The Narrator (19 page)

The Ghuard turns at once and, his armor now bright and cool, rushes purposefully back into the town.

You grope along the sandy bottom, bizarrely red and flickering in the firelight through the water. There above you, the aid leads the Edek onto the empty pier. The Edek keeps hold of a pinch of the aid’s smock, just above the right shoulder, as described.

The Edek’s black eyes pick you out at once, and the mouth begins to work violently inside the cloth sack.

“NAR-RA-TIVE SPIRIT-UH! COME FORWARD-UH AND LISTENNN! I HAVE SOMETHINNG-UH TO SAY-UH! COME FORWARD-UH AND LISTENN!”

You climb one of the pilings until you are able to raise your streaming head from the water. Heat billows over you from the land, and you rise and fall with the water. The Edek bends stiffly at the waist to stare down over the side of the pier, down at you. She drops to her knees, thrusts a finger into one of her black eyes, and brings it out all streaked with black.

Now she is writing with it on your face. You feel the light, scraping sensation of her fingernail spelling TRUE TO OUR MONARCH.

The Edek straightens up and points to where a few lights dwindle away on the sea, toward the horizon.

“NAR-RA-TIVE SPIRIT-UH! FOLLOW NOW / FOLLOW NOW AND ATTENND-UH! YOU WILL SERVE-UH THE ONE MASTERR! FOLLOW NOWWW-UH AND ATTEND-UH!”

Daylight discloses land already far out of sight, blue profundities below, and a sky thickly striped with clouds that cross our line of travel at a right angle and high overhead. The clouds are curdled white and grey or fine black like dirty little heaps of slush, all in rows. Nothing all around but a mind-cancelling low hill of water sloping off to the horizon, its subtle peak travels along just beneath us. I can’t tell if it is really peaceful or not. I mistrust it for its own sake and not as someone from the mountains.

I’ll describe the boat, but I lack nautical language. It doesn’t seem more than medium-sized to me, with a bridge up two or three ladders from the deck, that is the main deck or the one with the greatest area. There is a towerlike mast aft of the bridge, with a great profusion of riggings on it, but the ship really is powered by two impressive paddle-wheels amidships or nearly, covered in majestic sweeps of metal cowling. Paddleboxes is the word. These are driven by hinged pistons that periodically and in alternation thrust their acutely bent knees fantastically high into the air, rivalling the height of the mast; they look like the hind legs of grasshoppers taking slow thoughtful strides in alternation. The rhythmic churn of the wheels is lulling, the rotation of the frothing paddles is hypnotic, the meditative striding of the pistons is dreamy, the soft and fragrant air is narcotic. Across this reverence Saskia’s voice often cuts as she barks orders from the bridge. We seem to go in one reliable direction, and we seem to move fast.

While some of the madcaps in the ranks are seasick or huddled below decks, terrified of all the open space, the majority are beside themselves with delight and excitement. They rush from one end of the boat to another with their faces wide open to every sensation, dangling from the ropes, yipping and cawing, their clothes flapping and sloughing often in defiance of decency. We’re confined to the boat, smaller than the asylum was, with limitlessness all around us. After the first man overboard is retrieved at some expense of time, Saskia thunderously harangues the others:

“Go into the sea, and I swear to you you’ll stay there!” she bellowed.

So far, no new splashes. Now we’re pushing through a field of sea lungs, and the loonies are pointing and singing out and going ape. The boat is heavy and the strong engines lumber us forward so we seem to flatten the water as we go. The drone is oppressive. At first, I imagine I’d prefer to spend my time in the open air, but between the pummeling of the wind and the eyebrindling glare of the sky, I find myself staying inside. I can’t open myself to impressions of the sea. Whenever I try, impressions of dying are what I get. Me dying. I dying. Among many others. As an officer—and that’s a laugh—I am entitled to a bit of privacy. I bunk with Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake who is not an officer but counts anyway as a standard bearer, and a sleep-happy sergeant named Zept, who adheres to his berth like a clam.

The great monarch of the Alaks alone dispenses licenses to hunt the silver woodland lion. Whenever one is killed, only the head is taken. The body is carefully buried with a uniform draped over it. In exactly three days, an Edek will appear at the spot. Anyone unfortunate enough to witness this, I guess, sudden appearance, asphyxiates, and so no one can say exactly how it happens. Who cares?

Night falls, I go to the rail for some air. Up into the air, back down out of the air. Back up into the air, back down out of the air, always pursued by distaste. There is a ragged blue satin band on the horizon between the clouds and the black water. The ship is turning into a huge solid shadow, tricked out in a constellation of little lamps. Their light seems to twirl in the wind, and creates intimate, miniature islands in all the howling wildness. I’m not sick, only leaning.

I hear footsteps, and suddenly Saskia is beside me. Her hand drops heavily onto my shoulder.

“Don’t be forgetful, narrator,” she says. “You will remember it all, won’t you?”

“Sure. Sure I will.”

She’s looking earnestly at me. I imagine she’s thinks she’s improving my morale. Has she been tapping each of the officers in turn?

That hand pats my shoulder twice, firmly.

“You will have the distinction of witnessing our glorious triumphs against the usurper, and the just punishment of traitors; and you will have the honor of telling all the world about it. And don’t worry—” she raises a finger—“All are equal together in this great task. No one will hold your color against you. There is no room for bigotry amongst us.”

She strides away.

I look out over the grain of the water, forgetting all about her, and a pang goes through me. I’m thinking miserably about the school, Twisse and Spiena, that each passing triangular wafer of water is separating me from. From whom each passing etc. I see the Edek’s eyes glare like two cold suns—they dilate at me through holes ripped in the air, and I gasp with fear and unhappiness.

*

Jil Punkinflake tells me how Thrushchurl had been institutionalized after he set fire to a wing of the Embalmer’s College.

“He kept seeing mice everywhere. Of course, there were a few. But the ones he saw were in the corners of his eyes, not in the rooms. I think he set the fire to get rid of them.

“I wasn’t in attendance at the time,” he adds. “Anyway, we should keep an eye on him ...”

He looks at me seriously.

“Just in case ...” he adds, and his face goes a little irregular. “I don’t mistrust him—I’m just thinking of the safety of the unit.”

Thrushchurl has taken up residence under some stairs; his long knees and shanks protrude into the light. I’m looking, not watching. He’s removed his silk hat; his backswept hair, split up the middle, is still pressed into a winglike pair of pancakes. The yellow gleam of his fluorescent grin is intermittently exposed, while he turns this way and that, his back to the wall, straightening out blankets, and pausing motionless from time to time, peering into a corner, or at the line where the wall meets the floor.

As Thrushchurl readies himself for sleep, he spreads his oarlike hands over the fabric of his blankets until they’re perfectly flat, smudging the bypasser air with that somber rag of song that has taken up residence in his mouth. Often, he barely articulates the syllables; you get a melody of vowels only. I don’t think he knows he’s singing it.

“Little mice, little mice,

Even cats have got their lice,

Run-run, run get yourself away—”

“Dead as cinders, grey as ashes,

Cold as ice, now its eye flashes,

Too too late to get away—”

*

Who else has had anything to say about Meqhasset? Silichieh tells me the island’s whole interior is haunted.

“It’s supposed all to be ruins from another war, hundreds of years ago. Whole forests have sprung up from spilled blood.”

Makemin has plenty to say, not about the island but about the enemy, their tactics, his career. He deputizes me to copy out some of his financial papers—naturally he had no trouble taking them along—into one of the empty ship’s logs, so he’ll have all the information indexed, etc. The work is intolerably dull and draining. When I get the time, I set myself on Nardac, but she plainly avoids me, retires when I come near. She knows my narrator’s star, maybe, and doesn’t want to give her reasons for joining us. Jil Punkinflake made hesitant and breathless overtures to her, but he she spurns. At his approach, Nardac strikes the deck before her with a hand as numb and hard as a knot of wood, and he hops away in alarm.

Her preferred place is in the bow, where she has some shade and calm from the wild air. Once, as I sat waiting for Nikhinoch to give me something unimportant to do, and Thrushchurl was nearby, singing his ditty, I noticed she was looking at him, with no particular expression. With interest. But she sets herself among the idiots, who congregate around her in the prow. They mill and mewl and roll about on the deck with each other like huge, groggy kittens, as the wind dries the spit on their chins. From far away I have seen her lips moving, and I know she tells
them
things. Such a calm as hers doesn’t need to speak, but she does speak, eerily.

So I eavesdrop, and hear her brief relations rapped out against the ocean’s grain. The stories she tells have nothing to do with history. I provide a sample:

(An unhurried, slow inhalation.)

She was an artist (she says this in a matter-of-fact way, her eyebrows going up and her lips frowning a little). I followed her in that. I invariably begin by saying that she was an artist. I say that, but I mean that backwards. It’s not that she made an art of executing, but that an artist is that, executioner. There’s a kernel, a way of saying what I mean more simply than what I mean, which is that she was no functionary. The task was handed to her, but she did not merely receive that as a, as a task. (Her voice dropped there.)

Looking into her face, you wouldn’t know that. You had to see her doing it, because I don’t think you can imagine that. She did it with a look. She didn’t look—her eyes saw everything from the inside ... when she was at it. That was like cold fervor, but no that wasn’t. That was (she shook her head just a little) two things at once, you can’t imagine. Enthusiasm, or mania, maybe, and dreaminess at the same time. None of it was not real to her, though. I knew that not one single thing about it was unreal. Or vague—or anything but sharp and distinct. It’s ridiculous to say sharp but that’s the word. When she was at it, her eyes were like black wells, with glistens all over them. (She caressed the air by her knees with stiff old hands, seeming to coax the guillotine blade out of the sparkling air so that I for a moment actually saw it.) All pupil, that seemed, staring, and seeing backwards.

And I saw her, or I watched her, you couldn’t have observed her more closely than I did. I had my perches there to watch her from, that gave me a commanding view, unauthorized though. Never paid much attention to them, only to her. I saw them, naturally, but as she saw them. Or would have seen them, if she saw them from the outside, and she didn’t, didn’t seem to. No, she saw them inside, and I saw them outside, but I saw into her. She knew exactly how that was done, and she lived that through each of them, or that was her fantasy.

The door bursts open, taking the man completely by surprise, and almost at once the hooder claps the hood on him—they are superb at that, getting them right away. No amount of preparation on the man’s part, unless he kills himself. And how can he? There’s that explosive struggling. The sudden pinioning and muffling. The smell of the hood, and the brush of frayed eye holes. Pulled out in that hall, that moves forward like a ratchet one man’s spot at a time. That stops. Starts. Stops. Starts. That hall has a long gap in the wall at the top, and they can see the top of gallows in the yard. They can see the chopper rise there. See it drop. See it drip. See it streaked and dripping. That smell from the door, the hall’s full of it. The men struggle between their pairs of—helpers, as we called them. Cries, all of that tumult. Scraping feet. Now there’s that unrelievedly plain metal door in front of him. He looks down and smells that puddle spreading out from under the door into the hall and he recoils from it. He wants that his legs would shrivel and curl up to his body in the air rather than touch his feet to it. And the smell is right up in his hood.