The Narrator (28 page)

We peer together into the spacious room, a shuttered window’s bright regular lines opposite us. To one side is the grindstone and all the mill works, barrels and bulging sacks. A carpet of unground grain evenly spreads over the floor in big gleaming kernels, like little beetles, but a weirdly precise circle has been cleared of them entirely. At its far side, below and slightly to one side of the window, is a man Wormpig points out to us as Pepedora. He puts his hand on the door and leans in, speaking quietly for a few minutes. Pepedora sits cross-legged on a mat, the foot at the end of his exposed lean brown calf is misshapen and incomplete. His hands rest invisibly in his lap, and I can see the oily glint of light on his bare scalp, and the shades of a few dissheviled locks wafting filmily around the sides. There is an awed hush around him that suggests power to me, and I imagine he is the real authority in Vscriathjadze.

Wormpig makes an ushering gesture to Makemin. “Tell him.”

Makemin glances at me and strides bravely to the spot. Through me he explains our presence here. Pepedora does not fill in the occasional silences, but seems to be paying attention. When Makemin asks him,

“So, what cooperation can we expect?”

... a sepulchral voice, soft and yet resounding, comes from the man inside. I translate.

“He says we will have the help of their Spirit Eaters.”

Wormpig dispatches a boy, who seems attached to the place, up the hill with the message. Leaving the mill wall open, he then leads us across a bare space to the adjacent house, not twenty feet away, and knocks vigorously on the door.

“Open up!” he cries gaily in Lashlache, “Soldiers are here!”

We are seated within view of Pepedora, on cut up logs and barrels, and a woman brings us all cups of tea, one at a time, from within the house. The tea is surprisingly good—the water is very pure. We wait for the Spirit Eaters to come down. Wormpig and Makemin talk quietly together. I sit alone, resisting the temptation to stare at Pepedora, who seems to stare unblinking at us, and watching the breeze toy with dry weeds.

A steady rustling sets up around us; the boy thumps down the slope holding out his arms, hopping and bounding, erupts panting into our midst with a smile and darts out of sight behind our host’s house. The Spirit Eaters file down toward us along a rocky groove. As they pass a certain large stone on their left, each swings out his leg and claps the top of the stone once with the sole of his foot. They do this in a perfect rhythm, and flash of white fabric, although only the foremost seems to be wearing white—it’s the same gesture, repeated again and again with what looks like the same leg.

The Spirit Eaters rustle down in a knot, coming among us, seeking Pepedora and Makemin alternately. I can’t count them. There are more than a dozen; all roughly the same height, about forty, all in quilted jackets and trunks with puttis. Wind chapped and burned hands and faces, loose black hair lightly salted with dandruff or white hairs, a few approximately conical hats. They are muttering together in hoarse voices, milling and smoking. Somehow this all becomes a discussion involving both Makemin and Pepedora. I am privileged to observe one of the sublime transactions that form so much of the essence of our kind.

We return to the camp with the Spirit Eaters, who keep in their knot and talk low to each other, I think more to prevent us trying to address them than otherwise. Makemin calls out our Clappers, and immediately the Spirit Eaters and Clappers are embracing and hailing one another, forming a single mass. They arrange themselves and begin chanting aloud and clapping, raising their faces to the mountains, the clouds, the wind, with funneled lips.

*

I wander off to get a bit of lunch, then return to my cot. Shadow across my face, voice speaks my name. Zept stands there, holding an envelope out to me.

“This just came for you on the packet,” he says.

Now I’m alone. The letter is from her.

My darling, darling Low—

My precious Low,

I simply had to write you immediately. The idea that you might be worrying yourself about me weighs heavily on my mind, and I would place upon you nothing, no burden, that might distract you from the all-engrossing work you have nobly consented to do. Think only good and happy thoughts of me, with the fullest assurance that such thoughts reflect only the truth!

Your absence is the only imperfection in my happiness. Remember me—let your confidence in the constancy with which you shine in my thoughts be a comfort to you in the difficulties you face and please, please be careful. I am yours and, I believe, entitled to stand on my insistencies!

How empty my days are now, though my heart is full. News reaches us swiftly, and Orvar is so good at gathering up all its pieces to bring to me. I am thankful to have his help.

Yesterday I visited the tower by myself. I wanted to stand again on the spot where we first joined hearts. It seems the height of poetry, so to speak!—that it should have been there, at such a great elevation, and with such a free and open view of the world below, that it should have happened. You really tell me so little of your feelings, but that is customary for men, I suppose. I know that, for me, it was as though I had been rescued at the last possible moment, as I had been floating away from the world, off into the air, like a piece of dandelion fluff, when you took hold of me, and kept me from going.

How I wish I could go on, but I must get this at once into the post or it will not go at all. Orvar has just been here, and sends his “hearty hello.” Do not be too jealous, dear. I would not have you distracted on that account!

I send you all my love, and many many ardent embraces, many kisses—how hard it is to stop writing! Do write to me as soon as you can, you cannot know how I thirst for even a word from you! How well, how like paradise, it will be when you return—do think of it, it will be the very summit of joy for both of us!

Time will not wait—

cruel!

All, all my love to you—

your own, adoring,

Ohra

What I smell sifting up from the page makes my head spin. It’s insane. I can’t smell that smell while I see what I see around me—I feel like I’m in a dream as it starts to dissolve.

At the bottom of the page, I find what look like hastily added words, a little smeared, the letters less perfectly formed—

“
please please you mustn’t believe what they say about me
”

*

The Spirit Eaters and Clappers are still at it, and the day is wearing on and on. I’m outside the tent with the others, not really listening to what Silichieh says to me.

“He’s not listening,” Jil Punkinflake calls nastily to my turned back. “He’s just had his first love letter from the Cannibal Queen.”

Waves of fatigue billow over and anger me. Without a word I cross to Jil Punkinflake seize the front of his uniform and pitch him to the ground. I don’t know why everyone assumes I’m weak; as if a man could spend his life climbing rocks and hauling bags of books in the thin air of high mountain roads and not have some strength to show for it.

Jil Punkinflake tumbles down laughing, smiles up at me from the ground.

“All right all right,” he chuckles. “No tapping Low’s sore spot.”

“He gets grumpy when he’s tired, doesn’t he?” Silichieh asks.

Jil Punkinflake’s death’s-head moth flutters around my head and settles again on the lapel of his uniform. Where has he been keeping it?

Now a group of the Spirit Eaters approaches Makemin and Wormpig, and I hear them say, in clear, clipped tones,

“Now we should consult the Oracle.”

Wormpig translates that one. Four of the Spirit Eaters guide us out to a listing wooden tower with a badly cowlicked thatched roof and warped clapboard siding, to which are clinging a few intransigent, colorless scraps of paint. The Spirit Eaters gather in front of the tower, facing us, with dark expressions on their faces; disapproval, distaste, indicating to me that we are in the presence of some kind of delinquency. One of the eldest points at the gaping front doorway, in which a black rag curtain is currently floating, looking nearly into the eyes of a few of us in a row. He also mutters something I don’t catch—“In there” most likely.

Makemin dashes the curtain aside with a bold gesture, disappearing at once into the building; I hear a cry within almost immediately. A clear tenor, alarmed.

Now a crouched man comes barrelling through the curtain, across the porch and tumbling, nearly falling, down the steps. The Spirit Eaters fastidiously recoil to avoid colliding with him, and the man stops himself short and straightens, just as Makemin, who pushed him, emerges from the doorway. The man is surprisingly young, dressed like the rest of them in a sack suit. Short golden stubble covers his head; his wan face looks as though it had been carved out of an enormous scallop: white, cold, wet, and rubbery. He has a cleft chin and large, blue eyes, and he wants to escape, looking desperately from face to face. The Spirit Eater who pointed at the door takes hold of him by the collar and shoves him forward on the path, and the others cuff his head as he darts past with his chin down. We begin walking together; the Spirit Eaters keep close to the man and hold him in place with their censorious presences. Their hostility seems more or less formal; I don’t get the impression this man in particular has done anything to merit it.

The path takes us further into the foothills, through sparse foliage and rocks. We climb a ridge and move among many low peaks. Before us opens a broad arid space perhaps a hundred feet across and surrounded by steep slopes. The flat space is not marked by anything but its bareness; obviously all rocks have been cleared away. The path collides with and spreads along the circular rim of the space without touching it, forming a random, roughly triangular region between the circle and the slopes, with stones arranged in rows and sheared off across the top to serve as seats. We gather as indicated in these rows, although there are more of us than there are seats, and Thrushchurl, Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake and I end up standing in a milling bunch of other soldiers and tag-alongs, craning to see. Opposite us and a bit to the right what I take to be a natural channel extends across the slope and then breaks, sending water tumbling down a many-forked notch, in the form of many waterfalls, some frothing and some clear sheets, all collecting in a stony basin half-hidden from view on the far side of the circle.

The young man is standing despondently by the ring’s edge. I can glimpse him through the crowd, his shoulders rising and falling. A hand shoves him in the center of his back, and he half-turns thrashing the air with his forearms, anger and fear in his look. His lower lip protrudes a little, and as he turns back to the ring I know he is picking his moment to enter it.

Finally he steps deliberately in, walking toward the center briskly, in a businesslike way. Hush. He walks loosely, turning his soles up toward us, and swinging his hands past his hips. He passes the center of the circle and slows, then stops; I can’t see what’s happening to him. He drops onto his knees, and then, after a moment, forward onto his hands. Now he just stays that way, on all fours. Our mutter begins to return as time passes, and I wonder if the oracle will come out of that muttering, and not out of the empty circle at all. The light of the day is irregular with the drifting clouds, and now it grows brighter, as though a blind were being lifted in a corner. It shines on the falls and makes them sparkle, brighter, brighter, and brighter still. The water is dappled over with lights that turn as they gleam like gems, and now like stars, and now like suns—

—your enemy has landed—

—they’re here—

—they are coming through the mountains toward Cuttquisqui—

—as though a blind were lowered, the light goes. I have a rock at my back trickling grit onto me, and Thrushchurl is to my left, his hands pressed to his ears and his teeth chattering. Jil Punkinflake stands down the path with shock all over his face. He ran a little, I guess. We all did, or something waved us back. Silichieh is peering intently into the circle with pursed lips and his brow screwed down. The shamans, Makemin, Saskia, Nikhinoch, and other soldiers walk past us, heading down the path, discussing. Makemin turns halfway between me and Jil Punkinflake and calls out sternly to us—

“Hey! No dawdling!”

—and Nikhinoch nods, peering at us one by one.

We straggle together and begin heading back, in a mixed silence. Some of us are rattling more than we might, maybe trying to stir up some familiar sound, and there’s nervous laughter. I glance back through the men and get a glimpse of the oracle, sitting on the ground, his head bent on his knees. We are going to go meet the enemy. Silichieh is telling us hoarsely about Cuttquisqui.

He clears his throat.

“They worked a silver vein there, a while ago, until an influence came out from a ... mineshaft and made people sick, killed them. So they said a god had come there, and they left.”

The voice of the oracle hadn’t been so loud in his body, in his open mouth—the instant it flashed from his mouth, it spread in the air, like a pinch of dust dropped on to the surface of some water. I could feel my cold heart beating against the heat of my muscles. A deafening voice in a brittle sheet of sound, sweep and break over me again and again. Thrushchurl giggles vapidly. What language was that? I turn my eyes out over the ground to the side of the path, and I can hear the churning of waves, although the surf is miles away.