The Physiognomy

toward the mine instead. 'Perhaps you will die today,' he said as I stumbled through the entrance.

His words caused me to remember that I had planned to do just that, but I never seemed to get around to it. I realized as I pounded into the rock of my tunnel, sweating, heaving for air, that I would have to stay alive at least until I had finished reading Aria's manuscript. I worked with great vigor that day.

Whereas Flock's tunnel was filled with a make-believe garden, my mind was overgrowing with images of a real wilderness. As I worked, I began to wonder if Beaton had ever made it to paradise. This thought, no bigger than the grains of sulphur that flew about me following each blow of the pick, buried itself in my mind like a seed with the potential to blossom.

I was lying in bed, reading aloud to Silencio a passage from Aria's Fragments concerning a demon attack the miners had sustained in a tract of pines on a steep hillside. My monkey friend sat by my feet, wide-eyed, grasping his tail with one hand and covering his eyes with the other. A miner by the name of Miller was being disemboweled by three of the filthy creatures amid a torrent of rhetorical description. Blood was flying, duodenum was drooping, groans from the nether end of hell were being loosed into the wilderness when I was interrupted by a knocking at my half-open door.

The sound frightened me, and I thought, ' 'Could it be the morning already? I just began reading a few moments ago.'

Silencio jumped down off the bed, bounded twice, and then leaped up just as Corporal Matters of the night watch entered the room. The monkey landed deftly on the man's left shoulder and strung his tail around the corporal's collar like a necklace.

'Good evening, all,' said Matters, wearing a broad smile.

I had neither seen nor heard him since the night I had first arrived. Because of his absence, I had just assumed that he was really one and the same person as the corporal of the day watch. It was my theory that he had two wigs, one black and one white, and he would pretend, from reasons of insanity, to be two people. Now seeing him, though, smiling, reaching up to pet Silencio, I had to change my mind.

'Cley,' he said, 'it's good to see you. Sorry I wasn't by sooner to check up and see how you were getting on.'

I said nothing but tried to drop the pages on the floor next to the bed, fearing a rule that might require him to take them from me.

'Thought you might like to join me for a drink down on the back porch,' he said. At the sound of his voice, Silencio jumped down off his shoulder and scampered out the door.

I got out of bed, put my shirt and boots on, and followed him downstairs. As we were wending our way through the dark inn, I could hear the piano playing.

Later as we sat at the bar, sipping Rose Ear Sweet, he pushed his white hair behind his ear on the left side and said, 'My brother is quite a fellow, isn't he?'

I shook my head. 'With all due respect,' I said, 'he seems somewhat angry.'

The corporal laughed wearily. 'With all due respect,' he said and shook his head, 'he is the angriest person I have ever met.'

'The mines are brutal,' I said, feeling I could be honest with him.

'Quite,' he said. 'If it was up to me, I would not require you to go down there. I'd let you roam the island and live out your life here as you saw fit.' He paused for a moment as if weighing what he was about to say. 'I'm afraid you are going to die down there—you know that yourself already.'

I nodded, staring across the porch at Silencio as he worked the keys of his miniature piano.

'The realm is corrupt,' he said, 'rotten to the core. I'd rather be out here on this island then in that ill City. With all the death I've witnessed here, there is less suffering in the mine then there is close to Below.'

'Have you met the Master?' I asked.

'Met him? I fought alongside him on the fields of Harakun. You remember, no doubt, from your history lessons, the Peasant Revolt? Oh yes, the poor outside the walls tried to take the City. My brother and I both fought there. Knee-deep in slaughter we were.'

'I remember reading about it,' I said, though I remembered very little.

'Three thousand men in one day. Five hundred of ours and the rest theirs,' he said, then took a long drink. He wiped his mouth and continued. 'My brother's troops and my own outflanked a large party of peasants just south of the Latrobian village. They were all that was left of the revolt. We butchered most of them but took more than fifty prisoners. It was that maneuver that finished the war. We were to take the prisoners to the City the next day to be executed in Memorial Park, but that night, while my brother slept, I relieved the sentries and let every one of the poor beggars go.'

'And you're still alive?' I said.

'Below blamed both of us. My brother was furious. He wanted to kill me. We were to be tried and executed ourselves, but since we had fought so bravely, and the insurrection had no chance of rekindling, the Master spared us, giving us permanent positions here on Doralice.'

'How long have you been here?' I asked.

'A good forty years,' he said. 'And I haven't seen my brother since the day we arrived. Soon after disembarking on the dock, we came up with this arrangement. He would rule the day, and I, the night.'

'Not even a glimpse of him?' I asked.

'My only evidence of him is the suffering of the prisoners,' he said. 'If I were to meet him, we would probably fight to the death. I know it will happen sooner or later. I live with the thought of it always.'

We sat quietly for a long time. Silencio eventually stopped playing and came over to refill our glasses. That beautiful breeze was at work, and I wished I could sit there all night.

'Is this not a remarkable monkey?' asked the corporal, as Silencio pushed a drink toward him.

'Remarkable is not the word for him,' I said. 'He has already saved my life on more than one horrible day.'

'He came to us from the city,' said Matters, 'the result of one of the Master's intelligence transference experiments. Apparently they did not want to do away with him, but he was far too friendly to be of any use. We have become good friends over the years. My brother could not get him to have anything to do with policing the mine.'

'I will never look at animals the same again,' I said.

'Silencio has made friends with all the prisoners. He takes it very hard when one of them does not return from the mines at night. That is when he takes to drinking himself—Three Fingers with a shot of Pelic Bay is his poison. For a whole week he will be inconsolable,' said the corporal.

'A comforting thought,' I said.

He laughed. 'It is all rather absurd,' he said. 'But you'd better be off to sleep. Mine-is-the-mind will be here in a few hours.'

I put down my drink and stood. The corporal of the day watch shook hands with me, and I went back through the inn and up the stairs to my room. I was not drunk, but I felt calm and sleepy. Once in bed, I closed my eyes and let the images of the Beyond flood my thoughts. During the day, I hid the Fragments under my pillow so that Aria's scent would be with me all night.

When I picked up where I had left off, I discovered that there was with them now a foliate, a man of green, whom they called Moissac. It never said in the text how they had come upon him. He just appeared at the beginning of a long shard of the journey. He was friendly to the miners and offered to take them to an ancient abandoned city by the shores of an inland sea. Harad Beaton thought there might be evidence among the ruins suggesting a path to paradise.

Moissac spoke to them through touch. He placed his viney hand upon the side of a man's face and spoke fluently. In his thatched, flowering hedge of a face there were eyes like distant fires, but in the tangle of branches and roots it was hard to see their exact origin. When he moved through the trees and underbrush he was almost invisible.

At this point, there were only four miners left beside Beaton. Even out beneath the open sky, they felt as if they had been trapped by a cave-in. In the weeks preceding, they had seen their companions devoured by demons, succumb to suicide, fall from some precipice, but they had not lost the idea that they were on a divine mission. They moved like ants through the immensity of the Beyond.

Before they entered the empty City, the foliate told them it was called 'Palishize.' Other than this he could tell them nothing about it. It looked from a distance like a giant sand castle melting in the surf. Situated behind an outer wall were high mounds punctuated by crude openings one could not exactly classify as doorways or windows. It appeared to be more the home of some prodigious beetles than any human civilization.

The miners drew their rifles and clutched their picks firmly as they walked between the sand and seashell pillars of the main entrance. Moissac led the way, motioning for them to move quietly through the already silent City. The streets were cobbled with millions of clam shells between which weeds had run wild.

The buildings of Palishize were tunneled dirt mounds hiding an elaborate network of passages and small empty rooms. The miners lit the candles on their helmets as they explored the weird structures. They soon found that the buildings were connected by long, underground hallways.

'There is nothing here,' Beaton told the others after a full day of traversing the maze of tunnels. 'We had better move on.'

All were in agreement, especially Moissac, who told them he felt a sense of doom pervading the stale air of the place. They bedded down on the street for the night, thankful that they did not have to stay in one of the mounds. The dark emptiness of them reminded Beaton of a grave.

Just before dawn, the foliate awoke them. He pointed to the sky where strange red lights slowly moved like fish in a pool. The miners knelt and prayed, believing now what they had already suspected—that they were dead and working toward salvation in some world between heaven and hell. The lights swam in their eyes and dazed them, so that when morning came, they did not want to leave Palishize. Moissac implored them, telling them through touch that something was wrong.

Beaton told him everything was fine and that they would stay one more night to see the lights. All day they moved through the tunnels again, searching for some sign of humanity. Near evening, Mayor Bataldo's uncle, Joseph, found something in one of the passageways. It was a small gold coin with an imprint of a coiled serpent on one side and a flower on the other. After showing the others, he put it in his pocket and joined them for some salted caribou meat and turnip root.

My head nodded more and more with fatigue as I continued with Aria's account until I must have fallen asleep reading, because it was precisely here that the words of the text suddenly swept up off the page, turning into the snaking arm of a sea creature, and pulled me down beneath the surface of paper and ink. There was a minute of gasping for air, and then I, Cley, stood next to the huddled miners asleep on the street of Palishize. Even Moissac, who was supposed to be keeping guard, was firmly rooted in dreams. I leaned over and studied the face of Beaton as a young man.

'Cley,' said a voice a few feet down the street. At the curve where the cobbled shells disappeared around the base of a building, there was a woman. She wore a veil over her entire face.

'Aria?' I whispered.

She waved to me to come to her. I moved cautiously away from the miners. As I approached her, she reached out to me, and I instinctively took her in my arms. I kissed her through the veil and we fell to lean against the slope of the mound. She was breathing heavily as my hand ran up under her skirts, along her thigh, toward paradise.