by Lavie Tidhar
When I was five or six years old, my best friend was Mowgai Khan, who was Aislinn Khan’s youngest. He was a spidery little thing, “full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. His eyes shone like blackberries in late summer. When he was very small, the Khans undertook the long, hard journey to Tyr, along the blasted planes, and in that settlement Mowgai was equipped with a composite endoskeleton, which allowed him to walk, in however curious a fashion. On the long summer days, which seemed never to end, Mowgai and I would roam freely over the Land, collecting wild berries by the stream or picking pine nuts from the fallen cones in the forest, and we would debate for hours the merits or otherwise of Elder Simeon’s intricate clockwork automatons, and we would try to catch fish in the stream, but we never did catch anything.
It was a long, hot summer: the skies were a clear and uninterrupted lavender blue, with only smudges of white cloud on the horizon like streaks of paint, and when the big yellow sun hung high in the sky we would seek shelter deep in the forest, where the breeze stirred the pine needles sluggishly and where we could sit with our backs to the trunks of old mottled pines, between the roots, eating whatever lunch we had scavenged at home in the morning on our way. Eating dark bread and hard cheese and winter kimchee, we felt we knew all the whole world, and had all the time in it, too: it is a feeling that fades and can never return once lost, and all the more precious for that. For dessert we ate slices of watermelon picked only an hour or so earlier from the ground. The warm juice ran down our chins and onto our hands and we spat out the small black pips on the ground, where they stared up at us like hard eyes.
And we would story.
Mowgai was fascinated by machines. I, less so. Perhaps it was that he was part machine himself, and thus felt an affinity to the old world that I did not then share. My mother, too, was like that, going off for days and months on her journeys to the fallow places, to scavenge and salvage. But for her I think it was a practical matter, as it is for salvagers. She felt no nostalgia for the past, and often regarded the ancients’ fallen monuments as monstrous follies, vast junkyards of which precious little was of any use. It was my father who was the more romantic of the two, who told me stories of the past, who sometimes dreamed, I think, of other, different times. Salvagers are often hard and durable, like the materials they repurpose and reuse. Mowgai’s dream was to become a salvager like my mother, to follow the caravans to the sunken cities in the sea or to the blasted plains. His journey to Tyr had changed him in some profound fashion, and he would talk for hours of what he saw there, and on the way.
Usually after our lunch we would head on out of the trees, toward the misshapen hills that lay to the northwest of us. These hills were shaped in an odd way, with steep rises and falls and angular lines, and Elder Simeon made his home at their base.
When he saw us approach that day he came out of his house and wiped his hands on his leather apron and smiled out of his tanned and lined face. They said he had clockwork for a heart, and he and Mowgai often spoke of mechanical beings and schematics in which I had little interest. His pets, too, came out, tiny clockwork automata of geese and ducks, a tawny peacock, a stealthy prowling cat, a caterpillar and a turtle.
“Come, come!” he said. “Little Mai and Mowgai!” And he led us to his courtyard and set to brewing tea. Elder Simeon was very old, and had traveled widely as a young man all about the Land, for a restless spirit had taken hold of him then. But now he valued solitude, and stillness, and he seldom came out of his home, and but for us, received few visitors.
He served us tea, with little slices of lemon from the tree in his yard, and then we sat down together to story, which is what we do in the Land.
“You have gone to Tyr,” he said to Mowgai, and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Have you ever seen, on your way through the blasted plains, a town, standing peacefully in the middle of nowhere?”
Mowgai stirred, surprised, and said that no, he hadn’t, and he did not think anything still lived in the blasted plains.
“Life finds a way,” Elder Simeon said. “There is life there of all sorts, snakes and scorpions and lizards, sage and marigolds and cacti. But the town . . . well, they say there is a town, Mowgai, little Mai. I had heard of it in Tyr, where they say it sits there still, out on the plains, as perfect and as orderly as it had always been. No one goes near it, and no one comes out. . . .”
It is just an old men’s tale, I think, and you know how they love to embellish and gossip.
But this is the story. It is told in a curious sort of way. It is told in the plural, by a mysterious “we,” but who these “we” are, or were, no one now remembers. Perhaps “they” are still in the town, but though many claim to have seen it, its location always seems to change like a mirage in the telling.
“Once,” began Elder Simeon, “there was a little boy . . .”
*
Once there was a little boy who lived in a house with two kindly parents and a cheerful little dog, and they all loved him very much. The dog’s name was Rex, and all dogs in their town, which was a very lovely and orderly town indeed, were called that. Mother was tall and graceful and never slept at all, and Father was strong and patient and sang very beautifully. Their house too was very lovely and very clean. The boy’s name was Oli, which was carefully chosen by algorithm from a vast dictionary of old baby names.
The town was called the Town. It was a carefully built town of white picket fences and single-story houses and wide avenues and big open parks with many trees. The boy would go for a walk in the park with his parents every day, and he could always hear the humming of many insects and see beautiful butterflies flittering among the trees.
Really it was quite an idyllic childhood in many ways.
*
It had to be, of course.
It was very carefully designed.
*
You can probably see where this is going.
*
The shape of stories is difficult for us. We understand them as patterns, what you’d call a formula. We tell the story of Oli’s childhood in a way designed to be optimal, yet there are always deviations, margins of error that can creep in.
For instance, there was the matter of the purple caterpillar.