• ONE •
In which a Man is baited by a Bear, and of
the precedents of this

OBSERVE—BUT NO! No one may observe, save the unfeeling Moon, who sails without progress through the clouds—a young Lord, who on the ramparts of his half-ruined habitation keeps a late watch. Wrapt in a Scotch mantle little different from that worn in all times by his ancestors—and not on the Scotch side alone—he has a light sword buckled on, a curved and bejewelled one not of this northern land's manufacture. He has two pocket pistols as well, made by Mantons—for this is a year in the present century, tho' what the youth may see in the moon's light is much as it has been for these past seven or eight. There is the old battlement that faces to the North, whereon he stands, whose stones he rests his hand upon. Beyond, he sees the stony cliff, bearded in gorse and heather, that builds toward the mountains, and—for his eye is preternaturally sharp—the thread of a track that for aye has ascended it. Black against the tumbled sky is the top of a farther watchtower, reached by that selfsame track. Farther on, in the darkness, lie a thousand acres of Caledonian wilds and habitations: to which this outwatching youth is heir. His name, the reader will perhaps not expect to hear, is Ali.

Against what enemy does he go armed? In truth he knows of none—not his servants asleep in the hall below—not bandits, or rivals of his clan and the Laird his father, such as might once have threatened from the dark.

The Laird his father! The reader will remember the man, if the reader be one who listens to tales in London theatre-boxes, or frequents race-courses, or hells; if he have haunted Supper-clubs, or places with less euphuistical names; known Courts, or Law-courts. John Porteous—who inherited, on the death of his own amazed and helpless sire, the singularly inappropriate title Lord Sane—was a catalogue of sins, not only the lesser ones of Lust and Gluttony but the greater ones of Pride, Anger and Envy. He wasted his own substance, and when it was gone wasted that of his wife and tenants, and then borrowed, or coerced, more from his terrified acquaintanceship, who knew well enough that the Lord would stint at nothing in revealing their own indiscretions, to which often as not he had tempted them in decades past. 'Black-mail' was a word he professed to shudder at: he never, he said, employed the mails. What he spent these gains upon, however got, seemed less of interest to him than the expenditure itself; he was always ready to tear down what he contrived to possess, just in the moment of possession. It was just such an outrageous act of destruction that had earned him the sobriquet, in a time that liked to bestow such, of 'Satan'. He was a wicked man, and he took a devilish delight in it—when he was not in his rage, or maddened by some obstacle to his desire; indeed a fine fellow, in his way, and of a large circle. He had travelled extensively, seen the Porte, walked beneath the Pyramids, sired (it was said without proof) litters of dark-skinned pups in various corners of the South and East.

Of late 'Satan' Porteous has kept much to his wife's Scotch estates, which he has improved and despoiled in equal measure. Onto the ancient towers and battlements and the ruined chapel a former Laird added a Palladian wing of great size and bleak aspect, ruining himself in the process; there the present Laird kept Lady Sane, well out of the fashionable world and indeed out of the world entire. She is rumoured to have gone mad, and as far as Lord Sane's heir knew of her, she is not all of sound mind. The lady's fortune 'Satan' ran through long before—then when he had need of funds, he squeezed his tenants, and sold the timber on his parks and grounds to be cut, which increased the melancholy sense of ruination there far more than did the windowless chapel open to the owl and the fox. The trees grew a hundred years; the money's already spent. He keeps a tame bear, and an American lynx, and he stands them by him when he calls his son before him.

Yes, it is he, his father, Lord Sane, of whom Ali is afraid, though the man is this night nowhere nearby—with his own eyes Ali saw his Lordship's coach depart for the South, four blacks pulling with all their strength as the coachman lashed them. Yet he is afraid, as afraid as he is brave; his very being seems to him but a candle-flame, and as easily put out.

The Moon was past midheaven when, shivering tho' not from cold, Ali retired. His great Newfoundland dog Warden lay by his bed, so fast asleep he hardly roused at his master's familiar tread. Oldest, and only true, friend! Ali pressed for a moment his face into the dog's neck. He then drank the last of a cup of wine, into which a minim of Kendals drops were dropt. Nevertheless he did not undress—only wrapt his mantle close about him, his pistols within reach—propped his watchful head upon cold pillows—and—believing he would not sleep—he slept.

In deep darkness he woke, feeling upon him a heavy hand. He was one quick to wake, and might have leapt up, taking up the pistol near at hand—but he did not—he lay as motionless as though still asleep, for the face that looked into his, tho' known to him, was not a man's. A black face, the eyes small and yellow, and the little light shone upon teeth as long as daggers. It was his father's tame bear, the hand upon him its hand!

Having ascertained that Ali was awake, the black beast turned away and trotted across the chamber floor. At the door, which stood ajar, it looked back at Ali, and what it would convey in its looking back was evident: it meant Ali to follow it.

The young Lord arose. What had become of his dog Warden? How came the door to be unbolted? The questions appeared in his mind and then vanished, unanswered, like bubbles. He took up his curved sword, tossed back his tartan cloak, and the bear—as soon as it saw that Ali intended to follow—stood to a man's height, pushed open the door, fell again upon its four feet, and went ahead down the dark stair. It seemed odd that no one else in the house had roused, but this thought vanished too as soon as thought. Ever and again the bear turned back its great head to see that the young Lord followed after, and went on. Tho' he may stand on two legs to startle and amaze his enemies or reach the fruit on a high branch, the black bear goes on four legs like a dog for preference; and tho' his claws and teeth rival the lion's, he is a mild gentleman, and prefers a meatless mess.

Thinking this—and nothing else of all the things he might be thinking, on such an errand—Ali went out through the blasted park and across the arch of a narrow bridge flung in a former time over a tumbling flood, then away from the road and up the white clay track which, before, his eye had traced in the moonlight, toward the watchtower. And—mysterious—the Moon had made no further progress across the sky, but shone as and where it had, and the wind blew coldly, come across the Atlantic, and the Irish isles, and America—this Ali pondered, who had not ever seen those places—and he walked along behind the inkblot of his ursine guide as though a little afloat on the way, as though no effort were asked of him to mount.

The watchtower stood ahead, and the bear lifted itself again to stand as a man does, and with a curved yellow nail indicated it. The door at its base was long fallen away, and a light could be seen, dull and guttering, within.

'I may not go farther,' said the bear, and Ali took note of its speech without wonder. 'What lies in yonder tower is for thee alone to find. Do not mourn; for sure I shall not, for he has been as cruel to me, nay to all dumb things whatever, as to thee. Farewell! If ever thou shall see me after, think that thy time is come, and a different journey is to go on.'

Ali was of a mind to seize the beast, beg or demand to be told more, but it was already faded, as it were, upon the dark air, only its words remaining. Ali turned toward the tower and its light.

Thereupon the world and the night gave a sort of shudder, as a shudder may pass over a calm sea, or a horse's flank; and like a building fallen around him in an earthquake, the Night fell away in pieces, his Sleep shattered, and he awoke. He had slept, and dreamt! And yet—most strange—still he found himself on the track to the watchtower, which stood ahead—more far off than in his vision, and a deal more solidly made of stone and mortar, but the same—the earth and the air likewise—and his own Self. He had no knowledge that such somnambulations—as they are termed—could be;—knew not how it could be that in a dream he could have armed himself, gone out his House, climbed a Hill, and not tumbled down and broke his neck. A species of wonder flew over him like an icy draught—and dread too, as icy but contracting to his heart, for he could see, even from where he stood, that there was, as in his dream, a small light within the tower.

Now the Moon was almost down. He felt, as much as perceived, the way ahead. Not once did he think to turn back, and later would consider why he had not:—because he had been told to go on—because it lay ahead—because he could do no other.

Not only the door but all the floors within this ancient pile were decayed and fallen away, no trace left of them, the tower hollow as a whitened marrow bone, the top open and a few stars visible. Otherwise blackness, and the single light, a lantern that burned its last drop of oil as though gasping for breath. He must turn, Ali must, to see what thing the lantern's shuttered beam fell upon—was aimed upon, certainly of a purpose!—and he finds, some three feet in the air, a form like a man's—face black, eyes starting from their sockets as they stare upon him, black tongue thrust out as in mockery. The strong rope from which this form depends is strung from the upper floor's stone brackets, and winds about him like a spider's thread. It is no devil from Hell, caught in his own toils—and yet, it is all we know of such in this our earthly life—and his name is Legion. The man in the ropes is 'Satan' Porteous, Ali's father, Lord Sane, DEAD!

HOW A YOUTH bearing the name of the Prophet's son-in-law, a youth whose skin was bronze and whose eyes were onyx, came to reside in a far land nearby to Thule, where blue-eyed boys with hair of tow or straw sprout palely beneath the low-lying sun, may not be beyond conjecture—ships and carriages care not whom they transport, nor from where to where else, and many a London house can boast a blackamoor at the gate, or a turbanned Hindoo at table-side. But that such an one should not only be resident in a Scotch Thane's house but its Heir—that, as it seemed by the ghastly sight that transfixed him there in the tower, he was now in very truth the successor to the bound and strangulated Lord who seemed to stare back at him, and possessor of all his titles and his fiefdoms—that may be thought to merit explication.

In spite of his being brought thence at an early age—or perhaps because of it, for the Heart obeys its own logic and no other in respect of the workings of Memory—Ali retained an unclouded vision of his childhood land. For sure he knew not, when he was a child, what mother had borne him, nor what his father was, or had been—he was accounted an Orphan, and had always lived with an aged guardian in a simple cot, or han, in the mountains of the province of Ochrida in high Albania—amid scenes which, if ever as a child he pondered the question, he would have believed began with himself, at the beginning of Time: and surely of these mountains it can be said, as of few human habitations, that they have persisted unchanged since Adam's day, or at least Abraham's.

Copyright © 2005 by John Crowley.