Authors: D. F. Lewis
By now, in this renewed light, the bustle of barges upon the Balsam River was beginning a noisy trade of richly woven carpets and Angevin spices. Yet there was far more description to be endured before Beth and Greg would be able to do full justice to their vantage point, viz. the interlocking sights and clandestine intricacies and heady implications of such a place as Agra Aska and its near neighbour: the Megazanthine Core.
*
As our tunnelling party approached—at last—the mountain cutaway of South Agra Aska, I am sad to report a death. I am devastated—to the extent that I am not sure I am still the Mike I think I am or the Mike I think I have always been.
The whole incident has taken a lot out of me. But rest assured there is a consistency of viewpoint, a conviction that what I am reporting is the unvarnished truth, however poignant or indeed tragic for me (or for Mike if he is still me) that it happened to be. It is difficult to be certain about anything after such a long downward trek, interspersed with hawl training that was imposed on us by the intermittent appearance of service-tunnels alongside our main journey shaft. Both the girls, Amy and Sudra, were very game. They took all in their stride, despite the unfashionable carpet-coats and yellow clogs that any other young modern misses would no doubt spurn. Arthur has been a bit morose, weighed down to starboard as he is by a vast elephant ear. He has however acted as provender source, and there are no complaints on that score. Susan has been a real dream. I still love her.
Well, I can’t delay the incident’s telling, however long I dwell on trivialities to avoid addressing its terrible vision or loss. Sudra slipped in a momentary mess of darkness that smeared her vision, if not the vision of us others. We could see she was blinded by a mixture of darkness and a scalding flash of Corelight that was a freakish occurrence within her eyes alone: a combination far worse than the confusion of pure darkness itself. She hung over a mini-cutaway (one that was as nothing to some of the much bigger cutaways we had already experienced in our journey, but sufficient to waylay Sudra’s steps). Amy rushed to her assistance, grabbing her wrists: and then for an eternity of anguish, there Sudra hung. I, too, rushed, from a nearby tunnel where I was silver-plating pulley-hooks. A goodly task for an evening’s Corelight. But I mustn’t delay. I was there soon enough to see Amy kissing Sudra’s brow—as if in abandonment. Surrendering to an inevitable. Tears streamed down both girls’ faces in pangs of lost love and despair. I grabbed Amy’s ankles in an attempt to tug Sudra, via Amy, from the reaching abyss. I then managed to claw my way up Amy’s legs and hugged her thighs within her carpet coat, tears now streaming down my own face.
“We should have gone overland.”
These were Sudra’s words as Amy finally let go. And echoing through the abyss: Sudra’s screams of “New shoes, new shoes, new shoes, new shoes…” until even these strident sirens of hope faded into silence.
*
Sudra quaintly described them as “Redoubts”—but nobody seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, simply for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn’t want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. “Redoubts” in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word “Côté” was written on one broken brick wall that they were now passing—almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces... all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.
*
I cannot now remember to what Sudra once referred when using the word “Redoubts”, but it does cause me to wonder yet again who let go of whom on the edge of death’s cutaway when Sudra plummetted to her own abrupt cutaway. Who saw what in whose eyes? They both held each other’s wrists. Did Amy let go... or did Sudra let go when she looked into Amy’s eyes—flimsily disguised by tears of fateful surrender—only to see someone other than Amy behind those same eyes?
Amy was distraught. I could hardly comfort her, as she wailed and wailed into the sleep period. Susan, surprisingly, for a bereaved mother, was quite calm, as if she had been released from a burden of bewitchment—as if what Amy had carried behind her eyes had been passed off to Sudra in that critical moment of broken wrist-links. Or Sudra’s own shadow—which I had never noticed—was a stronger shadow than even Amy’s shadow. Indeed, once that Amy had recovered from the initial shock, she seemed to enter a new strobe period, without the necessity of us others having to strobe in tune with her own strobes. She became distant, detached, finally re-attached, but calmer. I felt as if a suicide bomb must have exploded inside Amy’s head and she had survived it by simple virtue of being strobed-out of existence at the instantaneous moment the bomb ignited itself.
It is difficult to dwell on the repercussions of Sudra’s death. Indeed, I can’t recall Arthur’s reaction in any way whatsoever, but it did inevitably mean Amy spending more time with him in alternations of sibling rivalry and sibling bonding. Susan was stoic and—if I say so myself—so was I. And we now need to address the circumstances of our arrival in Agra Aska. “Ever look to the future”, my Dad always said when he was alive. I always replied, in boyish pique, to his great astonishment, that such a tenet was a veiled threat, because futures often blighted pasts. That’s perhaps why I was destined to become mixed up with ‘hawling’, but then of course that word had not yet channelled its way down the generations to me in that period of my childhood (as it was later to do).
Agra Aska is now not at all what it was like in the distant strobe-era spoken of elsewhere, when John Bello and Joan Turner became young lovers to the backdrop of Ervin’s shriving—and of the political war-machinations that surrounded David Binns, Dictor Wilson, Robert Orwell, Chesterton and The Archer-Vicar. Today Agra Aska is blander, albeit still maintaining the now famous Straddling Cathedral and the Balsam River trading business. It substantially thrives on the
Angevin
cream that it mines from the Core—an export hawling business that will play a large part in the future of our campaign. So, yes, this
is
a mining city that has settled within its own strobe-history as near to the earth’s Core as it is possible for any civilisation to be positioned in such a city-shaped formation, i.e. in the manner of the more distant cities of Whofage, Klaxon and London—but, despite this infrastructure, still maintaining a conveniently short direct two-way filter to the Corecombs of the Megazanthus itself. By the way, I’ve just mentioned London and this city (established at sea level directly above the man-shaped man-city whence I and my party derived) is rumoured to harbour the domed cathedral of St Paul’s that was the original template for Agra Aska’s straddling version which, in its turn, is a vast structure that possesses the ornate and iconographised religious thoroughfare (aisle?) along the roofed bridge between two Babelline towers. The Balsam River torrents below this ‘bridge’, its relentless current leading to the tributaries of Abrundy and Tiddle.
The under-surface or floor-division between London and its strobe-twin city beneath it (i.e. man-city with Dry Dock and covered market) is a mere lightweight ceiling or carpet... or, rather, mere symbols of these things, in gossamer arcades of nothingness, barely differentiating between the two cavities or air-spaces that harboured each city. However, I assure you, the sea ‘unlevels’ do also help to maintain this division.
Having said that, I am minded to give my own personal impressions of Agra Aska as we emerged from the last earthen cutaway and viewed the ‘half-sky’ Coremoon settling above its silver pinnacles. We all heard a distant lonely flute. And a dog yapping. I hate dogs. Sudra would have been delighted. We knew it was a city, and indeed Arthur, with his over-extended left ear, could hear more than us—as city-life surely thrummed beneath us. Oh, by the way, I also spotted the ‘shipwrecked’ Drill lodged on a crag escarpment that bloated unnaturally from one of the Cathedral’s Babelline towers. But more of that later.
What I wanted to say, really, was that, for me, Agra Aska is the sea. It’s strobing in and out of existence so fast, beyond the scope of flickering eyelids, that it appears to be a swaying creature of waves. Even the buildings are waves and the river just another channel of current, criss-crossing other such channels at the culmination of forces that make me believe in a ghost of a pier which I watch shimmer more slowly in and out of existence. Of course, all this might have been just my imagination.
*
Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were dowager twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls—the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls—otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city—but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn’t grow. Brick is more prone to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south—but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imagination, because everything using the gaps had widened.
*
When the dowagers eventually disembarked at Agra Aska—faced with an undignified long-skirted clamber down one of the Babelline towers of the Straddling Cathedral—they certainly felt suspicious they hadn’t actually travelled
anywhere
but had been confidence-tricked by means of a ‘U Turn’ within Inner Earth or some sleight of compass prestidigitation regarding the tricking of the Above, the Below and the Across. The compensation, however, was that Agra Aska represented an oblique, if opaque, home from home—where all gaps went missing. Indeed, the whole of Agra Aska seemed to have landed within a blind spot so that they had to keep turning their heads to avoid not seeing it at all: and in the process saw only the legs of Clare (if you were Edith) or of Edith (if you were Clare) rather than any breathtaking views of their new home city that the descent of disembarkation would otherwise have entailed. It was rather like going into a bare room with bare floorboards, then imagining that if you took up the floorboards nail by nail you’d discover a carpet laid neatly
underneath
them.
What they did particularly notice was the temperature, the feel of the air, the Aska Agran ambiance. It was not as cold as they feared from what they had been told of the increasing cold the further Coreward one travelled. The legends circulating among the surface cities represented the other extreme, i.e. that the Core was red hot. Captain Nemo had indeed explained to them when they first signed up for the holiday that an effective blend of two legends prevailed. One legend that it was molten
Angevin
. The other that it was frozen
Angevin
. With the benefit of mixed myths, therefore, one could survive anything. He had laughed leaving the dowagers to fathom out what he had just explained. But it all seemed to make sense now. The Core itself could be seen spreading with a creamy consistency (outward from their fast diminishing blind spots) across half the sky, here more moon-like than sun-like, the quirk of refraction making it more yellow than white, followed by a blend of both colours when proto-incidence kicked in later during the natural diurnal process of Agra Askan sky systems.
Edith and Clare were the only Drill travellers who enjoyed an official welcoming party. A young couple, hand in hand—an emblem or living symbol of the love and affection that depicted the Agran Askan optimum ideal of existence, an ideal celebrating the beneficial hindsight effect of the curatively legendary times when the original young lovers in this city had had to endure one hellishly onerous quest as well as the religious shriving of their private parts in the process. Edith and Clare had arrived—partly in ignorance but partly knowing they would be using their trained counselling skills to further this ideal, and Mike (who had often acted as a radio phone-in agony uncle on the surface) would be supplementing their skills with his own special skills wrung from a mixture of hawling experience mingled with a semi-conscious self-condemnation for his own wicked thoughts and desires. The mixing of myths was the optimum, good and evil alike, used in the war against evil. The dowagers wondered if Mike’s stony path to his own
Road to Damascus
(or Road to Agra Aska!) had by now reached culmination. They could not yet see any sign of him or his party—expecting them, as they did, to appear duly shriven by the underfoot dangers of Inner Earth’s deepest pot-holing together with the hair-carpets on their backs. But they remained confident that they would soon arrive and bolster the dowagers’ own efforts to gather themselves to the tasks in hand. Any
Angevin
smuggling could be left to the others. That was merely a by-product of the mock-holiday, one the dowagers could safely ignore—although they wouldn’t decline any of the profits once they returned to the surface!
The young Agra Askan lovers (now called Hataz and Tho) led them by the hands towards the Core, lit from behind by a now wildly yellow innersky exploding into a balloon shape not dissimilar to the Augusthog icon or flying-pig kite glimpsed before in their travels. Followed by the quickly fading ghost of the Megazanthus itself with wings stretched between two infinitely distant horizons. The ladies would need their own brainwrights, to be sure, as they continued to fathom the real reasons for this their increasingly complex presence in an increasingly complex Agra Aska—all lies and dreams forgotten... at least forever.