The Narrator (27 page)

There is a path here, flat between humps and trees. We stand peering into the blue dark, and I can see white forms standing around us. Statues. Silence. Excited looks. Jil Punkinflake’s face settles further into its old color, the pink bleaching away, his face yellow against the blue night. Rotten egg smell, or stagnant water, and beneath it a familiar odor. Out of the trees to the base of a tower—one of many. They loom up just above the tops of the trees on either side. I can’t say whether the tower before us is stone or wood, it seems as though it were all one flow of stuff, like wax, or a wasp’s nest. The surface is puffed and cracked, chips hang peeling with faint shadows behind them. Thrushchurl disappears into the darkness of the rounded doorway; a chain knocks on wood. Sound from nearby of wind shifting broken glass. I examine the ground and see bits of glass here and there against the bottom of the wall. Thrushchurl holds the heavy heart-shaped padlock in his hands, turning it, then he takes it in his fingers like a sandwich and carefully sinks his teeth into the keyhole. His head works back and forth as though he were gently worrying a bite free of the metal. The lock clicks, and Thrushchurl sets the crinkling chain against the wall, pushes the door open with one hand wiping his lips with the other.

There is an atrium with an alcove, tenanted by a brass vessel full of dark earth. To the left is a stairway curving up out of sight, glittering with tiny square and rectangular tiles of cream marbled with blue. I smell decay.

Single file, we climb—the stairs end at the bottom of a shaft. There’s a stink of rotting flesh. Dusty, misfitting floorboards, trestles, a rough walled tube open to the distant sky, niched with alcoves and ledges. Pale figures lie in them, on the trestles, and some are scattered on the floor and against the wall. Fragments of bodies litter the floor. Thrushchurl sighs and clasps his hands, and Jil Punkinflake gives an awed “ohh ...” They pick their way reverently out onto the floor, and Thrushchurl strokes an arm that lies outstretched on a table.

The corpses are set out for vultures and ravens; the practice is known as “air burial.” A carcass lies near me, the chest open, the wind-stiffened skin pulled up in rags like hard leather. Looking closely, I can see phosphorescent, thin sky-blue V’s, regularly spaced, along the edges of the wound, fine as calligraphy. The cavity is plugged with black amber. I know the body was not prepared this way, but set here unembalmed shortly after death. There are a number of them, in this condition. Thrushchurl bends over a body examining the marks, takes its face in his finger tips, turns the head this way and that.

“Someone’s tampered with this one,” he says, a soft horror in his voice.

“The Predicanten have fed here,” I say, pointing to the prints of clever little paws in the dust by the remains.

At the mention of the Predicanten Thrushchurl quickly glances up at me, then peers down again into the face in his hands. Jil Punkinflake brushes up next to me, ducks to finger the amber. I can hear Thrushchurl’s breath catch.

“You’re right!” he whispers, tenderly drawing the eyelids up with his thumbs. “—they’ve been busy here inside ...”

He comes toward us, stepping into the capacitous shadow of a beam overhead.

“They replaced what they took out—”

He stops in the shadow. His speech stops.

I turn. Nothing behind us. Nothing to see. I call Thrushchurl quietly by name, but he remains stock still, as he is, in the shadow of the beam. Jil Punkinflake and I draw nearer to him. In the dark, I can barely make out his face; his smile is gone—his eyes are round. I take his shoulders in my arms—his body is rigid as wood.

“What is it?” Jil Punkinflake asks. “A fit?”

“I think it is.”

I touch his face—it’s cold. I give his shoulders a tentative shake—he tumbles forward into me, body toppling like a stack of boxes.

“—with memory,” he says, swaying onto his feet. He puts his hand dizzily to his head and leans on me.

“We should go back,” I say, trying to find his gaze.

“You’re right,” he says, “We should get out now.”

Jil Punkinflake takes him by the hand with a complicated expression and leads him to the stairs. Thrushchurl seems in a hurry to leave. Going last, I see my shadow condensing on the plaster before me as I turn to descend the steps, look back at a frail, yellow-gold light, a little brighter than a patch of moonlight would be, pooling in an alcove opposite me. A body sits there, its head tipped back into the alcove, and the glow gathering around its head in a circle, growing steadily brighter.

I’m afraid. I hurry away, and say nothing about it.

“What did you see?”

He is silent for a while. “I was falling ...” he says uncertainly. “A voice sang out low, on and on without pausing. I heard Makemin say ‘fire.’ I fell then.”

Escape through the trees now, as though something were coming. I keep looking back over my shoulder, and my fear doesn’t leave me. I get out ahead, am first into the road, glance up in time to see something whirring high in the air and recoil back under the branches hurling out my arms to stop my companions. We watch from the shade as two Predicanten crawl by overhead, flying in the direction of the towers. When they’re gone, we stride quickly down the road, keeping to the farther side.

“Who’s calling?”

Now I hear a howl—it starts low, and then rises, and grows louder as it rises. It outlasts itself, remaining in the air when the sound is gone.

“Predicanten don’t have voices like that.”

I think of the haloed head.

Grown gigantic, a Predicate passes in complete silence, its shoulders loom above the tops of the trees; I catch sight of it just as it begins a slow turn, melting into the gloom.

Predicate heads are bobbing among the trees on long, limp, stalk-like necks that trail off into nothing, peering this way and that with eyes swollen to slits, swinging all together in the air like a cat-o-nine-tails as though all those necks were gathered to one trunk.

We move swiftly to the nearer edge of the road, to hide behind the trees, go quietly, all of us breathing together. With a recklessness I can’t understand I sweep out onto the road again after a few minutes. I see no sign of the Predicanten, and we are a bit away now. We stop, looking and breathing. The night is very still.

“They put memory in the place of what they ate,” Thrushchurl is speaking a little as though this were obvious, but his uncertain tone might be a sign of astonishment. “Not memories, you know, of this or that, but just memory.”

He pants once.

“That’s how I know—I remembered it.”

“Without seeing it first?”

“Yes,” he beams, but with some fear knotted in his brow, “I remembered it
first.
”

His breathing grows more pronounced, through his teeth.

“I want to go back!” he says, and turns. Jil Punkinflake and I have him in a lunge, and we restrain him with effort.

“I want to know what they know!” he cries.

“No you don’t!”

“Please let me go! Please let me go!” he implores as he struggles.

“They don’t know anything!” I shout. “They don’t know anything!”

He stops struggling, and looks diagonally down at the ground. Warily, we unclinch him.

“You don’t know that ...”

Thrushchurl looks probingly at me, the yellow glow of his teeth like a banked-down fire there below his eyes.

“I wish I knew ...” he says, and I relax. I had thought he was going to ask me something.

“Where do they come from?” he asks, looking directly at me.

“I don’t know!” I shout, jerking back.

I’m flustered—why am I flustered?

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” I keep shouting.

Jil Punkinflake joins in, staring at me, his eyes harder than I’ve ever seen them but once but once before.

“Do you know something, Low?”

“No!” I shout.

A panic is eating me.

“They’re like Edeks and everything else. That’s all I know, like anyone knows! What everyone knows!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“You know something,” Thrushchurl says, pointing gently at me.

“But I don’t! I don’t!”

I don’t.

I don’t know anything
.

I see an idea in Jil Punkinflake’s face, his nostrils quivering, and he shrinks almost imperceptibly from me—

“You’re a
dreamer
, aren’t you?”

Between their two heads I can see the staring paper thing between the trunks of the trees—

“No! No!” I shout again and again.

“You’re one of
them!”

“I’m not! I am not!”

I feel like I’m dying. The world is just breaking ice floes spreading implacably apart over black killing cold water, ice water.

—Somehow I’m there, as though I’d been nodding off into an instant nightmare and now snap awake again, right into those denials still streaming from my mouth.

“I’m not! I’m not! I’m one of you! I have to be one of you! I’m the narrator!”

I am persuading them.

I see the suspicion slacken and fall from their faces, and they’re not leaning away from me anymore.

Jil Punkinflake actually takes me by the arm.

I still my voice and put my hand to my face, bringing it away slick with cold sweat.

Everything’s all right again.

We are
merry comrades
on the road together.

*

After a paltry morning mess I cross the camp and find Makemin in conference with the other officers. Saskia sits beside the leader of the Yeseg militia; a small man with a pale face, fierce without strength, red-rimmed eyes glassy with will. She looks obdurate and stony beside him, but she doesn’t seem like one of them, the Yesegs; from the way she keeps her eyes trained on Makemin, she declares herself still a part of our contingent. Jil Punkinflake’s face stiffens at sight of her and he also fixes his eyes strictly on Makemin.

The commander of the First Specialists is a gangly raw-boned thicket-faced man with freckles all over him, overbite through his moustache’s long threads. He’s speaking with Makemin in a low voice, waving his hands incessantly. No one has been here long and there hasn’t been much time or opportunity for organization, though only a few deaths since camp was established, luckily, so Makemin, who is evidently and to his obvious if undemonstrative satisfaction in charge, will handle the organizing himself. Commander overbite hands him the brevet notice in my presence. The First Specialists have accumulated a number of locals, some of whom speak Alak, and now they are called upon to help arrange a meeting with the city authorities.

These local people, a few men and women, talk among themselves, and one is dispatched up the street with the words—

“Go get Wormpig.”

Wormpig, it transpires, is a round, smiling man in a quilted jacket and felt boots, with a brick-colored sash round his waist. His grin folds around a twig of licorice in the corner of his mouth.

“The mayor?” he says immediately, his pronouncedly curved eyebrows scaling his forehead. “I’ll show you,” he turns in place, flicking his index finger by his shoulder, so that we would follow him.

Makemin looks about and catches sight of me.

“Narrator, you come along.”

Wormpig leads us through streets as tall and narrow as mine shafts; the towers are open in spacious verandas at street level and I wonder how these insubstantial lower stories can support the upper ones. Lamps burn everywhere even in the middle of the day, because the huddled buildings shut out most of the daylight. Wormpig stops before one of the verandas and gestures to it. Makemin takes to the steps and pauses almost at once, astride two stairs.

The mayor, for such I take him to be, sits on a cushion on the carpeted boards, slumped nearly altogether over a low table. Illuminated by a flannelly-looking fire in the compact hearth just behind him, he is sodden and irregular, like a half-molded clay figure. He laboriously turns his whole head in our direction; his face looks like he’s slept on it, his eyes clouded from drink. Makemin joins us in the street again, disgust on his face.

Wormpig, still smiling, says, “Now I’ll take you to see Pepedora, if you like. I think you’ll have more to talk about with him.”

We follow Wormpig to an open space below the steeps, where the land rises to form a tree-scalped shelf that curls like a cat against the feet of the seated hill. A few modest homes, octagonal towers with small-paned windows and elegant trim, gaze out mysteriously from the black hedges and branches here. The walk is brief. Before us rises a windmill. There is a low picket fence around it. The front of the mill is raised a little on pilings. Wormpig approaches from the side and I see there is a broad sliding section of wall, like the door of a freight car, I assume for the loading of grain. As we come to it, Wormpig takes a sudden additional step forward, rotating to us and raising his hand, pudgy fingers outspread, to make us stop there.

“Leprosy,” he adds, and then goes to pull the loading door aside on roaring, well-greased runners.