I awoke from a dream of cold, beautiful faces peering down on me, whiter than the ghostliest centipedes crawling deep in the plummeting darkness of the earth. They floated, singing in high, flat notes, like broken electronic toys. There was no melody, but something about the hollow sound of their alien music made my bones ache, even with my eyes open.
It was still too dark to get down and on the trail, so I stayed in my thermal sack, hoping to drift off again. I was traveling near the territory of the People of the Flint, the Keepers of the Eastern Door, and so was careful not to light any fires. I slept in my tent-hammock halfway up an old pine; I had heard the Grey Brothers calling to one another from the hilltops every night for the last week.
The People of the Flint know me because Grandma Jay lived with them for a time, during the Slippage. The territories land under the Great Law in the Great Law had grown greatly since Grandma Jay was a girl, as survivors joined them, adopting the Great Law of Peace as their own, from the Central Desert to the Burned Mountains of Ro. They traveled the length and breadth of the forests on their own business, teaching other peoples along the way. Grandma Jay had made several trips to the West to meet with them. They know me, and they call me "Little 12th Cousin", because my grandmother was born on the other side of the world, where their ancestors came from.
It seems impossible to come from the other side of the world, but that happened back before the Slippage, when so many things were like fairy stories, and human life was stretched beyond any reasonable limits. Grandma Jay says that fairies are like angels; all beautiful, some terrible. And that was what happened before the Slippage, when people played at being gods and angels and demons and squeezed the blood from the planet until it was not like our home anymore, but some smoky afterlife, haunted and pale.
Now we are taught to walk gently on the wounds of the poor, bleeding earth. There are people who had their fill of foolishness long before the Slippage, and they are short with those who forget that all our lives now are forfeit. The People of the Flint are among them. They know me, but I must show proper respect, and their rules are the same for everyone. The Gray Brothers know me as well. Still, it is better to sleep in the trees - they track everything that moves here in their forest. And their rules are the same for everyone as well.
My real name is "Alder Who Swims In The Wind", which is my name in the Temple Grove. Otherwise, I am Allie, or sometimes Alderana, when Pop has lost his patience, or when one of the men from the other Families thinks that name will make me sweeter or prettier. They would have better luck learning to shoot straight with a bow. Most of them can't, while I can split an oak leaf at one hundred paces. Even now, after my journey into Ro.
My family had packed for the move to the winter camp, and I took the opportunity to explore to the west, inland, far from the sea. Most all of the old dwellings had been picked over already, but sometimes you could find a usable fleece (they were all pretty much usable after a washing, unless they had been burned, or left in the sun too long), or a thermal sack, or something else that was light and easy to carry. But mostly I enjoyed moving by myself through the forest, rummaging through the ruins of the Dominion of Man, and imagining how they had been, how they had done the things that they had done, and if they, our ancestors, were much like us at all.
Most of the structures out this far were isolated farms, now buried in red pine forests, and the only way to find them was to follow the old roads and then smaller paths that looped through the hills or dead-ended at the old houses (usually just the foundation and ashes). The larger towns had been built along the main waterways, so there were still occasional trading posts. In any case, they had all been sacked and burned long ago.
As I got closer to People of the Flint territory, I decided to stay off the main roads, such as they were, and cut directly through the woods. There were less questions to answer that way. I could find the old homesteads by other signs, and I knew all of this territory fairly well, except for one area that no one visited, because that was one of their rules. Some ancient works were off limits. Like Ro. It was easier not to think of that, and to pretend that was not the reason I was here. Still, I kept angling that way, over the ridges, stopping to sift through the already-stripped ruins of homes and farms, camping without a fire, and not putting a name to my destination. The warm fall days, and the burning glory of of a golden stand of beeches lightened my steps, soft and silent on the litter of the shaded forest floor.
When I crossed a high ridge line, dense with firs and cedars, I knew I was getting close. The forest on the north side was lower, denser, younger. Once when I stumbled on a steep section I saw that there was a thick layer of ash mixed with charcoal under the mat of pine needles. I struggled with the descent for over an hour, but gradually the incline leveled out, and the walking was easier.
In a few more minutes I was rounding a large marshy pond with a wide border of cattails losing ground to purple loosetrife. The small hill on the other side had an unnaturally straight rocky gully leading up the side, like giant steps. On the other side I found the river I had been seeking, rolling calmly down at the far end of a flattened area big enough to hold a whole encampment.
There were shards of a broken building halfway to the water, twisted as if by a high wind, visible through the trees. Soon I was among them. Hulking, irregular boulders were piled around what fragments remained, rusted metal tubes and girders curled into fantastic shapes. Everywhere the columns and slabs were furred with black fungus, bunched or dangling, mostly on the water side. Closer to the river there were mounds of undulating rock, here smooth, there jagged, forming a rough circle, and in the middle a round pool of the clear, still water, surrounded by a thick carpet of the soft fungus that swallowed even the faint sounds of my footsteps. In the afternoon light, it seemed more luminous than the brilliant leaves or flowers on the creepers that climbed the splintered structures, like thick, polished glass. The floor of the pond itself was not clearly visible - the sides were sheer, rippling downward and curving out of sight in a luminous haze, the evening sun making it seem as if the light filtered up from below. The water was cool in my hands, and clear and fresh when I drank it.
The best place to camp was on the top of the hill, and I enjoyed the full orange moon imposing itself upon the sky and the unquiet river while drifting to sleep in my hammock.
I awoke on the ground, vomiting violently again and again until the spasms in my stomach could bring up nothing but a burning trickle onto the rich, moist earth beneath my hands. I think I crawled a few meters in some direction before the darkness returned. The familiar tones of my dreams awoke me (if something so alien could be familiar): shrill, flat, variegated, monotonic. I raised my aching neck and looked down at the round, moonlit pool below. The night was clear and bright, and the cold faces circled over the water, singing in a pearly blue glow that poured upward from beneath them. Their slow, unpredictable movements made me queasy, I felt a tugging pressure in my chest, and I blinked at the swirling darkness, struggling to see the awkward shapes around me as I rolled over, turning my eyes away. The darkness increased, smothering everything except the shrill music from below, ringing more clearly in the swelling emptiness around me. The trees were like flattened shadows, insubstantial swirls of black mist in the night, but they were shot through with veins of metallic fire, brilliant amethyst, beryl and tourmaline, lit up in some subterranean illumination. And the colors extended into the ground, swirled and striped and spattered across the slope. Incandescent ants and beetles bustled in the undergrowth. A night toad hopped away, its body carbuncled with glowing colors.
I knew I had to leave that place, even if it meant crawling across the mountains in a phantasmagorical darkness. Shuffling on all fours, I reached the top of the hill, now looking down on the marshy lake, limbs shaking from the exertion, and somehow my vision re-inverted itself. Moonlight frosted the trees with blood, reflecting off the milky water of the lake, leaving an irregular blotch of darkness in the center. The strange voices retreated, but not entirely.
The surface of the water slowly bulged upward, curving toward the empty night sky and the salmon moon. The dark patch moved across the surface of the glistening water, and I was looking at a cyclopean eye, manifest there, drinking in the endless night in some dance as dark as the pale one behind me. I was seized by the desperate fear that the eye would turn toward me, look upon me, and I knew I could not resist the avalanche of that gaze and its feral beauty. I would be undone. I groveled, grinding my face into the earth to hide from the terrible sight of it, scraping grit against my teeth and clutching my numb hands over my aching chest, lest my heart leap out to join those lurid dancers at the river.
--
They must have found me there, or perhaps I crawled onward somehow. I remember swinging gently in a sling, like a baby in a treetop, carried between two men; People of the Flint from their dress. They moved steadily and surely through the darkness of a pine-dense hillside, all rocking gently around my. We turned and the mountain swallowed us, and I sank back into my own darkness.
--
I don't know how many days and nights I lay asleep, or awake and dreaming of pallid, distorted faces and their shrill whistling, sick and aching to my bones. My hair fell out in clumps, littering the dirt floor of a wigwam where I slept, accompanied by a People of the Flint woman so old that her face was like a creased leather mask. Every day, morning and night, she gave me a thick black soup that tasted of pine tar and bitter herbs, making me retch painfully again and again, leaving me heavy and dull for hours afterward. She also gave me a thin, salty soup, bowls and bowls of it. As time went by, I returned less of the soup to the bucket she always had ready by my sleeping mat. After eating, I would tumble back into sleep, like a child into a well, the pull of slumber as real and heavy as the weight of my own body.
The old woman talked to me slowly while she crushed herbs that she had gathered from somewhere the dim space my world had become, or stirred one of the pots of broth she always seemed to have simmering over a heater. At first her droning voice drifted in and out of my wretched nightmares, but gradually the words began to sooth my dreams and replace the cold, shrill faces with other images. I began to get less of the black soup and more solid food, watery rice, corn bread, sometimes a piece of cool fresh fish. After what must have been many days, she and a teenage boy took me out into the sun, and I wept, for I knew then that I was not dead, even though my clothes hung from my body like a shroud. I began to feel more strength, and pay more attention, but in the end I could only remember a few of the things that she told me, about the Spirit People, and how some things came to be where they are.
This is what she told me.
The Spirit People only look like us when they wish to. When they come to our world they take the shapes of animals, or trees, or gemstones or volcanoes or clouds. There are powerful spirits that make their homes inside the earth. Before the slippage people hunted these underground spirits with great machines, pulled them up to the surface, drew them out of the dirt and rocks and set them in special cages where they burned with a cold blue radiance, a light leaking from the spirit world into ours. The humans used their power for themselves, thinking they could cage the spirits forever. But humans do not live forever, and not nearly as long as these spirits (who are not immortal either). During the Slippage many of them escaped, and burned down their prisons, and slew their guardians and set fire to the earth and tunneled their way back toward their home. There were places where humans had clumsily released so much of the power of the Spirit People that they are no longer part of our world, but have shifted partly to the Spirit World, and anyone who stumble upon them unaware risks terrible harm.
The People of the Flint know some of these places, have marked them with the old signs and guarded them. This knowledge is passed from mother to daughter to insure that it is not lost. The two men who had seen my footprints leading into the valley had come to repair the warning signs after the hypercane season, for Ro is one of those places where we are no longer safe.
She showed me the old symbols, the Dead Lotus, with its black heart and three triangular black petals on a square the color of a dead dog's teeth. She showed me the Horned Rose, whose cruel scarlet curves and thorns marked spirits more deadly than the others, but not as long lived. She also told me another story, one that seemed to be a different story, but in the end it was the same one, somehow. It was the story of the stars and how all things came to be where they are here on earth and in the heavens.
Stars live nearly forever - millions and thousands of millions of years, vast, alone, unthinkably powerful, spreading spirals of life around them in the vastness of space. If two stars meet they tear each other apart with such violence that just bearing witness to such a struggle would destroy everything on the earth, forever. So stars live alone, calling out to one another across the darkness, their bellowing voices all but lost in the vast emptiness between them. After uncountable eons alone, with only the distant whispers of their brethren for company, finally their hearts burst, scattering their spent bodies throughout the sky; their blue-green blood fills our seas, and their gray bones hold up the earth under our feet. But their hearts, their heavy shattered hearts are buried deep within, where the light of the unreachable stars does not penetrate.
It is foolish to awaken the heart of a star, even just tiny fragments, and bring them within the sound of the voices of their kind. I have seen and felt what happens when the bitterness of those boundless years is released again.
I sit in the sun now, feeling my strength slowly return, and count the liver spots that have sprouted across my hands and fingers, and wonder about the people before the Slippage, my ancestors, who had made that place by the edge of the river. They must have been mad, unhinged by their own magic and power and dreaming, to rouse the heart of a dragon with these soft, helpless hands.