The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [105]
Vali sat on the weathered steps of the tomb, her arm around Mona. Gwynn had walked a short distance away to smoke. She couldn't see Siegfried. It was possible to imagine that she and Mona were alone in the landscape of marble and weeds.
She fell gradually into a sense of timelessness, of being as still and untroubled as the tombs themselves, as if Time were a woman and she a babe on Time's back, and Time had put her down. She felt the mysterious life, the sense of familiarity with the stars.
Yet does it need us, any more than the seas of the world need ships? Vali wondered this, and answered herself, It never needed us or desired us until it made us, and then we, who are its organ of mind, desired it, and so love was formed and flung.
Mona stirred, bringing Vali back from her reverie. The sick woman was whispering something. Feeling strangely calm and adrift still ― had the stars moved? ― Vali bent her head down to listen. Turning around, she called out to Gwynn. He looked up from where he sat cross-legged on a sarcophagus on the ground.
"Mona wants to go down to the edge. I'm taking her. She wants you to come too."
Gwynn ground his cigarette out on the pitted stone, adding the butt to the several already there. He swung down and looked across the ragged land towards the cliff. "Fine with me," he said.
A wind always blustered across the barren margin between the tombs and the drop. That night it was a cold current that seemed to blow straight down off the stars themselves. But the no man's land was, in its own way, a beautiful place. The lonely stunted trees possessed a various, sinewy and surprising kind of grace in their wind-sculpted asymmetries and irregularities. Wildflowers grew among the untidy grasses, and these had the charm of things never cared for or interfered with by anyone. Birds came and went here too: wild geese, finches, nightjars, shrikes who had found ideal nests in the thornbushes onto which they affixed the rodents and smaller birds that were their prey.
Vali with Mona on her arm, and the separate figure of Gwynn, made their way across the delicate and brute ground, their hair and coats whipping in the wind. Siegfried followed several paces behind them, writing again in his notebook. More than once he tripped over rocks and pieces of fallen masonry he had failed to see, but he hardly noticed his barked shins and stubbed toes. His hands were trembling with excitement. He wasn't going to give this article to Verbal Nerve. Better publications would want it. He basked for a moment in the vision of a career reporting on the lives of the rich and dangerous, as one who had been admitted into their world. Realising he was running out of paper, he wrote as minutely as he could.
When they were about fifty yards from the edge, Mona insisted that she could walk unaided.
Crossing wasteland, Siegfried jotted. Miss Skye a fragile pilgrim or refugee, Miss Jardine gallant. At the edge ― long way down.
It was indeed a long way. The escarpment dropped over a kilometre -but it might have been a hundred, for there was nothing to give a sense of scale ― down to a dead ocean of sand that was dark bluish indigo in the moonlight, on which lay the faintly silver, irregular maculae of salt deposits. Here and there the sand surrounded weathered buttes and chimneys of rock. On the horizon the curve of the planet was clearly visible, an edge beyond the one on which they stood.
Siegfried stood next to Gwynn, close enough that he could smell the man's floral aftershave. He drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He was beginning to feel part of the team now, a companion to heroes. He narrowed his eyes and sucked in his cheeks a little, trying to copy Gwynn's pensive scowl.
"They say there are more bones under those sands than in all of the necropolis," Mona related