Celebrant (63 page)

Somewhere in one of these towns someone sits under a tree and recites.

The billows of magical darkness rage in the arid sky, boney sky.
One by one those numberless bones slip the length of his plumage.
Emptiness.
Chaos.
The gaping namelessness.
Black radio.

What is perfectly still is the easiest thing to move.
There is a pure stillness beyond all movement.
The darkest place is the most easily lit.
There is a perfect darkness that is beyond all light.
The wildest chaos is the most pregnant with things.
There is a primordial chaos that is the incestuous void, perfect annihilation, where nothing can be discerned.
The more complete nothing is, the more liable it is to erupt in something.
The perfection of nothingness builds an intolerable tension for there to be something.
There is a nothingness to come which cancels the future entirely.
The most terrible disaster is the easiest thing to improve.
There is a catastrophe so total that it can only be the end.
We watch.
When a thing moves, can it be said to move?
Which is in motion?
What is the difference between dark and light?
If what comes into existence must cease to exist, then being created is being doomed.
But then isn’t that doom also doomed to come into existence again as something different?

Exhaustion sets in.
The voice peters out, mumbling the gaping namelessness, resorting in dogged fatigue to an insistence on the hole in the middle, the central hole, which is still a positive thing and a center.
One has to have stamina, and keep running, above all.
deKlend picks up the motion of the gravity wave as it swells slightly in the distance, an invisible hump over the jungle.
It’s rolling this way, over that thing like the Arc de Triomphe, where men wave to a naked woman on a balcony, a very voluptuous, very pale blonde with braids, and as the wave rolls on thickening the present, giving it an erection, a kind of awkward, embarrassing, ambiguous hard on, the sort that the word tumescent was invented for.
The present is getting a hard on as the gravity begins to lean in toward the oncoming wave
—
then with leaden smack the wave heaves in.
deKlend leaps onto its crest like a grasshopper, as insubstantial as a soap bubble in the gravity froth at the wave head, through it to the dull, steely margin he can run on.

I am the Bird of Ill Omen and I spread for the last time my white wings.
Fledged in black letter I bear my curse steadily to you.
If you don’t remember, I will bring you an untimely reminder.
Then you will see the sky above you blotted out as I spread my wings, like two indelible stains, the sky smashed against my wings
—

The Bird of Ill Omen delivers an equivocal warning that’s hooted and croaked and leered, and leaves a spiral wake of precipitate self-destruction behind him.

(You are the one to be sacrificed)

Me?!
Why?!

(You’re chosen)

Who
chose me?!
the voice trembles as it demands to know, suspecting already, residually incredulous, trying to put up a show of defiance

(
You
did)

...
says the silent voice, and whether it registers something that is true or causes it to be true, with the depth of its emphasis, is unimportant.
The worst has come.

Catastrophe strikes
—
a whirlwind, earthquake, fire, epidemic.
Vengeance against the elements isn’t likely, so the victims blame themselves, punish themselves, and are destroyed again.
Beat the rush and destroy yourself.
If everything I value is so perishable, why not destroy it all myself?
Why not destroy all I value?

The Bird of Ill Omen doesn’t cause ruin, just announces it.
But he does roam the world sharing out his own proper luck to modern cities that have long since ceased to exist for any other reason than to be self-destroyed.

After my self-ruin there will finally be quiet.
Silence means
no
sound, tends to, but
quiet
means sound without noise.
There will be sound, vision, human tissue, the mighty wind.
Gurgles down in the mud.
Frenzied calm.
Frenzy is only a problem when it isn’t sufficiently energetic, which is usually the case.
When it has enough energy, it turns into a quiet current that whirs inside and out like the torus of a propeller, at once solid and porous and might bat your hand to pieces with a casual touch.

Like the owl, the Bird of Ill Omen can’t shift his eyes in their sockets.
There are times when he adopts human disguise, but all shape-shifters have their giveaway traits and the Bird of Ill Omen is no exception;
he can’t move his eyes.

There’s been some rain in Votu, but the cloud-wall has crumbled and its fragments hurtle in all directions.
People are shading their eyes against the gradual rewhitening of the day, and fill the spacious streets to do what they put off during the rain.
The white-haired mathete with the one black lock crooks his finger and summons a little homeless girl, bending forward to bring his face down to her level.
Too close.
There’s something strange about the way this man does his looking.
The girl suddenly gets the sickening impression that his face is a living mask, that another face moves behind it like a face at a peephole, turning this way and that.
The eyes don’t quite move naturally;
instead of rolling back and forth, they
lean
this way and that.

Without a word, the girl dissolves into the schooling crowd.

A huge black bird rises from the alley.
Its shadow mingles with the shadows of the clouds, but those who see it shooting along the ground toward them lunge away to avoid being touched.
Pigeon girls all gather safely beneath the awnings
—
their luck has been good lately and they are determined to keep it that way.
Rabbit girls rush to their passageways, except Kunty, who sits on the rim of the fountain devouring the remains of a lettuce with gusto.
The shadow sweeps right over her and she throws back her head as it does, her eyes shoot a sharp, furious tear-arrow at it, she hisses through a mouthful of leaves, then she lowers her head again.
She doesn’t turn her head to follow the bird in flight as it veers on behind her, but applies herself to her lettuce.

Fucker!
(she snarls)

It wasn’t at all hard to see the shining particles and the dark ones rise and fall alternating in each others’ places across the membrane.
A moment later it is as if nothing had happened.
A man crosses before the fountain, walking slowly, either tired or lost in thought, all bundled up in shawls.
Kunty watches him, chewing absently.
The sight of him, or maybe it’s the smell, stirs something in the middle of her.

What’s with him?
(she wonders)

As she watches, he stops and folds his hands behind his back.
His eyes are fixed on an unremarkable piece of Votu’s pavement.
He sighs deeply, and as he does, a plume of smoke slides from his mouth, through his moustache and hangs in the air like a long feather.
Without moving his eyes, still preoccupied, he lifts one hand and takes from the cloud a weird metal implement, like a short two-handed saw with no teeth.
Two swords joined at the points.
Holding this against his body, the man begins walking again.

He’s not sleepwalking (she thinks)

The man coughs twice, clearing the smoke away, and vocalizes in his coughing.

He’s heading for one of the shrines of the natural robots.
Kunty puts two and two together.

Just another fucking mnemosem (she thinks)

The man passes the corner of the shrine, which bristles like a porcupine with the black and warping swords of pilgrims.

She’s still thinking about his profile, and virtually remembering something that has yet to happen because she can’t shake off the lingering impression made by his voice.

deKlend:

A cart rumbles past hollowly grinding like a millstone with ZAMBODHCHIDNET OF V
—
painted on the side, the last word chipped all but completely away.

Votu (deKlend adds ruefully)

Bitter irony (he thinks)

But then (he looks around)
...
this could be Votu.
There is surely a resemblance.
He recites sourly, city of streets free to the wind.
City of bright awnings.
Mountain city.

Perhaps everyone is right, and I need only decide that this is Votu for it to be.
Maybe it is just a symbol.

Gazing this way and that, he says
—
This is Votu.

He sighs through his nose.

No, it wouldn’t be so simple.
I suppose I’d hoped that saying it, and giving up (or pretending to give up) wanting to appear in the actual city itself, would really take me there, like a spell.
Just once I’d like to make a spell work.
What would it be like to make it work?
I think that would make it all worthwhile.
I honestly can’t seem to find any exception.
Look at that little girl.

A stream of pigeon girls has swept by.
They are all so much like each other.
But this one happens to pause a moment, her attention evidently riveted by something in the sky
—
a cloud, or a bird or something.
deKlend can’t see what it is from where he sits;
there’s a building in the way, and he doesn’t want to approach the girl, doesn’t want to alarm her.

She is a typical specimen of those girls (he thinks)
How intently she’s watching!
The way she moves her head, it must be a bird she’s looking at.
It’s too early for bats.

The girl, oblivious to him, takes a few dainty steps to one side of the way and crouches with her arms around her knees, her back to him, watching.
A slight breeze swats at her hair like a cat playing with a fringe.

So I sit here, watching her.
And she sits there, watching whatever it is she is watching.
The Bird of Ill Omen, maybe.

deKlend’s eyes and attention wander.

He is waiting for enough will to accumulate on the other side of the scale, tip him up off his behind and set him in motion again.
Back en route to Votu.
And looking for Phryne.
The Bird of Ill Omen.
Inadequate leaps go on inside him, jumping up and falling back, but an adequate one won’t be long in coming.