The Last Legends of Earth Read online

  “That means exceptional trouble.” Nappy Groff, short and wizened, with a cuff of frizzy white hair collaring his bald pate, regarded Chan-ti Beppu through his usual glum frown. “Beppu, I have cared for you these nineteen years that you might be fulfilled. But never—never, I say to you now—did I think you would choose to leave us.”

  Chan-ti sat in the grasp of a brambly tree that reached out over the precipice and afforded her a wide vista of the purple lowlands. When she turned toward the old man, her broad, pallid face shone with the world’s underlight. “My fulfillment is not here—not yet.”

  Nappy Groff scowled with an understanding he had come to hate. The girl he had reared to womanhood had not been wooed in the three years since she had reached the age of consent—at least not by anyone who pleased her. Slack-jawed Gorlik had proposed, but she could barely eat across the same table from him without getting ill. Tradition decreed that she leave and not return until she found her mate. She was not ugly, not in Nappy’s eyes, but neither did she look like the other women. After all, she was not of them. Nappy had found her as an infant, and she had grown into a gangly, wide-faced woman with brindled hair and slanted black eyes so weak she needed to wear lenses. She was clever, intrepid, and playful, though few of the men—who were mostly humorless, stolid workers— found that desirable; and of those who did, none would marry a woman a head taller than the tallest of them— except, of course, Gorlik, who had grown fond of her some seasons ago when she had removed a hook from his lip and did not tell the others he had been eating the fish bait.

  “You do not need to leave,” Nappy told her. “In time, our wanderings will find the right man for you. You’ve wit if not lucky looks. Trust that and time.”

  “In time, I will be a crone.” She climbed out of the tree and dropped into the shaggy grass of the cliff’s edge. She wore a sojourner’s outfit—hiking boots, leaf-pattern jacket, and brown denim trousers that hugged her blithe form, emphasizing her femininity yet not diminishing her rangy bearing. “Don’t worry for me, Father.” She kissed his wrinkled brow. “I remember everything you’ve taught me, and by that memory—your greatest gift to me —I will make my way through the lowlands and return with my mate.”

  Nappy Groff nodded and frowned with doubt. “The road to N’ym is long. But the road to the heart is without end and tireless as a circle. Be wary. And remember everything I’ve told you. Don’t speak with voors. No matter what they promise you, don’t speak with voors. Avoid the fogroads even if they seem shorter. Refuse anything to eat that the Weed Woman offers you at the Back Gates, but be sure to give her your gun. And when you get to N’ym, go directly to Rence Walla’s shop. He alone in N’ym is one of us and can help you. By now my letter has reached him and he has gathered the information you need.”

  Chan-ti’s smile gleamed in the stars’ cold light, and she kissed Nappy Groff again. “I’ll do as you say, Father. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  Groff hummed skeptically and tugged a narrow yet thick volume from under his utility vest. “If the man refuses you, you can sell this to Rence Walla.”

  She took the book of tawed leather in both hands, an ancient edition. “The Glyph Astra.” She identified the famous Book of Horizons by its ritual name, it seemed that old. “I can’t accept this.”

  “You must.” He denied her returning it with the back of his hand. “If the man refuses you, how will you live? Sell this book to Rence Walla. It is one of the early editions and will bring a noble sum, enough to live for many years—even in N’ym.”

  “I doubt N’ym will last even one more year, Father. The war—”

  “Let’s not speak of war. Departure is grief enough. Read me a farewell phrase, instead.”

  Chan-ti opened the book and turned its rugged pages to a favorite passage. By starlight and memory, she read: “‘We are nameless. In each hand we hold a story. Between them, between the right story and what’s left, our hearts are the wedge. You know this is true.’”

  Tears lit Nappy Groff’s creased face, and the parting with this found child wracked him almost as miserably as the deaths of his own children under the Forest’s talon and fang, long ago, before his mate had shriveled around her cancer and died, before pain came to mean not what was lost but what remained.

  Chan-ti Beppu traveled quickly down the cliff paths above the amethyst gulf of the abyss, under thorny groves hung with a perfume that smelled of the green sea and clung to her like smoke. Where the fogroads switchbacked among clouds, she detoured and descended the longer way along mulestairs and rootsteps. N’ym glimmered brighter, and she could see the glass spires and amber towers, their topmost windows catching the early rays of dawn and burning like stars.

  Many before her had come this way, disappearing into the melting clouds on their way down to the Back Gates. Some had returned, a few again and again, with marvelous accounts of the journey and of the city at its end. She knew well what to expect; even so, she advanced anxiously, fraught with uncertainty. The man she had chosen for her own was a stranger; she knew only enough of his story to believe he might love her.

  Behind her, she left harder choices: Gorlik or a solitary life. She doubted she would have had the resolve to leave all that was familiar if, the season before, Velma, her adoptive mother and Nappy’s wife, had not died. Velma, a voluminous woman, larger and more fair-skinned than most of the others, expansive with laughter and industry, had remained brave and calm through most of her illness. At the end of it, though, when she had shriveled to a mad hag, violent with those who tried to care for her, her death became excruciating and ugly. “Will I die?” her last words stammered.

  Since then Chan-ti had been asking that of herself and had become determined to do what she dreamed. In the brisk air of the cliffside, with astounding glimpses of the star-whisked sky through rushing clouds, her resolve felt holy. The cliff roads, in good repair, maintained by the monks who lived in black rock chapels and cave shrines, made travel down the narrow paths easy. Along the precipices, dwarf forests sheltered lemurs and winged lizards and dangled boughs of berries and fruits. At night, she slept under a slanted outcrop that shielded her from the soft rain. She returned to the path with first light and ate a breakfast of cane almonds and plums while walking.

  Darkness still eddied at the bottom of the gulf when Chan-ti reached the foot of the cliffs. She paused there briefly and ate the root bread and waxed berries her women friends had packed for her. As the dim sun rose higher, the plateau glinted like flint, throwing off light from the crystal-stemmed shrubs abounding there. Except for the humanlike face screaming at her from inside a boulder, and a diving attack of red bats angry that she approached their hanging tree, the crossing continued without incident. She slept that night under a mane of tasseled cane and early the next day reached the Back Gates.

  Here the fogroads came down the cliffs to the plateau, unfurling from the clouds along the mountain flanks and converging into a majestic boulevard cloistered with ponderous trees and blossom-belled lianas. The broad avenue curved along the western edge of N’ym in a long crescent and disappeared among hazes of mountain forests. On one side of the stone avenue, the land rose toward the valley ridge, wild, gloomy with moldering oak and swales of heather. On the other side stood the Back Gates, a seemingly endless corridor of city buildings fronting on colonnades and buttresses draped in ivy. Untrammeled grass and flocks of red flowers banked the back walls of the buildings, stonegray bulwarks, windowless, and scrawled with vines. Copper doors, green and black with the stains of centuries, loomed under lintels graven of weathered runes she did not understand. Above the peristyles bracing the backs of the buildings, the towers of N’ym reared. A few chimneypots were also visible and spears of radio antennae.

  Chan-ti hiked for another hour before finding the Weed Woman. True to Nappy’s prediction, she had spotted Chan-ti coming across the plateau and was waiting for her in one of the flower banks that filled the alcoves between the stone buttresses. She stood among
globular flower-heads and waist-high tufts of grass, her spiderweb hair strung with weed feathers, thistle burrs, and dead leaves. From the basket under her arm, she offered breadfingers, groat cakes, fruit necklaces. Chan-ti remembered Nappy’s warning and declined.

  The Weed Woman only looked human. She had been created by one of the many powers—the spiders, lizard angels, Fire, the Face of Night, or maybe even the World Eater. She was already there when the first people arrived. Over the generations, as people explored the Back Gates, they learned that only she knew which of the endless gates entered N’ym. Other doors, forced open, enter barren expanses and provide no way back, becoming barriers of transparency impenetrable as a reflection. The Weed Woman always opened the one Gate into the city, for all except those who accepted food from her. She led them giddily away, laughing and singing, through another door to a glimpse of yolky sunlight, birch and willows. None ever returned.

  Without a word spoken between them, Chan-ti followed the Weed Woman, who smelled acrid as burnt tar. On a green metal door twice the height of a tall man, the crone pressed her fingertips, and the pylon shoved inward with a rusty scream.

  Before entering, Chan-ti relinquished her pistol. Nappy had warned her many times that the only way past the old woman at the Back Gates was without guns. According to lore, the Builders of the Gates had put her there to guard against firearms. Anyone could see from the ravenous stare in her gray face that the Builders had chosen well. When the Weed Woman had Chan-ti’s wide-muzzle revolver in her crablike hands, her stare went flat, and she stood aside.

  Chan-ti Beppu cast a proud look back the way she had come. Between the flinty sparks of the plateau and the large stars, the cliff of fogroads stood luminous as a dream of distance and spectral mists. There was her old life, all nineteen years of it, compact enough to hold in her sight. She had been loved and well educated by Velma and Nappy Groff; she had experienced friendship among the other women, and passion with a few rowdy boys too turgid to care about her height or her odd features; and she had known belonging, communal kinship, at the nightly fire dances. Yet she did not belong there anymore—at least, not until she found her mate.

  Chan-ti turned and strode through the narrowly open door into a tight alley. She had to walk sideways between lichenous brick walls that turned sharply several times before squeezing out onto a yew lane. Black hedges with gold underleaves walled in monumental dwellings. For as far as she could see, the backs of sepulchral houses lined the lane, their skinny backlots enclosed in hedgerow trellises and yews dark as amulets.

  She hurried along. Nappy Groff had instructed her to leave behind the yew lane and the black hedges immediately, to take the first byway with a slate sidewalk that offered itself. At every second house, the yew lane crossed a cobbled alley that climbed hills past skinny buildings with boxed windows and mullioned galleries. She had to walk eight blocks before she found a slate sidewalk. As instructed, she turned left and continued to bear left among wending roads and tall, skinny, crooked buildings that made her dizzy to look at until she came to a shopfront whose bay window had an octopus and a squid set in stained glass.

  The door to the shop opened with a ting of bells. Among bins of many-colored corals and display cases of pearls and exquisite shells, Rence Walla sat in a wicker chair: a pink-whiskered gnome, watching a diminutive television set propped in the lips of a giant conch. Chan-ti recalled seeing him before, among visitors at home in the mead grotto. He recognized her at once, and while tiny laughter and applause pattered from the TV, he asked about Nappy and the others. Amenities over, he stroked his pink stubble and appraised her unabashedly, “You’re too ugly to be wooed at home and you come here? Dear dreamer, the people of N’ym are animals of perfection. They are true human pedigrees.”

  “Odd as I look, I too can love,” she replied with an even smile.

  “But here? Wanderer, this is the City of the Sky, where eyes are blue and hair the color of the sun. Look at you. Dark elfish eyes. Streaky brown hair. Face starved as a wastrel’s. And spectacles! No one in N’ym wears them. Chan-ti Beppu—go back home. So you’re excluded from the fire dance because you’re too old. That’s just a formality. You can make a life for yourself teaching the children, tending the old ones.”

  “That was my ambition, Rence Walla—until I met my hope of true love. He is the one man whose story could include me.”

  “His story?” The gnome’s thin lips hooked a mocking grin, and he darted a glance at the volume peeking from her jacket pocket. “You have given too much of yourself to The Book of Horizons, Chan-ti Beppu. Is that the edition Groff gifted you?”

  She took out the book and let the shopkeeper hold it. He ran stubby, freckled fingers over the blue leather cover and the soft spine. An iridescent script dull with age tooled the edges. “Ah—the lurid seventh edition—over fifteen centuries old and yet paper and binding still sturdy. For sure this came through a timeshaft. For sure. A lifetime’s luck for Groff to find this on his stravaging.”

  Chan-ti opened the book in his hands and turned to the Oracles. “Here, Rence Walla—this is what I am about. ‘When the lorn Foke marries the gentle warrior of the Aesirai, the last legends fulfill themselves.’”

  The shopkeeper flicked an incredulous stare at the young woman, and when he saw that she was serious, laughter jolted through him. “What has Groff done to let such a child abroad?” He slapped the book closed and rubbed away a tear with his wrist. “You believe the Glyph Astra talks to you?”

  “It talks to all of us,” she answered, with an edge of annoyance. “But only those who listen hear it.”

  “For sure. That was the deepest laugh I’ve had in a while, young sibyl. So you’ve come to N’ym to marry a gentle warrior, have you? Shall we have a look at him then?” From a desk scattered with invoices and starfish, he plucked a thumbnail-size photo of a square-faced man in an officer’s uniform whose open stare and boylike smile contradicted the threat of his dragonish brow. On the back, his address appeared in minute script.

  To her amazed smile, he said, “Not hard to get at all. He’s in the City’s Sky Guard. Their publicity brochure had all seventy-eight of them. Getting his address—that took a black pearl in the palm of the Guard garage attendant.”

  “I will find a way to repay you.”

  “Nappy and Velma paid me long ago, when they hid me from the voors. I had inadvertently sold some of the voors’ talismans. Those zombies would have dismembered me, but your folks kept me out of sight while they tracked down and returned most of the talismans. I owe them more than a black pearl and a photograph. If I can talk you into returning home, I will have repaid them.”

  Chan-ti tucked the photo into her jacket pocket. “I will return home—but only with my mate, or I’ll have to wed Gorlik.”

  “And if your gentle warrior is already married and the sire of a brood?”

  “He’s not. I did think to ask him that, sly-whiskers.”

  Rence Walla shrugged. “Not I to thwart an oracle from The Book of Horizons. Supper before you go?”

  Chan-ti stayed with Rence Walla long enough to bathe and launder, and to share a meal of braised scallops and seaweed soup. Then she unfurled the rain hood rolled into the collar of her denim jacket and sat deep in the seat of the battered car that the gnome had arranged to transport her. Through web-cracked windows, she watched several city districts float by—slender spires, brass-domed vaults, hillside brownstones. The bootjawed driver, who wore a fishmonger’s cap and apron and said not a word during the entire drive, stopped before a tower of gray-tinted glass. As Chan-ti stepped from the car, it pulled away to wait for her on a sidestreet in case no one was in.

  At the reception desk under pillars of crystalline light, the house guard scrutinized the hooded visitor. A matronly woman in braids, the guard announced Chan-ti Beppu’s arrival over the intercom without budging her eyes from the cowled figure. A long pause followed in which Chan-ti counted twelve heartbeats before a man’s voice said to sen
d her up.

  *

  Nothing in all the worlds offered as much beauty as the city of N’ym. Built atop the eaglebrow cliffs overlooking the Silver Sea, the glassy minarets of the city were the first to catch the red rays of daylight and the last to let them go. The day never got brighter than twilight in N’ym, even at noon, when the distant sun, Lod, cast the slender silkstone buildings and their pedestals of plazas in a wan auburn glow. The city towers glowed like coral and the hanging gardens among the hillside houses blazed with flagrant colors. By night, the boulevards and the adjoining mazes of avenues, wynds, and alleys tinkled with the light of sparkfly lanterns hung from streetside windows by each household. Seen from afar, the glimmery lantern fires of the domed houses and the arc lights among the downtown spires limned the ideogram for Sky. N’ym, the City of the Sky, perched at the very brink of land’s end, its opaline towers lifting high above the clouds that fogged the lower slopes and trawled the sea. Overhead, both by day and night, the sky swarmed with planets, stardust, and the icy green feathers of comets.

  On the steep hills, in their glass and brickwork tier-level houses, lived the Aesirai, lords of Valdëmiraën. The most powerful of them had whole hills to themselves, crowned with columned manors and stands of tapered trees above mirror ponds. But even the least of the Aesirai lived well in chalets behind willow tresses and under terraced gardens. For those who preferred simpler lodgings, mirrorglass towers in centercity provided suites overlooking plaza-groves of hickory and oak and arbored canals reflecting starlight and planetshadows.

  In the lowlands below the cliffs and the threading cascades, hamlets huddled, hundreds of clustered bungalows, some square-roofed, some thatched, all on stilts, with rude vegetable plots cut from the grass verges. Behind the crooked walls that separated the broken pavements of the hamlets’ asphalt streets from the sunken fields and the fallen boulders of the cliffs, the workers of N’ym dwelled: the laborers, janitors, refuse collectors, and harvest hands of N’ym. Below them, among sedgy tracts and weed-trammeled dunes, fishing shanties dotted the crescent coast.