A Short, Sharp Shock

12. The Facewomen

After that Thel carried the mirror bag himself. And the next night they saw bonfires ahead of them, to the west. As they progressed along the low line of the old sandstone ridge, the air thick with salt and the roar of waves, the peninsula took a pronounced swing to the north, making an immense arc thrown in the sea. And to the west where the horizon washed over the black mark of the spit, a short line of bonfires sparked against the late twilight sky. Apparently where these fires burnt the peninsula was quite a bit taller, for the dots of yellow light were a good distance above the obsidian sea; nevertheless they flickered to the point of disappearing briefly from sight. The three face-women stood and watched intently. “They are our signal beacons,” one said, and after a while added, “They say we are being pursued.”

So they began to hike all through the long days, and in the dawns and dusks, and each night the three facewomen talked among themselves, and then one night their eye-faces talked among themselves, in high-pitched voices; and yet they said to the other three travelers only, “We are being pursued.” Gradually the distance between the bonfires began to decrease, and the line of four was almost one wide fire, growing brighter from right to left. Then they said, “We are being pursued; but we have almost reached our home.”

Wearily they hiked on, spurred by this pronouncement, and slept one more night out, and then the next day in the late morning they came to a deep stone-ringed firepit. The leader of the facewomen crouched and touched one of the stones. “We are home,” her eyeface said. She and her two companions led the way thereafter, skipping from knob to knob and touching each fire ring, then running downhill into the next swale between knobs. The peninsula became broader and more verdant: between the bonfire tors the crest ridge split in two broad lines of hilltops, holding between them sunken meadows spotted with vernal ponds that were in this season patches of bright grass strewn with wildflowers, dots of pure color. These meadows, strung like green stones on a necklace, grew larger and larger until they came on one that was broad and flat, and ringed by a split-log fence and a number of low twisty pines. At the far side of the fenced-in enclosure clustered a herd of small quick dark horses, flowing along the fence like a single organism. In the trees behind the fence stood hexagonal buildings with wood walls and hide roofs. These were arranged in circles, like their firepits or their corral.

The three facewomen ran to one of the huts and burst into it, and emerged with a small gang of other facewomen clinging to them and shouting. When they had calmed down, Thel, the swimmer and Garth were welcomed with a fluid formality, recursive smiles of welcome shrinking away into the infinity of the facewomen’s right eyes. It seemed to Thel that all the inhabitants of the meadow were women, but he noticed children among them, and saw that they tended to clump in groups of three; Garth confirmed that these were reproductive units.

Their threesome took them to what appeared to be the oldest threesome, village elders who greeted them and thanked them for rescuing their granddaughters. Thel took the opportunity to ask how the bonfire messengers had known they were being pursued.

“We saw the pursuers,” one of the old threesome said.

Thel frowned. “How?”

They led him to the knob above the village. There in the rocks stood a short pyramid of black fitted stone, holding up a long hollow tube carved from the same stone, set with a thick clear lens at each end.

“A telescope!” Thel said.

The old women nodded. “You know the principle?”

“Yes.” Thel waited while one of them aimed the glass, then stooped to look through it. “It’s powerful!”

“Yes. More powerful than that, in fact. But that is sufficient to see the spine kings.”

So it was; in the pale colors of the image, swimming on the air, Thel saw antlike soldiers, tramping in a line along the ridge. He looked over the top of the glass and saw it was pointed some halfway along the visible peninsula. “They’re far behind.”

“They stopped for other business. They will be here in a few days, at their pace. They will certainly come. We saw through the glass what you are carrying, you see. When the spine kings arrive you must not be here. But we will provide you with horses to speed you on your way west, in thanks for helping our daughters. And you may spend two nights here resting.”

They slept in a storage hut on piles of woven blankets, feeling so luxurious that they could scarcely get comfortable. The next day they were taken to the big meadow pasture’s corral and introduced to three of the small horses. “These are young ones,” the facewoman in charge of the corral told them. “They’re wild but they have no habits—they should accept you. Here, you hold their mane and jump on.” The horses’s hair was the chestnut red of certain fir trees Thel had seen back on the high spine, and their manes, long and rough, felt exactly like handfuls of the trees’ hairy, fibrous bark: indeed, looking closely at it, he couldn’t see any difference. He laughed. Then the small herd in the enclosure bolted and ran around the inside of the fence, all in a mass, their manes and long russet hair flowing behind them as if they were underwater, and he laughed again. “A horse is a fish made of trees,” he told the startled swimmer, and leaped on his animal and rose head pressed into the stiff rough red mane, feeling the sea wind course over him as it had during his wild ride on the other side of the mirror. Jerking the animal’s head to one side or another influenced its direction, and pulling back on the mane slowed it, as kicking it spurred it on. The,corral mistress said as he leaped off, “Ride these until you come to the brough—they can take you no further. Set them free and they will return to us. They know to hide from the spine kings.”

“Thanks for your help,” Thel said.

One of the smallest visible eyefaces grinned. “With what you are carrying,” it said in a small voice, “we want you as far away as possible when the spine kings arrive.”

“Ah.”

That night they built a massive bonfire, and when the flames were leaping as high as the treetops and higher, the eldest three facewomen brought the telescope into the clearing and put it on a portable stand, and stood Thel next to the fire, and pointed the glass at him and looked at him through it. Feeling scorched at the back of his neck, he looked into the lens at the leader’s face. She had the telescope placed against her eyeface, and in the little curved circle of glass he saw two eyes, blinking as they observed him: her smallest face, no doubt, too small for the naked eye to see. So there was an end to the recession after all, he thought. The ultimate leader of the face-women, perhaps; and she said in a squeak, “Stand still. Don’t blink so much. Look straight into the glass.” He did as he was told, almost laughing because it felt like a kind of eye examination. “How far back can you see?” he asked. The bonfire pushed roasted air past him.

“To your birth,” the high voice shrilled. “You have been through the mirror and back. You are not from this world. You fell into this world, one night, into the ocean with the seahorses.”

“Before that?” Thel asked, finding it suddenly hard to breathe. The clothes on his back were hot.

“A man in a bubble, flying through the stars. Others like you and not like you. When you were a child, you lived by a lake. The lake was circular and had high cliffs surrounding it. One day you tried to climb the steepest cliff, and fell. You hit the water feet first and survived the impact, plunging deep. The water of the lake was notoriously deep and so when your feet hit a submerged outcropping of the cliff you were astonished, and in that state of panic these moments of your future came to you, intense as any memory, for every vision is a memory, and every memory a vision of a world that never existed until called up in the mind. You saw then your immersion in our ocean, your step through the mirror, your stand before our glass, the fire behind you, all of it seen in that instant. Remember?”

Falling, water in his eyes, the sudden heat at his back. “Yes,” Thel said, wondering, looking within frantically to see all he could of that lost lake, his boyhood, his parents, the cat leaping from the table onto the dog, the old man who loved the clouds—

“Everything which we really are and never quite live,” the little voice said, and the whole thing snatched itself away from him and he was only aware of the heat on his back and his hair curling. He walked away, out of the telescope’s view and into the purple night, feeling his back radiate against the wet salty air. The face of his mother—he snatched at it, lost it. Dune grass flowing like seaweed, rustling against the chewing sound of waves: clouds drifting through the stars. Never to be in anything but the present, trapped in the moment which is always receding, never ours to have and hold—the swimmer came out after him and found him, and he collapsed onto the sand, sat there with an arm around her strong thigh. “I want to be a stone,” he said, “a stone man lying on the beach forever, never to think, never to feel the future sifting through me. I want to be a stone.”

“It’s the same for them,” she said.