The Narrator (26 page)

Vscriathjadze means “thousand waterfalls.” The broken slopes against which the city crowds its seaward edge are draped with waterfalls, many of which are used to run mills, and the water is collected in a ring-shaped reservoir encircling much of the city like a moat.

Jil Punkinflake is marching near me, holding the banner, looking visibly firmer now he’s back on land. I turn my head. There are many familiar faces around me. I don’t want to part from them—away from them, I imagine I will begin to feel less real myself. I am imbibing small draughts of confidence and substance from being among them, and words half-form heroic verses in my mind telling me that my destiny does not lie apart from theirs.

We’re approaching an elaborate, composite noise. Here,
on the far side of the city from the port, the buildings trail out onto a broad plain, and a sprawling camp has been laid here on the uneven ground. Voices in our ranks relay information—this is a battalion from the First Specialist Army, sent to reinforce us, mingled in with a Yeseg militia, who came to the island on their own. We stop and wait at the border of the camp, imagining ourselves to be a reassuring sight, while Makemin consults with the other commanders here. Presently we receive the order to set up camp.

A tall man is leaning against the tree, and another crouches at its roots. Suddenly she rises and snaps around—an Edek, fixing her sucking, blind gaze on me. I stiffen and lean back.

“You can’t touch me. You can’t touch me.”

I say it softly, to no one.

The Edek taps the crease of the last joint of the middle finger of her right hand against the pad of her thumb twice as I go by, her head swivelling as I pass.

*

Time wasted on my cot. I turn in my blankets and my hands reach up to my face—I idly cradle my head in my hands, turning it this way and that, and feeling its weight as an object. So this is all I suppose I am. I try to realize it, and imagine handling this head severed. I’m too tired to sleep. I’ll go into town and look at what they sell here. A billow of incredulity when I remember money, and how important it is. I am moved to hilarity, not too strong, in contemplation of the pomp of money, laurels profiles lofty slogans and the like. Our scrip is funny stuff. I lie there and tremble. A wave of fear rolls over me like a heavy rolling pin.

No one is available so I wander in the streets alone. I look about me with numb disinterest that I feebly stretch and try to break, but I lack the will. The people here seem to have no will either. They walk heavily. I expect at any moment to see them collapse on the ground in heaps of bones and flesh like wet cake, oozing from shapeless clothes. They avoid me, and it’s a relief to catch sight of Silichieh sitting with some of his countrymen, drinking on a raised platform. I am waved over and sit among them in a dully jovial chorus of greetings in Deme. I try to drink but a cat jumps in my lap; a burly young one, with thick grey fur, and his beefy tail interferes with my glass a bit.

*

It’s late in the day. The other soldiers are carousing noisily. I stop to examine Nardac, who lies breathing shallowly on her back, her eyes sparkle like black jewels in the gloom of the tent. Her wound is closed over now, looks like a coal-colored patch of bark growing on her flank.

Makemin is in his tent. Incredibly, there was a new stack of legal correspondence already waiting for him when he arrived. Sitting in an orange globe of lamp light, his table with the folding legs in an X, the regular motion of his pen pauses from time to time as he inhales a pinch of his stimulant, one nostril at a time, from a small pewter vessel beside his inkpot. I won’t be needed until tomorrow, and I rather hope some other translators can be found in the meantime. Nikhinoch whisks past me, bringing Makemin a pitcher of water, his hand on the bottom. He carries its weight through the air as smoothly as though it were on rails. We all seem to be hung here at our different levels in the night, each in his own station, and I’m like the little cat who goes levying or begging from one to the next, lapping up the cream I’m offered as if it were all my greed had had tonight. I don’t like to sit still. None of us knows what’s going to happen next, and none of us wants to dwell on that uncertainty, on the fantasies of that uncertainty ...

My cot receives me with a shrug. A moment later I am joined by Jil Punkinflake. Saskia has gone off somewhere among the other soldiers, most likely grilling them or sorting through the other Yesegs for spies. I can see he’s decided they’ve had a falling out, and is punishing her by withholding from her his unwanted company. This will end whenever the realization that she doesn’t notice stuns him, and I don’t want to be present to see his perfume cathedrals drop in rags. He greets me with a sound and lies on his cot, letting his hand sink down onto his dog’s head, the other cocked behind his own. Someone has pinned a scrap of printing on the tent’s center post, and I am staring at the two princes on it, Tewsetonta, our enemy, and Tewsetonka, in whose cause we fight, confronting each other in oval frames.

How is it possible no one sees the mania?

I see her distraught on her bed, the straps of her nightgown slipping from her shoulders. An ember sinks into me. I feel its heat against the backs of my eyes.

As night comes on, a wind emerges from the interior of the island and crumbles down out of the mountains into the damp air lining the valley, compressing it to the ground in the center and pushing it up along the sides. The dry wind runs off without mixing into the damp, divides into limbs that reach into the city, stirring the cool humidity they find there. Soft breaths sigh along my face and down my body wrapped in its uniform, and then a rough trunk of parched wind will strike and suck at me a moment, raking in my nose and throat the glittering dust it’s laced with. With which it is laced. I stretch my legs in front of the tent, the wind pouring eerily over and by me, and something is transmitted to me. The idea that this is a magical place, why hadn’t I felt it before?

There’s a fixed constellation that wheels directly above the city, not visible from anywhere else in the known world, and must therefore not be made of stars but of smaller, nearer things, at least according to some. My explainer here is obviously not impressed with this idea and I think it likely this is typical for natives—others, she goes on, and I know at once that this is her own opinion, believe them to be proper stars. Thrushchurl has appeared before us, his head against the starry sky busy with clouds, the constellation reflected in his fixed grin. He wants to look around, and me to join him. I turn to Jil Punkinflake, whose sullenness, after the briefest struggle, melts.

“God, I will,” he says, and instructs his dog to stay.

My grogginess evaporates; I am instantly bright and vigorous. We leave the camp, slip into the streets hastily, then slow our pace and begin our promenade with hands in our pockets. I amble in the direction of the well, but Thrushchurl whistles gravely at me.

“No,” he says, “Edeks there.”

We step back and remain in the line of the shadow. A moment or two later, a man drifts briefly in and out of view, his head back—unmistakeably one of their helpers. I retreat with Thrushchurl, who is leaning in a doorway, idly prying at the dry rot in the lintel with his finger. He tells us when it’s safe to go. He seems to shine in the clear air under the night sky, as if he were in his element. We make our way toward the outskirts of town, where it winnows back into a separate canyon. The buildings are no smaller or farther apart, but the streets are empty, and there are few lights.

Thrushchurl stops in front of a lit window, then steps up to the building, resting both hands side by side on the sill before his chin. A light burns on a table inside.

“I want that lamp,” he says softly, and rises off the ground, pushing himself up on his hands. He steps over the sill, cocking his knees. Jil Punkinflake steps forward with enjoyment and pulls himself in deftly, and I follow, straddling the sill sideways and ducking in my head.

The room is square, with doors opening on a hallway and a narrow flight of steps. A tiled fireplace, wooden floors with matting, two spavined chairs, dingy portraits. Thrushchurl creaks around the room, breathing it in more than he looks at it. He examines the lamp very critically, but it no longer seems to interest him.

“The fire’s all wrong,” I say.

“Fire is fire. All fires are the same, surely,” I say, blustering and disliking the false tone in my voice.

Thrushchurl glances up from the calm flame to me, “You’re ignorant,” he says plainly. “There are all different kinds of fire.”

There are plates on the table. Thrushchurl takes up one plate with thumb and forefinger and gropes overhand at the heap of peeled grapes it contains.

“Eyeballs,” he says.

Jil Punkinflake takes up another plate and similarly gropes at its tangle of noodles.

“Intestines,” he pipes.

They begin to dance around me like balletic waiters in a musical number, plates balanced on palms. Jil Punkinflake looks up toward the mantlepiece and Thruschurl looks round at the hallway. He gives a sudden, convulsive movement, as a puny grey shape darts from the room and into the hall. Like a gawky cat, Thrushchurl is after it, his feet clamouring on the floorboards. I run after.

Thrushchurl has it trapped in a corner between two doors. He is crouching with his face bent down to it, his lips stretching back from his teeth. The mouse is a tiny bundle of shivers—Thruschurl is staring into its round eyes. He seems to say to it, you are paralyzed, and the mouse understands, it does not move. Thrushchurl slowly brings his face in closer. The mouse is palpitating, and I wonder if it will die of fear. Something white is oozing from the corners of its eyes. Its terror is so intense I see the thick hair around its eyes is turning white.

The white forces its way along the length of each tiny hair from the skin to the tip, and now both its eyes are ringed with white. The white spreads, joins between the eyes, runs down the snout, up to the ears. Now the entire mouse is white, and its eyes I notice are turning red. I keep thinking it will burst apart for sheer fright, it’s trembling so violently—and I think I might see a trickle of blood run down from one ear. I’m wrong—it isn’t a trickle of blood. It’s strange: a vertical, dark line segment. Now the mouse’s head weaves slightly but the line segment doesn’t move with it, and I realize that I am seeing a line in the moulding of the wall
through
the mouse’s head. The mouse is plainly turning transparent—I can make out its tiny bones, and I can see the shadowy throbbing of its viscera. The heart is a flailing blot darker against the darkness of the floor. Suddenly the mouse bends itself in half and springs past Thrushchurl and through the door. Whisking along the bottom of the wall, it disappears through a gap in the floorboards. Just before it is gone, it passes through a bit of light, and I see the working of its hind leg bones through the transparent integument.

Thrushchurl is sitting up on his knees, his head thrown back, a look of wild triumph on his face.

“How did you do that?”

“I don’t know!” he says, his grin furling wider, “It never worked before!” He raises his trembling hand to his face, fingering his upper lip and teeth.

*

We are standing on a streetcorner in the wan light from the windows above us, glowing through dimity curtains.

“Do you smell that?” Thrushchurl asks suddenly, turning his head and raising his nose.

“It’s bodies!” Jil Punkinflake says, sniffing.

“They expose their dead, you know,” Thrushchurl says, coming a step towards us. He turns and follows the scent. Jil Punkinflake sails out after him as though he were tethered to Thrushchurl, and I come too, behind. Their heads go one way and another, like bloodhounds combing the air.

The street we follow is dark blue, all the windows are dark except where pale curtains glow feebly like clouds at night. There are light clouds wandering the sky now; stars in the strait between the buildings overhead, no moon. We are approaching the end of the street, where it does the splits and folds right and left in what looks to be little more than a pair of trails, and directly before us is a silvery ridge not quite as tall as we are, sparsely quilled with rattling white weeds. We take the left split; the trail is dust, overhung with half-fossilized branches, the ridge on our right and brick wall on our left, seven feet apart or so.

Why are we stepping lightly, not talking? Thrushchurl’s magic embarrasses us. Maybe magic works here. I should try making myself disappear.

No sound but the all-surrounding stir of air. The trail veers away from the wall and into a tunnel of laced boughs fragrant with resin, so low we have to duck as we pass. The path is a shallow trench; I catch a few snags. The roof drops away and the path sinks in between stones and follows an incline up and over. Weeds bow in the wind. The path widens, the land opens, but now there are trees around us, corkscrewed and bare, separated like trees in a park. We walk among these trees, which grow sparser and older, more enormous and spreading. The ground between them is a porridge of blue and silver soil, grit, stones, bleached weeds, into which the path has faded. A little aspirant noise from Thrushchurl and he points to a scaly wall. We trace it to a corner, double back and, further in the other direction, we find an iron gate. Thrushchurl pushes the gate, which is bound shut by a length of chain, in as far as it will go, and, his grin out of place with the concentration of his features, he squeezes himself through under the chain. Jil Punkinflake slips in as readily as he might through a half-open door, but I have to take my time, turning this way and that, the disagreeable smell of iron smearing on my clothes and hands.