Alium, page 22
“Dad…” Ogwold set the sword upon the table, which groaned dangerously. “Thank you.” At last his father noticed the tears rolling down his own face as much as his son’s. “I am sorry to have said so foolishly that these last months have been a waste, for I would never trade them away. If only I had known you more closely. I love you, Dad. I love the Nogofod, even Wog, that animal. I love Epherem and the sea. But I must away, for both our sakes, before this arm gets us both killed, before Autlos-lo gives up on me.” He stepped forward and wrapped Ogdof in a hard embrace. “One day I will return.”
Ogwold kissed his father’s bald, wrinkled head, and stepping back gently held the sea-scarred arms of the man who had raised him, smiling into those cryptic stone eyes which at last he at least partly understood. Then he packed a leather rucksack with as much of the dried fruit as he could manage, and tethered to its straps two bulging waterskins. Around his shoulders old and new fell the folds of the great white cloak as if they were sewn with his hulking figure in mind.
With much grunting he belted the enormous scabbard around his right shoulder, which seemed better to resist the digging-in of the strap. The long hilt stuck up behind his head, and the right-angle tip of the sword reached the backs of his knees, though the hump of his back lifted its length out behind him so that it might not slam against his legs. Testing the weight of it all, he figured he would at least be able to travel short distances with intermittent breaks. With one last kiss to Ogdof’s wet cheek, he stepped out over the threshold of his cabin for good.
*
The simmering coal-bed sky now kindled with innumerable cold stars. Elemdam and Fonsvana flew high over Ogdof’s cabin, joining in bright awareness of the path up from the scattered cabins of Epherem, out into the white rolling hills of the desert. Far off, the black mountains communed high-shouldered, and out from their nighted secrecy shot Zenidow in a pale pillar to heaven.
Ogwold took Nubes’ warm sphere from his pocket, where it had spent the greater part of the evening. The powerful drone which had so astounded him before had significantly lessened, though it still strung his ears together through the innermost atom of his consciousness. Perhaps it had become slowly more natural to him, like the lifelong backdrop of the roaring surf. Or—if the sphere was really a living thing—perhaps it slept. With this thought the light of it pulsed once, twice; smoothly it spun against his open palm, and rose into the air before his face humming no louder than before, not reflecting, but suffusing with moonlight.
“So you are awake then,” Ogwold whispered. Though still the humming felt as a constant medium, there was within it an infinitude of unique vibrations which all together created the impression of wholeness. From these complexities more endless and essential as Ogwold listened, there seemed to arise the pure confirmation that yes, the sphere had waited for him, and now it was time at last to go.
As if his gaze was carried up from those tiny silver deeps on some subtle crescendo in their music, he beheld the slender hulk of Videre poised atop a fingernail of white rock, three tails snaking like dense mists, bottomless eye-pits hovering in the astral form of a monstrous lupine cat. She leapt—in a moment interposed the crescent face of Fonsvana—and vanished. Noiseless she reappeared, lowering one enormous, triangular shoulder before Ogwold. He placed his grey hand tentatively upon the high, pointed bone, but when he felt her long, thick hair it seemed again, as before when he had returned to her in the tutum grove, that she was a friend.
He vaulted clumsily atop her huge, sinewy back, and she swung one black convex eye around as if to see that he was secure. The intensity of her stare was such that Ogwold instinctively gripped hard into the shaggy white locks of her long, barrel neck, pressing his chin down between the high pyramidal blades of her shoulders. Just as he realized that—big as she was—Videre was not only bearing his great carriage, but also the gigantic sword upon his back, her body exploded forward. The only sound in that elastic moment but for the crashing surf was the soft patter of dust against rock. In an instant they touched down; in another they were hurtling forward. Each pounce was a concert of delicate precision and uncoiling force, each soft congress of paw and rock like the brief swooping of predatory birds upon their speeding prey.
While Ogwold had planned to enter the desert from some more desolate stretch of coast, Videre cared little for the loose and drunken patrol that watched the highway. The Novare guards could scarce comprehend what massive bowling blur of white it was that like a ghost swept along the edges of their fires and vanished into the vastness of the pale desert.
Long into that white waste they raced, the dark range rising ahead of the crust of the world. Elemdam and Fonsvana fell beyond their craggy black bulks. Three newborn moons rose blossoming behind them, coming and going among the rushing, silvered clouds. First was jonquil Vitalem, and like a petal of the same flower Lucifella unfolded, the brightest of all moons, silver-white as the sheer wall of Zenidow, and said to be the second home of Caelare herself. Like a stem to the others was the slender Moon of Creation, Incipi, small, greyish, porous with craters and older than any. In the light of their eudaimonia stretched the shadows of wagons packed up for the night; many such a smouldering encampment they surpassed like a white wind in the night.
When the moons had set Ogwold figured they must slow for sight, yet Videre bolted through the total dark it seemed with even greater precision and vigour. He could hardly fathom how calmly and evenly she breathed, maintaining such powerful speed without fluctuation despite the rise and fall of the blasted terrain. Even come the thin rays of dawn her pace did not flag, but at the first sound of rattling wagons she paused so softly and suddenly as to have pitched her rider into the rock below were it not for the grip of his greener limb, which—he found—had extended and woven its fingers as roots fast around her shoulders, trunk and muscled neck.
Unsure at first why they had stopped, for he had not his partner’s ears, Ogwold took the moment to rest and observe the desert of his morning terrors. With the sun only just rising beyond the sea, all was cool and clear, and at last it seemed that the song of Autlos-lo would no longer torment him. Now there was even a majesty to this place otherwise so horribly manifested in his nightmares. Under the cloudless blue vault of heaven the rolling and cresting relief of dunes and hills and rocks all white and parched and cracked looked like the skeleton of the ocean stripped of its purple, flowing flesh and organs. Here was merely a slow and solid sea of different texture, whose waves crashed gradually over gulfs of time.
With a soft hiss smooth and liquid his greener limb slunk in upon itself and tightened easily to its previous likeness: a muscled Nogofod arm. Wondering at its impulse to change in that moment, Ogwold noticed that the voluminous white sleeves of his father’s cloak covered all but the verdant tips of his fingers, quite hiding their nature. His race, really, would be the difficult part of his being to obscure in Occultash. Then he heard the wagon wheels.
“I don’t think I’m in danger on this road, Videre,” he said, leaning forward into her layered sets of ears as if she needed to hear him more clearly. “You’re too fast! Besides, you are so large, I might look like a Novare by comparison.” Though he had spoken to her before, Ogwold was astonished by how naturally she understood, catching his eye and chuffing loudly. He wrapped his long arms around her neck, and locked his fingers back into the heavy layers of her shaggy hair. With the stunning ease and grace of her first and freshest stride, she bounded forth.
Almost at once there appeared over the mirage-pooled hills a rumbling caravan of wagons bound for Epherem. The first cornibets reared up, snorted fearfully and in succession down the line their drivers slowed to gawk, astounded by the strange and awesome creature that flew like a great spirit of the desert through this treacherous land, and by the huge stature and sword of the black-maned man that drove her away from the sea. So ferocious and swift were the calculated bounds of Videre that the snapping folds of Ogwold’s radiant cloak haunted the last wagon before any word of their coming had reached it. Yet already a new caravan shimmered on the distant coils of the road ahead. All morning they encountered new veins of weary traders, and several they overcame in their shared direction away from the sea. Only just before the highest point of day did the business of the ancient road taper and clear.
Alone at last they ranged through the dizzyingly bright, bare hills as the day star poured its molten totality into the trapping sand. Scorching, motionless air rose just hovering in an endless, cottony gag above the shadeless scramble. Ragged, limber shadows of desert birds troubled all periphery. Only atop the highest hills waited but a torturously brief swell of clear air. The real oppression and aridity of the desert was far worse than any nightmare, even as those memories inexorably compounded in his heat-oppressed mind. There was nothing surreal, nothing abstract about this place, and certainly nothing of deeper meaning. The torrid air scarred his throat; the heavy, stagnant burning sapped his strength and desiccated his skin; the scalding sand sliced and rubbed raw his naked face and tender eyes.
He slipped in and out of a heat-sick limbo that even the most historic dose of norm could not remotely dampen, investing all his waning strength in holding onto his mount. Tearing pain seared his stomach and left arm from the work; though his right gorged rather on the full glare of the sun, he could not figure how to again extend those gripping roots for support. Videre hurtled forward all the same, if a little sweaty.
Finally these changeless hours evened. The hard, gleaming block of the sky softened into the golden epilogue of noon. Caelare’s light seared low, swathing red the mountains, melting into their eaves. Though her speed had not lessened as the day wore on, Ogwold felt a lightness rise through Videre with the cooling evening wind, and he too felt a feeble cheer as they raced the darkling hours in near solitude—passing but a few camps of quiet wagons and campfire smoke—and the bracing freeze of a night lit singly this time by the dim vastness of solitary Somnam. Only in the violet hours before sunrise did Videre stop, breathing heavily and freely.
Ogwold slid from her back awkwardly, staggered around in a plume of dust and debris, and fell flat on his back. His left arm roiled with sporadic shooting spurs of pain and troubling dead patches; yet more arresting was a very different kind of enervation in his right, as if it could hardly wait any longer for sunrise.
Videre’s huge furry snout appeared over him, and she dragged a rough tongue along his cheek. He laughed. When she snorted, a strange rumbling voice burrowed through Ogwold’s chest, thrumming in his bones. Sitting up, rummaging in his rucksack, he fed her slowly of the tutum fruit. She ate curiously and delicately for so large and muscled a beast. He held out his waterskin, and she tilted her head, perplexed, stirring the dusty rock with one paw. He tipped the container slantwise, and she lapped at its mouth thirstily. As in a reflex his pouting green arm leapt out to catch the spilling water, which disappeared into its fibres as unto an inescapable vacuum. A tremendous thrill fired up the arm into Ogwold’s chest and heart, flowing over his skull and down the back in waves of ecstasy, and he looked down at the strange limb in wonder.
“Here,” he said, pouring a little more water into his green palm, but he had to stop soon as it seemed the plant would never stop drinking, and the chills of energy began nearly to overwhelm him. Feeling suddenly so strong and refreshed, he sat back against Videre’s furry ribs where she’d curled up, and ate some tutum himself, resting until those tall ears perked up as before with the approach of the morning traders.
Once more went the young Nogofod unto the great animal. Past the approaching wagons they soared over the sun-drenched rock, and they did not stop again to sleep until Caelare was retired and the first moon began to rise. That night it was the wide hemisphere of gigantic, deep-orange Sweelux, the Lucetalian Moon of Passion, yet many others would shine upon their winding desert path on nights to come.
On and again went their rush for the city, until fully six times the day star and those of its twenty pale sisters which chose to appear each night had spun through the firmament. So gradually in stature grew the faraway mountains over those days and nights, that only looking away and back again could Ogwold notice any change. But at last, on the morning of the seventh day they passed into the titanic, zagging shadows of the many peaks of Shadith, the nearest mountain. Videre slowed if only slightly, and whether it was through a subtle tremor in the ubiquitous humming of Nubes’ sphere in his deep pocket, or through the intimate link he now shared with this strange and awesome animal, Ogwold knew that the city drew near.
*
Videre’s seamless leaps just as smoothly transitioned into soft padding, her huge muscles wagging loose; somehow there was still no bumpiness for her rider. Shadith loomed mightily close, thrusting forward its numberless crags, so that even the bleeding switchbacks of its lower flank could in places through the circling, faint clouds be followed, and Ogwold thought he saw the smoke of industry hanging over dark masses which might have been forest.
A metallic proscenium breached the horizon, looking like the head of a titan pickaxe rising against the face of the mountain. Nearly as tall was a high stone wall stretching featureless out and back towards Shadith on either side. Soon the sheer slab towered over them, and in its shade they sighed with relief, for the sun now fully risen from the distant sea unleashed its most uncompromising glare upon the baking sand and rock, the mountain’s shadow thrown opposite them into the unknown West.
Dismounting with a thud that cracked the plates of rock beneath his boots, Ogwold lumbered for the left of the gate, avoiding its range of sight. He searched clumsily along the length of the wall, so vertical that it seemed to lean over his head. His legs were weak and wobbly, but little time passed before he happened on a snug trench in the land, a long-dry, primeval riverbed, ensconced by ancient boulders. Here he designed to hide and wait out the day. Videre curled massively beside him in the shadowed bottom, pyramidal shoulders folding together like great wings, and immediately began snoring, her great jowls fluttering and whistling.
When the worst heat had waned, a busy caravan issued from the city. Through the meeting point of two boulders, Ogwold peeped up over the riverbank and watched the wagons roll endlessly over the hills down to the distant shore, invisible now, though he heard it faintly in his heart, and felt its life stream even through his greener arm, thought it felt quite weak, parched as it was and now out of the sun. But he was distracted from its condition by the thought that finally he was on the other side of these shipments, for it was a deeply pleasant thought. He did not miss the sea then. The leagues of torrid desert behind him were but a beautifully rugged beginning. In his heart, he was grateful for the challenge of those seven awful days. He had not pushed himself so far since, well; at last he looked down at his now slightly shrunken right arm; since he had been attacked by the sea serpent.
Many caravans came and went while he waited for night. The pitiless sun roasted the land as it spun through the sky overhead. Even as it passed out of sight beyond the mountains, and even in the protective trench of the riverbed, the shade cooked with a stifling warmth nearly too much to bear, so used was Ogwold to the rushing wind of Videre’s speed. Yet she the far harrier slept and slept as though never more comfortable, so he felt rather soft for his complaining. Yet it was not only her strength and resilience that he missed. Now that those great black eyes were closed to him, Ogwold felt quite alone here in an unknown world on the perimeter of a city which despised his kind.
Seeking the time-blindness of companionship, he took the sphere out from his pocket, and stared into it like a brilliant hole in space, reflecting nothing despite that self-propagating luminance. When he released it, softly spinning from his flicking fingertip it continued on, floating in the air, slowing, pausing, its rotation evening. He leaned back against the rocky wall of the inner riverbank, and a drowsy sense of eternity arose as he gazed into the hovering silver-white face, listening to its constant hum.
Light orange, pink columns of cloud scudded through the sky, striated with an unseen sunset over the mountains. Ogwold could envision the sliding, darkly condensing paint of Caelare’s palace bleeding its runny purpling reds between the peaks to spill along the land. So summoned, such fingers of rich colour drifted overhead, staining the desert with twilit oils.
Awash in the exchange of day and night, Ogwold perceived the first impurity he had ever noticed in the impermeable silver of the sphere. Where colour and light had seemed always to slip ineffectually over its immaculate surface, now the darkest inks of evening subtly collapsed towards its presence, lingering delicately in its orbit before passing on. Only their faintest gossamer wisps stayed behind, which—whether actualized by their acknowledgement, the hypnagogia of twilight, or both—began to swirl steadily faster, assuming ribbons more vivid and clear, accreting into purple-black whorls and transforming discs. As he leaned further in, the massing complexities of the vision spun so swiftly as to uniformly ring their silver planet.
Even as this grand design settled into shape, the searing black and purple cord reached a velocity too great for the sphere’s gravity to contain, and exploded in spiralling tendrils of shadow out into the varicoloured vermilion heavens, ascending and opening to enormous breadth each as they went, splitting as seams ever widening unto cosmic gulfs. Compounding one against the other these tears chased away the already darkening sky as though it were the flat set-piece of a theatre.
