The Narrator (14 page)

“Megrodowite,” he says sullenly (Me-GRAW-do-weet-eh; the r is soft, last syllable very short). He’s a young man with dark curly hair, wearing a long white shirt and nothing else. His feet and lower legs are well shaped and mucky, and in his right fist he holds two limp chickens by their snapped necks.

“Where are you from?”

“I live here.”

“In the woods? Not with nice soft legs like those.”

“I live here I tell you.”

Another shake.

“You’re a thief, that’s one thing.”

“So what are you?”

“Don’t bother,” he holds up his hand to the sergeant who’s priming another shake. “I don’t care what you take—where are you from? Is there a village here?”

“All right, but I’m not from there.”

“Where are you from then?”

“It’s empty now anyway.”

“The village?”

“Yeah the village. They’ve all gone and left everything.”

“Was there an attack?”

“No, but they thought there would be or something.”

“But you’re not from there. Where are you from?”

Megrodowite is brooding.

“Let him go.”

The sergeant releases him but does not move away. Megrodowite stands there shuffling his feet and swaying a little, making up his mind. Makemin gives him time to do it in. In which to do it. He rubs the back of his neck and adjusts his thready collar.

“’M from the asylum,” he says uncertainly.

“What asylum? ... Show me.”

Megrodowite just looks at him, his head half ducked as if he expects to be cuffed.

“Is there anyone else there?”

“Yes, many of us,” his spirit revives in him. “At first word of the blackbirds, the doctors ran off, all the staff, left the patients on their own, half still locked in their cells and can’t get out.”

He holds up the chickens.

“We’ve got to feed them. We can’t just leave them to starve!”

“Well then, let’s see what we can do about that. Show me the way.”

Megrodowite rises at once to the occasion and draws us along the path into an overgrown tree tube, leading into the folded elbows of the mountains. There is a gradual ascent on matted leaves and spongy flakes of cork bark. We make our way along the writhing back of this snaking path, and a shrill, far-away cry stops us all in our tracks. Megrodowite goes on unfazed, and the column begins undulatingly to move again. Now the path is close in a dry rock flume, and we are switching back and forth nervously as we climb. The column has grown silent and hearkening. A moment later, the flume opens out like a funnel of rock and we emerge into opener land again, much less bouldery and glowing with new grass, particolor canopies of leaves.

The asylum nearly spans a woody hollow with steep green slopes rising all around it. A clammy fog clings to the ground here and seeps around the foundations and through the open windows like vast ghostly tongues licking the building. The walls are all deep rich and surly red brick, but, while the walls and windows are weirdly crisp in outline, the pile still seems to be slouching and half-dissolved because its high-peaked roof of thick grey thatch has a roving outline along the top. It’s like the shoulders of the building, as though the asylum were a body lying headlong towards us and wrapped in a woolly hide, the face flung forward resting its chin on the ground.

We begin to see inmates in among the foliage, or in the clear space in front of the building, and a few apparently stranded on the slopes, although we’ve met none in the road but Megrodowite. Now we are in the clear space, and they emerge and come out to us like a band of gentle spirits, all different, all uncanny, quiet, and wary. Some are naked or nearly so, some still wear their formless garments of stained and stiff linen, their bare legs under; and some are dressed all outlandish, in crude follies of their own making.

Here they come out to meet us in our uniforms and helmets and clanking equipment, with our indecipherable banner and our rummaged, half-scavenged gear. Some of the nearer ones instantly respond to our martial appearance with snappy salutes, some serious, some silly. Dull thuds of bare heels thumping together. I pass close to a young man with yellow curls, in white shift and thin cotton breeches, with the fly wide open, sitting on his bottom by the path, legs out before him, soles of feet stained green by the grass, drawing spirals and tic-tac-toes in the dirt with his fingers. He glances up at me and smiles and I smile back.

Hullo, loonies.

Makemin halts the column before the asylum, and, with his finger, jabbingly appoints a detail to venture inside. He will lead personally.

“Intepreter, come with me. Always with me.”

Silichieh and I fall in. There are eight of us entering the asylum now.

One of the heavy, double front doors is still shut and locked with bolts at top and bottom, the other is dangling inward on one hinge, with obvious marks of violence all over it. The lock looks as though it had been bitten away by a huge animal, and the wood all round that is savagely scored. Step onto an uneven tile floor, white with black diamonds, dotted with puddles that reflect the meager light. The fog roams here and there like a living thing, coiling under the stairs or slithering down into the basement. The inmates have put tinted paper around some lamps and set them down at random, creating whorls of colored mist.

I hear muffled cries, words and howls intermingled, knocks and bangs, like fists or feet against metal doors. The noise swarms up all around us as though the building groaned and racked itself in troubled sleep. To our left, a long hallway lined with doors, paint and plaster hang in flakes from the walls and clutter everywhere, like room-vomit. The ceiling is low, there is a sort of reception bar here, a blackened painting hung over it, a panel lined with cubbys, now mostly torn out. Behind heavy grilles facing us are two stairways that bend right and left up into black. The building shivers. To the right, double doors with smashed panes.

Megrodowite looks hangdog and points lifelessly to the hall on the right. At once Makemin leads us there, Megrodowite hanging back. The double doors squeal as we thrust them apart, and above and behind us, and far away, a high-pitched voice howls a long descending note.

This hall is abbreviated, a heap of rubble—charred remains of wooden chairs, it looks like—blocks the far door too deep in shadow to see. Megrodowite indicates another pair of doors, these solid. Makemin pushes open one side, takes a step over the threshold and immediately turns back letting the door fall to. In the puff of air the closing door forces out into the hall I smell the mortuary smell of decomposing bodies.

“Nobody knew what to do,” Megrodowite says lamely.

“Shall I go see if any ... still live?” I ask.

Makemin nods at once.

“Be as quick as you can. See if there are any medical supplies or stretchers. What ailing we find in the cells we’ll triage out in front.” He tells Silichieh to fetch my “embalmer friend,” and a moment later Jil Punkinflake and I are through the doors and searching.

“Hmmm,” he says, sniffing philosophically. “Mighty ripe!”

He gently brushes the temple locks of what once was a man, withered and streaked like a candle with dark putrescence, lying in a bed by the door. The room is long, tall, and white, with squat windows high by the ceiling. Half the beds are filled, all their contents alive with decay. The fog plays under the springs, and seeps between the fingers of drooping hands that hang from the edges of thin mattresses. I am less acclimated to the smell than I had hoped to be. They’re all so badly rotted not a one could be alive, but I have the intolerable idea that perhaps some neglected patient lies here, maggotty and gangrenous, but living and in agony. I check each body. Each is dead. Jil Punkinflake solemnly draws the sheets over them, one by one, as I rifle the cabinets for supplies, dumping what little I find into a pillow case. I grab a stretcher, set the sack in the middle, then stack that on top of the two other stretchers—these, like the beds, I notice, have straps ... and then we carry them all out at once. As the doors swing open, Makemin and the others roll back away from us. The doors are flapping back and forth, fanning infirmary air into the hall.

I set up the triage area, and we ready ourselves to go inside again. The ayslum is looking down at us, banging and shouting, and I hear again the same shrill, plunging howl, fringed with a shallow echo as it rolls down the halls. The asylum has the fixed expression of someone whose mind collapses, and not fast enough. The occupants are gradually becoming agitated, as each, I suppose, becomes aware of our arrival—in his or her own way. We go back in.

Makemin notices a small metal door between the stairs, set down a truncated shaft angling into the floor.

“The closet! Oh, I forgot it!”

Megrodowite staggers back with his face in his hands—his voice trembles.

After an exchange of looks, Makemin bids Silichieh break the lock. Light falls in the dim confine of the cell beyond, its contracted floor huddled with figures pale as flour sacks ... trembling, naked, frail as a clutch of baby birds. They slump against each other, knees up, and from this huddle rises a shaking face with sightless eyes, responding perhaps to the sound of the door. The mouth opens, and a cracked voice cries

“Sir is a genius!”

Other voices feebly join in, the heads stay lowered.

“Sir is a genius!”

Makemin turns to me.

“Get them out.”

Their flimsy bodies, as we convey them out of doors and into light for them unseen and unseeable, shiver and cringe even from our gentlest touch. Disgendered by neglect, they chant their slogan and raise their bent wrists toward their faces. The other inmates fall silent as we carry them out, nearly a dozen, and, with indescribable looks in their eyes, they gather around the cots to stare at them. There’s no treatment for these, except perhaps water.

Makemin asks me if I think it likely any will recover, and I tell him no.

“Screen them,” he says. “Use the tarps and tent poles for now. They are upsetting these others. ... And I don’t want to look at them.”

*

In no time the yard in front of the asylum is filled with milling persons. With Silichieh, I retrieve the handful who are either too stupefied or weakened by neglect to move on their own. The whole place is swarming with shadows, with sounds, but as we release the trapped patients, a trembling calm leaks down.

Makemin is consulting with Nikhinoch and the rest of us are grouped together under the trees. I’ve done what I can with the ailing ones, and rejoin my friends wondering what’s going on. Megrodowite comes over and stands next to me.

“You’re taking good care of them,” he says.

Here comes, from somewhere behind the asylum, a woman all in armor. She has a short sword with a basket hilt on her right side and a flapped holster on her left hip. She approaches Makemin boldly, homing in on his authority. A pleasing, and weirdly familiar face. I could say she looks like da Vinci’s “Lady with Ermine” if there had ever been such a thing. Strange thing to think. Jil Punkinflake flaps Megrodowite on the shoulder and points.

“Who’s
that?”
he asks, eyes riveted.

“Saskia,” Megrodowite says simply. “She was one of the locked-ins. I brung her food a few times.”

Jil Punkinflake draws closer to Makemin and watches her come. Silichieh, Megrodowite and I are drawn along.

“Must have retrieved her things from the attic.”

“You’ve come for me, haven’t you?” she calls in Yesge.

Everyone pauses, including Makemin, because her satiny voice is as deep as a man’s. Our unconcealed astonishment obviously irritates her, as though she presumed we might have the grace to overlook this peculiarity.

“Yes yes my throat was injured during the arrest,” she draws nearer. It’s unnerving; a very sensuous bass and she’s not much over five feet.

“Have you any message for me from Tewsetonka?”

“She wears Yeseg colors,” I comment to Silichieh, who nods.

Makemin answers.

“I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, and I have no message for you.”

She seems to calculate, with what I reckon to be her poker face—it’s a good one. Just a slight slackness around the mouth shows she’s putting together and reframing within herself.

“Why did you come, then? You are Tewsetonka’s men, aren’t you?”

“We are from the Alak army, and we are going to Port Conget and from there to Meqhasset.”

Makemin seems to want to break off his conversation with her and resume consultation with Nikhinoch.

Saskia reacts at mention of the Alak army, and her next words are in Alakan, with high-class enunciation.

“You’re off the road, you know. I can show you the way, should you need a guide.”

“I need no guide,” Makemin actually smiles a little. “I am here to recruit.”

Some of the officers standing nearby are visibly taken aback by this and trundle forward, preparing their protests. He is distracted by them and does not hear her insistance that she was wrongfully imprisoned here.

“Surely you don’t propose giving these people arms?” the sergeant asks incredulously.