The Narrator (4 page)

Now, how would a callow youth like myself know that?

Once you see an Edek, or once one sees you, you will see others. Two of them, hooded like hostages, now stalk out of the church with their wan-faced helpers leading them. Edeks are blind to this world, mostly, and see vicariously through their assistants. I don’t know whether or not these helpers all wear the same mindless look because they’ve been put through some sort of procedure, or if an Edek’s presence or influence brings on this condition, but it seems like a mercy to me.

The foremost Edek wears a long belted black coat, badly faded; she has the air of a wasted invalid just emerging from her sick chamber with an uncanny, almost supernatural new vigor. Her companion is in an officer’s tunic, a long scarf wound round her neck many times. They angle away in the direction I came, taking long powerful strides in near unison, and in near unison they both abruptly turn their puncturing gaze on me, four frigid pools of congealed ink .... They do not pause, their heads reswivel, and they go.

I search for the mustering point, and the day passes. Now I am in the outer skirts, where the streets swell and contract as they please. Fewer people, and older. A hat in one of the windows catches my eye and I stop to look at it; my eye drifts over wooden heads on stands, past the sill and down to where an anxious cloud of dust is tumbling against the base of the building, in the dry alley. Indirect sunlight sifting down from everywhere illuminates the dust faintly, and I watch the motes rise and fall in vertical orbits, on a current, I guess, of air crushed against the bricks and forced aloft. The dust looks like a woman, with a long dress and a wide hat; and now she seems closer, as though she had traversed a wide space between us and were peering through a window at me. I see her eyes, not the luster of her eyes although there was light in the face—like a face of gold ash on a wax head—and her gaze “glowed” into me, without light. Water splutters from a drainpipe opposite me, and spills down a shallow channel in the dirt along the middle of the alley, thickening with dust until its front end is a bulbous brown lip. I can’t see the woman any more, nor can I remember her face.

The ground is elevated here, the view is unobstructed and full of wind. The sheer black trench of the Idle runs away from me, black wrinkles in a grey ribbon, and on its far side is the spiracle mound of the death precinct, from which on some nights it is recounted one can see the titan form of a grinning mortuary student rearing up to set a green death taper in the sky. There’s the Embalmer’s College, crouched like a toad dropsically bloated with venom and warted over with cupolas; its presence exceeds its size, and draws attention to it among these other buildings as the eyes draw attention in the face.

I walk toward the river, and in less than a quarter of a mile I find a bridge to cross into the death district. Shreds of black crepe, and the dried husks of flowers that might have come from funeral wreaths rasp along the ground, are toyed with by the air. The bridge is encrusted with what look like brass teacups broken in half, like scales growing out of any order, embedded in yellow solder. I cross the empty bridge as the sun begins to slide down toward the backs of the mountains, and night’s elaborate mechanism whirs to life all around me. It’s just tuning up.

So this is the death precinct. I find willows sighing over strewn empty streets, dust and attentive calm on the other side of the bridge. Sunset takes hours, and there are no lights lit anywhere yet. No sound but rustling skirts of air, the half-hearted whine of a shutter’s hinges, crickets who chirp two or three times and stop. I wander without thinking, and as the darkness falls I am picking my way through unlit streets with bushes growing from the pavements; in the gathering night, everything is felty and dim, the stone buildings luminous pink and silver with bare lividity, patched with lichen and veiled in ivy. I am thirsty, but the stone trough I find is too scummed over to drink from. I haven’t eaten since the morning, and so imagine the state I am in. I have wandered too long to go back, and my mind is unclear. I start pushing in at doors and even windows, and here one door opens. For a moment my thoughts are sharp again. Charred beams and broken plaster on the floor, smashed furniture, walls glow white-blue like cheeses. Here on the window sill a chipped tin cup with a little sand at the bottom is nearly full of rainwater. I drink it down carefully so as not to drink the sand. I can feel it pouring down cold into my empty stomach. There’s even a thin, narrow mattress or pad here folded on the floor. I pull my jacket around myself and lie down on my side. My body groans with fatigue but it takes me a while, or so it seems, to get to sleep, listening to the wind, and the faint sound of settling dust.

*

Ravenous morning. I am already in the streets before I wake up all the way. I hear the voices long before I begin to see people, and then only a face here a face there. Mostly white people. I am blinking all the time, but it’s hard to see. There are mortuary students everywhere, the males in vested suits with cutaways and cravats, silk hats with black crepe around the band, and the females in black dresses and flowered hats. Only those who have matriculated may wear veils. I wash my face in a fountain and take another drink—a belly filled with water doesn’t hurt so much. I decide I have to spend something; two rolls vanish without a trace. I sit for a while and wait for them to percolate through me. Then I spend the rest of my money on a proper meal.

The cemetery gardens of Dusktemper truly are the finest imaginable. Every few blocks the land opens up in stately rolling green and dark cypress yew and willow, lawns spangled with lank stones, peopled with sculptures and mausolea. Some are in immaculate condition and some falling into picturesquely complete disrepair. The eerie serenity of these places hums with an undercurrent of menace that I find appeals to me. What is the nature of this oddly soothing feeling? I have seen the gardens of the life priests and they are tranquil and beautiful, but these fantastically still, entranced graveyards fascinate me.

So now I am moving among these monuments, trembling phosphorescence in the pale stones beneath lost grey sky. The path descends across the cemetery, and now the few distant visitors and groundskeepers drop out of sight. The path cuts into the ground, and becomes something like a stone-lined trench as I follow it around the base of a low hill. I am thinking of dead men, and the stories that they leave behind for us to repeat. It was to this task that I had proposed to dedicate my life, and now the fiat of someone I’ll never know or see has quashed that purpose.

I catch sight of a woman laying flowers on a grave. The lane I walk is baffled by a stone retaining wall on my right, and as I pass I keep gazing at this woman. The grave is marked with an upright stone, and she, the stone, and the colossal beech that overhangs it, are stark against a cream sky. No I didn’t actually see any flowers; she had been bent over the grave and straightened her back gracefully as I came. Only now does she notice me, turns her entire body toward me. An impenetrable veil is draped across her hat’s extremely wide brim, and gathers into the grey lace of her chin-high collar, and hat and veil together look like two saucers stacked mouth to mouth. A voluminous sooty cone from the waist down, her dress is cinched tight around her, blooming out from waist to taper back into her long neck, a grey fabric with a darker shell of transparent gauze web, dotted with tiny black flowers like evenly-spaced flies. She stands with her arms at her sides, staring at me with her invisible face. I think of charred wood burning black in the grate, creaking and whispering with cryptic fire deep beneath the scorch, when I look at her black and grey shape against the lividity overhead. I must be at or below the level of the occupant of that grave.

As though a string tugged it, my head keeps swivelling back to the woman, who seems to turn in place to follow me with a gaze emanating from the entire front of her body. Further on down the lane as I look back a little light shines across the veil and I glimpse the contour of a tapering face—there it is the green flash I’ve heard about that happens just at sunset in this part of the world, trickling around this tapering face through the veil. I seem to see or imagine two intense round grave stares like a pair of black pits or pools fixed and sucking at my image greedy as quicksand. I hurry to get out of her sight—I don’t enjoy this feeling, being watched, and this looking and hurrying, all too affected by someone else, and here I am mangy with poverty uncertainty and lostness.

The cemetery peters out into long-weeded lots and listing stone buildings shaggy with vines, all under the sprawling dry shade of ancient black-leaved beeches. Everywhere the cool air is settling gradually toward the earth like dust, tugging almost imperceptibly at me. In the wan light of this drugged day I pick my way through grave wrack tumbled up in lots, broken stone basins filled with clear rain water and brown scum at the bottom like a mat of tea leaves, watched over by stone angels their faces half-lathered with moss.

A sickening recollection of my reason for being in this city washes over me, nearly buckling my knees. These sharp sensations of coolness, quietness, beauty, all to be stolen from me for no reason, for nothing—I don’t even know what this draft is for. Epitaph collage of broken slate and granite tombstones knitted together by the weeds, “Rest In Autumn Loving Wife,” “Where We Shall Be Killed In Fire,” and protracted lines of numbers. The iron-piked wall is interrupted by a partially collapsed house and as this is the only exit that presents itself I part the curtain of vines and enter the house through the wall, setting my feet down with care on the slippery floorboards.

I hear voices near me. In the next room, three mortuary students are throwing dice against the far corner; a fourth lies with his head on a split cushion along another vine-draped hole in the wall, the day’s beaded light gleaming on his long legs and checked vest. He is watching the dice players and smiling. They turn to nod and grin at me, bent cigarettes at their lips, then return their attention to the dice. A fifth student lies nearby in the room’s darkest corner, his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles and his shoulders propped against a door in a deep doorway.

I can see the whites of his eyes, and the dim motions of his face as he speaks.

“As you honor death, buy me a drink!” he calls, smiling. It sounds like a quotation. If I were a wit, I’d know from where and give the countersign.

“I have no money,” I say, pinching at my empty pockets.

“Then you are my brother,” he replies at once, and lithely rolls himself into a crouch with his arms between his knees like a frog, but still sitting on the stone jam of the doorway. His face is round with a slightly tapering chin, skin white as custard and a sharky grin on red baby lips, faded grey irises in eyes like yellowed ivory. Straight pale brown hair bells from his top hat in a bowl cut.

“I’m Jil Punkinflake.” He says this as though he expects me to have heard of him, smiles up at me and offers his hand. “Go ahead and laugh if you like, but it’s my name.”

I don’t laugh, but we smile at each other.

“What’s yours?” he asks.

“Low,” I say.

“Just Low?”

“Low Loom Column is my complete name outside the country.”

“What country?”

“My country.”

“Mm,” he says. “What is it inside?”

“I can’t say it here. I’m not inside.”

Jil Punkinflake gets up and tugs the ladder from his vest. A large death’s-head moth, clinging to his lapel like a boutanier, opens and closes its wings meditatively. We sit down together on a piano bench by the wall. I explain my problem, how I come to be here.

“An exemption?” he asks.

“A narrator’s exemption; they’ll give it to you if you’ve already done your obligatory service, or trained for something.”

“So you get out of it if you’re a veteran?”

“No, I mean you go into the army when you come of age and serve a year, war or peace. It’s a standing army.”

“That’s what you did, Low?”

“No, I took medical training. The Sodality in town made me an award of the fees, because my marks were good in school.”

“But what possible good is it to the army training you if you can use that to get an exemption?”

“I imagine they reckon on being able to entice you to stay, having you right there. And there’s always the chance war will break out during your training period—there’s always one going on somewhere—
then
they can enlist you for a full tour without discounting your training time.”

“And just to whom are you assigned, Low?”

I have to check the ticket to be certain.

Jil Punkinflake’s head tilts back as though he’d just been lightly buffeted on the chin. “Makemin’s unit is understaffed. Half his troops have deserted already. Why don’t you run? Your chances are good.”

“I was seen by an Edek,” I say with a sheepish smile and toss of the hands.

“An Edek saw you?” he asks sharply.

“Yes.”

He shakes his head.

Twilight shows violet fire in the sky as we make our way to the dormitories. Skulls hang in net bags from the street lights, which are not lit.

One of the students grabs my arm and points, and the other students are watching in rapt attention as a hearse rattles by in the square terraced below this one. The horses are large and burly, with glistening curried hides and quivering tails painstakingly bundled atop their buttocks. Their plumed heads bend in the same direction at the same time, their dishevilled manes seem especially wildly to contrast with their otherwise impeccable grooming. A hatless man in a plain black suit is driving them. I crane my neck to see inside, but the windows are curtained. A veiled black wreath adorns the back. My comrades sigh and coo to themselves over it, and sagaciously evaluate the style of the brass fittings, the magnificent lacquering of the wood.