so tedious could be categorized as a game.

  “If you look at them for long enough, you can see how an indentation in one Bit’s coastline matches a protuberance in the coast of the Bit facing it across the Shiver,” Brindle insisted.

  “Shiver” was the local term for a channel running between Bits—or, in the case of the First Shiver, between the Bits and the mainland.

  Meanwhile Prim had skirted around behind Brindle to the southwest—or, the dead animal’s left foreleg. This was conveniently occupied by a peninsula that reached for some distance out into the sea. “Before turning inward again, Egdod asked himself how far the ocean might extend, and struck out south and west for some considerable distance until he became bored with it, which is why we call this arm of the Land the Asking, and the prominence at the end of it Cape Boredom.”

  “Huh!” said Lyne in spite of himself. “Boredom, I never put that together.”

  “But after satisfying himself that the ocean was quite limitless, and mindful of his responsibilities back in First Town, Egdod turned back and flew east, headed generally back toward the huge rock that he had set up to mark the outlet of the great river. It was a long journey, as you can see. He grew weary of flying in a straight line and began turning this way and that, and ever since this series of gulfs and peninsulas that complicate the Land’s southern coastline—so different from the Backhaul—has been known as—”

  “The Turnings!” exclaimed Mard. “Another of those funny old words . . .”

  “The largest of these Egdod later enlarged into the Central Gulf. But in due course he spied the big rock where his circumnavigation had begun and made his way to it, throwing in lots of picturesque headlands and cliffs here along the southeastern corner, as he sensed it was his last opportunity to use up his best ideas before he got to the end. And that is why the Land has the shape that it does—it’s nothing to do with El.”

  “I heard he got a lot wrong, though,” said Mard. Lyne shot him a look. “I mean, even people who believe in the old songs and tales say as much.” He said that for the benefit of Weaver, who had begun fussing with her harp—an instrument that was nearly impossible to tune even when it was bone-dry. She was older than Prim, and seemed to have devoted most of her years to memorizing stories and ballads. When her harp was in working order, which actually was not that often, she would sing them with enough conviction to make everyone present believe that they were true recitals of the facts.

  Sensing that the others were looking her way, Weaver shrugged. Oddly enough, she always seemed a little bewildered when she found herself the center of attention. “It would be a sign of great learning to be able to recite all the tales of Egdod and Pluto. I know only a small portion of them and yet could devote an entire evening to the telling of stories in that vein.”

  “And she will, if we sit still for it,” said Lyne.

  “It’s easy for fault finders to come along thousands of years later and say that Egdod shouldn’t have made Pluto’s job so difficult,” said Prim. “But that’s nothing like claiming that El made the entire Land. Why, that’s just rubbish.”

  “But the Pinnacle, the Palace, the Hive!” Lyne said. And he made a quick glance over his shoulder, roughly eastward, and bowed slightly at the waist. Even though they were too far away to see the Palace, this was a common gesture among persons who were inclined to take El’s side of things. Mard belatedly did the same. The others—Brindle, Prim, and Weaver—glanced east but omitted the bowing part of it. Burr jerked in his sleep. Corvus flapped his wings irritably.

  “Those are places, yes, where El changed things dramatically,” Brindle admitted. “But even the most fervent priests of El accept the notion that Egdod started it all. It works in their favor, actually, since whenever they notice something about the Land that seems ungainly or cack-handed, they can blame it on Egdod.”

  “I know,” Lyne admitted. “It’s just that it all seems a bit made-up.”

  “What do you mean, made-up?”

  “Egdod flying about and putting this here and that there, and Pluto cleaning up after him.”

  “Make this up, stripling!” shouted Corvus in a voice even more strangled and cacophonous than the norm. They all turned toward the boulder where he was perching and saw—a man. A naked man enrobed in long black hair, and a long black beard, with beady black eyes. His skin was ocher and his nails long and yellowed and talonlike. He was sitting on his haunches. His beard dangled down between his legs and concealed the place where one would expect to see a penis. The mountain breeze was whipping his hair around his face, only his eyes burning through the blur.

  “Oh. My. Goodness,” Brindle said.

  “Where did he come from?” Lyne asked, looking around for a weapon. “And where’s the bird?”

  Burr levered himself up to his full height, which was considerable, using his spear. It didn’t take long for him to notice the strange naked man on the rock. He took a step in that direction and brought the spear’s tip down to bear on the intruder.

  “I think he is the bird, Lyne!” Mard said.

  Weaver had set her harp aside and stood up. She was fascinated. She sidestepped over Burr’s way and rested a hand on the socket of his spearhead, just behind the glinting leaf-shaped blade, and pushed it gently aside. “Singing of this and actually seeing it are very different things,” she said.

  Prim stood still through all of this, gazing into the man’s eyes. “It’s you,” she concluded, “it’s still Corvus.”

  “Now that I have your attention,” Corvus announced. But then he gagged, hacked, and spat, as if having some difficulty learning to use the new vocal apparatus. When he had recovered, he went on in a somewhat deeper and more human tone: “There’ll be no more wanky chatter about such topics during the Quest.” He hocked up a little more and spat it in the general direction of the map. “Now roll that thing up, and don’t take it out anymore. What the hell are you doing, wasting your time looking at the map, when the world itself is spread out all around you?”

  And with that his glossy black hair and beard wrapped themselves around his body and came together to coat all of his face save his eyes and his nose, and the nose and jaw extended and hardened into a beak. His feet shrank and his toes lengthened into talons. There was a lot of unsightly twitching and spasming and vocalization that caused everyone except Weaver to avert their gaze; Mardellian even clapped his hands over his ears, and Prim had to step lively as the creature voided its bowels in midtransformation. Then it was just Corvus again. He made two experimental hops and then took to the air.

  The other six members of the party all looked at one another, just to confirm that this had really happened. Prim was still clutching the arrow she had been using as a pointer. She put it back into its quiver, then dropped to one knee at the eastern edge of the map. Before she began to roll it up again, she took one long last look at it, the way you do at an old friend before you set out on a long journey without them.


  Burr had never unpacked; he was already good to go. Turning his broad back on the way they’d come, he gazed down the pass. The convolutions of the valleys below beguiled him for a while. But after a bit he picked out a plausible-seeming direction and indicated it with his spear. Then he looked at Corvus and raised his eyebrows.

  “Ugh, more!” Prim blurted as they came round yet another bend in the valley. For she’d been hoping that this time it would be different and they would see open country, green pastures, a giantess looking after her beasts. “Is this what it is, or was, like to be Pluto?”

  Brindle, who was ahead of her, turned his head in profile, frowning. Then he seemed to understand—or perhaps he was merely humoring her—and he smiled and turned back to the next rock, the next footfall.

  “I mean,” Prim went on, “is it the case that Egdod said, ‘I want a valley here, with mountains at the top, and, at the bottom, a river emptying into the sea,’ and then flew on in the satisfaction of a job well done? And then Pluto came along later and shaped each individual rock and thought about where to set it down?” She feigned a yawn. “‘Oh, the previous two thousand rocks were all set in place rather firmly, I do believe I’ll balance this one just so, to trip up an inattentive traveler who might happen along a few eons from now.’”

  She looked back at Burr to make sure he’d noticed the rock in question. As usual he was paying more attention to the heights around them than to the ground in front of the shaggy mukluks that for him served as boots. But he had a third leg in the form of his spear and fell no more often than anyone else. Occasionally he would stop and shush them all, and in the silence they would hear the cry of an animal echoing from the cliffs that hemmed in the valley, or see a little cascade of stones dribbling down from a vantage point.