Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  Paul stood in the grove for a moment and listened to the sea wind breathing in the treetops. He had little idea how to go about building a raft, but there was no use worrying about it. He would do the best he could—he could certainly start by cutting down a few trees.

  It was surprisingly easy work. Despite his lack of experience, the ax bit deep with every stroke; it seemed only moments before the first tree began to shudder, and its fall came so suddenly that Paul was almost caught by the wider branches. He paid better attention next time, and soon had brought down over a dozen of the straightest and most slender trees. As he stood contemplating them, pleasantly out of breath but uncertain as to what to do next, something rustled in the undergrowth. A quail hopped out of the leaves and onto a stone. The little bird stared at him with one eye, then turned its head, topknot bobbing, so it could fix him with the other.

  "Strip off the branches and make the logs smooth," the quail said in the voice of a mischievous girl-child. "Didn't your mother and father teach you anything?"

  Paul stared. It was not the strangest thing he had encountered, but it was still a bit surprising. "Who are you?"

  She made a little chirping sound of amusement. "A quail! What do I look like?"

  He nodded his head, conceding the point. "And you know how to build a raft?"

  "Better than you do, it seems. It's a good thing Calypso herself brought you here, because you didn't even ask permission from the dryads before you chopped down their trees, and they'll all have to find new homes now." She flicked her tail. "After you strip off the branches, you need to make all the trunks the same length."

  Deciding that it was a poor idea to look a gift-quail in the mouth, he bent to work. With the olive-wood handle that felt as though it had been carved for his hand alone, he found the work went as quickly as felling the trees, and soon he had a nearly identical row of logs.

  "Not bad," his new companion said. "But I'm not sure I'd let you make a nest for me. Now let's get back to work or you're going to lose the light."

  Paul snorted at the idea of taking orders from a small brown-and-white bird, but under the quail's patient instruction the raft came together in short order, a sturdy little craft with a mast and a half-deck and a rudder, and with a sort of wall of plaited branches all around the side to keep the sea from washing unimpeded across the deck.

  Calypso appeared later in the day with a great roll of heavy, shiny cloth to use as a sail, but otherwise Paul worked alone, with only the little bird for company. Between her clever suggestions and the almost magical tools, the work proceeded at an amazingly swift pace. By late afternoon there was only the rigging left to do, and as he lashed the various bits into place with the quail hopping back and forth to stay out of his way, lending advice interspersed with mild avian insults, he became aware of an unfamiliar sensation, the warmth of accomplishment.

  Let's not kid ourselves, though. This whole thing has been set up to help useless sods like me do what they need to do without violating the simulation's rules—I'm pretty sure there wasn't any magical quail in the original, because the real Odysseus probably could have thrown together the ancient Greek equivalent of an aircraft carrier out of a couple of feathers and a stick. . . .

  Thinking of feathers, he checked to make sure the scarf was still tied about his waist. If he knew anything about these kinds of things, he was pretty sure he shouldn't lose this last version of the bird-woman's gift.

  Bird-woman . . . I'm going to have to think of some better name for her. Sounds like a comic-book heroine.

  After the quail's suggestion of chopping down a few more small trees to use as rollers proved a good one, he was at last able to ease his raft down to the white beach, where Calypso appeared again.

  "Come, Odysseus," she said. "Come, my mortal lover. The sun is almost touching the waves—this is no time to set out on a dangerous journey by sea. Spend one last night with me, then you can leave on the morning tide."

  Without realizing it, he waited to hear from the quail, who had followed him down to the sand. "She is kind, but sometimes she is headstrong," the bird said in a voice he alone seemed able to hear. "If you stay the night, she will cover you with such kisses that you may forget tomorrow you mean to leave. Then the gods will be even angrier with you."

  Paul was amused in spite of himself. "And what do you know about kisses?"

  She stared at him for a moment, then with an irritated waggle of her tail she scurried behind a rock. For a moment he was sorry he had not thanked her properly, then remembered he was responding to an amalgam of code, however charming. This led him to think about what Calypso offered, and what the goddess herself almost certainly was as well.

  "No, my lady," he said. "I thank you, and I will never forget my time here upon your fair island." Paul wanted to smack himself—bad as he was at it, it was still hard not to fall into flowery, epic language. "Anyway, I need to go."

  Sorrowfully, Calypso bade him good-bye, giving him skins of wine and water and food she had prepared for him. Just before he could push the raft out into the water, the little quail came pottling back around the rock and hopped up onto the timbers. "And where are you going?" she asked.

  "Troy."

  The bird cocked her head to one side. "You have gone all topsy-turvy, noble Odysseus—perhaps you have hit your head. I'm certain your wife expects you home to help her look after your fledgling, not clumping around fighting with Trojans again. But if you insist, you must remember to keep the setting sun on your right hand." She hopped down. He thanked her for all her help, then slid the raft off the rollers into the water, climbed on, and began to push away from shore with the long pole he had made.

  "Farewell, mortal!" called Calypso, a tear gleaming prettily in her eye, her hair billowing like storm clouds around her too-perfect face. "I shall never forget you!"

  "Watch out for Scylla and Charybdis!" piped the quail, naming what Paul's dim, spotty memories of Homer suggested were some dangerous rocks. "Otherwise, they will take you as a serpent takes an egg!"

  He waved and slid out into the open sea, everything around him now turned to beaten copper by the setting sun.

  Night at sea in the Age of Heroes was a much different thing on a boat than floundering in the water, clinging to a piece of flotsam. The sky was black as tar and the moon merely a sliver, but the stars seemed ten times as bright as anything he had ever seen. He understood how the ancients might have thought them gods and heroes looking down on the deeds of men.

  Toward the night's longest, darkest hour he found himself full of doubt once more. It was hard to remember the boy Gally and his terrible death without thinking that everything else, even his own hopes and fears, were rendered meaningless by it, but even at his lowest ebb, Paul had understood that it was pointless to think that way for long; he was even less willing to do so now. The ship responded to his fumbling control—the sails and rigging seemed as magical as the boat-building ax—the night air was tangy with salt, the waves actually gleamed in the starlight, and three times now he had been briefly surrounded and paced by dolphins, whose swift beauty seemed a kind of blessing. Paul could not lose his unhappiness and guilt, but he could at least put them to one side. He was rested, and he was on his way again, in search of Troy and whatever destiny held.

  Destiny? Paul laughed out loud. Good God, mate, listen to yourself. It's a gameworld. You've got about as much destiny as a bleeding pinball—ping, there goes Jonas again. Oops, now he's gone that way! Ping!

  Still, it couldn't hurt to feel good, at least for a little while.

  The first hint that perhaps he had been a little too quick to trust his fragmented memory of the classics came with the gray light of dawn, presaged by a slow but steady increase in the current—a current that he had not even noticed until now, but which was clearly tugging his boat astray despite the bellying sail pulling in a slightly different direction.

  He had been so busy steering the raft between the occasional tiny, rocky islands,
and trying to think through the confusing things he had been told by the bird-woman—his angel, as he was now beginning to think of her—that he had given scarcely any thought to the little quail's warning, but as the current began to assert itself and a low but definite roar made itself heard, he suddenly felt sick to his stomach.

  Hang on for a bit, he thought, that Scylla and Charybdis—were they just rocks? Wasn't one of them actually a whirlpool—something that sucked down boats and ground them up like a waste disposal swallowing kitchen debris? And, he suddenly realized as the deep roar mounted, wouldn't something like that sound just like this?

  He let go of the tiller and made his way forward, hanging onto the mast with one hand as he strained to see what was ahead. Releasing the rudder allowed the little craft to give in to the pull entirely, and its lurch to the west almost pitched him off the deck. In the morning mist ahead lay two rocky islands with only a few hundred meters between them, the one on the left a tall, jagged spike of mountain jutting up from the sea, its top shrouded in black clouds. Where the waves crashed against its somber flanks, it looked rough enough to peel the sides off a modern battleship, and Paul was definitely not sailing in a modern battleship. But frightening as that was, it was toward the other, lower island that the raft was bearing. The side facing on the strait curved in a rough semicircle, like a sunken amphitheater; at the center of the curving bay the waters swirled around and around with incredible violence and then tunneled downward, creating a spinning cylindrical hole in the ocean wide enough to gulp an office building.

  The wind was rising. Suddenly dotted with fear-sweat despite the chill morning, each drop a cold pinpoint against his skin, Paul lunged back along the sloping deck toward the tiller. He yanked back on it until the raft was on a course that would take it closer to the sharp-pointed rocks on the left: there was at least a chance of missing those, but once he came within the compass of the maelstrom, nothing could save him. The wood of the rudder groaned as the current continued to pull the raft sideways, and as he clung to the tiller, he prayed that the quail had known as much about shipbuilding as it had seemed to.

  One of the braces snapped with a disheartening twang as the raft entered the strait; the unsecured yard began to flip from side to side and the sail popped in and out. No longer aided by the wind, the raft began to slide toward the whirlpool side. After a moment of helpless panic, Paul thought of the feather veil at his waist. He quickly untied it, then knotted it to hold the tiller as straight as he could before rushing to the mast. The yard was swiveling as the winds changed, and he caught more than a few hard blows to the arms and ribs, but at last managed to pull it back to its proper position, then drag the brace around the yard and secure it, tying the best knot he could under the circumstances. It would not have impressed most sailors, he felt sure, but he couldn't care less. The swirling black waters of Charybdis were getting closer by the second.

  He scrambled back to the stern. The veil had already been stretched and loosened by the pull of the current, and he had to lean hard on the tiller to bring the front of the raft back toward the spiky rocks on the eastern side, then hold on with all his might as his beleaguered craft touched on the outermost ring of the whirlpool, which was agony on his battered ribs. Paul closed his eyes tight, gritted his teeth, then screamed as hard as he could, a noise that vanished without trace in the roar of the waters. The tiller jerked, then slowly began to turn against his grip, as though some massive hand were twisting the rudder. Paul bellowed his anger and fear again and hung on.

  It was impossible to tell how much time had passed when he first felt the whirlpool's grip begin to lessen.

  Exhausted and so weak in the knees he could barely stand, he opened his eyes to see the battlement cliffs of the mountain-island leaning out above his head, so near he could almost have touched them from the edge of the raft. He barely had time to make sure that his course would keep him off its rugged flank when something swung down from above—impossibly long, with fangs flashing in its business end. Paul did not even have time to shriek as the serpentine shape struck at him, but his legs buckled and dropped him to the deck so that the attack missed him, but the thing—a sort of tentacle made of rough, cracked leather—hit the mast and snapped the stout log as though it were a piece of uncooked spaghetti. The mouth at the tentacle's end snatched up the sail from the flinders of the mast and shook it viciously; in a second little bits of cloth were filtering down all around, swirling in the wind; Paul might have been fighting to keep his balance in a particularly unpleasant snow-globe.

  He barely had time to reach down for his ax before the great snaky thing was grabbing for him again. If it was a tentacle, the rest of the body was somewhere high above on the rock face, in the dark cavern from which this limb extended; if it was not a leg but a neck, the face at the end of it was eyeless and noseless. Whatever it was, dripping jaws large and toothy as a great white shark's clacked at the end of that huge rope of scaly muscle. Paul stumbled back and swung the ax as hard as he could. A brief moment of joy as it sunk deep into flesh was shattered as the thing jerked back, the ax still lodged in its hide, and lifted him three meters off the deck. Pinkish slime frothed from the deep wound and spattered his face. For an instant he was paralyzed, trying to decide whether to cling to his only weapon or drop away from the snapping teeth, then the ax-blade ripped free and he fell hard onto the logs he had so carefully cut and shaped.

  The thing twisted away, whipping from side to side in obvious pain, banging against the rocky cliffs and spraying froth everywhere, its jawed end half-severed from its long stem. Through the burning pain of his injuries he felt a fierce, mindless joy at seeing it crippled and suffering. Then five more identical mouths, each on its own serpentine neck, slithered down from the cavern above.

  The next moments passed in a kind of roaring, turbulent dream. The eyeless heads darted at him. He managed to duck the first, then the second stabbing strike. He sliced scaly hide from one of them, but a third snapped at him from behind and almost caught him. The sail was gone and the broken mast offered little shelter, but he slid across the froth-slicked deck and planted his back against it anyway, swiping continuously back and forth with the ax as the heads paused and then lunged, searching for a way through the whirl of razor-sharp bronze. He chopped into a jaw and the mouth drew away, hissing through the sudden fount of bubbling pink, but it did not retreat very far.

  He was growing tired rapidly, despite the magical lightness of his weapon, and the heads were no longer striking rashly. They swayed like cobras, waiting for a chink in his defense.

  The roar of Charybdis had been growing louder for some time. Paul's only fleeting thought had been that he was probably now being drawn into the whirlpool, too, just so the gods could make certain that he was doomed, but he could not help noticing that the sound had changed to a deep, gurgling bellow, Like nothing so much as the world's biggest ogre slurping soup. Then, as Scylla's heads bobbed, waiting for the ax in his weary hands to slow just a little, the crashing noise of the whirlpool abruptly stopped and the seas became still.

  Paul had only a few heartbeats to experience the immense, eerie silence—he could actually hear the wet wheeze of Scylla's multiplied breath and the splash of waves against the rocks—then with a roar easily as loud as before, Charybdis suddenly vomited up the ocean she had been swallowing, a great geyser of seawater that burst through the surface and fountained hundreds of meters in the air. The blind, fanged heads hesitated as the first sheets of white-and-green water began to splash down, then the underwater force of the whirlpool's reversal heaved Paul's raft up into the air as violently as if it had been flung from a catapult. Scylla's mouths snapped in vain before the waters covered them, but he was already gone. The great wave carried the raft rushing down the strait; as the little craft spun, Paul had only an instant to grasp for the tiller. His hand closed on the veil.

  Black rocks appeared to whirl around him, and the sea was first above, then below, then above him aga
in. White foam flew past as he rose into the air above even the cliffs of the strait, so that for a long moment he could see the ocean and islands twirling below him as he floated at the end of the veil, no longer tethered by gravity. Then the wave threw him down again and he smashed against the ocean's back once, twice, skipping like a stone before a last impact dashed all the thoughts out of his head.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Battle for Heaven

  NETFEED/NEWS: "Armored" Toddler Survives Dangerous Plunge

  (visual: Jimmy with father and stepmother)

  VO: Three-year-old Jimmy Jacobson, already the focus of a well-known "tug-of-love" custody battle two years ago between his mother and father, apparently survived a fall from a fourth-floor window due to biological modifications. His father, Rinus Jacobson, who has custody of the child, claims that he has strengthened the boy's skeleton and hardened his skin by the application of "simple biological science."

  (visual: Rinus Jacobson at press conference)

  JACOBSON: "I have done it myself. This invention will be a great help to parents everywhere. All can do what I have done to protect the little ones, now that I have perfected the method."

  VO: Jacobson plans to sell the engineered bio-organisms, which he claims work in conjunction with a standard ultraviolet sun lamp to strengthen developing skin and bones.

  JACOBSON: "It creates a, how would you call it, a rind. Like the skin of a rhinoceros. This child will never scratch his knees or scrape his face. "

  VO: Staffers from the Child Protection Agency, not to mention neighbors, are skeptical, and an investigation is underway.