A kind of subsidiary ecology had arisen within the fractured human community he made occasional contact with; there were those who preyed upon other wanderers – taking on the form of animals in some cases, but not all – and those who seemed to exist only to mate with others, merging from the time of their coupling to become an individual incorporating aspects of both the former lovers, usually still imbued with whatever hunger had driven them to fuse in the first place, and so seeking further unions.
Most of the people he met wanted only to absorb his story and exchange no more than information; he declined to reveal who he had once been but was happy to share what he knew of this level of the crypt. He was neither surprised nor disappointed when he realised he appeared to have lost all interest in sex.
He discovered that his rucksack contained three things: a sword, a cape and a book. The sword had a coiled metal blade which extended up to two metres and was not particularly sharp but which produced an electric charge which could stun the largest chimeric – or, at least, the largest which had ever attacked him. He thought of the cape as his chameleon coat; it took on the appearance of whatever his environment was at the time and appeared to offer almost perfect concealment. In its own way, it was more effective than the sword.
The book was like the one he’d found in the room in Oubliette; it was every book. Opening the back cover let the book function as a journal; words appeared on the page when he spoke. He made entries in the journal every few days and kept a note of each day that passed even when he didn’t record anything more about it. He read a lot, at first.
The landscape of the crypt was littered with monuments, buildings and other structures, most of them well away from the shifting sum-paths of the great data highways and many of them of indefinable design. It was here, in these singular follies, usually in the evening after a long day’s travel, that he tended to meet and converse with others; men, women, androgynes and chimerics. He never saw anyone who even looked like a child. They were rare enough in base-reality, but quite absent here.
He found, as his time in the crypt extended, that his dreams attained a vividity that sometimes made them seem more real than his waking hours. In those oneiric passages, when he felt that he sank beneath the surface of the land and entered a deeper underworld, he played the hero, often as not, in a landscape filled with people, cities, commotion and event: he was a dashing captain thrust by circumstance to unsought glory and fame, a poet prince compelled to take up arms, a philosopher king forced to defend his realm.
He commanded a squadron of cavalry, of ships, of tanks, of aircraft, of spacecraft; he wielded clubs, swords, pistols, lasers; he climbed to surprise an enemy cave, besieged walled cities, charged across river shallows to fall upon a vulnerable flank, planned the mining of lines zig-zagging across the swell of countryside, rode the leading missile-carrier to the smoking rubble of rail-heads, threaded a corkscrew course between black bursting clouds towards enemy capitals, slid unseen through the folds of sable space to wheel against unwarned convoys lumbering between the stars.
Gradually though, as if some part of him – the realist, the cynic, the ironist – could not accept the improbable serial triumphs of his exhausting martial adventures, the furniture of each of these aspirant dreams began to include the Encroachment, and in the midst of the bright clamour of some clash upon a dusty plain, he would find himself looking up above the joined havoc of the contesting armies to see the moon in a cloudless sky, whole face half dimmed by some fearful agent beyond precedent; or on some night mission, below radar across the darkened enemy coast, he would look up to see the stars had disappeared from half the sky; or, sling-shotting through the well of a gas-giant, the planet’s ringed bulk would fall away to reveal no welcoming spatter of familiar constellations, but a dark void, glowing beyond sight with the inflamed exhalations of long-drowned stars.
Increasingly, he woke from such dreams with a sense of gnawing frustration and abject failure no amount of subsequent rationalisation could assuage.
‘Let me see, let me see,’ the woman said. She looked perhaps ten years younger than he, though she sported an unflatteringly tonsured scalp and had no eyebrows. Black-clad, she sat in the centre of a circle of seven travellers, on a bare floor in a bare room in a large, square-planned house which stood, stark and alone, on a dark plateau.
He sat a little way off with his back to a wall where earlier callers had left strange curlicued designs and patterns carved into the plaster. Light came from a bulb hanging above the centre of the group. He had been reading while the others had told their own stories, taking turns in the centre of the circle.
It was the seven thousand, two hundred and thirty-fifth day of his time within the crypt. He had been here for nearly twenty years. Outside, in base-reality, somewhat more than seventeen hours had passed.
‘Let me see,’ the woman in the centre of the circle said again, tapping her finger on her lips. She had completed her own tale and was supposed to choose the next story-teller. He had been half listening while he’d read, finding this group’s compended histories more absorbing than most. ‘You, sir,’ the woman said, raising her voice, and he knew she was addressing him.
He looked up. The others were turned towards him.
‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘Will you tell us your story?’ the woman asked.
‘I think not. Forgive me.’ He smiled a little then went back to his book.
‘Sir, please,’ she said, pleasantly enough. ‘We would count ourselves fortunate if you’d join our group. Will you not share your wisdom with us?’
‘I have no wisdom,’ he told her.
‘Your experiences, then?’
‘They have been trivial, uninteresting, and full of error.’
‘So you protest,’ she said evenly. She looked at one of the others in the circle. ‘Great souls suffer in silence,’ she said quietly, amidst laughter.
He frowned, hiding his face with the book.
He slept that night in a high bare room looking over the dark plain.
The woman came to him in the night, her presence signalled by a creak on the stairs even before the rucksack – balanced against the door – fell over.
Called from a dream – in which he heaved a cutlass, knee deep in a fly-blown salt marsh – he sat with his cloak drawn around him up to his eyes, the sword concealed beneath.
She stood in the doorway, a pale ghostly head seeming to float above her black gown. She saw his eyes, and nodded.
He swept the cloak aside to let her see the sword.
‘I did not come for a duel, sir,’ she said quietly.
‘Then I regret there is no field in which I can give you satisfaction.’
‘Nor for that,’ she said, shutting the door and sitting down beside it. They sat looking at each other for a moment.
‘Why, then?’ he asked.
‘Absens haeres non erit,’ she told him.
He took a while to reply. ‘Plainly,’ he said without inflection, and waited to see which way that would be taken.
He saw the whiteness of her teeth as she smiled. ‘I was told it might not be possible to tell if you are the one. That might be a further sign in itself.’
‘Nonsense.’
She nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘What “one”, may I ask?’
‘You may. Choose from the many rumours, myths and legends. I don’t know.’
‘You have disturbed your own sleep and mine merely to tell me what you don’t know?’
‘No; to tell you this: seek the transformation of the enemy.’ She rose. ‘Good night.’
Then she opened the door and left, more silently than she had arrived.
He sat, thinking.
It took him a while to work it out.
* * *
4
Translation
Am in thi lammergeiers roost, ma bref soundin loud in ma eers & mixd in wif theez hissy clikky noyses coz am wearin this mask on ma fais & a breevin botil on me bak boath ov witch I got off thi ded spier.
This is a spooki ole playce & no mistake. Thers nobodi aroun & its very coald indeed & thi lite is very wyt & intens & washd out lookin. Bein in thi lammergeiers roost is like bein insyd a jiant holy cheez; sorta interconectid bubbilz & stretchd punkchird membrains ov stoan & metil evrywheare & hi up on thi wols in plaises whare thi bubbilz mak cup & boals juttin out thers theez nests lynd wif babil plant & fevirs onli thers no birdz in them nor eggs nor nufin. Thi floar of thi roost is lyk a hoal lot ov littil craters eech ov them holdin loadsa brokin, splintird boans. Ma feet go cruntch cruntch as I wok, lookin up & aroun & tryin 2 c if thers enybodi else heer Ithir hoomin or creetch but thi plais seems 2 b dessertid.