Authors: Alice Borchardt
Then the vision passed, and the bird dropped lower and lower as we entered a basin where the biggest waterfall I have ever seen created a giant lake, the water so clear that from where the bird flew, I could look down and see into the lake bottom. An awesome thing of beauty, it seemed an underwater forest and meadow. Low grass filled the center, thick as moss over dark splatters of rock. Fish of all sizes grazed over the meadow. Around it the long ribbon tendrils of some taller plants were wild splatters of bright green and transparent to the sun’s rays as they flickered and danced gracefully in the current.
Past them and dominating the lake and the floodplain beyond were the trees. Never before or since have I seen anything like them. Each tree was very tall, and their tops extended above the walls of the basin, towering hundreds of feet into the air. They seemed to grow as well in water as they did on dry land. The roots extended out from the base of the trunk, forming a shield. The trunk grew up from the center of the shield very high into the air. For such giant trees, the leaves were oddly tiny and formed clusters of plumes that feathered red-barked, smooth branches. The tree trunks were a smooth jade-green, becoming almost green-black as they broadened and entered the shield at the base.
The trees allowed nothing else to grow where they grew. The base shield of each one butted up against the base shield of another, and they formed a perfect carpet of hexagonal, living tiles that blanketed the earth in the shallows around the lake and extended out into the defiles of the floodplain where the lake emptied into a jumble of rocky, jungle-clad badlands.
Then I saw the city. Like the gazing bird, I saw it with one eye while the other looked into wilderness. It leaped up, a cluster of white and transparent towers held together by a matrix of those same, translucent green and red flowing vines.
And I understood something I had never known before, and never was clearly able to remember again. The universe unfolds into life. It arises from the stars, and flaring love-drenched emptiness into life, life unfolds into thought and will. A great experiment, but one that could have many outcomes, some sublime, some so destructive the mind turns from them.
But this glowing, glittering white city was sublime, as were the trees surrounding it and the flowers; those translucent ruby-petaled bursts of brightness sustained the city with the energy they accepted from the love of the ever-giving sun.
The bird circled the city’s towers, rising, riding the reflected heat energy from the flowers and their spires, higher and higher. As it did, I looked into two worlds, because the city inhabited both. One world was the Summer Country, green, wet, fair, filled with seas, meadows, gardens, and forests. The other—a world barren in many places, without oceans dependent on the cruel mountain peaks to pull water from the air, freeze it, then send it driving down to endow the fruitful valleys below.
I don’t know what the builders of the city called it. But for the Dread King, they were all long gone. But ever after, I always called it the City of Two Worlds.
About then the bird dumped me on a cold platform, a jutting balcony near the top of the tallest building in the city. Three-point landing, nose, knees, and the palms of my hands. I crouched, sick, dizzy, and in pain, with no protection from the icy wind, simply glad to be alive and on reasonably flat ground again. I wondered if I would be left here and if so, how would I survive the night?
One of the problems, Arthur thought, was that he didn’t know what he was walking into. Could this Dread King Bade be defeated? From the accounts given by some of the escaped slaves, he was awesomely powerful. No one had ever even seen a dent made in his control over what they called his golden towers. Escape was possible. Many had escaped. Arthur had been accepted as king by the heads of the families of the escapees. A few held out, but even they were friendly to him. It was just that they were so afraid of the power that ruled the gardens and the golden towers.
Slave revolts had ended in death for all the participants. So in their view, resistance was out of the question. Yet if he went forward, he was committed to a head-to-head confrontation with the king.
He was moving now through flatter but more broken country. The trail—probably a game trail that ran along the river’s rugged course—continued, but if he left the trail, the countryside around it was such a jumble of broken rock and thick brush that he doubted if he could have made more than two or three miles a day. This was landslide country.
The valley the river ran through was strewn with the remnants of rockfalls from the dark and endless forest from which he had come, and it was strewn between the massive boulders that composed the surface, with the corpses of the massive trees that formed the heart of its threatening immensity. Most were shattered, broken, and dead, trunks splintered, branches ripped away by their long fall. But sometimes the roots still clutched boulders and massive stone blocks.
The other side of the river was no better; worse, in fact, since there the ground sloped gently up for about four or five miles, then abruptly, sheer, massive, and very dark granite cliffs rose, seeming almost to crowd the sky. Fragments, some of them much larger than any house or church he had ever seen, lay piled on top of one another on those gentle slopes, and in places, rock slides had temporarily dammed the river and changed its course.
Why so many, he wondered. He found out that evening.
It was a nuisance trying to feed himself as he traveled, but there was no help for it. So he stopped early to set lines in a likely looking pool where the river widened, and also put out snares for rabbits and other small game. The broken ground was a paradise for rodents.
He’d just finished with the fishing lures when he was overtaken by what he thought was a sudden attack of dizziness. The whole world seemed to quiver around him. He dropped to one knee. A flock of finches feeding nearby burst into the air and several large water birds took wing, screeching.
Then the tremor came again, this time clearly not the result of anything he was experiencing. The earth shifted under his knee and he fell forward, catching himself on his hand and feeling the earth trembling under his fingers.
The crack was as loud as the crack of doom.
He leaped to his feet and turned in the direction of the sound. He reflected later, that was probably not the smartest thing to do during an earthquake, but battle training won out over caution. He saw, high up on the sheer cliffs above the river, a gigantic granite dagger break off and fall with what looked like—but couldn’t have been—great deliberation into the churned-up mass of shattered rock below.
Then again he dropped flat, to escape fragments of the rockfall that exploded out from the center of the concussion below. He noted with some annoyance that when he felt brave enough to rise to his feet, his legs were shaking.
“That,” he whispered to himself with some awe, “explains the condition of the valley.”
That evening he took five rabbits and three fish. He and Bax both ate well. A sense of warmth and comfortable repletion were new and refreshing things for him. So he sat quietly by the fire, dozing and puzzling over how to produce an attack plan against this King Bade. He had no allies that he knew of. The word of a bird . . . well, perhaps he was half-mad. Certainly his father had been sane enough, but some of the rest of the family walked with shadows most of their adult lives and no one ever knew if the specters that gathered round them were actually there or not. After all, a bird? What did a bird know?
He now had a wooden spear and a bow; in addition, a sufficient supply of sinew to string the bow. Arrows would take more doing.
His eyes drifted shut, and she appeared in his mind. He remembered her fragrance. She had her own. It had taken him a few minutes in her presence before he realized she wasn’t wearing any of the scents his mother or her women wore. That fragrance belonged only to her. It was flowerlike, but very gentle, like something deep but very distant, carried along by a midnight breeze. A thing you never quite remembered, but then again, never quite forgot.
A fish jumped in the river, and he opened his eyes and realized he’d been dozing while he was sitting up. Without thinking about it, he picked up a small piece of the yew and tossed it into the heart of the coals. The green wood sent up a dismayingly large billow of smoke, and from the thick of the smoke, a face looked out at him.
But it was not hers. His instant fear jerked him fully awake. This was a thing out of a nightmare. The eyes were huge. Set in dominoes of black skin, they had big orange irises and small, deep-black pupils. He recognized it as the male version of the great queen who had given him the tower.
A very fine, dense growth of feathers covered the face. It was white, as the queen’s had been, but with a deep red that began in a cluster of red feathers at the chin and continued up the face. The eyes looked out at him from the red V. Then the feathers continued up and up to a very high scarlet crest on the top of the head. A crest that, unlike the one that female wore, could not be entirely composed of feathers.
The rest of the face was flat, the nostrils almost nonexistent but for the steady movement of the feathers that covered them as the thing breathed. The mouth was a slit—correction, a fanged slit—the fanged teeth projecting both up and down. The face had no expression he could read, but hate and disgust seemed to emanate from it like some foul vapor.
“Vermin! I cannot think why I did not exterminate your scavenger breed when you wandered no smarter than some vicious monkey across those African plains! I set the cats on you to thin your numbers. But breed you can and breed you will . . . like rats, like green snakes. Vermin. You were never more than a superior sort of vermin. I should have known that when you turned the tables on the big cats and perfected your thieving ways by taking their kills.”
“She was one greater than myself,” Arthur said. “But she did not demean herself by insulting me. Indeed, she treated me with every courtesy.”
Arthur flinched as another blast of hatred and grief washed over him.
“Thanks to a thing like you, she is gone . . . gone forever. And I am truly alone.”
Alone
was a wail of sorrow.
“She wanted her freedom,” Arthur said. “Even if it were only freedom to sleep.”
“Why do I bandy words with such as you?”
“I think it’s thoughts you bandy,” Arthur said. “I hear no words.”
“Then hear this!”
The thing’s small nostrils distended, then closed. The whistling shriek was high, thin, and at the edge of human hearing. Arthur fell to his knees. It felt as though nails were being driven into each ear as the mad cry lifted itself into sheer pain. Everything around Arthur—grass, brush, small trees, even his clothing—burst into flame.
The river!
was the only coherent thought Arthur had, and he executed a low, flat dive into its icy water.
Whatever brought me to this city left me to spend an icy night on the small balcony. God, it was cold! It appeared there was no window or entrance to the soaring tower. I lay near the top, my back to one alabaster wall, looking out over the valley. I was in pain; my hands, knees, and elbows were skinned. It hurt to breathe. I think the bird’s beak broke at least one, or possibly two, of my ribs.
“Can’t you help me?” I asked my companion.
“I’m trying. I’m trying. But what are you up against?”
“The cold!” My teeth were chattering.
“Then go inside.”
“How?” I demanded.
“That panel. See it?” Yes, indeed there was a recessed panel on the back wall of the balcony. “Push one side.”
“Which one?”
“Either!”
I got to my knees, cramping from the chill, and pushed the right side. The panel pivoted at the center. Inside was a stone, windowless room. I stuck my head through and saw the room was empty, bare from wall to wall, made of what looked like fitted stone blocks. Windowless, doorless, and freezing cold.
“God, it’s like a tomb,” I said.
“Yes. Well,” my companion snapped at me, “at least it’s out of the wind.”
“Suppose once I get in, I can’t get out?”
“Wait!”
I had been on the balcony all afternoon while the air grew progressively colder and colder. I had explored the balcony from end to end looking for a place to climb down. There was none. The roses that grew in the hollow top rail of the balustrade had occupied me for a time. They were vining roses with long tendrils that curled around the railing and its supports. They bloomed profusely, but held no rose hips, seeds, or roots. They seemed to grow from the stones of the tower itself. Flowers and leaves were translucent to the light and blazed in the sun, green and scarlet.
“Don’t touch them!” my companion told me, or rather, warned me loudly. “I don’t know what they are, but whatever they are, they’re powerful.”
And indeed, whenever I drew near them, the armor leaped out all over my body.
For a time, I stood in the late afternoon sun to one side of the recessed panel and studied the tower. It reminded me of a bundle of rods of differing lengths. Some of the rods were covered with latticework, all bearing those same, glowing roses. Others, like this one, had multiple balconies. They were staggered and no balcony was directly over any other, but all had railings covered with the selfsame roses.
As the afternoon wore on, the wind grew colder and colder until by the time I confessed my fear that I would not last the night outdoors, the sun was a shimmering orange ball on the horizon.
“Well?” I asked.
“I can find no locks or bars,” my companion reported back to me.
“Did you check the center post?” I asked.
My companion gave an irritated little snort. “I checked that first. No. And as I said, at least it’s out of the wind. We’re being watched, but I don’t think the sentient watching us knows I’m here. So don’t hold any loud conversations with me or get into any arguments. And you needn’t roll your eyes like that. There’s nobody nearby to comment on your forbearance.”