Chapter 25 The soldiers rode toward the cataclysmic advance of the sun and they rode on all contrary toward what beast of war or famine with which to set their relentless jaws. The wind in the desert like sand in a glass. This, too, shall pass. The horsemen rode up a range of granite where they triangulated from known points of landscape, and reckoned anew their course. The morning light was ablaze on that terrain where the earth drained up into the sky. They rode out of that vanished sea like phantoms and they persisted the plains. They looked at the land like spectators as they passed. No one traveled this way. Here beyond all men’s judgments and covenants a world without measure or bound, the distant terrain as dark as the vaults of hell. The sun, too, shall die. A pillar of stone stood like a prophet in the earth’s long chronicle, a shapeless prophesy for the age to come, or the last prophesy on earth called up from its ruin. They rode down from this country, and there was no sound, not wind or bird, and their tracks across the land reflected the arcane movements of the earth itself. The stars, too, shall die. Hartford rode on his horse out past the dry weeds twisting upwards. Evidence appears as chance, but Hartford, who had reigned his horse forward, said that proximity is no removed thing, but the center, as what could be recounted unseen? *** They rode on like demons routed from a pen. But it may be that there are sinners so notoriously evil that the fires have spewed them back up, to travel that ignited plague and retrieve those who had misadventure, and it might have been in a long ago that the devils were coughed up to transverse the fiery vomit and salvage souls that have been blown up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. For this world must touch the other, but it’s just a notion and no more. *** The horses of war shuffled through the caked ash, and the sun glared red through the smoke. They camped and saw to their arms, drawing the charges from their pieces and reloading them. They cut the throats of the remaining pack-animals and divided the meat. They rode by day and by dark and moved like migrants. Nothing grew on that endless plain where all things aspired to the condition of war and where men have died or would die, gathered by the last wagon shouting out to the deepening darkness. The sun rose in a cremation, and burned in a holocaust, and dust rose along the horizon of that cooking world and blew down the void like the smoke of distant fires, and the smoke blew in the conjectural winds but of living things there were none, as told in the vectors of such waste where hearts and endeavors have been swallowed. That night a polar moon rose, and the scalpers were like a thing surmised out of the blackness, and there was the dry thunder to the south and rumors of light, and the voltage in the darkness making their shadows reel behind them like some third aspect of their existence hammered down wayward and wild upon those badlands of dark. *** The light in the east expelled strokes of glow, sunlit or ruinous, then the light became a thicker dash of color like blood staining the plain where earth and sky met at the edge of conception. The sun ascended up from nothing like an eminent penis head until it rose above the rim of the earth, and pulsed and perched vengeful in their wake, and their wake died away in the dusk. Like the sooty artisan within the heart of man that hammers out the dawn thousands of times for a single dawn so long due in the dark that its right use may never be. *** They rode toward some final reckoning. Toward the place where God sits to contemplate the destruction of that which He is at great burden to create. That day they crouched about the fire where it hissed in a softly falling rain. The memory of man is not certainty and the past that has been is only slightly different from the past that never was. They rode out that next day. Tracks do not show in the ash. They said so themselves. They camped and woke in the cold dawn to a world more grieved almost instantly, like ancient paintings buried for centuries suddenly exposed to day. In the history of the world there may be more crime than there is punishment but they did not know that and if they did they would have taken no comfort from it. And would that darkness into which they would dissolve then taste of them? That night they lay sleeping upward of one hundred souls. In the morning they rose and rode out with Jacobs leading, and their destination was darkness as was each soul. --(Working Title) Joe Churchwell
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 09:35:35 +0000
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