Chapter 31
The first thing to see was darkness. Darkness coloured the Clay like a dye. It melted forms and re-cast them with a deadly animation. It lay within and without; was both alive and yet the deadest thing of all. It breathed, and yet it stifled.
For many it was all they knew. All they would ever know.
The settlement was on the crest of a low hill, a sprawl of ugly, jagged shapes, littering the steep slope. Old, crumbling ruins squatted amongst the debris, black against black, their very shapes eroded by the darkness. The walls of houses stood no taller than a man’s height, the brickwork soft, moist to the touch. There were no roofs, no ceilings, but none were needed here. No rain fell in the darkness of the Clay.
The darkness seemed intense and absolute. It was a cloth, smothering the vast, primaeval landscape. Yet there was light of a kind.
Above the shadowed plain the ceiling ran to all horizons, perched on huge columns of silver that glowed softly, faintly, like something living. Dim studs of light criss-crossed the artificial sky; neutered, ordered stars, following the tracks of broad conduits and cables, for the ceiling was a floor, and overhead was the vastness of the City; another world, sealed off from the foetid darkness underneath.
The Clay. It was a place inimical to life. And yet life thrived there in the dark; hideous, malformed shapes spawning in obscene profusion. The dark plain crawled with vulgar life.
Kim woke from a bad dream, a tight band of fear about his chest. Instinct made him freeze, then turn slowly, stealthily, towards the sound, lifting the oilcloth he lay under. He had the scent at once – the thing that had warned him on waking. Strangers… Strangers at the heart of the camp.
Something was wrong. Badly wrong.
He moved to the lip of the brickwork he had been lying behind and peered over the top. What he saw made him bristle with fear. Two of his tribe lay on the ground nearby, their skulls smashed open, the brains taken. Further away, three men – strangers, intruders – crouched over another body. They were carving flesh from arm and thigh and softly laughing as they ate. Kim’s mouth watered, but the fear he felt was far stronger.
One of the strangers turned and looked directly at the place where Kim was hiding. He lidded his eyes and kept perfectly still, knowing that unless he moved the man would not see him. So it proved. The man made a cursory inspection of the settlement then returned to his food, his face twitching furtively as he gnawed at the raw meat.
For a moment Kim was blank, a shell of unthinking bone. Then something woke in him, filling the emptiness. He turned away, moving with a painful slowness, his muscles aching with the strain of it as he climbed the rotten sill, each moment begging that it wouldn’t crumble beneath his weight and betray him. But it held. Then, slowly, very slowly, he eased himself down the cold, broad steps. Down into the cellar of Baxi’s house.
In the far corner of the cellar he stopped, lifting rocks, scrabbling silently with his fingers in the intense darkness, looking for something. There! His fingers found the edge of the cloth and gently pulled the package up out of the soft dust. Kim shivered, knowing already what was inside. These were Baxi’s. His treasures. He was not meant to know of them. Baxi would have killed him had he known.
Kim tugged at the knot and freed it, then unwrapped the cloth, ignoring the fear he felt. Another Kim – another self – had taken over.
Straightening up, he knelt there, staring down sightlessly at the items hidden in the cloth, a feeling of strangeness rippling through him like a sickness. For a moment he closed his eyes against the sudden, unexpected giddiness, then felt it ebb from him and opened them again, feeling somehow different – somehow… changed.
Spreading the objects out with his fingers, he picked up each object in turn, feeling and smelling them, letting the newly woken part of him consider each thing before he set it down again.
A tarnished mirror, bigger than his hand, cracked from top to bottom. A narrow tube that contained a strange sweet-smelling liquid. Another tube, but this of wood, long as his lower arm, small holes punctuating its length. One end was open, hollow, the other tapered, split.
There was a small globe of glass, heavy and cold in his palm. Beside that was a glove, too large for his hand, its fingers heavily padded at the back, as if each joint had swollen up.
Two strings of polished beads lay tangled in a heap. Kim’s clever fingers untangled them and laid them out flat on the threadbare cloth.
There were other things, but those he set aside. His other self already saw. Saw as if the thing had already happened and he had been outside himself, looking on. The thought made him feel strange again; made his head swim, his body feel light, almost feverish. Then, once more, it passed.
Quickly, as if he had done all this before, he laid the things out around him, then placed the cloth over his head. Unsighted, he worked as if he saw himself from above, letting some other part of him manipulate his hands, his body, moving quickly, surely, until the thing was done. Then, ready, he turned towards the doorway and, by touch and scent, made his way out into the open.
He heard a gasp and then a shout, high-pitched and nervous. Three voices babbled and then fell silent. That silence was his signal. Lifting the globe high, he squeezed the button on the side of the tube.
Some gift, unguessed until that moment, made him see himself as they saw him. He seemed split, one self standing there before them, the cloth shrouding his face and neck, the cracked mirror tied in a loop before his face, the other stood beyond the men, looking back past them at the awesome, hideous figure who had appeared so suddenly, flames leaping from one hand, fire glinting in the centre of the other, giant fist, flickering in the hollow where his face should have been, while from the neck of the figure a long tongue of wood hung stiffly down.
The figure hopped and sang – a strange, high-pitched wail that seemed to come in broken, anguished breaths. And all the while the fire flickered in the centre of the empty face.
As one, the strangers screamed and ran.
Kim let the pipe fall from his lips. His finger released the button on the tube. It was done. He had seen them off. But from the darkness of the slopes came an intense, ape-like chattering. Others had seen the sudden, astonishing brightness.
He set down the glass sphere, unfastened the mirror and laid it down, then sat there on the broken ground, wondering at himself. It had worked. He had seen it in his head, and then… He laughed softly, strangely. And then he’d done it!
And it had worked.
He tore the cloth from his head and bared his sharp teeth in a feral grin of triumph. Tilting his head back, he let out a howl; a double whoop of delight at his own cleverness. Then, so suddenly that the sound still echoed from the ceiling high above, he shuddered, gripped by a paralysing fear, a black, still coldness flooding his limbs.
It was not triumph, merely reprieve. He was still here, trapped, smothered by the darkness. He coughed, then felt the warm corruption of the dark fill his lungs, like a liquid, choking him. He stood up, gulping at the foetid air as if for something sweeter, cleaner. But there was nothing – only this.
He whimpered, then, glancing furtively about him, began to wrap the treasures as he’d found them. Only when they were safely stored did he stop, his jaw aching from fear, his muscles trembling violently. Then, like some mad thing, he rushed about the settlement on all fours, growling furiously, partly to keep up his faded courage, partly to keep away the prowlers on the hillside below.
It was then that he found the knife. It had fallen on its edge, the handle jutting up at an angle where one of the strangers had dropped it. The handle was cold and smooth and did not give to Kim’s sharp teeth when he tested it. Not wood, or flint, but something far better than those. Something made. He drew it slowly from the tiny crevice in which it had lodged and marvelled at its length, its perfect shape. It was as long as his arm and its blade was so sharp it made his testicles contract in fear. A wartha, it was. From Above.
When they came back he was squatting on the sill of Baxi’s house, the long, two-edged blade laid carefully across his knees, the handle clenched firmly in his left hand.
Baxi looked about him, his body tensed, alarm twitching in his face. The stockade was down, the women gone. A few of the bodies lay where they had fallen. Some – those on the edges of the settlement – had been carried off. Behind Baxi his two lieutenants, Rotfoot and Ebor, made low, grunting noises of fear. He turned and silenced them, then faced Kim again.
‘Pandra vyth gwres?’ What is this?
Baxi glared at Kim, then saw the knife. His eyes widened, filled with fear and a greedy desire to own the weapon. There was a fierce, almost sexual urgency in his broad, squat face as he hopped from foot to foot, making small noises, as if in pain.
Kim knew he would kill to have the knife.
‘Lagasek!’ Baxi barked angrily, edging closer. ‘Pandra vyth gwres?’ His hands made small grasping movements.
Lagasek. It was the name they had given him. Starer.
Kim stood then raised the knife high over his head. There was a gasp from the other members of the hunting party as they saw the weapon, then an excited chattering. Kim saw Baxi crouch, his muscles tensing, as if he suspected treachery.
Slowly, careful not to alarm Baxi, Kim lowered the blade and placed it on the ground between them. Then he crouched, making himself smaller than he was, and made a gesture with his hands, the palms open, denoting a gift.
Baxi stared at him a moment longer, the hairs bristling on his arms and at the back of his neck. Then he too crouched, a broad, toothless grin settling on his face. The Chief was pleased. He reached out, taking Kim’s gift gingerly by the handle, respecting the obvious sharpness of the blade.
Baxi lifted the weapon and held it high above his head. He glanced briefly at Kim, smiling broadly, generous now, then turned, looking back at his hunters, thrusting the knife time and again into the air, tilting his head back with each thrust and baying at the ceiling high above.
All about him in the almost-dark the hunters bayed and yelled. And from the hillsides and the valley below other groups took up the unearthly sound and echoed it back.
Kim squatted at Ebor’s side in the inner circle of the hunters, chewing a long, pale-fleshed lugworm and listening to the grunts, the moist, slopping sounds the men made as they ate, realizing he had never really noticed them before. He glanced about him, his eyes moving swiftly from face to face around the circle, looking for some outward sign of the change that had come to him, but there was nothing. Rotfoot had lost his woman in the raid, but now he sat there, on the low stone wall, contentedly chewing part of her thighbone, stripping it bare with his sharply pointed teeth. Others too were gnawing at the meat that Baxi had provided. A small heap of it lay there in the centre of the circle, hacked into manageable pieces. Hands and feet were recognizable in the pile, but little else. The sharp knife had worked its magic of disguise. Besides, meat was meat, whatever the source.
Kim finished the worm. He leaned forward, looking about him timidly. Then, seeing the smiles on the hunters’ faces, he reached out and grasped a small hunk of the meat. A hand. He was tearing at the hard, tough flesh when Baxi settled by his side and placed an arm about his narrow shoulders. Reflex made him tense and look up into the Chief’s face, fear blazing in his eyes, but the warrior merely grunted and told him to come.
He followed Baxi through, aware that the circle of heads turned to follow him. Afraid, he clutched the severed hand to himself, finding a strange comfort in its touch. His fingers sought its rough, bony knuckles, recognized the chipped, spoonlike nails. It was Rotfoot’s woman’s hand.
At the entrance to Baxi’s house they stopped. The Chief turned, facing the boy, and pointed down to a small parcel of cloth that lay on the ground beside the sill.
Kim froze in fear, thinking he’d been discovered. He closed his eyes, petrified, expecting the knife’s sharp blow. Where would it strike? In his back? His side? Against his neck? He made a small sound of fear, then opened his eyes again and looked up at Baxi.
Baxi was looking strangely at him. Then he shrugged and pointed at the parcel again. Kim swallowed and set down the hand, then picked up the cloth bundle and, at Baxi’s encouragement, began to unwrap it.
He saw what it was at once and looked up, surprised, only to find Baxi smiling down at him. ‘Ro,’ said the Chief. ‘Ro.’ A gift.
The tarnished mirror was just as he remembered it, the crack running down the silvered glass from top to bottom. There was no need to feign surprise or delight. He grinned up at Baxi, giving a silent whoop of joy, almost forgetting that they thought him dumb. Baxi too seemed pleased. He reached out to touch Kim, caressing his upper arms and nodding his head vigorously. ‘Ro,’ he said again, then laughed manically. And from the watching circle came an answering roar of savage laughter.
Kim stared down at the mirror in his hand and saw his face reflected in the darkness. How strange and alien that face. Not like his hands. He knew his hands. But his face… He shivered, then smiled, taken by the strangeness of his reflected features. Lagasek, he thought, seeing how the stranger smiled back at him. Such eyes you have. Such big, wide staring eyes.
Kim was scavenging, looking for food in a place where nothing grew. The air all about him was rich with the stink of decay, the ground beneath him soft and damp and treacherous. Here, at the edge of the great dump, the dangers multiplied. There were many more like him, hidden shadows scattered across the vastness of the wasteland, wary of each other as they climbed the huge, rotting mounds, picking at the waste. All of them looking for something to eat or trade. Anything. Good or rotten.
The darkness was almost perfect, but the boy saw clearly. His wide, round eyes flicked from side to side, his small, ill-formed head moved quickly, furtively, like the head of some wild creature. When another came too close he would scuttle away on all fours, then rest there, at a distance, his teeth bared in challenge, growling at the back of his throat.
He moved in deeper, taking risks now, jumping between what looked like firm footholds. Some sank slowly beneath his weight, others held. He moved on quickly, not trusting anything too long, until he reached one certain resting place, the tower of an old church, jutting up above the vast mound of sewage from the City overhead.
Kim glanced up. The ceiling was far above him, its nearest supporting pillar only a stone’s throw from where he squatted. From his vantage point he looked about him, noting where others were, checking which paths were clear for his escape. Then he settled, reaching deep inside his ragged, dirty shirt to take out the object he had found. He sniffed at it and licked it, then grimaced. It smelled like old skins and had a stale, unappetizing taste. He turned it in his hands, looking for a way inside the blackened casing, then picked at the metal clasp until it opened.
He looked up sharply, suddenly very still, watchful, the hairs rising on the back of his thin neck, his rope-like muscles stretched as if to spring. Seeing nothing, he relaxed and looked back down at the open wallet in his hand.
Deftly he probed into each slender compartment, removing the contents and studying them closely before replacing them. There was nothing he recognized. Nothing edible. There were several long, thin cards of a flexible, shiny material. From one of them a faded face stared up at him, coming to vivid life when he pressed his thumb against it. Startled, he dropped the card, then steeled himself and retrieved it from the moss-covered slate on which it had fallen, deciding he would keep it.
There was only one other thing worth keeping. In a zippered compartment of the wallet was a small circle of shining metal on a chain. A kind of pendant. He lifted it gently, fascinated by its delicate perfection, his breath catching in his throat. It was beautiful. He held it up and touched the dangling circle with one finger, making it spin. It slowed, then twisted back, spinning backward and forward. Kim sat back on his haunches and laughed softly, delighted with his find.
The laughter died in his throat. He turned, hearing how close the others had come while he had been preoccupied, smelling the tartness of their sweat as they jumped up onto the tower.
Kim yelped, closing his fist about the pendant, and edged back away from them. There were three of them, one no older than himself, the others taller, better muscled than he. Their round eyes gleamed with greed and they smiled at one another with their crooked, feral teeth. They thought they had him.
He snarled and the hair on his body rose, as if for fight, but all the while he was thinking, calculating, knowing he had to run. He looked from one to the other, discounting the smallest of them, concentrating on the two eldest, seeing who led, who followed. Then, so quick that they had no chance to stop him, he threw the wallet down, nearest the one who was quite clearly the follower. For a moment their attention went from him to the wallet. The leader snarled and made a lunge across the other, trying to get at the wallet.
Kim saw his opportunity and took it, flipping backward over the parapet, hoping that no one had disturbed the mound that lay below. His luck held and the soft ooze broke his fall wetly, stickily. Pulling himself up, he saw them leaning over the parapet, looking down. In a second or two they would be on him. He pulled his arm free and rolled, then scrambled onto all fours and began to run.
He heard their cries, the soft squelch of the sticky mound as they jumped down onto it. Then they were after him, through the nightmare landscape, hopping between dark, slimy pools. Desperation made him take chances, choose paths he would normally ignore. And slowly, very slowly, he drew away from them, until, when he looked back over his shoulder, he found they were no longer pursuing him.
He turned and stood up, looking back across the choked mouth of the river. He could not make out the tower against the background of the rising land. Neither were any of the other familiar landmarks evident.
For the second time that day he felt afraid. He had come a long way. This was a side of the dump he didn’t know. Here he was doubly vulnerable.
He was breathing deeply, his narrow chest heaving with exertion. If they attacked him now he was done for. He crouched down, looking all about him, his face twitching with anxiety. This side seemed deserted, but he knew he couldn’t trust his eyes. He glanced down at the pendant in his hand, wondering if it had been worth the finding, then dismissed the question. First he had to get home.
Slowly, painstakingly, he made his way about the edge of the waste, his eyes straining for the least sign of movement, his sharp ears registering the least sound. And again his luck held. There, far to his left, was the broad pillar that they called the Gate, and beyond it, in the midst of the waste itself, the church tower. Kim grinned, allowing himself to savour hope for the first time since they had surprised him on the tower. He went on, clambering over the uneven surface, making a beeline for the Gate.
He was only a few paces from it when the ground gave way beneath his feet and he fell.
For a time he lay there, on his back, winded. It had not been much of a fall and he seemed not to have broken anything, but he could see from the smooth sides of the pit that it would be difficult to climb out. The earth was soft but dry beneath him. Tiny insects scuttled away from his probing hands, and the air seemed warm and strangely close. He sat up, groaning, feeling a stiffness in his back. His neck ached and his arms were sore, but he could move.
He looked up. Above him the opening formed a circle against the greater darkness, like two shades of the same non-colour. The circle had jagged edges, as if something had once lain across it. Kim’s mind pieced things together nimbly. The pit had had some kind of lid on it. A wooden lid, maybe. And it had rotted over the years. It had taken only his own small weight to bring it down.
He felt about him in the darkness and found confirmation of his thoughts. There were splinters of soft, rotten wood everywhere about him. Then, with delight, he found the chain to the pendant with his fingers and drew it up to his face, pleased to find it unbroken. But then his pleasure died. He was still trapped. Unless he got out soon someone would come along and find him. And then he would be dead.
He looked about him, momentarily at a loss, then went to the side of the pit and began to poke and prise at it. The curved walls of the pit were made of a kind of brickwork. Kim worked at the joints, finding the joining material soft and crumbly to the touch. He dug away at it, loosening and then freeing one of the bricks. Throwing it down behind him, he reached up a bit higher and began to free another.
It took him a long time and at the end of it his fingertips were sore and bleeding, but he did it. Kneeling on the edge of the pit he looked back down and shivered, knowing that he could easily have died down there. He rested a while, then staggered across to the Gate, close to exhaustion. There, almost beside the broad, hexagonally sided shaft, was a pool. He knelt beside it, bathing his fingers and splashing the tepid water in his face.
And then it happened.
The darkness of the pool was split. A shaft of intense brightness formed in the midst of its dark mirror. Slowly it widened, until the pool was filled with a light so intense that Kim sat back on his heels, shielding his eyes. A flight of broad, stone steps, inverted by the lens of the water, led down into the dark heart of the earth.
Kim glanced up, his mouth wide open. The Gate was open. Light spilt like fire into the air.
Trembling, he looked down again. The surface of the pool shimmered, rippled. Then, suddenly, its brightness was split by bands of darkness. There were figures in the Gateway! Tall shapes of darkness, straight as spears!
He looked up, astonished, staring through his latticed hands. Jagged shadows traced a hard-edged shape upon the steps. Kim knelt there, transfixed, staring up into the portal.
He gasped. What were they? Light flashed from the darkness of their vast, domed heads – from the winking, glittering, brilliant darkness of their heads. Heads of glass. And, beneath those heads, bodies of silver. Flexing, unflexing silver.
Slowly his hands came down from his face. Light lay in the caves of his eyes, a bright wet point of brilliance at the centre of each pupil. He knelt there, in the darkness at the edge of the pool, watching them come down. Three kings of glass and silver, passing so close to him he could hear the soft sigh and moan of their breathing.
He screamed, a raw, high-pitched sound, the noise dragged up from deep inside him, then huddled into himself, knowing that death was near. The pendant fell from his hand, unnoticed, flashing in the air before the water swallowed it.
One of the giant figures turned and looked down at the huddled boy, barely recognizing him as a creature of his own species, seeing only a tiny, malformed shape. A shuddering, thin-boned thing. Some kind of ill-groomed beast, long-maned and filthy.
‘Clay…’ he said beneath his breath, the word heavy with nuances – contempt, disgust, the vaguest trace of guilt. Then he turned away, glad that his face mask filtered out the stench of the place. Through the infrared of his visor he could see other shapes in movement, some close, some far away. Splashes of warmth against the cold, black backdrop.
He walked on, joining the other, suited men. Behind him, cowering beside the man-sized pool of light, the boy turned and followed him with his eyes, watching him go down into the darkness.
Then they were gone.
Kim stretched, pushing his hands against the soft, wet earth, steadying himself. The trembling passed from him, but still his mouth lay open, his fear transformed to wonder.
He turned, looking up at the Gate, a shiver running down his spine.
A wartha! The Above! The words formed in his head, framed in awe, like an incantation. He cupped water in one hand and wet his lips, then said the words aloud, whispering them, in an accent as malformed as himself.
‘A wartha…’
Again he shivered, awed by what he had seen. And in his head he pictured a whole world of such creatures, a world of liquid, brilliant light. A world above the darkness and the Clay.
His mouth formed a tiny O, round as his eyes.
Above him the Gate began to close, the pillar of brilliant silver fading into black, the broad steps swallowed slowly by the dark. And afterwards the blackness seemed more intense, more horrible than it had ever been. Like a giant hand it pressed down on him, crushing him, making him gasp for each breath. Again he screamed, a new, unbearable pain, born of that moment, gripping his insides, tugging at him.
The Light…
His fingers groped wildly in the mud, then flailed at the water, looking for fragments of the pearled light. But he was blind. At first his fingers found nothing. Then, for the third time, his fingers closed upon a slender length of chain, sought out the tiny metal pendant and drew it up from out of the liquid, holding it to his face, pressing it hard against his lips, not understanding why, yet feeling its presence soothe him, calm him. Like a promise.
It was a web. A giant web. Alive, quiveringly alive, expanding, filling the darkness with its pearls of light. Moist beads of brilliance strung on translucent fibres of light. It grew, at the same time both frail and strong – incredibly strong. The light could not be broken. He stared up at it, open-mouthed, and felt himself lifted, filled with joy. Incredible, brilliant joy, born of the growing light.
Kim lifted his hands to the light, aching to join with it. If only he could reach it; only lift his head and break the surface membrane of the darkness in which he was embedded, breathing fresh air. He stretched towards it, and felt the joy tighten like a metal band about his chest, crushing him.
And woke, tears in his eyes, hunger in his belly.
He shuddered, horrified. It lay all about him like a glue. He rested on it and it pressed its vast weight down on top of him. Each pore of his was permeated by its sticky warmth. It was darkness. Darkness, the very stuff of the Clay.
The dream made him grit his teeth and sit there, rocking back and forth in pain, moaning softly to himself. For the last few days it had been as if he were awake while all about him slept. As if it was their nightmare he inhabited, not his own. Yet there was no waking from their dream of darkness. Their dream outweighed his hope.
He straightened up, shuddering, hearing the movement in the darkness all about him. It was time. The tribe was preparing to move.
He got up quickly and went to the corner of the square of brick and stone in which he slept and relieved himself. Then he came back and packed up his few possessions: a blanket, a flint shard, the small bundles containing his treasures, lastly a square of cloth – a scarf of sorts – that had been his mother’s.
The one he had known as mother was long dead. He had been taken with her from the carriage and had watched while they held her down by the roadside, feeling a vague disquiet at their actions, not understanding the naked jutting of their buttocks, the squeals from the woman beneath them. But then they had begun to beat her and he had cried out and tried to get to her, desperate to save her from them. And that was all he knew, for one of them had turned and struck him hard with the back of his hand, sending him crashing into the stone of a low wall.
So he had joined the tribe.
Most days he did as they did, thoughtlessly. Yet sometimes a strange, dissociated pain would grip him – something not of the body, more like his glimpse of the light: something intangible yet real. Disturbingly real. And he would know it had to do with her. With a vague sense of comfort and safety. The only comfort, the only safety he had ever known. But mainly he shut it out. He needed his wits to survive, not to remember.
Kim stood at the edge of the group while Baxi spoke. They were going to raid a small settlement further down the valley, counting upon surprise to win the encounter. They would kill all the men and boys. Women, girls and babies they would capture and bring back alive.
Kim listened, then nodded with the rest. It would be his first raid. He clutched his flint anxiously, excitement and fear alternating in him; hot and cold currents in his blood. There would be killing. And afterwards there would be meat. Meat and women. The hunters laughed and grunted among themselves. Kim felt his mouth water, thinking of the meat.
They left eight men behind to guard the settlement. The rest followed Baxi down the stream in single file, keeping low and moving silently. Four hands of men, running swiftly, lithely down the stream path, their bare feet washed by the greasy, sluggish flow. Kim was last of them and smallest. He ran behind them like a monkey, hands touching the ground for balance as he crouched forward, the flint shard between his teeth.
There was a tumble of rocks, a small stretch of flat, exposed land, and then the other settlement. There was no chance of subtlety, only of surprise. Baxi sprang from the rocks and sprinted silently across the open space, the knife raised high. Rotfoot and Ebor were after him at once, running as fast as their legs could carry them, followed a moment later by others of the tribe.
It nearly worked. Baxi was almost on the guard when he turned and called out. His cry rose, then changed in tone. He went down, the knife buried to the hilt in his chest, its tip jutting from a point low in his back.
Kim squatted on the highest of the rocks, watching as the fight developed. He saw Baxi scream and curse as he tried to free the knife from the dead man’s rib cage, then turn to fend off a defender’s blow. Others of the tribe were struggling with the strangers, some of them rolling on the ground, some exchanging vicious swinging blows with flints and cudgels. The air was alive with grunts and screams. Kim could smell the stink of fear and excitement in the darkness.
He watched, afraid to go down, repulsion battling with the fascination he felt. His tribe was winning. Slowly the defenders left off trying to fight their attackers and, one by one, began to run away. Already his side were dragging away the unconscious women and girls and squabbling over the corpses. But still small pockets of the fight went on. Kim saw and realized where he was, what he had been doing. Quickly he scrambled across the rocks and dropped down onto the ground, fearing what Baxi would do if he saw.
He had held back. Shown fear. He had let the tribe down.
Kim hurried across the uneven ground, stumbling, then hurled himself onto the back of one of the escaping defenders. His weight brought the man down, but the stranger was twice Kim’s size and in an instant Kim found himself on his back, pinned down, the scarred, one-eyed stranger staring down at him. That single eye held death. The stranger’s right hand clutched a rock.
He raised the rock.
Kim had only an instant in which to act. As if he saw someone beyond and above the stranger, he called out anxiously, looking past the stranger’s face.
‘Nyns!’ he screamed. No! ‘Ny mynnes ef yn-few!’ We want him alive!
It was enough to make the stranger hesitate and shift his weight, half-turning to see who it was behind him. It was also enough to allow Kim to turn sideways and tip the stranger from him.
One-eye rolled and turned, facing Kim, angry at being tricked, but conscious that each moment’s delay brought his own death closer. He swung wildly with the rock and misjudged. Kim lunged in with his sharply pointed flint, aiming for the softest, most vulnerable place, and felt his whole arm judder as he connected. There was a moment of sickening contact, then Kim saw the man’s face change into a mask of naked pain. One-eye had been castrated, his testicles crushed.
One-eye fell at Kim’s side, vomiting, his hands clutching at his ruined manhood. Kim jerked his hand away, leaving the flint embedded where it was, then looked about anxiously.
Baxi was watching him, smiling ferociously.
Kim looked back, appalled, hearing the wretch heaving up each painful breath. Then, as he watched, Baxi came close, the knife in his hand, and pushed its point deep into the base of One-eye’s neck.
One-eye spasmed then lay still.
‘Da,’ said the chief and turned away. Good. Kim watched him strut, triumphant, self-satisfied, then throw back his head and whoop.
A web…A web of sticky darkness. Kim felt a warmth, a kind of numbness, spread outward from the core of him, a hand of eight fingers closing on him slowly like a cage, drawing him down beneath the surface of the dark. Darkness congealed above him like a lid, tar in his open mouth. And then he fainted.
They had never heard him say a word. Baxi thought him dumb or just simple, and others took their lead from that. They called him ‘Lagasek’, or Starer, for his habit of looking so intently at an object. That, too, they saw as a sign of his simplicity.
For an age, it seemed, he had been as if asleep among them. Their hideous shapes and forms had become as familiar as the darkness. He had watched them without understanding, seeing their scars and deformities as natural things, not departures from some given norm. But now he was awake. He stared at them through newly opened eyes, a bright thread of thought connecting what he saw to the sharp-lit centre of awareness at the back of his skull.
He looked about the flickering fire at their missing hands and eyes, their weeping sores and infected scabs; saw them cough and wheeze for breath, aged well beyond their years, and wondered what he was doing there among them.
Sitting there in the dust, the thick and greasy soup warm in his belly, he felt like weeping. As he looked about the small circle of men and boys he saw, for the first time, their gauntness, their strange furtiveness. They twitched and scratched. They stretched and stood to urinate, their eyes never still, never settling for long, like the blind white flies that were everywhere in the Clay.
Yes, he understood it now. It had begun there with that glimpse of otherness – that vision of glass and silver, of kings and brightness. He felt like speaking out – telling them what he had seen at the Gate, what he had done to scare off the intruders – but habit stilled his tongue. He looked down at his tiny, narrow hands, his long thin arms. There were no scars but there were sores at the elbows and the bone could be seen clear beneath the flesh.
He looked away, shuddering, his face filled with pain and a strange, hitherto untasted shame, then looked back again. They were talking among themselves now, their crude, half-savage speech suddenly foreign to his ear. It made him feel uneasy, as if he had knowledge of something better, some long-buried memory of things before the tribe. Across from him Tek and Rotfoot exchanged half-hearted blows in savage-gentle play, their broken faces filled with light and shadows. He lifted his head, sniffing at them in instinct, then settled, realizing what he was doing, filled with a sudden, intense sense of self-disgust.
For a moment he closed his eyes, feeling the warmth on his face and arms and chest. That too was strange. It was rare to have a fire. Rare to sit as they sat now, the circle of the dark behind, the circle of the light in front. But this was a special time.
Baxi sat in his place, on a huge, rounded stone above the others. A stack of wood – itself a kind of treasure – lay at his side. From time to time he would reach down and throw a piece upon the blaze, growling with pleasure.
They had found the sacks of firewood in a store room in the conquered settlement; three of them, hidden beneath a pile of other things scavenged from the dump. Baxi had brought them back and built the fire himself with a care that made Kim think he had seen it done before. Then he had gone down to his cellar, returning moments later with the fire-stick.
Kim had watched them all gasp and fall back as the flame leapt from his hand and spread amongst the gathered wood, muttering darkly between themselves, their eyes filled with fear and fascination. But Kim had known. He had crouched there, still and silent, watching as the fire kindled, like some strange, living creature jumping from one dark surface to another, consuming all it touched. Like the unspoken thoughts in his head, he realized. Yet this had a voice, a crackling, popping, sputtering voice, its breath strangely thick and dark, curled like a beard, yet evanescent-vanishing into the dark above the blaze.
For a brief moment it seemed he understood; held in his head a key to the pattern of all things. Then it too was gone, drawn up into the darkness overhead.
He felt misplaced. Torn from the light and cast down into darkness. But if misplaced, what then? How could he change things?
Run away, a small voice inside him called out. Run far away. To a place where the darkness ends.
He looked out beyond the fire, blinded by its brilliance, seeing nothing but the after-image of the flames. The darkness was unending and eternal. There was nothing but the darkness…
No, he reminded himself. Not true. There is a place of brightness. Up there. A wartha.
Among the gods.
Not only that, but there was a way. A single door into the brightness. A one-way door that often led to death, or so the men said. A door that only the youngest and the bravest took.
Kim looked down at his hands again. He was young, but was he brave enough? Was he prepared to risk everything on a single gamble?
He thought of the escapade with the mirror and the fire-stick and his spirits rose. Then the image of himself, scared and cowering on the rocks, came back to him. His stomach knotted. He wanted it. Wanted the brightness like he wanted life itself. But he was afraid. Dreadfully, awfully, numbingly afraid. He felt he could not do it – would die before he took the first step.
Better to stay here a thousand years…
A cold shiver passed through him, ice beneath the firelight on his face and chest and limbs. No, not that. Death was preferable to that.
He looked up. On the far side of the fire, beyond Rotfoot, stood Baxi, watching him. For a moment their eyes met and locked and some kind of raw understanding passed between them. And, in the moment before he looked away, Kim saw a crude kind of affection there in the older man’s eyes: a strange, almost wistful tenderness that he found unsettling.
Far away, said the voice inside. To a place where the darkness ends.
Kim rose and turned to face the darkness. The heat lay on his naked back, like the promise of comfort, but now his face was cold and the tension in him was worse than it had ever been. For a moment longer he hesitated, need and fear at war within him. Then, with a violent shudder, he nodded to himself and jerked away from the fire, his decision made. He would go. Now. Before the darkness took him back.
The sign was ancient. Time had turned the whiteness of its paint a mottled grey, had faded the dark, heavy lettering. Where the bolts held it to the wall a red-gold rust had formed two weeping eyes.
Kim looked up at it, struggling to understand. Like so much else it was a mystery; a symbol of all the things denied him. He studied the strange yet familiar shapes of the letters, wondering what they meant, filling the gap, the darkness of incomprehension, with his own meanings. The first letter was easy. It was an arrow, facing to the left. There was a gap and then the second, its double curves facing away from the arrow like a straight-backed woman’s breasts. The third was a ring. The fourth a drawn bow. The fifth? Two steep hills, perhaps, linked by a valley. The sixth again was easy. It was an upright column, like the column beyond the wall. The seventh? He felt the seventh was like the fifth, yet its difference – its lack of an upright strut – was significant. A gate, maybe. Or two interlocking flints – perhaps the sign for war. Then, after another gap, came the last of them; an eye with a dark, curled eyebrow overhead, linked at the eye’s left corner.
But what did it mean in total? What message had it once conveyed?
He looked about him, then ducked beneath the rotten lintel, pushing through the gap in the wall. There, like some vast subterranean serpent breaching the far wall of the ruined building, stood the column, its silvered surface gleaming in the half-light.
Kim stumbled forward and stood before it, his eyes drawn upward to where it met the ceiling of the Clay far overhead. There were many such pillars spread regularly throughout the Clay, but this one, Kim knew, was different from the others. It was a gate. An entrance into the Above.
Long ago they had chased a boy from another tribe across the nearby hills and trapped him here, between the walls of this old, ruined building. Faced with certain death, the boy had turned, gone to the pillar and pressed his hands against it.
Miraculously, the pillar had opened. A narrow aperture had formed in its perfect roundness, a dim, fierce light burning out from the space within. Fearfully, with a backward glance at them, the boy had gone inside. At once the opening had closed, throwing the space between the walls into an intense and sudden darkness.
They had camped there some while, waiting for the boy to come out, but he never had. And when one of the older boys grew brave enough to approach the pillar and press against it, they could all see that the space inside was empty.
It had eaten the boy.
For a time he had believed this version of events, and in truth part of him still believed it, making him cower there, terrified to enter. But the newly woken part of him reasoned otherwise. What if the boy had not been killed? What if he had been taken up into the Above?
They were huge assumptions. Hunches, not certainty. And the boy had gone inside only because he had had no option. But what of himself ? There were no knives awaiting him should he turn away. Only the darkness. Only the foetid Clay.
He grimaced and closed his eyes, tormented by indecision. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to be wrong.
Is death any worse than this?
The thought came like a voice in his head, and with the voice came the realization that he was no longer a single creature. There were two of him, sharing a single skull, a single body. One dark, one light. One kept him here, the other craved escape. Here, at the gate to the Above, they would have to fight it out between them.
For a time the darkness had him and he stood there, thoughtless, his animal self shuddering uncontrollably, a gobbet of spittle dribbling down his chin. Then, with an abruptness that caught the animal unaware, Kim threw himself at the column and scratched at its surface, trying to find an opening.
He could hear himself gibbering with fear, and in another moment he would have backed away, defeated, but suddenly the aperture slid open with an outbreath of air and he tumbled in, onto the smooth, uncluttered floor, his hands going up to cover his eyes against the brilliance.
The brightness hurt him. It cut into his head like a flint. Then the door hissed shut behind him, trapping him. He whimpered in fear then lay there, shivering, his legs drawn up beneath him, waiting to die.
What happened next seemed worse than death. The light in the room pulsed gently and a deep voice boomed out, filling the narrow space.
‘Kewsel agas hanow, map!’ Speak your name, boy! ‘Agas hanow!’
Kim gagged, then shat himself. His muscles went into spasm. For a while he could do nothing to control them. Again he was an unthinking animal, there on the floor inside the alien column. A stinking piece of quivering meat and bone. Then the bright thing in him bobbed up again and floated on the surface of his awareness. His name? What was his name?
‘Laga…’ He could not say it. He’d had too little practice. In any case, it was wrong. Lagasek – Starer – was not his name; or, if his name, then his name only in the darkness. It was not the name his mother had given him. Not the name he wished to take with him into the light.
He tried again. ‘Kim,’ he said, the word strange, more awkward in his mouth than in his head. His voice barely sounded the K and the rest of it was inaudible.
‘Kewsel arta,’ said the voice. Speak again. It seemed warmer than before, more soothing.
‘Kim,’ he said more clearly, then lay there, perfectly still, wondering what would happen.
‘Da, Kim,’ said the voice. Good. ‘Praga bos why omma?’ Why be you here? ‘Praga prak why entradhe hemma pylla?’ Why did you enter this pillar? ‘Gul nebonen sewya why?’ Does someone pursue you?
‘Nyns,’ he answered. No.
‘Nyns,’ the voice repeated and then chuckled to itself. What it said next was difficult to follow. The words were alien to Kim, like the nonsense utterances of his nightmares. ‘We’ve a fluent one here.’ This last seemed not to be directed at Kim.
Kim sat up, looking around him. Then he stood and went to the curve of the wall across from where the opening had been. No, he hadn’t been mistaken: there was a shape in the wall’s otherwise unblemished face. A pattern of light, almost too faint to see. He stood beside it, trying to figure it out.
‘Ah,’ said the voice. ‘My gweles why cafos an matrix.’ I see you’ve found the… But the last word was new. It was like the other words – alien.
Kim twitched and turned about sharply. The creature with the voice was watching him, then. Was close by. He stared up into the dimly lit tunnel overhead and tried to make out something in the darkness, but it seemed empty.
‘Matrix?’ Kim asked, pronouncing the word carefully, as if feeling the shape of it in his mouth.
There was laughter – soft, warm laughter – then the voice came back. ‘My bos ken tyller,’ it said, as if that explained everything. I be somewhere else. ‘Ha an tra a-dherak why bos un matrix.’ And that thing before you be a matrix. ‘Ef gul pycturs ha patron.’ He make pictures and patterns.
Kim struggled to understand, but could grasp nothing of what the voice was saying. Pictures? Patterns? How did it make these things?
‘Gasa-vydysquehs why.’ Let me show you.
The faint area glowed, then seemed to explode with colour.
Kim shrieked and leaped backward, scrambling away until his back was against the far curve of the wall.
‘Ef ny a-wra pystyk why. Golyas. Kensa un fas.’ He won’t harm you. Watch. First a face.
The screen formed a face. A typical face from the Clay, seen in partial darkness, its scars and deformities nothing unusual. Kim nodded, his eyes watching the matrix closely.
‘Nessa, un patron. Un semple patron. Tyby kettep myn bos un men.’ Next, a pattern. A simple pattern. Imagine each point be a stone. ‘My muvya an meyn formya un form. Un patron.’ I move the stones to form a shape. A pattern.
When the image on the screen reformed it showed three lines of three points. A square.
‘Den lufyow, le un bys,’ said Kim. Two hands, less a finger. It was the most he had said until then.
‘Ahah,’ said the voice, and this time Kim could hear a second voice speak softly in the background. ‘Numerate, this one. That’s rare.’ The hair on his neck stood up, hearing that foreign tongue again, and his lips peeled back, his dark self hostile to it, knowing it for the language of the light.
Unknown to him, however, he had taken his first step into the Above. And when the voice sounded again its tone was slightly different: less cosy, much more businesslike.
‘Dos ogas an matrix, Kim. Dos ogas ha my deryvas why fatel muvya an meyn a drodhe.’
Come near the matrix, Kim. Come near and I’ll tell you how to move the stones about.