By Force Alone

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘It’s like we’re the ants,’ he says.

  ‘Ants?’

  ‘Yes. It’s like we’re ants, crawling on the hide of some massive beast. We cannot really fathom the beast itself, we can only glance at the small features as we pass and try to make sense of them, and thus convince ourselves we know the whole. The first lesson of a crawler is to understand that we cannot. All we can do is try to survive the passage.’

  Lancelot looks at him in a new light, then, it seems to Gawain.

  ‘A beast?’

  Unwillingly: ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘You are saying the Zone is alive?’

  ‘It’s a metaphora,’ Merlin says. He scribbles something in his parchment. Dips the pen in a small pot of very dark ink. And Gawain thinks of Phoenix Blood, which can be sometimes found inside the Zone. The crawlers bottle it and carry it back, and when you write with it the ink’s alive, and crawls across the page.

  The hermit told him once that the blood really was alive. That some powerful creatures, too tiny to see, lived within in, and that released upon the page they still attempted to crawl back elsewhere. If so, he feels a kinship with the things. And he wonders where they try to go.

  The Blood is prized by augurs and their like. The shapes the ink makes when it settles suggests the future, or so some say. But like most things from the inside, its true purpose, if it has one, is unknown.

  ‘How large is the Zone?’ Galahad says.

  Gawain shakes his head. ‘Nobody knows for certain.’

  ‘Tell me of the people who live within,’ Merlin says.

  Gawain tears a chunk of bread and swallows. He drinks the wine. The wine is good.

  ‘It depends,’ he says carefully, ‘on what you mean by live. Or people.’

  He thinks of some of the beings he’d seen in the Zone. There are villages of the mutatio still inside, deformed men and women touched by the star-stone which is said to lie at the heart of the place. They have a semblance of a life still, isolated little villages, thatched mud huts perched on tiny bubbling brooks of tainted water. They hunt the birds and badgers that live inside and catch the fish in the streams for their food. If they have language still then it is not one Gawain can recognise.

  And once, in pale moonlight, he saw a procession go past through a clearing, who had no earthly form. But he does not tell the men from Camelot that.

  ‘Tell me about the sightings,’ Merlin says. Makes a note, of what, Gawain has no idea.

  ‘The sightings,’ he says.

  ‘Above the Zone.’

  ‘Ah,’ Gawain says. ‘That.’

  Flying lights, hovering silver shapes, darting almost like fish in the sky. The men from Camelot have done their groundwork, he thinks. But they do not know the Zone. It is one thing to compile reports and quite another to enter into that strange landscape where nothing is what it seems and all the ordinary human values are reversed.

  He humours them. He tells them anecdotes. They are familiar with the more common retrievables: witch mud and ghost wheels and leprechaun gold. He doesn’t mention the wishing well or the hermit. The men ask about the centre. The Merlin asks a series of questions about a star stone. Where did it land? Is there an impact crater? What lies at the very heart?

  Gawain shakes his head at them. ‘The paths twist and at last vanish. When you think you’re close you find yourself back near the perimeter. They say there’s a heart to the Zone, yes, but even I don’t know how to get there. You’ve got the wrong man.’

  They exchange glances then.

  They know, he thinks, that he’s not telling them the whole truth.

  ‘How far have you got?’

  They make him draw them a map. There is always a map in this sort of thing.

  He marks stable points: The Witches’ Cauldron, Three Hanging Men, The Spider Bite, The Place Where The Gristles Wash.

  They ask him about the distribution of leprechaun gold. Someone’s minting the coins, they keep saying. Someone holds power within the Zone. Someone human.

  Perhaps, he tells them. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t mention the dark castle and the wounded king and the Pool of Despair.

  He knows they have him. Where is he to run?

  Only in the Zone is he ever free.

  At last they relent. They let him go and wash. He applies witch mud to his wounds. The healing hurts. He curls up on a cot in an upstairs room and, finally, he sleeps.

  *

  In the morning, they set off for the Zone.

  62

  The landscape resolves slowly. At first it’s all dusty plains and low brown hills, cracked earth, barely a shrub in sight. A trail of black ants crawls along a precipice. One of the horses farts.

  Then you start noticing the wide horizon. The clear blue skies. The sun that is a yolky yellow of a most perfect kind – and what is the sun, exactly? The Greek, Aristarchus of Samos, had proposed that the sun is a great ball of fire which lies at the centre of all things, and that the Earth and the planets revolve around it. And furthermore did not Aristarchus propose that the very stars, those fixed in place, were suns themselves, and merely very far away from Earth to seem so small?

  Well, under the sun they traverse the distance out from Wormwood. Soon there is no human habitation. There is little water or shade. They see few animals as they pass. Yet it is all – so Gawain, the crawler, tells them – illusory to an extent. Part of the blight or curse placed on this land by the event.

  A dragon’s breath, some say. A star stone, say others.

  Merlin keeps his own counsel.

  He’d love to go into the Zone. He has some thoughts as to its nature. Oh, how he longs to go exploring! To catalogue its fauna and flora, make learned notes, draw vibrant illustrations of new species, make charts of their anatomy. He has a thought that what’s inside is unlike anything else found on this Earth. Though who’s to say? And he knows that the Greeks and Romans recorded the finding of many curious skeletons of a giant size. The Athenian general Kimon, for instance, excavated just one such on the island of Skyros.

  And Merlin thinks that perhaps, long before humans ever trod the Earth, before their imagination could conjure up his kind, there lived upon the land strange giant beings. And if that is so, and humans’ time had only just begun, then who’s to say what could or couldn’t live on other worlds, and what strange manner of creatures could still be found upon the Earth itself?

  And yet he knows he cannot go. Predominantly among the reasons is the simple fact that the Zone is poisoned.

  For people, yes, but for Merlins, more. If Merlin is right and the star stone he saw fall across the sky in the reign of Uther lies at the heart of that place, then it is deadly to his kind. In his tower in Camelot he spent many nights poring over artefacts retrieved from the Zone. Even then, using care and protective equipment, the experience proved hazardous. The fae are too susceptible to whatever invisible radiance emerges from the matter of the Zone. It kills them with its reason.

  So he must stay behind. It is best. While this affair continues there are other pressing matters to consider, namely the problem of the Anglo-Saxon tribes. They are expanding, more and more. With their guttural Anglisc and their keen sense of place and foreign battle strategies, streaming across the channel into Britain, taking up land, making native-born babies, slowly but surely pushing at the borders of Arthur’s united kingdom. This cannot go on. The Anglo-Saxons shun the old Roman towns and build their own encampments outside the places that they conquer. They speak not the native tongues. They maintain their own strange customs.

  He worries that they cannot be defeated by conventional weapons. He needs something else, something definitive.

  A weapon to end all wars.

  And he thinks: the grail.

  But he cannot dally. Arthur’s away at war. The years have aged him. Power is like poison, it feeds into the blood. And Merlins hunger for the power of men. So where?

  And he has heard disturbing rumours, which
draw him west of here. For Morgause has been too quiet of late, and yet he knows she lays her plans. And word has come to him of a new power arising, some dark warrior, youthful and savage, who made bargains with the Irish and reunited the warring gangs of the coast, cut-throat smugglers and brigands the lot of them.

  One single name, coming out of the wilds of the west:

  Mordred.

  And Merlin longs for peace. To study his star charts and the anatomy of frogs. To dream of distant Qin and Aksum, of Greek philosophers and of the infinity of the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

  And this he cannot have.

  *

  On the second night they make camp on a low mound in the shape of a femur bone. Lancelot builds a small fire and Galahad, reluctantly, goes foraging. He comes back with a bloodied hare and a sour expression.

  ‘No more hunting,’ Gawain says.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Gawain gestures at the darkening horizon. Ahead of them they can now clearly see the skies above the Zone. Fantastical lights chase one another in ethereal greens streaked with crimson and violet.

  ‘Sometimes the smaller creatures cross over the threshold,’ Gawain says. ‘No more hunting after tonight.’

  ‘Then what do we eat?’

  ‘Not much.’

  Galahad scowls and sets to skin the hare. Lancelot stretches his legs by the fire and stares towards the Zone. He has his own agenda being here, Merlin knows. These men of the Round Table all have that in common: they are unholy sneaks and thieves and liars to a man, and will connive and scheme and murder to pursue their goals. No wonder they all flock to Camelot. It is that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the kingdom are irresistibly drained.

  Merlin slices a piece of dried apple and chews without much appetite. He stares at the Zone. It is hard to avoid it. The eye is drawn to that display of light. The place taunts them with its mysteries.

  He observes the men who are about to go within. He cannot trust them, but he can trust in that at least. As for Gawain, the crawler, he no doubt plans to sabotage their journey just as soon as they’re inside.

  Merlin stirs.

  He says, ‘Your daughter.’

  The crawler is startled, but tries not to show it.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Helena,’ Merlin says, without mercy.

  He sees the knowledge suffuse the crawler’s face.

  ‘You wouldn’t—’

  Merlin nods.

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘Her mother was from there, was she not?’

  Gawain stares into the fire.

  ‘She was so beautiful,’ he says. ‘And so free…’

  The other men stir and pay attention.

  Gawain says, ‘I was lost. Deeper into the Zone than I’d ever been before. Starving, half-delirious. You were right, wizard. There is a place deep at the heart. A dark castle high on a hill above a pool of black water… You do not want to go there. There is nothing there but despair.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I met her after I made my escape. In a grove of weeping trees. She came out of the night, a pale lady, and her eyes were bright. She took my hand in hers and led me to her abode. There were others like her. Their forms shimmered and changed when you glanced at them sideways. In the moonlight they were translucent. I dwelled with them there for a season. She gave birth to my daughter. Then something happened, I know not what. When I awoke from it I found myself back outside the perimeter, holding a small, rag-wrapped bundle in my arms.’ He blinks a few times, turns his eyes from the fire. ‘I named her Helena. My daughter… She is not like the other children.’

  He stares helplessly at the wizard. ‘She is very precious to me.’

  Merlin says delicately, ‘I wish her no harm.’

  ‘You have her?’

  Merlin lets his silence be an implication.

  ‘I will serve you true,’ Gawain says. ‘But your quest is folly. The Zone does not abide intrusion. I fear you will find nothing but death and despair within.’

  Galahad turns the hare on the fire. He stares. Merlin knows Galahad has no stomach for this work. He would cut and run if he could.

  Lancelot stretches. ‘I’m willing to take that chance,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘Reason,’ Gawain says, ‘does not exist in the Zone.’

  Galahad scowls. But Merlin knows the little rat too well. Merlin had made sure to spell it out for him. His fate depends on a successful mission.

  He’ll stay the course.

  They share the hare, some bread baked back in Wormwood. For their supplies Gawain had told them to pack travelling food: hard cheese, dried meat, pickles and dried bread. Lancelot packs a small bag of precious salt. Galahad has an amphora of wine secreted on his person.

  They sleep by the embers. The night is almost too quiet. Over the Zone the lights move soundlessly, like green-dressed ghosts dancing in the starlight. Merlin listens to the other men sleep. Lancelot snores, Galahad grunts and mutters as though he’s fighting off a leg of lamb. Gawain, the outlaw, sleeps very quietly, he notices. His breathing is so slow and even, almost as though—

  ‘My daughter,’ the crawler says. And somehow he’s no longer by the fire but standing behind Merlin in the dark. Something cold and sharp touches Merlin’s neck.

  He licks his lips.

  ‘I saved your life,’ he says evenly.

  ‘You set them on me.’

  ‘True. So what do you want?’

  ‘My daughter.’

  ‘She is different how?’ Merlin says.

  ‘She speaks to the artefacts from the Zone. She can… understand function.’

  ‘And we do not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why do you think that is? Where do these things come from? Ghost wheels and scar-bugs and elf-fingers?’

  ‘You know of these things?’

  ‘I have made study of the objects found within, yes. What do scar-bugs do?’

  ‘They bore. Outside the Zone they go half-dormant, unless the phases of the sun are such as to activate them fully. They are small black things the size of half a thumb. You’ve seen one?’

  And Merlin thinks of the specimens in his tower in Camelot. They had survived for a time and he had occasion to experiment with several at first. They bore through anything: wood, metal, stone. What powers them he doesn’t know. But far enough from the Zone they slowly disintegrate, he discovered. He had not been able to preserve any Zone specimen for long.

  It has frustrated him.

  ‘Why do they do what they do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who made them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I need to know!’ Merlin says.

  The pressure of the knife against his neck.

  ‘My daughter,’ the crawler says.

  ‘She will be safe.’

  ‘I have to know this.’

  ‘Bring these men out of the Zone alive. Bring me that which I seek for my king. And you have my word.’

  The crawler hesitates, his hand steady on the knife. Merlin had studied this Gawain, his past, his methods. Twenty years of going in and out of the territory. He could have retired several times over on the loot he’d brought back from inside.

  ‘Crawlers don’t usually live very long,’ Merlin observes.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yet you survive.’

  ‘Listen, wizard. In all this time all I have learned is that I know nothing useful. Each trip into the Zone is a blank slate. Each trip can be your last.’

  ‘You must be lucky.’

  Gawain gives a hollow laugh. ‘Yes, lucky,’ he agrees.

  ‘You have my word.’

  The knife withdraws. When Merlin turns the crawler’s gone. He’s back by the fire and gently snoring.

  This is no witchery that Merlin knows, but something’s in the man’s blood that should
not, by any rights, be there.

  And Merlin doesn’t even have the stupid girl!

  Oh, he had tried. He’d been so careful. They came at night, embedded watchers let them through the gate. The girl was sleeping in the house that her father built her. She hadn’t left. How softly they crept in.

  And yet she wasn’t there. The window open and a dry breeze blowing in and she was gone. The bed still warm. And in the room the ghost wheels spun in unison, and on the wall he saw a star chart drawn in ink, a child’s hand, and it showed no constellations that he knew.

  She must have sensed their coming. A different magic, he thinks. But then the world is filled with the mysterious and strange, and only Greek philosophers and Merlins ever try to understand its inner workings.

  For everything there is an explanation, Merlin thinks. A rationale.

  A wizard born of fae and mortal, this Merlin’s cursed – for he alone does not believe in magic.

  63

  A butterfly as large as a fist flitters past Galahad’s face and he bats it away savagely. The creature’s wings are veined with outlandish whorls of violet and sick-yellow.

  ‘What the fuck,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ the crawler tells him. ‘I warned you before.’

  ‘Fucking thing flew at me!’ Galahad says. ‘Fuck.’

  Gawain, the crawler, is ahead. Lancelot brings up the rear, his lanky frame moving with surprising grace. It’s Galahad who’s stuck between them.

  The branches of the trees here are a vivid green. Their leaves sting if they touch your naked skin. Gawain had instructed them to cover up before they left. It’s hot under the rags they wear. The tree trunks are like the exposed bodies of a worm or grub. Belly-white, and strangely alive, they move too much, almost as though breathing.

  It’s silent in the wood, and the canopy of the trees hides the sun. It’s humid and the air is full of flying insects. Twice now Galahad’s been stung, each time he’d killed the creature, found a smear of violet blood on his hand.

  It’s silent but somehow he can hear the trees whispering. They know he’s there. They watch him pass. They say his name. Every time he takes a breath he hears Gaheris crying. Gaheris, saying, Please, Gally, don’t.