A Shadow All of Light Read online

  “His shadow on the tree trunk—what did you observe?”

  “That without the lamplight it does not appear and when you loose the light upon him his shadow darkens the wood. “’Tis but a child’s game.”

  “How long does his shadow stay on the wood?”

  “Briefly, of course.”

  “What else did you see of the surroundings?”

  “Little. The light went away too quickly.”

  “This then is our exercise,” I explained. “In that brief space of time while the lamplight is loosed we must each learn to see and locate the objects about us accurately and remember where they are. And we must not allow our shadows to lie on any surface for more than the swiftest of moments.”

  “Why so?” asked Torronio.

  “If our shadows be not visible, they cannot be taken from us. Yet in the dark we cannot find the objects of our desire. So we must learn to place them in our minds as if by the flash of a lightning bolt and then go to them in the ensuing blackness. If we are deft at this sleight o’ hand, we shall take our prizes.”

  They gazed at one another for some moments and then laughed softly.

  “We are fishers,” said Sneakdirk. “We work our boats and nets at sea when no light from landward shows. We float silent in the darkest night.”

  “That is one reason I have enlisted you,” I replied. “But fishermen labor in moonlight and starlight. We enter the Vale in the dark of the moon. Have you seen your shadow cast by starlight?”

  “Faintish to discern.”

  “Too faint, too flimsy, we shall hope, to be snatched away from us. We shall toil when the moon is absent in a place where little starlight enters. If we work quickly, our shadows shall be secure.”

  “Shadows are often stolen from men and women,” Torronio said. “I have heard that in Tardocco town there dwelleth a master thief named Astolfo whose trade in shadow-filching is profitable as well as venerable. Yet I never heard that they who lose their shadows to him perish afterward.”

  “Those shadows still exist in our world,” I said. “They only go to serve the purposes of others. But shadows forfeited in the Dark Vale are destroyed utterly—so all the sages agree. It has been said that they are devoured. Such a destruction must bring the end of life.”

  “This is but a tale for the idle chimney nook,” he said.

  “We shall take precautions,” I stated firmly, and with that we set at it again, opening the lanthorn blinds quickly and clapping them shut. We advanced so well in this practice that in the time required for the least gray glimmer of a shadow to appear on the tree trunk, we had thrust into memory much detail of the surroundings.

  When this employment began to wear the aspect of sport, I called a halt and we made ready for sleep.

  “By tomorrow midday we shall reach the limits of the Vale,” I told them. “There we will stop and observe. In the dark we shall enter.”

  “Well,” said Torronio. The others said nothing. Solemnity had crept upon them.

  * * *

  “Stalwart, where are you?”

  It was Crossgrain inquiring, but his voice lacked its customary querulous tone. There was no reason to whisper as Sneakdirk did, since we were going not among men or animals but only plants. The Dark Vale, it was said, was void of animal life. Only plants throve there, as in that happy age of the world before humanity arrived to sully creation.

  “Here I am,” I said.

  “I cannot see you. I can see nothing.”

  I grasped his shoulder from behind and, startled, he made a tremulous half leap.

  “Gods!”

  I had wrapped myself in a thin black cloak, muffling the green-forest colors of hose and doublet and eclipsing the glitter of buttons and silver buckles. My colleagues were outfitted less prudently and I could just make out their forms, dark against the dark.

  We had made our way in the gloaming down the disused trail through the hill cleft and had paused till full dark before descending into the Vale itself. I had spent the daylight on the hilltop, scanning the area with my glass, trying to distinguish the more valuable plants and locating them in memory. This was a vague undertaking. The terrain would be much different at the lower levels than it appeared from a height and the darkness made of this landscape a different world.

  Commercing with shadows, as I had done now for a half dozen seasons, I had experienced darknesses of every shade, texture, and smell, but this night in the Dark Vale brought forth a voluminous atmosphere aggressive in blackness. Here might be one of the world’s origins of darkness, I thought, and there was writing to the effect that great earth-mouths in the Vale opened to a world below and that visible darkness poured forth from these orifices like streams gathering themselves to rivers from woodland springs. It had been conjectured by Albertus and Lullius that the precious flora of the Vale had first developed in these local subterranean caverns and over their long generations had progressed gradually to the surface, braving the light and changing their pallid mushroom hues to dark greens nigh black in their flat dullness. It was proposed by some half dozen wise herbalists that these plants—ferns, flowers, creeping shrubs, and low bushes—fed upon shadows to replenish the obscure powers they had derived from their underworld beginnings.

  But books are never so accurate or so wise as their authors claim and here we had to trust mainly to our own wits.

  We had fared middling well so far. Squint had proved the aptest among us for facility in opening and closing the lanthorn blinds and Goldenrod was most capable at locating specimens in the black intervals. But the farther we penetrated into the depths of the Vale, the deeper the obscurity thickened, and this had caused Crossgrain to lose all sense of where I was and where the others might be.

  “All goes well,” I told him. “I am here at your side.”

  “I can see nothing. I feel this dreadful darkness pressing upon my eyes like dusty cloth.”

  “’Tis thick,” I admitted.

  “No! My eyes—”

  “Light us,” I told Squint. “Be quick.”

  He unblinded the lanthorn and shut it again and in that instant we saw that Crossgrain’s eyes had been taken from him. That was our swift impression. Then when the dark returned and the glimmer-echo of the light had faded from my eyeballs, I understood. A great black moth had lit upon Crossgrain’s forehead—the size of a saucer, this insect—and its velvet wings spread over his eyes.

  “It is but a bug,” I said. “Cast it from you. The gleam of your eye-water drew it to you.”

  “’Tis monstrous,” he said.

  “There will be more. We must take all care.”

  “There was to be no animal in here. So you said. What else might there be?”

  “Our business is with plants. Did you not glimpse a night-bloomer just now in reach of your right-hand side?”

  We heard him step away and heard the rustle of his hand amid foliage. “Yes,” he said. “I feel a huge blossom here. Moist and pulpy, like the tongue of a young heifer, though not wet.”

  “Feel below where its stem joins to the main stalk. Snip there and place the blossom in your pouch. Then follow the stalk to the ground and find whether you can lift it out or we must dig.”

  We heard him fumbling with the plant and breathing hoarsely as he stooped, though not from exertion. The black moth had quickened the breath of each of us.

  Then he swore. “The ground is covered with—”

  We waited. “What is it?”

  “Light!”

  Squint complied, and we saw that the ground about Crossgrain’s feet writhed as if with throbbing vines. A network of ebon vines undulated, shiny and repulsive. When he closed the lanthorn, we waited a space to try to comprehend what we had seen.

  Goldenrod spoke first. “Black serpents. They are all around us. I can feel them over my boots and crawling upward.”

  “We are undone,” said Crossgrain.

  “Courage,” I said. “If they were noxious, we should already be shr
ieking with pain. But there is nothing here for a poison serpent to strike. The plants consume the shadows of anything that moves.”

  “These serpents move most unpleasantly,” said Goldenrod.

  “But they cast no shadow, being so close to the ground.”

  “What if they be attracted to eye-gleams like the moth?”

  “Did you not note that they have no eyes? They are harmless to us. Let us set about our tasks.”

  “What is that smell?” asked Torronio. “It much clingeth.”

  We made sounds of disgust nigh unto sickness. A passerby in this deep night, if any such person could be in this place, would surmise that we had all fallen foul of spoilt oysters.

  “It smells as of an ancient offal pit, filled with excrement and diseased corpses.”

  “It is odorous as a hundred turnip-fed bum-blasts.”

  “A devil has shat here and been proud of his work.”

  Squint ascertained the source. “It is those cursed blind serpents. They exude an oil that smears upon the skins of things. They need not fangs to repulse their enemies. Their perfumery is more daunting than the sharpest bite.”

  “Take heart, lads. Let us cleave to our purpose. Keep in your mind’s eye the picture of gold coins stacked into a tower. Let it glow before you in this foul darkness like a beacon on a promontory.”

  They answered not, but Squint was busily opening and closing the shutter of the lanthorn and the Wreckers were gathering leaves, buds, roots, and blossoms as quickly as they could. They were not discriminate in their collecting, but I had no heart to admonish. I longed to depart this noisome hole as avidly as did they.

  * * *

  We were at this tedious work for the rest of the watch. The Wreckers tried to lighten their burden with common shipmate raillery, as when Goldenrod said to Crossgrain, “Had’st not thou once a wife who smelled as of this place?” and Crossgrain retorted, “If you say so, then thou know’st more than is well for thee.” But there was more determination than true humor in their chat and when the east began to lighten they were glad to hear me give order to depart.

  “Take care to tie up the bags and keep the vial lids tight,” I said. “We must not cast our shadows on our prizes.”

  They mumbled assent and we turned to go back up the slope, but I had miscalculated the hours and more light was spread through the sky than was healthy for our welfare. A saving grace was that clouds thinly veiled the east; we did not cast dark shadows with sharp edges but only ghostly emanations, the tinges of shadow that the pulpy leaves rubbed against and the questing tendrils of vines touched searchingly.

  Wrapped in my black cloak, I was less affected than the others, but when a great black leaf that looked something like a burdock swept against my tinge-shadow my forearms went gooseflesh and my neck hair prickled. I urged them along more quickly, and they did not hang back. They struggled upward as fast as they could.

  When we arrived at camp on the crest of the ridge the sun was almost ready to peer over the horizon, and I ordered them to cache all our goods in the holes we had dug to store them and to cover these over with canvas and brush.

  This done, we looked to one another. Squint must have caught the worst of it. His pupils were enlarged and unfocused, gray sweat bathed his neck and forehead, and his face and arms and hands had taken on a sickly, blue-gray pallor, as of a consumptive shut long away indoors.

  “Brandy,” I said. Goldenrod reached for the bottle in our chest of potables and Squint dosed himself with three liberal swallows. His eyes became calmer, but his complexion remained gray.

  “How goest thou?” I asked.

  He considered. “It felt like something was being pulled out of me,” he said. “Out of my chest, from between the ribs.”

  “Like a knife withdrawn?”

  “No … like a length of wool-stuff slipped through the fingers.”

  “Painful?”

  He shook his head and tottered and his mates settled him to the ground, where he put his head between his knees and coughed dryly.

  “Is anyone else affected?”

  “Here, cap’n,” Sneakdirk said. “Naught but only a twinge, like the passing of a dead woman’s hand over my front.” He wiped his forehead. “’Tis away from me now.… I will take brandy for it.”

  “Better conserve,” I said. “We know not but we may have need.”

  “Let us all take a sup now,” Goldenrod suggested. “I am certain it hath power to ward off evil aforehand.”

  I let them jolly along with such talk, then put it to them: “What think you? Shall we try the Dark Vale again tomorrow night? We have learned that it is indeed the danger it is fabled to be, though we know not what causes it to be so.”

  “But we have learned,” said Torronio, “that our precautions are good defenses, if we take pains to follow them aright. We were only tardy in taking leave, so that our palest shades betrayed us. If we approach in full dark and depart while the dark still holds, we shall be secure enough.”

  “But we would not return to the same place,” objected Crossgrain. “If we go back, we must thrust farther to gain a different variety of herbage.”

  When they looked at me, I nodded. “He says true. There will be more profit in a wide selection. But are we willing to face those slime-snakes and their dire stenches again? Maybe we can ablute ourselves with a substance to keep the ooze from us.”

  “But look!” said Sneakdirk. “The slime is drying.”

  So it was. Goldenrod had been most thoroughly covered with the ooze, and I asked him to stand forward against the sunrise now full on the horizon. As we watched, the black oils whitened like campfire coals embering, gathered to a gray dust, and fell from him like flour through a sifter. He shook himself like a bear that has forded a cold river, and all that substance dropped away.

  “I am game to return,” he said.

  * * *

  When I put it to them that we must capture some of those black serpents to bring out of the Vale, they were displeased. The hour was drawing toward twilight and it would soon be time to reenter.

  “Wherefore?” scolded Crossgrain. “I do not relish going again amongst these smelly slime-worms, but I will do so to obtain plants. Yet I see no profit in the serpents. No sound mind would purchase such ugliness.”

  “I have not become enamored of them,” I replied, “but I have had a thought. The slime that covered Goldenrod changed to white powder when the sunrays struck it. Upon examining, I found it to resemble that generative fine dust the ancients called pollis or pollen, necessary to the propagation of all flora excepting the ferns. I think that if we carry our Dark Vale plants away, they will not propagate without the aid of those black snakes.”

  “So you think,” retorted Crossgrain, “but you do not know.”

  “True … Can you conjecture another purpose for such animals?”

  “They exist,” said Sneakdirk, “in order to sour the innards of anyone who attempts to uproot those plants. Their guardian purpose is to sicken by putridity, in the fashion of vultures that protect themselves by vomiting.”

  “I will perform this task myself,” I said, “since none else hath heart for it. If the rest of you will gather the flora, I will collect the serpents. I may take as my reward a slightly larger portion of profit.”

  “And welcome to it,” said Goldenrod.

  * * *

  So we returned to the Vale, following the track as before but pushing a little farther into the valley, where the darkness seemed to grow thicker and more malodorous with every pace. Squint had acquired a swift skill in unblinding and reblinding his lanthorn and the others grew defter in plucking, snipping, and uprooting. I judged that we would have a broad variety of plant life to take away.

  My duty with the serpents went none so pleasingly. I grasped them up, dropped them in disgust, found others, and thrust them into a leathern bag. Though eyeless, they struck at my hands and legs as would any of their breed, but they had no fangs. It was something
like catching eels, except that people make dishes of eels. The man who would eat these serpents must be a starving omnivore, capable of ingesting iron, stone, and the burdens of privies.

  Yet again I had miscalculated the amount of time our expedition must consume, and my error cost us grievous. There being no birds in the Vale, there were no fore-dawn songs to warn of daybreak and, too, we had penetrated farther and would require more time to leave.

  The light came on sooner than we were prepared for, and on this return our shadows were more substantial than before. Torronio advised his Wreckers to keep close to one another, reasoning that in a group they would cast but one large shadow instead of five smaller ones and the plants would not be able to tear such a large one away.

  It proved a sound stratagem until Goldenrod gave in to his terror, broke from the pack, and struggled up the slope past me as I led them. There he stood plain against the light that slanted over the ridgetop. He had climbed some six paces before me, panting, stumbling, and sobbing. I saw that his shadow, though not solid, had sufficient body for a black, spiny bush to catch its edge with a thorny twig.

  There was an instant when his shadow seemed to stretch like a woolen stocking pulled from the leg. And then came a sudden chuck of sound, as of an arrow striking into an oat-straw archery target. The tall fellow uttered no more than a squeak; a mouse in the claws of a tabby would make a louder sound.

  His shadow I could not see as the bush enveloped it, but the effect on the plant was evident. The ebon thing shuddered from ground to top leaf. It wriggled within itself, enlarging its shape, and the pulpy leaves rubbed against one another with a motion like a butcher washing his hands after a slaughter.

  Goldenrod—or rather, his corpus, for he was no longer a living man nor even the same man now dead—pitched southwise off our track like a statue toppling. As life left him, I could feel the serpents in my bag suddenly roil and tumble together. The other plants around set up an inward commotion. All about us there was a change in everything, even in the soil. Everything shifted.

  Now the Vale gave birth to an eerie music, a moaning dirge mingled of the voices of scores of men, a chorus of those who had died here, their shadows absorbed into the bodies of plants as red wine is absorbed into a swatch of linen. What mouths produced this music we never discovered. I have conjectured that the sad chords emitted from animals we had not seen, but Torronio proposed that the blind serpents sang out when a shadow was taken by the Vale.