City of Golden Shadow (2 page)

Paul smiled a bleak little smile, then carefully laid the pistol in his lap. It would be unpatriotic, surely. Better to force the Germans to use up their expensive shells on him. Squeeze a few more working hours out of some mottle-armed fraulein on a factory line in the Ruhr Valley. Besides, there was always hope, wasn't there?

He began weeping once more.

Above, the wounded man stopped screeching for a moment to cough. He sounded like a dog being whipped. Paul leaned his head back against the mud and bellowed: "Shut it! Shut it, for Christ's sake!" He took a deep breath. "Shut your mouth and die, damn you!"

Apparently encouraged by companionship, the man resumed screaming.

Night seemed to last a year or more, months of darkness, great blocks of immovable black. The guns sputtered and shouted. The dying man wailed. Paul counted every single individual object he could remember from his life before the trenches, then started over and counted them again. He remembered only the names of some of them, but not what the names actually meant. Some words seemed impossibly strange-"lawn chair" was one, "bathtub" another. "Garden" was mentioned in several songs in the Chaplain's hymn book, but Paul was fairly certain it was a real thing as well, so he counted it.

"Try to think about getting out," the yellow-eyed man had said. "About really getting out."

The guns were silent. The sky had gone a slightly paler shade, as though someone had wiped it with a dirty rag. There was just enough light for Paul to see the edge of the trench. He clambered up and then slid back, laughing silently at the up-and-down of it all. Getting out. He found a thick root with his foot and heaved himself onto the rim of the earthwork. He had his gun. He was going to kill the man who was screaming. He didn't know much more than that.

Somewhere the sun was coming up, although Paul had no idea where exactly that might be happening: the effect was small and smeared across a great dull expanse of sky. Beneath that sky, everything was gray. Mud and water. He knew the water was the flat places, so everything else was mud, except perhaps for the tall things. Yes, those were trees, he remembered. Had been trees.

Paul stood up and turned in a slow circle. The world extended for only a few hundred yards in any direction before ending in mist. He was marooned in the center of an empty space, as though he had wandered onto a stage by mistake and now stood before a silent, expectant audience.

But he was not entirely alone. Halfway across the emptiness one tree stood by itself, a clawing hand with a twisted bracelet of barbed wire. Something dark hung in its denuded branches. Paul drew his revolver and staggered toward it.

It was a figure, hanging upside down like a discarded marionette, one leg caught in the high angle of bough and trunk. All its joints seemed to have been broken, and the arms dangled downward, fingers reaching, as though muck were heaven and it was struggling to fly. The front of its head was a tattered, featureless mass of red and scorched black and gray, except for one bright staring yellow eye, mad and intent as a bird's eye, which watched his slow approach.

"I got out," Paul said. He lifted his gun, but the man was not screaming now.

A hole opened in the ruined face. It spoke. "You've come at last. I've been waiting for you."

Paul stared. The butt of the gun was slippery in his fingers. His arm trembled with the effort of keeping it raised.

"Waiting?"

"Waiting. Waiting so long." The mouth, empty but for a few white shards floating in red, twisted in an upside-down smile. "Do you ever get the feeling. . . ?"

Paul winced as the screaming began again. But it could not be the dying man-this was the dying man. So. . . .

"Feeling?" he asked, then looked up.

The dark shape was tumbling down the sky toward him, a black hole in the dull gray air, whistling as it came. The dull thump of the howitzer followed a moment later, as though Time had turned and bitten its own tail.

"That it's a mistake," said the hanging man.

And then the shell struck, and the world folded in on itself, smaller and smaller, angle after angle creased with fire and then compressed along its axes, until it all vanished.

Things became even more complicated after Paul died.

He was dead, of course, and he knew it. How could he be anything else? He had seen the howitzer shell diving down on him from the sky, a wingless, eyeless, breathtakingly modern Angel of Death, streamlined and impersonal as a shark. He had felt the world convulse and the air catch fire, felt his lungs raped of oxygen and charred to cracklings in his chest. There could be no doubt that he was dead.

But why did his head hurt?

Of course, an afterlife in which the punishment for a misspent existence was an eternally throbbing headache might make a sort of sense. A horrible sort of sense.

Paul opened his eyes and blinked at the light.

He was sitting upright on the rim of a vast crater, a surely mortal wound ripped deep into the muddy earth. The land around it was fiat and empty. There were no trenches, or if there were, they were buried under the outflingings of the explosion; he could see nothing but churned mud in any direction until the earth itself blurred into gray-gleaming mist along the encircling horizon.

But something solid was behind him, propping him up, and the sensation of it against the small of his back and his shoulder blades made him wonder for the first time whether he had anticipated death too soon. As he tilted his head back to look, his helmet-brim tipped forward over his eyes, returning him to darkness for a moment, then slid down over his face and onto his lap. He stared at the helmet. Most of its crown was gone, blasted away; the torn and tortured metal of the brim resembled nothing so much as a crown of thorns.

Remembering horror tales of shell-blasted soldiers who walked two dozen yards without their heads or held their own innards in their hands without recognizing what they were, Paul shivered convulsively. Slowly, as though playing a grisly game with himself, he ran his fingers up his face, past his cheeks and temples, feeling for what must be the pulped top of his own skull. He touched hair, skin, and bone . . . but all in their proper places. No wound. When he held his hands before his face, they were striped with as much blood as mud, but the red was dry already, old paint and powder. He let out a long-held breath.

He was dead, but his head hurt. He was alive, but a red-hot shell fragment had ripped through his helmet like a knife through cake frosting.

Paul looked up and saw the tree, the small, skeletal thing that had drawn him across no-man's land. The tree where the dying man had hung.

Now it stretched up through the clouds.

Paul Jonas sighed. He had walked around the tree five times, and it showed no sign of becoming any less impossible.

The frail, leafless thing had grown so large that its top was out of sight beyond the clouds that hung motionless in the gray sky. Its trunk was as wide as a castle tower from a fairy story, a massive cylinder of rough bark that seemed to extend as far downward as it did up, running smoothly down the side of the bomb crater, vanishing into the soil at the bottom with no trace of roots.

He had walked around the tree and could make no sense of it. He had walked away from the tree, hoping to find an angle from which he could gauge its height, but that had not assisted his understanding either. No matter how far he stumbled back across the featureless plain, the tree still stretched beyond the cloud ceiling. And always, whether he wanted to or not, he found himself returning to the tree again. Not only was there nothing else to move toward, but the world itself seemed somehow curved, so that no matter which direction he took, eventually he found himself heading back toward the monumental trunk.

He sat with his back against it for a while and tried to sleep. Sleep would not come, but stubbornly he kept his eyes closed anyway. He was not happy with the puzzles set before him. He had been struck by an exploding shell. The war and everyone in it seemed to have vanished, although a conflict of that size should have been a rather difficult thing to misplace. The light had not changed in this place since he had come here, although it must have been hours since the explosion. And the only other thing in the world was an immense, impossible vegetable.

He prayed that when he opened his eyes again, he would either find himself in some sort of respectable afterlife or returned to the familiar misery of the trenches with Mullet and Finch and the rest of the platoon. When the prayer had ended, he still did not risk a look, determined to give God-or Whoever-enough time to put things right. He sat, doing his best to ignore the band of pain across the back of his head, letting the silence seep into him as he waited for normality to reassert itself. At last, he opened his eyes.

Mist, mud, and that immense, damnable tree. Nothing had changed.

Paul sighed deeply and stood up. He did not remember much about his life before the war, and at this moment even the immediate past was dim, but he did remember that there had been a certain kind of story in which an impossible thing happened, and once that impossible thing had proved that it was not going to un-happen again, there was only one course of action left: the impossible thing must be treated as a possible thing.

What did you do with an unavoidable tree that grew up into the sky beyond the clouds? You climbed it.

It was not as difficult as he had expected. Although no branches jutted from the trunk until just below the belly of the clouds, the very size of the tree helped him; the bark was pitted and cracked like the skin of some immense serpent, providing excellent toeholds and handholds. Some of the bumps were big enough to sit on, allowing him to catch his breath in relative safety and comfort.

But still it was not easy. Although it was hard to tell in that timeless, sunless place, he felt he had been climbing for at least half a day when he reached the first branch. It was as broad as a country road, bending up and away; where it, too, vanished into the clouds, he could see the first faint shapes of leaves.

Paul lay down where the branch met the trunk and tried to sleep, but though he was very tired, sleep still would not come. When he had rested for a while, he got up and resumed climbing.

After a while the air grew cooler, and he began to feel the wet touch of clouds. The sky around the great tree was becoming murkier, the ends of the branches obscured; he could see vast shadowy shapes hanging in the distant foliage overhead, but could not identify them. Another half hour's climbing revealed them to be monstrous apples, each as large as a barrage balloon.

As he mounted higher, the fog thickened until he was surrounded by a phantom world of branches and drifting, tattered clouds, as though he clambered in the rigging of a ghost ship. No sound reached him but the creaking and scratching of bark beneath his feet. Breezes blew, cooling the thin sweat on his forehead, but none of them blew hard enough to shake the great, flat leaves.

Silence and shreds of mist. The great trunk and its mantle of branches above and below him, a world in itself. Paul climbed on.

The clouds began to grow even more dense, and he could sense the light changing; something warm was making the mists glow, like a lantern behind thick curtains. He rested again, and wondered how long it would take him to fall if he were to step off the branch on which he sat. He plucked a loose button from his shirt cuff and let it drop, watching it shiver down the air currents until it vanished silently into the clouds below.

Later-he had no idea how much later-he found himself climbing into growing radiance. The gray bark began to show traces of other colors, sandy beiges and pale yellows. The upper surfaces of the branches seemed flattened by the new, harsher light and the surrounding mist gleamed and sparkled as though tiny rainbows played between the individual drops.

The cloud-mist was so thick here that it impeded his climb, curling around his face in dripping tendrils, lubricating his grip, weighting his clothes and dragging at him treacherously as he negotiated difficult hand-to-hand changeovers. He briefly considered giving up, but there was nowhere else for him to go except back down. It seemed worth risking an unpleasantly swift descent to avoid the slower alternative which could lead only to eternal nothingness on that gray plain.

In any case, Paul thought, if he was already dead, he couldn't die again. If he was alive, then he was part of a fairy tale, and surely no one ever died this early in the story.

The clouds grew thicker the last hundred yards of his ascent he might have been climbing through rotting muslin. The damp resistance kept him from noticing how bright the world was becoming, but as he pushed through the last clouds and lifted his head, blinking, it was to find himself beneath a dazzling, brassy sun and a sky of pure unclouded blue.

No clouds above, but clouds everywhere else: the top of the great frothy mass through which he had just climbed stretched away before him like a white meadow, a miles-wide, hummocked plain of cloudstuff. And in the distance, shimmering in the brilliant sunlight . . . a castle.

As Paul stared, the pale slender towers seemed to stretch and waver, like something seen through the waters of a mountain lake. Still, it was clearly a castle, not just an illusion compounded of clouds and sun; colorful pennants danced from the tops of the sharp turrets, and the huge porticullised gate was a grinning mouth opening onto darkness.

He laughed, suddenly and abruptly, but his eyes filled with tears. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. After the great gray emptiness and the half-world of the clouds, it was too bright, too strong, almost too real.

Still, it was what he had been climbing toward: it called to him as clearly as if it had possessed a voice-just as the dim awareness of an inescapable something awaiting him had summoned him to climb the tree.

There was the faintest suggestion of a path across the spun-sugar plain, a more solid line of whiteness that stretched from the tree and meandered away toward the distant castle gate. He climbed until his feet were level with the top of the clouds, paused for a moment to revel in the strong, swift beating of his heart, then stepped off the branch. For a sickening instant the whiteness gave, but only a little. He windmilled his arms for balance, then discovered that it was no worse than standing on a mattress.