I think I fell asleep—I must have, because I remember waking up, and the smell of burning lamps and burning grass was all around me, and there was a light, a light already fading into a memory of silver, and my ropes were untied, lying limp on the grass beside me. I sat up and rubbed my numb, rain-soaked ankles and legs until, painfully, they prickled into life again, and I was able to stand.
I did not make it to my feet.
A great wind blew through the little valley, and it knocked me to the earth again, a wind so stiff and quick that it slapped my eyes shut like snow-stuck windows, made them water behind the lids, whipped every drop of sweat from my skin until I was dry as a page. I could not open my eyes, I could not see, but hands seemed to clutch at me in the dark, tear at my clothes, carry me up into arms I could not begin to guess at. Dark moved through dark and time passed without speaking to me.
And, though a man would not sleep at such a time, I woke with a raw throat and another child’s arm flopped over my face. It was thin and bony, all elbow. As I swam up into myself, I realized I was lying over another body, not less thin than the first. I looked up through a net of limbs, and beyond the limbs were thick bars of glass frosted over with ice. The wind had dwindled somewhat, much as a sirocco will dwindle into a sandstorm, but dwindle nonetheless. It curled and snapped through the cage and every angled limb.
As I struggled up through the mass, some sleeping children moaned and turned over, some wakened ones moved to the side—all were nearly naked, clothed in scraps which might once have been suits and dresses, and none reached up to draw a rag over their nakedness when my movement brushed the clothing aside. I reached the top of the pile of bodies—I thought there were about twenty of us there, shoved into the cage like stacked cow-ribs—and peered out into a world of wreckage.
Please be patient with me—I am trying to describe a place you will never see.
Wind-sprung tears streaked my face as I looked across a kind of central square. There were houses at its pale edges, fountains, even a bell tower, but I could see no wood or stone. Everything in the place was made of what the wind had managed to accumulate—paper and fish-bones and the bodies of unfortunate birds, scraps of fur and broken plaster and apple peels, lemon rinds, date seeds, old dresses, shoes without soles, soles without shoes, frayed rope and shattered pulleys. But most of the detritus of the city, most of the city of detritus, was paper. The fountains shot folios and scriptures and broadsheets into the air, and they were drafted by the gales into construction: endless pages sealed together as walls and stairs and peaked roofs by the unceasing wind. At the smallest break in the storm, I suspected, the whole place would drift into nothing.
The glass cage swung from an iron frame on a dais in the square. Canopies hung in patches over us, shredded cloth stretched through their frames, threads slipping almost to the ground. There were holes and rifts and cuts everywhere, but under their doubtful care, the wind behaved like a willful infant: cowed, but determined to get its own back the minute any back is turned. Folk moved over the rustling courtyard, poring over barrels and boxes and trays—tottering creatures with slender, wispy arms and legs, necks like those of swans, curving up to heads high above their shoulders, and great, distended bellies, swollen as a mother’s mound on a woman already full of too much meat and wine. Occasionally, one would peel a blown page from its spidery calves. The moon shone dully through the torn canopies like a bone through punctured skin.
We were ignored in our cage, shivering, clutching each other in a blind search for warmth, for hours. Sometime near dawn I grabbed at an arm for purchase and heard the smallest of cries—and I saw her, for the first time. A little older than I, but much thinner, thinner than a fawn at the bottom of winter’s well, and she looked up at me with enormous black eyes, her dark hair cut roughly, like a penitent’s, close to her head, in uneven patches and bald spots. Her lips were pale, cracked, as though she had not drunk water in days. Her tiny wrist twisted painfully in my hand. Her gaze slid to the wandering creatures in the square and back to me. I let her go as though she had burned me—and she had burned me, of course she had—those black, black eyes had burned me as surely as a brand. I held out my hand to pull her up out of the well of legs and arms, but she shook her head and cringed back into them. I rested my head against her gingerly; she coughed a little. These were the first times I touched her, and the first sounds I heard from her mouth.
Finally, the sun came gray and dingy through the high and wind-worried clouds, and one of the long-necked things came sidling up to the dais. In one quick motion it unlocked the door of the cage and stepped aside to avoid the pile of children that tumbled out. Soundlessly, it prodded us, squeezed us, and, with a strength I would not have suspected, pulled us apart, sorting us onto either side of the dais, where others of the city’s folk guided us into two shivering lines. The creature’s skin was pale and silvery, as though water moved just beneath the surface; its touch was cool and dry.
I was relieved that the girl was sorted into the same line as I, which was much shorter than the second. We stood side by side, she and I, waiting. The children opposite us were tied together, wrist by wrist, with a rope paler than skin. They looked at us helplessly, teeth chattering, toes blue. Then, their thin-armed guardian towed them over to our side and gave the lead to the last child in our line. It had to prod him roughly, and finally it just put the rope into his hand and closed his fingers around it. The creature who had opened the cage then took the hand of the child at the front of the line and led us all away. By instinct we locked hands together, as if going to a picnic behind our mother’s skirts. The girl squeezed my hand gently. We walked out of the courtyard and into the howl, through streets made of little more than rooster bones and petrified branches. It cracked under our feet, and the cracking was the only sound, until we stopped before a tall edifice with a solid, well-made door set into the rubbish-walls. It might have been a church, once, a basilica with tall towers. Now, like most of the architecture
of the city, the factory—for that is what it was, I came to learn—was mostly paper. I could read many of the printed letters, but they folded into each other or thatched over each other to make an arcane gibberish:
HERE BEGINS THE BOOK OF CLOWN, BURGLAR, CRIMINAL PROSPERITY TO MARROW AND ALL HER MARKET CLOSED BY ORDER GOATFLESH—TWO PORTIONS FOR GOBLETS UNAVAILABLE IN BLUE, YELLOW, RED SILK MEASURED BY PROPRIETOR’S ARM NOT CUSTOMER’S WOLF SOUP HOT AND TASTY CARAT WEIGHT THUS WAS BURIED ONCE THERE WAS A CHILD, WHOSE FACE WARNING: SALE OF INFESTED WHEAT ALL WEALTH TO THE CHRYSOPRASE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT—
On and on it wound, around the lintel and over the walls like a frieze, parchment and vellum and plain paper and linen, white and gold and black and gray and even scarlet, bright green mold glinting at angles. The children passed through the door—and it seemed so strange to me then, that a real door should have been shoved into the pages here but nowhere else—first the unbound, then the bound. The silence pressed down like piled stones on our shoulders; it was too much to bear. Just as the last of the knotted ones passed over the threshold, I slipped my place in line, hauling the girl with me, and dashed out, down the steps and onto the wind-racked street of bones and branches.
One of the creatures caught us easily—they are so fast on those thready legs, like terrible ostriches. In a gale-shaded alley it gripped me by the hair. It motioned back toward the factory and tried to guide us with its gaunt fingers. I stood my ground, and my friend moved closer to me.
“Where are we?” I hissed. But my hiss was like a shout in the hushed, empty alley. The thing looked startled.
“You are not supposed to talk to me,” it said haltingly.
“We can’t obey rules no one tells us about,” I insisted.
“You know now. Go inside and don’t make trouble.”
“We shouldn’t have to obey rules we haven’t agreed to. You aren’t our parents,” the girl said, and thus I heard her voice for the first time. It was low and thick and firm as a forest floor.
“She’s right,” I said. “Tell us where we are. And what is that place where you sent the others?”
It stood, confused, looking from the door, where its companions had already disappeared with the last of the children, to us and back again. It rocked from one stiltlike leg to the other. “I’ll be punished,” it whined finally.
The girl rubbed her shaved skull. “Look,” she said, “has any other child tried to talk to you?”
“Never.”
“Then you can’t really know you’ll be punished. But you’ll certainly be punished if I scream and he runs off. If you tell us these things, we will be good, and afterward we’ll go where you want us to go.” She looked at me, her dark eyes burning like blades. “We promise.”
The thing took a deep breath and pulled its meager coat closer over its huge stomach. Its mouth was very wide, almost ear to ear, and strings of bluish hair tumbled down over its cheeks.
It cleared its long throat. “All… all right…”
THE
FOREMAN’S
TALE