Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,307

around by larger ones. They passed through a sort of arch that communicated with the yard and formed up in an arc centered on Corvus.

“Let’s go,” Corvus said, and spread his wings to take flight.

“Just a moment, if you would,” said a man with hair growing out of his face and extending down onto his chest. “We Calladons are no strangers to Quests, and in fact if you were to fly into our Hall over yonder you would see pictures on the walls of our ancestors engaged in some, as recently as a hundred falls ago. So it cannot be said that you have come to the wrong place altogether. But before you make off with our Prim, we would like to know one or two things about just what it is you have in mind. Such as: which direction are you going?”

“I had given very little thought to it,” said Corvus.

“Well you see, that does concern me a little,” said the man. “For some directions are more hazardous than others; and if you should happen to pick the wrong one, why, you will only get farther away from your destination with each beat of your wings.”

Corvus meditated upon these words. “Very well,” he said, “I’ll be back.” He began to flap his wings but had some difficulty getting clear of the apple tree’s impossibly gnarled branches.

“There is carrion out back of the kitchen,” said a younger man with hair on his upper lip. “It might give you greater strength if you ate some.”

Standing next to that man was a woman with yellow hair. “And the greater your strength, the farther you can fly . . . from here,” she added helpfully.

“If you go south or east,” said Prim, “stay high—because of arrows.”

“North or west, low—eagles,” added the man who had spoken first.

Thus advised, Corvus worked free of the tree’s grasp and flew over behind the hall, to a little yard where someone was tossing food out of an open door onto the ground. There it was being fought over by various low-to-the-ground creatures. Wanting no part in their squabbles, Corvus flew in through the door and found a piece of a dead animal lying on a slab of wood. He picked this up in his talons. The woman who had been throwing the food took exception and hurled a metal container at him, but it did not strike him, so he flew into the Hall, carrying the piece of the dead animal, and went up to a high exposed piece of dead tree that seemed to be playing a part in holding the roof up. There he bided for a while, tearing the “carrion” into shreds small enough to swallow. As had been promised, the building’s walls, below the windows, were adorned with images. Some were made by the weaving together of colored fiber, others by applying colored stuff to flat things. At first these made little sense to him, but as his stomach filled with carrion, his powers of understanding grew and he saw that all of these were ways of tricking the eye to make it see things that were not actually present. Apparently the figures shown were Calladons. Or at least some of them were. The handsome ones astride four-legged beasts—probably Calladons. The ugly misshapen ones they were depicted as killing—probably something else.

Prim had made passing reference to a giant who was asleep. It could be guessed that the very large biped made of rocks, prominently featured in one of the larger pictures, was the very same—though, during the events shown, most definitely awake.

Stringing all of these pictures together into a story looked to be an all-day project, but Corvus didn’t have to go to all that trouble to get the drift: Calladons and other suchlike persons had come here a long time ago as part of an epic adventure featuring not only giants but floods, avalanches, packs of ravening beasts, flying bipeds with bright swords, and diverse other entities that did not look much like them. Strange-looking cities had been visited, caught on fire, fled. This had at some point given way to a more settled way of life in circumstances that were nicer but, on the whole, colder. Crops and orchards had been planted, animals husbanded, babies made, buildings raised. Efforts, apparently successful, had been made to defend all of that through the systematic application of violence. These doings accounted for most of the pictures. But there were a few that did not fit