Tad Williams - Otherland 1 - City of Golden Shadows

VIP免费
2024-12-05 0 0 1.29MB 368 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
City of Golden Shadow
By Tad Williams
Otherlander 1
Contents
Foreword
First - UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR
Chapter 01 - Mister Jingo's Smile
Chapter 02 - The Airman
Chapter 03 - Empty Signal Gray
Chapter 04 - The Shining Place
Chapter 05 - A World Afire
Chapter 06 - No Man's Land
Chapter 07 - The Broken String
Chapter 08 - Dread
Chapter 09 - Mad Shadows
Second - RED KING'S DREAM
Chapter 10 - Thorns
Chapter 11 - Inside the Beast
Chapter 12 - Looking Through the Glass
Chapter 13 - Eland's Daughter's Son
Chapter 14 - His Master's Voice
Chapter 15 - Friends in High Places
Chapter 16 - The Deadly Tower of Senbar-Flay
Chapter 17 - A Call from Jeremiah
Chapter 18 - Red and White
Chapter 19 - Fragments
Chapter 20 - Lord Set
Chapter 21 - Up the Ladder
Chapter 22 - Gear
Chapter 23 - Blue Dog Anchorite
Third - ANOTHER COUNTRY
Chapter 24 - Beneath Two Moons
Chapter 25 - Hunger
Chapter 26 - Hunters and Prey
Chapter 27 - Bride of the Morning Star
Chapter 28 - A Visit to Uncle
Chapter 29 - Tomb of Glass
Chapter 30 - In the Emperor's Gardens
Chapter 31 - Bleak Spaces
Chapter 32 - The Dance
Fourth - THE CITY
Chapter 33 - Someone Else's Dream
Chapter 34 - Butterfly and Emperor
Chapter 35 - Lord of Temilún
Chapter 36 - The Singing Harp
Chapter 37 - Johnny's Twist
Chapter 38 - A New Day
Chapter 39 - Blue Fire
-------------------------
This book is dedicated to my father,
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (1 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
Joseph Hill Evans,
with love.
Actually, Dad doesn't read fiction, so if someone
doesn't tell him about this, he'll never know.
-------------------------
Acknowledgments
This has been a hideously complicated book to write, and I am indebted to many people for
their assistance, but especially the following, who either provided desperately needed research
help or waded through another giant-economy-sized Tad manuscript and had encouraging and useful
things to say afterward:
Deborah Beale, Matt Bialer, Arthur Ross Evans, Jo-Ann Goodwin, Deborah Grabien, Nic Grabien,
Jed Hartman, John Jarrold, Roz Kaveney, Katharine Kerr, M. J. Kramer, Mark Kreighbaum, Bruce
Lieberman, Mark McCrum, Peter Stampfel, Mitch Wagner.
As always, many thanks are due to my patient and perceptive editors, Sheila Gilbert and Betsy
Wollheim.
For more information, visit the Tad Williams web site at: www.tadwilliams.com
-------------------------
Author's Note
The aboriginal people of Southern Africa are known by many names--San, Basarwa, Remote Area
Dwellers (in current government-speak), and, more commonly, Bushmen.
I freely admit that I have taken great liberties in my portrayal of Bushman life and beliefs
in this novel. The Bushmen do not have a monolithic folklore--each area and sometimes each
extended family can sustain its own quite vibrant myths--or a single culture. I have simplified
and sometimes transposed Bushman thoughts and songs and stories. Fiction has its own demands.
But the Bushmen's old ways are indeed disappearing fast. One of my most dubious bits of truth-
manipulation may turn out to be the simple assertion that there will be _anyone_ left pursuing the
hunter-gatherer life in the bush by the middle of the twenty-first century.
However I have trimmed the truth, I have done my best to make the spirit of my portrayal
accurate. If I have offended or exploited, I have failed. My intent is primarily to tell a story,
but if the story leads some readers to learn more about the Bushmen, and about a way of life that
none of us can afford to ignore, I will be very happy.
-------------------------
Foreword
It started in mud, as many things do.
In a normal world, it would have been time for breakfast, but apparently breakfast was not
served in hell; the bombardment that had begun before dawn showed no signs of letting up. Private
Jonas did not feel much like eating, anyway.
Except for a brief moment of terrified retreat across a patch of muddy ground cratered and
desolate as the moon, Paul Jonas had spent all of this twenty-fourth day of March, 1918, as he had
spent the three days before, and most of the past several months--crouched shivering in cold,
stinking slime somewhere between Ypres and St Quentin, deafened by the skull-rattling thunder of
the German heavy guns, praying reflexively to Something in which he no longer believed. He had
lost Finch and Mullet and the rest of the platoon somewhere in the chaos of retreat--he hoped
they'd made it safely into some other part of the trenches, but it was hard to think about
anything much beyond his own few cubits of misery. The entire world was wet and sticky. The torn
earth, the skeletal trees, and Paul himself had all been abundantly spattered by the slow-falling
mist that followed hundreds of pounds of red-hot metal exploding in a crowd of human beings.
Red fog, gray earth, sky the color of old bones: Paul Jonas was in hell--but it was a very
special hell. Not everyone in it was dead yet.
In fact, Paul noted, one of its residents was dying very slowly indeed. By the sound of the
man's voice, he could not be more than two dozen yards away, but he might as well have been in
Timbuktu. Paul had no idea what the wounded soldier looked like--he could no more have voluntarily
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (2 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
lifted his head above the lip of the trench than he could have willed himself to fly--but he was
all too familiar with the man's voice, which had been cursing, sobbing, and squealing in agony for
a full hour, filling every lull between the crash of the guns.
All the rest of the men who had been hit during the retreat had shown the good manners to die
quickly, or at least to suffer quietly. Paul's invisible companion had screamed for his sergeant,
his mother, and God, and when none of them had come for him, had kept on screaming anyway. He was
screaming still, a sobbing, wordless wail. Once a faceless doughboy like thousands of others, the
wounded man now seemed determined to make everyone on the Western Front bear witness to his dying
moments.
Paul hated him.
The terrible thumping roar subsided; there was a glorious moment of silence before the wounded
man began to shriek again, piping like a boiling lobster.
"Got a light?"
Paul turned. Pale beer-yellow eyes peered from a mask of mud beside him. The apparition,
crouched on hands and knees, wore a greatcoat so tattered it seemed made from cobwebs.
"What?"
"Got a light? A match?"
The normality of the question, in the midst of so much that was unreal, left Paul wondering if
he had heard correctly. The figure lifted a hand as muddy as the face, displaying a thin white
cylinder so luminously clean that it might have dropped from the moon.
"Can you hear, fellow? A light?"
Paul reached into his pocket and fumbled with numbed fingers until he found a box of matches,
miraculously dry. The wounded soldier began howling even louder, lost in the wilderness a stone's
throw away.
The man in the ragged greatcoat tipped himself against the side of the trench, fitting the
curve of his back into the sheltering mud, then delicately pulled the cigarette into two pieces
and handed one to Paul. As he lit the match, he tilted his head to listen.
"God help me, he's still going on up there." He passed the matches back and held the flame
steady so Paul could light his own cigarette. "Why couldn't Fritz drop one on him and give us all
a little peace?"
Paul nodded his head. Even that was an effort.
His companion lifted his chin and let out a dribble of smoke which curled up past the rim of
his helmet and vanished against the flat morning sky. "Do you ever get the feeling. . . ?"
"Feeling?"
"That it's a mistake." The stranger wagged his head to indicate the trenches, the German guns,
all of the Western Front. "That God's away, or having a bit of a sleep or something. Don't you
find yourself hoping that one day He'll look down and see what's happening and . . . and do
something about it?"
Paul nodded, although he had never thought the matter through in such detail. But he had felt
the emptiness of the gray skies, and had occasionally had a curious sensation of looking down on
the blood and mud from a great distance, observing the murderous deeds of war with the detachment
of a man standing over an anthill. God could not be watching, that was certain; if He was, and if
He had seen the things Paul Jonas had seen--men who were dead but didn't know it, frantically
trying to push their spilled guts back into their blouses; bodies swollen and flyblown, lying
unretrieved for days within yards of friends with whom they had sung and laughed--if He had seen
all that but not interfered, then He must be insane.
But Paul had never for a moment believed that God would save the tiny creatures slaughtering
each other by the thousands over an acre of shell-pocked mud. That was too much like a fairy tale.
Beggar boys did not marry princesses; they died in snowy streets or dark alleys . . . or in muddy
trenches in France, while old Papa God took a long rest.
He summoned up his strength. "Heard anything?"
The stranger drew deeply on his cigarette, unconcerned that the ember was burning against his
muddy fingers, and sighed. "Everything. Nothing. You know. Fritz is breaking through in the south
and he'll go right on to Paris. Or now the Yanks are in it, we're going to roll them right up and
march to Berlin by June. The Winged Victory of Samo-whatsit appeared in the skies over Flanders,
waving a flaming sword and dancing the hootchy-coo. It's all shit."
"It's all shit," Paul agreed. He drew once more on his own cigarette and then dropped it into
a puddle. He watched sadly as muddy water wicked into the paper and the last fragments of tobacco
floated free. How many more cigarettes would he smoke before death found him? A dozen? A hundred?
Or might that one be his last? He picked up the paper and squeezed it into a tight ball between
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (3 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
his finger and thumb.
"Thanks, mate." The stranger rolled over and began crawling away up the trench, then shouted
something odd over his shoulder. "Keep your head down. Try to think about getting out. About
really getting _out_."
Paul lifted his hand in a farewell wave, although the man could not see him. The wounded
soldier topside was shouting again, wordless grunting cries that sounded like something inhuman
giving birth.
Within moments, as though wakened by demonic invocation, the guns started up again.
Paul clenched his teeth and tried to stop up his ears with his hands, but he could _still_
hear the man screaming; the rasping voice was like a hot wire going in one earhole and out the
other, sawing back and forth. He had snatched perhaps three hours of sleep in the last two days,
and the night fast approaching seemed sure to be even worse. Why hadn't any of the stretcher teams
gone out to bring back the wounded man? The guns had been silent for at least an hour.
But as he thought about it, Paul realized that except for the man who had come begging a
light, he had not seen anyone else since they had all fled the forward trenches that morning. He
had assumed that there were others just a few bends down, and the man with the cigarette had
seemed to confirm that, but the bombardment had been so steady that Paul had felt no desire to
move. Now that things had been quiet a while, he was beginning to wonder what was happening to the
rest of the platoon. Had Finch and the rest all fallen back to an earlier series of scrapes? Or
were they just a few yards down the line, hugging the depths, unwilling to face the open killing
ground even on a mission of mercy?
He slid forward onto his knees and tipped his helmet back so it would not slide over his eyes,
then began to crawl westward. Even well below the top of the trench, he felt his own movement to
be a provocative act. He hunched his shoulders in expectation of some terrible blow from above,
yet nothing came down on him but the ceaseless wail of the dying man.
Twenty yards and two bends later, he reached a wall of mud.
Paul tried to wipe away the tears, but only succeeded in pushing dirt into his eyes. A last
explosion echoed above and the ground shook in sympathy. A gob of mud on one of the roots
protruding into the trench quivered, fell, and became an indistinguishable part of the greater
muddiness below.
He was trapped. That was the simple, horrible fact. Unless he braved the unprotected ground
above, he could only huddle in his sealed-off section of trench until a shell found him. He had no
illusions that he would last long enough for starvation to become a factor. He had no illusions at
all. He was as good as dead. He would never again listen to Mullet complaining about rations, or
watch old Finch trimming his mustache with a pocketknife. Such small things, so homely, but he
already missed them so badly that it hurt
The dying man was still out there, still howling.
_This is hell, nor am I out of it. . . . _
What was that from? A poem? The Bible?
He unsnapped his holster and drew his Webley, then lifted it toward his eye. In the failing
light the hole in its barrel seemed deep as a well, an emptiness into which he could fall and
never come out--a silent, dark, restful emptiness. . . .
Paul smiled a bleak little smile, then carefully laid the pistol in his lap. It would be
unpatriotic, surely. Better to force the Germans to use up their expensive shells on him. Squeeze
a few more working hours out of some mottle-armed _fraulein_ on a factory line in the Ruhr Valley.
Besides, there was always hope, wasn't there?
He began weeping once more.
Above, the wounded man stopped screeching for a moment to cough. He sounded like a dog being
whipped. Paul leaned his head back against the mud and bellowed: "Shut it! Shut it, for Christ's
sake!" He took a deep breath. "Shut your mouth and _die,_ damn you!"
Apparently encouraged by companionship, the man resumed screaming.
Night seemed to last a year or more, months of darkness, great blocks of immovable black. The
guns sputtered and shouted. The dying man wailed. Paul counted every single individual object he
could remember from his life before the trenches, then started over and counted them again. He
remembered only the names of some of them, but not what the names actually meant. Some words
seemed impossibly strange--"lawn chair" was one, "bathtub" another. "Garden" was mentioned in
several songs in the Chaplain's hymn book, but Paul was fairly certain it was a real thing as
well, so he counted it.
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (4 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
_"Try to think about getting out,"_ the yellow-eyed man had said. _"About really getting
out."_
The guns were silent. The sky had gone a slightly paler shade, as though someone had wiped it
with a dirty rag. There was just enough light for Paul to see the edge of the trench. He clambered
up and then slid back, laughing silently at the up-and-down of it all. _Getting out._ He found a
thick root with his foot and heaved himself onto the rim of the earthwork. He had his gun. He was
going to kill the man who was screaming. He didn't know much more than that.
Somewhere the sun was coming up, although Paul had no idea where exactly that might be
happening: the effect was small and smeared across a great dull expanse of sky. Beneath that sky,
everything was gray. Mud and water. He knew the water was the flat places, so everything else was
mud, except perhaps for the tall things. Yes, those were trees, he remembered. Had been trees.
Paul stood up and turned in a slow circle. The world extended for only a few hundred yards in
any direction before ending in mist. He was marooned in the center of an empty space, as though he
had wandered onto a stage by mistake and now stood before a silent, expectant audience.
But he was not entirely alone. Halfway across the emptiness one tree stood by itself, a
clawing hand with a twisted bracelet of barbed wire. Something dark hung in its denuded branches.
Paul drew his revolver and staggered toward it.
It was a figure, hanging upside down like a discarded marionette, one leg caught in the high
angle of bough and trunk. All its joints seemed to have been broken, and the arms dangled
downward, fingers reaching, as though muck were heaven and it was struggling to fly. The front of
its head was a tattered, featureless mass of red and scorched black and gray, except for one
bright staring yellow eye, mad and intent as a bird's eye, which watched his slow approach.
"I got out," Paul said. He lifted his gun, but the man was not screaming now.
A hole opened in the ruined face. It spoke. _"You've come at last. I've been waiting for
you."_
Paul stared. The butt of the gun was slippery in his fingers. His arm trembled with the effort
of keeping it raised.
"Waiting?"
_"Waiting. Waiting so long."_ The mouth, empty but for a few white shards floating in red,
twisted in an upside-down smile. _"Do you ever get the feeling. . . ?"_
Paul winced as the screaming began again. But it could not be the dying man--_this_ was the
dying man. So. . . .
"Feeling?" he asked, then looked up.
The dark shape was tumbling down the sky toward him, a black hole in the dull gray air,
whistling as it came. The dull thump of the howitzer followed a moment later, as though Time had
turned and bitten its own tail.
_"That it's a mistake,"_ said the hanging man.
And then the shell struck, and the world folded in on itself, smaller and smaller, angle after
angle creased with fire and then compressed along its axes, until it all vanished.
Things became even more complicated after Paul died.
He _was_ dead, of course, and he knew it. How could he be anything else? He had seen the
howitzer shell diving down on him from the sky, a wingless, eyeless, breathtakingly modern Angel
of Death, streamlined and impersonal as a shark. He had felt the world convulse and the air catch
fire, felt his lungs raped of oxygen and charred to cracklings in his chest. There could be no
doubt that he was dead.
But why did his head hurt?
Of course, an afterlife in which the punishment for a misspent existence was an eternally
throbbing headache might make a sort of sense. A horrible sort of sense.
Paul opened his eyes and blinked at the light.
He was sitting upright on the rim of a vast crater, a surely mortal wound ripped deep into the
muddy earth. The land around it was fiat and empty. There were no trenches, or if there were, they
were buried under the outflingings of the explosion; he could see nothing but churned mud in any
direction until the earth itself blurred into gray-gleaming mist along the encircling horizon.
But something solid was behind him, propping him up, and the sensation of it against the small
of his back and his shoulder blades made him wonder for the first time whether he had anticipated
death too soon. As he tilted his head back to look, his helmet-brim tipped forward over his eyes,
returning him to darkness for a moment, then slid down over his face and onto his lap. He stared
at the helmet. Most of its crown was gone, blasted away; the torn and tortured metal of the brim
resembled nothing so much as a crown of thorns.
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (5 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
Remembering horror tales of shell-blasted soldiers who walked two dozen yards without their
heads or held their own innards in their hands without recognizing what they were, Paul shivered
convulsively. Slowly, as though playing a grisly game with himself, he ran his fingers up his
face, past his cheeks and temples, feeling for what must be the pulped top of his own skull. He
touched hair, skin, and bone . . . but all in their proper places. No wound. When he held his
hands before his face, they were striped with as much blood as mud, but the red was dry already,
old paint and powder. He let out a long-held breath.
He was dead, but his head hurt. He was alive, but a red-hot shell fragment had ripped through
his helmet like a knife through cake frosting.
Paul looked up and saw the tree, the small, skeletal thing that had drawn him across no-man's
land. The tree where the dying man had hung.
Now it stretched up through the clouds.
Paul Jonas sighed. He had walked around the tree five times, and it showed no sign of becoming
any less impossible.
The frail, leafless thing had grown so large that its top was out of sight beyond the clouds
that hung motionless in the gray sky. Its trunk was as wide as a castle tower from a fairy story,
a massive cylinder of rough bark that seemed to extend as far downward as it did up, running
smoothly down the side of the bomb crater, vanishing into the soil at the bottom with no trace of
roots.
He had walked around the tree and could make no sense of it. He had walked away from the tree,
hoping to find an angle from which he could gauge its height, but that had not assisted his
understanding either. No matter how far he stumbled back across the featureless plain, the tree
still stretched beyond the cloud ceiling. And always, whether he wanted to or not, he found
himself returning to the tree again. Not only was there nothing else to move toward, but the world
itself seemed somehow curved, so that no matter which direction he took, eventually he found
himself heading back toward the monumental trunk.
He sat with his back against it for a while and tried to sleep. Sleep would not come, but
stubbornly he kept his eyes closed anyway. He was not happy with the puzzles set before him. He
had been struck by an exploding shell. The war and everyone in it seemed to have vanished,
although a conflict of that size should have been a rather difficult thing to misplace. The light
had not changed in this place since he had come here, although it must have been hours since the
explosion. And the only other thing in the world was an immense, impossible vegetable.
He prayed that when he opened his eyes again, he would either find himself in some sort of
respectable afterlife or returned to the familiar misery of the trenches with Mullet and Finch and
the rest of the platoon. When the prayer had ended, he still did not risk a look, determined to
give God--or Whoever--enough time to put things right. He sat, doing his best to ignore the band
of pain across the back of his head, letting the silence seep into him as he waited for normality
to reassert itself. At last, he opened his eyes.
Mist, mud, and that immense, damnable tree. Nothing had changed.
Paul sighed deeply and stood up. He did not remember much about his life before the war, and
at this moment even the immediate past was dim, but he did remember that there had been a certain
kind of story in which an impossible thing happened, and once that impossible thing had proved
that it was not going to un-happen again, there was only one course of action left: the impossible
thing must be treated as a possible thing.
What did you do with an unavoidable tree that grew up into the sky beyond the clouds? You
climbed it.
It was not as difficult as he had expected. Although no branches jutted from the trunk until just
below the belly of the clouds, the very size of the tree helped him; the bark was pitted and
cracked like the skin of some immense serpent, providing excellent toeholds and handholds. Some of
the bumps were big enough to sit on, allowing him to catch his breath in relative safety and
comfort.
But still it was not easy. Although it was hard to tell in that timeless, sunless place, he
felt he had been climbing for at least half a day when he reached the first branch. It was as
broad as a country road, bending up and away; where it, too, vanished into the clouds, he could
see the first faint shapes of leaves.
Paul lay down where the branch met the trunk and tried to sleep, but though he was very tired,
sleep still would not come. When he had rested for a while, he got up and resumed climbing.
After a while the air grew cooler, and he began to feel the wet touch of clouds. The sky
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (6 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
around the great tree was becoming murkier, the ends of the branches obscured; he could see vast
shadowy shapes hanging in the distant foliage overhead, but could not identify them. Another half
hour's climbing revealed them to be monstrous apples, each as large as a barrage balloon.
As he mounted higher, the fog thickened until he was surrounded by a phantom world of branches
and drifting, tattered clouds, as though he clambered in the rigging of a ghost ship. No sound
reached him but the creaking and scratching of bark beneath his feet. Breezes blew, cooling the
thin sweat on his forehead, but none of them blew hard enough to shake the great, flat leaves.
Silence and shreds of mist. The great trunk and its mantle of branches above and below him, a
world in itself. Paul climbed on.
The clouds began to grow even more dense, and he could sense the light changing; something
warm was making the mists glow, like a lantern behind thick curtains. He rested again, and
wondered how long it would take him to fall if he were to step off the branch on which he sat. He
plucked a loose button from his shirt cuff and let it drop, watching it shiver down the air
currents until it vanished silently into the clouds below.
Later--he had no idea how much later--he found himself climbing into growing radiance. The
gray bark began to show traces of other colors, sandy beiges and pale yellows. The upper surfaces
of the branches seemed flattened by the new, harsher light and the surrounding mist gleamed and
sparkled as though tiny rainbows played between the individual drops.
The cloud-mist was so thick here that it impeded his climb, curling around his face in
dripping tendrils, lubricating his grip, weighting his clothes and dragging at him treacherously
as he negotiated difficult hand-to-hand changeovers. He briefly considered giving up, but there
was nowhere else for him to go except back down. It seemed worth risking an unpleasantly swift
descent to avoid the slower alternative which could lead only to eternal nothingness on that gray
plain.
In any case, Paul thought, if he was already dead, he couldn't die again. If he was alive,
then he was part of a fairy tale, and surely no one ever died this early in the story.
The clouds grew thicker the last hundred yards of his ascent he might have been climbing
through rotting muslin. The damp resistance kept him from noticing how bright the world was
becoming, but as he pushed through the last clouds and lifted his head, blinking, it was to find
himself beneath a dazzling, brassy sun and a sky of pure unclouded blue.
No clouds above, but clouds everywhere else: the top of the great frothy mass through which he
had just climbed stretched away before him like a white meadow, a miles-wide, hummocked plain of
cloudstuff. And in the distance, shimmering in the brilliant sunlight . . . a castle.
As Paul stared, the pale slender towers seemed to stretch and waver, like something seen
through the waters of a mountain lake. Still, it was clearly a castle, not just an illusion
compounded of clouds and sun; colorful pennants danced from the tops of the sharp turrets, and the
huge porticullised gate was a grinning mouth opening onto darkness.
He laughed, suddenly and abruptly, but his eyes filled with tears. It was beautiful. It was
terrifying. After the great gray emptiness and the half-world of the clouds, it was too bright,
too strong, almost too real.
Still, it was what he had been climbing toward: it called to him as clearly as if it had
possessed a voice--just as the dim awareness of an inescapable _something_ awaiting him had
summoned him to climb the tree.
There was the faintest suggestion of a path across the spun-sugar plain, a more solid line of
whiteness that stretched from the tree and meandered away toward the distant castle gate. He
climbed until his feet were level with the top of the clouds, paused for a moment to revel in the
strong, swift beating of his heart, then stepped off the branch. For a sickening instant the
whiteness gave, but only a little. He windmilled his arms for balance, then discovered that it was
no worse than standing on a mattress.
He began to walk.
The castle grew larger as he approached. If Paul had retained any doubts that he was in a
story and not a real place, the ever-clearer view of his destination would have dispelled them. It
was clearly something that someone had made up.
It was real, of course, and quite solid--although what did that mean to a man walking across
the clouds? But it was real in the way of things long believed-in but never seen. It had the shape
of a castle--it was as much a _castle_ as something could ever be--but it was no more a medieval
fortress than it was a chair or a glass of beer. It was an _idea_ of a castle, Paul realized, a
sort of Platonic ideal unrelated to the grubby realities of motte-and-bailey architecture or
feudal warfare.
Platonic ideal? He had no idea where that had come from. Memories were swimming just below the
surface of his conscious mind, closer than ever, but still as strangely unfocused as the many-
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (7 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
towered vision before him.
He walked on beneath the unmoving sun, wisps of cloud rising from his heels like smoke.
The gate was open but did not seem welcoming. For all the diffuse glimmer of the towers, the
entranceway itself was deep, black, and empty. Paul stood before the looming hole for some time,
his blood lively in his veins, his self-protective reflexes urging him to turn back even though he
knew he must enter. At last, feeling even more naked than he had beneath the hail of shellfire
which had begun the whole mad dream, he took a breath and stepped through.
The vast stone chamber beyond the door was curiously stark, the only decoration a single great
banner, red embroidered with black and gold, that hung on the far wall. It bore a vase or chalice
out of which grew two twining roses, with a crown floating above the flowers. Below the picture
was the legend _"Ad Aeternum."_
As he stepped forward to examine it, his footsteps reverberated through the empty chamber, so
loud after the muffling cloud-carpet that it startled him. He thought that someone would surely
come to see who had entered, but the doors at either end of the chamber remained shut and no other
sound joined the dying echoes.
It was hard to stare at the banner for long. Each individual thread of black and gold seemed
to move, so that the whole picture swam blurrily before his eyes. It was only when he stepped back
almost to the entrance that he could see the picture clearly again, but it still told him nothing
of this place or who might live here.
Paul looked at the doors at either end. There seemed little to choose between them, so he
turned toward the one on the left. Though it seemed only a score or so of paces away, it took him
a surprisingly long time to reach it. Paul looked back. The far portal was now only a dark spot a
great distance away, and the antechamber itself seemed to be filling with mist, as though clouds
were beginning to drift in from outside. He turned and found that the door he had sought now
loomed before him. It swung open easily at his touch, so he stepped through.
And found himself in a jungle.
But it was not quite that, he realized a moment later. Vegetation grew thickly everywhere, but
he could see shadowy walls through the looping vines and long leaves; arched windows set high on
those walls looked out on a sky busy with dark storm clouds--quite a different sky than the shield
of pure blue he had left beyond the front gate. The jungle was everywhere, but he was still
_inside,_ even though the outside was not his own.
This chamber was larger even than the huge front hall. Far, far above the nodding, poisonous-
looking flowers and the riot of greenery stretched a ceiling covered with intricate sharp-angled
patterns all of gleaming gold, like a jeweled map of a labyrinth.
Another memory came drifting up, the smell and the warm wet air tickling it free. This kind of
place was called . . . was called . . . a conservatory. A place where things were kept, he dimly
recalled, where things grew, where secrets were hidden.
He stepped forward, pushing the sticky fronds of a long-leafed plant out of his path, then had
to do a sudden dance to avoid tumbling into a pond that the plant had hidden. Dozens of tiny fish,
red as pennies heated in a forge, darted away in alarm.
He turned and moved along the edge of the pond, searching for a path. The plants were dusty.
As he worked his way through the thickest tangles, powdery clouds rose up into the light angling
down through the high windows, swirling bits of floating silver and mica. He paused, waiting for
the dust to settle. In the silence, a low sound drifted to him. Someone was weeping.
He reached up with both hands and spread the leaves as though they were curtains. Framed in
the twining vegetation stood a great bell-shaped cage, its slender golden bars so thickly wound
with flowering vines it was hard to see what it contained. He moved closer, and something inside
the cage moved. Paul stopped short.
It was a woman. It was a bird.
It was a woman.
She turned, her wide black eyes wet. A great cloud of dark hair framed her long face and
spilled down her back to merge with the purple and iridescent green of her strange costume. But it
was no costume. She was clothed in feathers; beneath her arms long pinions lay folded like a paper
fan. Wings.
_"Who's there?"_ she cried.
It was all a dream, of course--perhaps just the last hallucinatory moments of a battlefield
casualty--but as her voice crept into him and settled itself like something that had found its
home, he knew that he would never forget the sound of it. There was determination and sorrow and
the edge of madness, all in those two words. He stepped forward.
Her great round eyes went wider still. "Who are you? You do not belong here."
Paul stared at her, although he could not help feeling that he was doing her some insult, as
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (8 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
though her feathered limbs were a sort of deformity. Perhaps they were. Or perhaps in this strange
place he was the deformed one.
"Are you a ghost?" she asked. "If so, I waste my breath. But you do not look like a ghost."
"I don't know what I am." Paul's dry mouth made it hard to speak. "I don't know where I am
either. But I don't feel like a ghost."
"You can talk!" Her alarm was such that Paul feared he had done something dreadful. "You do
not belong here!"
"Why are you crying? Can I help you?"
"You must go away. You must! The Old Man will be back soon." Her agitated movements filled the
room with a soft rustling. More dust fluttered into the air.
"Who is this old man? And who are you?"
She moved to the edge of the cage, grasping the bars in her slender fingers. "Go! Go now!" But
her gaze was greedy, as though she wished to make him into a memory that would not fade. "You are
hurt--there is blood on your clothing."
Paul looked down. "Old blood. Who are you?"
She shook her head. "No one." She paused and her face moved as though she would say something
shocking or dangerous, but the moment passed. "I am no one. You must go before the Old Man
returns."
"But what is this place? Where am I? All I have are questions and more questions."
"You should not be here. Only ghosts visit me here--and the Old Man's evil instruments. He
says they are to keep me company, but some of them have teeth and very unusual senses of humor.
Butterball and Nickelplate--they are the cruelest."
Overwhelmed, Paul suddenly stepped forward and grasped her hand where it curled around the
bars. Her skin was cool and her face was very close. "You are a prisoner. I will free you."
She jerked her hand away. "I cannot survive outside this cage. And you cannot survive if the
Old Man finds you here. Have you come hunting the Grail? You will not find it here--this is only a
shadow place."
Paul shook his head impatiently. "I know nothing of any grail." But even as he spoke he knew
it was not the full truth: the word set up an echo deep inside him, touched parts that were still
out of his reach. _Grail._ Something, it meant something. . . .
"You do not understand!" the bird woman said, and shining feathers ruffled and bunched around
her neck as she grew angry. "I am not one of the guardians. I have nothing to hide from you, and I
would not see you . . . I would not see you harmed. Go, you fool! Even if you _could_ take it, the
Old Man would find you no matter where you went. He would hunt you down even if you crossed the
White Ocean."
Paul could feel the fear beating out from her, and for a moment he was overwhelmed, unable to
speak or move. She was afraid for him. This prisoned angel felt something . . . for _him._
And the grail, whatever it might be--he could feel the idea of it, swimming just beyond his
grasp like one of the bright fish. . . .
A terrible hissing sound, loud as a thousand serpents, set the leaves around them swaying. The
bird woman gasped and shrank back into the center of her cage. A moment later a great clanging
tread sounded through the trees, which shivered, stirring more dust.
"It's him!" Her voice was a muffled shriek. "He's back!"
Something huge was coming nearer, huffing and banging like a war engine. A harsh light
flickered through the trees.
"Hide!" The naked terror in her whisper set his heart hammering. "He will suck the marrow from
your bones!"
The noise was becoming louder; the walls themselves were quivering, the ground pitching. Paul
took a step, then stumbled and sank to his knees as terror fell on him like a black wave. He
crawled into the thickest part of the undergrowth, leaves slapping against his face, smearing him
with dust and damp.
A loud creak sounded, as of mighty hinges, then the room was filled with the smell of an
electrical storm. Paul covered his eyes.
"I AM HOME." The Old Man's voice was loud as cannon-fire and just as boomingly inhuman. "AND
WHERE IS YOUR SONG TO GREET ME?"
The long silence was broken only by that hiss like escaping steam. At last the bird woman
spoke, faint and tremulous.
"I did not expect you back so soon. I was not prepared."
"AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO BESIDES PREPARE FOR MY RETURN?" More crashing footsteps sounded as
the Old Man moved nearer. "YOU SEEM DISTRACTED, MY NIGHTINGALE. HAS BUTTERBALL BEEN PLAYING
ROUGHLY WITH YOU?"
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (9 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt
"No! No, I . . . I do not feel well today."
"I AM NOT SURPRISED. THERE IS A FOUL SMELL ABOUT THE PLACE." The ozone stench grew stronger,
and through his laced fingers Paul could see the light flickering again. "AS A MATTER OF FACT, IT
SMELLS LIKE A MAN."
"H-how . . . how could that be?"
"WHY DO YOU NOT LOOK ME IN THE EYE, LITTLE SONGBIRD? SOMETHING IS AMISS HERE." The steps grew
closer. The floor shuddered, and Paul could hear a discordant creaking like a bridge in high wind.
"I BELIEVE THERE IS A MAN HERE. I BELIEVE YOU HAVE HAD A VISITOR."
"Run!" the bird woman screamed. Paul cursed and staggered to his feet, surrounded by head-high
branches. A vast shadow hung over the room, blocking the soft gray light from the windows,
replacing it with the stark blue-white of its own nimbus of sparks. Paul flung himself forward,
smashing through the clinging leaves, his heart beating like a greyhound's. The door . . . if he
could only find the door again.
"SOMETHING SCURRYING IN THE SHRUBBERY." The titan's voice was amused. "WARM FLESH . . . AND
WET BLOOD . . . AND CRISP LITTLE BONES."
Paul splashed through the pond and almost lost his balance. He could see the door, only a few
yards away, but the great clanking thing was just behind him.
"Run!" the woman pleaded. Even in his terror he knew that she would suffer some dreadful
punishment for this; he felt that he had somehow betrayed her. He reached the door and flung
himself through, skidding and then rolling on the smooth stone floor. The huge gate stood before
him, and thank God, thank God, it was open!
A hundred steps, maybe more, difficult as running in treacle. The whole castle shook beneath
his pursuer's tread. He reached the door and flung himself through and out into what had been
sunlight, but was now twilight-gray. The topmost branches of the great tree stood just above the
edge of the clouds, a seemingly impossible distance away. Paul bolted toward it across the field
of clouds.
The thing was pushing through the door--he heard the great hinges squeal as it forced its way.
Lightning-scented air billowed past him, almost knocking him off his feet, and a great roar filled
the sky: the Old Man was laughing.
"COME BACK, LITTLE CREATURE! I WANT TO PLAY WITH YOU!"
Paul sprinted across the cloud-trail, his breath scorching in his lungs. The tree was a little
closer now. How fast would he have to climb down to move beyond the reach of that terrible thing?
Surely it couldn't follow him--how could even the great tree bear the weight of such a
monstrosity?
The clouds below his feet stretched and jounced like a trampoline as the Old Man stepped from
the castle. Paul tripped and fell forward; one of his hands came down to the side of the trail,
pushing through the cloud surface as through cobwebs. He scrambled to his feet and sped forward
again--the tree was only a few hundred paces away now. If he could only. . . .
A great gray hand as big as a steam shovel curled around him, a thing of cables and rivets and
rusting sheet iron. Paul screamed.
The clouds fell away as he was jerked high into the air, then turned to dangle in front of the
Old Man's face. Paul screamed again, and heard another cry, dim but mournful, echo from the
distant castle--the keening of a caged bird.
The Old Man's eyes were the vast cracked faces of tower clocks, his beard a welter of curling,
rusted wire. He was impossibly huge, a giant of iron and battered copper pipes and slowly turning
wheels that steamed at every crack, every vent. He stank of electricity and grinned a row of
concrete tombstones.
"GUESTS MAY NOT LEAVE BEFORE I CAN ENTERTAIN THEM." Paul felt the bones of his skull vibrate
from the power of the Old Man's voice. As the great maw opened wider, Paul kicked and struggled in
the cloud of choking steam.
"TOO SMALL TO MAKE MUCH OF A MEAL, REALLY" said the Old Man, then swallowed him. Shrieking,
Paul fell down into oily, gear-grinding darkness.
"Quit that, you bloody idiot!"
Paul struggled, but someone or something was holding his arms. He shuddered and went limp.
"That's better. Here--have a little of this."
Something trickled into his mouth and burned down his throat. He coughed explosively and
struggled to sit up. This time he was allowed to. Someone laughed.
He opened his eyes. Finch was sitting beside him, almost on top of him, framed by the mud of
the trench top and a sliver of sky.
file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (10 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20S\hadow.txtCityofGoldenShadowByTadWilliamsOtherlander1ContentsForewordFirst-UNIVERSENEXTDOORChapter01-MisterJingo'sSmileChapter02-TheAirmanChapter03-EmptySignalGrayChapter04-TheShiningPlaceChapter05-AWorldAfireChapter06-NoMan'sLa...

展开>> 收起<<
Tad Williams - Otherland 1 - City of Golden Shadows.pdf

共368页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：368 页 大小：1.29MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-05

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 368
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注