When it began, they loaded us onto the boats in single file. The night was deep and clamorous, river thick with flaming detritus that drifted lazily downstream while explosions dealt gash after gash to the darkness in the forest behind us. The old fishers were the only men coming. They stood on their rafts, beckoning us on board with wild eyes, loosening ropes with hands, feet, teeth.
We set out over the river. Just as we thought ourselves free, bursts of water erupted from beneath the rafts. They were attacking from below.
They had taken on monstrous forms to stay our retreat. They were as the skeletons of sharks, yet longer, sinuous, with many tails and fins the color and strength of polished brass. Spines flashed as they breached and dove. Darkness and the murky river hid from us their true anatomy; they were no less, no more than the destruction they caused. They could have been many, or one swift as lightning.
This vision is burned into the back of my skull: as the fishers rowed toward the opposite bank, and the boats were eaten from beneath, an explosion from the riverbank lit up the night for a split second. I saw the bulk of the thing as it rose from the depths and reared over the vessel just ahead of ours. Its head unfurled like a clockwork flower, revealing teeth or blades that grew radially from what seemed, in that instant of terror, to be both mouth and eye: purple crystal glinting, hungry darkness howling.
The light vanished and I was blinded. There were carnivorous sounds that froze my blood. The next burst of light only moments later revealed red clouds, splintered wood, and lengths of drifting rope in the current. I watched the tails of the thing crack the surface like whips as it turned to dive—it was a mechanical serpent, fueled by death, mouth and eye in one purple-black singularity.
Forever more, that is how I will remember our enemy: beasts that perceive and consume with the same organ.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
The colony was ancient and unaware of its purpose.
Its geography was simple and beautiful. Carved out of thick forest, it rested on the western banks of the widest swath of a river that streamed south from highland springs just below a snowcapped chain of fog-shrouded mountains. The river split just downstream from the colony. One arm curved eastward to weave deeper into the forest and out toward the ocean, the other continued due south to sleep and fester in the swamps.
The river guarded the colony from the east, and all other sides were guarded by the wall. Twenty feet high and built of moss-spattered stone quarried in the shadow of rolling hills long ago, reinforced on the inside by spiked logs jutting at an angle just over the rim, it emerged from the river at the northern bank of the colony, proceeded west for over a mile, swung south for three, then turned east to disappear into the water downstream from whence it came.
The wall kept wilderness and civilization divided. On the inside were thatched-roof huts with chimneys that smoldered in wintertime and windows thrown open to summer warmth. There were rare groves of trees sprouting up from hillocks here and there, decorating the space between measured plots of farmland. But most of the space was tall tawny grass through which dirt roads twisted from one home to the next. All roads converged at the stone shrine on the central bank.
On the outside of the wall was endless forest. It was a place where the branches were so thick and tangled that no underbrush grew, where night and day were often confused, where navigation was impossible. It was a natural labyrinth orchestrated by chaos. A man could dissolve in those narrow corridors between trees, terrified and enraptured by the hungry sounds that echoed in the haze. There was one gateway into the forest: an ancient wooden door, thick and heavy, bound to its stone archway with rusty iron hinges. Hunting parties passed through the threshold, but never at night, and never to stray far.
To be sure, there was psychological darkness at work in the colony’s design. Nevertheless the inhabitants were meditative people. They practiced an art that was archaic, mystic, yet far from trivial. All of their culture, religion, politics, mythology, and philosophy revolved around this single art—this art revolved around a handful of coins, a hand of playing cards, and a wooden cube.
◊ ◊ ◊
Among the colonists was Aristokles, a frail man with tired grey eyes, hollow cheeks shaded with stubble, and wild brown hair. He was forty years old when sorrow struck his face, thirty or younger when laughter washed it clean. He was respected among the artists for his abstract imagination and his dignified, steel-spined gait. Rather than summoning his skills near his home, he chose to wander. He could be seen walking along the top of the wall, ambling in wide arcs through tall grass, wading into the river in the hot months, searching for a spot where he might engage in the art, cube held in the crook of one pale arm.
The cube was not the source of a shaman’s power. It was a channeling device. Every male colonist owned one, and treasured it above all other possessions. The cubes were one cubic foot in volume, carved seamless and smooth from the cylinder of a tree trunk. They were only frames; no walls, floors or ceilings, only a frame of empty space.
Aristokles’s cube was beautifully intricate. Though his hands did not craft it, they had mastered the feel of the object, and in turn its subtle magic. The wood was dark red in tone, and as stiff as marrowless bone. Air could whistle through it, clean and strong, filling its precise volume with invisible song. Each edge displayed a potent mythological text, engraved in runic symbols. He could tell each of the twelve stories by running his fingertips along the proper edge. In time he had discovered analogous connections among each trio of stories that met at one corner. He was fascinated by the tales, and would tell them whenever asked. To the listener they were only stories, but to Aristokles, with the patient machinations of a literary mind, they yielded worlds of insight. His dreams, furious with clarity, often parodied the cube’s mythology, and more than once reality had been invaded by the stories as well. He meditated on the recursive nature of the stories, but kept his faith secret.
Aristokles desired more time for his personal inquiries, but moments of solitary reflection were a rare luxury in the midst of a war.
The location of the front lines was unknown. But somewhere outside the colony, beyond the dense forest, beyond the sheltering arms of the river and the snowy peaks of the northern mountains, a war was being waged. The outcome would result in the extinction or survival of humanity. The colony had been founded to ensure victory. The shaman, the artists of the colony fought this war. They did not fight with steel or fire, with armies or force. Their stratagems were employed through the faintest movements of their fingertips, with the lightest tossing of their hands and swaying of their bodies, with their focus and brilliance, with sublime concentration on the voids of air within their cubes.
They became in tune with the power of Chance over all things, and they became intimate with vast metaphorical systems that lay just beneath sensory detection. They became able to influence cosmic events in the most remote location by making a minute movement over an exact space of time. The windows of time were short, the necessary movements precise, and human aim has never been accurate. If these difficulties did not exist, the art would not have been an art, and the war would have long since been won.
◊ ◊ ◊
The boats docked on the other side of the river, and we leapt to the shore with children in our arms. The fisherman followed, pushing what remained of the boats back out onto the river to distract the beasts. We thought we would watch those men die as they waded into the water, but the creatures would not come near the shore. The sinking ships drifted downstream, bursts of water-laced brass machinery following in their wake, tearing the wood to splinters as it was carried off into the night.
We tripped and scrambled our way over the stony beach and up the bank, then turned to face the opposite shore. All we could see were the fires in the forest and their orange gleam dancing like a mad spirit across the ripples in the river.
We fled to the forest and starved in terrified silence for days. It was early autumn and the nights were cold. Three days passed before we felt safe enough to light fires and to fish the river for food. But once our stomachs were full and our physical discomforts alleviated, reality struck and a heavy depression settled over us like a storm cloud.
Where would we go? What could we do? Most of our men had been swallowed or dismembered by the ferocious plague that still stalked the land. We knew from rumors that had met our ears months before the attack that the beasts held sway as far in every direction as any traveler had seen. We had remained unscathed until the horror of that night; now all of us knew and would never forget the carnal hunger, the cruel purposelessness of our enemy.
We had to assume they would come again. We had to build a wall.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
The sky was confused on the day Aristokles was to gather with all shaman at the shrine. Brooding thunderheads were intertwined with mellow white clouds, and beyond was pure blue. Fast winds kept the array in visible motion and constant flux. He could smell the tension of captive rain; some force would not allow its cathartic release.
His dwelling lay at the north end of the colony, close to the river and beneath the shadow of the wall. His father had cut with his own hands a channel that led a ribbon of the river under a waterwheel built into the side of the hut. It gently spun day and night, churning the water and grating two millstones against one another. He lived there alone, sleeping, when he was able, wrapped in blankets on the straw mattress in the bed frame of the single room. He left his door open each day for the farmers who made flour. It was this service that allotted him his share of sustenance, and gave him ample leave to practice the art. Home had always meant the dusty scent of unmade bread.
That morning he walked out of his front door and made his way to the bank. Walking along the pebble beach was the quickest route from his home to the shrine. The chaotic sky reigned overhead, and being sensitive to such forces he found himself conflicted. But the cool flow of the river staid his anxieties, and he took to the common task that afflicted his mornings: remembering the dreams of the night before.
His dreams often featured the drone of the millstones, horror to some ears but a comfort to his own. But last night had been no routine vision of mountains being ground into powder. He could recall a blue mist rising from water, but all other images had vanished. He was left with a sense of awe he could not disentangle from the ache of nostalgic loss. The river whispered her eerie secrets: he possessed no cypher to her language.
The pebbles clacked under his leather sandals for a mile of time, and then he stopped short. Before him, crouched in the fetal position with toes in the water, was the craftsmen Kyriakos. He was carving images into a chunk of driftwood with a bone knife. Aristokles hailed him. Kyriakos was a scientist and mystic theorist, the designer of Aristokles’ waterwheel and one of the few and respected cube-makers. He had pioneered the process of chemically extracting salt from the silt of the river, and ever since had been allowed his share of the colony’s food to pursue whatever project that engaged his interest.
“What busies your hand on our strange morning?”
“Strange indeed, Aristokles,” said Kyriakos through his graying beard. “Spirits are at odds in the sky. I’m mapping out the supernatural struggle as my inward eye details.” Sarcasm, evasion, or a poetic expression of some glorious blueprint? Any and all were likely in the words of the shrewd craftsman.
“Did you hear of the meeting?”
“I know what’ll be said.” The old man was squinting at the driftwood, using the point of his knife to etch a minute series of lines between points. The picture so far was akin to a night sky, a network of white dots thrust into the brown wood. Aristokles was versed in astronomy, and could see, after crouching beside him, that Kyriakos was creating a false series of constellations on the true star-map—and during the day. Aristokles cracked the crooked smile of a conspiring intellectual.
“Allow me to hear your predictions.”
Kyriakos raised his eyes from the carving. His face had borne a permanent sorrow as long as Aristokles had known him. “We are closing in on the end. I can feel it in my palms.” There was a moment of silent reflection during which his eyes traced the changing contours of the river. Then, as if declaring the task impossible, he returned to his work with fervor.
Aristokles passed him by.
◊ ◊ ◊
The architecture of the shrine was meant to convey purity. In earlier times the place may have glowed. Now it held to its foundational concept in form but not in color. Set on four circular plates of marble stacked in succession of shrinking radii near the tallest edge of a raised bank were in turn four columns, unfluted, plain but for the miracle that they were each hewn of one boulder: no drums, singular cylinders. These columns held aloft a vaulted ceiling impressed with one continuous groove that formed a golden spiral.
The four capitals displayed elaborate stone masks facing, altogether, in the four cardinal directions. The eastern mask looked out across the river, its expression serene, philosophical, transcendent. The western looked across the colony, through the wall, into the forest, and it wore the brutal smile of exploratory conquest. The mask that faced south looked downriver with an air of foggy nostalgia, memory reaching farther than sight. The mask that faced north was of course a skull, its vacant sockets aimed upriver and beyond, reflected, perhaps, in the snow that feathered the mountain peaks on the horizon.
Aristokles climbed the four steps, passing beneath the northern skull, walking around its column, careful, placing each foot where it should fall. He was under the vault, and when he had walked the radius of the floor—twenty strides at a reverent gait—he came to the round table at the center. The table was not great in size, but all elements of the shrine seemed to lean toward this center, as if the spirits of the place were watching intently.
They should be. On this table was the strategic, topographical, moving map of the war.
Miniature hills and vast open fields once lush with growth but now barren, starved, festering in ash, were populated by thousands of glowing pinpoints and lines of two colors: purple and green. The map changed in real time as the armies marched across terrain upon which Aristokles had never lain eyes.
It was obvious that the power was in the hands of purple. Purple points outnumbered the green, and the purple lines that surrounded groups of points, representing, as the experts had told him, territory or at least temporary control, were beginning to encircle the green lines. Most of the green points were concentrated in a valley on which the purple were inexorably bearing down from the higher ground.
Kyriakos had been right. The shaman would gather and sit in a circle on the cool marble while Nikephoros made his speech. We are closing in on the enemy, the stout old artist would say, but victory is far from imminent. Let Chance and skill redistribute our abilities for the coming days, and then carry on.
Aristokles placed his hands on the rim of the table and set himself over it, a watchful god invisible to the combatants. The drama played out like two ant colonies at war on a plate of molasses. Aristokles was no tactician, and did not dare interpret the events of the greater armies. He decided to watch the minute actions of two scouting parties that were drawing close to one another. One purple speck of light, and three green. After a few minutes of stalking one another, circling and waiting, flirtatious evasions and seekings, the two forces met. The purple speck glowed brighter for an instant, and all three green points dissolved into haze before vanishing from the map.
Aristokles returned to the pebble beach to make use of his art until the gathering was over and the redistribution began.
◊ ◊ ◊
Legs folded, lungs expanding and contracting. Breathe in: one with the outside, part of the whole, all is with, selfless. Breathe out: severing of the self, separation from the outside, all is against, alone. Breathe in and breathe out until the invisible line between outside and inside is aware of itself. Transform observational peristalsis into intense, willed action. Eyes closed, daylight skipping off the waves of the river to splash in dull red heat across the eyelids. Eyes closed again, the second pair of eyelids this time, the film of dreams and distant recollections. Wide awake, the body is slowed. The heartbeat levels off to a steady tempo, calm quarter notes in a measure of unknown length, unknown signature, unbroken but for the occasional irregular pair of eighths. River sound in the ears, a rushing lull, a whispered roar.
When the mystery dissolves, when presence becomes dream-presence, when the mind is an open field without boundaries, when the strings of causality can be felt quivering at the fingertips—eyes open.
The cube on the stones. Cards with pictures and symbols arranged around it with deliberate geometry.
The space within the cube. Focus.
The squared volume of air wavers like heat off of sand. Adjust the mind, keep pace with the vibrations. Chance is at work in the motions of matter: in the river, in the shapes of the stones. Within this precise cubic volume of air there rushes billions of particles, pushed by the wind and swapped out for another set of billions each second. Within this precise volume there is no conscious design. Until now.
Now each of the billions of particles that passes through this space must first pass through the analogy of the self that observes, who alters their behavior by his very observation, and controls their behavior by altering the nature of his observation. Now the wind must pass not only through the smooth edges of wood and through this exact section of physical being, but also through the self-conceptualization of the acute spectator.
By carefully folding his observation into his willed selfhood, Aristokles has made his perception yet another muscle. He flexes that muscle, and the space within the cube bends, and the fate of the universe is changed ever so slightly.
◊ ◊ ◊
It wasn’t long before we discovered we were not the only refugees in the valley. Thousands of the displaced streamed down from the mountains and foothills to the north and through the forest to the west seeking shelter from the inhuman threat. They often worked their way along the river, and so would stumble upon our encampment. Few of those who found us carried on. Common sense taught that there was relative safety in numbers.
Yet beyond that simple truth was something intangible that dwelled about the place, haunting and serene. It remained unspoken, but we all knew it in our bones. We were being protected here.
Soon the projected enclosure of the wall had been expanded by several square miles. Every man, woman and child who arrived at our encampment was enlisted to work on the fortifications, to clear great swaths of forest, to build homes, to make farmland. We were no longer a mere handful of mourners hiding away in the woods. We were a community of dedicated individuals. One might have mistaken it for the blossoming beginnings of a city destined for greatness, had it not been for the sorrow in our movements, the revenge in our eyes.
Though the colony grew strong, each citizen felt the weight of the coming struggle as if it were already upon him. Soon the plague would have to be confronted. What had began as a series of predatory slaughters would transform into all-out war.
As the colony sublimated around them, the leaders among us sought not only the most strategic defense, but even then an obscure method of conquering the enemy. The beasts were becoming stronger out in the wilderness, while we were still recovering our senses, bracing ourselves for invasion, cataclysm, extinction.
It was the alliance between two great minds that brought about the revelation. Leon, soldier and strategist, held strenuous counsel with Anakletos, philosopher and craftsman. Together they reached this conclusion: The only way to combat an enemy with such incredible advantages was to influence probability itself.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
The redistribution had begun. Three men sat on stools around a wooden table in the midst of a field, their cubes placed carefully to the side in the grass, eyeing hands of cards clutched firmly between thumb and fingers. Their names were Timokrates, Anaxagoras, and Phaedrus. Silver coins, dull-cornered hexagons embossed with curving symbols circumscribed in a forgotten language, clattered to the center of the table one upon the other. Phaedrus slapped his cards face-down and leaned back, arms folded, to watch the showdown. Timokrates placed his cards face-up on the table: two Quiet Stones, one Standing Tree, one Formless Air, one Boundless Field.
Anaxagoras revealed his hand with a flourish of the fingertips, each card clapping against the table in quick succession like a run of grace notes preceding melody. Three Bold Mountains and two Boundless Fields. Phaedrus whistled high to low, Timokrates groaned in disbelief, palms pressed white against his forehead, and Anaxagoras smiled as he collected his winnings, scraping the coins toward himself in one clean shovel-motion.
“Aristokles,” he said, “we missed you at the gathering. Take a seat.”
Aristokles sat, assuming the role of the fourth player. He reached into the folds of his cloak and produced the hand from the last game he had played. Anaxagoras began to deal out hands to himself and the other two players.
The game had been crafted ages ago as part of the system of shaman artistry. A handful of coins was possessed by each shaman, the quantity of which determined the potency of a shaman’s art. The cards were as old as the coins, each one embossed on stiff parchment with an elaborate hand-painted representation of a natural object. Trees, stones, bodies of water, meteorological forms, mountains, hills, fields, elements; all were accounted for in the Deck. The cards were in constant circulation, and no table-deck held all of them. They were said to be the mystic symbols of the types of power a shaman could wield with his spells, and were meant to be the subject of deep meditation, in parallel with the shaman’s cube, during sessions of artistry. The value of each card was indeterminate, and the winner was only proclaimed as such by an unspoken, collective interpretation of card-to-card relationships accepted by any given table of players. The purpose of the game was to distribute power (coins) and abilities (cards) in accordance with both the skill of the players and the chance of the draw.
Players left the game at the beginning of a hand, and kept their last five cards with them at all times. The last hand of Aristokles had been four Drifting Smokes and a Whispering Stream. He regretted to see the excellent hand shuffled back into the table-deck after the first round, but won a palpable sum with it before it was assimilated into the obscurity from which it had been assembled.
It was to be a lucrative redistribution for Aristokles. He doubled the number of coins in his possession before he left the table. Anaxagoras came away from the table with a slightly increased hoard, and by the twitching of his eyebrows as he stood up with his final hand, an inspiring set of abilities. Timokrates and Phaedrus lost much of their wealth, but retired with the same calm and friendly demeanor. It was, after all, the will of Chance that had robbed them of their power: surely Chance was on the side of the faithful, surely out of these subtle turns of events the human victory would be achieved.
Aristokles left the table with a hand that was, judging from the table’s determinations of value during this series of games, utterly worthless. Fanned out before his eyes were five different cards. One Quiet Stone, one Boundless Field, one Aimless Cloud, one Wandering Star, and one that Aristokles had never come across in all his years of card-slinging. It pictured a cartographic view of the colony itself, all in shades of gray but for the stark blue river carving its way southward, accurate to the last detail. . . except for the small bridge that extended from the central shrine to an island in the midst of the water that he knew did not exist.
The card was called Cunning River.
◊ ◊ ◊
Even before the wall was complete, the arms race had begun. We were stockpiling weapons and training the youth, racing against the monsters that lurked outside the colony. They were out of sight but never out of mind, and we could feel them like a heavy shadow creeping toward us from the periphery of vision, a motion that slides out of sight when the eye is brought into focus. The military men were playing chess with an invisible foe, fashioning an offensive stance out of a thousand pieces, unaware of the position of the enemy and even doubting its existence.
Once the idea of shaping Chance to our advantage had been spoken, it could not be forgotten. The wise-man Anakletos had long held certain theories regarding the nature of this universe. As the story goes, he had been silent for days, watching the river, when the philosophy struck him. The world, he claimed, is held together by a being’s awareness of it. To gaze upon the river was to alter, in miniscule gradients, the speed, the flow, the substance of its current. To observe was to reshape. And surely a creative mind, armed with clever and disciplined eyes, could change the way it perceived the river. Therefore, by ontological law, a man could bend the river to his will.
Toward the necessity of preserving our race, his philosophy was drafted into military service. Under the supervision of the commander Leon, Anakletos had begun to hone his new art and teach it to the next generation. Rigorous experimentation took place. Veteran soldiers would engage inexperienced recruits in mock battle; the former alone with their weapon, the latter armed in addition with a practitioner of the art seeking to manipulate the outcome. The results were beyond dispute.
Yet there were those who argued that there was another factor at work, the boundless variable known as faith. It was possible that the combatants’ awareness of the practitioner was enough to strengthen the subject of focus, and to throw the opposing soldier off-balance. But however it came into being, was that not the desired effect?
The warrior-artist was born. It was not long before his craft met the less forgiving test of the battlefield.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
The cube twitched.
Aristokles woke with a spasm, wiped beads of sweat from his brow, then stared into the sun until the sleep was burned from his eyes. She was past the zenith now and traveling lower. He was sitting on top of a rock with his legs crossed trying to remember his dream. He let his legs slide apart and his toes touch the earth. After a few gentle minutes of kneading his bare feet into the forest soil and looking through the sky, his gaze came to rest on the object between his feet. The cube. He focused, eyes straining. Had their been movement, or had it only been his imagination echoing another forgotten dream-image?
One instantaneous flash of color.
It lasted for the blink of an eye, and could have been the bright spot cloven into his sight by the sun. But no, the image had been too sharp, the colors too vivid. It had been the terrified face of a woman, blonde hair with eyes of blazing green, beautiful even in its contortion.
Aristokles recoiled, falling backwards off of the rock. He laid there, gazing upward into the blue for a long string of moments. Had he been granted the sight of a goddess? Had it been a vision into the past, or into the future? An image transmitted directly from the battlefield by the convoluted tides of coincidence? What had terrified, was terrifying, would terrify this woman?
After his thoughts had raged in every corner of possibility, he bade himself relax, and began steady breathing exercises. The vision had come to him with purpose, and had come to him because he had followed the will of Chance and brought himself out into the forest in search of a quiet stone. He sat up, groaning and running his fingers through his hair. He walked around the rock and found his cube, his last hand arranged around its sides. Near the left edge he had set the Quiet Stone, the first of his recent hand.
The second was the Boundless Field.
He picked up his cards and tucked them into his cloak, their dealt order still intact. He gripped his cube and jogged off deeper into the woods, heading for the nearest clearing.
◊ ◊ ◊
The wall was now almost complete. Its long arms extended deep into the river and far out over the land, cradling us in protective embrace. The last stones were laid and the sharpened tree trunks raised. The carpenters built the gate, and the smiths fashioned it with thick iron clasps and a massive bolt. A crowd gathered to watch as it swung shut for the first time, blocking out the terror of the outside world—locking us in.
The men were separated into two castes: soldiers and warrior-artsits. The castes were of equal numbers, and they were paired according to their styles of combat, their temperaments, even intellectual compatibility. One soldier to each warrior-artist. One man to deal and receive the blows, one man to twist fate in his soldier’s favor.
There was a time of great contentment with this system. But rifts in task soon become rifts in thinking, and all the wider for it. Leon and his soldiers grew disdainful of the warrior-artists. Why not bolster the fighting force with as many able-bodied men as we could muster? What’s more, the creed of the warrior-artists shifted further toward mysticism each time it was vocalized. The warrior-artists were scornful in their own right. Why deprive their purpose of a single man who could help turn the tides of Chance, when every mind set to the task brought them that much closer to controlling the fabric of causality?
The dispute was serious. But when the common enemy reared its formless head again for the first time in years, it was cast aside. One of the hunting parties had walked out the gates as twenty strong, and scrambled back in as three badly wounded, spouting tales of dark monstrosities devouring their companions.
The fighting force leapt into action. They were frightened, we could see it in their faces; but greater than fear was the hunger for the first militant confrontation with the enemy. They marched out of the gates in twos, led by the one hunter left with the strength to guide them.
And then, a miracle. Ragged, bloody, and filled with laughter, they returned. They had won. The beasts—so long rumored to be immortal, invulnerable, demonic—they had seen the beasts bleed and die.
The victory was only the first in a long and arduous campaign. So spoke the two great leaders, and they spoke no lie.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
Two days had passed and Aristokles had brought about the visions of the woman four times, each in conjunction with a location delineated by the order of cards in his last hand.
The Boundless Field had led him to a wide clearing in the forest where wild grass swayed and insects hummed. After half an hour of intense concentration he had conjured the vision again. This time the woman lingered a moment longer within the empty walls of the wooden cube.
The search for a location symbolized by the Aimless Cloud had been far more rigorous. He had wandered through the forest for the remainder of the day, always with his eyes turned up toward the sky. No chance occurrences sparked an epiphany, no secrets were unveiled. He had reentered the colony with the evening hunting-party just before nightfall with a heavy heart, and retired to his dwelling. His sleep was plagued with intense dreams of wandering through vast expanses of uncharted territory, and as he walked he felt the blade-like pupils of crouching predators tracing his steps, set in golden circles gleaming from the shadows. He had started awake in the midst of night, and could not fall asleep again until he brought to bed with him the iron sledgehammer he kept for maintenance of the mill.
In the morning he had set out again, this time searching within the colony. He hiked along the dirt roads, passing farmers on horse-drawn carts and fellow shaman honing their skills in patches of matted-down field grass. When he sighted the hill from which a lone tree sprouted, he hurried off the path and up the gentle slope. He had reached into his pocket and gazed into the painting on the Aimless Cloud. This very hill, it seemed, had been sketched at the bottom of the picture, above which a great cloud was passing. He had sat down under the tree and waited.
The sky was clear but for one pure, white, lumbering beast. The vision came quickly this time, and he was able to sustain it for almost a minute. Her breathing was heavy as if in sexual passion, and her green eyes blinked in the face of some unknowable monstrosity. Was she being tortured, swallowed by the enemy?
She was seeking a listener. There was dark truth in her eyes, a yarn waiting to be told. He was determined to unravel it, and seek the center of the labyrinth.
That night he had leapt into the river at the north end of the colony and climbed the slippery birth-slope of the wall. He ambled along the top for nearly an hour before settling into the lotus position with the cube before him and the Wandering Star placed inside it. He looked up into the night sky: the stars like winter morning ice-crystals on black plate glass. One star, isolated from any constellation, winked and shifted, calling his attention. He poured his thoughts into it, imagining a huge, infinitely distant orb of fire, spinning fast enough to tear itself apart and fade into blackness. There and then the woman appeared to him for the fourth time, the vision burning through the surrounding night, so lucid he could almost hear her short breaths.
Aristokles saw a darkness framed in the green of her eyes, the silhouette of a malignant machine assembling itself out of a thousand fragments to reveal one striking purple disc reflected in the moisture of her quivering irises.
◊ ◊ ◊
That night Aristokles returned to his home. The machinery was droning on in the dark corner of the hut, muffled by the chuckling flow of the artificial stream. Ptolemais was waiting for him there. She had placed the sledgehammer on the rough dirt floor as if in fear or respect, and fallen asleep on the straw mattress. The woolen blanket hid her thin, curved frame up to the neck, but he could see she was wound tightly underneath, her extremities pulled inward to concentrate body heat. Her hair tumbled free across the blanket, thick and black, in tight waves. Her cheeks were hollow like those of a much older woman. Beneath her tight eyelids he could sense the oceanic blue of her eyes as they darted in circles.
He sat down on the side of the bed and ran his hands over his face and through his hair, gathering himself. He seemed to be squinting at himself from a great distance, trying to ascertain his own shape, to remember where he was. In the months before the fateful vision had befallen him, struck him like a subtle disease of the mind, he had courted Ptolemais in the fields of the colony, sipping wine and trading jokes and stories. A wave of guilt overtook him: lost in the depth of these past obsessive days he had all but forgotten her. Now he prepared himself, weighing phrases and apologies in his head, crafting a means of bringing her close to him again. But not too close. Not into the midst of these serpentine doubts. If he was to be, as the aura that enveloped him whispered, a sacrifice toward the discovery of higher knowledge, he would bear the fate alone.
Her eyelashes fluttered, and Ptolemais was eased out of an anxious dream by a calloused hand stroking her cheek. She opened her eyes and gazed up at him. She smiled, perhaps thinking herself, in a semi-conscious daze, wrapped in the familiarity of some moment long past that they had shared. But as the present seeped into her she remembered his long absence, and her lips tightened with concern.
“Where have you been?” she asked as she sat up in the bed. As the sheet fell from her shoulders Aristokles saw her smooth flesh, and felt, with some confusion, no desire for her.
“Stargazing,” he replied. He pulled her head to his chest and kissed it gently.
“I’ve been worried. You’ve been wandering again, as you used to. Everyone says you’ve become a man apart. Have you forgotten me?”
“No.” It was not a complete lie, he told himself. Surely he had kept her memory close on some level of consciousness. “I’ve been pursuing new methods. I have to follow my art where it takes me.” He was looking her in the eyes now. A cloud had passed across the moon, and the cool pallor had wormed its way through the windows and erected itself between them, firm and visible, thick as a wall.
“The shaman who pursue victory don’t need new techniques. They’re doing fine. Victory is near, they say. Why push into new territory?” She had wrenched away from him, frowning. Eyes downcast, her temper began to show. “They say you are already the best. You have the sight, and the gift, and the willpower. Don’t waste it. The art is a means, Aristokles. Don’t perfect it for the sake of your ego.”
“They’re dedicated to victory, Ptolemais. I’m dedicated to understanding what that victory signifies.” With a breathless motion of the lips he added, “They know nothing.”
“You’re so distant tonight. It’s been a long time. But it’s more than that.” She looked up at him. Desperation coursed through her question: “What is it this time? Are you forlorn or inspired?”
“They come hand in hand.”
With this he took her hand in his, and laid down beside her. They drifted away from the room, away from the bed they shared, and into dark individual spaces where they were each alone.
◊ ◊ ◊
After the first victory, the great campaign our leaders had spoke of crossed from conjecture into execution. The soldiers and warrior-artists were divided into regiments, and a disciplined hierarchy emerged. A different regiment marched out of the colony each day to scout out the position of the enemy, engaging them when necessary. They struck like packs of wolves, luring small groups of the creatures away from their herds and overwhelming them with a combination of force and artistry. Soon the groups were becoming self-sufficient, staying outside the colony on week-long patrols, returning only to bandage the wounded, bury the dead bodies that had not been devoured, and resupply.
There were whole months that went by when not a single regiment was seen within the colony. The occasional messenger would return from the front lines with news. The campaign was intensifying. Leon and Anakletos were developing their methods by careful experimentation in the field, coming to understand the new powers they wielded and learning the weaknesses of the enemy. The resistance had evolved into a complex guerilla war, and by all accounts it was going as well as it could.
But old discontents began to arise. More and more soldiers were lost to the enemy, and Leon’s doubts about the artists grew. Anakletos insisted that his men were on the brink of revelation, that he needed the soldiers to buy him more time, and he needed more artists in his ranks. Soon, he said, they would be able to transform Chance into human design, to create a victorious outcome from the chaotic forces of the world. Soon the soldiers would no longer be necessary to his project.
Leon wanted to believe, but could not accept such an intangible course of action. His men were bearing the majority of casualties, and the artists refused to become soldiers to compensate for losses. Anakletos saw faith in their eyes, where Leon read cowardice and superstition.
It was during a tight spot in the campaign that Leon proclaimed all warrior-artists must either be drafted as soldiers or banished from the battlefield as cumbersome insubordinates. Many complied and enlisted. But Anakletos and his closest disciples would not concede what had become their religion and purpose. The artists had no tangible strength to resist the soldiers, and so those who remained in the fold had no choice but to go. Leon assured his old friend, with a final stiff handshake, that they could return to the colony and continue to practice their art in the service of the war.
Anakletos and his remaining men were unfazed. If their abilities were truly what they believed them to be, they could steer Chance toward victory without physical proximity to the soldiers. But new methods would have to be invented.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
There were times when Aristokles was sighted as in a zoetrope, seen frame by frame through the narrow gaps between logs as he moved ghost-like within the damp triangular space between wood and stone, under the wall, below the angled trunks. He alone knew the secret to entering that secluded corridor: hidden by moving water at the north bank of the colony was an asymmetric void where one log was missing from the wall, forming an underwater entryway. The rite of passage was a struggle against the current and twenty breathless seconds.
The water ran down his face in streaks as he walked along the corridor, naked as an ancient statue. His cube and hand of cards had been left behind under his bed in the hut, stashed in silence while the first morning rays played across the sleeping face of Ptolemais. He needed more time alone, to contemplate the final card, the Cunning River.
The name suggested the river itself was consciously withholding secrets. The map on the card was ingrained in his mind: the image of a bridge extending from the shore near the shrine, leading across the water to an island that did not exist. Was the card so old that these objects had eroded away, swept off by the river or destroyed? Or was it a schematic meant for careful study and construction? Paranoia crept up his spine. The answer was close enough to taste—it tasted of old blood, buried tragedy. The other cards had led him to the vision of the woman with green eyes, each time more intense and lucid. She had a part to play in this yet. Aristokles could still feel her reaching up to him from a dark chasm, its stony lips closing together, inexorable and slow, to crush her truth and speak no more.
His muscles had gone tense without his approval. He slowed his pace and relaxed, and felt his heart rate diminishing. Aristokles reminded himself to think like those who had designed the card, to think like an artist. If the island and its bridge existed than there would be nothing extraordinary about the map on the card. The aberration was the only clue. He would have to find the bridge, or a bridge inward, seeking an island jutting from the midst of the stuff of life, a vacant space that the energy flow was forced by its own laws to circumvent and never touch. To contemplate this he would go to the shrine, the place where the bridge began.
Aristokles walked half the perimeter of the wall before doubling back. Now that his course was decided the way home seemed longer. He followed the narrow passage back down into the river, dove beneath the water, and swam up through the gap. He let the current carry him downstream, then swam into the man-made channel that led to the waterwheel. He grabbed one of the paddles as it came around, gripped it as it took him under, and held fast as it lifted him up above the hut. He jumped off and landed on the thatched roof, then tumbled down the slope and off the edge to land in a heap at his own front door.
He stood and brushed off the straw that had stuck to his wet skin. There was a broad smile on his face for the first time in days. He had not taken that way home since he was young.
Aristokles walked inside. Ptolemais had left him a breakfast of warm porridge before going on her way. He ate like an animal, crouching by the embers of the fire she had lit to cook the meal, drying himself. Then he slipped back into bed. He had only slept a handful of hours, and he would need full concentration for this final task. What’s more, he always thought more deeply once the sun had gone down.
The blankets were thick with Ptolemais’ sweet, fleshy scent. He dreamed of the woman with green eyes. She smelled just like his lover. She hummed a mournful folk song and danced a light dance as forest fires raged in the darkness behind her.
◊ ◊ ◊
Aristokles woke just as the sun sank below the forest. He dressed himself, stashed the cards in his cloak, and looped his arm through the cube. Then he was out the door, down the bank and onto the pebble beach, walking toward the shrine.
He looked out over the river. Thick fog was accumulating over the lapping water, shattering the moonlight into so many splintered points of vapor that it became one silver-blue haze. He had seen fog on the river before, but never like this. The heavy, earthbound clouds were swirling into shapes he could almost recognize, then dissipating before they could be given name or meaning. His mind was contorting its surroundings, as he had trained it—but those contortions were acquiring no definition.
There was another, invisible fog between himself and the shapes dancing across the river. Unfocused focus, intricate ambiguity, detailed opacity. No phrase could illustrate a film so fine, a lens synchronously convex and concave.
Halfway southward along the shore Aristokles encountered a familiar figure sitting cross-legged on the stones. It was Kyriakos. He had no tool in hand now, no astrological symbols scraped into driftwood. His vacant, open palms were placed on his knees, turned upward toward the shrouded sky. His eyes were wide open, absorbing the changing forms of fog into their glassy stillness.
Aristokles knelt down beside him. After a long quiet moment he posed his question.
“What do you see?”
Kyriakos did not stir. After what could have been an hour of drifting smoke and seamless silence, Aristokles stood and began to walk away. Then he came to a dead halt.
Kyriakos was whistling a tune. It was the song the green-eyed woman had hummed in his dream. The old man gradually broke off from the melody and descended chromatically in pitch until he could no longer intone the notes, and his lips vibrated with the sound of wind through an empty canyon. This too faded away as his single breath ran dry.
Kyriakos inhaled deep, and without breaking his gaze into the fog he said, “I see time.”
Aristokles passed him by.
◊ ◊ ◊
The warrior-artists returned to our colony, hearts heavy, spirits yet unbroken. It was the first time we had heard news of the war in half a year. Many believed that the army had been destroyed, that it could not survive so long in the field without returning to the colony. The artists explained the intricacies of the war to us, how Leon had established multiple base camps that the army periodically inhabited and then abandoned. The war machine had become a mobile city.
The news of the schism in the military was shocking, though predictable. The same tensions had been present as the regiments were first formed. Behind the artists’ shame lay a burning anger, but Anakletos was not about to let the transience of emotion come between himself and the goal of his faith. Once safe inside the wall, he assured his men that they would continue to refine their art in the service of the war, and that no grudges must be held with cataclysm still on the horizon. Then he plunged into seclusion.
Days passed as Anakletos brooded. Their power was undiminished, perhaps stronger than before, but they needed new methods to compensate for the loss of a true battlefield scenario.
Anakletos reached the conclusion that distance from the battlefield had robbed the warrior-artists of three things: their subject of focus, the influence of Chance on their individual power, and the influence of terrain on their individual methods of combat.
Anakletos chose to do what any man of faith does in the absence of the truth he proclaims. He created symbols for what had been lost.
For lack of a subject, Anakletos crafted an object. He let his hands run wild with the tools of a carpenter, following the flow of the wood, cutting away what was rotten and keeping what was dense. The result was the rough frame of a hollow wooden cube. With careful motions he smoothed its contours and gave it pure shape. It was perfect for his purposes. It had to be hollow, so that the emptiness, and not the object itself, might come under the sway of his scrutiny.
For lack of Chance’s influence on the artist’s power, Anakletos forged a great number of iron and copper coins, such as were used as currency in foreign lands. He had noted then that the coins seemed to be an analogy for natural energy, constantly changing hands as a representation of value, yet worthless without this motion. The warrior-artists needed to be surrounded by Chance, to be at its mercy, even where their power was concerned.
For lack of the battlefield itself, the various natural scenarios that determined how the artist would protect and empower his soldier, Anakletos created an innumerable deck of cards. Each one fell into a named category of geographic formation, yet each painted picture was unique. The cards would inspire in the subconscious those arenas of battle that were no longer physical realities, and thus strengthen their faith in the chaotic craftsmanship of nature.
The warrior-artists had crafted new tools. Now all they could do was practice the art and wait.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
The fog swirled beneath the shrine’s vault, playing havoc with the shadows. The marble columns were spotted with water droplets that rolled downward and collected in pools on the floor. Aristokles climbed the moist steps and walked to the table, to the map. The pinpoints of light on the miniature battlefield produced an eerie glow, churned into luminescent foam by the fog. He leaned over the table and looked down on the war. The fog was thick enough that even his view of the map was distorted, and every group of points became one amorphous globule against the veiled landscape. Was there fog out in the field? he wondered. Were the soldiers groping for footing through this same obscurity? The purple mass had closed off all escape routes for the green, and was falling in on them as naturally as water moving downhill.
Aristokles tore his gaze from the table and walked to the eastern column of the shrine. He sat down on the steps, set the cube before him, and placed in the center of it the card named Cunning River. He then folded his legs underneath him, and after one upward glance at the sublime expression of the shrine’s eastern mask, he looked out over the river, deep into the fog, keeping the cube in his peripheral vision. He focused his thought on giving structure to the vapor.
In time, structure emerged. The fog above the water condensed, then curled away in tall curves that formed a series of arches over a pathway across the river. The path was weightless fog. Aristokles flexed his mind, and in a sudden, implosive rush of wind the path became solid. It was a wharf of rotting wood held aloft by poles set deep in the riverbed. The fog still held its parabolic shape above the bridge, forming a tunnel into the darkness. Aristokles sat still for a long time, afraid to move lest the vision dissipate. When he finally relaxed his mind, it held.
He stood and descended from the shrine. Trembling footsteps carried him to the high bank from which the bridge began. Aristokles paused before moving onto the wooden boards and squinted, searching for the exact point at which the wharf vanished into the darkness. Finding no division between wharf and night, he placed a foot on the boards and began to cross. Wood groaned beneath. He walked under the vault of fog, careful not to reach out into the vapor on either side of him; he felt as if he himself would evaporate if he touched the clouds with his fingertips, carried off into the crude dream from whence these shapes appeared. The river laughed from below, deep chuckles and high trickling—air passing through a heavy chest, brushing against rough patches of throat tissue.
The bridge led exactly where he remembered: straight to a door set into the weathered rock-face on the western side of the island. The door was tall and wide, two sloped edges meeting in a point at the top, the same flaking wood as the bridge. It was covered with splotches of moss, and from its boards two iron rings hung. He gripped one of the rings, rust flaking as he wrapped one finger around it at a time, fascinated by the intricacy of his muscles, amazed at his own dexterity.
He pulled open one half of the door and stepped into damp torchlight. The chamber had been carved out of the inside of the island. There was a guilty spirit to the place. To his left and right the walls were bare and craggy. Before him was the puzzle.
It was composed of nine stone tiles. Hundreds of bowl-shaped recesses had been hollowed into these tiles, an elaborate conduit of carved lines connecting them. Spheric stones lay in piles all over the floor. A feeling welled up in Aristokles: there was a river far greater than the one surrounding the island held back by this wall. The puzzle was the lock on a levy. The story was hidden, but the room’s logic was obvious. Of course the stones would lie just in this way, like scattered constellations fallen out of the sky, out of their own mythologies.
Constellations. . . Aristokles ran his hands along the wall, letting his fingers trace the lines, setting his balled fists into the dark, hollow spaces. He crouched down and lifted one of the stones in his hand. It was slimy and cold, and the weight was familiar. He thrust the stone into one of the spaces. There was a loud clack, and the stone held it place.
Now he was scrambling for more stones, rapidly arranging a shape on the wall. It was to be the form of one of Kyriakos’ contrived constellations. He couldn’t believe his memory of the driftwood carving was so vivid—he must have seen the shape before, somewhere else, a long time ago.
When he finished the picture the square tile on which he had arranged the shape broke from the wall and shattered as it struck the floor.
Hidden beneath it was a layer of granite, upon which text had been chiseled. It told of a nocturnal escape across a river from an inhuman enemy. As he read, tears began to stream down his face; suffocated in the steel grip of an emotion he could not recognize.
The text was punctuated with a delicate signature. He pronounced the name in a whisper. . .
“Zoe.”
The flash of green irises passed across his mind’s eye. “Zoe, beautiful terrified Zoe. . . was that your name?”
Aristokles stood, the torchlight playing over his face. It could have been a trick of the shadows, but wrinkles seemed to have been carved into his visage, as if he had aged years in a moment. He blinked, shook his head, blinked again, raised his right arm across his chest to clutch his left shoulder, lowered it again. He was aware of every hair sprouting out of his chin. He looked down and saw his feet, wrapped in sandals, and watched as his toes stretched away from one another, then settled in two neat rows again. So lucid, so much detail.
After another two hours of memory, confusion, and rapid movements of his hands, eight constellations from the driftwood carving had been recreated on the wall, every vertex accounted for by a smooth round stone. Eight tiles had been loosed from the wall and burst, one after the next, into porcelain-like shards on the cavern floor. His wide eyes had digested seven fragments of some mythic historical document, and they now moved, with inexorable slowness, over the eighth:
◊ ◊ ◊
For one cycle of seasons the artists practiced and perfected their art. With distance from the battlegrounds, their methods of incantation and meditative awareness came to revolve more and more around metaphysical vagaries and intangible modes of thought. They had abandoned all logic, and placed their faith in the cards, the coins, and the cubes. Their system became deeply subjective, and many feared they had lost touch altogether with their goal. Anakletos assured them that they were accelerating toward a singularity at which the war would no longer be the focus of the art—their control over reality would become so complete that the war would never have occurred. The trouble was there was no way to grasp such a result. How would they know when they had breached the wall of time, when causality was fully at their disposal? Could it be that this climax had already passed, and they now practiced on without knowledge as to their effect on the world, in stumbling, blind omnipotence?
The answers to these anxieties came trudging back into the colony, drenched and muddied from rain, bloody and wounded. They were a dozen men, and they were the last of the warriors. Leon and his surviving handful had returned to the colony, drained of all feeling in limbs and hearts.
Their stories unfolded as we warmed them with fire and sustenance. The enemy was too many, too strong, and too savage. No tactics could match their wolf-like brutality.
The war was lost. The final task was to wait for extinction.
The skilled craftsmen among us found a way to pass the time. Among Leon’s possessions was an extraordinary notebook that detailed the movements of both our warriors and the enemy throughout the conflict, complete with technical sketches of terrain. Within the shrine that marked the spot at which we first disembarked on this side of the river, the craftsmen constructed a fantastic machine with fragments harvested from enemy bodies. With living clockwork and mirrors, the monument would repetitively display the tactical movements of the war at the same speed they were executed, from beginning to end, unto eternity.
-Zoe
◊ ◊ ◊
Aristokles knew the risk he had taken by leaving the island. He knew his art well enough to recognize the unique significance of a specific moment in time. If he should return at a different hour, in daylight or in twilight, or with different emotions or thoughts, the bridge was likely to not show itself, and to never show itself again. He had found the instant of passage, and it was (barring the possibility of a deranged, cyclic temporal system) the one and only instant of its kind.
But it couldn’t be helped. There was a task to be done.
When he found himself home once again, he reached under the bed and gripped the shaft of the sledgehammer, wrapping one finger around it at a time, cradling its gravity in his palms. Then he was following the path through the field, too afraid to walk the beach lest the mists show him anything more. He leapt up the stairs of the shrine and walked toward the monument. With one last look he saw the purple force streaming down on top of the green, purple sparks hunting, green sparks winking out one after the other.
Just as he swung the hammer down into the machine, a thought crossed his mind: How could the craftsmen have programmed their own extinction into its tactical history? But the thought, along with the miniature topography and battling points of light, was shattered upon impact.
Aristokles dropped his weapon and sank to his knees on the smooth marble floor. Within the great gash he had rent in the machine he saw steel gears twisting, fanged cogs turning, lights winking, mirrors flashing.
This was not the tractable reality he had been promised. This was the irreversible, merciless past, echoing on for an unknown span of ages.
◊ ◊ ◊
Tucked within folds of invisible fabric, real only in the void between two distinct eventualities, the ninth and last tile of the puzzle lay unturned. The gateway had opened and closed, and just before the text yet hidden under the stone slab effectively ceased to be, it read as follows. . .
◊ ◊ ◊
As we wait for the end, the warrior-artists have assumed one final, desperate task. If, in truth, they are, on some level however minute, able to alter the substance of Chance, to reshape the effects of causes, to control discreet events by controlling their own perceptions. . . then perhaps they can alter the flow of time. Perhaps they can reach backward and protect those who we once were, long before we were beyond salvation. Perhaps, if only within some dark pocket of untouchable space, they can produce another reality in which the war is only a myth.
-Zoe