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

Sunlight spilled into the dome’s door and splashed vermilion through my eyelids. I sat up and blinked, bluing the world. The air was still and cool and the dome was mostly dark. My godmother, Aine, was already up and doing.

For a few moments I watched her. She was a tiny woman, with tiny deft hands, and skin more wrinkled than the folds of the flats outside. Her gray hair hung like a bell about her face. She was weaving one of the seventeen patterns, and crooning to herself of the Harrowing.

I remembered what day it was. Aine must have sensed it, for her song began to touch me gently. “The keys to Sephaura I have,” I said. “Tonight I watch. Tomorrow I go Walking.” She didn’t answer. “Perhaps you won’t know me when I get back,” I said.

“Perhaps I won’t,” she replied, and went on with her weaving.

I rose and stretched. A young Arrasene, I was lean and muscular, with golden hair and golden skin and green eyes like twin jades. I slipped on my sandals and stepped out.

The vast empty flats were streaked orange and deep russet and blue, a disk with no edges except where the hard dome of the sky came down on every side. The monolithic Pillar was a big black spindle, the spoke of the boundless wheel.

I went over to the well my godmother shared with the other domes in our clutch. It lay in a small sinkhole carpeted with mosses of many colors, teeming with nudibranchs and trilobites. Blood-red dragonflies darted through the air. I lowered a long ladle into the pool and lifted the bowl to my lips, then made an offering to the naiad, a pinch of gold-dust from the ephath-wood box on its post.

No one else in our clutch was up yet. Darek and Naphet, two of the boys I’d trained with, would rise soon to tend to their family’s chebothim. This was the last day of my boyhood, and my manhood would be apart from theirs, so I turned quickly and returned to my godmother’s dome.

Ordinarily I would have eaten then, but this was a fast-day for me, so I circled to my little workyard instead. The chassis and mechanism were complete. The only thing was to find a material light enough and strong enough for membranes. As I examined my dried resins that morning I knew I had found what I needed. One day soon I would fly, I alone in all the world.

And then it was time. I went inside and kissed my godmother. “Find your own songlines,” she said. “They reach into all places. That is truth.” She blessed me. I took up my scrip and my spear and set out for the Palace.

* * * * *

The clutches were groups of domes scattered across the Wabe of the Pillar, the monolith’s shadow-path. All men lived in the Wabe; that was Law. The only other building was the Palace, a rambling labyrinth piled against the Pillar’s base, formed from great stone blocks so skillfully shaped and smoothed that not the slightest gap showed.

Gyges, my uncle, awaited me in the Phylarch’s Court. I advanced across the pebbled floor heaped with scaly skins, swimming through incense and peat smoke.

“You are ready?” he asked. “You have your arms?” He was a squat, sallow man; he’d once been counted handsome, but his looks had soured of late.

“My spear I have,” I said, shaking it twice. “The sword you must provide.”

Gyges started. “I watched no sword,” he said. “Nor did my brother, nor our father, nor our father’s father.”

“But I will watch it. I may. That is Law.”

“That is truth,” Gyges said, his mind working. He signaled to a servant to bring the blade from the chest behind the throne. It was green with eld and wrapped in spider webs. “Keep it well,” he said. “With this sword our forefather Neimruth slew the chimera Phun Baba.”

I took it and hefted it. It seemed glad of my hand. “Now I am ready,” I said.

My uncle led me deeper into the Palace, where the Holy Place was built against the foot of the Pillar. The chamber was tall, narrow, close, and dark, with the only light falling in through two tiny square windows high up over the entrance. Its walls were whitewashed and its floor was of packed earth. The altar was shiny but the niche was empty.

Gyges took my arms and laid them on the altar, then recited the invocation. I knelt before the altar and put my hands together. My uncle left.

All day I watched, alone, almost delirious in the end from the shooting pains in my knees. Perhaps I did become delirious in truth, for I was seized by a conviction that the old phylarch, Brandobrabdas the Earthspanner, my grandfather, was there at my side, but unable to speak, as he had been on his deathbed, stricken by palsy.

A geometer as of old, Brandobrabdas had made his name by finding the number of strides from the rising of the sun to its setting. He was the only phylarch in memory who’d expanded Sephaura, the abstract Tower of Knowing, whose tenets are unlawful to write in clay or stone, lest they die. The starglass, the eye into the outer spheres, was his handiwork, too. He looked too closely, perhaps, for one day he sealed off his observatory and cursed it.

Though only in my fourth summer at the time, I remember his death clearly. The tremendous heaves his corpulent body made as it wound down like a machine, the moment his spirit evacuated its mortal container, leaving his mouth frozen in a permanent snarl—these were engraved on my brain.

Astyges his son, my father, was less a man of Sephaura than of earth. He showed how the starglass could be used to sear and destroy. He was also a maker of machines, such as the screw that draws water uphill. When he assumed his office he entered the observatory, then closed it again. He spoke of it to no one.

I, Keftu, was still a boy when he was declared unclean and driven into the desert. Why, I never knew; my elders were careful not to speak of it in my presence. No one saw him after that. It wasn’t time yet for my Walking, so my uncle became phylarch. He took my mother to wed, for she was a widow. That was Law.

I went to live with my godmother at the edge of the communes. Gyges said, “That will be better.”

All day and all night I drifted through the past and the present, never certain which was which. And then at last it was dawn.

My uncle came in behind me. I rose and faced him. “Now is your Walking,” he said. “Stay away one night or one thousand nights. But return with a Song.”

I went out through the Common Court with creaking knees. Everyone was gathered to see me off. I wondered if a shade at its funeral felt as I did then. My godmother and I exchanged a glance, and my heart beat warm. My mother was there, too. She was pretty, as always, but also seemed sad. I avoided her eyes.

I passed through the outer courts into the communes and the desert. Without looking I knew that my uncle was on the roof of the Palace, watching me from the parapet. His eyes burned on my back. As I stepped over the edge of the Wabe I gripped my sword’s hilt. What would happen when I returned only the gods could say.

2 Walking

I picked up a braid and followed it south, pursuing it with a passion, singing with it of all I passed. It was a current that tugged day and night, a voice without words, a vision without light.

I had always lived in the desert. We all had. We were alone under the seraphim, and the seraphim were not. The songlines were the paths of the seraphim, their steppings from time before time, when they sang songs without words and put everything in its place. The people of the Wabe followed this skein of invisible threads, walking them in truth, whether hunting for meat or for medicine.

The land was a counterpane. Red rippled flats, fields of glittering boulders, dry wadis, mossy wells, clusters of little hills like round rocks dropped from the sky. Lone maugrethim nosing through the night. Casts of land crabs like ghosts in the waste, with teardrop bodies and tiny pinchers.

Late the first day I turned and looked back. I’d gone on hunting expeditions before, but this was the first time I’d been so far beyond the Wabe on my own. The Pillar’s shape was clearer at a distance. It was a square prism with a worn and pitted crown. Never before had I realized that there were giant letters on its face.

Still I pressed on into the south. On the third evening a bastion of clouds came after me from the north. The anvil heads were touched with sun-gold but their purple banks flickered electric yellow. It was a rainstorm. I knew that from stories Aine had told me.

All night I sat and watched the lightning leap from buttress to buttress. It was terrible to be alone, waiting for that colossus to come. Thunder rolled across the desert and the wind began to kick up dust. Soon huge raindrops began to fall. I let the water course down my face and my arms. For a while I thought it might be the end of the world. But dawn came as always.

Everything was clean and fresh. The wet stones seemed masses of something rich and edible. The earth exhaled.

The well where I’d stopped for the night was babbling with new vigor. A giant dragonfly sat at the edge of the pit. I’d never seen one so large. Its wings were almost as wide as my outstretched arms. It lifted into the air and hovered, beating slowly, then dropped to the south in the train of the storm.

I supposed it might be the beginning of my Song. But the songline urged me on. All morning I thought about how that dragonfly’s wings had beat.

I went on through days and days, deeper into the south, tracing my line from well to well, embroidering it with my own story. And there, I suppose, it speaks of me still. The Pillar watched me from afar, a dark eidolon standing over the landscape.

One day the wells vanished, but I pushed on, so fiercely did that braid pull me. I even allowed my skins to drop below half-full. I knew my elders would have thought this unwise, but my faith was rewarded when the desert floor ended at the brink of a cliff. I stepped to the edge and looked out.

Red cliffs dropped to a rock-littered plain of pink sand that sloped toward a sheet of gray water. Mushrooms of salt stood along the shore of the Sea of Bitter Tears. Twisted orange mountains aspired to the bronze-blue sky beyond. Away to the right, the fossil city of Cormrum filled a canyon mouth whose sluggish issue ran beneath a bed of stones. The quays were high and dry. Hulls of corroded iron dotted the dead sea bottom.

I followed my songline down a carved staircase to the plain. The feet of the cliffs were pocked with seeping caves where armored efts hid in the mosses, the outflow of what ran so slowly beneath the desert. I filled my skins at a pool and went west.

As I rounded a buttress of stone, a grinning, dagger-toothed face brought me up short. It was a deinoth, a sail-beast, the last of a tribe cut off by the retreat of the waters. It snapped at me as I got closer. I took my spear in both hands and ran it down the lizard’s gullet. It chomped on the shaft and died spitting black blood.

I used my sword to hack off its head. “You I’ll call Deinothax,” I said to the blade. That seemed to gladden it, for it glowed a little. Such was the beginning of our long friendship. I pierced the deinoth’s jowls with an awl, threaded a thong through the holes, and slung it over my shoulder. Then I went on.

I reached the quays and walked along them, peering into buildings at random. In a palace I saw wall paintings of a green landscape dotted with scaly moss-trees.

Going back out, I looked down toward the dead sea and wondered who the people were and where they had gone. The song of victory that came unbidden to my lips was mingled with a mysterious elegy. But my Song had begun. It was time to return.

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