Shadow of the Seer

by Michael Scott Rohan

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

The Winter Chronicles record many tales of the folk who fled out of the west seeking refuge from the spreading dominion of the Ice. The savage, soulless warriors had destroyed the ancient civilisations, and all that survived was legend. Among those legends is the extraordinary story of Alya, a seer's son. Still struggling to control the magic he has inherited from his father, Alya is cast adrift in a hostile land. With nothing left to lose, he embarks on a quest - to avenge the slaughter of his kin, and to rescue the girl he loves. It is a quest that will lead Alya through a world in turmoil - a world of magic and ice.

Release date: November 28, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

IT was the light between the mountain peaks that awoke him, rather than his father’s hand. The first long beams fell full on his face, flooding his weary eyes with a wash of blood-tinged flame he could not shut out. It was all too like the vicious dreams that rampaged across his sleep, and he sat up sharply, gasping. Often, he knew, the mind could vastly magnify some slight sound or feeling at the edge of waking; for his father was deep and wise in the lore of dreams. But these apparitions had left him far more seriously shaken than the light could explain, or the touch. His shoulder had been shaken, gently; and his father was not normally a gentle man.

The boy shook his head to clear it, sought to uncross his thighs, and groaned. His father ran a hand down the deep lines flanking his straight mouth. ‘You fell asleep, boy.’ There was no expression in his voice. The boy nodded mutely, ready for the slap that usually followed. Some time in the small hours he had nodded off where he sat, cross-legged, head sagging over the pattern marked out for him on the earthen floor. Now he was too numb and stiff to move. The slap would almost be welcome; but it did not come.

‘You finished the pattern?’ demanded his father; but it was not really a question. The boy stared. Somehow, though he could not recollect it, he must have done. All the small stones were set out in their spiralling swirls of ochre-red and yellow-brown sand, interwoven and interlinked with darker swirls of grey ash and black soot, a fierce contrasting energy of movement that led your eye inwards like a steep cliff path, too steep to take slowly; you had either to run with it, or fall away from it into confusion. He must have finished it on the fringe of sleep, his hands moving instinctively with the practice drilled into him since he had spoken his first recognisable word. He decided to say nothing of that. Safer simply to nod and grunt, as his father did.

But the iron-grey voice said, ‘You have done well, Alya,’ and the boy could not help looking up in surprise at the tone, almost warm, and the sound of his name, which his father seldom spoke. His father squatted easily on his heels beside him, and waved an approving hand over the pattern. ‘The sleep is permitted – this time. You have done well to complete the Trail at all. That in itself often brings darkness down over the mind. But if you are to succeed in passing the barrier one day, you must learn to endure, so that you may understand and direct, and explore – not simply suffer what is shown you. Tell me now what you saw.’

The boy shivered; not simply with the cold in the little hut, or need of food and warmth. Those he was used to. ‘I saw … men, who fought. And more than men. Many, many men, like ants seething in a nest. They fought at the walls of … great villages, towns greater than I have seen. You will laugh at me, but … their huts were huge and of many floors and of stone, as it seems. Like wonders that I have heard of only in tales. Great walls like whole cliffs of stone, yet … yet carven, shaped by some art. Could such things be?’

The older man rasped a thumb against his chin. ‘Towns under siege. Towns of stone. Aye, such things were; still are, maybe, in distant corners of the lands. All I have seen are their ruins; and even those are very mighty. Yet they were thrown down, and burned, long ago.’

‘Burned! Aye, there was fire! Men outside, who fought to enter, and raised ladders and great engines. And the defenders, men cased in glittering metal, running up and down the heights of those walls like goats on a cliff. They hurled all manner of things down upon the others, weapons, darts, arrows from strange short bows. And then the fire came, fire from above, raining down in great blasting streams … I saw it. Like all the evil things in the world, in one unhallowed shape. Scales … and claws … whirling around in smoke and confusion; and great beating wings. A thing that flew, a great thing but no bird, vast beyond any bird I could imagine …’

‘Yes?’ demanded the older man curtly, as the boy wavered and closed his eyes.

‘I do not know … More like a bat, as big as a cloud and blacker by far, sending down blasting spurts from its jaws … You will strike me, when I say many mouths. Yet only one creature …’

But his father only shook his shaggy head. ‘Tugarin! The Buryakud! Tugarin son of Zamai, eldest and worst of the curses of the Ice!’ He breathed out. ‘But surely that was long, long ago. You have seen far and well, my son, farther even than I dared hope. It is many an age since that horror was loosed upon the world! You will be a powerful chooser of the paths to your folk one day, a wise Seer. More so than I, maybe.’

The boy glowed with this sudden and unprecedented praise, but his father simply snapped, ‘Now, what more? What then?’

Alya closed his eyes again, felt them sting with smoke, although the peat-damped hearth gave off no more than a faint warmth. ‘There was fire, fire everywhere, all over the walls. They blackened; and the men fell from them, blazing, or cast themselves into the abyss. Fire … They were so majestic, those walls. The huts behind them, so mighty and tall and fair, like the pillars of the sky. But the fire rolled over all. Still I strove to see, more closely …’

His father’s face changed, the eyes as intent as a stooping hawk’s. ‘Yes. And then?’

The boy felt the shudder of fear return. ‘Then it was as if the walls changed before my eyes, and become a real cliff! Of rock, black, jagged and fierce, as if weather had never touched it. Yet the blazing spew of the beast still trickled down it in rivulets, so that the very stone smoked. So hot that it burned my cheeks and drove me back, every time I sought to approach it.’

The thin lips turned down grimly. ‘Indeed, my son. Learn now, then, that that which you call a cliff is not of any stone that ever was upon this world, even among the Firedream of its first forging. That cliff is a barrier set before you, before whatever you would see of your own will, rather than be shown. It is the Wall, that lies at the end of the Trail. Every shaman, every true Seer must first build it up within himself, and then contrive to pass it, whatever the obstacles it places in his path, whatever the terrors. Only then can his spirit be free to begin its journey on roads it chooses, and wield freely what power it has.’

‘Yet I seemed to see across it, beyond it, even as I woke. There was a horizon beyond it, as there is here. Blue, uncertain peaks …’

‘Most likely these above us, remembered in dreaming.’

Emboldened now, the boy shook his head. ‘Father, no! They stood across … across an expanse of water, wider than a river, a lake, anything. The hugest trees, larger than I have ever seen; and then the water. Like a great grey beast-fell spread out about the world …’

The older man only snorted, and snatched a bundle wrapped in greasy leather from the wall. ‘Water to put out the fire, no doubt! Forget it, my son. If you have come thus far, there is work still to be done, and without delay, indeed. Come with me now! Leave all this, and follow. Leave your robe. Take no food. Cold and hunger are the Seer’s friends. But bring your bow, in case!’

So they left the little hut, with its floor of trodden earth, where his mother and sister lay still asleep within the wattled inner chamber, plastered with mud and dry grass to hold in the precious heat of their bodies. Had they been awake, they would not have dared to listen to what passed on the other side of the fire, let alone watch. That was men’s work, and they knew better than to brave the father’s wrath. Women had their own mysteries with which to content themselves.

The tiny knot of huts was barely stirring, the old watchman on the wall nodding in the blessed moment between the perils of dark and day. Yet he sat up straight as the pair passed. He knew the very shadows that stretched before them, as he knew all in the little farm, the older man’s tall and lean, but shoulders bowed as if by great burdens. And little Alya, already grown so much like him, almost a man now at his fifteenth summer, with a full chieftain’s name to bear, Alyatan-kawayi’wale Atar. The watchman saluted them with hand to brow, and eyes on the ground. Nobody dared watch what paths the Seer took, or cared to wonder what was held within the dark bundle he bore – one reason he was an outliver among his folk, with only a few poor kin in his huts to gather and work the soil for him. When they took the stony path to the valley’s ridge, father and son, and beyond that to the mountain-ways, none dared mark their going. Seer and Seer to be, they walked alone on paths lesser men could never follow, and it was known that the hard earth beneath their feet was not always where their spirits trod.

There were cairns beside the path, some mere heaps of stone, some half concealing a worn stone stump with some trace of natural shape. From some cairns the boy watched his father take a stone, and add one to others, often with a brief clasping of the hands and a swift, nasal chant. They climbed and climbed the narrow trails, for long hours, until the boy felt exhaustion weighing down his limbs, his belly griping on nothing and his chest sucking painfully at the thinning air. His father gave him dried leaves to chew, which tasted foul but eased both the hunger and the pain, leaving only a light, faint giddiness he dared not give way to.

For the last stage they truly climbed, rather than walked, scrambling across cold, frost-shattered rocks to a crevice, a chimney and above that, even as the boy’s strength failed, a ledge. He pulled himself on to the harsh rock, softened by odd patches of mossy soil, and lay gasping, sickened yet unable to vomit. Gradually the feeling subsided, and he saw his father outlined against the sky, sitting cross-legged, hands outstretched as if in supplication to the brilliant glaring blue sky. ‘Come!’ was all he said, and the boy scurried to sit beside him. Yet even as he reached the edge he stopped, and gaped, and sank to his knees, still staring.

The elder shaman nodded. ‘You see what it is most fit for a Seer and a chieftain’s son to see. Behold the world, spread out as upon wings beneath you!’

The boy drew breath, deeply, shakily. They had ascended for hours, but the sun still stood below its zenith, not far above the peaks at their back, and its rays reached out like shafts of yearning across the expanse beneath. The lower slopes it left in shadow, touching only the very tops of the foothills with glowing colour, as if the brown scrub burned suddenly from within. But the vale beyond, where grass still fought to grow above the bed of unmelting ice and scattered stone in the thin soil, it lit with kindly warmth, whitening the smokes that twisted up from the little scar of tended land that was theirs.

And beyond that, the open expanse that the boy had always seen as featureless infinity extending to the world’s edge, it revealed first as a rolling mass of low brown hills and shallow, greener vales, cut by meandering streams with strange little woodlands crouched along their banks, and brown bogs and livid green reedbeds above which flights of birds seemed to float like dreams, among feathery wisps of cloud. Along the water’s edge some small herds of great beasts strayed.

‘So wide and free,’ said the boy, wondering. ‘And so passing fair … Can we not go out there some day, and see it at close hand?’

‘You may live to see more than you wish,’ said the Seer, and his son was to remember those words. ‘Look now to the northward, whence come those dark rivers that stem not from our mountains. Does that seem so fair?’

It was not so far in that direction, along the black wide streams, that the brown hills seemed to become browner and the green grew less, the trees and bushes lower and scrubbier. The earth showed through them in wide bare patches, and through it in turn the grey bones of rock and stone, rolled boulder and solid, rising ridge. Colour and life drained from the land, till it became a rounded, riven country of stones. And increasingly, as one looked, it grew tinged with white, light and uneven at first but swiftly thicker and solider, till it enveloped height and distance and identity in a hazy featureless mantle that seemed to bleach the very air above. Sky and cloud mingled as one with the earth beneath, a chilly veil behind which lurked some suggestion of massive solidity, massive as the mountains beneath them, and cool, remote menace.

‘Yonder lies the realm of the foes of men,’ said the Seer, neutrally. His eyes were steady. ‘The ancient powers of the Eternal Cold, and their domain, undying citadel and weapon in one, the moving Walls of Winter, the glaciers of the Ice. There, in their stony hinterlands, the warrior tribes they have corrupted, our kin no longer kin to us, dwell – the Aikiya’wahsa, the Ekwesh. And thence they ride forth to rape and raid, and take for their own what little men have wrested from the earth to feed themselves and theirs. Well, would you see more?’

‘Not of that!’ shivered the boy. ‘Can we not look elsewhere?’

‘It is wise to,’ agreed the Seer, and pointed once again. ‘Yonder, my son, to the south and the west. There in warmer lands the ancient green of the growing land lingers still among the stones, even to forest and woodland of a kind. There dwell our kin, still, some in settlements such as ours but greater; and perhaps some even in those towns you remember from your infancy – such as have been spared. But for the most part they dwell in isolation and in fear. Their only hope is that the storm will pass them by, and perhaps also their children. Beyond that they do not think, save in idle fancies and foolish visions.’

‘Yet you say yourself that even the faintest dream-picture may have deep meaning—’

The slap came, this time, a hard one. The boy bore it as he had learned to, but his eyes burned. His father’s voice was unyielding. ‘I speak of what is shown us from within, not stupid fictions men confect, to console themselves for what is not. Hear for yourself! These empty heads say that if you only voyage far enough eastward, you will come to some enormous lake, wider than sight or sound, with a greener land, more forested, such as this land once was, along its shores. Well, that is as may be; but they also say it is thick with salt! Think of the hot springs you have seen, mineral-encrusted, stinking. Could anything green grow along such a shore? And there is more. They claim that on its further shore there is a better land yet, where men with white faces dwell!’ The elder hawked and spat, copiously, out into the glassy air.

‘As if any lake, large as may be, would hold back the cruel hand of the Ice, or place men beyond its grasp! It gathers the world into its cold palms, and who can restrain it? Yet fools have set out to seek that land, following the Eye of the Swan that looks forever eastward – whatever that may be! And indeed by such a fool’s portent they may find it! For this could only be the land of the dead, where the pale-faced ghosts dance.’ He sighed. ‘No, my son. The way of the Seer is wiser. To seek wisdom through the spirit, and guide his folk in ways where the hand of ill does not fall. Learn now, learn swiftly, and be wise.’

Alya was about to ask more, but the sting of his face made him hesitate. By then the Seer had opened his bundle, and with a tender grasp he lifted out a strange sight, that yet was somehow very familiar to the boy. As a toddling infant in dead, distant days, living in a town with others, he had gaped in delighted awe at the spirits that came and danced on holidays – at the turning of the year, at the veneration of the ancestors in the sowing and the harvest, and the festivals of children and unmarried girls at summer’s height, when the days seemed endless and the Ice far away.

They were like men, these spirits, but with their bodies streaked and circled in glorious gaudiness, bright as jaybirds on rainbows, and their heads stranger and brighter still, mingled visions of beast and man with jaws that chomped and beaks that clapped. Their ancestors, the children were told; their forebears, at one with the prey they had hunted in richer, more plentiful lands.

Ancestors who would, with enough propitiation and offerings, bring back the game and the good seasons. Ancestors who danced out the old tales, and the prophecies of tales to come, and most magically of all scattered gifts and sweetmeats to the children of their children. Ancestors who, after dancing and eating and drinking and coupling with their descendants till they were dizzy, fell writhing and shouting into the arms of their fellows. When they had left the town, Alya saw them no more, though at times the beat of drums from his father’s hut would bring them back to mind.

But this, here, rising from the box – this was one of them, itself. It was with deep wonder he saw for the first time that that awesome head was made of painted wood and metal, beautifully carven and shaped.

His father nodded. ‘You understand now. The spirits need us, as we need them. They need our solid shapes to live within the pleasures of life once more, and for a while enjoy the offerings we give them. We can receive them within us only at the height of our powers, in the grip of the living dream – just as, in that state alone, can we penetrate the Wall and its terrors. To scan what lies beyond and share its many eyes and ears and thoughts, to draw upon its powers to influence the world – even, for the most supremely powerful of us, to carry us throughout it, from one place to another, by unseen paths …’ He shivered with evident delight at the idea of the power. For that also we need to take their form, to beguile the many Guardians. And therefore they taught us how to don the Shapes that are their aspect, and to dance the dance of the Mask.’

The old Seer had been building a tiny fire of dry twigs as he spoke, and kindled it now with a spark of flint into dry moss tinder, sputtering and smouldering. He raised the heavy mask reverently above his head, into the warming rays of the sun. ‘This is the dearest of all the shapes given to our folk, most precious of my masks.’ After an instant the warming wood creaked and sang, and he laughed aloud.

‘Hear the voice of the ancient wood, speaking to its beloved children! It is said that in that foolish cuckoo-country, that ghostland, the pale men make their magics with hammered metal! As if the earth’s cold blood could contain any such life force as this once-living wood! As if it could give you eyes to see through, and a mouth to speak and sing!’

Swiftly, deftly, the Seer lowered the heavy wooden shape about his forehead and slowly down, until his face was hidden. The mask seemed to float lightly above his shoulders, long beak with crooked tip, huge eyes painted in red and white, picked out in glittering obsidian, but hollow at their hearts. Then he knelt, pulled the rough barkcloth shirt from his back, and streaked himself with earth from the ledge, and smearings of chalk and coloured sand in fat from the bundle.

‘This is Raven, great patron of our folk! Friend of Men, who stole the Sun for them to defy the first coming of the Ice. You are the last Seer of his most ancient line, Alya; so learn now how to invoke his power. You know this dance, this chant; you have been taught it since you could barely walk. See now the use of it, and the meaning.’

He sprang lithely to his feet, and the beak snapped cruelly. Out of the bag he took a small roundel of steam-bent wood, topped with a taut skin of dark deerhide; hanging from it was a short length of antler, polished by many years of wear. On the drumskin were painted symbols hard to make out against the age-blackened hide, stark, sticklike figures in black and red. The Seer tapped the drum once, twice, on different symbols, and then again, in a different, wilder measure. He beat the skin with the antler stick, and the deerhide thrummed and rang. He sang, in a low husky voice, the same syllables again and again, sounds that were not words but were all the more heavy with meaning. The arms, streaked now like rows of dark feathers, flapped once, twice, and thrust out, fingers spread, in a gliding curve. The drum stuttered to silence, the feet stamped and shuffled in the same soft pulsing beat, but the upper body remained still, as it seemed, wheeling and gliding like the dark specks over the woodlands below. Back it swooped against the rockface, then up and away, out to the very edge of the rim as if to join its brethren in the airs below. Small stones skittered and crumbled into emptiness, but the feet did not falter, whirling and kicking with the energy that infused the effortless glide above.

When the arms came down, the drum thuttered again. Alya thrilled at the sight of his Ancestor, felt the pace of the dance in his blood, and drummed exultantly on the moss with his flat palms. He felt no fear for his father, as he trod the thin line of the cliffs edge; to him also it seemed as if the masked figure would take flight and soar any instant, out of the abyss and into the face of the climbing sun. He longed to follow.

The voice grew higher, harsher, and faster, gasping and dry. The syllables merged and blurred into a raw rasping cry. The voice, not of a single bird, but of many, the cawing clamour of a rising flock; and out of the empty air distant voices knew and answered it. The figure stood straight up suddenly, arms outflung. The jaws opened, wider than before, gaping; and within them, set deep at the throat, shimmered the metal mask of a man, smooth-skinned, impossibly serene, the features bland and general save for the white-painted beard, a rare thing among his folk. And yet the boy clenched his fists in wonder; for within it, within the very metal itself, like glimmering trout in a clear stream, flickers of cold light came and went, and the bland metal eyes blazed and glittered into his own. A single rasping cry rang out among the rocks.

Suddenly the cliff face behind them flashed and shone bright as a mirror, as solid obsidian—

Just as suddenly, the light vanished. Warm darkness was around him, the smell of sweat and leather. His father was putting another mask over his head, telling him to try it, to dance with it in place. ‘This is an easier ancestor to bear, the Hawk, the young hunter who feeds his brood; he will carry you as far as you should need. Remember the pattern, the earths, the pebbles! Think hard upon its tracks, for it is through the Trail you are dancing. Dancing on your journey, to the Wall; and one day, beyond.’ He settled the mask in place, and let Alya swing his head, grow used to its weight.

‘How shall a man get there? Seers seldom agree. Some say you may fly over its summit, some say you may burrow under. For that matter, some say it is not a wall at all, but a very range of mountains, in which paths and passes must be opened and explored. Some others seek to ride thither in the minds of birds and beasts, which know no distinction between it and the outer world; or even through the minds of other Seers. But I who am the Seer and son of many Seers, and carry within me now the words of many more, I say it is a Wall; and that for the strong Seer there is but one way, to rise over it himself, by his own power. Unless he is among the great – and they go through! Dance now, boy. Dance, Hawk. Dance!’

His arms were already outflung; his feet already stamping the moss. The drum rattled, the chant droned on in his father’s exalted voice. Dizzy with exhaustion and altitude and the essence of the dry leaves, Alya threw back his head, and felt the short beak clack and clatter. The mask wobbled, ill-fitting, and he staggered. He knew he should stop. His father’s singing took on a harsh, angry tone, the contemptuous voice that made him shrivel when he faltered or failed at anything, worse than any slap; and at the very thought of it his shaking legs thrashed harder. He could not stop. He wagged his head to and fro, desperately trying to balance the mask. The chant burst from his lips in an answering torrent, higher than his father’s, almost like a wounded bird piping. Beyond the narrow eyeholes there were only the clouds. He thrust back his wings, trembling as he glided, hovered, stooped …

The mask half fell sideways, the eyeholes away from his eyes. Hunger shook his legs. Stone cracked and turned beneath his weary feet—

Everything vanished. He was staring into that jagged, glassy surface, silken smooth yet savagely etched and fanged. High above him it loomed, as far below; and flame boiled in the depths. It was as if he were torn in two. He heard a voice scream, knew his own, and the glassy rock wheeled sickeningly as his legs failed him. He fell back, felt the ledge hit him hard in the back, but his head fell back out into empty space.

He stared upside down into the abyss, and the fiery mouths clamoured in his roaring ears. Light and air smote his cheeks once again. Into the distant depths something small turned and wheeled away, and he convulsed with horror. It was the Hawk mask.

He flung out useless arms, but it was far gone. A distant, hollow smash rose from below, and the rattle of a few rocks. He stared in mute horror and humiliation. He had destroyed a thing he knew must be unimaginably precious. What would his father do to him now? He could almost let himself slide after it.

A firm hand hooked in his shirt, hauled him back up, and dropped him hunched and shaking on the moss. He curled up like a baby, shivering, and awaited the rain of blows that would almost be a relief. ‘I’m sorry. I let the Hawk fall! I’m sorry.’

‘You did nothing,’ said the Seer’s grim voice, sternly enough but evenly. ‘I saw. The mask sat awkwardly upon you from the start. That, it should not have done, not with any man, and never has before. And yet you achieved the pattern of stones … Strange. I thought the mask would settle. I should have taken it from you at once. When I did not, it fled you of its own choosing, and for its own reasons. You are not meant to have the Hawk, that is clear.’ There was a note almost of sadness as he added, ‘And no more, now, am I.’

Deep misery must still have marked the boy’s face, for the Raven mask lifted to reveal his father’s features, as ever stern and unbending, yet not without a touch of concern. To the boy’s surprise he reverently raised the great mask from his own head. ‘Here. Don this!’

Passively, dumbly, Alya let the thing be slid over his head, the beak closed once more, the leather lining positively hot to the touch and slick with sweat. It seemed to cling to his cheeks, yet once in place it did not feel too hot. It was heavy, draggingly heavy; but the boy nodded very carefully, and felt it fit across both scalp and jaw, moving with them, but never itself stirring in its seat.

The Seer gave a long, low grunt of satisfaction, and struck the drum hard. So sudden was the thrill that Alya surged to his feet, hardly heeding the wooden weight. ‘Now can you dance?’ growled the older man. ‘Now, yes? Yes!’

Cold fire ran in the boy’s legs, where a moment before milky weariness had flowed. He clattered the beak and cawed as his father had, and flung back his head wildly, and as the drum stuttered he once again echoed the chant. Wheeling, diving, the blue sky spun crazily in the eyeholes, but he knew now why his father had not stopped for the cliffs edge, for fear or even for the mildest caution. He could no longer even feel the stone beneath him; but the wind was cool and thrilling beneath his wings.

All at once the light whirled into the spiral of the Trail, the blackness roared in his head and drew him in. The jagged gloss of the Wall arose again, its innumerable facets now mirroring his naked face, bare of any mask. Endless facets, countless faces, eyes wide, jaws slack, gasping for breath – infinite selves. Then hands scrabbled within the dark glass, clawing, burning at their finger-ends even as they reached out. The faces were no longer his. They were faces he knew. They opened to him, in menace or mute appeal, and glows burst from their eyes, their gaping mouths and distended nostrils. Mother, sister, the tillers of the farm, the few friends of his early life – he fought to rise, to break free of their fearful clutches, to soar above them and crest the grim barrier. For an instant he seemed to see through it, to make out a distorted image, such a wide spread of lands as he had seen from the ledge, but from far higher. And among them, standing out sharply, the valley, the farm, the figures around it like dots, and far, far above them the ledge itself, with a figure that squatted grim and motionless, and another that wheeled and turned—

He could not rise further. Instead he struck the black surface, like a windblown bird. Agony speared one arm, and he felt the tangle of limbs, and the screaming, sickening fall.

He was on his knees on the grass, choking and shaking within the mask, desperately afraid. He plucked it off, and it came willingly, for all it had fitted so close. And again, as he stared at it in his shaking hands, the coursing gleams and glows came and went within the metal. They were continuous things, like serpents, like fish that dived in one piece of metal and surfaced in another, as if there was some incredible unity in the metal, threading the painted wooden sections tog