[1,300] The Last Garden: Prologue
This is the prologue to an epic fantasy saga. I am looking for general feedback.
My primary goal for this piece is to establish a sense of "atmospheric weight". I want the environment, specifically the high desert, to feel as oppressive, ancient, and alive as the characters themselves.
PROLOGUE:
*What the fire takes, the water keeps.*
- the third line of the oldest prayer; the fourth is struck from every stone, and no living mouth recalls it
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The cold came up out of the ground.
That was the first thing the high desert had taught Maruk to mistrust. In the towns cold fell, down off the night sky as rain came down, or judgment, from somewhere above a man. Here it rose. It seeped up through the soles of his boots out of black rock, and a man who lay down to sleep thinking the danger was in the air over his head would wake in the grey hour with the chill already inside him, in his knees and his spine and the deep meat of him, and would not wake warm again. Maruk knew that.
He crouched now with one knee in that cold and his fingers spread above a track in the sand, and he did not touch it.
It was a hand. He had spent more of his life reading ground than reading his own skin, and the ground was telling him a thing he had no wish to hear. A handprint, pressed deep beside the mark of a bare foot, and the wrist had set wrong, canted forward, the heel of the palm worn hard and smooth as a hoof from going where a hand was never meant to go, which is along the ground. There were more of them ahead, a dozen, a score, hand and foot and hand and foot, all fresh, the night wind not yet come to soften the edges, all crawling the one direction. Inward. Toward the blank place the maps left empty at the center of everything.
The maps named the black rim around that blankness the Lion Mountains, and there were no lions, and it was not a mountain. It was a ring, a low broken wall of black ridge laid in a circle scores of miles across, and it lay so flat on the floor of the world that a man crossing the outer flats saw only weathered stone and thought himself nowhere in particular. You did not see the thing for what it was. You only felt the roads bend quietly away from it under your feet, season on season, no matter where you started, as Maruk's own road had bent, until every path he walked came at last to this blank ring that nothing crossed.
"We should turn back."
Maruk did not answer. The boy had said it perhaps thirty times since the rim first came up on the edge of the world two days gone and then refused to come closer, far things behave so in the deep sand, hanging at the limit of sight while a man's water dwindled and his nerve dwindled faster. Beko was a good boy and had been a good guide for the easy half of the road, when the way ran well to well; nineteen, narrow and quick, with the long bones of the river people and an open friendly face the desert had not yet finished teaching. Maruk had hired him out of the last green town for a guide and a witness and, in the small hours, for the plain animal comfort of not dying alone, and he was sorry for all three now. There are places a man has no right to bring a boy with his whole life still in front of him.
Behind them the she-camel made a low sound in her chest, and that he marked, because the camel was worth more than his own courage. He had ridden her eleven years and heard her make that sound twice, and both times there had been death inside the hour. Her head was up, her nostrils wide, her eyes rolling white at the dark. She did not spit and did not complain. She was afraid.
The boy had stopped saying it. For two days Beko had filled the dark with *we should turn back*, thirty times and more, the way a man keeps his own voice for company on a bad road; and somewhere in the last hour the saying had dried in him, and now he sat the camel's off side and made no sound at all. Maruk marked it as he marked the camel, and did not turn, because there was nothing in his own face he could have shown the boy that would have served him.
Then the wind shifted off the rim and brought the smell, and Maruk knew the camel's fear for his own.
It was an animal reek, the close rank warmth of a living thing that has bedded a long time in its own filth, and it had no business here, in a dead cold place the dry should have scoured clean an age ago. He had it downwind a hundred paces before he had the shape: a low pale hummock in the lee of a ridge that he took, coming up on it slow, for a sand-coloured beast gone down to die, some goat lost off a caravan, carrion he would not touch but had to read. He came over it with the knife out of long habit.
It lifted its face. It was a woman.
Or it had been. She was naked, weathered the grey-brown of the country itself, worn so far into it that a man might step over her in daylight and call her a stone; and she had gone on her hands so long that the wrists had set forward and the shoulders had come up around a sunk head, and there was a beetle moving at her cheek and she did not mind it. She looked up at him out of that ruin, and there was a light in her eyes, far back, behind some shutter that had closed a long time ago, and for half a breath the light came up toward the front of her, toward him, toward the fact of a person standing over her in the dark, and tried to be a woman looking at a man. And could not find the road. It reached the shut place and stood there; and then it sank back to wherever it lived now, and she put her face down again to the dead shrub and the beetle.
He had seen the grey people in the towns lift a worn man's grief off him with one swallow of something sweet, and leave him smiling and light, and had taken that for the whole of it. He knew now it was only the near edge. Here was the far edge, crouched in the dirt with a beetle at its lip, the same kindness given not once but without end, that does not lift the self out clean but wears it away a grain at a time, the high things first; the words, the shame, the standing up, the keeping of the dead, the knowing of one's own name, and leaves the rest to go on its hands, with a light behind the shutter that can no longer reach the glass.
There was nothing to be done. The road back had grown shut in her years before tonight; he read it in the set of the wrists as he read everything. He crouched, against the knowing. He spoke to her. Not soft, as you gentle a frightened beast. Plain, as you say a thing to a person who is owed the saying. He told her the night was cold and the wind off the rim was bad and she should keep to the lee of the ridge. He told her his name. He asked her, getting no answer and expecting none, whether she had been anyone's once, and whose. He spoke on the one chance in ten thousand that some last filament behind the shutter felt it land, the way a hand laid on a sleeper is felt down in a dream.
"I see you," he said, last of all, and meant it, and rose, because there was no more of it in him to give.
The boy had not come down. Maruk had heard him try, a scrape on the loose stone, a half-step, and then nothing, held where he stood at the camel's head. Maruk did not call him down. There are things a man does not make a boy come closer to, and he had brought the boy close enough to too many already.
And the dark gave up the rest of them. They were all around him, he saw now; scattered wide across the outer flats in ones and never twos, a reach of dark between each and the next: a slow field of the gone, sunk into the lee of every ridge, drifted up against this outermost ring as sand drifts to the slack edge of a dune, while somewhere past them, ring on ring, the dark went down toward whatever the maps left empty at the center of everything.
That was when the bell began.
It came from under the earth. Maruk could not have said how he knew, except that the sound did not rise off the rim as sound is meant to; it came up, through the cold dead stone and into his ribs and his teeth, faint and round and impossibly deep, as if the whole floor of the world were a hollow thing brimful of black water and somewhere fathoms down a hand had reached out and struck a great bronze bell once, and then, after a silence just long enough to hope it was the only one, struck it again, lower, and a third time lower still; three slow strokes and a fold at the end, spaced like the words of a man speaking very slowly to someone very far off, someone he is not sure can hear.
And out on the flats, among the worn, one shape stood up that was not worn. It came erect and unhurried out of the dark at the foot of the rim, tall, wrapped head to foot in white that took the low moon and gave it gently back, and it bore a lantern that did not flicker or lean or stream as a flame leans in a night wind but burned level and patient and wrong; and it moved out among the fallen the way a man moves down rows he has tended a long time, bending to none of them, only passing. A keeper. A thing that walked upright in the one place on the earth that had taken the upright out of everyone else.
It stopped, and turned its head, and looked up the dark slope, across the flats, across the hundreds of paces of broken stone and thin black air, to the cleft where two men lay screened in rock, hidden as well as the desert had ever taught Maruk to hide a thing. There was no power on the earth by which it could have seen them. It looked at them anyway, with no surprise in it and no alarm, only a mild and level regard, the notice a man gives a sparrow come into his yard. And the old certainty went through Maruk cold and entire as a blade laid flat along the spine.
At Maruk's shoulder the boy's breath had gone wrong, fast and shallow and climbing, the breath of a thing about to bolt; Maruk knew the sound from the camel, and reached back a hand in the dark for the boy's arm.
Beko broke. The boy made a thin sound that was not a word and surged up out of the dark and ran, all his hard-learned caution gone in the one instant, and Maruk lunged and his fingers closed on cold air. A pale shape going up the slope into the blackness, and then no shape, and then nothing, no sandal, no cry on the wind. The dark simply took him. And Maruk knelt with his hand still open on the air and the keeper's mild eye still on him from below, and could not go after, and the boy was gone, and he called it death, because death was the only word the dark had left him to call it by. He had brought a boy with his whole life in front of him to the one place that wears the life out of a man and leaves the body to crawl, and he had lost him here, and the losing went into Maruk in the place his certainty had been, and did not come out again.
The lantern lowered. The bell folded down into its last stroke and was done, and the wrong cold drained out of the ground on the rising wind until a man could half believe he had dreamed it all, the worn, the keeper, the deep slow bell, but for the smell, which stayed. When he made himself look again the keeper was gone and the white lantern was gone, and the field of the fallen lay where it had lain, patient, unhurried, going nowhere.
He did not go down. Whatever sixty hard years had made of Maruk, it had not made him a man who walks toward the thing that has just shown him how small he is. He found the she-camel where she had broken her hobble and run a little way and stopped, trembling, and quieted her with hands that would not be still, and turned her head north and east, back toward the maps and the wells and the comfortable lies of men.
The relic rode against his chest where it had ridden ten years, a map worn to a ghost, the coastlines run together like old bruises, the inked towers of the holds rubbed down to shadow. He had carried it for faith and not for use, for the sake of the one line the rot had spared: pressed so hard into the hide that the stylus had near breached the pelt, set down in a dying scholar's fierce small hand in a manuscript-city that was itself dying around him, the words that had cost Maruk everything he had once been and everyone he had once had.
*The mercy was found, not made.*
He had taken them, those ten years, for a door into a riddle: that the kindness spreading across the dying world on its carts had a source, a first place, and that a man who found the source might understand the thing, and perhaps undo it. He had it now. *Found, not made:* dug up, older than the holds, older than the crown, older than the war no one remembered, out of a grave in the floor of the world that the dying earth bent all its roads toward, that turned no soul away and set them down on their hands at its edges, and rang a bell up through the dark as though something at the bottom of it were still trying, after everything, to say one word it could not finish.
He rode north out of the place the maps miscalled the Lion Mountains with the worn map warm against his chest and the certainty gone out of him forever, and one cold thought lodged where it had been: that he had been right.