The Narrator (18 page)

There it is, the flame. I will think, which necessarily means I will think obsessively, about this flame.

Is it there?

What is there?

Is it there the way an object is there every moment, considering that it is not exactly an object but a procedure?

Or an exhalation?

Are all things like flames, in that they only seem to be as it were stable entities because, after all, it’s always the same name, more or less, more or less the same, used for them? I mean, it must be something stable because I keep on recognizing it and calling it that, this time, another time, over and over, but then again how can I know that I am recognizing, and not just sort of improvising with myself? Or repeating myself?

I won’t write down a word of this. It’s not history. Just nonsense, that comes and goes like this fire here. Although it’s history that gives light and heat. So I pass the time in the evening, before, as I know will happen before it does happen, Jil Punkinflake claps me on the shoulder, and we go bottle-hunting as before, in a place where I can watch as a flame as before becomes a million flames through ranks and files of essentially similar bottles. If I were a poet I would say something about fire in the bottles, bottled fire, time is fire as before, bottled time, time is sand, sand in fire is glass made into bottles, hourglasses, fire burns time in me as I get drunk as before and forgetful; and I drink, and the drink burns my throat and slakes my thirst somehow at once, and I get dizzy and forgetful, and now—empty bottles. Splatter of vomit in the street.

*

I hear Jil Punkinflake’s sharply intaken breath.

“That old woman there!”

He points to a bald old woman in a shapeless, colorless linen gown, emerging from the rubble that borders our little camp. A white band swaddles her neck up to the ears, and her intent, falcon face swivels this way and that, face cool and keen as a biting, weightless wind. Jil Punkinflake’s face wears an awestruck expression.

“That’s Nardac!” he exclaims. “She was executioner for the whole district!”

He makes a sweeping arc with his finger. He’s almost forgotten to be pale and ashamed now.

The woman is making her way toward Makemin, taking long, back-crooked strides, slightly fragile, pushing her knees down from time to time with her fibrous hands.

“Did she come with us from the asylum?” he wonders aloud.

Thrushchurl shakes his head, “No. I saw her there once, but she was always free to go.”

Makemin is fuming; we are stuck again. There are no boats that will take us to Meqhasset, not for a time and perhaps not at all. The transport he had been assured would be here isn’t, and isn’t expected. Diverted, maybe even. Plus, no additional troops. No additional supplies. Nothing.

Nardac and Makemin retire to his tent, and he waves Nikhinoch up to take her arm. I see her give him something. Then she’s gone.

Jil Punkinflake puts his hand to his lapel, where the death’s head moth had once hung—it must have abandoned him during the fighting. He has his dog now, instead.

I feel his hand in the crook of my elbow.

“Do you think—? ... Listen, I have nothing to give you ... but, couldn’t you make another of those rolls for me, Low?”

“I suppose so, if I could find the right sort of books.”

“Let’s look!”

There’s a wan, sad hopefulness about him.

We move out at random into the town, looking together for more books flowed in together. I feel half-ghostly and not up to the task, but Jil Punkinflake is insistent, electrified by the search.

This is the route those moaning carts of dead bodies take on their way to the Ghuards’ camp, I suppose to be eaten or perhaps simply fondled and torn and toyed with. With which to be toyed. Or perhaps the dogs eat the ones who arrive dead? Jil Punkinflake’s dog sniffs the air here, but he is a contemplative and unruffled animal whose loyalties are by now it seems ineffacibly established. He cranks his head around and I can see the nondescript little brows above his different-colored eyes. Jil Punkinflake squats beside the dog and rubs his knees, and I am standing there a moment confusing myself with my own haste to find the right way to get lost, away from here or any other byway frequented by the Ghuards, when Thrushchurl, who is beside me, lunges a bit and then starts over to the other side of the road, where something sizeable flattens down a bed of weeds whose fringes screens it from view. Thrushchurl carefully takes the body, a woman wearing only a ragged shift and some dust, and sets it by the road, holding her out at arms’ length on the flats of his hands slowly without any visible tremor in his arms.

She must have fallen from one of the carts.

Thrushchurl arranges her, puts her arms on her breast, and smoothes her hair with the reverent attentiveness I knew from the Embalmer’s College. He throws a glance at Jil Punkinflake, whose attention is drawn at once, but who clings instead to his dog, his eyes widening, staring. A Ministerial Ghuard has silently loomed out from a street abutting this one.

In a stride he snatches the body up by the arm and flings it jauntily over his shoulder. He reaches up one massive hand and flicks her head with his finger, causing it to flap on the limp neck. Jil Punkinflake gasps and cringes down trying to vanish into his dog, and even from this distance I can hear the hairs bristle on Thrushchurl’s head. I open my mouth to remonstrate with him but his face is shuddering and his pupils fixed on the Ghuard’s mask have closed to pinholes—he opens his mouth and the yellow teeth visibly yellow to polluted gold and from between them erupts a scalding effusion of curses that makes me clap my hands to my head. Jil Punkinflake’s dog whines and cringes, and Thrushchurl chatters out each bitter syllable clear as a bell. Rotten, clotted blood black as ink forms in his jaws and streaks his chin, hanging in ribbons from his lips; these are curses that only a mouth that had moiled itself in foulest rottenness could utter. The Ghuard reels back and the body slips down his arm to the ground. He staggers against the wall of a house; I grab Thrushchurl and Jil Punkinflake and we run.

*

“Wake up! You must get out! They will come for you now!”

The voice croaks at me through mental slush, beating me awake from a distance. And something else—there’s a bad smell.

I sit up blinking, and there are lights streaking by the front of the tent, and broadcast commotion, and Silichieh is sitting up too, rubbing his head.

“The Ghuards! Get to the piers!”

I go to wake Jil Punkinflake, whose upturned face is crossed by a beam of faint light from somewhere, and see he is shouting in his dream: this alien voice that is not his bursts from his lips and tongue without breath, without throat, splattering his coiled-up mouth and cheeks with ink brack, black decay ink like ink made from black sea-bottom muck, tarry bog ichor that stinks. His eyes flick open and he bolts up nearly striking his face against mine, begins gagging and making sounds of disgust in his usual voice. I hear him washing out his mouth, dangling his torso over the edge of the cot—but everywhere there is franticness. I stick my head out the tent and I see Makemin directing the others, packing up, some of the camp is already gone. Squares where tents had been. No sign of violence, but much fear. And I see something white in the waves, just opposite the camp, wallowing there side to side. As I pause to look at it, it drops its head in and is gone, a momentary white motion under the foam.

We get ready—why not? I’m asking everyone in sight what’s going on until out of it all dimly emerges the suspicion that Saskia and Makemin have conspired to steal a boat and get us out of the Port.

We packed. We fly through the streets, all in confusion. We can’t stay together. We are separated, flying along the streets and all around us now there are cries and shouts, horns, banging insonorous gongs. We dart around a corner a huge tongue of ruby-dark fire stops us, bellowing a tall point high over our heads and seizing furiously on the buildings flanking it. Ghuards are rioting in the flames, I see one right in the fire, his armor blackened and smoke seeping from within, through the eye holes, and he howls a high wailing raucous joy note of wildness and rage with nothing of pain in it, reeling drunk in the flames until he broils to death, and the others are crashing through the town on all sides of us now, rending it all out of shape and upset it everywhere in flames. Screams, alarms, dark shapes flit against fire, we are part of a general flight now toward the water.

Jil Punkinflake’s dog leads us there. I see lamps rolling calmly on inky darkness ahead, interrupted by the dark regularity of a pier thrust out from the land. Piers here, and we are alone on this route. I can see the lights of ships pulling out to sea, but I can’t see the Redeemer or the Alak fleet anywhere.

A shriek like ripping burlap and there’s a Ghuard behind us, tearing loose from a blob of smoke, his scorched armor still smoking.

The Ghuard lopes toward us like a stricken giant; then he pauses as though lost in thought, and I notice a copious, dark juice flowing from his helmet’s left eye. The enormous hands pat an invisible pillow and smooth a vast phantom bed, and the Ghuard falls on it on his face. Makemin struts purposefully forward from the margin of the road, and there is a sharp tching! as he snaps his visor-goggles back up into his helmet, snap of the bolt and the satisfied little ring of the shell casing as it springs from the breach. He waves us on, his arm crossing his chest as he points to the boat, which stands lit up at the end of this pier over here. We are among the last to board.

Makemin gives the order to cast off.

“Saskia’s not aboard—!”

And I can’t find Silichieh anywhere.

Makemin shouts again and the lines are cast off. I can see Nardac stationed in the prow. Gathered up into her robe she looks like a vulture. Her black eyes shimmer there against the stars on the horizon. She must have had something to do with finding the ship. The engines chug and we pull away from the pier and out to sea. Now Ghuards are spilling out onto the piers, and I can see missiles splashing around the other fleeing boats, and around ours as well. Running everywhere looking for Silichieh, now I’m on the bridge where Makemin stands by the rail shouting orders down to the deck. Over me a star winks. I look, then clap Makemin hard on the shoulder. He wheels and glares at me. I am pointing, and he with furrowed brow traces my gaze to something grey and small moving across the sky; he yanks down his visor goggles, then waves his hand to Nikhinoch who quickly puts his rifle into it. Makemin lifts sights and shoots—grey form, a little Predicate flying to warn the Redeemer most likely, plops into the ocean. Makemin jerks up his visor again and nods grimly at me.

“Sharp eye.”

After a while looking again I feel clammy nausea at heart and throat as I don’t find Silichieh. But he is there, after all. One moment nothing, the next moment he and Saskia are there on the deck not far from me and he is climbing down off her back. She has those metal cuffs on her legs, she’s Yeseg, and trained, so she can fly along like the blackbirds, too. It transpires they had been all over the Port. It’s a good thing she made it. Saskia is the only experienced sailor among us, and she will be in effect captain of the ship. I watch as she takes the helm from Makemin, who stalks off to his cabin, pressing the heel of his palm to his brow.

From the butt end of the boat, we watch fire devour Port Conget. Even from well out in the darkness the mammoth forms of the Ghuards are visible bounding airily in and out of black and red coils of fire. The reflected flames wave on the still water of the ocean like tall clumps of grass in the wind, upside down. In their sullen glow, a solitary Alak hulk can be seen receding heavily up the coast, oblivious to the destruction. Dark red lifts its bolts of red into black and grey tubes of smoke, gobbled by the hot air below the moon’s thready crescent: buildings slump and crumple inwards spurting embers, whisked away and gulped by the smoke too. There is movement everywhere on the shore, flight.

What about these others who were counting on all those burning boats to make their escapes?

A Ghuard all in blackened, sizzling armor reels into an empty street.

“STOP!”

The voice brings him all the way up and he turns toward it. A uniformed Edek stands in the gloom at one end of the street, her white-smocked aid at her side.

“ATTENTION-UH!”

The Ghuard snaps to attention.

He stands in a circle of cooling, blue white light that steadily increases in brightness and in cold as the Edek continues seeing him. The Edek brightens the light by darkening her own mind. There is a cold inner suppression hollowing her, so that she speaks and acts from her muffled face even as her awareness still lives buried in a winter night.

“SALUTE-UH!”

The Ghuard salutes, his armor rattling. Steam plumes out the snarling mouth of the ass. He is brightly illuminated now, like a star gleaming amid all the red fire.

“YOU WILL PUT AN ENNND-UH TO THIS ACT OF FAITH-UH! YOU WILL ACT TO RESTORRRE! / YOU WILL NOW / YOU WILL NOW ACT TO RESTORE ORRRDER! YOU WILL PUT AN ENNNND / TO THIS ACT OF FAITH-UH!”