The Apex Book of World SF 2 (10 page)

He simply walked
behind Herrero as the linguist selected a campsite. This was not hard to do:
the whole hillside was dotted with pits, each of which held the remains of a
discarded campfire.

The rest of the
morning passed peacefully. Herrero had wandered off and was seated in the
centre of a group of natives, gesturing, laughing, offering gifts of beads and
other trinkets which seemed to go down very well with the natives. Soon, they
were gesturing for Carrizo and De Menes to join them.

The two sailors did
as they were told. De Menes sat down gingerly between a greying old man and a
woman who could not have been more than twenty, with jet-black hair. He tried
to keep his eyes away from the exposed anatomy of the locals, but the circular
seating arrangement made that difficult. Carrizo stared openly, but none of the
women seemed to mind.

Herrero was already
making progress with the language. Interspersed with the gesturing, there was
now a word here, another word there, which seemed to please their hosts, who
tried to correct his pronunciation and laughed at his efforts.

One woman, however,
was paying no attention to Herrero. The girl De Menes had sat beside seemed to
have eyes only for him and stared the entire time. At first, he thought it must
simply have been the close-up view of his light skin and strange clothes, but
he soon realised that the girl had not even glanced at the equally exotic
figures of Carrizo and Herrero.

He smiled at her and
placed one hand on his chest. "Joao," he whispered. Her dark eyes invited him
to speculate about the rest of her, and he tried desperately to keep his own
gaze locked on them while she spoke.

"Teuhuech," she
replied, placing his hand on her own chest. He pulled it back quickly as she
said something else, a rapid-fire string of words in her own language,
delivered in a husky monotone. The man on De Menes' opposite side chuckled.

At that moment, a
couple of men from the
Trinidad
arrived, carrying sacks of provisions. "Your
tent is down in the boat. If you want to sleep under cover, I'd suggest you get
it. We aren't coming back up here."

Grumbling, but
relieved to be able to escape from the strange natives for a few moments,
Carrizo and De Menes walked down the hill. Herrero, of course, was much too
important to be bothered with menial tasks. They joked with the oarsmen as they
pulled the poles from the boat. "Magalhaes says we'll be back tomorrow or the
next day. He wants to sail beyond that outcropping—" the man pointed to a
peninsula some leagues away "—to see whether we can replenish our water."

De Menes' heart
sank. They would be alone, without even the comforting sight of the flotilla to
keep him sane, on a small spit of land at the edge of the world. But he would
not give the tyrant the satisfaction of begging to be allowed back on board. He
gestured Carrizo to pick up his half of the burden and set off towards the
campsite.

The wind, already a
desolate howl, had picked up even more as they began to pitch the tent. By De
Menes' reckoning, it was about three in the afternoon, and there were still
hours and hours of late spring sunlight remaining. And yet the sunlight seemed
weak, thin, as if its force was being drained by invisible fog. De Menes
shivered.

The girl, Teuhuech,
realised he was back almost immediately, and joined them just as Joao attempted
to position the final tent pole. He watched her walk in their direction, unable
to ignore the fact that there was a young and supple body beneath the red
paint.

She playfully took
hold of the tent pole, her surprisingly strong grip resisting his efforts to
tear it from her grasp, and his attempts to twist the pole without making
contact with her skin only made the native girl laugh.

Finally, she
relented, allowing De Menes and Carrizo to finish erecting their tent, a
medium-sized piece of canvas suitable for three men. When it was done, she
smiled and crawled inside. De Menes tried to look away, but Carrizo had no such
qualms. He stared at the indecently exposed flesh and then turned to his
companion and winked lewdly. "I would go in after her, my friend, but I don't
think that would make her happy. You, on the other hand, should hurry before
she changes her mind."

De Menes gave him a
dark look. While he wasn't a saint, by any means, and certainly wasn't averse
to the occasional dalliance with a native girl, this one's single-minded
determination made him nervous. It was impossible to shake the feeling that
there was something deep and disturbing lurking just behind those smiles. Maybe
it was just his dread at having been abandoned by his ship at the edge of the
world with nightfall approaching fast. But he felt his soul and his immortal
existence were at the mercy of forces no mortal could ever hope to control.

He shook his head
and returned to the circle where Herrero was still holding court. The Spaniard
complemented his limited—yet still impressive, considering how little time he'd
taken to create it—vocabulary with wild gestures and vocal sound effects. His
audience sat in rapt attention.

"I'm telling them
the story of our Atlantic crossing," he explained. "Although they seem to
believe that we're sorcerers from the sky, because they saw the sails of our
ship, and think it looks like a bird."

De Menes nodded and
sat on the cool ground, squeezing between two of the local men who'd arrived in
their absence. The red paint did little to cover them, either, but it was still
less distracting than having Tehuech beside him. As the story went on, more men
arrived, none aggressive, all painted red. The girl, disappointment evident on
her face as she saw his new seating arrangements, sat straight ahead of him.

The long afternoon's
anaemic light soon gave way to an eternal twilight, and the men began to drift
to the nearby fire pits. Soon, the demonic eyes once more lit the hills, but
this time De Menes sat amongst them. He wondered what else walked the night,
connecting the dots between the warmth and light.

The sailors were
left to their own devices as night came down and the last vestiges of the day's
warmth and cheer were swept away before the howling wind. De Menes had
difficulty believing that the savages could bear the chill without clothes, and
found himself wondering whether they insisted in that same lunacy during the
winters, which he imagined must be merciless in those latitudes.

Their own fire was
an unimpressive affair, built close to the tent and casting a small ring of
light from which De Menes refused to venture even to relieve himself. He could
feel the demon lords watching them from the darkness, present in every shadow
and trying to find the doorway that led from their own grey and boundless
kingdom into the world of the living.

Knowing sleep would
be beyond him, he'd offered to stand guard. So he sat with his eyes open long
after Carrizo and Herrero had drifted into snoring slumber. He cringed at each
sound, ready to defend himself but, when the demon crawled into his tent and
took his hand, he could do nothing but follow it out.

It led him endlessly
across the stiff grass to the embers of another of the bonfires. By its light,
De Menes saw that no demon held his hand, but that Tehuech had brought him
there. He knew exactly why. She was still naked, but she'd also scraped off the
paint.

He pulled his hand
away, trying to remember the way back to his own fire and the security of the
tent, but fear had made him an unthinking being, a sheep led to slaughter. He
turned back to the girl, and a movement above her breasts told him that she
wasn't completely bare. A necklace of stone and shells and driftwood danced
above her breasts.

Seeing where his
gaze lay, she smiled. "Joao," she said. She removed the necklace and held it
towards him with both hands, saying something incomprehensible, and then "Joao,"
again.

He shrugged and
bowed, allowing her to pass the offering over his head. It caught on one ear,
but was soon in place around his neck.

"Thank you," he
said, and she smiled back, understanding the meaning, if not the words.

Joao felt more
relaxed. Having accepted her gift, he felt that it would be all right to return
to his camp. He turned away from the fire, the afterimage of the embers dancing
in his eyes. He waited for them to subside, for his night vision to return.

But, instead of
disappearing, the moving lights came into sharper focus, resolving themselves
into points of light just beyond the ember's illumination. Eyes that stared
unblinkingly back at him, seemingly an arm's-length away. De Menes recoiled
from those eyes, his steps taking him straight into Tehuech's waiting embrace.

He knew the fire was
all that kept them away, and that the girl was all that kept the fire alive,
and that the creatures of the netherworld were not there to interfere, but to
bear witness to a consummation.

 

The following day
dawned bright and clear; memories of the previous night burnt away, but De
Menes was still surprised to wake inside the tent. He had no recollection of
having returned, and his memory of the rest was blurred as if veiled in grey
fog. But it had not been a dream: the clicking of his new necklace as he
crawled out of the tent assured him of it.

 

"Come on,
sleepyhead," Carrizo chided. "The sun's been up for an hour, and Magalhaes is
back. He found some more savages a little further west, and they seem a bit
more advanced than these. We have to pull up the tent and return to shore."

The manual labour
allowed De Menes to temporarily forget about midnight rendezvous and ghostly
eyes and, as he approached the sea and its waiting boat, he felt an enormous
weight lifting from him. Each step felt lighter than the last.

A small party
awaited, natives mixed with sailors. The savages even helped to load the boat,
only asking a few trinkets and some cloth in return for their unnecessary help,
which were given gladly—too often, the sailors had had to fight natives who
took a dim view of outsiders. Tehuech, amongst the local group, said nothing
and kept her gaze on the ground.

Finally, as De Menes
was about to step aboard, one of the older women came forward, and said
something to Herrero.

Herrero listened,
and turned to Joao. "I'm not really sure what she said, but I think it was "That
man wears a wedding circle," and she pointed at you. Do you know what she's
talking about?"

De Menes hung his
head. "I think I do." He pulled the necklace back over his head and walked to
where Tehuech was standing, heart heavy with dread and remorse. He held the
jewellery out to her, but she made no move to take it and refused to meet his
gaze, eyes resolutely turned away. Finally, he left it at her feet and stepped
back. Still, she gave no sign of acknowledgement.

Joao walked back to
the shore and boarded the boat. None of the savages made any move to stop them.

 

As the
Trinidad
left the hills with eyes far behind, the crew began to taunt De Menes, asking
what had happened, and attempting to get the details of what they imagined must
have been one of the more sordid escapades of the journey. But he refused to
elaborate and the speculation soon passed into the realm of wild orgies and
fantastic pleasures.

 

De Menes heard none
of it. The lewd shouting seemed to him a far-off whisper. As the ship advanced,
it grew fainter and fainter.

Even the ship itself
seemed to be fading. It had sailed into a fog which became thicker as they
sailed through it. The
Trinidad
's prow became a ghost of itself, and
soon, even the mainmast, scant metres away, seemed a spectre.

A small tremor of
panic coursed through him as he realised that the deck beneath him was no
longer solid, but made of ethereal mist, but he simply shrugged it off.
Understanding had replaced fear, and a broken trust was suitably punished.
Perhaps the endless, featureless grey at the end of the world would not be as
bad as the visions of fire and torment that the hell of his own land promised.

And perhaps, just
perhaps, he would be called upon to bear witness in some distant future,
thereby remembering what it was like to tread upon the grass at the end of the
world, and share the love of one of its guardians.

 

The Tomb
Chen Qiufan
 
Chinese writer
Qiufan Chen is a graduate of Peking University and a prolific short story
writer. He is the author of the novel
The Abyss of Vision
, and winner
of, amongst others, the Dragon Award. The following story appears here in English
for the first time.

 

This
is entrance; and exit, of course.

 

The
dim blue light slid across the cold, wet, rock
y ceiling and into deep
darkness. Between the indistinct here-and-there stood a mouldy wooden counter,
the type in an old-school by-the-hour hotel, with the bell, the chair, the, and
the man.

A
hand as skinny as an insect was wiping the metal plate with a black cloth
clipped between the fingers. The man, hidden in the blue shadow, breathed upon
the plate once in a while till the engraved words shone:

"
That
seeing they may see, and not perceive.
"

 

"Ding." The bell quivered on the counter. The face lifted immediately—the fine wrinkles
bathed in the blue light—and gathered into a smile. "Hello, sir.name is Chen,
code V0817. A pleasure to serve you. Are you passing by or assigned here,
please?" He straightened his legs, his back slightly bowed and his hands curled
on his breast, rubbing against each other and jerking like a pair of mating
arthropods.

 

No answer.

"Hmmm,
confidential? No problem. Please register?" He opened a purple book and drew out
a rusted pen. The edges of the blue pages had grown black.