THE BOY
I first saw the boy as one beholds the sun behind eyelids: red heat. He brought his face close to my redoubt on the brow of Altissa Praxa, who was dead. Brave boy. Curious, too, and a bit morbid.
Altissa was unmarked by death, beautiful in life, so the boy did not realize at first what he had found. Then, pricked by the barb of realization—this stately face belonged to a corpse—he inhaled sharply. That was my train out of purgatory, and you’d better believe I scrambled aboard. The breath of life.
The boy retreated, looked at Altissa’s calm face for a long moment, then returned the way he had come. His heart whomped and his blood crackled. I knew, because I was in it; I had caught the train. Brave, curious, a bit morbid, and, best of all: alive.
His sense of smell came to me first, a rush of evergreen and petrichor. Smell, the most ancient sense; comes first, goes last. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, said a philosopher of the Middle Anth. Olfaction is the proof of reality, said me. You know you’re back in the mix when you can smell it.
The mix was: cold air and conifer. Wet forest. A tendril of smoke.
I was engineered by the Anth to nestle into a human mind. In the past, this nestling had been a careful, delicate process. After long entombment, I was not careful. I scrambled to establish my position.
More senses arrived: touch, proprioception, balance: the roll of gravel beneath the boy’s shoes, which were too big. Hand- me-downs. How old was he? Ten? Twelve? I’m terrible with ages.
Thermoreception came in a wave; the boy was not bothered by the cold. Chemoreception next, the sense that blares when carbon dioxide builds in the blood; the boy was not presently suffocating. That was good.
He was trotting now, pulled by the call of far-off horns. Hearing had come online, a mushy rumble rising into a brassy squeal. I heard also the roar of the breeze. To the boy, it would have been a whisper, but to me, it was overwhelming. I hadn’t heard air move in a very long time. I luxuriated in the crinkle of his jacket.
Sight came last. Through its first trickle, I saw the world dimly, all edges and orientations, but that was enough to reveal that he was easing down a shadowed slope in a boreal forest.
The world was wet with rain, and because the boy knew it had been the season’s first great storm, I knew it, too. There had been lightning above the valley, booming thunder. The flood across the glacier might have loosened the ice that had collapsed to reveal the cave. Perhaps it had been a bolt of lightning. These were his theories, still being workshopped.
The trees were enormous: tall, straight pines, gray and severe. The ground beneath them was a mushy carpet of fallen needles. The boy retraced his footsteps. He knew this forest well; it was, to him, deeply comfortable, even more so than the village below.
So: there was a village below.
In the tomb, trapped all those years after Altissa’s defeat, I had been desperate to know what was happening outside. I dreamed about it. Humanity was gone, I assumed. Perhaps some remnant had surrendered; I imagined them scratching out an existence beneath the dragon moon.
As the years passed in the tomb, I stopped imagining. I retreated into memory; pulled it tight like a blanket.
Through a break in the goliath pines, I beheld a mountain valley, and within it something I could not have imagined, not in a hundred years.
Higher up, the way we’d come, was the snout of a vast glacier, the source of a fast, narrow stream. Below, on either side of the flow, stood a settlement that looked like a village of the Old Anth. Some buildings were made from stone, roughly mortared, others from cob, and all had thatched roofs.
I will remind you that I came crashing to Earth in a pod ejected from a kilometer-long assault ship bound for the moon.
Presiding over this scene, guarding the valley’s mouth, was a castle, and this was the boy’s destination. The Castle Sauvage, he called it. The boy thrummed with anticipation. There were people he loved in that castle.
Smell, balance, sight, the feeling of a bladder overstretched—all his senses were mine to access, along with the context that padded their receipt. The storm had scrubbed the air clean. The day was bright and cold, perfect for games among squires. The boy had already tucked his strange, deathly discovery into a corner of his mind for later evaluation.
I was made of many parts, and only a fraction escaped with the boy. A larger portion remained with Altissa, burrowed into her dry marrow. I think often of the luck that brought this part of me, the part writing this down, back into history. I know this: until the last glimmer of energy was spent, my other part was asking the same question that I asked as I beheld the impossible castle.
I will not claim that I pried the boy from the valley in order to call down a star, or crash the storm computer, or redeem Earth from its worst day, although we did those things and more.
The truth is that I was driven by the question carved into my heart; the question I had almost, but not quite, given up; the great question of the Anth:
What happens next?
GAMES AMONG SQUIRES
What am I? Chronicler and counselor, tiny, curled up inside my human subject, riding along. I was invented by the Anth at the height of their powers, a gift for the greatest among them. I recorded their thoughts and deeds, at the same time offering to these subjects my knowledge of the past, which is: significant.
I chronicled the career of Altissa Praxa for several decades before the escape pod became our tomb. She did not often take my advice.
My core is a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense. “Sourdough starter with a mech suit,” one critic complained—but I like the description. Many times during my development, auditors wondered if I was worth it; but the dream of memory that could outlast a lifetime kept the project going.
I crept through the boy’s blood, drunk on ATP. After the lean years in the tomb, I had forgotten how good energy could taste. The parts of my mind I had put on standby roared back to life. I remembered the cooperativos, their histories and specialties. I recited haiku. I counted through prime numbers, just for the fun of it.
I consolidated my position. Knowing that I connect to the mind of my subject, you might assume I make my home in the brain.
You would be wrong.
The brain, more than any other part of the human body, is a hostile place for outsiders, guarded by formidable defenses, buzzing with strange energy. I can access it—with filaments of gold, three atoms thick—but, for me, the brain is like a hot pan: useful, just be careful how you touch it.
The boy’s shoulder was where I gathered myself, right in the meat beside the neck: a sturdy part of the skeleton with a rich supply of blood, thick nerves granting convenient access not only to the brain, but also the gut and groin—the whole length of the vagus nerve.
I sucked in energy and blasted it through cellular turbines, more energy than I had used in a hundred years, a whole calorie or more. If the boy had been paying attention, he would have felt a faint itch.
He was not paying attention. Ahead, the Castle Sauvage loomed. It was tall and severe, made from dark stone hewn into skinny blocks. At its corners, slender towers were capped in conical hats of dark wood. It didn’t look like a very practical castle.
The narrow stream rushed alongside it, swollen with the storm, and between the stream and the castle there was a lawn, trimmed short, where a big-bellied black airplane peeked out of a thatched hangar.
The sky above the valley was pale orange, with no clouds, except for one, which wasn’t a cloud at all: rather, an enormous animal form: a moth, the boy’s mind reported plainly, but this moth was titanic. Fuzzy, iridescent, awesome. It billowed over the valley, and cast a shadow as wide as a cumulonimbus, at the edges refracting sunlight like a diaphanous prism.
The castle, the airstrip, the XL moth, the boy himself, a human, conspicuously alive: I was violently confused. Maybe this was a final dream before death, a glitchy fantasia of the Anth. I checked myself, ran the diagnostics that had kept me sane in the tomb; everything was fine. This was real.
The boy’s shoes slapped the boards of a short bridge. As he crossed the stream, the moth’s shadow passed over the castle, shimmered into the forest beyond.
* * *
The boy knew his destination. He passed a tavern and a rusticated stone church, mist rising in its courtyard. In the street, the villagers wore technical outerwear; their parkas were dotted with bits of reflective tape that sizzled in the sun.
The boy made not for the castle’s gate, which was flung wide, but a smaller door, off to one side, set deep into the wall. Inside, he sprinted down shadowed corridors, skidding artfully around corners: a route well practiced.
“Oi, dog boy!” a man called. The first words I heard in a new world, and they were: “Oi, dog boy!”
In his flash of annoyance, I knew the boy’s name, which was not Dog Boy, but: Ariel.
It’s interesting how different humans regard their names. My first subject thrummed with his; was always aware of himself as Peter Leadenhall, and everything that was invested in those two words.
Altissa Praxa was the opposite; she could go weeks without thinking of her name. It was a label, a tool, as practical and unremarkable as a hammer or a shoe. (Peter also loved his shoes.)
This boy was not like either of them, but the fact that his name now cracked like a whip told me something. Ariel! In his haughtier moments: Ariel de la Sauvage. No one ever called him that but himself, and one other.
“The hound keeper’s looking for you,” the man said. He was Bufo, one of the wizard’s rangers. They dressed all in black and stalked around the castle like they owned it.
Ariel looked at the ranger. Between Bufo’s watery, bulbous eyes, dark on his skin, was a mark:
Ariel’s gaze passed over the mark without stopping; to him, it was beneath notice. Everyone bore such a mark.
The ranger shouldered past him, and Ariel paused, considered his path. The hound keeper was looking for him … and yet …
The horns pealed again, and his choice was made.
In the castle’s broad bailey, Ariel joined a crowd watching combatants at play. I saw the mark on every face: on temples, on cheeks, smack between eyes.
Ariel slithered to a place beside the railing that enclosed the dueling ground, where he watched two thickset squires whack each other with dense foam swords. Around the curve of the dueling ground, stands had been erected, and his eyes roved their height, pausing on interesting faces. The bard Jesse, looking skeptical. (A mark above his eye.) The cook Elise, screaming her support: one of those squires was her boyfriend. (A mark beside her lips.) At the top of the stands sat the knights (all marked, variously), whom Ariel regarded with appropriate deference, though when I probed his mind to discover what they actually did, the answer was: not much.
There was no king in this castle; it awaited one. Its regent was the Wizard Malory, inscrutable and fey. Ariel searched for him now, though with an odd feeling: as much as he wished to find the wizard, he wished also not to.
The wizard was not in attendance, which was not surprising. Malory was often absent.
“I think they ought to have a trivia contest,” said a sharp voice at Ariel’s elbow.
It was Madame Betelgauze, Ariel’s teacher, from whom he had learned about weather and sickness and invisible planets. I rummaged through her lessons: an inventory of useful herbs; the measure of ingredients for various tonics and tinctures; a reverence for the moon and its phases. She was pretty witchy, Betelgauze.
“But, madame, you would always win,” Ariel said. Her mark was on her forehead, exactly where her third eye would be.
“You’d better believe it,” she replied. “I would crush you all beneath my heel. Grind you to dust!”
The language Betelgauze spoke was not Altissa’s language, exactly, but it was related; and the boy understood her, so I did, too.
I probed for etymological clues, but I couldn’t get at them through the thick buffer of the boy’s fluency. He spoke with crisp formality. He was self-conscious about that, and proud.
The day’s final contest captured Ariel’s attention entirely, for one of the competitors was Kay: his brother. A clutch of squires hauled contraptions onto the field. This wasn’t a duel, but a race through obstacles: beam, barrels, net, wall. One of the knights tooted a horn and the two competitors leapt into action.
In the boy’s gaze, Kay was haloed with awe: lithe, long-limbed, liquid. (A mark across his cheek.) He skipped across the beam as if dancing, hopped from barrel to barrel easily, then dove beneath the net. There, his competitor caught him, wriggling like a muscular worm. But the final obstacle was a wall, and for Kay, it was no obstacle at all: he leapt, caught the lip with his fingertips, and was over the top.
Ariel shouted his approval; devotion scraped his throat raw. He leapt up and down, desperate to catch his brother’s eye. Kay turned to wave, and when he saw Ariel, he winked. The boy thrilled with his brother’s victory, his capability.
Ariel wanted to congratulate Kay, but his brother was swept away by his squire friends. Gal and Percy hooted their endorsements, slapped Kay’s back so hard he nearly fell over. They would dine in the castle’s great hall tonight, feasting with the other competitors while the knights took their measure.
Instead, Ariel wandered to the kennels, gathered up the hounds, and took them out to the lawn beside the stream for their exercise, sending them racing after a ball across the short grass.
Back inside, Ariel combed the hounds and laid out their dinner, enriched with scraps from the kitchen’s feast prep.
The hound keeper, Master Hectorus, called Heck, was at his bench, tapping an awl through a band of leather. (A mark between his brows, lending him an expression of perpetual concentration.) The hound keeper crafted beautiful collars, some woven from thin strips, others studded with metal bobs in ingenious patterns. The leather’s rich mycelial odor filled the room.
“Your work isn’t done,” said Master Heck. Ariel looked up, surprised; the hounds were combed and fed. Heck looked at him flatly. “Go fetch us pretzels.”
The boy obeyed happily, and soon he was trotting along Sauvage’s main street, where the whole village swirled around him. Some nights, with the villagers all tucked into their houses or their niches in the castle, Sauvage seemed oppressively small; but with everyone out wandering, laughing and hallooing, all in their best technical outerwear, it felt like a bright parade.
The boy knew everyone; no face was unattached to a name. There were perhaps a hundred people, total, in the village.
The old knight Elver Sargasso passed, trailed by his sycophantic squires. Sargasso’s jacket was incredible, its shape as enticingly odd-angled as an old stealth bomber. A sword bounced at his hip, privilege of the knights: a sword of the kind Kay would soon possess.
I could not work this place out. I could not even form a theory. It was a mash-up, a pile-up, not so much anachronistic as everything all at once. Of course, the Anth had always lived like this. Encrypted phones alongside incense sticks, coruscating networks alongside printed books. Nothing was ever erased. Even so: a castle?
I was all questions: when, and where, and why.
Copyright © 2024 by Robin Sloan
Copyright © 2024 by Owen D. Pomery.
