Hal Duncan, page 48
¯ Humanity.
The Ballad of Seamus Finnan
¯ Tell her, the bitmites whisper in his ear. Consent to do her this one favour; tell her all that still remains of wandering. And give the other tale to us. Don't deem us undeserving of your words. We desire only this: tell us who will release you. How and by what means? Hush now, he thinks.
¯ If I tried to explain such wisdom as me dear old mother told it to me we'd be here forever, and there'd still be nothing learned. Ye couldn't fookin understand it even if I told you straight. If yer in earnest, if ye really are sincere, I'll not refuse to tell ye all ye want to know. But Seamus Finnan's sat here in this chair, remember, on the rock and in the wire, and only half of him is Seamus now, the other half the fookin ancient thief of fire.
He wonders how the first of the union ever dealt with this. Sure and it's madness, so it is, sitting and talking to the girl who was once yer sweetheart back in 1922 but with the vision of what's to come so clear ¯ as clear as a memory ¯ that ye don't know what now is, if yer in the future living the dead past again, or in the past remembering the future before it happens. Time in the Vellum, he thinks.
He can feel her kidskin glove warm in his hand, and he can feel the wire cutting into his wrist and he can feel the cold Caucasian rock at his back.
¯ These are the proofs of what you say, the bitmites hiss, the proofs to us of your intelligence, that it sees more than the visible.
But that's the rub, of course, thinks Seamus Shamash Padraig Prometheus Foresight Forsythe Four Scythes Finnan Finn the giant of Ireland and the giant of the world half-awake and half-asleep under the dreamings of humanity, a creature of the Vellum as much as a man of life and love and flesh. Does he take these bitmites for minions only out to do their master's bidding, using poor Seamus like a bucket down a well, drawing up the secrets of the future from the depths of his own past? Or does he take them for free agents that want only what we all do, just the understanding of ourselves and what we're doing here?
She sits at the foot of his rock, Anna, Phreedom, Io, in her long white dress, her long, dark hair blown in the cold wind, and is it Inchgillan, or is it the Caucasus? She holds his hand where it's chained against the rock ¯ Jesus, but the wires cut deep ¯ and the way she looks at him he somehow knows it doesn't matter if she's a phantom, if she's just a form adopted by the bitmites trying to communicate with him through the media of his memories.
- To you first, Io, then, he says, I'll tell the wanderings that will vex you. Engrave them on the tablets of the heart, because ye know, ye know that what I say is true. I'll tell what you'll endure, and if ye give me just a little time I'll reach the point, and take ye to the very limit of your wanderings. I'll tell ye all, and if there's any of it unintelligible to you, or just difficult to understand, ask all ye want. I'll try to make it clear; I have more time to kill than I would like. I'll give you all you want to take.
— Give us a song, then, Tam. Come on. The Ballad of Seamus Finnan, eh?
She turns her head, watches the man as he strums his guitar and starts.
— Well there was a young man, Seamus Finnan by name, who went off to the war, O, to play the great game. Now it wasn't the blood and it wasn't the fire, but his heart it was broke by a night on the wire.
She's heard them sing about her. She's heard the whole term of her travels told in epic verse, her past and future, what will happen when she comes to the molasses land, close to the speaking oaks up in the mountains of the New Dordogne, where all these protean Dukes sit on their thrones as oracles; now more than ever it's as if they're only following upon the tracks of words spoken a long, long time ago. She's heard the tales of Jack too, the prodigy, the prodigal, and clearly, and without enigma, those who sing these songs want her to be the famed fiancee of a deus. It's strange the way things change here in the Vellum, as if the more mutable the world is, the more the people in it seek to put it into simple terms. And now she sits in the tavern listening to the Ballad Of Seamus Finnan, a folk' song about this young Irishman who goes off to fight in the First World War. Finnan never really was one to talk about his past, but as she listens to the song, a shiver runs down her spine.
¯ Well, it wasn't for Belgium, it wasn't for France. It wasn't for England he entered that dance. It was all for the love of a sweet Irish lass, that he marched through the muck and the guns and the gas.
¯ See, Anna his sweet had a brother called Tom, and he tapped his feet to the beat of the drum. With his Trinity pals he got wild in the pub. And they took the King's Shilling and signed with the Dub's.
The tavern ¯ no, this is more of a pub ¯ is Finnan through and through, with the stag's heads on the wall and the wooden indian boy, the papier-mache effigy of a ruler hated for her cruelty and called the Iron Lady, depicted with the savage, beaked nose and beady eyes of a political cartoon. Hundreds of different whiskies line the walls behind the bar. Men sit in a corner, on wooden pews taken from some old church, playing guitar, fiddle and bodhrin. The pub itself is called the Uisge Beatha. Water of Life, explains Don. Outside, the waters of the Gulf of Rear are chopped up in the same storm that tossed their little vessel back and forth all the way along the coast. Waves crash over the sea wall of Nova Iona and in the wildwinds of Evenfall only the odd maniac can be seen now and again through the bubbled glass of the window, struggling along in a yellow waxed coat, one step forward, two steps back, flapping a hand to drive away the grey maelstrom of mechanical, magical midges, the bitmites that they can't escape, no matter how far they travel. She never visited Scotland or Ireland back in the world before this afterworld, but this seems to be a little piece of Celtic geography in the depths of the Vellum, an expatriate archipelago. She imagines ancient Ionian sailors blown here through tears in reality and returning home with tales of the strange Western Islands, the Hebrides.
¯ Now Seamus was hurt to see Anna so sad, so he swore to her then to look after the lad. And he picked up his kit and he followed young Tom. Yes he followed the boy all the way to the Somme.
Three or four of the others around the table all join in with the chorus.
— Tis a hard thing is life, tis a hard thing indeed. And it's easy to die, cause it's sorer to bleed. But tis hardest of all for the last man to stand, looking down at yer pals all across No Man's Land.
There Is a City
¯ If anything is left to tell, the bitmites chorus, speak of her sad journey. Speak of what's to come or what is past. But if you're done, give us the favour which we ask. Remember.
So Prometheus, he says to Io:
¯ When ye've travelled through the tumult of the flood, he says, across the boundary of continents, towards the burning oriental sun, sure and ye'll reach a great plain of gargantuan cisterns, deep wells in the earth where neither sunbeams shine nor moonlight falls at evening or night...
They guide their horses carefully across the pitted land, night-vision goggles scouring the land in front of them, alert for all the dangers of the terrain, and alert for all the dangers of its inhabitants. The shanty-town stretches for miles around them, tents and shacks of corrugated iron and wooden board that make her think of the out-skirts of Mexico City. Stumps of dead volcanoes rise out of the mass of unpaved streets lit up by burning oilcans around which the denizens of this wounded land huddle, staring up at them as they pass. A boy drawing water up from one of the natural wells stops to look at them, rope in hand, eyes shining as they track the silver crucifix cross-bow of the disruptor slung over Don's back. Further on an old man merely shrugs and pours a bucket of filth down one of the other holes, drops a sheet of corrugated iron back over the cesspit. She wonders if the smell is worse now than when the lava field was still active and sulphurous fumes bubbled up through molten rock, creating the unstable land of pits and thin bridges that could collapse at any moment.
Don whistles as they ride on.
¯ All the way, she'd said.
Three old toothless hags with necks stretched up by hoops of ivory, white like swans in the moonlight, sit on a rug outside a tent, their scarred faces with only one eye between the three of them, lit by what looks to be a shining boar's tusk that they sit around; it's brighter than the moon. Inside a shack, glimpsed through the open door, she sees three women all tattooed with iridescent dragon/scales over their bodies, naked but for the veils on their faces and the long hair, braided and beaded like snakes, that falls down their backs and over their shoulders. One of them stretches her black wings out wide as her and Don ride past. A scent of incense wafts out of the shack, something sweet and rotten at the same time, a delicate poison, almonds and corrupted fruit, yeast and burning plastic. Creatures somewhere between the size of cats and dogs circle and sniff amongst deep heaps of garbage, ribcages showing through their golden fur, beaks picking silently at scraps, wings flapping as they claim this chunk or that as theirs. Graia, gorgons and gryphons.
She looks over to her left, at another gruesome sight. A host of horsemen watch them from the other side of a deep ditch of a gutter in full flow, flooded with a golden liquid that smells like ¯ that has to be ¯ a mix of piss and beer. The riders are all one-eyed, known through these lands as Ahriman's Spies. The story is that when they gouge one eye out there's another vision looks out through the empty socket, through the eye that isn't there, that they become like cameras for their . . . controller sitting in a dark room somewhere, surrounded by a thousand screens.
¯ I tell ye, Phree, Finnan had said, there's dangers in the Vellum that ye can't fookin imagine. But here ...
And he'd tailed off, shaking his head. He couldn't persuade her not to go, of course. She belonged with the monsters now. She'd head out into the Vellum, as far away from the Covenant as she could get, and she'd be safe. Her and Jack would be safe.
— Maybe, he'd said. How far are you willing to go?
¯ All the way, she'd said.
— There is a city, Canopy, he says, last of a distant land and near the fountains of the sun, inhabited by a dark race. You'll find it by the aether's open river, by the broad banks and the wide mouth of the River Nill, where it sends down its sweet and sacred stream, down from the mountains, babbling.
They creep down the river's steep bank, feet skidding under the scree of the steep incline, digging their ruptors in as staffs to keep from losing their footing. In the distance she can hear the rumble of the great waterfall beyond the city where the Nill crashes down over the cliffs and into ... nothing. Above them on the ridges of the ravine, the lights of the city glitter against the dark sky, amongst the silhouettes of minarets and domes. Great iron bridges span the gulf here. Further down the ravine widens, the gradient lessens and the buildings crawl down the slopes to meet. The river itself becomes shallower and splits off into streams that disappear into grated sewers under the city streets, the whole construction built over the delta of the Nill. Canopy they call it and that's sort of what it is, closing over the branching river and roofing it in vaults of stone, plugging the mouth of the ravine like a great dam. Somewhere under the city, the streams reunite though and she knows that, on the far edge of the city, like a Trevi Fountain built by God, it thunders out through an enormous sluice gate, falling down forever into empty eternity. The city at the end of the world.
She looks behind her at the ragtag mob now following them, her progeny of sorts, her colony. There's fifty of them in all, and every one of them no more than a girl, every one of them in silk shifts and with perfumed hair, and some of them crying because their feet hurt; they don't have the shoes for this terrain, only soft slippers like a ballerina's, like a bride's. They don't look capable of it, she thinks. Not one of them could you look at and picture the vengeance and the bodies, war's welcome in a marriage bed, those girlish hands wrapped in a husband's hair and round a two-edged dagger cutting the man's throat, such a picture of divine brutality, a dove splattered with blood. But she knows better. Cousins, she thinks. What kind of man would sell his daughters to his brother's sons?
¯ Their laws don't bind us, princess, Arkos had said, sitting corpulent and complacent in his tent, as his nephews died in silence and darkness, and she stood there with her ruptor trained on him, Don outside keeping watch. The great pharaohs practised incest, he had said. To build a dynasty of pure-bred unkin — think of it — with not a drop of human blood to soil their veins. The purity. I don't care if they're .. . unwilling. They will bear my royal race.
And then the ruptor in her hand was hot and Arkos was a pile of ash.
It wasn't her plan — it never is — just another case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, where a young girl could come to her, tell her that she had to help them, that she had to. I know your real name, she had said. I know your real name, Phreedom.
She looks behind her at them all, scattered, scrambling down the slope. Only one of them, fifth back from Don, couldn't bring herself to do the deed, wavering at the last minute, whether it was from fear or love or just not wanting to be stained with blood.
And not far behind these doves now she can see the hawks, Arkos's men, his brother and his sole surviving son. Don follows her gaze, turning around. He looks at her, at their pursuers, back at her and raises his disruptor.
— Go, he says.
Go, thinks MacChuill. Just go. Now, before you change your mind. Before Henderson decides to chase you out here and drag you back into that bloody travesty of an interrogation. Just get the fuck out of here and go. Aye, but where? he thinks.
He closes his eyes and leans back against the wall of the slaughterhouse, feeling the sun warm on his face and soaking it up. The red and orange and golden glow of it through his eyelids seems full of indistinguishable patterns, wheeling things that almost resolve into regular shapes ¯ spirals, mandalas ¯ but never quite make that much sense. And it's what he feels like. like he's just one of those wee bits of things that's moving in circles around and around as part of a pattern that he cannae bloody well make head nor tail of.
He opens his eyes and it takes him a while before he can distinguish the dots floating, distant in the sky, from the after-images of sunlight broken-up and filtered by his own thin skin and veins, before he can make out the circling birds of prey. And it looks that ordered, too. It looks like they're patrolling the skies with purpose, with a plan, the whole flock of them going round and round the way soldiers patrol the perimeter of a camp, in a jungle somewhere, green and lush like this mountainous part of Mexico. He remembers watching men in uniforms the same colour as his bamboo cage and the bamboo splinters that go under the fingernails. Going round and round.
The tips of his fingers are still numb from touching the Irishman's soul, and he flexes them, rubs his hands together.
But of course the birds only look like they've got a purpose, so he's told. In truth, they don't know where they're going; they're just following each other, keeping close enough together, far enough apart, to feel comfortable with their situation. That's what flocking is, this ¯ what's the word? ¯ emergent behaviour, that seems ordered but is really chaos. So he's told. MacChuill still has problems adjusting to this new world with its new ideas and new wars. New enemies. He wishes things were as simple as they used to be, when he was a lad, whenever that was.
This isnae your fight, he thinks. No if it's a fight that means torturing some poor bastard, some poor sad bastard that never done anyone any harm except for in the foolishness of being in pain. No. He cannae conscience this. He cannae.
Seamus Finnan, he thinks. Where do I know that name from? And somewhere in the back of his head he finds a memory of a wee pub in Glasgow and a folk musician sitting in a corner singing a song. How did the chorus go again?
Tis a hard thing is life. Tis a hard tiling indeed. But it's easy to die 'cause it's sorer to bleed. But the hardest to be is the last man to stand, looking down at your pals all across No Man's Land.
MacChuill makes a decision.
He's got no idea of where he's going, but looking around him at the empty loading bay he knows that he's got to get the fuck away from here right now. Maybe, somewhere there's a fight thaf s right for this old soldier of an empire on which the sun, they said, would never set, but it's not here, not now.
Don glances up one last time at the buzzards and starts walking.
Waking the Giant
¯ It was a wise man, Anna says, who weighed things in his mind, and said it first, that marrying according to one's station is the best.
Not being just a labourer, a menial, he thinks bitterly, with hands too dirty, sure, to woo those who're so clean, so pure with wealth and fookin breeding, so fookin pristine. I hope yer fookin happy with yer fookin officer, whatever his fookin name is. But the defeat in him is like a lead weight in his heart, an anchor dragging him down into the cold Atlantic that he stares out into, and part of it's because he knows she won't be happy. He can hear it in the tremble of her voice, that it's herself she's trying to convince with her old man's words. Sure and does she really have a choice in the matter?
He slides off the rock and walks out across the beach, crouches down to pick up a flat stone. It skims across the grey water, bouncing, bouncing, one splash, two, three, then it disappears. Would she run away with him, he wonders. Is that what she's really here for? Not to kick him when he's down, poor crazy Seamus Finnan locked up in a looney-bin that's passing for a War Hospital, not just for the horrid cruelty of it, but in the hope that he'll say what she's too afraid to say herself, maybe even too afraid to think. Sure and he doesn't want to see her in this state, unhappy with the wrong man, in a foolish marriage that's half love, half hate.
