The Dragons of Babel

"I don't understand. Why me?"

"Because you're here. Now stop asking fucking questions and listen." Monadnock shook his limbs loose and took a deep breath. Abruptly a shiver ran through his body and he shook as if he were having a seizure. His eyes rolled up so that only their whites showed. In a high, half-strangled voice, he said (and in his head Will simultaneously heard the words translated):

"Sol ter sortna,

sigr fold i mar,

hverfa af himni

heidar stiornor.

Geisar eimi

Via aldrnara,

leikr har hiti

vid himin siaifan."

(The sun blackens, Lands sink into sea, The radiant stars Fall from the sky. Smoke rages against fire, Nourisher of life, The heat soars high Against heaven itself.)

Then the dwarf seized Will's shirt with both hands and yanked down his head so that they were on the same level. His eyes still terrifyingly blank and white, he gripped Will's forehead in one broad hand and squeezed.

It was as if he were struck by a bolt of lightning. All the world turned an incandescent white. For a long still time he stood alone and immobile on a cold and lifeless plain under a starless sky. Everywhere there was rubble. Nowhere was there life. Radiation sleeted through his nonexistent body. Will had no idea what this vision meant. Yet he knew, with that same sourceless certainty one experiences in dreams, that this was a true seeming and possibly even his destiny. This was unquestionably the single most important moment in his life. All else would be a footnote to it.

Then the dwarf flung Will away as one might a rag doll, bent double, and threw up.

By the time Will had regained his feet, Monadnock was lighting up another cigarette. The dwarf walked to the edge of the cliff. There was a light, erratic breeze coming up from the Gorge. Quietly, he said, "I think I deserve a little fucking privacy now, don't you?"

"What was...? Those words. What did they mean?"

"The words are from the Motsognirsaga, which is a text so sacred to my kind that no surface-walker will ever see a copy of it. So you gotta figure that's not good. But what the vision means is for you to find out and me not to give a shit about, jerkoff. Now get the fuck out. I got something I gotta do."

"Just one thing — is this a vision of something that might happen? Or that will?"

"Go!"

Hesitantly. Will walked back toward the camp. At the top of the rise, just before the twist where the road went over the tracks and down again and the Gorge disappeared entirely, a horrid presentiment made him hesitate and look back. Hut the dwarf was already gone.

Mother Griet died a fortnight later, not from any neglect or infection but as a final, lingering effect of a curse that she had contracted in her long-forgotten childhood. As a girl, she had surprised the White Ladies in their predawn dance and seen that which none but an initiate was sanctioned to see. In their anger, they had pronounced death upon her at the sound of — her third crow-caw, they were going to say but, realizing almost too late her youth and i

Such was the story Mother Griet had told Will, and so when its fulfillment came he knew it for what it was. That morning she had called to him from a bench before her tent and set him to carding wool with her. Midway through the chore, Mother Griet suddenly smiled and, putting down her work, lifted her ancient face to the sky. "Hark!" she said. "Now there's a familiar sound. The black-fledged Sons of Corrin have followed us here from—"

Gently, then, she toppled over on her side, dead.

Esme had been playing inside, building a mud-and-stone dam across a tiny brook that meandered through. Mother Griet's memories of the lost forests of her youth. In that very instant, she began to wail as if her heart were broken.

Will thought her to be merely upset at the loss of her playground, which he knew would not survive its creator, and so he did not go to her until the local elders had crowded out of their tents and pushed him away from Mother Griet's corpse and he discovered himself without any other responsibility than to comfort her.

But when he took the child in his arms, she was inconsolable. "She's dead," she said. "Griet is dead." He made hushing noises, but she kept on crying. "I remember her!" she insisted. "I remember now."

"That's good." Will groped for the right words to say "It's good to remember people you care about. And you mustn't be unhappy — she led a long and productive life."

"No!" she sobbed. "You don't understand. Griet was my daughter."

"What?"

"She was my sweetness, my youngest, my light. Oh, my little Griet-chen! She brought me dandelions in her tiny fist. Damn memory! Damn responsibility! Damn time!" Esme tugged off her ring and flung it away from her. "Now I remember why I sold my age in the first place."

The citizens of Block G honored Mother Griet's death with the traditional rites. Three solemn runes were caned upon her brow. Her abdomen was cut open and her entrails read. In lieu of an aurochs, a stray dog was sacrificed. Then they raised up her corpse on long poles to draw down the sacred feeders, the vultures, from the sky. The camp's sanitary officers tried to tear down the sun-platform, and the ensuing argument spread and engulfed the camp in three days of rioting.

In the wake of which they were loaded into railroad cars and taken away. To far Babylonia, the relief workers said, in Fäerie Minor where they would build new lives for themselves, but no one believed them. All they knew of Babylonia was that the streets of its capital were bricked of gold and the ziggurats touched the sky. Of one thing they were certain. No villager could thrive in such a place. It was not even certain they could survive. All pledged, therefore, a solemn oath to stay together, come what may, to defend and protect one another in the unimaginable times to come. Will mouthed the words along with the rest, though he did not believe them.

The train pulled in. The yellow jackets stood atop barrels on the outside of mazelike arrangements of cattle fences prodding the refugees toward the train cars with long poles. Will moved with the jostling crowd, keeping a firm hand on Esme, lest they get separated.

Ever since Mother Griet's death, Will had been thinking: about her, about the Commandant, about the dwarf and his prophecy. Now everything fell into place. All those events he had witnessed were one and the same, he realized, naught but the harsh white light of justice working itself out in the pitiless court of existence. The good suffered and the wicked were punished. He realized now that he did not have to approve of his own side to take action. In fact, it made things easier if he didn't. He had a purpose now. He was going to Babylon, and though he did not know what he would do when he got there, he knew that ultimately it would put paid to everything he had been through.

I am your War, he thought, and I am coming home to you.