Through sparser tree tops towering, irregular spars, impossibly high mounds, crossways are dim blue grey against slate sky. We’ve stopped, and a cart wheel is being repaired; I lie down on my side facing away from everyone and gingerly draw the charm from my pocket. This fragile thing is my life. I don’t dare even hold it, and my hands shake. So I slide it along the ground up to my face. The figure inside points unerringly in a single direction, toward the high silhouettes. Tatters of sky are reflected in its glass, grow blurry, now I see a sort of a gateway, a rubble road by a titanic pinwheel-shaped building sprouting hoses, and the cemetery beyond. Has this thing all along been thinking pictures silently to itself in my pocket?
Soon I am pointing the way again, Jil Punkinflake glowering at me over Saskia’s shoulder. He should thank me for the opportunity to feel something different.
*
Solitary buildings among the trees; no matter what the light, their insides are always completely dark, and the flaking rust walls are radiant with dark. Enormous trees erupt out of a few of them, transforming them into shapeless skirts for tree trunks.
Vast shapes of light shine at us, through the trees ahead. Our emergence from the woods is sudden; there before us is a smooth wall, bellied out like a sail, that looms and spans. The surface is chipped enamel, buff streaked with rust. There’s a regular series of tapering, protruding openings, like the wide ends of funnels, high above.
The gate isn’t far. It comes in view after a half hour’s walk along the base of the wall, which vanishes directly down into the soil. The wall turns away from us at a place where the land breaks, and we look out now from a crag, not too high or steep. Just below it is a tangle of collapsed derricks scabbed with rust, some of them curled up on themselves like dried worms. Bolt-shaped metal pillars that rust has roughened and bulbed over like coral are thrust up among the derricks, which crushed the building they belonged to when they fell. The ground before us carpets itself with enormous shards of glass, warped metal beams orange with rust and tossed together like twigs, and what look like great blankets flung haphazardly down, all of rust metal mesh. There are some deliberate-looking streaks on the earth to show where buildings once stood.
The crag slumps off to our left, with an easy way toward the gate, which is now only visible sidelong as a complicated bus on the shield-like wall. It turns into direct view as we go—the oblate mouth of the gate is pitch black, set into a wide winged structure emerging from the wall. The sunken ground immediately before the gate has filled with water, and the mouth is reflected in it. From the near side of the pond emerges a brown-orange streak of what had been a paved road, its surface now gathered into tiny pellets that stir a little in the wind.
The wall simply stops a hundred yards beyond the gate, the edges of the outer skin stick out in angular segments, and mammoth rusted rods, each one a man’s height or more in diameter, droop from within the epidermis like brown intestines. Blown out, somehow.
Predicanten explode from their red rookeries high over the gate and circle as we come—their beaks are closed, the shrieking is the noise their wings make against the air, and the groaning of their own rusted joints as they flap. We stand at the brink of the pool, and only now is a white coin visible deep in the gate, like the full moon reflected down a well. Without hesitation nor too long a look at the Predicanten, whose shrill noise chitters against itself in my ears, Makemin wrecks the wind-riffled surface of the pond with his boot, and we wade through to the ramped opening of the gate.
Its black arc hoods us. We are in the even darkness of the gate, in cool, dry, iron-smelling air. Sharp squeals and the sound of our feet and wheels rustling the water, hum and blend dully in the tunnel. The city’s ruins draw near, in the egg-shaped opening ahead.
There’s a small open space on the other side, gigantic wreckage all around it hampering our view of the rest of the city. Blankets of rusted mesh and elaborated metal beams with branches, mats of rusted wire, broken blue mortar, blue enamel shells like conches hundreds of feet high, crumbled metal plates beneath our feet. The shrieks of the Predicanten have died away; apart from the sounds we make ourselves, there is only the distributed creaking of a vast ruination to listen to.
There are ways through the ruins: I know which one. What we see is impossible, no sun’s light
could
show it, but we see it through the dead white light of the fog that wreathes the spires and high ramparts. To the left, what looks like a metal honeycomb, all the steel frame’s angles are wrenched and the building is leaning over and twisted on its foundation, with a long colorless cracked mantle of glass sweeping down one side like a cape, all flowed melted from the windows and made this mineral waterfall, and charred objects are frozen inside. On the right and all around are vast shapeless hives of coagulated rust. Rust like cinnamon powders the ground, which holds many white puddles. Silichieh points to slabs of the white substance the white abutment was made from, still impeccably white, studded with blackened wens of metal looking like warts, old black excrement on new-fallen snow. Shelves of blue cement between us and the foundation of the unbuilt wall, some stacked up with a few long branches of metal, like pillars or bridge pilings, that seem to have melted and slumped against the stacks, forming ribs or veins there.
As we walk, guns out, looking carefully this way and that, Thrushchurl nudges me and points to the buildings, where intermittent gestures are happening here and there, parts of figures and parts of motions, like raising a glass, or handing someone a letter, flash there dimly and almost without light. There is nothing magical about them, they are banal shapes thrown around by the wind; I can see the wind has abstract faces in it, black eyes and black mouth in a round piece of wind going by.
Lights flit in the buildings ... a human skull protruding from a mound of rust as big as a house ...
Some blackbird droppings, too. Charred remains of stamped-out campfires, and a few tin cans, still wet inside.
Thrushchurl is turning round and round, a weird, foolish sort of smile on his face. He stops, staring at something—rushes toward it. He so loves anything eerie, and he never seems to get frightened. Dying doesn’t scare him. He’s like an animal that way, but I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t think about it. His way of understanding doesn’t involve fear.
We follow him, Makemin snapping at us to come back, but we haven’t far to go. Thrushchurl has ascended a broad flight of shallow steps to a bare semicircular terrace of that white material, fronting a huge white building whose roof has collapsed and whose sides bulge and spill out. There is a crushed and blocked doorway there, but he is approaching the exposed wall beside it, which runs on for many feet, covered with the shadows of people who aren’t there to cast them. Black streaks run from a spot by my two feet to climb the wall, join into a torso of a man with arms at his sides, facing, I think, toward the wall.
Thrushchurl caresses the shadows without touching them, a lingering sigh welling from his chest. Mutely imploring figures, knees buckling, arms flung up before the face, another kneeling hands outstretched in warding off. At one end, a figure caught turning to look. We look at them. Black and white. Snow spins around me so thick I can’t see the horizon, the trees, I can’t see what past I’m in, although I’ve remembered this moment so many times since out of black and white I swam together and became a “character”—
—now see the flash that scalds the eye, through the glare see the shining city’s beautiful towers minarets domes and columns wilt sag and jet fire as the whole city seems to deflate, crazily lie down on its side on a bed of screams—I see people burning to cinders, and dying in the ruin of the buildings. I hear silence. The light destroys the air. Instantly the light turns to darkness, blindness, a sky without sun, moon, stars, clouds, as black and dead as charred wood. The land glows with transparent white flames that ooze along the ground, and everything they touch turns over and curls up, changes from one color to another to another, shrinks and then billows out flat.
Far off down the street I see someone, a woman, going to and fro, crossing and recrossing the busy street, approaching everyone, briefly stepping into every business on the busy street, avidly searching for someone. Her clothes are entirely unfamiliar to me. This concerns me, but I haven’t got time to think about it. My time is not my own. Inside my head are many many long lists of things I have to do right away. I check my watch. I have to collect my rations before the office closes.
The train is idling on the platform; I sit across from the open door as we wait for the connecting train to arrive. I watch the passengers criss-cross the platform between the two trains.
The streets aren’t too bad, people move swiftly in even files on the proper side of the pavement, slip across the street hastily when they think they’re safe—not many dare. I want to save time by crossing the walled square diagonally but the prisoners are doing exercises there in the center and I have to go along the edges. The supervisor is a willowy older woman with a shaved head, who is surrounded by a few officers and a group of soldiers.
On her orders, a number of prisoners in white rags are compelled to lie on their stomachs. The soldiers stand over them and shoot them, through them into the ground; the noise is like a row of stitches popping. Now she directs another group of prisoners to take the bodies and pile them into a hopper set into a wall.
Out of my way a little more to avoid proximity of a loud homeless man, who harangues the crowd from this street corner. He is a local fixture, tolerated by the authorities because he exhorts passersby to remember the indignities and injustices perpetrated against us by our jealous enemies. His eyes rustle icily over me as I go by.
What I didn’t get at the office I couldn’t get, not anywhere. What I see is all a white that makes me feel a wave of illness, and I avoid the thought. A young man emerges from a knot of people drinking from steaming mugs, going round to greet another warmly, and a wearily smiling dog trails after him.
Gradually the crowd around me is stirring ... the bull-like bellow of the claxons, a pulsing, dead white howl.
Chaos, shouts and running; prisoners have escaped, armed themselves. I make my way to the side but the alleys are filling too—I shove through a doorway and race through empty halls, I come out in a darkened shop with cold steel hoppers, remnants of ice, odor of fish. Out the door—keep moving—I pass a mob that have set on a couple of prisoners—I can smell their blood. People are running by with hands that drip red. I want to join them, but the prisoners are dead. Police rush to the windows of their towers actually colliding with the ledges in their haste, their eyes staring they move frantically like electrocuted men yacking and fumbling with their rifles, so frenzied they can barely work them, fire them randomly in the direction of the fleeing prisoners, twitching hands jerk at the controls they fire faster than they can aim—the gun goes off before they’ve even got the site to their eyes—
Shots buzz past me and I throw myself onto the ground, collide with a woman who claws at my arm and back. The street is being cleared from the far end forward, everyone is rushing for doorways and side streets—I want to get low but I’d be trampled. I can only just get behind a bin by the lamppost—the police have run right into a group of prisoners with guns flaring on all sides—blasting, moving barrel first they move start stop shoot—the bullets go over me in both directions every instant—police prisoners and bystanders drop clawing their wounds or flop over like sacks of flour—the air is all made of gunshots and thuds of body hits cries howls of rage agony—no one is taking cover, no one is backing off—
I shake with seizure hysterics panic, I’m moving on all my limbs through bullets dying blood and pain they don’t stop they run in among each other killing firing their rifles not a foot away from each other shooting as they are shot all eyes white, white, white.
I crawl away from the shots, booms that seem to drop like walls from the buildings—if only
I
could find a gun—how can I join in?
The lobby walls were all glass and broken out, no cover for me, I run deeper and deeper into the building followed by breaking glass, metal walls are pocked with bullet holes—
Metal walls are buckled over with rust ... a tree grows here in the outer wall.
I am looking up at a boll of roots that coil down corkscrewing in and out of the metal and down into the floor, form basins of rainwater.
Everything is ruined—smashed, bizarrely old.
I am bizarrely old. Long dead. Low still lives, in the ruins of the city, inside a vast ruined building by myself.
I look down to see my face undulating in the puddle at my feet, step out of the water with an exclamation. The sound rings down the length of a long, wide gallery, its ceiling perforated by roots and trunks, hanging moss of rust, icicles of melted glass, clumps of black wire hang down like scalps. Through gaps in the wall I see high misty air and building tops, I’m up high. The floor is wavy, rolling like hills seen from high mountain tops.
There is a sort of apse protruding from the gallery. It opens itself not far from where I stand.