The Beyond (14 page)

As he hunched over the pond, letting the water drip from his face, he peered down at his own reflection. He had not seen himself for a very long time, since well before his hair had grown long enough to tie back and the beard had grown in. The man below, looking up, momentarily startled him. Now he knew the person that the Silent Ones knew, and he wondered if his frightful aspect had made them ill at ease. He looked every bit a man of the wilderness.

Bringing his hand up, he touched the scar on his cheek where the demon had drawn blood with its barbed tail. It was while inspecting this feature of his face that he saw another. Upon noticing it, he could not believe he had not spotted it sooner. In the center of his forehead, directly above his eyes, there was a design. He leaned closer to the water and now could make out clearly the image of a thin blue snake coiled eight times around a central point that was its head. The final loop came halfway around the spiral, and the end of the tail bent, pointing due north.

Just before nightfall, they reached the opposite end of the oasis and stared out on more pink dunes rolling off toward the setting sun. It was as he had expected it would be. Still feeling the wound of his betrayal by the Silent Ones, he did not have the will to continue north. He decided to stay in this new forest for a few days of rest before starting his journey across the sands.

They left the edge of the desert and returned a quarter of a mile into the green island to a clearing Cley had noticed earlier. It was difficult finding firewood, because everything was so alive and full of sap. Eventually they came upon a lone tree that had died of some disease, and the hunter hacked its branches off easily with the stone knife. By the time he managed to get a spark to leap from the stones and set the kindling going, night had come, and the area around their camp was made fantastic by the intermittent blinking of fireflies.

In addition to the flying squirrel Cley roasted for Wood, he had collected a variety of the different types of fruit that grew plentifully in every quadrant of the oasis. Some of them he had already tried, and although a few specimens were bitter to the point of being inedible, many more proved to be sweet and full of juicy pulp.

As the dog ate the charred strips of squirrel and Cley worked away at one last white plum, a refreshing breeze began to blow through the forest. Yellow moths circled the fire, a few giving their lives to be one with the flames.

“What do you say?” the hunter asked the dog. “Is this the Earthly Paradise?”

Wood looked at him. He rose and began moving around the area as if searching for something.

Cley laughed. “We left it in the desert,” he said, yawning.

The dog whined and finally came to rest by his side.

“There were no more pages. They were all devoured by our hosts,” he told his companion.

Wood continued to complain.

“I'll tell you a story,” he said, and pretended he was opening a large book.

The dog closed his eyes and rested his head on his front paws as Cley began speaking.

“Once there was a man, who woke one day to find a blue snake tattooed on his forehead. He wondered where it had come from and why it was there. ‘What can this mean?' he asked his friend, the dog, but the dog had never heard of such foolishness, and wasn't about to start. The blue snake twirled around itself in a spiral whose center was its head. At first the man wondered if it was there, between his eyes, to help him focus. Then he wondered if this snake was supposed to be the snake, Kiftash, in
The Legend of the Alluring Woman of Constance and Her Last Wish
, or just meant to represent a circle without end. Some snakes, as you know, are poisonous, and yet sometimes this poison can be made into a medicine to cure the sick. Perhaps this was a snake that rattled its tail or danced to music or, being blue, was discovered curled up in a rock in the heart of Mount Gronus. Snakes have always been treacherous fellows, but …”

Cley stopped speaking and listened to the crackling of the dying fire. One lone moth still circled the flame. Wood lifted his head, then returned to sleep. The night wind moved among the trees and carried the scent of blossoms. Something was creeping through the underbrush, and Cley thought to himself, “I need my knife,” but in the process of acting on that thought, he forgot about it, and his eyelids closed.

Perhaps a butterfly, a falling leaf, a blossom on the breeze brushed against the hunter's right cheek, and he brought his hand up to swat it away. In his slowly rousing consciousness his last thought from the night before fired like a spark in his mind. He sat up quickly, reaching for his knife, and opened his eyes on a new day.

Wood was still asleep, which was unusual. Now Cley noticed that lying on the sand in front of the dog was the empty leather binding from the book of the soul.

“So much for my stories,” Cley whispered to himself. He pictured the dog, sneaking away from the camp, tearing through the forest at night and then breaking free of the trees onto the pink sand illuminated by moonlight.

“That flinking book is a curse for sure,” he said, then poked Wood in the rear end with the toe of his boot.

The dog woke immediately.

“Let's hunt,” Cley said.

Wood rose and stretched, his front legs forward, his back in the air, while Cley looked around for where he had laid his hat. He remembered taking it off just before they had sat down to eat dinner, but now it was nowhere in sight. He was about to question the dog, suspecting retribution for having left the book out in the desert, but then he noticed something in the sand.

The hunter dropped to his knees and spread his arms for support, bringing his head down close to the ground. The dog came up next to him and also looked at the ground. Cley traced the outline of it with his index finger as if to validate the discovery.

It was a footprint, not an imprint of one of the soles of his boots but a large vague outline of what appeared to be a human foot. He looked up at another spot in the sand. There were more, leading off into the forest.

A scream came suddenly from behind them. Cley reached for his knife and spun around on his knees with the blade pointing out just in time to see the yellow bird in the branch overhead scream again. He looked back at Wood and motioned with his hand to his mouth—their sign to stay quiet. The hunter stood, and with the distinct sensation that he was being watched, turned slowly, peering into the tangle of growth.

They followed the shaggy footprints west through the oasis toward an area they had not yet explored. Cley wondered if the hat thief might be one of the Silent Ones left behind to spy and play tricks on him. “Who else would be about in such a far-flung place?” he asked himself. He ruled out the apparition of the eyeless woman, since she left no prints when he had encountered her in the demon forest. Then he had a sudden memory of the face that was inscribed in blue outline on the queen's backside. He saw it again in his mind's eye, and realized where he knew it from. “Brisden,” he said, and stopped walking. Wood held up and waited for him to continue following the trail.

“I'll be damned if it wasn't Brisden, that tub of words,” he said. He thought back to his journey through Drachton Below's memory and recalled the corpulent philosopher, who had saved the dream woman, Anotine, and himself from death at the hands of the Delicate. It seemed like another lifetime when last Cley had known him as the symbolic representation of a concept in the mnemonic world. As he later learned, all of those he had met in that reality had antecedents in this one, in real life. How could the queen have Brisden's portrait on her left buttock if he had never been or was not in the Beyond? Perhaps the Silent Ones had brought Cley to meet the man, since he was also pale-skinned and had obviously at one time been a subject of the realm like Cley. “But what are the chances?” the hunter asked himself. “And why would he steal my hat?”

Late in the morning, just before Cley was about to stop and pick some fruit, he and Wood passed a shallow pond covered with lily pads. From each of the round leaf bases grew a violet flower whose petals were sharp spikes. Half-submerged in the water and surrounded by the floating blossoms was the skeleton of a Sirimon—the bones gone green and the left horn cracked off. The sight of its sharp teeth startled the hunter, and he raised the bow in self-defense before he knew what he was doing. At the last moment, he held the arrow back.

Sitting beneath an overhanging frond, surrounded by the gnawed cores of red fruit, Cley and Wood dozed in the afternoon heat. They had searched for hours and eventually lost the trail of prints in the sand. The western end of the oasis seemed much like the area they had traversed the previous day. The hunter had killed a small wild pig for dinner, which was lying next to the waterskin. He kept his bow close by and the knife in his hand should anyone or anything try to steal another of his meager belongings.

He began to doubt that what they saw that morning in their camp were human footprints. The possibility that some other creature could have made them seemed all the more likely. He remembered his ruminations about meeting Brisden in the heart of the Beyond and laughed quietly to himself.

“Madness,” he thought, and as the notion passed from his mind, his hat passed along over the tops of a stand of tall ferns that lay across the sandy clearing before him.

The hunter sat upright and watched as the black, broad-brimmed shape sailed by. “Wood,” he called quietly to the dog. His companion looked up and saw the hat moving off into the forest. In seconds, they were on their feet. Cley grabbed the bow and arrows and was off after the thief. They broke through the ferns and saw in the distance, through the mesh of tree trunks, vines, and tall ferns, a vague figure disappearing into the green. Cley began running, and the dog was soon bounding ahead of him.

For the remainder of the afternoon the hat led them on a chase through the exotic forest of the oasis. They stumbled past tranquil pools, gigantic flowers, birds with the most outlandish plumage, a million insect wonders, but noticed none of it, their sights fixed firmly on the quarry which seemed always to stay at the same distance—close enough for them to make out the black lid but far enough away so as to keep its wearer's identity a mystery.

Near dusk, they realized that they had not seen the hat for an hour and were running blindly with no purpose. Cley called Wood to him, and they turned back, the hunter trying to remember the direction toward the spot where he hoped the pig he had killed would not have been set upon by scavengers.

As they made their way around the undergrowth and between the trees in the failing light, Cley was no longer nervous about the stranger, who was obviously much more afraid than he and Wood were. In fact, he desired a confrontation, his curiosity now ablaze.

Just as he was considering forsaking the wild pig and stopping to make camp in the next clearing, they came upon the site where they had left their kill. He realized that while he had been walking, his mind turning wildly with thoughts of the day's pursuit, he had been unconsciously following Wood. The dog obviously knew all along where he had been headed, driven by a desire to eat roasted pork.

Luck was with them, for no scavengers but the ants had bothered the meat. These were easily scraped off. Firewood was searched for and a fire started. In their toil to prepare for the coming night, Cley did not notice the hat sitting atop a large bush off to the right of the clearing. Just as the dark completely swamped the oasis, and he was carving up the kill into strips to affix to his makeshift spit, the hunter noticed the hat. In astonishment, he began to laugh out loud and shake his head.

“Our neighbor is a trickster,” he said to Wood.

The dog looked where Cley was looking, saw the hat and walked over, lifted his leg, and urinated on the bush.

“Revenge,” said the hunter, and turned his attention back to preparing dinner.

That night a sweet wind carrying the narcotic scent of blossoms slithered again through the forest. Cley had already read the sleeping Wood a confabulated nonsense story from the missing pages of the book cover the dog had insisted on carrying in his mouth all day. The hunter leaned back on a tree trunk well within the flickering bubble of light cast by the fire's glow. He was exhausted by the day's exercise. Through lowered lids he looked across the clearing at the hat perched atop the bush and let his thoughts unravel. In his hand was the stone knife and lying next to him in the sand was the bow and quiver of arrows.

The sizzle of a moth in the flames woke him from a doze, and he looked around the clearing to see that everything was as it should be. He glanced at the hat and jerked himself forward to sit upright. Squinting in order to focus his sight, he scrutinized the bush atop which the lid rested, and confirmed what he, at first, could not believe. Some inches beneath the broad black brim, two burning eyes, like tiny fires recessed in twin caves, had opened in the matrix of leaves and seemed to be staring straight at him. Confusion paralyzed the hunter, and though he wanted to stand, he could only sit where he was and stare back.

A moment later, a dark opening, obviously a mouth, appeared below the eyes. Then, the bush began to slowly move in unnatural ways. A leafy arm spread itself from the whole and reached out, followed by another on the right side. There were hands of tangled vine with delicate sprouts continuing like thick hairs from the tips of root digits. The body of the bush began to rise on incredible legs composed all of leaves and tangled twigs. It stood upright, like a man, but a man of vegetation, with tiny white flowers growing here and there amidst the thatch of its body. The black hat riding atop this green impossibility was the most absurd thing Cley had ever seen, and he could not help but smile through his amazement and terror.

The plant creature walked toward him, and still he could not move. Already he sensed that it did not mean to attack. Its movements were as gentle as the wind-rocked fronds of the tree above him. It stepped carefully over the sleeping dog and came to a halt before the hunter, where it slowly lowered itself to sit only inches away, facing him. Then the two arms that seemed cut from a hedge rose simultaneously and lifted the hat with leafy hands off a head of spiraling, tendriled hair. It reached over and placed the hat on Cley's head, and the dark opening that was the mouth almost formed a smile.