The Half-Made World (2 page)

T
HE
H
ALF
-M
ADE
W
ORLD

PROLOGUE

HOW THE GENERAL DIED

~ 1878 ~

The General lay flat on his back, arms outflung, watching the stars.

A rock pressed into the base of his spine. He’d hit his head and turned his ankle when he fell, but the rock was the worst of his pain. Other sensations were leaving him, but the rock, obstinately, persisted; yet he was powerless to move. He was powerless to will himself to move. Between his will and his body, there was the
noise.

A dark cloud passed before the stars, and their light was shadowed, then returned, cold as ever. He watched the night sky over the mountains burn and wheel, hiss and dance, shudder and fall.

The General was losing his mind.

There were no trees—no pines. He lay in a bare hollow, a high flat stony clearing. The General and his last most loyal twenty-two men had been caught in their desperate flight between the Line behind them and the cliff’s edge before them.

If the General could only have mustered the will to turn his head, he would have seen the mountain’s peak. It was dark, and forked like a gesture of benediction. It had been his destination, before this—this unfortunate interruption. It would have been better, he thought, to have died watching the mountain than the stars, which were meaningless.

In the end, no shots had been fired. No words exchanged or warnings given. The Linesmen’s awful weapon had simply come whistling out of the night sky, fallen like a stone at Lieutenant Deerfield’s feet, and poor young Deerfield had gone pale, eyes wide, turning to the General for last words; then the
noise
had begun, the mad awful
noise
, and Deerfield’s wide eyes had filled with fear and blood, and he’d toppled one way and the General had toppled the other, and now they both lay where they fell.

The weapon had quickly burned through its fuel and gone silent, but the terrible noise still echoed in the General’s mind. The noise split his mind in two, then in four, then into scattered pieces. The echoes ground him to finer and finer dust. The process was frightening and painful.

The General was a man of extraordinary character. He’d built the Red Valley Republic out of nothing—hadn’t he? He’d preserved it against all enemies and all odds, he’d taken the mere words of politicians and philosophers and he’d
beaten
the world into their mold. As the noise crashed rhythmlessly back and forth across his mind, he held tightly to his pride—which maybe slowed the process of disintegration but could not stop it.

For twenty years the Republic had flourished, and it had been the finest moment in the history of the West; indeed, the finest of all possible moments, for the Republic had been constructed in accordance with the best possible theories of political virtue. Gun and Line and their endless war had been banished—the Republic had been an island of peace and sanity. It was gone now, ten years gone, undermined by the spies and blackmailers of Gun, crushed by the wheels of the Line, never to return. But it had lasted long enough to raise a generation of young men and women in its mold, and it was for those young persons that the General wished he could somehow utter, and have recorded, some noble and inspiring last words; but all that now came to his shattered mind were fragments of old fairy tales, curse words, obscenities, babble. He thought he might be weeping. He couldn’t tell.

He was vaguely aware of the Linesmen going through the bodies around him. He could see them out of the corner of his eye. Squat little men in their grays and blacks stepping dismissively over the bodies of heroes! They stopped sometimes and knelt down to use their dull-bladed boot-knives to silence murmuring throats. They went like busy doctors from patient to patient. The General’s men lay helplessly. A bad way to end. A bad way for it all to end.

Would the Linesmen notice the General, still breathing? Maybe, maybe not. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

One more section of the architecture of his mind crumbled to dust, and for a moment he entirely forgot who he was, and he became preoccupied with his memories. He’d been a leader of some kind? He’d had some great final duty, which had brought him up into these damned cold ugly mountains; he forgot what it was. For some reason, he remembered instead a fairy tale his nursemaid had told him, many, many years ago back in green Glen Lily, in Ulver County: a tale regarding a prince who set out from his father’s red castle bearing nothing but a sword and, and, an owl, in search of the princess, who . . . no, bearing a
message
for the princess, who . . . the princess was a prisoner, chained in a tower, ebony-skinned, beautiful black hair to her waist, bare-naked . . .

A Linesman stepped over him—black boots momentarily blocked out the stars. The Linesman’s black trousers were worn and smeared gray with dust. The Linesman shouted something, something the General couldn’t understand, and moved on, not looking down.

The General clutched at the scattering dust of himself and recalled that this was not the first time he’d lain outside at night, under the stars, among the dead, bleeding and dying. Indeed, a night like this had been the making of him, once. As a young soldier he had been wounded in the shoulder by a lucky shot at the battle of A . . . at the battle of . . . at the field of gorse and briars, by the stone bridge. He had been left for dead in the first retreat and spent the night among the dead, too weak to walk, strong enough only to hold his jacket to his shoulder and pray for the slow bleed to stop, and to watch the cold stars. He’d been very young then. There he had learned to dedicate his soul and his strength to a bright distant purpose, to lay his course by a remote star. He had learned to be
heroic
and not to fear death. So he’d told too many generations of fresh young recruits.

The recruits hadn’t been so fresh or so young, or so many, in recent years—not since the horrors of Black Cap Valley. Not since all was lost. Not since the Line drove them into the hills and the woods and the back alleys like bandits, not since the army of the Republic, reduced to a desperate fierce remnant of its former glory, became a matter of secret meetings and disguises and dead-drops and midnight explosions and code words and signals. He remembered! No—he remembered only the codes, not why they were sent. Matters of great weight and significance hidden in the lines of humble everyday domestic correspondence—
The children are growing tall and strong
meant
The weapons are ready to be retrieved
—he struggled and grasped at codes and symbols. . . .

He remembered they sent messages encoded, among other things, in fairy tales, in letters that purported to be addressed to much-loved children safe at home. He remembered writing,
Once upon a time, the Prince of Birds looked down from the Mountain over his kingdom and was unhappy
. It meant something secret; it conveyed maybe good news, more likely bad, because all the news had been bad for ten years; he couldn’t remember what.

He tried to recall the names of some of his men—many of whom, perhaps all of whom, lay scattered on the mountainside around him, their own minds ruined and crumbling like his own. No names came to him. What came to him instead were the faces of three Presidents, three of his masters: Bellow, big-bearded, who was once only Mayor of Morgan, who drafted the Charter; Iredell, little wiry brilliant man, who was the first to sign it at Red Valley; stout but simpleminded Killbuck, who in retrospect was perhaps a sign of the Republic’s rapid decline.

But his memory of Bellow’s bearded face was perhaps confused with an illustrated king from the storybook his nursemaid read to him.

The noise kept sounding in his head, and he forgot Bellow forever. The noise ricocheted madly back and forth against the chamber of his skull like a bullet. The
meaninglessness
of the noise was its worst quality. He forgot his battle standards. He recalled, then forgot again, the stables at Glen Lily, where he first learned to ride and read and hold a sword. The stables were long since ground under by the Line. He recalled with sudden sickness that he had a daughter of his own, whom he had not seen for years, for all these years of hard campaigning, of hiding in the hills, of raiding and harrowing the Line. He wrote letters; she always waited for him to come home. Now he never would.

He’d sent her a last letter, from the foot of the mountains, just days ago: there was something very important in it, but he couldn’t recall what. Something about these mountains and these stones on which his mind now bled. He recalled that he signed and sealed it with a reckless wild abandon. He said things it was dangerous to say. He had set years of discretion and secrecy aside. He remembered thinking,
Secrecy is behind us now. If we win through, the earth will shake
. He forgot why.

He remembered, terribly vividly, the stink of Black Cap Valley, after the battle, its mud and vile flowers black and glistening, slick with red blood. One of his sons had died there. He forgot where the other one had died.

A Linesman stepped back over him, knocking his head sideways, so that he could no longer see the stars. He saw instead the shuffling legs of the Linesmen and the body of Lieutenant Deerfield. Deerfield! A good man. He wore trappers’ furs, not his old red uniform, because the days of splendid red uniforms were long gone. He was pale and dead.

Behind Deerfield, the General saw the body of Kan-Kuk, the stone-caster, the Hill-man,
his
Hill-man. His ally among the First Folk. There were a great many secrets about Kan-Kuk in his last letter. The General had forgotten them all.

Kan-Kuk’s naked bone-white body jerked and flopped like a landed fish. Kan-Kuk’s long skinny arms flailed like stripped branches in a storm. Kan-Kuk tore at his wild mane and ripped away greasy black fistfuls. That struck the General as strange; the General was fairly sure that he himself was still, very still. Perhaps the mind-bombs affected different species of person in different ways. Or perhaps the General himself, without knowing it, was also thrashing and flailing and screaming. Everything was very numb; he couldn’t be sure.

The General wondered if Kan-Kuk would rise again. It was said of the Folk, and perhaps it was only a fairy tale, like the story of the princess and the prince and the mountain . . . It was said of the Folk that when they died, and were buried, they rose again, in due season, immortal, like a song or a dream—or like the masters of Gun and Line. If Kan-Kuk were to be buried, and to rise again from the red earth, would his mind recover, or was Kan-Kuk ruined now, too? His fine, strange mad mind, now ruined.

It was at Kan-Kuk’s request that the General had gone on this last mad mission. Those were the terms of their deal. People had said for years that the General was mad to keep a Hill-man around like that, and maybe they were right. Now the General remembered what Kan-Kuk promised: that his people had a secret. A Song, Kan-Kuk had called it, though the General had thought:
a weapon
. A weapon to bring peace. An alliance between resolution and atonement for peace and goodwill, that oldest dream. The General would have tended his garden in his old age, grown roses perhaps. Kan-Kuk’s people had been ready to share it at last, to forgive, again, at last. There was a cave, there was a cave in the red navel of the world, there was drumming, there was the City of the First Folk, for they, too, were fallen from greatness. Down in the dark, fallen. There were, so Kan-Kuk whispered, to have been tests of courage and virtue and . . .