Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (15 page)

Interlude

29 The Infested

The world was a canyon of windy darkness rushing past the windows of my eyes. My feet pounded the pavement; I didn’t know why. I had an impression of having plunged from a great height through a dome of glass, but it was like a dream within a dream. Now I was running, running through the empty streets, fleeing a grinning something that sat on my back. If I stopped running, it would devour me, body and soul.

An upright bar of darkling luminosity showed where the street ended ahead. It grew larger, sprinkled with stars. I neared the foundation’s edge. Now I saw the gas fields like a trough of darker night strewn with golden pinpoints of light, and the jagged teeth of the mountains aspiring into the black sky.

I reached the edge and bounded into empty space. I touched down on a viaduct that twisted like an iron ribbon through the night and leaped again. The helots below scattered in fright as I hurtled toward them. I struck the water, plunged deeply into the oozy bottom, and set the surface alive with hissing bubbles.

The causeway that ran parallel to the city blocked my view of the horsetails. I strode forward through the muck and scrambled up the bank, streaming with filth, tearing out great clods of earth with my hands. The workers fled screaming at the sight of me. Still driven by the oppressor that sat astride me, I gathered myself up and shot off at a sprint, rocketing along the track that ran between two parallel lines of fields, making for the mountains and the desert.

Soon I reached the outer rim of the marshes. I cleared the moat and went tearing up the rocky bluff beyond, uprooting moss-trees and throwing boulders out of the way, starting small avalanches that went rattling down into the stagnant water.

Now I was leaping across the rocky plateau that sloped up toward the jagged ridge through which I had guided my flier. Heaps of stones gleamed in the moonlight. Patches of black showed where the tops of moss-trees rose out of winding ravines. My pounding footfalls sent mocking echoes through the waste.

When dawn backlit the pinnacles of the higher range I was careening through a maze of fins and pillars at the top of the lower. I emerged high above the rift valley. Wreaths of clouds curled over its dusky depths. Terrified at my own recklessness, I went swinging from handhold to handhold down the face of the cliffs. Despair laid a single withering finger on my heart. I knew I was at the end of my strength. Soon I would stumble and fall, and my pursuer would make me its puppet.

I was down among the pernathim now, pushing my way through the huge undergrowth that hid the splayed roots of the scale-trees. Flowing water spoke in my ears. I was thirsty, desperately thirsty. Pale light showed ahead. I fell on my hands and knees and went crawling through the ferns and mosses like one of the armored amphibians I frightened out of my way.

The stream was a rippled pane of clear glass. Long, leafy plants swayed back and forth in the current. I put my face in the water to drink. It was then that the parasite took hold of me. I was dimly conscious of a monstrous, inhuman personality overwhelming my own. I went rooting in the mud like a beast, whimpering, soiling myself and rutting. I started scratching around in the bracken, making a place to lie down. In one last corner of sanity I knew that I would never awake to myself again.

A figure strode up out of the shadows. It was an old man, the first old man I’d seen since coming to Enoch. His skin was brown and taut, like a mummy’s, but he looked virile, and he had strong white teeth.

Unable to help myself, I tried to attack him. The old man struck me across the shoulders with his staff, stunning me. Then he went to the edge of the stream and cut a big scouring rush. He dipped it in the water and sprinkled me with droplets. “Come out of him,” he commanded.

Something convulsed my body and rushed out of me with a blast of arid wind. It shot off laughing among the scale-tree stems. I rolled on my side and dropped into oblivion.

*          *          *          *          *

There were two incessant sounds. As I struggled up toward the waking world I sought to identify them. At last my desire grew so great that I opened my eyes. Rain pattered on the roof. A clock told time in another room.

I was in a small, square cell. My mattress lay in an arched alcove built into a whitewashed earthen wall. Dark planks upheld by rafters formed the ceiling. A small window with age-rippled panes admitted damp, sylvan daylight through the wall behind my head. A few glowing nuggets throbbed gently in a corner hearth whose flue formed a continuous curve with the walls. There was a green woven rug on the floor.

I lay beneath a heavy, colorful counterpane that was old and worn but clean and fresh. There were fragrant herbs in my pillow. I was warm and dry and snug, and the sound of the rain emphasized my comfort. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep to the sound of the ticking clock.

When I next awoke nothing about the room had changed, except that the old man was now sitting in a wooden chair beside my bed, watching me, with a bowl of white broth cupped in his bony hands. He was quite bald, so that the lines of his skull were clearly visible, and his thin skin was wrapped tightly about his knobby joints. He wore a coarse hempen habit.

“Back with us at last,” he said, smiling. It was strange to hear such a strong, hearty voice emerge from such old lips.

“You…drove it out of me,” I said. It was as much a question as a statement.

“I did.”

“I—struck at you. I’m sorry. I—I didn’t—”

“Say no more of it. Are you hungry? It would be good for you to eat at least a bit of this, even if you don’t feel like eating.”

“I will,” I said. The old man began feeding me a spoonful at a time, as though I were an infant. Between swallows I asked: “What would have happened to me if…?”

“If I hadn’t come along when I did? The spirit of wind would have possessed you. You would have become its puppet, and the slave of the one who commanded it, if it happened to be a theurge’s familiar.”

“Who are you?”

The old man smiled as he offered another spoonful. “No one in particular.”

“Then how is it that you have the authority to cast out unclean spirits?”

“Every man has that virtue as his birthright. But a virtue abused or neglected diminishes. The princes of the air are quite perceptive when it comes to sensing who has kept at his exercises and who has not.”

“What exercises?”

“Listen,” said the old man. “What do you hear?”

After a moment, I said: “I hear the beating of raindrops on the roof, and the ticking of one of those machines the Enochites use to keep time.”

“Correct. Atop that clock there lies a brass key. Once every week I use the key to wind the clock.”

“Yes?”

“That’s all,” the old man said. “That’s my exercise.”

I took a spoonful. “You’re making fun of me.”

“A little.” There was a twinkle in his eye.

“All the same,” I said, “I’ve just come from Enoch, and while I was there I noticed that the phylites rarely wind their clocks. At the time I wondered why.”

“Did you?” The old man was smiling, but interest was kindled in his eyes. “And what conclusions did you draw?”

I fell back on my pillow. “No more for now,” I said. “Thank you. I didn’t draw any conclusions. I just wondered, that’s all. I’m trying to fathom your meaning.”

“My meaning?”

“Yes. You remind me of someone. My godmother, who was also a healer. She often teased me, but there was always some deeper meaning hidden behind her humor. I had the same thought about you.”

“Don’t let’s be thinking too much quite yet,” the old man said, getting to his feet. “Sleep well tonight. Tomorrow you can get up.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Two days.” He set his withered hand on the door latch.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Gaspar.” He opened the door.

“Gaspar,” I said.

“Yes?”

“How many days go by between windings?”

Gaspar observed me long and shrewdly. “Seven,” he said.

“That’s what I thought.”

Gaspar softly closed the door. The rain pattered at the window, and the clock went on telling time.

*          *          *          *          *

I slept through the night. When I opened my eyes the cell was filled with the warm glow of the hearth. Purple twilight fell through the window. It was dawn.

I rose and stretched. My muscles were painfully stiff. The floor was chilly. In the corner beside my bed I found a chair with a habit of brown velvety stuff and a pair of slippers. I put them on and opened the door.

The main room of the cottage lay beyond. A door in the opposite wall gave upon what was presumably Gaspar’s bedroom. The massive front door was in the right-hand wall between two round windows. A big arched fireplace faced it across the room, heaped with glowing nuggets. Ironmongery and earthenware and dried provisions hung from the ceiling and filled alcoves and shelves. My armor sat in a corner.

The only piece of furniture was a small yet massive wooden table. Its top was scored and shiny from long use. There was a bench on either side of it. I sat down and waited.

Gaspar came in a moment later, laden with two earthen jugs swinging from a bar across his shoulders. He slung them down to the floor. “Good day to you,” he said. “You found what I set out for you, I see.”

“Yes. Thank you. What’s this robe made of? I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“It’s from the cap of a giant mushroom. They grow in a ring in a dark dell farther up the canyon.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Good.” Gaspar went over to the hearth and ladled gruel into bowls from a pot suspended over the coals. Then he lifted a cast-iron oven out of the embers. With a pair of tongs he transferred the steaming contents to a basket lined with cloth. This he set in the middle of the table. A pair of spoons and two ceramic mugs of strong, black tea completed the setting.

“Now,” he said, “if you will kindly stand.” I rose, and my host bowed his head and asked the auraiads and naiads and dryads that watched over the forest to bless our food. Then we sat and began our meal.

“Help yourself,” said Gaspar, indicating the basket. I lifted up a corner of the cloth. Curling wisps of steam rose into the air. Heaped in the basket were fruiting bodies, bell-shaped and disk-shaped and ruffled, red and orange and pale gray and brown, with gills gloriously dark and exuding earthy odors. I lifted one out and ate it hungrily, then ate some gruel, and then two more fruits.

“You are a Recusant,” I said as the edge of my hunger was blunted.

“You might say that.”

“I know little more of them than that they live by the seven-day week. Someone in Enoch told me about it.”

“You must have kept questionable company there,” the old man said.

I laughed. “We misfits don’t have the luxury of choosing our associates.”

“You aren’t a misfit, Keftu,” he said. “You’re an alien.”

I suddenly felt cold inside. I ate a few more bites in silence. “How do you know my name?”

“You raved while you slept,” the old man said gently.

I stared at my bowl. “I don’t wish to seem ungrateful,” I said. “But I am, as you say, an alien, and I had several unpleasant experiences in Enoch. They taught me to be cautious.”

“Prudence is the queen of the virtues. But every virtue has its twin vices. Prudence degenerates into heedlessness on one hand and cunning on the other. Be prudent, not cunning.”

“That is well taken,” I said slowly, “and to me it seems the part of prudence to…”

“To make inquiries as to my person and purposes,” the old man said mildly. “I am willing. Ask me what you will.”

“Did you know I would be coming this way?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know?”

“That is easily asked, but not easily answered. Let us say the forest told me.”

I nodded slowly. “I had some thought of that,” I said. “Perhaps we’ll return to it in a moment. Are you in fact a Recusant?”

“As employed by the Cheiropt, that word can mean a number of different things. But this I will tell you. I am a member of the interstitial people that traces its roots back to the vanished kingdom of Eldena, whom the phylites commonly call Recusants.”

“Eldena! Where have I heard that name?” I searched my mind. “I have it. The race of slaves.” I looked up in surprise. “Then they are one and the same? Recusants and Eldenes?”

“Strictly speaking, no. The Eldenes are a people. Recusants follow a certain observance. But the words are usually used interchangeably.”

“Someone told me that there were no more Eldenes.”

“That is understandable. There are certainly very few of us. And the Cheiropt doesn’t formally recognize our existence as such.”

“Do you know where I’m from?”

“You are the young Phylarch of Arras, or believe yourself to be.”

“Did I say that as I raved, too?”

The old man smiled. “Not in so many words. I made some inferences.”

“And do you believe I am what I claim to be?”

“I am inclined to. Scions of long-vanished realms are commoner than madmen of such cunning.”

“Is it true that Arras and Eldena were sister realms?”

“If we are to delve into the annals of elder ages,” the old man said, “you had better help me to clear away this mess and clean my crockery. It’s too long a tale to tell over dirty dishes.”

30 Elder Ages

We were walking through the forest now. The understory was a riot of color and form with a fretted roof upheld by the pale, glossy stems of the scale-trees. It was chilly, and I had my hands in the voluminous pockets of my habit. The air was moist and earthy, as at the entrance to a cavern. I breathed it in deeply. I was already hearkening to the silent songs and wordless litanies of the land at the mountains’ roots.

“The Psalter Hexaemera,” Gaspar was saying, “sets forth four ages of man. First the Age of Gold, man’s long infancy in the warm garden-rifts of the hyperborean regions, in glacier-beleaguered Sharon. Then the Age of Silver, after Sharon fell to the wanderers of Leng, when the twin daughter-realms, Eldena and Arras, began anew here in the south. Arras vanished beneath the encroaching sands of Eblis, while Eldena was wracked by disasters and swept away by invaders. Thus began the Age of Bronze, in which some say we now live.”

“And what is the fourth age?” I asked.

“The Age of Iron. The Psalter foretold it, but nothing has been added since the death of the last archon. Some believe that it has yet to come. My own belief is that it began with the Inception of the Cheiropt.

“The Enochites’ annals look back only to the foundation of Enoch Minor in Lesser Panormus. They call the time before that the Age of Wandering. The Age of Strife began as the tribes settled around Tethys and established city-states. The forging of the Synoecism under Enoch opened the Age of Glory. The Age of Peace began with the Inception.

“The fall of Eldena came at the end of the Age of Wandering. For myriads it existed as a land of contention between empires. Then came the Synoecism, and the Eldenes became a diaspora in ocean-girding Enoch.”

We crossed to the other side of the stream. The canopy became denser, and the lichens and mosses gave way to huge fungi. Big spiders with long, drooping bodies and pale legs hung from dew-sprinkled webs in the shadows. The path rolled in and out of pits and dells.

“When I was in Enoch,” I said, “a friend told me that it was the Eldenes who built Bel and the Gardens.”

“So they did,” said Gaspar. “The Enochites can follow any course laid out for them, perfecting and extending it like no other people, but leaps of insight there are none. The Great Library is a mere formless heaping of disconnected works, a confused babbling of many tongues. An Enochite can lay one brick upon another, but only an Eldene could have planned the Tower of Bel and placed Narva in the sky.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why would they have labored like that for the people who oppressed them? Weren’t they making themselves slaves?”

“Who can say? They were never slaves in name, although there are subtler means of coercion. My own belief is that they built Bel because they could. It may seem strange, but that time was a great flowering of new ideas for them. Perhaps they thought that their lot would be bettered if all Enoch lived in a single house. But then came the Inception.”

“The Age of Iron,” I said. “The Cheiropt, the prison of black iron.”

Gaspar nodded. “While the Eldenes worked in daylight, the artificers of the great social machine labored in secret. They set it in motion as Bel neared completion. It took on a life of its own, developed faster than they had anticipated. The week was shortened from seven days to six, and Eldena was driven into the catacombs. Their eyes were opened. They realized that they had been building a prison. The Tower sits unfinished to this day. It’s falling into ruin now, but the Enochites haven’t the skill or the heart to repair and finish it.”

We drew up to a rotten scale-tree stump, a pithy, crannied mass wreathed in spider silk. Gaspar set down his empty hamper. “Here,” he said, handing me a hatchet he’d had hidden among the folds of his habit. “Work for your gruel. Break that stump up into chunks and fill the basket.”

“These are the coals I saw at your house?”

“Yes. They burn slowly but hotly. I learned it from the helborim of Nightspore.”

“What is Nightspore?”

“The moss-jungle that covers the southern continent at the mouth of Tethys. There’s an ancient kingdom of goblins in its depths, and many other curious things.”

I worked in silence, hacking at the stump and pulling out fragments with my hands. “I don’t understand it,” I said. “Why not leave it as it was? The week, I mean.”

Gaspar smiled. “There’s no point in asking why the Cheiropt does what it does, any more than in asking why water flows downhill. But there is a certain inexorable logic in its every action. The Enochites use a system of counting based on sixes. It’s well adapted to the annual calendar. It was only logical to divide the year into six-day weeks grouped into sixty-day cycles, with an intercalary period at each end.”

“They’re exact in their measurement of days and seasons, then,” I said.

“Oh, yes. There are no orreries in Enoch, but they can predict eclipses myriads ahead of time.

“The change in the week’s length was a cataclysm even among the phyles. But hierophants of the Cheiropt pointed out that it would give the gods one day of worship for every five of work, rather than one for every six. Who could argue with that? And so the prison of black iron swallowed up every last Enochite in the space of a year or so. Even their gods were assimilated. Only the Eldenes refused to adapt, and were branded recusants for their obstinacy.”

I began placing the fragments I’d broken up into the hamper. “Don’t pack them too tightly,” said Gaspar. “They won’t burn properly if they’re smashed.”

“It was Narva that first drew me to Enoch, you know,” I said. “I saw it hanging in the sky, and set out to wrest from it the secret of eternal life.”

“The Narvenes are said to have found the key to immortality,” said Gaspar, “gods and angels know how. They think themselves divine, though they discreetly keep the fact to themselves. Each one there thinks he is secretly the ruler of the rest.”

“It seems madness now,” I said. “I was alone in the desert. My people were all dead, and the wells were rotten and foul. Do you see? There was nothing to do but escape. Then I got here, and the Cheiropt was waiting for me.”

“The vision is one that can’t be rescinded,” Gaspar said quietly. “If you say nay once and to one thing, you say nay at all times to all things. You have a fracture running across your being. You must learn to live with it. If you try to escape it, you’ll only be assimilated by the Cheiropt again. Next time it will be so complete that you’ll never suspect what happened.”

I worked in silence for a moment. “If the Narvenes have no wisdom as the Eldenes had,” I asked, “then how can they keep the Gardens in the sky?”

“A class of adepts keeps the palace in place through a compounding of epicycles within epicycles, extending algorithms laid down by Eldena which the Eldenes would have replaced long ago.

“The Enochites are a people of algorithms. There is an island, once known as the Holy Isle of Thera, now called the Isle of the Combinators, where they have analytical engines as large as buildings, each capable of processing and storing a thousand million pieces of data and performing computations to any degree of accuracy. But even something as fundamental as the division of a number into indivisible factors is beyond them.”

“This is full,” I said.

Gaspar got to his feet. “Let us go, then.”

I shouldered the hamper, and we began retracing our steps.

*          *          *          *          *

“Master,” I said after we had crossed the stream again.

“Yes, my son.”

“How long may I stay with you?”

“The room you’ve been sleeping in is unoccupied. I have no objection to your staying as long as you wish. But you’re a young man. Do you not want to be off and doing?”

“I do,” I said. “But I don’t know what.”

“Ah,” said Gaspar.

“I came here in search of immortality. It turns out that that was only a way of taking on the yoke of the Cheiropt. So now what do I do? I’m back where I started.”

Gaspar shook his head. “You must find your own path, Keftu.”

We walked without talking for a few minutes. At last I had enough courage to say: “I believe I know what I must do.”

“Yes?”

“I must destroy this Cheiropt that holds all Enoch in its grip. Then, if I—”

“Destroy!” said Gaspar, with something like a frown. “How does one destroy chaos? You may as well scourge the sea, or bludgeon a fog bank. Have you not heard all I’ve said?”

My face turned red. I stammered: “I—I’ll continue to think about it. I don’t wish to be a burden to you. I—I am a hunter. Perhaps…if you have a spear…”

“I do not. I abstain from flesh meat. But perhaps it would do you good to hunt. It would also put less strain on my stores. There’s an old smokehouse behind the cottage. You’ll have to provide yourself with tools. But don’t tax yourself. You’re still recovering.”

“It was that armor that made me so weak,” I said.

“I know. Did you bring it all the way from Arras?”

“No,” I said. Again I blushed. “I took it from a tomb buried beneath the city. I was forced to go delving for treasures.”

“Treasures! Are there still treasures under Enoch?”

“Perhaps ‘treasure’ is the wrong word. We mostly just brought up curiosities that could be sold by the person we worked for.”

“Ah. An antique mart for phylites.”

“You’ve heard of such things?”

“These marts appear from time to time. As a rule the phylites have no thought for anything beyond their own experience, but sometimes one or another will become obsessed with antiques. It’s counted a shameful thing among them, and the Cheiropt penalizes them for bringing disparate objects into their apartments. That’s why they have to sneak down to Hela to get them. How did you end up in such a place?”

I recounted how I had flown to Enoch, how I had been lured into Hela and sold to Granny, how I had fought in the pit and then delved for curiosities. “When I escaped with her,” I said, “she was afraid to go out into Hela, so I took her down, deeper than I had ever delved. There I found a monstrous corridor twisting through the under-city.”

“Ah,” said Gaspar.

“A songline runs through it,” I said.

“A songline?”

“A stepping from time before time, when man was not.” I looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”

“Tell me what you mean, Keftu.”

“I thought you must know, Master, for your house stands at their confluence. But there’s little to tell. They’re not the kind of thing one talks about. They are a web of…of relations, with signs that signify themselves… We follow them, as the sun draws the moss-tree up out of the earth, pulling its branches and leaves along the channels laid out for them; as the stars steer their courses through the sky; as the fishes swim the paths of the sea. When I came to Enoch I thought at first that there were none here. But I was only deaf and blind to them. When I found them at last, it seemed to me that whoever laid the city’s foundations must have heeded them.”

“Imagine,” said Gaspar, “how it was at the beginning of the Age of Glory. Sprawling cities set on hills and promontories around the ocean, growing ever larger, reaching out long tendrils to one another. Causeways and viaducts overleaping low-lying areas, woven so densely that they hide the sun. Men crowded out of the centers, pushed to the periphery.

“Long before building the Tower—itself a feat of many generations—the Eldene architects were called upon to lay foundations for the city’s growth. Legend has it that they were assisted by anakim. Perhaps they were guided by these songlines, or something like them.”

“Was the armor I found Eldene?” I asked.

“Possibly. They made many curious things.” He looked at me. “It’s a strange thing that you found it as you did.”

“Why does it drain me so?”

Gaspar smiled grimly. “You were being digested by the Cheiropt, Keftu. You see, old age—senility and decay—come early in Enoch. The phylites have ways of retaining their youth outwardly, but when they reach a certain age—it depends on the phyle—they deteriorate almost overnight. It’s a fearful thing to see, but very rare, for the Cheiropt compels them to drink a mycotoxin when they near the age of degeneration. They’re so bored by that point that they mind it but little. In much the same way, when you gave yourself up to the Cheiropt, you severed your link to the life of things. The panoply, drawing on your vital forces, drained you too quickly.”

“Would it have killed me?”

“No. Its force would have diminished with your life, both tapering together toward nothingness, in theory indefinitely. You would have died of natural causes before long, of course. If you hadn’t been…infested.”

“Would I have been infested if I hadn’t been wearing it?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. It was your succumbing to the Cheiropt that laid you open to it. Tell me. Where do the princes of the air like to dwell?”

“Among desert tombs,” I said. “And in old houses left alone, where men have lived, but not too long ago. I’ve seen the marks they leave in the dust at sunset, when light slants through the windows.”

Gaspar nodded. “In Enoch they haunt empty lots, in-between spaces, abandoned flats. Any place where disorder is advancing rapidly. When perfect disorder approaches, they become latent. It is the same with the minds of men.”

“The Inception must have been a fearful time, then,” I said.

“Let us not speak of such things,” said Gaspar.