They came from everywhere, they came with everything.

Busk, Michael Reid

THEY CAME FROM EVERYWHERE, they came with everything. From the scarred plains the scraggy northerners trundled down in mastodon carts, their blunt women and ticky children eating raw oats by the fistful. The flash-blind hobos rode the ultrarails, stroking each other's faces and speaking of freedom, their knapsacks bumpy with books they hadn't been able to read even before the great detonation had burned out their eyes. Long before, the swelling, paling sun had already boiled the four central rivers away, but along their pitted beds the slaves stumbled and swayed, starving and thirsty and sunstruck, their masters disemboweled or indifferent or mad. In flatbed trailers the meatmakers brought meat, cured and piled with smoking dry ice. The jungle tribes zoomed along the shoulders of dead roads on cycles as long as whales, all pedaling in sync, clothed only in kudzu. Tattooed on their right eyelids was the name of the thing each most loved, and on the left, the name of what each most feared.

They came from everywhere, they came with everything. When camping for the night, children would trap animals, staking them bleating or hissing to the ground in order to teach each other. This is the fire bulb, they would say, pulling the skin apart and palpating the dark organ beneath. Or: This is where their lies live, scraping the skin from the inside. Stripping veins from the limbs and tying them in a bow, they might whisper, The true hurt is not knowing. They discovered they could prop the face open by stabbing a stick between the roof and the soft undermouth, making it so much easier to release the tongue. Over the tonsilly rattling they would shout: Only the guilty complain.

They came from everywhere, they came with everything. The skymen were greeted with huzzahs as they drifted down in their bubbly pods, snapping their fingers and gargling their mint water. The slaves had to be told not to worship them. Nothing was worshipped anymore--they were beyond such things. The clowns leapt over each other in time to calliope music only they seemed to hear, juggling shrapnel, wounding their hands, grinning. Even the northerners laughed, stopping their mastodons short and pounding each other on the chest, offering the sleek skymen bushels of oats, tub-sized skins of mastodon milk. Only the astrologers were silent. In ages past, the heavens had belonged to them, and now they were reduced to dusting the tomes and reciting the Five Great Truths and the Three Likelihoods. They smelled of myrrh and saltpeter, and the blind hobos sniffed them out, asking them to read their own books aloud. The astrologers were old enough, kind enough not to tell the hobos their books were rain-bleared past the point of comprehension, instead composing ex tempore tales of marooning and shanghai, whole narrative universes constructed around the premise that no one is ever where they want to be.

They came from everywhere, they came with everything. When the travelers first saw the mountain, they celebrated with smoked meats, oats, milk, the clowns' stale candy corn, the petals of the skymen's cloud orchids. The clowns beat each other with bats until none of them could stand. The jungle tribes winked, and that was entertainment enough. The children placed orchid petals on their tongues and closed their eyes, dreaming the petals were the eyelids of the jungle tribespeople, imagining the ink of love and terror seeping down into their deepest insides. The astrologers brooded in the shadows, far from the effigies, embarrassed to be wearing the silk robes that were the only garments they owned, robes they had as young men lovingly stitched with images of sky spirits they now knew did not exist--the One-Eyed Duchess, the Wind Pilot, the Laughing She-Bear. Nonetheless, the astrologers were asked to come nearer, to warm themselves, to recite the Five Great Truths and the Three Likelihoods. Nodding, they wrapped their beards scarflike around their necks and intoned. Even the yammering clowns hushed, knowing there was a truth beyond the slap and the gasp and the great fall.

They came from everywhere, they came with everything. The scaffold had been erected at the summit by the woodsmen who lived along the tree line. The mountain was old and had until recently been considered holy, but it was certainly tall, and whether it was banshees or thermal eccentricities that writhed shrieking across it, even the hardiest woodsmen could not ascend without succumbing to the gooseflesh of ancient soul chill. Wind and feet had worn the peak flat centuries before, and atop it the woodsmen flexed their rough sport, too violent ever to become a national game: a skull was excavated from a living body, then hurled and punted and bowled. Bodies piled, heredity was questioned, men spat at each other and grabbed their groins with frostbitten fingers.

They came from everywhere, they came with everything. Squatting in hollows on the skittery hillside, the children of the freeborn asked the children of the slaves if they had scars, if they had ever seen a man die. The children of the woodsmen said that they knew the smell of human marrow. The children of the slaves said you could see the spirit of a dead man rise from the mouth of the corpse and circle the body three times before disappearing. For the meat of the meatmakers, the woodsmen traded eagle eggs and cenotaphs carved from basalt, and for the jungle dwellers' painfruit and snakeskin gloves they gave agates and honeyed wines. The farmers from the lake country, who disliked finery and would not drink liquor they had not themselves distilled, sold beets and rutabagas and after supper retired to their wagons to throw dice and chew cinnamon as the others danced and copulated and tried not to grimace when the winds came howling down. During the festivities on the hillside, a group of jungle dwellers, clowns, and northerners challenged the woodsmen to their game (which in their chuttering dialect the woodsmen called game), offering the woodsmen the skull of an expired mastodon as a ball. The woodsmen admired the girth of the skull, then arranged their younger daughters into a team to face the outsiders, warning the girls not to disturb the scaffold. The girls acquiesced. The outsiders doubted. The girls won. They bit their tongues at the outsiders, just to taste the blood.

They came from everywhere, they came with everything, to witness the execution of the king. The executioners ushered him to the scaffold as the sun, the color of the blind hobos' eyes, shrugged up over the mountain, but after the previous night's long debauch, few were conscious to see him as he stood on the planks with his house's characteristic bow-leggedness, stripped to the waist, sweating but not bleeding, long-jawed and slightly cross-eyed. The woodsmen lay snoring on their skins, dreaming of the absent skywomen but clutching the wives of the meatmakers, who were parked at a safe distance down the mountainside. The slaves not huddled in snoring clumps against the dawn cold thought they were watching a coronation, until they were informed by the blind hobos, who also asked the slaves if the king did indeed have stork wings growing from his spine, if his right hand was in fact monstrous and red. Only the children were prepared. They had scorned the licentiousness of the previous night, carving pikes from the branches of the cedars, brewing what they hoped was poison in the oat pots of the northerners. The attitude toward the execution they had hoped to find mirrored in the old was that loamy delta between glee and lust and dread. But the old, as usual, disappointed them. At dawn, the children trudged uphill with their cauldrons and spears, around the detumescent bodies of the adults who were so easily excited, so easily satisfied. The children could not understand the charges one of the executioners read aloud, although they suspected none of the adults could either. When a few of the astrologers passed by, the children bit their thumbs and shouted: Wisdom is pain. Betrayal is the only currency. We seek a higher and unwavering star. The astrologers said they understood, just as the heavens began machine-gunning the mountain with hail. The would-be witnesses woke, whining like monkeys, and in the strange logic of execution, the death-dealers led the king under the scaffold to wait out the storm. Seeing their opportunity, the children raced up to the executioners, spears strapped to their backs, poison spilling from the cauldrons and scalding the ground. The children asked the executioners how the death was to proceed, if it was to be fugue-like, the moment of expiration delayed by the delicate passages of harmonic tortures. They asked the executioners how modernity had affected the ancient art of death dealing. Thumbing the ends of their cedar javelins, the children asked if the quickest way to a man's heart really was through his stomach. The king appeared less frightened than chilled. The adults were coming, with their rules and hierarchy, their disastrous lack of focus. Shaking their heads at the laziness of the universe, the children found a calligrapher from among their ranks, and while they held down the king, she went to work, writing The future on his left eyelid, The future on his right.