Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (16 page)

31 A Roasted Heart

We reached the cottage. “Are there sail-beasts in this forest?” I asked as I emptied the fragments into a crib.

“There are adrothim and deinothim farther down the valley.”

“Do you have a whetstone?”

“On the top shelf.”

“Today I will sharpen my sword,” I said. “Tomorrow I will go hunting.”

Soon I was seated at the table, honing my blade. Gaspar sat across from me. He was sewing a shift of chitin-cloth.

“Master,” I said.

“Yes, Keftu.”

“Where do the Eldenes live now?”

“Nowhere in particular. They have to live as they can, doing business with one another. The Cheiropt has mechanisms to keep them from treating with phylites.”

“Why don’t they leave Enoch?”

“Some did, long ago. Their city, Darien, is said to lie far to the northwest, across Tethys, beyond the karst plateaus and the great basin. Recusants emigrate there from time to time, but no one ever hears from them again. If the Darenes still exist, they must be a people apart by now, with their own ways and customs. Most of us feel that Enoch is where we belong. We get along as we can.”

“Why are you here in the mountains?”

He smiled. “I’ve lived a long life. I did my part in the long defeat, a magus of the White Flame, the Heart of the Sun. One day it seemed that I ought to withdraw. So I came here.”

“To wait for me?”

“Perhaps.”

“You told me earlier that you knew I was coming.”

“That’s putting it too strongly. I wouldn’t even call it a feeling. It’s something like your songlines, perhaps.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Not long at all, it seems to me,” he said. “Longer than your lifetime, though.”

“You’ve been here alone that entire time?”

“I have two books for company. The Psalter Hexaemera, of which I spoke earlier, and the book of the nature of things. The first is writ in the mazes of my mind. The second flows past the windows of my eyes.”

“Then you don’t have Sephaura,” I said. “I thought perhaps you did.”

“What is Sephaura?”

“The abstract tower of knowing. It is the first duty of the phylarchs of Arras to protect and preserve it, and to approve new additions. It has a life of its own.” Briefly, I sketched for Gaspar its layout: its solid foundations; its mansions and ordered gardens; its dynamic nodes and branches; the places where it was incomplete. “It keeps me awake at night,” I said, “knowing what must die with me, if I die. I’d hoped Eldena preserved it also.”

“Why not set it in writing?”

“That is forbidden. ‘Wisdom dies imprisoned.’“

“Did your people not write?”

“Yes, but only messages, and edicts, and things of that sort.”

Gaspar bowed his head. “Steppings from time before time and the ivory palace of knowing,” he said. “It’s a strange and vehement wisdom you bring to us from a land we thought dead. You call me Master, Keftu, but in some things it seems that you must be our master.”

I drew the stone along the now-gleaming edge of my blade, filling the room with its ring.

*          *          *          *          *

I set out the next morning, following stream and songline downhill, loins girt, sword at my side, a scrip over my shoulder. At midday I reached a place where the stream fell over a narrow cliff into a ravine. The swaying scale-trees arched high overhead, filling the defile with livid gloom. I slid down the moss-carpeted wall and landed on my feet in the pool.

I continued down the stream, striding soundlessly through the glassy water. The pebbles beneath my feet were like heaps of opals, carnelians, and jaspers. The walls receded, and the banks became narrow jungles, as delicate and colorful as coral reefs.

Suddenly my skin prickled all over. A great grinning face looked out from the mosses. The sail behind was dull red with black spots. A stay shaft of sunlight fell incarnadine through the skin stretched weblike between its dorsal spines. The creature’s small, round eyes blinked once or twice. Its maw opened slightly.

I drew Deinothax. It gleamed like a bar of metal in a smithy’s fire, remembering the first blood it had tasted at my hands. The deinoth was still sluggish with the cool of the morning. It tossed its head and snapped as I rushed it, but neither attacked nor retreated. I drove my sword’s point home through its dewlap, above the breastbone, then leaped back. I had missed the heart. The beast thrashed in its agony but weakened swiftly. It slid down into the water. My second thrust was its death-blow.

I guided the carcass downstream to a stony eyot and set about dressing it. First I removed the steaming viscera and set them on the stones in a heap. The great heart I kept separate. I cut off the head, the four feet, and the tail, and removed the skin in two pieces—one on either side of the sail—and set about detaching the sail itself.

It was eerily silent there. I was continually starting and peering around at the shadows. The ravine, pillared and roofed by the pernathim, was like a tall, narrow cavern flowing with a river of the underworld.

A slithering of stones brought me around. A second deinoth was crossing the shoals on the bank, attracted by the smell of blood. I strode swiftly through the water and beat the beast with the flat of my sword. It retreated into the undergrowth and waited there.

Soon I had the carcass trussed around a pole and wrapped tightly in a sheet of old chitin-cloth. The dorsal spines I had removed one by one and bundled together. The head was in my scrip, wrapped in leaves. I splashed upstream and cast about for a thread that would take me back to the top. The second lizard was already devouring the remains of its mate.

*          *          *          *          *

Gaspar was out when I reached the cottage again. I laid my burden down outside the door and carefully opened it up. Withdrawing the heart, which I had replaced in the breast, I took it inside, thrust it onto a fork, and roasted it in the hearth. The black blood sizzled and popped as it dripped onto the throbbing coals. When it was done I cut off the tip and threw it over my shoulder, then devoured the rest.

This accomplished, I went back out to prepare the meat. I removed it in strips and salted them down. The smokehouse, I found, though long disused, was still in working order. After draping the meat over the poles at the top, I prepared a bed of scale-tree fragments at the bottom and ignited them with a live coal from the house. The fire spread slowly from chunk to chunk. I tended them until they were glowing evenly, then packed them down and left them smoking.

The remaining joints I took and roasted in the hearth. Gaspar came in as I was stripping the bones with my teeth and cracking them apart for marrow. I ate neatly, as befitted a scion of the House: there was not a spot of grease on my face, and I held the joints genteelly between forefinger and thumb.

The clock began to chime. It was evening. Gaspar sat in a corner and watched the firelight play on my face. Every so often the coals crackled. I went out when I finished my repast and washed my hands and face.

“You’ve been busy today,” Gaspar said as I came back in.

“I have.”

“Are those adroth spines?”

“Deinoth,” I said. I lifted the sack that held the beast’s head and swung it.

“Do you always slay such things with your sword?”

“Preferably not. This fellow was fat and confident, though. I’ll use these spines for javelins from now on, so I won’t have to get close.” I sat on the hearth and opened the bag. The lizard’s eyes gleamed dully in the firelight. Its jaw hung slack. I began to pry the teeth loose with a knife and a pair of pliers.

“You’ll use his bones against his brothers, eh?”

I laughed. “They aren’t above eating one another, if they get the chance.” I held up a long, sharp tooth in the firelight and admired it.

“Keftu,” said Gaspar, “yesterday it was easy to imagine you a young Eldene learning his catechism. Today…” He trailed off without finishing his sentence. I smiled, but there was something in my eyes. He bowed his head.

Night settled heavily about the house. Sail-beasts screamed in the darkness, and the soft boughs of the scale-trees swayed beneath the stars.

32 Watchful Eyes

For two weeks I lived as though I would never leave. I rose with Gaspar at dawn, searched with him for fruits in the forest, and saw to the curing of my meat. I hunted once more and boiled all the bones, “for,” I said, “they may be useful.”

Then one morning I opened my eyes and decided to retrieve my odonatopter from its hiding place. At breakfast I said: “Is there a pass to Enoch near here?”

“Yes,” said Gaspar, “a little to the north. What do you think to do?”

“When I came from Arras I flew down a pass through this lower range and left my flier on a half-dome.”

“That lies along the way to the north. You’re retrieving your machine?”

“It’s almost time for me to be off and doing, I think. But I mean to be back tomorrow, Master. I’ll not leave you in peace just yet.” I rose and cleaned my things. A few minutes later I set out into the forest with a day’s worth of dried meat and a tooth-tipped javelin.

Finding the pass took a long time, the trees were so thick. It was midday before I was climbing it and late afternoon when I crested the saddle. I wended my way into the canyon and reached the foot of the half-dome at sundown.

I climbed to the summit and looked out. Enoch was a jaw of carious teeth chewing the lower heavens, set to receive the dull red wafer of the sun. Higher up, a fat airship crawled across the sky like a blow fly on a grimy window.

The flier was where I had left it. It was too late now to return to the rift, so I stretched myself out on the stones. Enoch opened its argent eyes one at a time. I thought of the seraphim whose voices echo through the void. But I thought also of the world-serpent whose eye-opening would begin the end of things.

The noise of the city drifted faintly over the waterish lowlands. Helots spread out like termites from holes in the foundation. Álurin the king-planet hung low over Enoch. Narva was a bright spark higher up. I watched it, and it watched me.

*          *          *          *          *

I awoke in the night, thinking I had overslept. The mountaintop was bathed in hot, white light. I sat up, my shadow a pool of pure blackness behind me, and shielded my eyes. The light seemed to fall out of nowhere. Rising, I stumbled over the stones, bewildered by shreds of sleep. The half-dome was a chessboard of white and black, like an airless planet close by the sun.

Then, abruptly, the light shut off. My eyes adjusted slowly. The stars winked in the sky. Narva glittered like a baleful jewel.

I threw myself back down on the stones, not entirely certain I’d been awake, and slept through the rest of the night undisturbed.

*          *          *          *          *

I reached Gaspar’s at midmorning, guided by the wisp of smoke that drifted up through the canopy. I set down in a clearing by the stream, disassembled my flier, and carried the parts to the house.

Gaspar saw me coming. “You fly with a machine heavier than air,” he said.

“I know the Enochites think it impossible. Their airships are clumsy things. But surely the Eldenes must know better, having set Narva in the sky.”

“Narva is above the earth’s envelope of air,” said Gaspar. “The architects used engines to lift its parts into reaches where they can hang as the moon. Lower down the air would drag, causing the palace to lose speed and crash, or else burn up.”

“But air can lift as well as drag,” I said. “There are ways of making it work. The dragonflies keep from falling, don’t they? I’ve seen one with wings as wide as a man’s outstretched fingertips. The motion of their wings is subtle but patterned.”

“And your machine follows this pattern?”

“Something like it. Certain things have to be adjusted because the air is so rare for my weight. Right now I need to see if this will still bear me in my armor.”

“You haven’t worn your armor since you came,” Gaspar observed.

“No.”

“Are you afraid to?”

“Perhaps.” I hesitated. “I feel no different than when I first wore it in Enoch. Why should I be able to bear it now any more than then?”

“Have you renounced your first quest?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Do you have a new object?”

“No, Master, I don’t. And that’s what worries me. I see only a direction. Not a path, but a suggestion of where I should step first, and a conviction that suggestions will continue to come.”

Gaspar nodded. “You shouldn’t worry that you feel no different,” he said. “It’s realities, not feelings, that matter. What matters is your stand in the life of things. Don’t let obscurity trouble you. Any clearly perceived goal, however lofty, would be unworthy of you, I think. You can only be completed by what lies beyond every name and idea.”

So we went together to the side of the canyon, I wearing the panoply and carrying my flier. I was less conscious of the armor’s effects now, except that at each stride I felt as though stepping into an abyss and being caught by the earth at the last instant. The green that coursed along my limbs had less of brown and blue and more of gold.

I scaled the sloping wall of the canyon and reached a mossy shelf that looked over the sighing sea of leaves. There I assembled the flier. I knelt, laid it across my shoulders, took hold of the handles, and dove into empty space. My motion described a smooth parabolic arc as I rose, crested, and plunged head-foremost into the leaves.

The next thing I knew I had my head in Gaspar’s lap. He was slapping my face and calling my name.

“My helmet,” I moaned. “Where is my helmet?”

“Be calm,” said Gaspar. “All is well.”

I shook off the old man’s hands and sat up, still bewildered. We were sitting in a bed of fiddleheads. The odonatopter lay in pieces all around us. My helmet was on the ground beside Gaspar’s knee. There was a clod of earth stuck to its crest, and the entire left side of my body bore similar signs of my crash-landing. I looked up at the canopy and saw the hole I’d made. It all came back to me.

I groaned. “Too short. The wings are too short. The motions aren’t right, either. And if I’m to do what I must, my hands have to be free.” I looked at my broken flier. “I’ll need more resin. What a shame that I didn’t think to find it before I made the trial! Now I’ll have to go on foot.”

“Where will you get it?” asked Gaspar.

“On the far side of these mountains. I saw ephathim in the heights when I came here from Arras. Are there any dangers I should know about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “No one has ever crossed the Pelus. They’re held to be unscalable.”

“Well,” I said, “I have my armor.”

The rest of that day I spent preparing for my journey. In a pack I stowed meat, dried fruits, skins for water, a blanket, nails, and cups made from dried mushroom caps. I also sewed a long pocket on the side and slid a bundle of javelins into it.

That night we sat together before the fire. “Master,” I said.

“Yes, Keftu.”

“Do you remember when I thought to destroy the Cheiropt?”

“Yes.”

“You told me that I might as well scourge the sea.”

“Yes.”

“That’s true, I suppose. This is the Age of Peace, as the Enochites say. Nothing happens anymore—someone once told me that in the city. And yet there’s a tension here, Master. I know it. I could feel it even in the pits of Hela. Take this Misfit and his new-formed phyle. Has Enoch ever seen such a thing? The phylites are agitated because they see hoplites where before there were none.”

“Look at the pendulum in that clock,” said Gaspar. “There are two positions in which it could stand still. Do you see?”

“Yes,” I said. “Straight up and straight down.”

“That’s right. Now, if that pendulum were set in any other position, it would flee the one and approach the other. Yes?”

“Yes, it would swing down to the bottom.”

Gaspar bowed his head. “The Inception began a headlong rush. After a time Enoch approached a state of rest. But somehow it failed to reach the truly stable position. It settled into a position only partly stable—a kind of saddle point—and sits there now through inertia.”

“What is it, then, that keeps Enoch from perfect disorder?”

Gaspar hunched his shoulders. “For better or worse,” he said, “the phyles. The Tower is the great mixer. One at a time the phyles cross over and are dissolved. But the rate of division on the mainland about equals the rate of dissolution in the Tower. The Cheiropt is powerless to overcome this. It’s a point the makers didn’t foresee.

“There’s much to be said against the phyles. At the same time, the gaps and crannies between them shelter all manner of misfits and recusants. It would be the end of Eldena were they to dissolve on the mainland. I’ve thought about this a great deal, out of fear for our way of life. It has often seemed to me that some convulsion—a few sudden jolts, a push from the side—would be enough to send the city rolling into the truly stable position, in which each man is his own phyle, as it is in the Tower.”

“This man Jairus, the Misfit,” I said, “he’s been receiving ova from someone.”

“Ova?”

“Living germs of chimeras. They were sent him from the Deserits.”

“To what purpose?”

“He seeks to escape with his phyle. They’re supposed to aid in the exodus. He doesn’t know anything about them, but I do, for Sephaura speaks of them. They’re agents of chaos, an ancient evil.”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“They are terrible! They’re neither living nor dead. Some say they were fashioned by the gods in wars waged before man was a dream, to serve as vehicles and weapons. The powers of the air have lost their old strength, but the chimeras still exist in seminal form in the deeps of the earth. From time to time one matures, emerging to breed horror in the hearts of the innocent. We had many tales of them. It’s foul, the things they do. I’ll not describe it, unless you ask me to.”

“That I do not. Who’s providing them?”

“I don’t know. Someone in the desert. Jairus considers this person his ally, though not very trustingly. But I can’t imagine chimeras being used for whatever he intends. It would be like harnessing the sun to draw a cheboth-cart. Chimeras are said to be something like machines, but they grow, and grow, and never die. No. There’s something else at work here. He’s being played upon.”

Gaspar rubbed his chin. “Someone must know what we know,” he said, “and is using it for a purpose of his own. Who, I wonder?”

“The ruler with the rod of iron,” I said. “The warden of the prison of black iron.”