The Book of Elsewhere

You have been walking for a long time. You have been walking for no time at all. Something and its opposite can both be true. When you told Kaisheen that you had a journey to make she was sorrowful and angry and she asked you not to go. Her child was only just born and his eyes and mouth and the set of his expressions were still imprecise as clay and Kaisheen said she did not know which of her husbands was the sperm giver, but the baby breathed and you knew it could not be you. She said it might be (you did not explain why she was wrong) and that would bring responsibilities, and she said it would be wrong to deprive him of a parent. She said she did not want to be without you. More than once you have tried cruelty and will surely do so again, but for more than four hundred seasons you’ve been experimenting with dispassion, and you calmly walked away from her pain.

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If that boy still lives he is an old man, and perhaps his stories are of a boy one of whose fathers left him. If he lives, almost the whole of his life but for those first few days you have been on this journey.

Once you spent three lifetimes sitting without moving on a stone chair halfway up a mountain, to see what would happen. Nothing happened.

This time you came south without urgency through vivid varied landscapes, avoiding small settlements, tracking through dense wetlands as humid as if the world itself were sweating, past frozen rivers, readying themselves to flow one day, to disappear, leaving stone behind.

Years ago you reached the shoreline and you knew that the place called Suhal was across the shallow sea. You sought and found the people of the estuary. They have strong jawlines, and they consider for a long time before they speak. They considered for a long time before they agreed to take you on their canoes, into the archipelago.

They declined your offers to row, according to norms of hospitality, so instead you were like a carved watcher at the front of a long vessel. Once, the second youngest of the crew fell overboard in a storm and you followed him in and brought him back up through the dark. Once, when the waves stilled against nature, the back of a great green beast surfaced an oar’s length away and up reared a head both serpentine and crustaceous, mandibles tapping in hunger, and while the crew screamed and begged their dead for help and called the animal the name of whatever evil ocean deity they considered it, you stood on the yawing deck screaming too, but with relief, because it had been days since you had unclenched, released the cold fire that always grew within you, as you knew you must, and you let it out, and you saw through a haze of blue-white-blue that spread across your eyes, and you jumped from the canoe with your obsidian out and gouged the startled leviathan and you (must have) fought it and its teeth (must have) pierced you to give you that diminishing wound in your flank and the two of you (must have) turned the churning waves red and you (must have) killed it and cut out its tongue and let its body sink to be eaten by the tiniest creatures and you came back to the boat your ragefugue ebbing as you crawled slippery aboard again and the crew called you godkiller and thanked you and shunned you too and what you felt for them was compassion and you pretended that the drug they added to your meat at the next island was efficacious and you pretended not to wake, listened to them rouse themselves and gather their tools and charms and creep soundlessly, as they imagined, back to their boat, and you did not move while you heard their oars over the light waves.

Now you sit up, alone, in the bright and ruthless sun, when they are long out of sight. They have left you food and gourds of water.

Companionless, boatless, you walk again.

You slip down scree and you pack your clothes with as many stones as they will take.

You walk laden. Out of the low remnants of the trees, out from under the curiosity of bright birds, into the shallows, your feet cut by clamshells and wrapped as if in response by the gentle warmth of weeds. Into the surf. To the depth of your waist, your chest, your shoulders. Your neck. Your beard, your clamped-shut lips.

You take a long deep breath before the next step down onto this coral road between islands. The warm brine closes over your head and you stare through it into the sun and the sun stares at you and you tell yourself the stories of your life as down you go.

No you are not the oldest thing that has ever lived, of that you are confident. On some far-off continent there must be proliferating aspen trees all sharing one complex of roots, born perhaps the day before you were. There must be miles-long seagrass meadows all arisen from one ur-clot, ancient many lifetimes before you opened your eyes. But if there are in the world more older living things than you that you could count on both hands, you would be astounded. And it is close to a thousand years since you were last surprised.

Your mother said to you, You are a gift. You were a gift. She said, You have a gift.

She told you these things when you were young, though grown too quickly into a man’s body and face. When she told you, you loved her, as you love her still, if you can love the dead, but then you loved her with a wordless and unquestioning fervor and without the subtleties of age or the suspicions that the world instills and she was, you know now, able to mask her own concerns and unhappinesses with some facility and you perfectly recall her saying I love you back. You can hear again the cadence of her pride. It was only several lifetimes after she died that, bringing to mind her face, you understood the emotion you recollected in her. That she was proud, but she was sorrowful for you, too. She admired you and she worried over how you were being admired, for what it would do to you. If she believed you gifted by gods, a gift to her and to her people, had she no less also thought you cursed? Her love for you: what did it do?

You have been descending long enough on this incline hauling your slate ballast that the churning plane where sea meets sky is as far above you as an oak tree’s canopy is above a woman on a forest path. You watch the dappling of the sunlight with the sting and haze of submarine vision. First, she said, there was Nothing. All at rest. Then came Something,

to shake the Nothing out of its peace. Out of Something came Things in proliferation, noise and edges and motion, darkness and light and gloaming, rocks and stars and water and fire and cold. Out of them came muck and slime. Out of that came darting specks. Out of them after a while came trees and birds and us.

Here, now, they come, the press and pain in your chest, the surge of your blood, the drumbeats of your heart.

You spent seven years once with a steppes culture long since fallen. You submerged yourself in their sacred pools. For longer and longer every day. Such techniques stay with you, as do all your memories. You can hold your breath for minutes yet. It will not be pleasant, but you can.

You clench the muscles of your belly and put out a hand to lean against the up-dangling slippery trunk of a great kelp and the matter of your path eddies and billows, here it is, and is this an eel to ask what you are? Are these moving bruises in your eyes observant fish come to question? You nod at the visions politely, descend into darker, more pressing water.

We were nomads, your mother said to you. We found a valley. We settled there. We were not warriors. Four times every year horsemen came, an aggregate band, our neighbors, a temporary coalition of predation, with their weapons out, to take our food, our families, for slaves and spouses and games.

Passing under a coral arch, in your mind, kindly enough, you whisper, Mother, do you know how many stories start like that?

A stonefish watches you tell her memory that in the epochs that followed her death, people forgot how to ride horses, and the horses went wild again, and then people learned again, and then forgot again.

We were plucked like fruit and we bled, your mother said to you, and who needs a weapon more than those who are not born to war? She said, We needed a tool. So I asked the gods.

What happened? you asked her. Her little man, sat by her (too big for her lap already), eyes open wide. How did you ask them?

I made a drink, she said, to make me dream. Some plants are pathways, you know that, little Unute, like some flesh is a pathway.

Unute is your name, she said. Unute was what the drink said through me that night.

What did you do? you asked.

Aren’t I telling you? she said. Only listen, Unute. The brew opened the doors of the storm and I went to a blue place, to where the storm lives, or the storm came through or we met on the threshold, and I fucked the lightning, and the next day my tummy was big, and we called you the Impatient Boy. Two moons later out you came.

So my father is not my father? you said.

Hush, silly, she said. Your father is your father, he’s your dayfather, and the blue lightning is your nightfather. Don’t interrupt a story, Unute, or the flowers won’t grow. Fire didn’t frighten you and you didn’t shout with pain when you played with burning sticks. Three moons after the fire you killed a wolf that came for scraps, you killed it with your teeth and your little hands. A season after that you played with young men fighting with the axeclubs we had copied from the raiders and I still don’t know if yours was a game or a true conflict, only that the war in you saw the war in them as it had seen the snarl in the wolf, and out your own war came.

You said you hadn’t meant to and your father gave the dead boy’s parents rights of chanting for the bloodsorry and they hated you thereafter for their son, but they said you were the weapon, and we called their dead boy the whetstone that had sharpened you.

The water through which you walk is not lightless. You know you’d have to go much farther for that, you know that the spears of the sun extend deep into the sea, but it is cold and it is dim where you are and the animals that watch you have the furtiveness of shadow dwellers. And still the way goes down and enough minutes have passed that your head hurts and the water presses in.

Unute, keep going.

And the best spearman in the band taught you, your mother said to you. And your wounds healed months’ worth of healing in days, little weapon. And when your eyes began to shine the color of your father’s eyes, glow as blue as your nightfather lightning, we put you in the pit with great animals we had trapped. They thought we gave you to them, did not know that we were giving them to you. You danced your war and took apart the bears and Smilodons and the monsters of the foothills, and if in those dream spasms, in the warpings that overcame you so you’d cry out and become a beast, if occasionally you broke apart your teachers or pulled the limbs from your playmates so they bled out in shock or if you caved in the chests of our people, well, everyone knew not to get too close to Unute the weapon in his transports. Everyone knew to run and hide when your eyes shone with the shocklight. You were not a bad boy but a dangerous thing and you were always sorry and they were careless.

She said, And then the raiders came back.

You trudge along a gorge of vaulting coral overhangs and each moment your chest burns of not-breathing. Your mother always sang this part of the story and you sing it now into the water, opening your mouth for the watching morays. She sang, you sing:

Listen!
These horsemen
ochre warnings on their faces
laughed at warlessness offered
rode to where the mountains watched
to where the nightfather lightning spilled seed
to the weaponboy.

Unute of the eyes!
clubaxe-edge, child, spearpoint, in conclave.

In he went dancing
through the horses
through their riders.

This is his fugue.
War-rage!                         Hamask!
Spasm of the warp!
Frenzy!                               Fury!

Unute took a bloodroad
Unute walked the bones
He was filled with arrows and he did not cease
He was the cleaving edge

He was the play of terror
He was the ender of things.

We loved you, your mother said. After you were done with them we swaddled you. You were still a baby. We wrapped you and we cleaned the dead from you and said to you thank you and told you that we loved you.

Every step is pain. When you strode into the surf you hoped the decline would be met and matched by an incline beyond, that you would ascend again after a time of walking, your head and heart and lungs in torments, that was your wager, that there was a crag in the reef that came close enough to the surface that your head would come up and out into the air before your lungs failed, that by a sequence of such up-down travels you would make your way, and if the war energies came up in you on this walk, the inverted hunger, the necessity of destruction in the chill shine of your eyes, that you would slake them on sharks and coral towers, and carry on again beyond the eddying blood in your trembling recovery up and down toward the southern continents. That that would be the way of it.

You long ago identified in yourself, no matter what evidence you amass that the thought is folly, a sense of toldness. That certain things must be, to make the shape of life a story. You have seen such a hankering in most of the people you’ve known. It is because you share that dangerous inclination that you hesitate to say you are not human.

It is wrong many more times than it is right.

This way goes only deeper, into the darkest part of the sea. And you are slowing, and your fingers are too numb to remove the stones from your clothes.

The story in you accelerates. Not in your mother’s voice, now. One you tell yourself, from memories and investigations, from hints and conclusions.

Here you are, in a widening place, where—Look!—the blue darkens and there is nothing beyond a coral wall, you are at a cliff edge and there is nothing but the blackest water beyond. You stumble. And hazy as your mind grows the story you tell yourself goes faster and faster because you are not at the end of it yet and because you do not have long left. Quickly then.

There were always more tribes to fear, to be stopped, which had to be stopped before they started, they said, your band and your dayfather said, and your mother too until she stopped saying it. They bade you raise your war-rage against fisherfolk and mountain dwellers and edifices in the snow, whose spires have long been pounded into dust, but which were when you crested the path between peaks the greatest city that ever was.

You went in

cut the king apart cut the guards apart walked the boneroad left the bloody hall descended the great stairs cut through every person in the city sat atop a pyramid of the dead. You saw

lightning come down in the distance, red this time, and your father saw and cursed your mother and you saw him in the valley and he took something from her and threw something into the pit where once you’d torn bears apart and he shouted at your mother when she said she was fearful for you and wanted your pain to end, you didn’t know what she meant because you did not know that what you felt was not just what it was to be alive. You would ask her more you decided and you followed your dayfather but in a gorge ten thousand arrows met you and you hamasked, shifted into the blue-glowing-glaring-eyed version of yourself and performed your urgent bloody changes on the attackers and on those among your own band who did not heed the strictures about keeping distance and you heard your father shout and you knew it was a trap and a distraction and you came back to yourself enough to follow him, to outrun the last of the horses back to your own settlement and you

found your father crouched over your mother, she was dead, at invaders’ hands, and you felt like a desert and you told him this was his desert and you walked away and they came and killed him too and you walked on to where at a meeting place of stone an army of all the tribes through which you’d walked your road waited.

You did not lift your hands against them, when they came for you and raised their weapons.

At the edge of the undersea, here you are, crawling like a thirsty person in a desert, toward dark into which you stare as if it is an eye, and this is the last of it, you cannot stand, the stones keep you down, and the darkness rises before you from the canyons at the bottom of the world, and comes in from your edges, and descends more powerfully now than the light of the sun, pouring down from the dark of space into the sea to enshroud you, and the only word for this is agony, and you lie down you don’t know if supine or prone but sightless and this is the last of it.

You remember your enemies’ blades coming down, thousands of years ago. You cannot stop yourself inhaling the terrible water of the sea.

The pain in your lungs does not cease. Drowning was always the worst way to die.

You die.

and then comes pushing

a push and bursting free

of a shell, amid thick and clouded sediment of meat and blood, and here you are, thinking again, naked and raw, salt stinging your new flesh and washing you clean, and here you are denied that first painful and lovely breath with which you have greeted your hatchings in the air, and you make out the cavern of the ovum out of which you have come, that has grown from the weird fertility of your drowned body, clogged there, wedged on the undersea clifftop, just as you came out of your first egg in that sunbaked stone place where you were first pulled and cut apart, and out of every one of the eggs since, when you have chosen or been forced to the limits of even your recalcitrant body, born anew naked as on your first birth, so you have no stones nor any pockets for them now, and even without air within you you are buoyant and you let yourself rise to know which way is up. That is the direction in which you kick.

And you breach the surface, and at last you take that first breath.

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From The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville. Copyright © 2024 by 74850, Inc. Used by permission of Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher