The Half-Made World (44 page)

In the winter of the year 1482, representatives of the nations and trading companies of the East met to discuss the news that a pass had been discovered in the World’s End mountains, which had previously been thought impassable. Indeed, it was commonly believed by scholars and peasants alike that the mountains had been erected by God for that very purpose—impassability. Perhaps He had changed His plans. Reports of initial explorers were of an ocean of dark woods. It appeared that God’s Creation was far larger than anyone had imagined. Some foolish priests, who saw in change only the danger of decline, not the hope of progress, fell into despair. Braver and more forward-thinking fellows discussed exploration. From these discussions came the famous Council of Seven Nations—the Maessen Principalities, Dhrav, Juddua, the Provinces of Kees, little Koenigswald. . . .

The General showed no interest.

“Try violence,” Creedmoor interrupted. “I made progress when I threatened him.”

“You are disgusting, Creedmoor.”

She’d been suddenly angry; the words had spilled out. She glanced at him nervously, but he only smiled.

“Cooler now,” he said. “Positively chilly. Time to move on.”

All afternoon and all evening they trekked west down the valley. The sun seemed not so much to set as to
recede,
shrinking slowly in size and in brightness as if withdrawing from the world into the interstellar depths, until at last it was only one of countless dim stars. The moon, by contrast, grew and grew, larger and larger, yellow at first and then closer to red, until Liv could no longer bear to look at it.

When she tore her eyes away from the derangement of the heavens, she noticed that Creedmoor was looking intently around at the valley’s dark walls, and appeared to be listening for something.

He put a finger to his lips.

She listened. She slowly became aware of sounds of distant motion—and snorting, and grunting, and what might have been barking.

Something howled.

“Not the Linesmen,” she whispered.

Creedmoor shook his head. He whispered, “No. They are days behind us. Short legs, as I think I’ve said. I hear them only faintly, which is a relief; their conversation is dull.”

“Then what is it?”

“I have no idea. Could be anything. I suggest you ignore it.”

They continued.

The next day was cool and pleasant. Nothing in the behavior of the sky was remarkable, and there were no disturbing noises. They stopped to eat and rest in the open air, in the gentle breeze that blew down the riverbed and rustled the willow trees on its banks. Creedmoor produced a battered tin cup from his pack and made a small fire. With a grand air, he also produced a bag of dark leaves, and he made tea. Liv shivered at the waste of water.

She had never before noticed a waste of water.

But the leaves had been spoiled in the downpour and the tea was not a success. “It’s the effort that counts,” Creedmoor explained, and he downed the bitter dregs. “As a representative of civilization, Liv, you will understand. Now you and the General sit for a moment; rest. Talk amongst yourselves.”

Creedmoor jogged off up the wooded slopes. For food? To spy on their pursuers? Liv had no idea.

She sat under the willows and attempted to ignore the way the green fronds flexed and stroked the air as if they were trying to become fingers. . . .

She checked her golden pocket watch. It was still broken. It had broken days ago. It still ticked steadily, but some days the hands didn’t turn, and some days they spun so fast, the mechanism shuddered, and sometimes they turned backwards—the land out here was not yet ready to be reduced to regular time. Useless though it was, she didn’t quite have the heart to throw it away. Surely it would never be found, and that saddened her.

She made a search for weapons and was stunned to find, on the riverbed’s floor, among the flat round river stones, a stone spearhead. Arrowhead, perhaps. She had no idea and didn’t care. It was very sharp. She soon found another, and another.

Hillfolk’s traces. So obvious, even she could see them—but of course, this far west they had no reason to hide themselves. Were they recent? Surely Creedmoor, too, had seen them, long before she had; why had he left her alone with these weapons? Was he watching to see what she would do with them?

That way lay madness, paranoia, ultimately paralysis: Liv shut the door firmly on such speculation. She selected the lightest and sharpest of the arrowheads. She slipped it under her clothes—under the shapeless red flannels Creedmoor had purchased from the wife of that farmer near Kloan; beneath the farmer’s heavy belt that still felt so strange on her.

How she hated to wear the clothes he’d stolen for her!

It was not uncommon, Liv knew, for persons in her unenviable situation to form attachments to their captors. She had for an instant felt that it was disloyal to plot against him. She had no intention of allowing that to go any further, either. She’d seen him murder a man—
do not lose sight of that
.

Creedmoor bounded up the sandy slope. He was happy. The simple purpose of walking west was proving quite enough to entertain him. Fresh air and exercise was, as the good Doctor and the General would no doubt agree, the best of all medicines. More important, it was days since his masters had spoken in his mind; it was days since he’d had to do anything degrading or dreadful. In fact, one could say he was engaged in a noble cause, shepherding the poor old man and the young lady to safety from the Line. . . . It amused him to imagine so, anyway.

When he stood on a high rock and cupped his ear, the Line’s blunderers were just barely audible in the distance. Their heavy stamping boots were a remote echo. He had days of lead on them.

He found a freshwater stream and filled his water-skins.

He’d saved a handful of cigarettes from the long rain in a tin case. Now was as good a time as any to indulge himself. He sat against the rock and smoked and listened to the stream.

The rocks around the stream were marked with swirls of crimson paint. Flakes and facets of cobalt and red glittered in the sun that fell through the trees.

The stream’s water pooled between the rocks. Motion in the water caught his eye, and he knelt to look more closely.

From the water’s depths hands reached up. The pale white hands of drowned men. Thin almost fleshless fingers waving nervelessly like weeds on the tide. He could count three, four, ten: but counting was beside the point. A single broken nail violated the water’s tense surface; a shock, an obscenity, as if his reflection had winked at him in his morning shaving mirror. The dead flesh beneath the nails all red and bloody. Thin arms receding down like a tangle of white roots into the water—the water deep and dark as memory. Creedmoor recalled drowned men. Murdered men. Some women, too—mostly men in his career, but inevitably a few women, murder being no kind of exact science. All waving feebly beneath the water. Some of them beckoning. The whistling of the birds in the trees around him, the trill of frogs in the reeds had gone silent.

This was Folk trickery. It was meant to threaten or communicate or warn or amuse or
something;
who knew with the Folk? It did not seem friendly, if Creedmoor was any judge.

It was all frankly unpleasant, but he’d seen worse. He’d seen uncannier things near every day in the whispering dark behind his closed eyes when Marmion spoke to him. If this was the worst the valley and the far farthest West could offer, he’d consider himself lucky. He stared into the water until the unsettling images went away; until, in the blink of an eye, they turned back into lilies and white water froth. The birds and the frogs regained their voices, like bar pianists starting up again once the shooting’s over.

The General stood and tried to wander off. Liv held him back; he struggled feebly, but she easily overpowered him. She sat him down on the dry earth of the riverbed, and she sat beside him.

The absurdity of it! Liv nearly laughed; she felt as though she
should
laugh. Creedmoor seemed to think she could mend the man in a matter of days, while they fled helter-skelter into the wilderness. Creedmoor had her confused perhaps, with a fairy-tale witch or fairy godmother. She
did
laugh, and she turned to the General and asked him, “Sir, do you have any stories about a fairy godmother? Anything to pass the time.”

The General said nothing. He was shivering. She held him close to her. His breath and his heartbeat fluttered. She stroked his bony shoulder. She felt a great and ridiculous affection for him. For a moment, she felt close to tears.

Slowly she became aware that the General’s eyes were wide and fixed forward, down the valley ahead of them.

Some twenty feet westward, the valley floor narrowed; two big rocks nearly met and pinched it shut. In the gap between them stood—what was it?

It was not a goat, but it was goat-
ish
. It was too large to be a goat; it had shoulders almost like a bull, but it had a goat’s horns and legs and fur. Black fur. It had terribly wild and pained red eyes. It stamped and pawed the earth with a hoof like a grave-digger’s shovel. It snorted and whinnied. It smelled of—weeds? Stale water? Loamy earth? It smelled
terribly
of it.

“Once upon a time,” the General announced, “there was a bridge over a river in a forest in a land ruled by three queens and in a forest in the mountains and over a river, and a goat lived under that bridge. In midwinter when the river was frozen and like a necklace of diamonds a traveler approached not in hopes of crossing the bridge but in search, you see, aha, of the bridge itself, the border itself, it having been foretold . . .”

The creature did not move; nor did Liv. She gripped her sharp arrowhead tightly and waited.

She was ashamed to hope desperately for Creedmoor’s return.

The creature’s fur was black, and the long hair that hung scruffily from its throat was stone-stiff with dirt. Its eyes were blazingly red. Its shoulders were huge and swollen.

“The traveler is driven forward by love of a woman,” the General continued. “The goat is fixed by mute love of his place, of his bridge. Before there was a bridge there was a mountain, and before there was a mountain there was a great city of the First Folk, and before that there was nothing.”