“The Ruins of Granada” (1899) is unique in that it is one of Spain’s first speculative fiction stories and its author, Ángel Ganivet (1865 — 1898), was known mostly for his “serious” writing which helped genre fiction enter the mainstream of Spanish literature. Early in the century, the distinction between “fantasy” and “science fiction” was more fluid than today and thus “The Ruins of Granada” evokes the feel of the “contes philosophiques”—philosophical tales used by early scientists in which a fictional frame provided the context for discussing a scientific theory. The influence of this predominantly nonfiction form can be seen in much nascent science fiction. We feature this story as part of our Strange Scifi Summer; the story was unable to be included in The Big Book of Science Fiction for reasons of space. If you enjoy this story, be sure to visit our interview with Marian and James Womack.

‘Would you care to come with me,’ a scholar said to a poet, ‘and see the ruins of Granada?’

‘I have, for some time, for a long time now, wanted to visit that corner of old Spain. If I am a poet, then I am a poet of ruins. There is nothing interests me as much nor moves me so deeply as contemplating the sense of hopelessness contained in the wretched remnants of things which once were and which now are not. If there is anything more beautiful than life, then it is the bitterness and disenchantment that existence leaves as its residue. Life is like a child who diverts us with his innocent games, and the ruins which life leaves behind itself are like a man of wide and varied experiences who always bears on his lips words that can explain great secrets.’

‘In ruins, what attracts me the most is the idea that they are places where something that we once knew only by reading ancient authors has been resuscitated or come back to life. And I prefer the ruins that are left behind after a catastrophe to those which remain after the destructive action of time; there is something natural about the ruins of Greece or Egypt, something that has developed over the years and which shows how briefly the work of man lasts, even those works that seem to be the greatest and most solid; there is more glory in the ruins of Pompey or London or Granada: these are places where life was suddenly brought to a close, and when they are excavated we discover a few centuries later life, exactly as it once was, petrified at the moment of its extinction. For me, a volcano, which can suddenly engulf a city, cover it in flames, is a sculptor inspired by pure chance. After some time, it is curiosity that opens such an immense sepulchre, and the marvellous work of art appears, the image of an entire civilisation, at a particular moment in the history of humanity.’

‘That is how an archaeologist sees it; there is a more beautiful way to interpret this vision; an artist does not see a petrified version of life, but a new kind of life, life in which man is no longer necessary, in which ideas live and interact in the very air, inspired by the poetry that rises from the ruins. I guess that the ruins of Granada will fill me with the idea of love, that I will sense there the sighs of a woman who loved much, who died loving, who loved so much that scented roses and red carnations grow over her grave, calling out to everyone who passes by…’

‘And is there poetry only in those vague ideas? Is there not also poetry in monuments that have been cast down, and in the skeletons of men? I have thought often about the discovery of the ruins of Granada and what it makes me think about is my desire to see a city suddenly annihilated. Historians say that the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii was presaged by certain strange phenomena which spread panic and enabled almost all the city’s inhabitants to escape to safety. The same thing happened when London was drowned in the sea: the fact that the land was sinking was noticed a long time before the final catastrophe and the Londoners step by step abandoned the city in advance. But the volcano which some thirty centuries ago made Granada disappear forever without leaving a single trace was brand new and, as it burst through the earth’s crust with its lava, it did not leave any time for people to escape, so rapid was its appearance and so quickly did it carry everything away, from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada all the way down to the sea.’

‘Well let us head there at once, I am impatient to see these marvels.’

***

The poet and the scholar headed towards an aerostat station and ordered one to take them to the ruins of Granada.

‘Would you like to travel by the land route or the sea route?’

They had the option of seeing the ruins of London and of ancient Brittany as well.

‘We will go by the shortest route,’ the scholar replied.

‘In that case you should travel via Paris. It is,’ the chief aeronaut added, looking through his travel guide, ‘five thousand and seventy two ptometres.’

The travellers paid for their tickets and got into a small aerostat that was to be towed by a huge balloon that ascended rapidly until it was almost lost from sight. A little while later the balloon came down slightly and the aerostat, driven well by an expert aeronaut, began its flight to the South East, with a following wind.

After a brief and happy journey the travellers found themselves crossing the sky above Granada. As they had travelled, the aeronaut had told them the names of the countries and cities they were flying over, in case they wanted to descend. A few times they did go down in order to enjoy from the scent that rose up from the gardens they saw, or else simply to observe the cities with their inhabitants heading hear and there, busy as ants; at times they had to ascend so as not to knock against the peaks of mountains.

When they came to the end of their journey the aerostat descended until the travellers could see all the details of the dead city. The moon was full and the city was silent and the poet wanted to hear the voice he dreamt would talk to him; the scholar wanted to put together the plan of the city in his head and mentally reconstruct how life had been in the city when it had been alive.

‘I can see fragments of a Moorish city sticking up here and there, buried under mountains of rubble whose meaning I cannot determine.’

‘I am thinking,’ the poet said, ‘of a statue. In the middle of the city the ruins form an extended shape that looks like the reclining body of a woman.’

‘That must be the river which they say had gold in its sand.’

‘And the figure is broken in two, by heaps of stones that seem to be a woman’s waist.’

‘That must be a bridge over the river.’

‘And there are columns spread all over the right hand side of the body, that look like two crossed hands.’

‘That must be a Cathedral.’

‘And high up in the city, where the woman’s shoulders are, there is an eminence that seems to be a reddish pillow.’

‘That must be the Alhambra.’

‘And there is a head that lies on the pillow. It is such a perfect image! Everything is there. The mouth, the nose, the forehead…’

‘Those must be the palace and its turrets.’

‘…the dark splendid hair…’

‘That is all that is left of a forest that the lava burnt to ashes.’

‘And those eyes, that still sparkle so sensuously.’

‘Those must have been cisterns or pools, now filled with rainwater, sparkling in the light of the moon…’

***

When dawn began to break they went down to the ground, landing at the red mountain where the poet had imagined that he saw the head of the reclining statue, symbol of the dead city. The scholar walked over the ground, with its ruins and the typical flora of cemeteries, and he examined everything, looking for archaeological remains for his collection. The poet had stopped to look at some turrets, cut short and cracked, but still somehow standing; the only things standing in that desolate landscape portrait. He took an ebony box out of his pocket and stared at it, fixing his thought in it and on it, on a bright button in the lid of the box, and the ideophone started to sing, melancholically:

How silently you sleep,
you cracked Alhambra bones.
A dream many centuries deep
slips across your stones.
You sleep, and death is your dream
though death is far away.
Awake, for there soon will come
the fresh new light of day.
      Your walls in the light of the sun
are painted in shades of gold;
your walls in the light of the moon,
are lit by beams that are clear and pallid:
and you are asleep for ever,
though death is far away.
      In the firmament the stars
give you their colourless light,
wrapped in the shadowed arms
of the sad and blurry night,
and you are asleep for ever,
though death is far away.
      The silent breezes at dusk
rub themselves against you;
the savage autumn gusts
try as they can to rend you.
And you are asleep for ever,
and death is far away.
      A dream many centuries deep
slips across your stones;
should it reach down to your roots
your death would then be close.
Would that I could be like you
and sleep as the aeons passed
and fall from sleep anew
into nothingness at last!

***

‘Eureka!’ the scholar interrupted. ‘I’ve just made a most marvellous discovery. I have gone down this slope to a place near the river, and I thought that the ground under my feet sounded hollow. I started to dig and remove stones and I found I kind of storage chamber, and inside were several mummies so admirably preserved that I doubt that there are any their equal in any of the museums of the world.’

‘Let’s go then,’ the poet said, without much enthusiasm, putting his ideophone away. ‘I don’t like the sight of mummies all that much, but I am a little curious to see people who existed so many centuries ago. At least, I suppose the mummies are human.’

‘They seem to be; let us go and take a closer look.’

When they reached the mummies’ tomb, the poet and the scholar spent a long time uncovering them, touching them as little as possible, for fear that they would crumble away in their hands. This was an excessive precaution, because the mummies were entirely petrified, and could have been carried from one place to another like blocks hewn from a quarry. There were four of them, and they represented four different types of microcephalic mankind, the sort who lived in the world during the Metallic Age, the period between the nineteenth and twenty-second centuries. However, craneoscopic examination did show that they had attained a certain degree of mental development, roughly of the level of apodic man, that is ‘man without feet’, which existed during the age known as the Metallic Age, or the Movement Age.

All four mummies had irregular features, as their mouths were much larger than their eyes, which allowed one to infer that the people of that period spent more time thinking about eating than about seeing; all of them had beards, from which one can infer that this was an age without barbers.

The first mummy they examined had an extraordinarily well developed superior, or coronal, circumference, which fact suggested that this must be a vertical man, or as they used to say, a comedian (which is to say an individual who, whatever accidents he was faced with in his life, always landed on his feet like a cat).

The second mummy, as was absolutely self-evident once one had examined the smoothness and circularity of his skull, was a horizontal or lazy man, a type of which one can still occasionally find living examples in Araby, where one sees them lying down full length, melancholically dreaming in the hopes of paradise, a place that has been announced to them long since by their gods, to whom they still render homage.

The third example was curious, mainly because of the disposition of his spinal column, twisted almost into a bow; this mean that the man must have been one of the curved people, an optimist as they used to be called, given to agreeable living and laughter, and very poorly suited for tasks that required energy and application.

As for the fourth and final mummy, his posterior circumvolution was extremely pronounced—a clear sign of sensuality—and his skull was flat and angular, thus demonstrating his inverted or pessimistic nature, his desire to move against the flow. In short, he was filled with a kind of insubordinate and infertile energy, poorly adapted to the world in which he lived.

This, in brief, was the scholar’s opinion. And his conclusion was that if these four types represented the general constitution of the men who used to live in this city, then there was no way in which they could have developed to do anything useful or worthy, and that perhaps the volcanic eruption was providential. A result which allows us once again to see the way in which God’s actions with regards to his creatures are always watchful, healthy and beneficent.

The poet listened to all this and grew thoughtful; then he took out his little box and looked sadly at the ideophone; the instrument sang the following sad song:

THE SONG OF THE STONE

Life and death are but a dream
and all the world in dreams is grown;
dream is life itself to a man,
dream is death to the stone.

On your closed and dreaming eyes
one idea is drawn:
‘Worth far more than a man who sees
is the blindness of the stone.’

On your hard and rigid lips
one stiff word will form:
‘Worth more than speech to the man who speaks
is silence to the stone.’

Drawn from the depths of your breast
your hope is dead and gone:
‘Worth more than life to a man
is the death that lives in the stone.’

If life and death are dreams,
if dreams are the world alone,
I will give my life as a man
to dream in the death of the stone.

The post The Ruins of Granada appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Marian Womack

James Womack studied Russian, English and translation in St. Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford. Amongst others, he has translated works by Alexander Pushkin, Chéjov, the Strugatski Brothers, Ivan Turgenev, and Sergio del Molino. His first collection of poems, MISPRINT, was published by Carcanet in 2012. He was recently selected for the prestigious PEN-Presents European Translation Project. His versions of Vladímir Mayakovsky, Vladímir Maiakovski and other poems, will be published by Carcanet in October.

Together, the Womacks run Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation.

***

The translation team of Marian Womack and James Womack recently embarked on several translations for The Big Book of Science Fiction, out from Vintage this summer. Continuing our exploration of “strange SF,” we’re happy to bring you this exclusive interview with the Womacks—about translation and about science fiction. We’ll also be posting their translation of “The Ruins of Granada,” an early classic of weird SF, which could not be included in the Big Book of SF for space reasons as well as their new translation of Sever Gansovsky’s classic “The Day of Wrath,” which brilliantly updates Island of Dr. Moreau themes.

What has been the hardest translation job for either or both of you—into English?

Silvina Ocampo

James Womack: I find translating SF/F particularly difficult in general. At its best—and I would say that a lot of the stories we have translated for this book are among the best—it is a genre that is constantly wrong-footing the reader, and so your work as a translator is initially affected by your being wrong-footed as a reader. If you are translating stories set in worlds that are either fascinatingly different from or interestingly oblique to the ‘real’ world, then a lot of the handholds that you have with straight-down-the-line realist fiction just don’t exist. That said, within the stories we translated for the Big Book, I found Dmitri Bilenkin’s ‘Where Two Paths Cross’ tough because of the different perspectives within the story and the deliberately ‘alien’ vocabulary.

Marian Womack: TBBOSF has given me the chance to reencounter the Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo in a new way. She’s not only an author I am in awe of, but, together with Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter, she is a part of my personal corpus of imaginative and frighteningly clever writing. She excels at surrealism, which is such a difficult type of writing, so easy to do badly. Her language is endlessly inventive, her metaphors thought-provoking. She’s not the easiest of authors to translate, but the enjoyment inherent the challenge—the possibility of achieving results above the norm—makes the process that much more enjoyable.

Do you have a philosophy or central thought about what translation should be that guides you?

James: Nothing very interesting: pragmatic faithfulness, I suppose, in a very broad sense, and depending on what I consider ‘being faithful’ to mean in any particular context. Sometimes you need to reproduce certain formal aspects of a work; sometimes the literal meaning of a passage is absolutely paramount, no matter how clunky the translation sounds in English. And to try if possible not to be led too far by convention: sometimes things that are standard speech or standard literary locutions are just what you don’t want, and you have to fight against them.

Marian: I don’t want to sound too mystical here, but translation for me implies embodying an author’s voice, appropriating it for a short period of time, and so I can see an almost mediumistic quality to it. I certainly spend a great deal of time before starting a translation studying the author’s style and idiosyncrasies, her/his use of language, and rehearsing her/his voice. The transmutation process has to be faulty, that’s the nature of the act, but one can only hope to be as faithful as possible. And feeling that you are finally ‘embodying’ an author’s voice is rewarding.

At what times do you work together and when alone on translations? For example, do you, Marian, contribute to the Russian translations, too?

James: It’s a fairly collaborative process. We both read everything we translate, and edit together, no matter who does the first draft.

Marian: We are very old-fashioned in this. I like to think about us like a wife-and-husband team. When we started collaborating in these projects, around 2008, I had ‘some’ Russian, and James had ‘some’ Spanish. We have both grown on the way, as translators, both separately and as a team. But I find that the way our brains work mean that we can almost ‘side-read’ the other person. It’s like playing a duet; we inhabit the same space when we are working on these projects.

When you’re re-translating a famous work, like Casares’s “Squid in Its Own Ink”, is your process any different?

James: The advantage of there being a history of translations of a particular work is that you can do research before starting your own version: seeing how other people have dealt with problems is a good way of giving you ideas of how to deal with them yourself. Obviously, without plagiarizing or copying previous work, but there are times when previous translators have got something right in a way that seems to you both neat and unalterable, or at least gives you a roadmap to help you find something neat and unalterable of your own.

Marian: I’m the opposite; I prefer not to look at anything! It’s the same with writing: I have to read poetry if I’m working on a short story, non-fiction if I’m writing a novel. I am very easily contaminated. To me, approaching an author of that stature does not change my normal work process. But I’m very shy by nature, and have to try hard not be overwhelmed by an individual’s literary stature.

On the Russian side, what special barriers are there when translating Soviet-era work? I know you translated Bulgakov into Spanish, and some translators of Bulgakov into English have left out the Soviet-era referents.

James: I think I’ll answer this one. There is a strain in Soviet-era work which revels in localia, in specific particularly satirical details, but the best stuff overcomes this, and may even make a virtue of the obscurity and obfuscation out of which it was forced to grow. I’m thinking of scenes like for example the theatre show in The Master and Margarita, where the fairy gold conjured up by the devil transforms into illegal foreign currency. But Soviet debates about currency speculation are a background to this scene rather than its main point, and Bulgakov can be read with great pleasure even by people with no knowledge of the context. Or else, knowing just how virulent anti-religious propaganda was in the Soviet Union helps you see how transgressive as well as original Bulgakov was being in his retelling of the story of the Crucifixion, but it’s not something you absolutely need to know. There is a great deal of what the critic Lev Losev called ‘Aesopian language’ in Soviet literature, but it is a common element to Russian literature in general: writing which tries to speak between the lines, past the censor, to a public better-skilled at exegesis. Lots of this is, yes, untranslatable, but also a lot of it is of minor importance, reinforcing the already-visible main thrust of the work. One writer whom I would be scared to translate is Andrei Platonov, for whom absolute ambiguity is a fundamental creative principle, but luckily the translations into English, largely by Robert Chandler, are amazingly good.

When faced with a choice between fidelity and sense for a modern reader, which way do you go?

James: Sense. There is a lot to be said for interpretative translation. On a basic level, when a character says ‘On a clear day, you can see for twenty versts’, I find it generally makes more sense to me to have him say ‘On a clear day, you can see for a dozen miles [or even just ‘miles’]’ rather than give a footnote to explain what a verst is or else say ‘On a clear day, you can see for 13.2 miles’.

Marian: Sense, absolutely. Although verst is an interesting example to have chosen: Spaniards are used to the term, and it is even accepted by the Real Academia, the Spanish institution concerned with the ‘purity’ of the language, so for translations into Spanish we can actually leave it as it is.

Did you have a personal connection or commitment to any story or stories in particular that you translated for the Big Book of SF?

James: As publishers in Spain, we have brought out a book by the Strugatsky brothers, and are going to publish another hopefully next year, so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to do some of their work into English.

Marian: I am personally very fond of Silvina Ocampo’s work, and would love to see more of her stories translated.

Were there any surprises during the translation process for Big Book of SF?

James: I didn’t know anything about Sever Gansovsky before translating his story ‘Day of Wrath’, and he is a major discovery. The story itself is wonderful: astonishingly nihilistic for a Soviet-era writer, and very visual in its description of a Winter’s Bone-style backwoods Russian countryside that hasn’t had enough focus in Russian literature in general. And I’ve gone on to read a lot more by him, and he holds up very well. Worth translating more of; worth telling the world about.

Marian: I have to agree with James. And from the perspective of a small press publisher which started specializing in Russian, I have become aware of some amazing Russian SF authors I hadn’t previously read. Russian SF, and Russian literature in general, never ceases to amaze me; you are discovering new things every day.

Are there any personal favorites not yet translated into English that you would love to see in some future anthology?

James: On the Russian side of things, there are a number of contemporary writers whom I think are worth anthologizing. To name just one, Dmitri Kolodan is a fantastic young author: his novella Time of the Jabberwock is an inspired retelling of the tropes of Carroll’s Alice in a very different context.

Marian: I will give a Spanish example, if I may. Perhaps I’m being biased, because she’s one of our authors (and, full disclosure, a good friend), but I certainly think there is no one writing as well and with such variety nowadays as Sofía Rhei. Her output is breathtaking, from poetry to children’s writing, to speculative fiction and fantasy stories which explore her interests in linguistics and meta-literature, to adult fantasy novels, and the breath of her creativity is immense. I am quietly sitting in a corner waiting for the explosion to come, when everyone realizes that she is a genius.

In your role as publishers, writers, and translators, can you explore for me what you think the future of science fiction holds? How will SF be different in ten years?

James: Very briefly: publishers are getting more interested in writing from outside a straightforward Anglophone market; more books originally written in languages other than English are being noticed; translators are stepping up to the plate in what has been seen as their secondary job—but which might in the long run turn out to be the more vital side of their work—of suggesting to publishers authors who might be interesting. The difference will come from globalization, books that are reports from the frontline rather than armchair tourism.

Marian: From a Spanish perspective, the major change that we are seeing is that women are started to be more visible than before. It is still a struggle to get women in this cultural space—the recent nominations for the Ignotus Awards, a major Spanish SFF and horror prize, didn’t have a great number of women; but the general consensus was that there were ‘a few more’ than the previous year, so we are progressing, but it’s still a very steep mountain to climb. It is still difficult to convince a Spanish reader to pick a book by a woman, even if she’s had twenty five-star reviews. I can see that the tide is slowly turning, and I’m sure than in a decade female voices will be ‘mainstreamed’, but I’m not sure it’s happened yet. Not talking now in particular about female voices, but picking up on James’s answer, SF will change dramatically when new practitioners are exposed to diverse voices in general as a normal thing, and can count them as members of their own influential ‘canon’. It will be wonderful to see.

The post Translating Strange Science Fiction: An Interview with Marian and James Womack appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit^[1]

Looking through the threshold of the front room, his wife’s bedroom now, he caught a glimpse of her gigantic silhouette. The swollen pregnant belly seemed about to explode. The mountain of flesh, hidden under a knitted bedspread, lifted and sank, lifted and sank, to the faltering rhythm of her breathing.

He put the kettle on and ran upstairs. He took his time shaving, allowing the blade to flick water at the mirror with a dull spatter. He rinsed it and towelled his face dry before heading downstairs; the kettle was whistling. In the kitchen, the stagnant air of last night’s work met him, heavy and sickly-sweet. On the counter sat the fruits of his labours: six jars of shining golden marmalade. He held one of them up to the light. It did not move. The liquid had set. He allowed himself a slight smile of relief.

After cutting two slices of bread and rubbing them with tarragon he breakfasted standing up, sipping at his hot tea. It was the day of the barter market, or rather the day the militia turned a blind eye to non-official transactions, which was the same thing. He looked at the marmalade and ate hurriedly, worrying that he’d miss the best offers.

He liked getting to the market when they were still setting up the stalls, putting together planks and wooden boxes protected by rusty metal frames and oilcloth. He would look at everything. Only then would he decide where to trade, and with whom.

The map on the kitchen wall was a stain of purples and reds, drawn on top of the furrows of the canal system and the river. The river was a curve that surrounded the city from the north, squeezed it, hugged it like a drowning lover. The river was the danger. The purple patches showed the areas that had been flooded in the last two years; the red dots marked possible danger zones. He felt a stab of pain in his chest, but this was now a more diffuse hurt, not like the sharp needle of months back.

It was with a mixture of apprehension and defiance that he had started to study the river. Grief for what had happened with his wife’s last pregnancy, alongside a furious certainty that he would not let it happen again. He forced himself to take another sip of tea, which burnt his tongue and tasted mouldy. The most important thing was to continue with those small gestures, the little familiar things. Shave every morning. Sip a comforting cup of something resembling tea.

The noise from the back garden took him to the window. He allowed himself to imagine fox cubs, leverets. He hadn’t seen any for ages. But neither had he lost hope that they would reappear, and he continued greasing and recalibrating the traps which he had set several months ago.

The garden was a muddy square, abandoned and haggard. Guilt squeezed his chest again. He couldn’t do anything about this, not yet. His wife had looked after the garden. That’s how it had always been.

What he saw was a woman bent over a sort of gigantic bramble of aromatic herbs, grown up all by itself after the garden had been left to rot. She was wearing a brown cotton tunic, army boots, and her hair was dyed blue. Several amulets were clinking round her neck, little jars of cures for almost all illnesses. The woman stood up slowly, sniffed at the herbs she had just gathered, and turned to walk towards the back door. She entered the kitchen, and directed her steps to where the kettle still was steaming.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning.’

The woman moved round the room as if she were walking round her own house. Without hesitating, she opened the little cupboard where the cups and saucers and teapots were kept, washed the herbs at the sink, smashed them into a one-person teapot, and poured hot water on top of them.

He watched her without saying anything.

The doula had been with them for almost four months, during which time he had been able to go to work every morning feeling the pain in his chest relax a little.

‘It’s the barter market today,’ the doula said.

‘That’s right. And I need to pay you for the week.’

He held a jar of marmalade out to the woman. She frowned.

‘Is that real marmalade?’

‘Yes.’

‘From real oranges?’

The man nodded.

‘It’s not synthetic?’

‘Can’t you smell it?’ he said, waving vaguely at the air in the kitchen. The doula shrugged.

‘I don’t remember how anything smells any more.’

He couldn’t stop his lips curling up a little. The doula was still young, childbearing age. He felt the guilty pang all of a sudden and composed his face. The woman accepted the jar, still disbelieving.

‘This would be enough for the whole month.’

‘It’s for a week.’

‘But…’

‘I insist.’

The woman stroked the jar.

‘In the black market…’

‘I’m going to be late,’ he said.

Before he left the house, he went through into the front bedroom.

***

It took ten minutes by bicycle to reach the market square. He had to add in five more for the morning river inspection. He decided to push himself, to get this time down to thirteen or even twelve minutes. He took Ferry Path at full speed and came up onto the Fort St George, stopping in the middle of the small bridge. The bicycle halted with a slight jingle from the jars of marmalade in the wooden box on the back.

What came down the river was a vague brown stain of liquid mud, which brought to mind the thick blood of an enormous animal. The opaque water led to only one conclusion: the river was rising. He took a deep breath, considering the dark current that pushed the river onwards.

It would be impossible to imagine another outcome than the eventual flooding; he knew the signs. The mud-lie water was punctuated by rubbish, stems and stalks, branches, trash, clothes, cardboard—all from who knows where—that floated on the bright oily surface, showing where the accursed water was flowing, and how fast.

If he shut his eyes he could still see the bundle of stained towels falling from that same railing a year ago; he could even hear the phantom cry of a newborn baby. He forced his mind to compose a different image: at the last moment the child had taken flight, had headed up to a clean blue sky.

The cold snapped him back to reality: a sky filled with storm clouds, eternally tainted as a blackboard, bruised and sick, hanging over them like a stone, and an air so thin and cruel that it had turned everything into a lifeless swamp.

***

After leaving his bicycle in the patch that served as a parking lot he crossed the deserted street in the direction of the market. The proceedings were only just coming to life. He went past the stalls, looking at the goods still packed in their boxes, the pedal-powered carts, the eel-baskets. He rummaged among the bicycle spare parts, and the woollens, all in that characteristic indeterminate drab colour that years of use had given them. He noticed sadly that there was hardly any food. Almost no one traded the food from their own gardens any more.

A group at one of the corner posts excited his curiosity. The larger the number of customers, the more likely it was that there would be something to eat. His instinct was right. They were selling eatables. At a distance he could see ducks and coots hanging from a rope, covered in tar to preserve them. As best he could he made his way through the crush, until he got to the side of an old man who was staring open-mouthed at the goods on offer. He stood stock still, and almost dropped the box with the jars of marmalade.

In a large metal washtub, the stallholder had five or six giant swallowtail butterflies, huge and tarnished yellow-brown, each with a blue eye on its wing, unusual spots for this species, or at least that’s how it appeared to his expert gaze. He calculated that each butterfly must measure more than twenty inches across. And they were fresh, no doubt about that. Fresh but frayed. The bottom of the washtub was a muddy pit of water and earth and the remains of those bright wings, ruined by death and by the hunt. Those broken wings were beautiful: the deep blue eyespots, which seemed to be staring straight at him, were nothing more than a chance discrepancy, but they almost provoked the old familiar pain in the pit of his stomach, mixed with some other emotion he could not recognise.

‘Orange dogs! Orange dogs! Ducks, coots!’ cried the stallholder.

‘Where did you get them?’ he found himself asking. There had not been butterflies like these for several years: he had only seen dissected specimens.

‘They’re not mine, I didn’t catch them. I’m only selling.’

‘It’s very important that you tell me, I need to know,’ he insisted. The man lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender.

‘Mate… I only sell them. I don’t know anything else.’

He managed to convince himself that his interest had been purely professional, and he walked away from the stall, from time to time turning back to look at it, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he had just seen. The old man he had been standing next to was following him with his eyes.

***

The morning went by much as expected. In exchange for his jars he got supplies and parts to fix the door of the wood-burning stove in his kitchen. But the biggest prize was the medical supplies that the preserves had managed to win him. When he only had one jar left, the old man came up to him.

‘Excuse me… Is that real marmalade?’

‘Yes,’ he muttered. He was exhausted, and only wanted to leave. His eyes kept on wandering to the insect stall. ‘Do you want to make a trade?’

‘I haven’t seen marmalade since I was a kid… Much less eaten it. May I ask how…?’

‘I work in the Old University Natural History Museum. We have a pass to go to London twice a year, to the National Museum.’ He didn’t normally explain so much about his life, but he only wanted the old man to shut up. ‘Do you want to trade or don’t you?’

The man’s face clouded over. His little eyes were the only things that still shone, reflecting this liquid gold.

‘I don’t have anything.’

‘Goodbye, then.’

But as he was turning to go, the old man said: ‘The only thing I can offer you is information, perhaps something you want to hear.’

Had he heard right? Information? Who was this man, and what did he know about him? What did he know about his wife and his dead son?

‘What the hell are you trying to say’’

‘The butterflies…’

Everything clicked.

‘I know where they’ve got a nest.’

The old man was trying to string him along, for sure.

‘Listen, my job is studying the Papilionidae… I know they don’t live in nests. So you can get lost.’

‘These ones do,’ the old man said.

He realised that he was in fact intrigued.

‘All right. Okay. I’ll give you my last jar in exchange for whatever it is you want to tell me.’

The old man smiled like a child.

‘But I must warn you that if you’re lying to me then I’ll denounce you to the militia. I am a third rank specialist worker, and they will listen to me.’

This was just a bluff. His rank had been no use at all when she needed medical assistance. They hadn’t even deigned to come and pick up his son’s body after the child had been stillborn in the sixth month, so he didn’t know if what he was saying was true or not. But the old man seemed to believe him. They walked off to an alleyway, and made their exchange, a fairly common exchange, all in all: information for food.

***

He cycled furiously. In the early dusk, the water was as dark as the sky, and shone with spectral glints.

After a time he realised the impossibility. The disused lock the old man had spoken of was several miles away, and night was falling. He would have to try again tomorrow.

He turned round and went home, following the river, which kept twisting and twisting, and he was incapable of making himself look to see if the water had covered the greenish marks of its last high point.

***

After his careful additions, the map looked the next morning like a grotesque purple and red stain.

If his predictions were correct, then the floods could be worse than in previous years. He wondered if anyone else had spent the last few months watching the water, making calculations on a plan of the town. It was clear that the authorities had not foreseen the consequences of a possible new rise in the water level. There had been no official announcements, or advice about what to do in that case; the people were once again abandoned to their fate.

He spent the first part of the morning examining the map. Bates Lock was quite a long way for him to go and come back after work. It was not uncommon for night to come upon him while he was in the museum, cataloguing specimens or inspecting exhibits.

Just as he was about to leave, the doula asked to speak to him.

‘You have to be ready,’ she said. ‘It could be any day now.’

He looked straight at her for a few seconds; he wanted to thank her. To tell her that they wouldn’t be where they were without her. But he froze. His tongue felt dry and scratchy inside his mouth.

‘Thank you,’ he managed after the woman had already left the kitchen.

He left the house and got onto his bicycle, but he did not start pedalling. Something stopped him. His mind was a blank, he couldn’t think about anything, couldn’t decide anything.

Bates Lock floated in his head.

Then he had an idea. He would ask one of his neighbours’ children to come over the bridge into the centre of town to find him if anything happened, if she went into labour, he forced himself to think, strangely aware of the meaning of the words. Only then was he ready to go.

***

While crossing the Fort St George Bridge he went over in his mind the route to the lock that he had memorised. He did so compulsively, trying to push aside his fear of that thing, the other thing, that was about to happen. In the leaden sky a flock of geese circled, a ragged “V” with no apparent direction, stunted and lost, spiralling in its vague escape to nowhere.

***

He reached the museum in less than twenty minutes, his best time yet. Thanks to his job there he had not lost his house, and had even managed to garner certain privileges: some food, warmth during the winter, access to certain books. The biannual trips to the capital. Who knew how, but it was a place where strange food managed to appear, memories of a memory, things whose taste and smell no one remembered clearly.

The group he was working for was trying to throw a little light on the reasons why, after their appearance on the island formerly known as England, the papilio cresphontes had developed certain unusual habits, some of them violent, for example the males eating the females, and occasionally even the larvae. This had been a key to the early disappearance of the insects. Some of them had developed a strange venom, and it was believed that the unusual colours in the eyespots was a warning of its presence. Shortly after their appearance they had given themselves over to hunting smaller creatures, such as field mice and even on occasion baby hares, flying away with their prey immobilised. It was believed that the venom the group he was working for was trying to track down served this purpose.

These were no more than hypotheses. After the irreplaceable loss of most of the books, of the computer communication system, of the telephones, of almost everything that had provided information and facilitated scientific exchange, they knew almost nothing, and that was the truth. They had to start again from the beginning, to examine this new world. This was his obligation, the important job that survivors like him had to carry out.

His access to books was very limited, but he knew German, and most surviving treatises on butterflies were by mere chance in this language. He only knew how to operate a small number of the heavy brass instruments, to turn the crank and adjust the microscope lenses, to fill the little stoves with coal and wood, to filter the water for the distillations. His job was important but not irreplaceable. But he felt it as his duty to find the lock. It was vitally important, if a small population of Papilionidae had established itself in the county, that they had access to it.

What he didn’t stop to consider was why he felt disinclined to share the knowledge of the nest with anyone in the museum.

The papilio cresphontes—commonly called ‘orange dogs’—had disappeared in the same sudden fashion that they had appeared in the records. The annals recorded their arrival as being after the first great flood. A large part of the town had been submerged. The canals where the students had punted, with their straw hats and their picnic baskets, their books of poetry or mathematics, had overflowed. The colleges of the university bore the brunt of the furious water which finished off the destruction of all their treasures, a destruction that had been started by the months-long freeze, unexpected and murderous, which had preceded the waters. The world’s most expensive wines were drowned in the college cellars, and the large kitchens and dining rooms and studies lost their impressive beauty under the force of the silt. Whole libraries of incunabulae were lost. The whole town was flooded, Jesus Green, Mill Lane, the Backs, like a less luminous Venice in its death throes.

But the water was not exactly hell, that was still to come. For after the flood had come the summer, the long-awaited summer. The first of the hottest summers ever recorded. Fifteen fateful years of suffocating heat, damp, mosquitoes, monstrous and terrifying greenery. The flood had surpassed all expectations, but in the end the water had been sucked up in some form by the earth, risen in order to fall back down again, drop by drop, only to be spat out and multiplied in the form of a swampish miasma under the survivors’ feet, after which the ground had exploded into an impossible jungle where all kinds of unknown flora had sprung into life, bringing the strange fauna along with it. The town had transformed itself into the unexpected home of parrots and parakeets, the river the cradle for swarms of mosquitoes so dense that they sometimes covered whole houses.

And then came the giant insects, like dark angels who had climbed up from hell by mistake. The centipedes, the caterpillars, and the moths and the butterflies, huge and ugly, brightly coloured, pot-bellied. The forms and shapes of the eyespots on their wings were not recognisable as those of any catalogued species.

That late and lengthy summer had not been a period of truce for the exhausted human race. Even after the waters went down there was less to eat. The unexpected heat led to old diseases, which had been cured generations ago, and returned now to decimate the population.

And then came the eternal autumn, in which he had been born. They ploughed the fields once more, they reverted to the old wisdoms. But it was too late, many people thought.

The butterflies disappeared then almost entirely, the caterpillars buried themselves in the earth so as never to come out again.

***

He had been bluffing with the old man. The sanitation patrols never came round now, not even to register a death. They only let themselves be seen, descending from their bumblebee helicopters in masks and white jumpsuits, when there was a suspicion of cannibalism. This was something that they were determined to stamp out root and branch, vanishing suspects with them up into the sky. No one came when his wife went into early labour, not even the doula could cross the river to help them, because that year it had risen more than ever.

It had been his fault as well, he knew that much.

He had not paid attention to the signs.

The sunflower field, the one he could see in the distance from his office at the museum, completely submerged, the heads of the flowers the only visible things above the grey water. The coots walking into the middle of Jesus Green, leaving their watery nests, making themselves easy to catch.

He did not want to think about his guilt. But she had not abandoned the garden, had carried potatoes and parsnips, her belly sticking out, proud of the activity she could still perform. That’s how she had been until almost the sixth month, until the day she started to bleed.

He had to help with the birth himself, had to carry out that horrendous task. The river had broken its banks as well, had flooded Jesus Green, had flooded Midsummer Common, had almost reached his house. His wife had not stopped bleeding until the doula arrived, but she had survived, a miracle. If he had helped stop her haemorrhage then he had no recollection of how he had done so. The baby had not been so lucky. He remembered it as a liquid mass of unmoving flesh and blood. The doula had told him that it would not survive, that he should bury the bundle before the mother woke up. Had she said he was dead? He simply was not sure.

***

Recently he had started to remember those horrid hours differently, seeing the child’s eyes in his mind; a cruel joke of his exhausted brain, for the little thing never opened them. He could still feel the little chilled body, and the doula insisting that he bury it in the garden, almost opening the back door and pushing him into the inhospitable outside. He stood there for a while, a bundle of bloody towels in his hands, and started to walk somewhere.

***

Those memories might have been invented, tainted by the shadowy twilight that hung above them, or by the thick fog that rolled up often from the river, conquering the world. It was easy to call up strange memories when the fog came upon you at the riverside, it was easy to get disoriented. Everything, his memories and his daily life, seemed changed by that shadowy unreality.

***

He decided to go home. He could not allow it to happen again, it would not happen again. By now he understood the signs better, and realised that the city would flood again in a few hours. He could see lightning far away, a vast electrical storm, oddly silent in the distance, and realised that this was the last warning, that soon after the storm reached them and burnt itself out, everything would once again be covered under the stain of black water.

***

The birth happened that afternoon, and it was much quicker than the first time. A few hours of pain, and then everything seemed to take place in ten minutes: a few pushes, the doula shouting instructions and cheering her along, and soon he was holding in his arms a boy, purple with the effort of the labour, long and apparently perfect, and, most importantly, alive. His wife rested under the doula’s close watch, and the baby slept alongside her.

That night he stole a couple of hours of sleep away from his constant fear. His dreams were troubled, filled with water. The baby had little electric blue eyes. It’s too soon to tell, the dream-doula said, but he looks like he’ll have his mother’s eyes.

In the dream his wife died, and he sat up for her wake, feeling lost and alone.

He woke up with his heart filled with grief, into the comfort of the real world, realising that everything was fine, that they both were fine.

His dream had been very different. He had been aware that she was dead because of the way her face had changed, becoming dry and powdery as parchment. People who died only needed a few hours to gain this uncertain texture of fragility in their skin, falling back against their bones so that the dead person resembled a human skeleton, like the ones they had in the museum.

There was a moment when he felt a new tremor run through his soul.

He went to the front room and entered without making any noise, to lean over his wife. Her skin was glowing, and the child’s was as well, and both of them were moving slowly to the deliberate rhythm of their breathing.

***

It was then that he knew. The bundle that was his son a year ago had not dried out either, his skin had not become the parchment-like texture.

This was a fact; at last he had found one.

He sat at the foot of the bed for a few moments, and cried in silence.

***

It took him all his strength of will to go out without making any noise, shutting the front door carefully. The sky was an endless black stain. He got on his bike and rode down the street.

***

If it is difficult to measure distances in the dark, then in the unreal eternal twilight it is almost impossible. The canals spread out before him, apparently endless. When he reached the lock he would not have been able to say how long he had been riding for, or how long it had been since he left his wife and son in the distant town.

The light after the storm spilled ghostly onto the canal. Maybe it was the tiredness he felt, the tiredness that weighed in his eyes and swelled his brain, but he could not say if it was day or night.

The lock was closed, abandoned. The sign that said ‘No Bathing Allowed’ still hung on one of the walls of the lockkeeper’s hut, its red letters bleeding rust and mould. On the horizon a late bolt of lightning shone out. A few distant groans, and the unexpected howl of some living creature broke through to reality.

He would not have been able to bury the bundle that afternoon, just a year ago, a brief dozen months, which he remembered as distant as if it had taken place a decade back.

What had happened was different: night had fallen when he found that his footsteps had taken him to the Fort St George Bridge. He watched the river for a while as it nearly rubbed against the bridge, even after going down for a day. The water seemed as dark to him as the sky. He balanced the bundle against the rails, and just when he decided that he was going to go home to bury it, the bundle slipped from his trembling hands. And then he thought he heard the child make some kind of sound, no doubt another sick joke on the part of his mind; this was too cruel to be true. Whatever had happened, it was now too late, as the bundle sank with a dull noise.

Looking down he saw nothing. He went to the other side, following the current, but didn’t see the bundle pass under the bridge. It must have gone into the deepest part of the water.

Just then he saw that winged creature flying up, carrying something whitish and stained. What the creature then let drop from the sky were his towels, and in the uncertain twilight he could have sworn that it was a gigantic butterfly, one that had not been seen for years, flying ochre and leaden into the dusk, carrying his dead unshrouded son like the spoil of a monstrous bird of prey. This, and no other, was the memory that had followed him all that year.

***

He considered the lock —a rectangle filled up almost halfway with stagnant water, with all kinds of natural and artificial rubbish floating on top.

He thought it must be deceptively easy to drown in a lock.

There was no doubt that he was in the right place. He could hear clearly a papilio’s wings moving. But he couldn’t see where the creature was. He cranked his lantern’s handle, which would maintain the light for the time being. That’s when he saw it, a square hole, artificially made to repair some of the lock’s mechanism, in the side. He threw himself into the water.

It was only then that he understood how dirty the water was. His arms and his head got instantly covered in a dark oily liquid, whatever it was that the water had transformed itself into over the decades, stock still like a dead sea. He did not waste much time in thinking. As well as he could he pushed his way through the tins and the beams and the branches, and reached the spot where the square hole was; he held on with both hands and lifted himself up. He managed to get half his body in, only his legs still hanging out.

He heard the murmur—birds, bats? Butterflies. Papilios. Orange dogs. All of them with the same unusual electric blue stains in the wings, so similar to his wife’s wide open eyes as she pushed and pushed to let their child into the world.

Nothing there of course. He thought he could hear a child whimpering at the end of a large tunnel, and tried to crawl towards the sound. But he could not move. Then the butterfly came out in his direction.

The largest one he had ever seen.

Obviously not a child. Nothing human could moan like that. This made him relax a little. What exactly was he looking for there? What had he hoped to find? His overwrought mind could only hint at the reply to that question.

Another noise broke upon him — the unmistakeable and deafening racket of furious water. The lock would soon flood, killing off those creatures. Killing him as well, if he did not get moving. He chose life, surprising even himself.

Once again he came out to the stagnant water. He looked for the steps cut into the stone, intended to help anyone climb up the canal’s artificial bank, but he slipped and sank. Water filled his lungs. He tasted it avidly as the water soaked into him. This was the end. With a superhuman effort, he moved his arms and found himself beating against the wall. This time he climbed the steps on fingertips, clawing the life out of the stone itself. Without knowing how, he managed to give himself a push and got a foot onto the bottom step. Climbing up was easier than he had thought. He found himself next to the canal, sprawled on the ground, covered in dark mud and spitting out that black water which he had found so sweet a minute ago. He tried to sit up then, but something pushed him back, making him bite the earth. He turned over.

Then he saw them. Spat out of the hole. A swarm of papilios that went following their queen, escaping from whatever it was that had made them grow in such a supernatural way, escaping from the rising waters that would soon have drowned them.

He got on his bicycle and pedalled away as quickly as he could, more quickly than he had ever pedalled before in his life, in the opposite direction, against the current, back to his wife, back to his newborn son, back home.

____

[1] They warn that they are poisonous, from a German treatise on butterflies.

The post Orange Dogs appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The following story originally appeared on Palabras Errantes. Visit the Palabras Errantes page where you can also read the original version in Spanish.

***

A, of the many entrances: its walls are made of doors and the inhabitants all have a window to the front – whether painted or not we do not know.

B, which is mounted on vast wooden platforms and pulled back and forth across the plain by beasts of burden.

C, whose scholars have learned how to control light: citizens can dress in white and shine like a supernova, blend with the shadows on the darkest night, or be a rainbow.

D: the dazzling, the devastated, the divided, the darkling, the durable, the desperate or, more likely, the disappeared.

I

Horatius Kustos came in search of “the famous Latin Cities”. We welcomed him at the town’s only lodgings. I say we, because someone had to go with Septimus, my brother. He is the mayor, following family tradition dating back to the tenth century, but we only chose him and nominated him because he is shy and always avoids getting involved with or indeed speaking to anyone.

As a result, I took charge of the conversation. We sat at the table where Grandma Flavia used to sit until last year, that is until she fell into the ditch and broke her neck: her long-suffering face gazed out at us from the portrait of her that Valerius, the innkeeper, had framed and hung on the wall following the accident. We all knew that the two had been – vainly – in love since the sixties but since they had never even kissed (Grandma’s various guards all agree on this) the family honour was never in doubt and no action was taken against him. Septimus looked at the portrait in order not to look Horatius Kustos in the eye.

Now, I have made enquiries and am given to understand that Kustos – who is thin, and wears a beard and a nervous air – usually presents himself just as he did with us: as an explorer or investigator, a man dedicated to finding and recording the strange, bizarre, and unusual, in order to tell others about it.

“I have been in Mexico and Ulan Bator, in Hollywood and Shangri-La (which is not at all what they say it is, but never mind), and everywhere I have discovered something new, and returned with tales to tell.”

All I could think was that this must be the most absurd job there is, and I told him so. He began to explain something about the value of his discoveries, but I paid no attention.

Then, instead of shutting up, Kustos started going on about the mystery (as he called it) of the Latin Cities, which obviously are thousands of miles away from Italy, and which nobody admits to having visited. In these cities, Latin is spoken, “though it is a dead language, at least in the rest of the world”, and their names all begin with a single letter.

“Every time I found out a bit more information about them, I had the same thought: what must such places be like?”

***

The brothel city of E is so called by consensus of its governing factions: they first considered Ecstasy, Erotica, Eden.

In the city of F, all the names – of people, places, objects – are random strings of numbers and letters: formulas (hence the name) that only the gods know how to decipher.

G (they say) would be the city of the gophers (the animals or the messengers), who would govern without the grandees of the great houses and the government buildings realizing.

The city of H has just one inhabitant, whom no one has ever seen or heard: it is said he exists because he “throws rubbish or furniture at visitors” from the roofs of empty buildings.

II

“The tales of these cities are as laconic as they come. They look like they were written by an aphorist. I saw them for the first time on the internet…”

I told him that we don’t have those kind of devices here. That we are a conservative community and proud of it.

“What devices?” he answered. “Well, anyway. I’m used to finding myself in far-away or little-known places but this, I thought, is absurd. It’s not possible that there is nothing but these brief texts. So I said to myself: I have to go.”

Outside of the inn, the children from the One School were performing their daily exercises, marching first from north to south in a phalanx formation, and then from south to north in a legion formation (naturally, these were scaled-down formations, since we don’t have the thousands of children required to create a phalanx or legion like those of ancient times).

It has always moved me to see the tall crests on the helmets and the steel-tipped spears. This time I felt more overwhelmed than ever by the memory of my own pitched battles, the cries of victory, the firmness of the military calls, the smell of blood. Distracted by these recollections I was unable to interrupt Kustos, who carried on talking:

“Curiously enough, as well as the lack of available information, there was the fact that a strange group of cities seemed of no surprise to anyone in the circles I move in. That is, none of my colleagues displayed much interest when I asked them if they knew anything about the matter. Cities like these are nothing special, they told me. Still, I couldn’t take my mind off them. There is something different about them, I thought. And well, it is true: to start with, I am talking to you in Latin…”

“Not very well”, I told him, because his declinations were terrible.

“Is there somewhere that offers Latin classes for foreigners? It would be a great experience. I love language classes and I’m no poor student: as well as the usual languages I know Esperanto, Volapük, Arahuá, Tokipona, Tasmanian, Xulsolar, Bora-witoto…

***

I is, in fact, a very tall tower: each inhabitant resides on a floor measuring two metres square, which they must leave with great care if they want to make a visit.

J is a city with streets that curve like knives, where so many die. No one knows if the streets came before the murders, or if, on the contrary, the murderers refined their habitat over the centuries.

Every new-born baby in K is taken to the Registry Office where a judge puts on the record the secret cause of their arrest when they grow up.

L takes its name from the appearance from a distance of the city’s sole construction, the Wall, and of the Eleanos who live in its shadow.

III

“Here there are no schools for foreigners”, I said. “The fact is, and please don’t be offended, we don’t like them.”

At this point Septimus said something inaudible. He is incapable of speaking above a murmur (another reason why he is an excellent mayor: my brothers and I, I must admit, add to the arrogance and egoism of the family with our tendency to argue out loud, and we can’t tolerate anyone interfering in our discussions or affairs).

“What did you say?” Kustos asked him.

“Talk properly,” I told him.

It took us a while to understand him, however: the second time Septimus spoke even lower, the third he turned red and couldn’t even open his mouth, and so it went on for ten or twelve attempts. He has never been able to express himself normally. When we were at the School we studied physics for several years, and we took to calling Septimus “The Suspended Particle”.

I had to threaten him, saying I would get our cousin Plautus (now our chief of police) to beat him up, as he did almost every day when we were young. Septimus rarely says anything interesting, but Kustos seemed to have taken an interest in him… and, even though I was not particularly interested in Kustos, the rules of hospitality among our people have existed since the Circasian-Melanesian Invasion, and they have not been changed by the plagues of 900, 1324, 1558, 1789, 1925, 1977 or 2004, or the Edgarian Uprising, or the invasions from the outside world we have suffered since before all this. I won’t be the one to fail to follow the rules that have empowered my family, may Jupiter and God deliver me.

“So if you’re going to behave like a faggot or a pussy”, I yelled at him while I grabbed his shirt – though at bottom I was being quite kind to him – “and you’re not going to express yourself like a man…”

“I said”, Septimus whispered at last in an intelligible manner, his face red and swollen, “don’t be so rude to our guest.”

I felt my own face swell and turn red.

“What’s more”, Septimus continued, “I think you should tell him the whole story.”

***

The founder of M, perpetrator of terrible crimes, gave his name to the city. It will be a refuge for others, he said, where they can live in peace and follow their dreams.

M, the city of constant screaming.

No one knows if the city of N really exists or if it is perhaps a different city with a different name, but in disguise.

The city of Ñ isn’t where they say it is: at such-and-such a distance down such-and-such a road. Some believe it doesn’t actually exist. Others, that only its inhabitants exist and only recognize each other by the language they speak.

The city of O is populated, naturally, by fat and thin people: what unites them is their circular lives, which they begin and end as babies.

IV

“So there is a story too!” Kustos cried joyfully, and his poor Latin sounded to me like the voice of Hannibal at the gates.

I began to yell even louder, criticizing Septimus’ indiscretion. Then I gave him a good shake, dragging him from one side of the room to the other and knocking everything out the way. Three boys emerged from the next room and started cheering me on: it was Donte, Natalius and Justinus, grandsons of the innkeeper, who only stroked his beard and the few hairs remaining to him.

After a moment I recalled the rules of hospitality among our people, which have existed since the Circasian-Melanesian Invasion, etcetera, and I let go of Septimus. Kustos came to help him to his feet. His manner was so solicitous that something very strange occurred to me: that my brother actually inspired pity in him. I asked myself if this might be a general characteristic of Kustos’s countrymen (I don’t know where he is from; it appears no one knows) or an affectation peculiar to him. And to think that his name is of Greek origin!

Valerius the innkeeper brought a first aid kit (and Kustos used the word kit, in the barbarian tongue!) to treat a couple of minor scratches Septimus had suffered.

“Doesn’t being mayor mean I should get treated with a bit of respect?”

What an absurd question, I thought, but what he said next – in a weak voice but clearer than ever before – surprised me still further:

“I only accepted because I’m fond of you all. I didn’t expect you to treat me the way you do. I had other ambitions in life, you know?”

What lay at the bottom of such complaints? When had he ever received anything but affection from the whole family, despite who he was? Septimus did not continue because Kustos was finishing a couple of stitches his wound had required, so I took the opportunity to say:

“Since my brother can’t hold his tongue and since it is neither here nor there whether you know about these matters…”

And so Kustos understood that we would tell him more:

“The first thing I need to know is how you came to be here. You are closer to Kuchisake-onna than to Paraxiphos. Did you emigrate from Europe? Did you learn Latin from people who came from there? Did you wipe yourselves off the maps or were you never on them? I refer, of course to the… “official” maps, that is… those used in the “known” world… If you know what I mean?”

***

P has different reputations: good (prizes) and bad (perversions). The Peeans refuse to reveal the truth behind their heavy doors.

Some call Q a superfluous city, built just because, and wholly dispensable. Its skies, its cafés and its nightmares are unique in the world.

Other cities fear the people of R: they think of their red raiment, their rabid dogs, their raucous laughter, and their love of war.

Was the city of S founded by snakes, as they say? Instead of a central square they have a reptile house, which the people enter when old, never to emerge.

V

It was some time before Kustos tired of asking questions. What an insatiable character! I have never understood curiosity.

“We don’t know everything that you wish to learn”, Septimus began to reply, while Valerius cleared up the mess from my brief attack of annoyance and his grandsons served us wine, bread and cheese. I had signalled them not to serve the best, because that evening we had an event planned and we would be left short. “But there is more that you should know. Did you bring with you the information you read and that led you here?”

Horatius Kustos opened his traveller’s knapsack – of poor-quality but strong leather – and took out a sheet of paper folded in four. He unfolded it and read.

“It is really so little!”

“In the internet everything tends to be this short.”

“Is the internet a place, then?” I interjected. “Didn’t you say it was a device?”

“It is a little more complicated than that?”

“Is it a beautiful place?” asked Septimus. “An interesting one?”

“We can talk about this later, I promise”, said Kustos, and smiled. His smile seemed forced. Septimus made a face that to this day I still don’t think I can describe and (I’m certain) winked at Kustos.

At the time I didn’t think much of all this, because I was still appalled by the course taken by this meeting (which should have been nothing but a formality) and naturally I had no inkling of what was soon to come.

“First of all”, said my brother, “you need to know something that this information does not say. Did you notice that all these cities begin with a letter of the Latin alphabet?”

“Of course.”

“The classic, fundamental…”

“Except for the Ñ.”

“Yes, except for the Ñ, which is from a different language, if I am not mistaken”, said Septimus.

“Spanish”, I said. “A hybrid of Latin and some barbarian language or other.”

They paid no attention.

“The thing is”, said Septimus, “that Ñ also exists, but somewhere else: unlike the other cities, it is not to be found along the road to the south, the one you can see from here…”

“That should be my route?”

“Yes, but do not be distracted. Listen. Beyond the road to the south there are others. And there are other cities along the way. One is Ñ. Another is Ç.”

“Which one?” I said, and again they paid no attention.

“Ç?” said Kustos.

And others too, still more distant: Ŵ, Ĭ, Æ, many more. Several of them have their own collective name: they are called the Cities of St. Cyril…And further away still are the cities that arise from different systems of signs altogether. The Chinese Cities. The Japanese Cities. The Egyptian Cities. Do you understand, Horatius? This is the land of human writing, we might say, and it is vast. I don’t even know the farthest-off cities and, most likely, I can’t even imagine what they are like…”

***

T can only be reached by train and the service is designed to ensure no one arrives there. Those who do make it are despised, and called “Enlightened ones”.

From U it is only possible to return. What a mystery.

V has been having a party since the fifth century: no one now remembers what triumph is being celebrated. Everyone wears a paper cap except for the tourists.

W was constructed inside a cave: people awake to electric light and the howling of the creatures of the deep, which no one has ever seen.

VI

Not only did they continue talking long after that. Not only did they begin to exchange travellers’ tales of curious places from this and other regions, and to grow enormously enthusiastic about it all. Not only did Valerius and his grandsons leave off working at some point to listen to them.

But also:

“It is a fairly lengthy undertaking, then”, said Kustos. “Travelling the road to the south and all those beyond it. Seeing each and every one of the cities.”

“But it is a journey that is worth taking for someone like you, is it not?” said Septimus.

“Undoubtedly. It will keep me occupied for a long time.”

“It must be a great life you lead, right?” asked Septimus.

“Well…” began Kustos.

“It must be interesting”, Valerius added. “Plenty of opportunities for fun. A woman in every port, like a sailor…”

“Listen”, I said. Once again they paid me no attention.

“It has its ups and its downs”, said Kustos. “But I wouldn’t swap it for anything.”

“You are a curious figure”, said Septimus. “You seem moved by the desire to see the things you spoke to us of earlier. You seem to have no other purpose, that you could do nothing else. Have you met people like this on your travels? People who suddenly discover they do not wish to be where they are, that they want to go out into the world…”

He paused for a moment but then continued:

“If you had a guide to accompany you, who could put you on the right path as you head south…”

“That would be of great use to me.”

“When you are done will you return to the places you came from? Will you visit once again Mexico, Ulan Bator, Hollywood, Internet?”

“Internet is not a place”, said Kustos, very slowly. “Not like the others. But I can explain it to you later, if you like…”

By this point I had understood that I was missing something, but the anxiety about what it was annoyed me. I looked out the window towards the road, realized it was getting dark, and interrupted the conversation. Kustos had obtained all the information he needed to continue his journey, I said, and it would be best for him to stop wasting our time with idle, and perhaps even improper, questions.

“Although this town is much smaller than the Latin Cities, it is just as old: since it was founded it has been known as Comma. It is a modest name, but one not lacking in dignity… And you come here with your tales of other places to tell us that the whole world is greater than our own lands, and I only put up with you because of our laws of hospitality. It is plain to see that you have come with the malicious intention to sow dissent with these stories…

“What on Earth are you talking about, Theodorus?” Septimus interrupted.

I stopped short. I must admit I didn’t really know either and that made me angry. I told Valerius to find a room for Kustos and got up from the table. Septimus did likewise. I bad farewell and we left. Half an hour later we returned, since the party we had organized with our brothers, cousins and all the prostitutes of Full Stop was to be in the same inn. There was no sign of Kustos.

The next day, Septimus was missing. We waited for him at the town hall as usual, but he did not appear. Given we were all suffering from hangovers and didn’t arrive until after noon, we thought that perhaps Septimus was also feeling rough. However there was no sign of him all that afternoon and evening. We went to his house to look for him, but instead we found a letter from him in a sealed envelope. I will not cite it here.

Upon reading it we immediately ran to the inn, where Valerius told us that Horatius Kustos had made an early departure. For the road to the south, yes. With his knapsack and belongings, yes. In company, yes.

“He went on and on about these places with curious names”, Valerius said. “Internet and the others. And Kustos was smiling. The last thing I heard him say was that yes, he’d be glad to take him to one of them. When they returned.”

***

Some may find it strange, but X is the most famous of the monogrammatic cities. Tales of its variable towers and its Empty Square are ascribed to many other cities.

In Y, when someone chooses between two options he may opt for both at once. This causes the universe to bifurcate, at least in the vicinity of the city. Travellers who gaze upon it from afar describe the city – the collection of countless cities – as an immense and luminous tree.

Z lies at the edge of the Final Peninsula, before the Sea-that-Folds. Many people travel there to complete novels, or to die.

 [2013]

The post The Latin Cities appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.