Innocents Aboard

by Gene Wolfe

  The traveler felt a chill of dread. “I will endeavor to do so.”

  “You were fortunate to find him,” the sister remarked.

  “I was. But it is a weary business, recapturing a camel, when one is on foot.”

  “Doubtless it is,” the woman who had borne the water jar conceded. “I have never done so, and for that favor thank the goddess.” Some shading of her voice informed the traveler that her mention of her goddess had not been fortuitous.

  “I might fetch my instrument and play and sing for you,” the sister suggested.

  “I have no doubt you play and sing charmingly,” the traveler told her politely, “yet I would prefer to complete my business first. Then the three of us might make merry with whole hearts. I have brought samples of my spices in order that your father may examine them.”

  At these words, the old man thrust his head from the entrance of the tomb, saying, “You have brought your spices? That is well.” He had vanished into the darkness within it before the traveler could reply.

  “He is preparing our food.” The face of the woman who had carried the jar writhed and twitched, but soon grew calm again. “Sumptuous Moon food, the sacred meal of our goddess, by which all share life.”

  “I could play my rebab for you,” the sister suggested, “and sing of love while Heerhoor dances. She is a skillful dancer.”

  “Behold the length of these legs, Traveler.” The woman who had carried the jar rose as a serpent uncoils and snatched to one side the rotting wrappings that served her for a skirt. “Behold also the length of my neck, the pride of our mother. I dance with cymbals of red gold on fingers and thumbs in the ancient manner, which in this degenerate time is called the Nautch of Necromancy, and is preserved in no other place.”

  The old man came out to join them, and the traveler, who by that time was anxious to change the topic of their conversation (and indeed to leave the place if he could with decency) asked, “Why have you no fire tonight? If lack of fuel prevents you, I will gladly collect as much as you require.”

  “What need of sticks and dry dung have we today?” the old man replied, and caught him by the sleeve. “You have brought your spices?”

  “Small samples thereof,” the traveler told him.

  “Spices cannot be sampled unless they are consumed.”

  Reluctantly, the traveler agreed.

  “Have you a spice for cold meats?”

  “A most excellent one,” the traveler declared, and produced a little vial of clear brown glass. “Herein are blended the peperi of ancient days, the black and the white, the pink, the red, and the green, confounded in strict accord with formulae renowned ere the foundations of my southern city of Mirouane were laid.”

  The old man displayed a clenched fist, breathed upon it, then opened it to reveal a massy gold ring set with a stone that blazed purple, then orange, in the level daylight. “This is the gem Hamalat,” the old man confided. “The royal gem wrested from Mahes by the Moon. A thousand years it waited in the ruins of Endymion. Those who wear it can never suffer sunstroke or go blind. It has further powers in addition,” his voice fell, “which I will confide to you only if you obtain it. The man who possessed it might soon shape a kingdom for himself.”

  “Then why have you not done so?” the traveler inquired, while greatly admiring the ring.

  “I am glad you asked,” the old man said, “and more glad still that you asked in my daughters’ absence.”

  Looking about him then, the traveler realized for the first time that both women had left them.

  “For it was only my devotion to our goddess that kept me here searching for it—and certain other things—and still more my wife’s. If at midsummer you were to mount your camel and pursue the Moon across the sky, you would, if you were favored, attain to a certain hill, a broad hill but not high, and marked in no particular way. That hill, and this lost town of its dead, are all that remain of the great city of Endymion, that came down from the Moon. Know you the tale?”

  Music sounded behind the traveler, and turning he beheld the sister with her rebab.

  The woman who had carried the water jar knelt before him. “Lend me your sword, you who are the Moon and Sun to me, and you shall see such a dance as few men have ever seen.”

  “The King of the Moon leaned forth one day, and cast his lure across the seas,” the old man began.

  “You cannot dance with my sword or any other,” the traveler told the woman who had carried the jar, “for I see that you have golden chimes upon the fingers of both your hands.”

  “But Leviathan took the lure and wound the line about him,” her father continued.

  “Gold is as nothing to us,” the woman who had carried the jar murmured as she slipped the yataghan from its sheath, “we grind it beneath our feet, and so shall you.”

  “He fell for a year, a month, and day …”

  Rising, the woman who had carried the jar began to dance to the music of the rebab, fevered music that was like to the flashing of the recurved blade she flourished aloft. Ever the chimings of the red-gold finger cymbals slipped through, around, and over the exigent strains, and in a minute or three (though it had grown dark) the fluting notes of a syrinx joined them, an eerie piping, more distant far in time than space, that railed against death and the desert, and like a child forlorn sobbed of wildflowers.

  “Flitting down from the Moon they followed him,” the old man said, “and built the city from which they might behold her always. Here they buried their dead.”

  “I see,” the traveler said.

  “It is a tale for children, and yet to those who know its secrets, it reveals much. And that is why we teach it to ours.”

  “By the Moon’s gift we never die,” the sister told the traveler, and she began to sing.

  What death is there without decay?

  She walks with me the white Moon-way.

  Hand in hand and hand in mouth,

  Eat, thou traveler from the south.

  Nameless instruments joined the music, hissing and thudding, and the woman who had carried the jar danced now in a circle of torches, her rotting wrappings flying from her as dead leaves in a storm.

  “By the grace of the goddess we never die,” the old man explained. He had taken back his ring, and his tone was almost apologetic. “Our dead are consumed by the living, and come to share their lives. The more who eat, the more life for those who once eaten are undead. Our goddess, you must understand, is herself dead. Mahes gives her life, but though he hates us, she loves us. Give me the spice you brought.”

  The traveler sought to rise, but a dozen hands pressed him down.

  “My wife died last night,” the old man said. “Tonight we will share her flesh, all of us. She will make you one of us, a beholder and celebrant of the Moon, and for that she—and we—rejoice.”

  Presenting a covered dish, the sister knelt before the traveler, and the point of his own yataghan was at his throat. She removed the cover, which was of gold; its mellow ringing served notice that the music had ceased.

  A human brain rested upon the dish.

  The old man unstopped the vial and sprinkled the powders it contained, black and white, pink, red, and green, upon the brain, then thrust the ring beneath it. “Eat,” he said. “Eat to the ring and the ring is yours.”

  A sigh escaped a hundred unseen throats.

  “Refuse and die. Nor will anyone share life with you.”

  The traveler felt the points of spears and knives at his back, and the rebab sobbed.

  “I will eat,” he said. “I will eat because I must. But first I will speak the truth. I seldom do so—it is not wise for travelers, nor is it the way of traders. Yet it is time that the truth was spoken to you.”

  “Eat!” exclaimed a dozen voices.

  “You have a disease. I do not know what it is called nor whence it came—out of these tombs, perhaps. I only know that you have it, and that you pass it one to another by this means. You are sick,
though you think yourselves sacred. Delirious, you imagine that you see the Moon traversing these empty avenues. You also believe that this unfortunate woman will live on in us, when in truth it is only the thing that killed her that will live on in us.”

  A caravan would have passed by the lost town of the dead, but the man who led it saw the traveler’s camel, which wandered free over the desert by day and returned to the lost town to drink with the goats at evening. Hoping to capture it for himself, he followed it; it led him to the town, and his four wives and his slaves entered it with him in search of water.

  They were met by a man skeletally thin and dressed in the rotting cloths that had once clothed a corpse. He welcomed them and led them to the well; but when the leader of the caravan had begun to descend its steps, the man skeletally thin pushed him from them so that he fell to his death, and laughed as madmen do.

  That night, with his long-barreled jezail, he shot a certain old man of the town in order that his new wives might eat; after which all five dashed howling and shrieking through the streets of the lost town of the dead, accompanied by the slaves, the Moon King and his gauze-winged subjects, the woman who had carried the water jar and her sister Ahool, and various others.

  The Walking Sticks

  Jo saw something in the back yard day-before-yesterday, and that should have warned me right there. Got me started on this and everything. I should have gone to the big church over on Forest Drive and talked to somebody, yelled for the police and put this out on the net—done everything I am going to do now. Only I did not. It was a man with a funny kind of derby hat on and a big long black overcoat she said, and she went to the door and said, “What are you doing in our back yard?” And he sort of turned out to be smoke and the smoke blew away.

  That is what her note said, only I did not believe her because it was practically dark, the sun only just up, and what does it mean when a woman says she saw a man in a black overcoat at night? So much has been happening, and I thought it was nerves.

  All right, I am going to go back and tell all of it from the very beginning. Then I will put this on the net and maybe print it out, too, so I can give a copy to the cops and the priests or whatever they have over there.

  Mavis and I got divorced six years ago. Guys always talk about what big friends they are with their ex. I never did believe any of that, and that sure was not how it was with us. As soon as it was final I went my way and she went hers. Mine was staying on the job and finding a new place to live, and hers was selling the house and taking off in our Buick for Nantucket or Belize or wherever it was she had read about in some magazine that month. Jo and I got married not too long after that and bought this place in Bear Hill Cove.

  All right here I better say something I do not want to have to say. A letter came to Mavis from England, and the people that had bought our old house from her carried it over and stuck it in our box. I ought to have opened it and read it and written to the man in Edinburgh. His name was Gordon Houston-Scudder. I should have said we did not know where Mavis was and not to send anything, but I did not even open it. I thought sooner or later Mavis would turn up and I would give it to her. Now I wonder if she was not behind the whole thing.

  Around the end of September a pretty big crate came from England, and there was a good-sized cabinet in it. Jo and I got it out and cleaned up the mess. The key was in the lock, I remember that. And then inside the cabinet there was another mess of wood shavings that got all over the carpet.

  Under that was the canes, twenty-two of them. Some were long and some were shorter. There were all kinds of handle shapes, and a dozen different kinds of wood. The handle of one was silver and shaped like a dog’s head. It was tarnished pretty bad, but Jo polished it up and showed me hallmarks on it. She said she thought it might be pretty valuable.

  About then I remembered the letter for Mavis and got it out of my desk in here and opened it. Mr. Houston-Scudder was a solicitor, he said, and his letter was from what looked like lawyers, Campbell, Macilroy, and somebody else. He said the estate of some doctor from the 1800s had been settled and the canes were supposed to go to a woman named Martha Jenkins or something, but she was dead now and as far as they could see Mavis was her only relative so they were sending them to her.

  I thought that was all right. We would just keep them for her and if she ever came back I would give them to her, and the cabinet, too. Those kids that got killed? I had nothing to do with that. Nothing. So help me God.

  Anyway, that was that. We put the cabinet in a corner of the dining room, and I locked it and I think I put the key in my pocket. Only the cane with the German shepherd head was not in there because Jo wanted to keep it out to look at. It was in the kitchen then, I think, leaning against the side of the refrigerator.

  Here I do not know which way to go. If I just tell about the walking and the knocking, you probably will not get it. Maybe I should say that the key is lost before I get into all that. I think I must have left it in my pocket, and Jo put my jeans in the wash. For just a cabinet it was a pretty big key, iron. I have tried to pick the lock with a wire, but I could not get it open. I could break the doors, but what good would that do?

  The thing is that I do not deserve to go to prison, and I am afraid that is what is bound to happen. But I did not do anything really wrong. In fact nothing I did was wrong at all, except that maybe I should have told somebody sooner. Well, I am telling it now.

  It started that night, even though we did not know it. Jo woke me up and said she heard somebody in the house. I listened for a while and it was tap-tap-tap, rattle-rattle. I told her it sounded like a squirrel in the attic, which it did. But to shut her up I had to get up and get my gun and a flashlight and have a look around. Everything was just like we had left it when we went to bed. The front door and back door were both locked, and all the windows were closed. There was not any more noise either.

  Then when I had turned around to go back to bed, there was a bang and clatter, like something had fallen over. I looked all around with my light and could not see anything, but when I was going back to bed, passing the cabinet, I stepped on it. It was the one with the silver handle. That was the part I stepped on, and it hurt.

  So I said some things (that part was probably a mistake) and leaned it back against the cabinet like Jo had probably had it, and went back to bed. Naturally she wanted to know, “What was that?”

  And I said, “It was your goddamn cane. I must have knocked it over.” Only I knew I had not. Then I asked why she had not told me there were little jewels like rubies or something for the eyes, and she said because there were not any, and we argued about that for a while because I had seen them, and went to sleep. Now I am going to have another beer and go to bed myself. I have locked the pieces in the trunk of my car, and it is not doing that stuff anymore anyway.

  Here is what I should have written last week. The thing was that I had told it to go to hell, when I stepped on it, I mean. I think that was a mistake and I ought not ever to have done it, but a sharp place had cut my foot a little bit and I was mad. Only I know it walked that first night before I said anything. That was what Jo and I heard, I am pretty sure.

  A couple of nights after that Jo heard it again, and next morning it was leaned up against the front door, which was not where we had left it at all.

  So that night I put it in the bedroom with us and shut the door, which was a big mistake. About midnight it knocked to be let out, loud enough to wake up both of us. We got up and turned on the lights, and it was exactly where I had left it, and there were dents in the door. I said they had probably been there before and we had not noticed, but I knew it was not true. I took the cane out and leaned it up against the cabinet in the dining room again and went back to bed.

  That was the first bad night I had, because it woke me up but it did not wake up Jo. I lay there for hours listening to it tapping on the bare floors and thumping on the carpets. It seemed like it was going through the whole house, room after r
oom, and after a while it seemed like the house it was going through must have been a lot bigger than ours.

  It was lying in front of the front door in the morning.

  Jo said I had to throw it away, and we had a big fight about it because I wanted to take off the silver dog’s head first and saw the wooden part in two, but Jo just wanted me to throw away the whole thing.

  Finally I just put it in the garbage, because it was a Saturday and I did not have to go to work. Then when Jo went shopping I got it out and wiped it off and hid it down in the basement. When Jo got back the garbage had been picked up and she thought it was gone.

  I know you must think I am a damned fool to do that, but I was wondering about it. In the first place, I was not really so sure anymore that I had heard what I thought I had. There were the dents in the bedroom door, but I got to where I was not really sure they had not been there already. Besides, what if I had left it in the garbage and the garbage collectors had taken it away, and I heard the same thing again? Squirrels or something. I would have felt like the biggest damned fool in the world.

  Anyway, that is what I did. And that night I did not even try to go to sleep. I just lay in bed listening for it, and when it knocked loud on the basement door to be let out, I got up and put on some clothes and went to the basement door. It was really pounding by then. It seemed like it shook the whole house, and I was surprised Jo did not wake up.

  When I put my hand on the knob of the basement door it felt hot. I never have been able to explain that, but it did. I stood there for half a minute or so with my hand on the knob while it pounded louder and louder, wondering what was going to come out when I opened the door, and whether I really should. I was trying to get my nerve up, I guess, and maybe I thought pretty soon Jo would come and there would be two of us. Finally I turned the knob and opened the door.