Awake in the Night Land (25 page)

I remember I asked him once why he bothered to record my testimony: “None of you believe me. The Night-Hounds are intelligent. One will, one malice, one purpose, moves all the powers in the Night Land against us.”

Ctesiphon said, “My lady, no one can doubt that seven of the Greater Powers beheld you as you crossed the Land, and spared you. By the time you stood and flashed your weapon and shouted your brother’s name, not eight miles from the House of Silence, and were not slain, even the most skeptical of us were convinced that something was preserving you.”

I said, “Such was my guess at the time, but I tried to keep it away from the forefront of my thoughts, lest the Ulterior Ones be aware that I had pierced their masquerade, and find no further use for me.”

He made a note of that, nodding, and then he said: “The opinion is divided whether the Dark Powers acted to spare you, that you might betray our Pyramid to their plan, or whether one of those mysterious Good Powers was hovering near you, unseen, keeping the malignancy at bay. When you rode in front of the Crowned Watcher, and it beheld you, all our needles jumped, and atmospheric microphones recorded a voice that sang a song of great beauty, coming from somewhere in the smoke clouds overhead. Perhaps there is something above those clouds, which acted to hinder the Watcher.”

I said, “It was not a Good Power which persuaded Dracaina to trick me to open the Circle for her. It was her cunning. The Night-Hounds are intelligent. I saw the sense in her behavior. I heard Draego speak.”

He shook his head. “Unlikely. Limophoitos is a simpler explanation: fasting-delirium. Your mind strained to make sense of throat-noises which meant nothing.”

“No: it was a message.”

“What did it say? The monster, I mean.”

“ ‘
One word away
’.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have had many nightmares about it, and finally the meaning became clear. Draego was saying that Dracaina, invited over the boundary of the Circle, was about to raise her mouth and call out an invitation to the Black Things. The physical barriers of our armor could not have stopped these Greater Powers, which are only partially in our continuum. It would have meant sudden, absolute, and instant annihilation of mankind. Death for us all, if she had spoken the proper word to open the Circle. One word away. She was opening her mouth to speak when I cut her throat.”

I was expecting him to roll his eyes.
How convenient that the madwoman who breached our gates just so happened to save us all!
But he took the comment soberly.

He shook his head. “Let us suppose that the monster was occupied by a sending, or by some other art had been granted a temporary intelligence. It could not have uttered the Master Word with its brain-elements. The Circle would not part, not for it.”

“Polynices treated them with human love. Perhaps he taught them the Master Word.”

“Rubbish.”

“Perhaps being raised by Man, the monster-beast actually learned love and loyalty, and so could understand the Word.”

“Rubbish.” He snorted. Then, remembering who I was: “Ah, excuse me, my lady! I mean; that is not in accord with the received wisdom, my lady.”

“You stopped taking notes. Are you going to write down Draego’s last words?”

He shrugged. “We don’t write down what the Voices in the Darkness say, my lady. They speak only to deceive. But, I will write your ladyship’s account, and your theory, because later generations will know more, and their aeon will judge the true and false of it, not ours.”

“Yet it is true. There is a single malignant will which guides all the horrors against us.”

“Mandragore the Eschatologist is the ancient authority whose opinion is most respected in the area: and he avers that the Night Land acts with greater unity of purpose, and grows more cruel and subtle, whenever a daughter of Man ventures into the Outer World.”

I said, “Why?”

“No one knows why. The monograph of Abrasax has been indicted as heretical, but it claims the Night Land is merely a projected materialization of our gathered fears. But if his theory is correct, we could deduce that women, whose spiritual strength is known to be greater than that of men, merely by walking the land, would more greatly feed the Powers there, and make them grow more terrible. The orthodox opinion, following the writings of Bellona and Autonoös, is that the feminine nature is more sacred than the masculine, and creates a greater desecration, more useful to the enemy, when it is degraded. The enemy does not wish merely to kill our bodies, you know.”

I asked angrily: “And how would anyone have discovered this? Since no woman, ever, has walked the Night Land, save Mirdath the Beautiful, and save me?”

“You were not the first, nor was she, though we suppress the tales of prior women who violate the law, lest ambitious maidens like you take heart.”

“You suppress the truth!”

“My Lady,” he said, bowing. “When the truth becomes a weapon in the hand of the enemy, it loses its sacred character. When love compels you to acts so heedless that all human life is set in peril, even love becomes an abomination, an abhuman thing, rather than a perfect culmination of our spirit.”

The entries were filed under my name. I was brought up out of my cell to the Affirmation Hall to read and confirm the entries, and affix my seal magnetically, and with the concentration of my brain-elements.

It was a grand and stately hall, hung with somber black and green, to symbolize the outer dark and the inner gardens. All the Masters of the Order were present, as well as a number of Archivists, Librarians carrying their ceremonial lamps, Foretellers with their chains of office, Scholars, Antiquarians, and even two Aediles of the Architectural Board, measuring rods in hand.

THE TESTAMENT OF ANTIGONE. The scrivener applied the words, and the witnesses applied their seals. That terrible and insulting name now would be preserved as long as history; as long as the Last Redoubt should stand. I raised my eyes to see the great calendar that hangs above the Archives. Four million years of history remained to be recorded, and the blank books on their pedestals, numbered and arranged, stood to my left, many fewer than the filled books of history to my right.

In the Vestry, after the ceremony was done, I asked the prentice Monstruwacan who escorted me about all this: how could I, who had disgraced every law of mankind, be granted so honorable a mention, my name written in the books of eternity?

The young prentice just smiled. “Oh, we don’t care about that jabber,” said he, meaning my treason, all my adventures. “These records are meant to last.”

He meant last beyond the time when every rumor of our era, all our accomplishments and follies, had been utterly forgotten.

There is something comforting about the Monstruwacans. Their studies set them apart from the petty and quotidian concerns of other men.

The Master Monstruwacan himself came down to interview me once. His was the shortest interview of all.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?” I said, wishing there was a more original way to phrase that question.

“You know what I wish to know.”

“Ah!” I nodded.

I described the second figure standing behind the leaf of the door in the House of Silence, its hood turned toward the first figure. The second figure has its hand stretched out, palm inward, as if beckoning or entreating the first figure, but hanging oddly just above the tips of its thin fingers is a pinpoint of colorless strange light, motionless, unflickering.

I told him. “The Bianitorianist theory is correct.”

He nodded. “We will move the observation of Aetius into the endorsed category.”

There was nothing else he wanted from me. He gathered his dark robes about him and stood, departing without a word. My life or death was too brief an event to interest him.

So perhaps there is something not so comforting about the Monstruwacans after all.

I do not even know why Creon went through the meaningless ritual of an Inquest. The three magistrates of the Tribunal were all his men, puppets who owed their places to him. The common people (whose love of ancient tradition is always greater than that of the rich, for poverty makes men fearful, and fear breeds caution) were demanding I be skinned alive, and my flesh nailed up next to the felon whose hide is still displayed, a grim sight, on metal pegs on the inner side of the Great Gate.

Even his half-mythic crime was not so heinous as mine: for I had violated the prohibition against women, and also I had invited the enemy across the protections. Some electrospiritualists believed that the weakness of the boundary was permanent, lodged in the racial unconsciousness, and certain to influence the energy flows of the machinery feeding the White Tube from henceforth.

The nobles had no reason to speak on my behalf. I had brought a shame on my phylum; indeed, some said I discredited the whole theory of dividing mankind into phyla. A thousand or two thousand years from now, my name would be used as the final word in any argument against entrusting the high-born with special privileges to compensate for their special duties.

So there they sat, the magistrates, foolish looking in their antique tall caps, reciting in tedious detail the facts we all knew to be the case, driving to the decision we all knew must come forth. Our laws forbid the penalty of death, since it is not right that man should kill man, not in a world where the dark creatures are so eager to make us inhuman. But I knew they would find some way.

When it was my turn to speak, I spoke my many bitter thoughts, and condemned the cowardice of all my kin. Oh, I poured my scorn on them, these Watchman of the law who had no loyalty to the law. They were not even as loyal to the law as the Night-Hound I had seen die by his master.

I said the many things no well-bred lady is ever meant to say; but I knew they meant my death, and so I had no reason to hold my tongue. I called upon them all to end this farce, and ask Creon, in his tyrannical, untrammeled power, how my death would be accomplished.

There was a man in the court who took notes to tell the hour-slips the news. He was the only one who smiled at my speech; but he was relishing the fame his lurid account would bring to him, I am sure.

Creon took me at my word, and stood, and spoke. He pretended he was merely advising the court. It was within their power to limit my movements; a punishment called cloister, but also called by its older name of incarceration. He said there were cities on many levels of the pyramid, which had been lacking in light and power, heat and mess distribution, for centuries.

Up until that moment, I expected them to call for my voluntary suicide by some graceful means, a stiletto-stroke to the neck. Or I thought they would have the physicians prepare a room awash with deadly radiations, into which I would walk of my own accord, and lay down painlessly as if for sleep.

But Creon grimaced at me, and spoke of the sanctity of life, and of how it was forbidden that any should exanimate a human soul.

Oh, that terrible smile. He finally had his way. He finally won the dispute he’d begun with my father so long ago. I was not to be executed. I was to be deprived of food and light, and simply be allowed to die.

Even the Magistrates were shocked. “Must so terrible a sentence be executed? The girl is of tender years...”

Creon said, “There is no evil worse than disobedience.”

The look in his eyes was so glad and so terrible! And yet I saw, or thought I saw, the look of piercing shame in them as well, as if even he were astonished by the enormity of what he was about to do.

Who am I to blame him? That restlessness which made the second race of man venture forth to found the Lesser Redoubt, which made Mirdath able to cross the Night Land when all others of her people perished, which made Polynices or Labdacus our ancestor willing to dare what no one else dared: that is what I saw in his eye. There are some walls never meant to be breached, lest the darkness enter in and destroy us. I was too much like him, Uncle Creon. When our gazes met for the last time, I think he saw that thought in me, and knew it to be true. It was his gaze that wavered and dropped, despite that I was led away in chains, and he in pomp.

How had Andros done it? The first ancestor of our line had been possessed of this same restless, anarchic spirit, the pride that will not bow. He dared what no others would. How had he tamed that spirit, and rode its back as if on a monster, to glory, and not to shame?

They took me to a dark, large place, a dead city, and buried me alive, sealing large slabs of armor across the doorways and lifts.

The city was named Ventral Southwest Nine.

The city where I have been banished is empty. The doors and hatches leading in and out of this aeons-old metropolis were sealed shut sixty years ago, with me alive inside.

There are other cities above and below me, to the north and south and east and west, but whatever the noises of their multitudes, their celebrations and lamentations, their duties and their leisure, I am cut off. I neither hear their solemn paeans during the Contemplation, nor their gay applause during the Games. There are no windows and no openings peering Out: this is one of the interior cities, near the axis of the Last Redoubt.

They meant me to die, of course, the long, slow, painful death of starvation. They meant for me to go mad in the place without lights, where I could keep no count of time. But the air is sweet here, and the water in the public fountains and baths is pure, and so I conclude that the eternity-circuits have been set to replenish the air and water. They did not mean me to die of dehydration or asphyxiation: such would have been too quick.

Neither did they search carefully this city, and discover all its sealed and buried secrets. Creon assumed, as we all did, that the supplies and the power cores, the granaries and stock-templates would all be kept in some central strong house, protected by the civic guard, as they are in all the cities on the other inhabited levels of the Pyramid in the current aeon. So, after sweeping the main public buildings in the center of the square with their wands, the gaolers declared the space uninhabitable, empty of victual, that the terms of my short exile be complete.