XXV

THE COLOURS WERE all wrong. The sky was red, the grass mauve, the water a virulent green. Flapping Eagle blinked, but they didn’t change. He looked at the unearthly scene for a long moment and then, gradually, as his eyes accustomed themselves to full light, normality did return.

They were on a river-bank. Behind them was a thickly-wooded hill and the mouth of their tunnel. The river filled the gap between it and the next hill, then emptied itself into what had been a bright green lake. Hills circled them, silent captors and judges. In the centre of the lake stood a stone building, tall and circular. A high-pitched voice chanted words which were, at first, as meaningless to Flapping Eagle as the crazy colours had been; and then his ears, like his eyes before them, found the key to the sounds. Bus heart missed a beat.

It was a chant he had not heard for over seven centuries: a hymn of praise to the great god Axona. He bit his lip. Virgil Jones looked at him, but said nothing.

They were standing by their bicycles at the water’s edge when Flapping Eagle saw the boat. A crude coracle with this name painted on a board tied to its side: Skid-Blade. Flapping Eagle, the master of the knife, felt his spirits sink still lower, and realized that he had read an omen into the name. Where the blade skids, there skid I. He climbed into the boat, motioning Virgil Jones to stay behind; and helplessly, weightily, Mr Jones subsided to the ground as Flapping Eagle paddled out to the stone shrine which was the voice of his past, claiming him. Their bicycles lay crookedly, uselessly, beside Virgil on the empty shore.

It was the votary flame that produced the second illusion. When Flapping Eagle, on his guard, passed through the open door of the shrine, he saw, in light once again dirty and yellow, the forms of two giants shadowed on the far wall. Vast forms: an Axona chieftain in his full headdress sitting in erect profile on a ceremonial stool as a supplicant knelt chanting at his feet; the whole tableau some twenty feet high.

It was, however, the votary flame that had done it. It burned in its stone bowl immediately below the small platform where the scene was actually taking place and cast huge shadows on the distant wall. But even when he deciphered the trick his eyes had played, Flapping Eagle found no relief; partly because, now twice-bitten by illusion, he expected a third; but mostly because he felt in himself both an absolute certainty and a crippling fear that this old, dark, hawknosed, feathered chief was the incarnation of the god Axona himself. And, the dimension being what it was, the truth was as he believed it to be.

The god Axona rose from his stool; his devotee continued his chanting until the chief cut it short with a gesture. He was quite a small man, but the glare in his fierce, heavy-lidded eyes pierced even the temple’s stygian gloom.

—So Born-From-Dead has come at last to his god, said Axona, and the words struck a new chill into Flapping Eagle’s heart, because they revealed what the darkness and ceremonial garments had hidden.

The god Axona was an old, dark, hawknosed, feathered woman.

—Born-From-Dead.

The god mouthed his name (ignoring his self-given brave’s name in calculated insult) in tones of overweening disgust.

—All that is Unaxona is Unclean, said the god. Unclean. Had you forgotten, miserable defiled whelp that you are, what that commandment means? Is it to commit sacrilege upon this holy place that you come, whiteskin, paleface, mongrel among the pure, traitor to your race, is it to commit your supreme act of defilement that you come? Born-From-Dead has no patience with Axona; he cannot have come to worship. In death you were born and destruction is your doom. Whatsoever you touch, is soiled; whatsoever you grasp, you break; any person you love is stifled by your love; any person you hate is purified by your loathing. Is it the god Axona herself you seek to destroy? Is it this far that the worm in you has stretched?

She had touched the roots of Flapping Eagle’s own self-doubts; he could barely speak, yet he forced the words from his dry lips. They rustled weakly in the half-light.

—If I can, said Flapping Eagle. I will break you if I can.

Axona laughed, and her cachinnation rang around the room.

—From your own mouth you are condemned, Born-From-Dead, she cried; and it is by your own hand you shall die.

As she sat down once more upon her stool, the devotee, who had lain silent while they spoke, whirled round and cast off his cloak. Again Flapping Eagle’s self-control received a body-blow.

He was gazing into his own eyes.

His own eyes: but a vilely altered representation of himself. The body was the same; and, like Flapping Eagle, the creature wore a single feather in its hair; but the rest of its garnishings were utterly different. He wore a striped single-breasted jacket over a bare chest. The skin was deathly white. Around his waist was a string of beads, from which hung two squares of cloth, a yellow square covering his genitals, a blue square flapping at his buttocks. Otherwise he was quite naked. There were women’s earrings in his ears, women’s redness in his cheeks, women’s lipstick on his lips. His eyebrows were plucked into slender arches and his eyelashes were long and drooping.

And that voice: the unbroken, high, eunuch’s voice, a travesty of his own.

—Come, Born-From-Dead, it said. Come.

In the creature’s right hand was a light axe, or tomahawk. In its left hand was a rifle. Flapping Eagle had no doubt that it was loaded. He also knew that he was helplessly unarmed.

—Come, Born-From-Dead, mocked the voice of Axona, Will you not face my champion? They say you are a great warrior. Come.

Flapping Eagle sighed and came slowly forward.

He was gambling on his surrogate behaving as he would in such a situation, and using the tomahawk before falling back on the simplicity of the rifle. He had always been more at home with the throwing, infighting instruments. So he sauntered in, almost insolently, and thrust his hands into his pockets casually, to irritate his opponent.

His right hand closed over a hard, rounded object. He pulled it out, wondering. It was the Bone of K! The very same Bone that Bird-Dog had flung to him before she disappeared down the tunnel of herself.

The Bone of K: Flapping Eagle lost no time in speculation. He could have thought: where did that come from after all this time? Would it not have been noticed before now? But none of that mattered. He had a weapon, and that changed the nature of the contest. It was now probable that his surrogate would decide on safety and use the rifle. So he had only a few seconds, the brief “freeze” his opponent would undergo when he saw the unexpected object.

Flapping Eagle hurled the Bone, in a single, fluid movement, like throwing a large, ungainly dart. It hit the rifle at the point where his enemy’s hand gripped it. A shriek of pain and the rifle fell to the floor. So did the Bone; it shattered, with results that froze both Flapping Eagle and his alter ego in their tracks.

It was only afterwards that Virgil Jones decoded for Flapping Eagle the secret meaning of the name. It was a cypher whose key was the sound of its secret name:

Os, a bone. K, a place. Hence K-os, the Bone of K. Or, alternatively: Chaos.

At the time Flapping Eagle saw only the terrifying effect of the breaking of tibe Bone.

The shards and splinters rose like a spinning mist from the floor where they shattered and formed a cloud in the centre of the arena of combat. The rifle disappeared completely. It simply ceased to be. So did everything else.

What was left was a hole. A turbulent disarrangement in the structure of the dimension. Chaos.

Flapping Eagle came out of shock a fraction faster than his alter ego; probably because he was further from the hole. He rushed at his adversary head-first and hit him full-tilt in the belly. The surrogate Flapping Eagle staggered, stepped backwards and sideways.

And was gone in the hole, decomposed into chaos, into not-being.

Axona was on her feet, eyes blazing with wrath; but Flapping Eagle knew that behind that anger she was afraid. The Bone, the random element, had foiled her perfect plan; and now she was at his mercy. He advanced upon her with slow deliberation.

—Stay where you are, Unclean, she said, but her voice betrayed her.

—I don’t know what you are, said Flapping Eagle as he walked forward, but when I defile you, I am cleansed of my past. Cleansed of the guilt and shame that possessed some hidden part of my mind, of which your presence is the proof. To free myself, I must render Axona unclean. Do you understand?

He spoke the words with a gentle astonishment, like truths he had just understood.

Then he raped her.

When Skid-Blade returned to the shore where Virgil waited, it carried a new Flapping Eagle. Virgil listened to his account, then said: —You really must do something about your imagination, you know. It’s so awfully lurid.

With the help of Virgil Jones, it wasn’t difficult for Flapping Eagle to extricate himself from the web of Dimension-fever. They constructed their escape simply: Flapping Eagle closed his eyes and, while Virgil danced the Strongdance , willed himself to awake. It was, in the end, as anticlimactic as that, now that the battle was over. Flapping Eagle had become stronger than the inner dimensions.

Long experience, however, adds to strength a certain sensitivity to nuance and wrongnesses; so that as they neared consciousness (as their separate consciousnesses drew closer and closer together, almost touching for an instant, before separating) it was not Flapping Eagle, but Virgil Jones who became aware of a third presence, a third consciousness, also rising.

An instant before the blackout that spanned the fragment of time in which he was restored to himself, Virgil touched the intruder and knew it.

Wakefulness. He was naked, his clothes piled where he left them, on Flapping Eagle’s chest, the greenwood surrounding them, his body still describing the methodical, circular perambulations of the Strongdance. He felt the dead weight of exhaustion in his limbs, but forgot it in his anger.

—Where are you? he shouted. Where?

The “voice” of the unseen Gorf came calm from the woods.

—Greetings, Mr Jones.

Virgil dressed rapidly.

Flapping Eagle awoke with a splitting headache. The words where am I? formed on his lips for the second time on Calf Island; he dismissed them with a wry twist of the mouth. Where is anywhere? he asked himself.

Nevertheless, it was Calf Mountain; the slope of the forested ground told him so. And the cry of the dimensions, for the Effect remained, even though he had mastered it …a nagging in the corners of the eyes, ears and mind. Soon it would become like a mild tintinabulatory infection of the ear; he would become unaware of its presence except in moments of utter stillness. Now, it remained an irritant, niggling at him, a whining reminder of the world’s infinite cavities.

He stood up and found himself alone. A moment of panic; he shouted Virgil’s name into the clearing. Then, collecting himself, he heard the voice in the forest. Virgil’s voice, low and angry. He crept towards the sound with the stealth of his childhood.

In the forest, Virgil Jones was remonstrating with an old acquaintance.