Three from the Stones Read online

  Vegetation covered the earth around them. Sleek, rubbery pods of green and deep mauve. And some of them, so turgid, had ruptured, and a clear pus dripped down to glaze their stems. Soft, knobby fruits hung from many. On the ground between them were the fallen fruits, already brown and half-devoured, worms swimming through.

  Clouds of flies in shapes ever reconfiguring wagged from here to there and lapped the juices. And the bats, wary enough of the humans to clear a path before them, regathered in their wake, shuttling through the clouds of flies to feast.

  Rhoneh thanked whatever part of himself had called him back to this, the space outside. For he knew that very soon more would be required of his faculties than simply to place one foot in front of the other.

  But, at the same time, he despaired at having abandoned his creations for the sake of this, this dread tedium, this Great Wound. And the endless effort of moving through space.

  Having already lapsed once into his inner world it was all the harder to remain outside. So it is with one who, having submerged fully into a warm pool, stands up again, wet and naked, to be lacerated by a cold wind.

  He knew he must remain attentive, engaged, both for his own sake and for that of his others. Never more than now was his attention so essential. And yet he felt only mercy toward the transgression he knew he was about to commit. He slipped back into the warm pool, and was relieved.

  Chapter XIV

  He thought he could guess. For days he had listened. Had heard each chirp, each click, each coo. Absorbed in his listening Lhiar had not, at first, hoped to find any pattern or sense to the song — no more than a blithe, weary traveler, absorbed in watching a rushing stream, hopes to anticipate what designs will appear next in the froth of the current.

  But he could feel the movement of the song. As one riding a horse feels the animal’s motions below.

  Then gradually he had become more and more aware of the nuances. The movement seemed to come from him; the horse’s steps were his own steps, and the progression of this journey of sound that he heard outside of him began to take form as if from within his own mind. Not quite visually — no. If asked to describe the shape or direction of the song he could not. But he could feel it, inside and out. It was his own journey.

  As if he were a man sprinting over the brittle surface of a frozen lake, discerning spontaneously, mid-leap, where and how to land his foot, and how next to spring forward, and not land wrongly and crash down through the fragile ice. This was how he heard it, the song of the tomtoads. Discerning — or deciding, it seemed—each note only in the very moment in which it appeared, so that it seemed to be somehow both surprising and also premeditated.

  Carried by one after the next of these mad footsteps. Absorbed in the arrival, in the immediacy, of each new sound. And as to all the other sounds successive and previous, as to any kind of reflection or anticipation, as to the overall movement of the song, its future progress, and the course it had taken up to the present moment, Lhiar could at first afford to entertain only a vague, abstract acknowledgment. As vague as a tight-rope walker’s acknowledgment of the vast space to either side of the line.

  But a radical moment came. And the scope of his sight widened.

  Now, suddenly, it was as if he had looked up from the mad racing footsteps and seen before him what could be nothing other than the complete, remaining course of the song’s journey. Where it would go, and how. Beginning with the very next step.

  The song was a shape, an intention, an idea, in progress. And he saw not just the one step, but the very road, from here in the present moment, stretching far ahead to the journey it meant to fulfill. It made sense. It was only proper. Given what had come already, he could see where it must naturally go.

  This great change in his understanding occurred in a single moment. And he prepared himself, radiant, breathless, for the next moment to come, which would be the moment of affirmation. The moment when his ears would perceive the sound that he now could expect to arrive. The moment when his own mind would unite with the mind of the tomtoads.

  He listened for it.

  But, when it arrived, the note that he heard was so utterly not what he had anticipated that a despair like a gasp, like a vacuum, swept through him. It was as if the ice had split below him — and he fell.

  No, he had not mastered it. The road still eluded him. The sense of the song, its meaning, its intention, which he had grasped at and fondled with such hope, now had splintered into shards that cut his hands. No, he could not enter into the song, could not sing with the tomtoads. On the contrary, he now saw, he did not have the least knowledge about any of it.

  Lying on his mat his shoulders rose, tense, to his ears. He beat his hands on the floor.

  Chapter XV

  If he tried to latch onto them, to make note of them, he lost them. To observe them as a creature that remembers, a creature that catalogs, that clutches hold, was to place too much distance between the images and himself. In the instant that he grasped at them they would slip away.

  So Rhoneh did not try to remember the things he saw, but witnessed only, immersed. A spectator to himself.

  Resting in silence, as in a dark cathedral, he watched the pictures appear. They were squeezed into existence out of some darkness, to arrive before him; and then, in the next moment, they collapsed back to make room for others. They came to him naturally, propelled, it seemed, by their own motives. From where, or why, Rhoneh could not say.

  But gradually he began to assert himself. As one slowly alters the direction of a ship by a finger’s nudge at the steering wheel, he asserted his will, with a finger’s nudge, over the vessel of his mind. Ever so slightly influenced its course as it navigated that dark current of shapes and feelings.

  Still, he did not know what, precisely, would appear. Still, the forms that came were startling, provocative, elating — and yet he now felt somehow responsible for them.

  He was setting the parameters, adjusting the apertures through which they flooded him.

  Like an experienced birdsman he watched these images appear, and watched for the ones that had not yet come. Waiting in the woods patiently, scattering a carefully concocted mixture of feed, hoping to attract rarities.

  The rarities came.

  First, out of the darkness, the drawing room of an elaborate house. The room was quite large — large enough to house a small forest. Yet this in itself did not strike Rhoneh as extraordinary, for still, despite the room’s size, he could with a single glance take inventory of everything inside it.

  And, as a man in waking life might glance down at his hands and be reminded of himself, of his shape, his constitution, and his physical boundaries — just such a feeling entered Rhoneh as he glanced at the room. As if this were some vital and personal characteristic, or some definition. As if whatever else he had experienced in his life, this room represented a thread that had travelled through it all.

  He sat down in the middle of the room, and this action seemed to carry an immense weight, for all things hushed around him. As if a chief had taken his seat at the head of his council. And whatever was about to follow, however it was going to express itself, it was, all the same, for one purpose only: to affirm the omnipotence of this chief within his proper realm.

  He sat for eons.

  The material of the room, then, slowly, began to dissolve into something else. But within Rhoneh nothing stirred. Though everything that he saw began to change around him, still the scene, as far as what it meant for him, did not essentially change. It was as if the room were still, in fact, there — only now it was something else.

  It had become an open plain of grey night. And shapes grew from the greyness. Still, Rhoneh sat in the center of his domain, untouched by the greyness, untouched by the wide silence. Untouched by the shapes that took form around him. He himself unchangeable, the chief within his proper realm.

  In waking life there are things made by human hands — things like pots and brushes, stairs, nail
s, curtains — and to look at them is to be reminded of their artifice, of their having been made. And, as for the things not shaped by human hands — trees and clouds and stones — one can, upon looking at them, also be reminded of their having being made, born, grown, ignited, shaped by water and time. But the forms that came out of the greyness of the wide plain were entirely the opposite. To look at them was to be reminded of what was never made. Like splinters or burrs that had latched onto the heaving organic form of the universe, traveling with it, and yet alien, appended, unaltered by its processes of growth and transformation.

  Like needles of eternal light in the greyness they danced around Rhoneh. And Rhoneh began to be affected by them. To be moved. To be estranged.

  He felt his insides give way like a ledge on a muddy slope, falling, falling, away from himself. And he, in his awareness, was both what fell and what remained. So that he was, more precisely, the rapidly growing distance between two points. An avalanche, a yawn, a schism.

  The grey expanse, which just moments before had been his own, his personal realm — perhaps more under his control, even, than his finger, or his eyelid (which might once in a while twitch of its own accord) — this domain had transformed. It had been filled with those primordial, alien shapes. And he the chief had been replaced with himself as he now was, expanding, flailing, like a radio wave hurtling into the dark reaches of space. Growing, and only ever lonelier in its growth…

  …until, finally, he found himself outside his dream, in his bodily form, in waking life. Sweating and weary in the Great Wound. Several moments elapsed before he overcame his confusion.

  He looked before him and saw eyes, frightened and hostile. Looking down he saw a great rift in the earth, fifty meters deep. His left hand was clasped tightly around a tree trunk at the edge of the gorge and he was leaning over it, one hand extended toward the figure on the opposite bank, whose eyes glared.

  Frightened and hostile.

  It was a rush of so much important information that Rhoneh nearly collapsed. Yet he did not collapse. He maintained his grasp on the tree and thought furiously, trying to determine what must have occurred in the moments just previous, and what was now demanded of him.

  His body felt unnaturally light, and, on searching his person, he realized that the cords of rope he had been carrying were not with him. He glanced at the figure on the opposite bank, but she, too, was without them. The ropes were not to be found. And it came as a certainty to Rhoneh that what had happened was this: that they had needed cross the rift, one by one; that each had passed to the next their provisions, before leaping across to the opposite bank; that Rhoneh, as he passed his ropes, had erred, had passed them to no one, missing the open, outstretched hand and dropping them instead down to the gorge’s bottom. Trusting, as an infant trusts: passing the ropes to the air. And the air received them.

  So Rhoneh had behaved, in his own absence.

  A heat like a fever flushed over him. He looked again, and saw the figure on the opposite side back away to make room.

  Rhoneh leaped across.

  Chapter XVI

  Silence, but for the sound of the falls below. Silence, despite the hundred bodies in the room.

  Beyan was afraid. Already he had seen things he had never seen before. Grown ones had entered. Removed from streetview they took off their masks and folds, and their arms and faces lay bare, thick like bark, and gray their skin. Without hair, without lashes. Their flesh like a mold lumped upon them.

  These were the first Beyan had seen of the grown ones, behind their clothes. And for an hour now he had shared the room with them, and also with other young ones like himself, still haired and soft-skinned.

  Waiting for it to begin.

  Beyan was ready for it, and yet did not know what to expect. It did not occur to him that anything might be asked of him. He had come here, he had given himself up to it, was willing to be led down or up whatever road it would take. The others in the room, they seemed the same way. Ready for it to start, and equally ready to wait endlessly until it did. Until someone started it.

  And it happened that one voice began to sound, though whose Beyan could not say, for the voice’s keeper did not stand forward, but remained among them, in the midst of the crowd.

  “Once, maybe, there were tyrants in the world who made their slaughters and conquests because they knew how much pleasure they would gain from them. Maybe one of them, catching a sweet fragrance blown by a distant wind, razed every forest and city, searching every drawer, every hollow on the way, until he found the substance at the source of that smell. And when he found it, he used it to prepare the finest smelling oils and delicacies, and he reveled in them. And one ounce of all his sins was paid for by the great pleasure they afforded him.

  “Another, maybe, once saw a bird fly past with antlers like an elk, and a tail of long silken plaits. Fancying it, the tyrant burned every tree and tower in the kingdom so that the bird would of necessity roost in the parapets of his own castle. And, having lured the bird close, he sat and watched it, and wondered at it, and smiled. And if he had strewn atrocities across the face of the earth with every act he committed in his waking life — still, an ounce of his soul was redeemed by his pleasure in what he took.

  “But the tyrants who govern this, our world, are a worse breed. Perhaps a more tragic breed. A petty breed. For they take and take and do not love. They get, at every cost, what they desire, and yet find no pleasure in it. Negligent of the scars they leave. Negligent of their unjust demands. Negligent of the gross abundance around them. Negligent of the very wonders that bombard their senses. They are slaves to their own tyranny.”

  The voice was young. It cracked now and again. A boy’s voice, a child’s — yet with razors in its words. And for an instant Beyan thought of the tomtoads, whose voices were so gentle, so melodic. And yet they had not chosen their voices, no, they could only make do with the ones they had. And what words of fury might their sweet music carry?

  “You can see their destructions in this very room. Look down, and maybe see the scars on your own bodies, feel the flesh crying, outraged, ‘What have they done to me?’ Feel the stiffness in your joints, the stiffness they laid upon you.

  “And if you are still young, and so far exempt from the miseries of which we speak, the miseries you see around you — then, look well at your hands! For they will change! Feel well the ease of breath and motion, the eyelids still light and spry, needing no strain to be held up, needing not always the greatest exertion to prop up their weight. Feel well — and take pleasure! Yes, take pleasure! You had better — for you may be the very tyrants of whom I speak!”

  Tears crowded Beyan’s eyes. Tears whose source he could call only, “Emotion,” for his reason could not carry him so far as to interpret it as guilt. He was thinking of Lehlan, and of the pumpkin seed bun, and again he was filled with an unknowing, a desperateness. A perception of wrongness he could not identify, but in the midst of which he felt himself trapped.

  “Is it just, that our grown ones should bear such tribulation? That they should scorch their bodies so? That they should live two days of each month as upon the narrow blade of a knife — a painful road, aye, that one, to walk, and oblivion only one misstep to either side! Is it just, that they must cloak their bodies? Keep at bay the contagions caught out there, in the Great Wound, which not even the hottest steam may burn away? Is it just, that they must silence their mouths? Keep at bay their heavy words, lest they crush all their others with a like despair?”

  An alarm filled Beyan. He looked at the bodies around him, and the grey skin, and he thought about the contagions. Surely some must already have seeped into the air over the past hour. Into the air, and down into his own lungs.

  And his panic became an anger, at the grown ones, for having removed their masks and cloaks and exposing themselves. But when he had allowed himself a moment’s thought he turned his anger from them to the tyrants. For wasn’t it the tyrants, after all, who were a
t the root of it?

  “Is it just? To demand so much? And for what? For whose sake? So that little ones can chew on poppy seed buns. And apricot cakes. Gobble them down and complain there’s no more. Or spit them out, throw them on the ground, and whine, ‘The honey lacks in sweetness!’ If they only knew whence their rolls and jams came, at what cost they were gathered and stewed — their great shame might make men of them!”

  Beyan thought of his others, the little ones from school. Thought how, indeed, they were not men, were not women. Were such children. So childish. How they would indeed quarrel over their cakes and rolls, and make complaints, “Not enough! Not enough!” How sometimes even they threw them at each other, so that the pastries were spoiled on the ground.

  Beyan thought about them with scorn. And if he thought about himself it was only about the person he had been, once; and, then, unknowing. For now he knew. He had heard the voice of the Maddened. He had seen beneath the grown ones’ folds. He was different now. He knew.

  And thus, knowing, surely he was not to be counted among those tyrants whom the voice of the Maddened named?

  “And what remains now to be known is what more we can — must — do. And what we do we must every one of us do. For that is our only hope for a change.”

  Chapter XVII

  Fourteen men and two women beside a half moon low in the sky.

  They huddled among the sicklenut leaves. Each leaf sleek and long and padded, like a rubber sheath. A rare friend to these folk in the world they knew.

  They, the folk, took out their pouches, and from each a pinch of agar. Some of them downed it in an instant, deeming that better. Others held it in front of them and stared for moments, minutes even, trying to savor the experience of the agar not yet on their tongues.