Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes Read online

  I laid her gently down and stooped to pick it up. It was a black pendant, carved in the shape of a ball, with curious markings of pale gold and pearl too small to read, but arranged so that the two hemispheres were exactly identical. It hung from a golden chain. A long-ago day came to my mind, and I saw her telling me with a sad smile that it had been my father’s. I felt sure she had intended for me to find it there, and slipped it into my pouch.

  Then I took her up again. Her body was light, and it didn’t take long to pick my way into the hallows beneath the Pillar and leave her in her place. My father’s pendant was warm in my pouch.

  That evening I made a holocaust. There were no animals to slaughter, so I used dried provender instead. I fired the offering on the altar before the Palace. The sun was sinking into the west, pink, apocalyptic, a ball of electric glare without heat. I crouched in the sand, watching the black smoke raise its head high in the air.

  A ramp fell out of the globe, and a smoking thurible went up and down it three times, passing between the divided portions. I saw a succession of images. A river that flowed with embalmed bodies. A vacant temple buried by buildings. An engine that sailed between the stars. A sleeping goddess ringed by flame. A goblin king in a midnight moss-jungle. A tower that reached to the sky. A city wrapped in darkness. A glimmering tree that spread its boughs over a nighted land.

  Then I came to myself, and saw only the dying embers of my offering, and the first stars peering out of the ashy sky.

  * * * * *

  I left the remains of the rest of the people where they were—the domes would be their sepulchers—and took up my old place in my godmother’s house. Her bones I left where they were, too.

  I awoke at midnight that first night, weak and delirious. I’d set my trophy on the floor near the door, and it was leering at me. “What is it?” I asked.

  What are you going to do? You’re Phylarch of Nothing now.

  “I’ll wait,” I replied.

  Wait? Wait for what? New subjects?

  “The seraphim can raise up a new Arras from the stones of the earth.”

  Is that what you think? You think they’ll restore Arras just for you?

  “The world is the garden of Arras.”

  If the world is a garden, why did the seraphim blight its wells? If Arras is so much in their minds, why did they smite its members?

  “They must have trespassed while I was gone,” I mused.

  Ah, but perhaps it’s you who trespassed. Have you thought of that? Maybe it’s you who died, and they all wonder what’s become of you.

  I had no answer for this, and soon drifted off to sleep again.

  * * * * *

  The next morning I went out, hopeful for the day’s doings. But I soon found that I had little to do. What end was there for me beyond my own life? So I became restless as the sun rose high in the sky, having nothing to set my hand to.

  I went into the Palace and searched every corner of it. My uncle’s body was nowhere to be found. But I came upon the Garnet Crown in the royal apartment, and laid it upon my brow, and slung the Serpent Robe about my shoulders. I erected several dried bodies in the Phylarch’s Court and looked over them from the throne.

  After a few minutes I climbed down and put the things away. I went through the Court of Women to my mother’s room. Her wardrobe stood in the corner. It was made from the wood of a tree that had vanished from the earth ages ago. I opened it. All her clothes were there, save what I had buried her in. I ran my hand over them. They still held some of her life.

  I put on a gown of gold sea-silk, an heirloom of the House. It smelled like her, and I hugged it close. I laid her gold necklace about my throat and set the Jade Tiara on my head. There was a hematite mirror in her apartment. I caught my eye in it, and hastily disrobed and went out, trying to blank my mind. As I stepped into the sunshine I started at my own shadow. It seemed a demon there waiting for me.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. I scanned the dancing distance and descried a solitary figure against the sky. So I sat on a rock and waited. The sun slid down toward the west as the figure drew near. It was Gyges, my uncle.

  Madness lurked in his eyes. He had wandered far from the songlines, listening to false voices. The poison from the wells had caused the flesh of his gums to shrink back from his teeth. He was like a skin-wrapped skeleton, and his face was a living skull.

  “Do you disturb the land of the dead?” he demanded.

  “Is this the land of the dead, then?”

  “So it would seem. All are dead in it save you and me.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “I came back, and it was like this. The wells are foul.”

  “A storm swept in from the north soon after you left. For three days after it passed the wells ran high. And then they flowed with poison. The people drank and died.”

  “And you fled?”

  Gyges’ eyes glinted but he smiled his death’s-head smile. “How have you spent your time here, Nephew?”

  “I laid my mother to rest. Nothing else.”

  “So! You haven’t climbed the Pillar yet? It’s your right, you know. Your Walking is over and done. You are Phylarch now.” A look of cunning stole into his face. “But perhaps you don’t know how to break open the seals. Only I know their secret, as shown me by Astyges my brother.”

  “You never broke them, Uncle?”

  “Your mother thought it was the starglass that tainted your father.”

  I weighed this in my mind. “Be that as it may, we’ll go.”

  “Today? Now?”

  “Are you fit, Uncle?”

  “For this I am fit,” said Gyges. “Let’s go.”

  We gathered some supplies into a scrip and set out for the Pillar. I led the way. In and out of weathered folds we mounted the dreadful stair, past deep-carved letters too large to read, past wind caves where crabs hung in clusters from the ceiling. Evening draped itself across the flats.

  At a place where a crevice opened beside the path, I felt lightened of my sword. I turned. Gyges held Deinothax in his hands. Madness blazed in his bulging eyes. “The secret is mine, youngling. There are only two of us in the world now. With you gone I shall do as I please. It’s I who was meant to be Phylarch of Arras, steerer of the world’s fate. So your father learned, to his undoing.”

  “Would you murder me, Uncle? The seraphim see all that you do.”

  “Seraphim, ha! I deal justice, not murder. You lust after the secret of the chamber. I know it was your ambition to put me out of the way as soon as I had served my purpose. But now the sword is in the other hand.”

  “Give it to me, Uncle. If there must be bad blood between us, let’s separate. I’ll go out into the desert and find a place where the springs are still sweet. You go up to the house and see what there is to see.”

  “And let you fall on me unawares when I come back down? Ha! I know your mind better than you do yourself.”

  The sword was glowing brightly now. Gyges looked down. His hands were smoking. “Hot!” he shrieked. His terrified eyes met mine, but there was no recognition in them. I lunged for the blade. He drew back. Then everything went dark.

  * * * * *

  I awoke in the crevice where we’d been talking. Night had fallen and the air was cold. My head ached. I felt it gingerly, afraid my skull had been laid open. My hair was matted with dried blood, but the sword had dealt me only a glancing blow. I was thirsty. I felt around for the scrip, but Gyges had taken it. The sword I found on the ledge.

  There was nothing to do but wait until it was light. I grew thirstier from moment to moment. I discovered a flask of mescat in the pouch that hung from my harness. It helped a little.

  When silver lucidity crept over the plain I began to go up again, moving warily, afraid Gyges would leap out from behind a turning and throw me off. The sun was high in the sky when I gained the summit. I looked all around. Gyges was nowhere to be seen.

  The sun-bleached crown was wrinkled and scored like
a behemoth’s hide. A ring of standing stones surrounded the domed observatory at the highest point. The seals, I saw, were broken, the door ajar. I cautiously pushed my way inside.

  Gyges swung from the ceiling. He had launched himself into space. His face was livid and his hands were black where the sword had scorched them. The rope creaked gently with his swinging. The starglass sat on a table below him. Beside it was a clay tablet.

  I took it up and began to read. “The word of Brandobrabdas, Phylarch, Custodian of Sephaura,” it said. “Behold, the curtain is torn. On the seventeenth day of the third moon of the nine hundredth Year of the Crab, I looked into the starglass and saw a thing. We are not alone.” Not alone. The tablet went on to explain how to use the instrument and where to look. My mind reeled. Not alone!

  I cut my uncle down and dragged the body outside. The desolation sank in slowly. I nursed the mescat while I waited for nightfall. The shadows lengthened. I was sick to my stomach and my eyes felt gritty. At some point I dozed off. It was dark when I woke up.

  I positioned the table, opened the shutter, and looked through the glass eye. High over the western horizon was a tiny ellipse of light, with glowing corpuscles moving between it and the earth’s rim. “The palace of some celestial emperor,” I whispered, repeating the words of the tablet, “or an abode of blessed spirits, tethered to the sun’s setting.”

  My mind conjured up visions of vast cities teeming with men who had no thought of the dead realm of Arras swept eternally by the Pillar’s black shadow. The irruption into the settled scheme of things was too much to take in at first. I went out and sat on a sun-warmed rock.

  The desert floor fell away in every direction. I was pinned to a ball rolled by abstract scarabs. The single-eyed spirits of flame pressed down on me from their black thrones. Low down in the east, Saant burned like a flickering red candle.

  Later I went in and looked again. The stars had wheeled, but the oval was there. I watched it for a long time. I didn’t know what it was, empyrean palace or translunary garden. But I swore to myself that I would ascend its ladder, storm its gates, and wrest from it the medicine of immortality. Man’s lot was death, they said, but Sheol would never have me, nor its gates stand against Sephaura.

  I kept thinking of the distance. The great dragonfly came to my mind, and the driver that lay in my workyard, and my resins.

  I returned to my dome in the morning. Three days later I had my odonatopter.

  I went soaring over the desert, suspended from a flexing skeleton, driving the blurred wings with my arms. The leap from the Pillar’s crown had proved it.

  4 Soaring

  The creeping death lay in a band that stretched from east to west across the constellation of wells, seeping slowly beneath the desert. But the springs to southward were still like emeralds strewn over the flats. I followed them to keep my water replenished.

  It brought terror to my heart to soar as I did, higher than any living creature I kenned. A snapped ferule, a stopped cog would mean my swift descent and death. But more than this I exalted to see the earth spread like a map below me, to feel the freedom of the air. It was an exultation shot through with fear, for high spirits go before a fall. Though I longed to spiral up toward the sun itself, I knew that this would be to leave the path of wisdom, and held to my level course.

  I regained the canyon two days after setting out, upstream from where I’d left it the first time. It was broad and deep, with red-black walls and flat-topped fins. The fossil city of Urgit climbed up terraces on either side. The ribbed stone riverbed held pools of clear water. There had been no wells that morning, so I spiraled down to where it trickled from trough to trough before disappearing beneath a bed of shoals to the south, and there filled my skins.

  Now I needed a place to launch my flier. A big dome with a cupola beyond the eastern bank looked to afford an easy ascent. I took the machine apart and carried it up the ruined bridge and through the gate.

  A great plaza with a dry fountain lay just inside, surrounded by buildings like giant stone blocks. Streets ran away from it in every direction. I set my craft down on the pavement and went to explore the widest way.

  It was a dark and winding defile of carved stone, with shadow-hung doorways opening on either side like square caves, and paintings of hoplites in formation and cataphracts on clawed schyrothim. The acrid odor of maugreth dens tainted the air.

  The street emerged upon a terrace at the base of the cliffs, where a fissure in the side of the canyon was fronted with a pillared portico. I went up the steps and entered the old darkness.

  The nave within was a huge crack with rough natural walls that met overhead in a series of pointed arches. The floor had been filled in and leveled. A dais with a stone altar occupied the inner end, beyond which a wall reached from one side of the crevice to the other. High in the partition were images of the sun and the moon, golden and white. A hole gaped between them like a giant, empty niche, giving upon the eternal night of inner earth.

  There was a flight of steps running down to a crypt beneath the altar. An enthroned skeleton-king guarded the vestibule to the city of the dead that lay beyond. His gold-coin eyes glittered in the dark. I saw that and left the temple.

  It didn’t take long to make my way up to the cupola of the dome and reassemble my flyer. Soon I was in the air again.

  * * * * *

  The desert went on as before, except that the wells had been left behind for good. There were no songlines in the air, nor any that I could discern below. But I told myself that this was no time for songlines.

  After two days I neared a mountain-wall running from north to south before me. Another day carried me to the foothills. Wrinkled knolls of loose dirty white and pale blue-green earth sloped up to the rampart. The sharp peaks shivered in the air of the baking hilltops. Their knees wore an earthy panoply of white, orange, pale yellow, salmon, black, and gray-green, with rounded roots all scored by deep folds swelling out like heaps of huge, huddled behemothim.

  I alit high in the crumbling land. It was evening. The mountains threw a blue-black cloak across the landscape, beyond which the sun-brilliant vermilion flats stretched beneath a sky of verdigris. The Pillar was a tiny irregularity on the smooth rim of the silent earth.

  * * * * *

  It took days to get through the range. But I was in less of a hurry now, for there were running streams in the mountains.

  Late one afternoon I came over a barren pass into a valley that sloped down to the west. The basin held a shallow lake, a mirror framed with green rushes. The blue horizon was still mostly hidden, but there were clouds in the distance.

  I made camp that night on a saddle that swept up to a last sentinel of the range. The peak blocked the view of the land of the sun’s setting. That was how I wanted it. I didn’t know what I would see beyond it; I didn’t want to sleep knowing what was there.

  During the night I dreamed a dream. I was walking over the plain of Arras, but it was green, carpeted with soft mosses and dotted with purple pernath groves. The Pillar, no longer bleached and pitted, was like a prism of black obsidian with a snow-dusted crown. The dome of the sky was a deep azure like velvet and sprinkled with stars. A song without words danced around my ears. It was a strain I often hear in my dreams, always with a vision of earth more big with meaning and joy than our own.

  Suddenly an aspiration took hold of me. I leaped into the air, laid hold of heaven, and pulled myself through, thrusting the roof tiles aside and emerging into a palace of white light. My grandfather, Brandobrabdas, was there. We kissed one another, laughing.

  And then I awoke. The blue that precedes dawn lay over the earth. I sat up and blinked, trying to treasure the dream. It flowed from my mind, though, leaving only the memory of a feeling, until something recalled it many weeks later.

  Soon I took to the air again, following a valley that curved around the mountain’s base. It joined a rift that ran parallel to the range from north to south. Beyond that was a l
ower rampart wreathed in damp clouds. Waterfalls fell down it like veils of white gauze. The floor of the canyon was filled with a dusky forest of moss-trees like giant vegetables with pale, herbaceous trunks.

  I followed the rift northward. A great gorge opened on my left, and I wheeled into it to wind my way through the lower range. As I came over the saddle of the pass I saw a sight that almost killed me, for my heart rose into my mouth and I forgot to keep driving my wings. I recovered, banked to the right, and mounted up to a high half-dome. There I alit, leaped to the cliff’s brink, and crouched like a carved grotesque, looking over the lowlands.

  Beyond a gulf of shadow, beneath a shroud of smog, lit infernally from below like a nightmare city of hell, there stretched a stupendous jungle of glittering towers, with streets that teemed like glowing rivers of light, curving out of sight along canyons of stone and steel and glass.

  It was a crushing vision. I turned to the east like someone looking away from a bonfire to rest a heat-strained visage. There, low down between two rough mountain-teeth, was the crescent moon, thin as a nail-paring, with horns turned up to the pale, starry vault. Centered just above it was Mirya, the harbinger of general illumination, a pendent jewel resplendent with the rays of the approaching sun.

  The portent was swallowed up by the growing light. I sat down on the cliff edge and set my face to the west. The lowlands became a counterpane of purple-green shadow crisscrossed by gleaming silver. The towers above them flushed, first rose, then orange, and then became a uniform yellowed white. Their pinnacles were wreathed in dingy vapors that spread out like a blanket between two layers of air. The breeze that blew from the marshes was thick with rot.