Free The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman Page A

bellowed, “Boy!” in a suddenly coarse voice. He sat back down, apparently pleased.
    “I’ll tell you what, Doctor. Talk to a man called Mr. Bond. He’s taking a party out soon. A trading caravan. They’re not headed to Gloriana, but they’ll get you close. Maybe he can use a doctor. Who knows? The world is full of curses but also full of blessings, if you just keep on smiling.”

    She took lunch at the hotel, in a dark dining room under the mounted heads of antlered beasts. There were stags in the forests of Koenigswald, but their counterparts here seemed more profoundly, more complexly, more savagely antlered than in the civilized world—antlered beyond utility, she thought.
    She tried to explain their situation to Maggfrid; he was confused. Twice, he stood suddenly and proposed simply to walk west, and protect her from whatever got in their way.
    He was full of energy these days, and restless. She wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or bad. On the walk down from Fort Sloten, she’d tried to explain to him how to walk with a stick and at first he hadn’t understood the principle of the thing, and had used the stick to strike the ground with each step as if trying to beat the mountain flat.
    To calm him, she played a very simple card game with him. Then she went to her room to lie down and read. She was entirely too tired to read any of the scientific journals she’d brought with her, so instead she opened, for the first time, The Child’s History of the West.

    The Child’s History was apparently the work of one General Orlan Enver, of the Red Valley Republic—the severe-looking uniformed gentleman who glared from the frontispiece. It was written in tones of stiff enthusiasm. It alternated between accounts of battles, which Liv found dull, and advice regarding exercise and cleanliness, which she found duller. It struck Liv as a well-meaning but unsubtle piece of propaganda—when she skipped impatiently to the final chapter, she learned that the Red Valley Republic had established peace and liberty and democracy, forever and ever, that the last holdouts of irrationalism and oppression and vice would soon learn from the example of young men and women of virtue and decency, that the turbulent history of the half-made world was at an end, and that the West was now made whole and ready to take its place among civilized nations.
    But of course, she reminded herself, with hindsight everything seemed absurd; no doubt her own publications would look comical to later generations.
    She tried to read chapter 1, “The First Colony at Founding,” but quickly fell asleep.

    She woke and washed her face with water from the jug. There was no mirror, so she looked blearily in the window for her reflection; and she screamed. The jug fell and shattered and cut her bare foot but she hardly noticed, because the white face suddenly at the narrow window pressed up against the glass and—
    For a moment the face had reminded her of that madman’s face from her most terrible memories, that face as it came running through the willows, and she had been transported back to childhood. But that face had been round and sweating and spectacled, and this was angular and jagged; and the eyes were ruby red; and though the killer’s face had been pale, it was nothing next to the inhuman chalk whiteness of the face at the window; and what hung around that face was not the green branches of the willows, but a filthy black mane of hair.
    It was one of the men of the hills, she realized, one of the aboriginal people of the West, who had lived in the land when it was still formless and unmade.
    The expression on the face was solemn, still.
    She calmed her breathing. Her foot started to sting.
    She was in her underclothes—but then the figure at the window was apparently naked, under his mane, and it seemed silly to stand on ceremony. She said, “Good afternoon.”
    He reached out a hand. The arm—beneath that black mane—was long,