Hal Duncan, page 24
— Not Lulal, my son, Inanna cried. He is a king amongst men, my right arm and my left arm. I'll never give Lulal to you.
— Walk on to your city then, Inanna, the ugallu said. And we will walk with you to the great apple tree in Uruk.
They're closing on her as she hits the tunnel, as she swerves to overtake a station wagon, going so fast the driver freaks and shreds the side of his car against the brick wall in a scream of sparks and bounces the lumbering auto right across to make the other side shriek, into the path of the sleek black auto which veers, just clips it, sending chrome bumpers rolling through the air. She can see them in the mirror. She can see the fuckers leaning forward, the one with dark hair behind the wheel, the other in the passenger seat, his bloody hand pressed against the windshield, flames burning in the sockets of his eyes, and she knows that they don't work for Metatron any more, and they don't work for Eresh; they work for something that's only concern, that's only motivation, is the brutal aesthetic of a proper ending, of a fate written and bound, eternal and unchanging. And she won't fucking give them it.
At the tunnel's end the road twists sharp round to the right, but she doesn't turn the bike; she ploughs straight through the barrier, over the handlebars and through the air, through leaves and branches and broken bones and torn flesh and through a door out of reality and into the Vellum.
Through the Long Grass
In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves, Tammuz, the lover of Inanna, sat, sheened in his me-garments, lounging, still, upon his throne. Inanna fastened on Tammuz the gaze of death, spoke out against him words quiet in wrath, uttered against him cries of shame, of blame:
¯ Take him! Take Tammuz away! Wash him with pure water and anoint him with sweet oil. Clothe him in a red robe and let the pipes oflapis lazuli play. Let all the party^girls raise up a loud lament for him. Take him away.
She lies there on the ground, looking up at blue sky, at an impossible crescent sun, at the boughs of a tree that dapple the golden light with mottled greens, and at her brother's face. He tries to stop her, but she's already muttering the charms she needs to give her the strength, she's already dragging herself up to him with one arm around his neck and reaching inside her jacket with the other. It's a page torn from the book, the mark of Tammuz, and she shows it to him, hands it to him while she pulls her broken arm out of its sleeve. She has to wipe the blood off to show him where her story and his meet, here in the Vellum, the end of her story and the beginning of his. In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves...
She curses him as a fucking idiot, as a fool, as a coward.
He shakes his head. She doesn't understand. It's going to be OK.
She can hear them coming through the long grass, the things that Metatron created, that Eresh destroyed and that the machine souls of a thousand long-dead unkin have sent out to close the door and keep them sealed inside their fates. She has the knife out of her pocket now and she fumbles with it in her left hand as she twists her arm round to find the place, the right combination of signs and sigils. In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves...
All she has to do is cut it off, cut that little part of herself off, and it doesn't have to happen that way. She can rewrite the story, change it. He can too. Doesn't he see?
He shakes his head. She doesn't understand. They are the story now. The angels, the demons, none of them matter; it's their story now. It's going to be OK.
¯ You'll always be getting captured, she says.
¯ And I'll always be escaping them.
¯ They'll kill you, over and over and over again.
¯ And all the time I'll still be here, he says, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves.
She holds the shred of skin in her hand now, leaning her broken body back against the tree, blinded by blood and tears. The two creatures stand behind him but the three of them just wait, wait for her to say the word in a moment of sunlight and pain that stretches out for an eternity. He has the knife in his hand but he won't do it to himself. All he has to do is cut that little bit out of himself and they can walk away from this together. That's all he has to fucking do. She bites her bottom lip and tries to pull herself up but she's too weak, too broken and wounded to do anything other than lie there. But she's alive, and she's free and she looks at him and hates him for it, for leaving her alive and free when he is not, when he could be, he fucking could be if he'd just listen to her, just this once, do what she tells him.
He drops the knife.
¯ Damn you, she says, and the demons' hands clamp round her brother's arms, start to pull him back away from her into the blur of sunlight and green.
He shakes his head. She doesn't understand. It's going to be OK.
Errata
Under a Tree of Golden Apples
Late afternoon sunlight of summer casts its shadows long as I walk through the grass towards the napping, nodding youth with his green hair and scrag of a goatee, and the horns of a kid, of the eternal kid, pinking the air through his scruff of tousle. He lies against the tree, in doze or daze, in a haze of whirlicues of smoke that furl up from a precarious cone of paper wedged between index and forefinger in his hand lain across his lap. A stoned Pan in green combats and layers of beads and necklaces under his lolling head, something of yester years, something of modern times, and something of the days lost in between. His face, familiar but unplaced in my memory, displaced by the horns, I approach with puzzlement, eyes peering as if to resolve his identity in a blur that's truer than sharp focus, until ten foot away, my shadow falls across the orchard sprite.
He brings the cone of a joint up languidly to his lips, and with a lick of them first he slips a suck, holds curling pluming smoke in his open grin for a second before deepdrawing down into his lungs, and it's the motion that I recognise, finally in a forgotten face.
¯ Puck, I say. Thomas.
¯ Do I know you? he says, blinking, fluttering his eyes against the low sun. He accepts the name without question, with only a slim curiosity in his half-shut eyes and raised brows, not asking why I call him by these names, but who I am to know them.
¯ Reynard, I say, but I'm not sure if that means anything to this horned echo of my past. Is this Puck mine, Jack's fairy fuck and Joey's fucking fairy? Or is he just some cognate avatar of attitude cut from the same mould in this altered world deep in the Vellum, an apple fallen from the same tree, with the same juicy tartness in his relishing touch of tip of tongue to lips?
¯ Reynard the Fox? he says. The King of Thieves, no less.
I have no idea if he's being serious here, but then I never did.
¯ I ¯
It's so long since I have practised speech to anyone other than myself, I find it hard to form my sense into a sentence.
¯ I am at your service, my fine sir, he says, twirling his hand and showering hot rocks through the air in a most Puckly gesture. What can I do you for? You need someone to drive the getaway car? You know how fast I am in flight. Or is it a distraction that you need while you sneak in, in dead of night, to steal the crown jewels of the God of Light? I can be very distracting, you know.
And even though he's patently not the Puck I knew, he's Puck all right.
¯ I think, I say, we better... start... from the beginning.
He tells me he was born under a bad signpost, stolen from gypsies as a young child, raised by werewolves in the wilderness, ran away from the circus, bought the devil's soul and sold his arse on the streets of Heaven.
¯ What's your story? I ask him, and he says:
-Which one? he says, I fought the Law and won. I shot the sheriff and his deputy. I ¯
I hold up a hand.
There is a gleam of deviousness in his eyes that quite belies the innocence of his smile, and I know it's going to be impossible to separate the fabrication from the facts; looking at him, I'm not even sure that there are any facts.
¯ Do you remember Jack? I ask. If there is anything to connect this Puck to my long-lost reality it has to be poor, crazy Jack.
¯ Jack Flash? he says.
Jack Flash?
I think of Jack with his flame hair and his wild laughing eyes, the passion burning in his soul for Puck and burning in his head after... It has to be the one.
¯ I thought Jack Flash was dead, says Puck.
But that's not right; Thomas is dead, I'm dead, if this place, this Vellum, is what I've always thought it is, but I left Jack behind me very much alive. Ten thousand years ago? Ten thousand years ago, long turned to dust. I look at this Puck. Time, in the Vellum, it seems, is not so simple.
¯ I don't know, I say.
¯ Man, says Puck. Jack Flash is my fucking hero.
He flicks the joint away into the air in spirals of sparks.
¯ If Jack's alive, he says, I've got to get him back.
He licks his lips.
The Broken Seven
The five of them stand there in a row, shiftless, uneasy without Carter and Pechorin to speak for them, unaware of even why they've lost their fire and their ice. The one at the far left keeps glancing at the two pillars with the relevant gravings, unfortunate reminders. It wasn't necessary for the rest of them to be involved, Metatron explains. The sacrifice was required but he could not afford to lose them all, the Covenant could not afford to lose them all. There is no need to worry; Carter and Pechorin will be back shortly.
In truth, of course, from the sheer howling quake that blasted through the Vellum, raking every unkin this side of eternity, with the death-cry of Eresh, but more from the burning, blinding sear of light that followed, and the deafening, icy silence in its wake, Metatron can tell those two are never coming back. But the others don't need to know this. When the right two newbloods come along, hell simply tweak their souls here and there in the renaming and bind them into this seven as their replacements. They won't be called Carter or Pechorin, but those human names are meaningless anyway. One angel of fire is all angels of fire. One angel of ice is all angels of ice. But he gives this broken seven the reassurances they need, patching over the cracks in their gestalt identity.
They're not the only cracks he has to worry about.
The news on the net is now reporting the discovery of an exciting new cache of cuneiform tablets looted from the ruins of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities back at the start of the Middle East War, where they had lain forgotten and untranslated for half a century under various turbulent or tyrannical regimes, now seized by US troops in a sting on stolen artefacts being used to fund the never-ending cells of terrorists streaming in from Syria, Iran, the Yemen, Saudi Arabia. The first tentative translations, the text scrolling across his lenses tells him, appear to indicate that this is an entirely unknown epic, telling of the conquering of the underworld by the god of war. They've christened it The Death of Ereshkigal. This is only one of the more rational and comprehensible effects. A new cult has appeared in Indian history, according to his cross-referencing search, a group called Thuggees worshipping a goddess of death called Kali, now eradicated, it seems, but still an alteration. Infant mortality rates. Flocking patterns of vultures. And those are just the start.
But it's the other cracks that worry him more. The disruptions in the temporal world from Eresh's death were to be expected, and with her having kept herself hidden in little nooks and crannies over most of humanity's written history, crawling in the dust and darkness, the majority of the changes are minor. Nothing like the shitstorm that happened when Marduk carved up Tiamat into little pieces; they called that the Neolithic Revolution. And Pechorin's death seems to have had all but no effect. But Carter is different. This little angel of fire, this nobody, this mere footsoldier in the war against the Sovereigns, the endless enemies of the Covenant, has left a trail of debris scattered through the Vellum and the world written in lines and solid shapes of certainty upon it that is completely disproportionate to his worthlessness.
Folklore and fairy stories, Jack the Giant-Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk. An urban legend from eighteenth-century London ¯ Spring-heeled Jack ¯ some fire-eyed demon leaping from rooftop to rooftop in impossible bounds. From London again, Victorian-era, a killer slaughtering prostitutes in Whitechapel. Calico Jack, a pirate of the Caribbean. A whole new musical movement finding an icon in an obnoxious orange-haired thug in shredded clothing wearing a flag now called the Union Jack. Fifty-two cards in a deck that once held forty-eight. Spring-loaded children's toys and balls in sports that go back centuries. All from this nobody, this nothing. It's like a million little sparks of his shatterling soul have started forest fires everywhere they fell.
Metatron dismisses the five and starts to contemplate the clean-up operation. At least, he doesn't have the Messengers to worry about now. Their inevitable story has the boy doomed the next time he sees his sister, and she herself, well, she'll be just another little demon, hating the world for what it's done to her. And revenge is so much more predictable than ambition as a motivation.
But Jack...
On Metatron's earphones, the words of a suddenly famous rock song howl.
I was born in a crossfire hurricane...
VOLUME TWO
Evenfall Leaves
ECLOGUE
The Song of Silence
Of Kings and Battles
Within the cavern of the tavern, two young hawks called Chrome and Mainsail spy old wily foxy Silence lain asleep, veins swollen with the wine of yesterdays and yesteryears as ever. Garlands slip, slide from his head, fall rolling to one side. A heavy wine-jar hangs by its worn handle.
They approach him, tentative until a flurry of wings behind them strengthens their faint hearts as Eagle, fairest of the knights, comes down to join them. The old man's teased them all just once too often with the promise of a song, and now they fall on him, to tie him up in his own laurels. Eyes wide open now and wrinkling, twinkling under the blood/red stains of mulberries smeared over his brow and temples, he laughs at their crafty scheme, cries out.
¯ Why all these bonds? Release me, boys. You've made your point and it's enough that you had the audacity to try, to think you have the strength to hold me. Well, you've earned your songs. Go on. List all you want. For you, it will be songs.
He looks from Chrome to Mainsail, back again, and at the Eagle in her adamantium armour and her wings. Fierce fire in her features; there's a battle going on within her, between fate and free-dom, the mark carved on her soul, the name held in her heart. He winks.
— I have another payment set aside for her.
And with that he begins.
*
¯ When once I sang of kings and battles, gods of synthe twitched at my ear and told me this: Teacher, a shepherd should have sheep full-fed and fat but he should sing a slender song. So now, my faeries, since you have so many pressing to express their praise for you, your various deeds and dreary wars, I'll muse instead, on this slim pipe cut from a reed, upon the rural idyll, fold my song into the fields ... as our first tales once deigned to dabble with the kind of verse that sires accuse, shameless, unblushing as it dwelt in woods of dappled light.
They don't look pleased, but Silence shrugs, the herdsman of his own soul.
— I babble only if my safety's vouched. Remember, faeries, if there's one, if there is one who reads of you in rapture, then our tamarisks and all the forest shall resound and sing of you, of you. And there could be no page more precious to the sun than that on which your name is writ.
And Chrome and Mainsail lay their weapons down, nodding assent to listen to a tale of other glories than their own.
— Well then, let us proceed godspeed, you virgin pyres, with music of the sickle, but let's sing a song slightly more solemn. Humble hedge and tamarisk do not serve everybody's taste; if we must sing of woods, let woods be worthy of a consul.
Now, indeed, you might see fauns dance to the beat, cavort with wild things of the woods, and sullen oaks bow down and sway their heads in time. Pernicious cliffs never rejoiced so much in being ravished by the sun, nor did the open road shimmer so sleek with rapture in the airs of Orphan's songs. For Silence sings.
The Silence of a Moment
Endhaven.
The dark sea crashes low, slow and rhythmic on the beach where chains and charms strung all along the wire fence jingle and jangle; and, up in the turmoil of the blue-black dust clouds overhead, gulls wheel, crying merciless complaints against the cold wind's moaning: and over all this I hear the bells of the rag-and-bone-man's cart, way off in the distance, cutting through if all, and I turn to Jack where he lies beside me, just so I can see his closed eyes and feel a little bit more secure.
¯ Are you awake? I say.
He mumbles something.
¯ Are you alive? I say, prodding his side with a finger.
¯ Something like that, he says, laughing. I stroke his arm, his cool smooth skin, and slip my hand into his. Jack gives my hand a squeeze but otherwise he is as still as the ground underneath us. Dead man Jack, mystery man Jack, breathing only when he wants to speak, is the silence of a moment, a moment drawn out to eternity. Lying curled in beside him, I can't help but expect the natural rise and fall of normal respiration, the steady rhythm of a heartbeat. The tension of anticipation, the disjunction of the way things were and the way things ... are, is something I have never gotten used to, and I'm not sure I want to. Jack's otherness is exciting to me; I have a hunger for the secret to his stillness.
¯ Why won't you tell me who you are? I say.
¯ I'm Jack.
He grins, an eyebrow raised as if to say, what more needs to be said?
¯ You know that's not what I—
