The Narrator (36 page)

It sounds as though every joint in the place adjusts to my every step. Empty except for a few cushions on the mats, a table, a lamp. I get the lamp going nicely—it has an adjustable wick that can be dimmed out to nothing at all but turned up again to full brilliance without relighting—and lie down to listen to the roar of water. It’s hard to stop my mind, or to rest, because I am not certain someone with a better claim to the place might not appear at any time. I keep hearing the fumbling of what is trying to become a knock at the door, the sound of footsteps—a visit just barely trying, and failing to take shape, failing to compose these intractable elements into an event.

I decide I want to sleep. I turn down the light and the room shakes with deafening laughter. I turn the light up at once. The room reappears as it was, silent, unshaken. I listen to nothing but pounding rain.

Presently, I extinguish the light again. The laugh explodes in the room and when I turn the light on it illuminates only a face inches from mine from which is pouring that shattering, mind-annihilating laughter.

I rush outside and the ground is dry—there is no rain. I walk in haste. The city is deserted. Ruined buildings, litter, bones in the street.

The sudden appearance of a red lantern draws my eye to the brothel whose window I am passing, and through the window I see the Lieutenant lunging back and forth in uniform on top of a cooing woman whose dress is gathered high above her waist like froth and whose hands are widely splayed on his back; he is facing in my direction the circular eyes rolled up in blemished rings as she kisses his exposed upper teeth with dreamy abandon. His dangling lower jaw leaves viscous dabs the size of thumbprints where it flaps against her chin and throat.

I recoil from the sight into the blackness of a side street. It takes me past many brighter streets that I feel I must avoid, and I continue to follow this dark side street until it gives way, expels me into the utter darkness beyond the city altogether. I stop and start, go forward and stop again.

I look out over the battlefield again with a feeling of terror brimming in me at the idea of the bodies lying there in total darkness.

In the darkness I dimly spy a form dashing purposively here and there, gathering the bodies of the enemy in its arms and tumbling them with a kind of hasty decorousness into several heaps. This figure works tirelessly, moving with almost fantastic speed in its work. Then it alters its activity. It goes from one heap to the next, with long intervals at each. Then it retires I don’t know where. I get up higher to search it out but my eyes are baffled by so much dark.

A pale and glowing tendril slithers up from within one of the heaps, fluttering its wormlike end against the sky. More rise around it, and from the other heaps. The fires are seeping up around the sodden clothes and catching the short hair. I watch every blaze expand and do its work.

*

Always the sickening feeling, like a lid dropping down on me, to shut me forever in the dark.

I was just asking someone for something—paper, I think—and someone said—

“Was that yesterday?”

I am looked at incredulously. I realize they mean the battle I witnessed—but that was days ago, weeks, wasn’t it?

How many nights?

I climb to the spot again. I can see the marks I made in the earth, my knee and foot prints. Still there even after the rainstorm. I wander here and there, looking away from the stinking ravines ahead, streaked with blood and swimming with flies whose drone rumbles like far away thunder. The charred heaps of bodies still smoulder there, and from time to time a whiff comes this way.

What’s that? I have been staggering a bit—it makes sense, I haven’t eaten. I am on my knees, looking straight ahead no doubt stupidly and there before me I see a heap of those ferrous rocks and a crevasse there, the size of my hand, made by a jumble of smaller stones in among the larger ones. This crevasse has bewitched my attention so that I can’t look away from it. I draw closer and peer in—there’s something tickling in my head. I push the stones apart and peer more intently into the little crevasse, and a blue light begins to sift down among the veering edges of the stones ... only a bluish dust, but it catches the light strangely, because that light doesn’t illuminate anything else. My own breath becomes audible to me and switches on its own to my open mouth as I look, because the arrangement of these edges, the pebbles, the fine-grained light, the chalk white, is what I want but can’t deny precisely corresponding to the arrangement I would see every time I returned to my home from the town as I would look down from the pass—I don’t know what to do—

I see my home again, the serene-looking College. I feel my breath stop and start, and hot lines down my face, but what do I do—it is too painful to go on seeing but it’s too beautiful to push away—I can only fall into my seeing it until I am exhausted?

Then noises well out of me and I paw at the little stones as though I could reach out and stroke the vision, ruining it. I expect I’m making a disgusting racket.

*

I can’t do it. Let’s say I come away, back to the city, and I eat, eating badly. I push food into my mouth chew and swallow it as though it were all still new to me. The mechanical action of eating as I am eating now has no relation at all to whatever it is I feel the irritable, kinked feeling in my middle. Walking away from the table, whosever it was, I can feel the jagged food lodged in my stomach; the effort I had put into gagging it down has drained me of my strength. I sag into a cellar doorway and lie down at the base of the stairs.

Now I am sleeping again.

Our characters are all crudely stamped on us along with our silly names and our tics, and now that I’m forever brushing first my left and then my right cheeks I have mine as well. Try explaining, rather than being understood, I think profoundly. How do you feed stone fishes?

Now it’s a story—around the little farm house the young man calls on the eldest daughter, and they refer to him by a name that’s never quite the same way twice; first, Taddy. Then Keddy. Then Kedded. He’s talking with the girl as he stands in the tall grass by the window; they all love him there and the family is gazing fondly at him through the window. Deep blackness swollen up in the treeline beyond the high grass, shaggy branches make a line like the side of a half-melted candle. He’s still chatting happily with them, and blackness stands now only a few feet behind him like a night wall. A cloud dims the sun, and when the light returns the two of them are gone from the tall grass and the family calls from the windowsill “Kaddy! Where are you?” He’s gone forever.

“Thrushchurl? I thought he deserted.”

“He’s around here somewhere.” Setting fires. Placing fires. Putting fires. I gesture halfheartedly; I’m being asked to shake off powerful fatigue in order to explain something with many parts. I see the beating lights before I find the flames. Everyone has come unmoored from the ground and hurtles around me in the air, like Wacagan, but without the stopping and starting, back and forth.

Rumor has it Makemin is unhappy. Well fancy that. He wants to pursue the enemy into the interior but the Predicanten are holding him here until reinforcements from the mainland arrive. So we are waiting and he is fuming. Let him. I stay in the cellar until a few other soldiers blunder in bickering. I go looking for another hiding place like an elderly dog looking for a moment’s peace.

The wind blows the battlefield stink into town. People light torches day and night and march brandishing them in the street, trying to thin out with fire the plague of flies. The fog returns from the sea, and in it the flies look like black leaves swirling in milky tea.

I’ve been sent to bring a message to Saskia. Everyone who has seen her can tell me immediately which way she went—they’re that careful of her. I find her where she does her target shooting, on one of the slopes where the gorse trembles close to the ground. Sitting on a stone with her right arm resting palm up along her thigh, opening and closing her fist with mechanical regularity, she doesn’t see me coming. Her eyes never leave her hand. Getting her attention is like being suddenly illuminated by a permeating, judging light.

She looks up as I approach. I fix my eyes on the air over her head, stop within arm’s reach and hold out the note. It is snatched from my hand. I wait, trying to go to sleep or to find some soft way to resist the spell of her dominating, pitiless stillness.

“No reply,” she says, and again I’m disarmed and shaken at the deep, incongruous voice. Despite myself, I bang my heels together in a gesture of efficiency I’ve always hated, and turn to go. To make up for it, I take my time; veering from the threadbare path I amble instead over the shrubby ground. After a few minutes, a movement catches the corner of my eye, and I turn to see Jil Punkinflake approaching Saskia. She is on her feet, her pistol in her hand. I imagine she’s been loading it. Now she holsters it and watches him.

He is pale and puffy, with rings beneath his eyes. He also holds an envelope gingerly in his hand, and offers it to Saskia, the whites of his eyes very bright. Makemin must have guessed that he would be the one to find Saskia, wherever she might be. She takes the note, and he stands with his hands at his sides, a little more on one foot than another, breathing through his mouth, fear and yearning gushing from his stricken eyes.

Saskia has read and replaced the envelope’s contents and shoves it slowly into her pocket, looking at him. Her back is to me. She slaps him. It’s a glancing blow, her fingertips knocking against his chin’s edge. His head jars, more with nerves than with the weak force of her hand, his eyes widen.

She slaps him again. I hear the sound. This time his head swings to the side and back at once; he stares and pants, white as milk. She slaps him and advances a step, slaps again and steps again, and he recedes before her, with an astonished, joyless excitement in his face. Suddenly she pulls her arm well back and strikes him to the ground. He does not cry out, but falls on his side and elbow. He raises his head and looks up at her with such a bleak longing in his rapt eyes that I turn away. I leave them there, Saskia towering over him.

*

The wind grows stronger. A cave breaks open in the fog, sweeping into the ferns, and in a moment I see a form through grey transparence and then that fog is swept away and I see her plainly. She is clearly there.

At the same moment you stride into an illuminated archway in my heart’s spot like a little goddess. You had had another name before, and I learned it from your lips. Your fine lips pressed each letter carefully into my ear. Later you ordered me to forget it, not to say it, think it, or remember it. I don’t, but I feel it stir anyway in the air in my open mouth, because your face glows through mine. I see your two eyes glisten through your veil—the intensity they stir in me stops and starts with my breath and grows like the intensification of light at dawn.

I take a step toward you. As always, a great spiral foam of dreams spins out of you like a galaxy but what do I know about galaxies? Your arms hang nervelessly at your sides and you hold your head up and back straight. You seem to want to draw me in under your chin, raising it at me. I see again the swell of your dress at your waist, where it is broken up by so many creases, all bowed to you—near your throat there is always a warm lineny smell a little like lemon rind. I close my eyes, still seeing you, and the gauzy dreaminess of your house and body close over me like a cold spring, offering me a whole life in sleep. You would be a monumental hourglass towering over the landscape, sifting out my time without seeming to. I’ll resolutely stand here with my eyes shut dreaming myself out from under the hood of this nightmare with all my will until I find myself back in Tref, and Makemin dead and stinking in a ditch on the island, and you before me.

Fog creeps up toward the peak, and mires itself in the trees.

I have to escape.

*

I am beguiling my time sitting under a tree with a little blue guide to the city. A hermit lived here ages ago in a hovel built into the side of the mountain. Shepherds led their flocks into the vicinity and disturbed his meditations with their songs and their pipes and their bells and baas, and, in frustration, he picked up a piece of ice and flung it against a stone. The stone disappeared and water sluiced out of a “porcelain hole.” The noise of the water drowned out the sound of the shepherds and the hermit was satisfied. Unfortunately, the entire fabric of the slope was gradually undermined and soon water began gushing out everywhere, forming the many waterfalls that still provide the city with its water. The destiny of the hermit is not described. “In the beginning was the end,” someone’s written here.

All around me are deep prayer platforms and mills, droning chants. They are eliciting the help of the spirits. I don’t really understand.

I watch a Predicate form over the roof of the shrine. A lopsided gobbet, grey and lavender in color, spins there like clay on a potter’s wheel, and long carrot-like stalks begin to droop out of it. It flails, convulsing away into the air like a bundle of dirty laundry infused with an antic simulation of life. Glancing down, my thumbnail has inadvertently indented a line beneath the sentence “although some say this spirit worship grew out of a primitive monotheism, and did not merely supplant it” end of page.

Flip the book aside and walk. Deep within the hood of this shrine is an enormous stone idol I’ve seen many times: a stone book. It is swarming with tiny, shivering leathery forms. Bats. Clappers and Spirit Eaters stand in rank and file before it, bolt upright with their feet together, chanting stanzas. Edeks tilt in and out of the slender wooden pillars, Predicanten perch in the dim rafters. One of them points to something with its lean bent arm, the wing hanging down like a voluminous sleeve, and it rasps a few observations to its glassy-eyed, ring-mouthed neighbor. A Clapper comes in from the right carrying blood in a paper basket, red soaking steadily into the white, and it is set down on a table beside the idol. With one continuous motion the bats begin to slither down the book, smelling their way toward the blood.