The Beyond (19 page)

“We heard that the Well-Built City had been destroyed in the east,” said another young man.

“Yes,” said Cley. “It succumbed to its own gravity.”

The soldiers weren't sure what he was talking about, but in order to be polite, they nodded as if it were a foregone conclusion.

“How did your ship get to the inland ocean? We were unaware of its very existence back in the eastern realm,” said the hunter.

“There are channels through deep gorges, very dangerous to navigate, that lead from the oceans of our world to this one,” said the soldier to Cley's left. Although he was not yet a man, he bore a wicked scar across his left cheek and an eye patch on the left side. The others called him Dat.

“How long is the voyage?” asked Cley.

“Four months,” said Dat. “The inland ocean is enormous, with many strange beasts, leviathans, and krakens, and more. I was pleased to set foot on solid ground.”

“But the strangest, Cley, was the ghost ship we found floating low in the water and wrecked as if it had met its fate in a typhoon. Some of the sailors boarded it and said they saw in the hold a block of ice with a naked woman trapped inside,” said Weems.

“They said she was beautiful,” said the largest of all the young men, a fellow named Knuckle. “I could see from their expressions when they returned to our ship just how beautiful she must have been. From that moment, they seemed to be lost in a daydream for the rest of the trip.”

“And do you have wives and girlfriends back home?” asked Cley to change the subject.

Many nodded quietly and appeared to be daydreaming, themselves, in response to his question.

“And what of the Wraiths?” asked the hunter.

“We don't talk about them if we don't have to, Mr. Cley,” said Weems. “Better not to dwell on them, says the captain. He says he doesn't want us going mad.”

There was a moment of silence.

“After you see what they can do, you'll be as scared as we are,” said Knuckle.

It was midnight, and Cley stood on the narrow catwalk of the northern wall of the fort, staring out across the moonlit field of new snow at the dark tree line of the forest two hundred yards away. It was cold, and he huddled inside the large, yellow army coat they had given him. The rifle he carried was of inferior quality to those manufactured in the Well-Built City. It was a single-shot weapon with a double barrel, so that it held only two shells at a time. They had, though, given him a pocketful of shells. The western realm had never been known for its technology.

The hunter still basked in the afterglow of the pleasant time spent conversing at the dinner table. His humanity had been revived somewhat from its desolation through the months wandering in the Beyond. He was very pleased with his new home and his status among the soldiers. It was a certainty that the captain could use his skills as a hunter. With a place to rest and a job to do, he looked forward, without dread, to the winter months.

He turned and peered back down inside the fort to see that all was well. Wood sat on the ground beneath the catwalk, watching Cley's every move. On each of the other three walls there was a soldier at sentry duty. In the yard within the compound there were another four men making their rounds. The hunter tried to picture the slaughter the recruits must have faced when first they arrived at Vordor. A brief scene of butchered corpses flashed through his mind. He remembered one of the young men telling him that they had spent the first week at the fort digging graves out in the earth fifty yards off the western wall.

He looked back over the field and spotted a deer moving. Although he soon became weary, he occupied his mind with thoughts of Anotine sailing haplessly from ocean to ocean, forever frozen in Time. He wondered now if she was the sign that Vasthasha had told him Pa-ni-ta had predicted he would find. “Could there be such a coincidence? The world is too large to grant such a meeting,” he thought to himself. “But then, as the foliate had assured me, it is also too complex not to.”

Wood quietly growled and Cley woke to the darkness of his new room. It seemed to him that he had only minutes ago come in from his watch. He heard the door opening slowly, and with that sound reached for his knife, which was hidden beneath the pillow. “Wraiths,” he thought, but then a familiar voice sounded. It was that of Captain Curaswani.

“Cley,” he said, and the door opened all the way. The hunter saw the light from a candle that the captain was holding. “Get dressed. I need your expertise.”

The hunter was fully dressed, still not having had the time to shed his habits from a life in the wilderness. He slipped into his boots and was on his feet in a moment.

“What is it?” he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“An emergency,” said Curaswani.

“A Wraith?” asked Cley.

“Even that might be preferable at this juncture,” said the captain.

He led Cley and Wood down the hallway, speaking over his shoulder in whispers.

“There are only three of the settlers left living in the fort,” he said. “Two of them are women, and one, now a widow since her husband was separated from his head by a Wraith, a Mrs. Olsen, is inconveniently with child. Private Dat has informed me that you had been a midwife or something close to it in your previous life. I'm ordering you to deliver the child in question, if you don't mind.”

The captain stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway. From behind it, Cley could hear sounds of heavy breathing and muffled cries of pain as if someone was screaming into a pillow. Curaswani turned and patted Cley on the shoulder.

“Pull this off, and I'll see to it that you are awarded an honorary medal of honor in the armed forces of the western realm.” He saluted the hunter, then retreated back down the hall as fast as he could manage on his bad leg.

The room was cramped and very warm. The flames of the two candles sitting on the night table next to the bed guttered with the heavy breathing of the expectant mother. Shadows danced, a rocker creaked behind the hunter, and he turned quickly to see an old woman sitting with a bottle of spirits in her hand.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked in a cracked voice.

“Cley. I know something about delivering babies,” he told her.

“Good, because as much as I know about it, you could fit in a flea's ass,” she said, and took a pull at the bottle.

“What is the mother's name?” he asked.

“Willa Olsen,” said the old woman, whose hair was done up in a silver pile atop her head. She was wearing a high-necked, green-velvet dress. Although the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes testified to her age, in the shifting shadows of the candlelight she appeared to him alternately beautiful and haggard.

“And what is your name?” asked the hunter.

“Morgana,” she said.

“Will you help me?” he asked.

The old woman rocked the chair forward, and in one fluid motion, stood and rested the bottle on the table.

“I may need something to sew with, a needle and strong thread, and they must be boiled so they are sterile,” he said.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“The wilderness,” he said. “Now hurry. I don't think we have much time.”

“I'm already gone,” she said, and passed through the open doorway.

Cley watched her leave, and saw her sidle nervously past Wood out in the hallway. Then he turned back and lifted one of the candleholders off the nightstand. He brought it up close to the face of the woman in the bed. His patient was sweating and breathing heavily in between quiet moans. At times her mouth opened wide, and he was reminded of the captain's pipe bowl. Her body was pitching back and forth. The face he saw gave him some trepidation about the delivery. Willa Olsen was not in the prime of youth—only a few years younger than Cley, himself. Advanced age was one of the factors, he remembered, that often gave rise to odd birth positions, anomalies, stillbirths.

“Willa,” he called loudly to her. “My name is Cley. I have delivered a score of children, and I am going to deliver yours. You can help me by not moving so much. Regulate your breathing; you are wasting too much energy. It will make the pain worse. Above all, don't push until I tell you to. Do you understand all of this?” he asked.

For the first time, the woman in the bed opened her eyes and looked at him. Her breathing grew more regular, and she nodded.

“I am going to have to uncover you, touch you. It is the only way I can help your baby. Do you understand?” he said.

“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth.

Cley reached down and lifted the covers off the woman. Amazingly enough, she was fully clothed. He slipped the stone knife out of his boot, and with a smooth maneuver that harkened back to his scalpel work as Physiognomist, he slit through three layers of fabric, baring her body. Besides her swollen stomach, she was somewhat plump, with wide hips, and Cley took this to be a good sign.

When the hunter put his hands on her stomach, she cried out and twisted in the bed.

“I am just feeling to see if the child is in the proper position,” he said. “And it is. You have never given birth before, I suppose?”

She shook her head.

He breathed deeply and began to pry apart her knees.

In all, the delivery had been routine. The old woman, Morgana, was snoring in the rocker, the empty bottle lying in her lap. The mother was resting peacefully, with the child asleep between her breasts. It was a boy. Cley tried to remember now if he was ahead on boys or girls, and decided the score was perfectly even.

He sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, studying the features of the sleeping Willa Olsen. “This hour,” he thought, “might be the last free of strife that she will have for some time. Her husband dead, on her own with a new baby in the wilderness in a fort that is under deadly attack …”

For a brief moment, he gave himself over to a casual Physiognomy, trying to predict from her sleeping visage if she had what it would take to survive. Her face was round and neither homely nor pretty, but plain in a way that could not be described. Her straight brown hair was chopped short, obviously in haste, as if it had been gathered into a tail and hacked with a knife blade. He tried to find some distinguishing feature, perhaps the nose or chin, that would give him a clue, but he ended by shaking his head.

The hunter put the knife back in his boot and blew out the one candle that had burned nearly to its base. He knew his work was done, and what would happen now was up to the new mother and the will of the Beyond. He closed the door gently as he left. Then, stepping carefully so that his boots did not tap the floor, he headed back for his room, with Wood following close behind.

Cley grew accustomed to life at Fort Vordor in the days that followed. Although the captain did not require him to perform any functions other than guard duty and hunting for game, he readily volunteered to help in all chores from keeping the weapons cleaned and oiled to peeling potatoes for dinner. There was a welcome monotony to the routine, and the work was by no means demanding. There was plenty of time to get to know the soldiers. The hunter had great respect for Curaswani, who knew how to balance authority and humanity, tempering both with a dry sense of humor. In the late afternoons, before dinner, he usually met the captain in his quarters for a drink of whiskey and a half-hour of conversation. The old man lent him one of his pipes, and they would toke up a minor squall in the small office.

Beneath this idyllic life, there ran, constantly, an undercurrent of fear. The Wraiths had not struck for a full month and everyone knew they were due. In the course of building a cradle for the new baby one morning, the hunter realized that he could be the next victim. “I must not lose sight of the fact that this is only a short stop in my journey,” he told himself.

He took some time out of each day to leave the compound and search the nearby forest for game. Unlike the demon forest, this stand of woods seemed to retain its deer population through the winter. They were not the white variety, but tawny brown and larger than their cousins to the south. Dat, the one-eyed, scarred soldier, usually accompanied him and Wood on these hunting forays. For having one eye, Dat proved himself an excellent shot. Occasionally, on their way back to the fort, if they had been lucky and were returning early, they engaged in a marksmen's competition, aiming at some twig or rock in the distance. The young man always won, and Cley laughed with the pleasure of his loss.

The hunter inquired as to the health of the new child as often as he could. He worried that the mother might be too inexperienced, too distraught with recent events to help the baby thrive. Willa Olsen had not shown herself in the compound since the delivery, so Cley questioned Morgana. The old woman reported that the nursing was going well and that the mother was keeping her sanity and health together. Her only concern was that Willa had not named her son yet. Through her cursing, drinking bravado, he caught glimpses of the duenna's concern for the mother and child and soldiers. She made the rounds daily, joking with the men. At night, from his guard post, Cley saw her stroll nonchalantly, with head down, across the compound to slip inside the captain's quarters. She told the hunter that someday she would read his fortune.

From the captain's window, Cley could see the snow driving down. Curaswani threw another log into the fireplace behind his chair and returned to his seat.

The hunter puffed at his pipe, and said, “I remember you telling me that there were five citizens left alive when you arrived, and that two have been killed since. Now I have met Morgana and Willa, but who is the third?”

“You don't miss a trick, Cley,” said the captain. He took a drink of his whiskey and began to relight his pipe. “A fellow named Brisden.”

Cley sat forward. “Brisden is here?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Curaswani. “He is in a jail cell in the cellar of the barracks across the way. A comfy little place for him next to the furnace. Do you know him?”