Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,313

place with an enormous rock on the south bank and then began to fly north, keeping the sea to his right and creating the shore to his left. About here”—Prim pulled an arrow from her quiver and used it to point to a broad steady curve that formed the northeastern extremity of the Land—“Egdod thought better of making the Land any more enormous than it already was and swept gradually round until he was flying west. Which he did for a long time. Which is why the generally straight-ish northern coast of the Land, which stretches on for such a vast distance, is known as the Backhaul.”

“Oh, hmm,” said Mardellian Bufrect. “To me that was always just a word. It never crossed my mind that it was based on anything. Back-haul.” He cleared his throat and blushed slightly. Then, in what he apparently thought was a more authoritative voice, he added, “Pray continue.” He exchanged a glance with his kinsman Anvellyne. “With your entertaining tale.” Mard and Lyne (as they were generally called) grinned at each other, a detail Prim did not notice, as she was shifting round to the map’s northwest corner. Weaver, sitting on a rock nearby going through her damp things, shot her most peevish look at the two young men. Burr still appeared to be sleeping. Corvus was hopping about the place showing his usual complete lack of interest in what the humans were talking about.

If the map was considered the splayed skin of a dead animal, with its butt end pointed due east, then Prim had come round to its right foreleg—the northwest quadrant. “Lacking any means of judging distance,” she continued, “Egdod overshot the Palace considerably, which is why as much of the Land lies to the west of it as to the east. The Second Bending, hereabouts, is where he decided to turn south again.”

“It doesn’t look the least bit like the First Bending,” pointed out Lyne, in a tone of voice meant to indicate he was having none of it and just humoring Prim as a sort of private game with Mardellian. “It’s just a mess of islands with channels between them.”

“That mess of islands—the Bits and Shivers—is your home, and Calla is the largest of the Bits!” Prim scolded him. “And it wasn’t thus when Egdod made it. It, and the First Bending, used to be as symmetrical as a pair of shoulders!”

Mardellian seized on this pretext to gaze at Prim’s shoulders—as if he needed a flesh-and-blood model in order to fully grasp her meaning.

“The whole region west of the river—west of where Secondeltown now sits, here—snapped off.”

“Snapped off?”

“Gradually, as big things move slowly,” said Prim, sensing a bit of weakness in her own position. “So the big channel here—the First Shiver, which used to be a river—is the widest, and you can’t see all the way across it except in some places. This whole chunk that broke off just happened to contain most of the wild souls and the giants.”

Lyne sighed. “So much talk of giants, in all the old stories—yet I have never seen one.”

“You see them all the time.”

“You will see one tomorrow,” croaked Corvus, “if you will only shut up and accept your fate as a two-footed thing, namely, to walk.”

Brindle broke the awkward silence. “A game we used to play, looking at this map, was to think of all of the little islands among the Shivers as if they were shards of a broken pot. Then try to mentally imagine how they could be reassembled.”

Anvellyne and Mardellian exchanged a look. They seemed uneasy with Brindle’s proposing that any activity so tedious could be categorized as a game.

“If you look at them for long enough, you can see how an indentation in one Bit’s coastline matches a protuberance in the coast of the Bit facing it across the Shiver,” Brindle insisted.

“Shiver” was the local term for a channel running between Bits—or, in the case of the First Shiver, between the Bits and the mainland.

Meanwhile Prim had skirted around behind Brindle to the southwest—or, the dead animal’s left foreleg. This was conveniently occupied by a peninsula that reached for some distance out into the sea. “Before turning inward again, Egdod asked himself how far the ocean might extend, and struck out south and west for some considerable distance until he became bored with it, which is why we call this arm of the Land the Asking, and the prominence at the end of it Cape Boredom.”

“Huh!” said Lyne