The Narrator (6 page)

“You’re looking for Makemin?” That voice is thickly accented and ragged, coming from a strongly-built man in a long dark sweater, sitting on a canvas seat surrounded by nothing in particular. I go over to him. He smokes, and seeps the smoke out horizontally into the wind from his mouth.

“Wait ‘til you see what mood he’s in before you try to talk to him. If he dislikes you when he meets you, he’ll always dislike you.”

I introduce myself and he tells me his name is Silichieh. He’s part of Makemin’s unit—a veteran, although he hasn’t served with Makemin before. He shows me his green engineer’s armband. When I exhibit my red X’s, he pouts and says, “We’re both professionals,” smiling.

He has a broad square face covered in bristles and a rabbit mouth. I sit down on a low heap of bricks, and now his head is above me, against the oceanic sky. I tell him about my exemption problem and he nods philosophically.

“It’s an old story. Just don’t tell it to him—” whenever Makemin comes up, Silichieh points vaguely in the direction of one of the tents, “—no matter how good your case is he won’t listen, and things will be worse for you then. He’ll think you’re shirking.”

“Do you know where we are going?” Surprising I haven’t thought to ask this earlier.

“Meqhasset,” he says, and his eyes light up strangely. “You know Meqhasset?”

I shake my head no.

“It’s an island. We’re going to Port Conget; there’s a boat there we will take to Meqhasset.”

“Is it very far?”

“Not visible from mainland, but not far.”

“There are Yeseg on the islands?”

“Not yet, but Meqhasset—you don’t know?”

Again I shake my head.

“Well, it’s complicated. Meqhasset is federated with other islands. They’re all independent internally but they are all supposed to cooperate for each other’s defense, and they mount strong defenses, particularly their navy. Meqhasset is very strategically placed because it’s so close to land; from Meqhasset you can really have coastal control here, or pile up troops there to bring anywhere here. Now, lately business there is bad, money’s gone and so, when either we or Wacagan men cross into their waters, other islands’ navy don’t come around. With no money, there’s no help from anyone else, so now Meqhasset is vulnerable, and we race to see who gets there first. That’s why Makemin is so frantic to move.”

“I thought we were fighting to put down a Yeseg rebellion or something.”

Silichieh smiles. “No, no. It’s Wacagan versus Alaks again, as always. Wacagan are backing Tewsetonta, who’s King of Yesegs, and encourage him to break with Alak Emperor, so now Emperor is behind Tewsetonta’s brother Tewsetonka to take his place. Alaks and Wacagan fight through them. Taking Meqhasset is Tewsetonta’s idea, and now we are supposed to head them off before they can get it.”

He looks past me.

“There he is.”

The camp is bordered on the town side by a few long low buildings, and from between them a group is emerging not far from us. I see a man talking agitatedly with a few others, starting and stopping, and they are nodding and making brief comments. Makemin is beside himself. He talks, gesticulating vehemently, his face drawn. Suddenly his whole body snaps and his fist staves in the side of a crate. He storms across the camp, his knuckles dripping blood into the dust. I take him in as he passes. His cropped hair and his skin are the same color and that makes his scalp look splintered. Drab tan uniform with something like a split skirt hanging from under the tunic, over his trousers, short boots and gaiters, cross-chest strap to his belt and a large buttoned holster. Medium sized and solid man, boiling with fury, and nearly all one color, clothes and person. He looks like a lot of light brown dust just congealed itself around his eyes. I’ve never seen more rage in one face.

Makemin storms by and disappears into his tent, the one Silichieh kept pointing to, with a furious dashing aside of the flap door. I glance at Silichieh and he makes an expressive face, what’s the use?

“He’s no jolly good fellow.”

He tells me to try again in a few days. If anything comes up, there will surely be an announcement.

“Well, he’s been getting divorced for months now, and she’s not just divorcing him, but there’s this lawsuit about some property or some land. That case is separate but related. So he spends every free minute he gets in there, writing letters and filling out forms or something. He can’t possibly have wanted this assignment, and I don’t know what he did to get stuck with it but it must have been pretty bad or pretty stupid. And now he has to deal with half his soldiers deserting, and no more can be spared, and so on, and they won’t let him leave. It’s all pretty bad shape.”

“Did an Edek see you, too?”

“An Edek? No! Did one see you?”

I nod ruefully.

He runs his hand over the top of his head, then drops it into his lap and sniffs thoughtfully at the air.

“Why do you stay?” I ask.

He looks up at and a little into me. “Meqhasset is enchanted, everyone says. I want to see it.”

“Enchanted how?”

He drops his eyes sideways.

“I don’t know exactly. Whatever it is, is interior. No inhabitants have anything to do with it, and they don’t talk about it. I heard about it from my cousin. He had to go there, on a boat, and he heard stories. And he saw something too, I think, but he would never talk about it.”

“What does he think of you going?”

“Oh, he’s dead. My whole family is dead. No wife, nobody waiting, so,” he shrugs, “I can throw my life around if I want to. And I’ve been on campaigns before. I learned always to avoid glorious campaigns—everyone is more likely to die in glorious campaigns. You get yourself assigned to something small-time deal like Meqhasset, where you spend half your tour getting there, and you’ll come back alive. Probably alive.”

*

I follow the river into the commercial area. There are kiosks selling mineral water and witch hazel, porters rushing everywhere with heavy bales of cinnamon, camphor, cotton and kegs of sea salt. Here’s an overwhelmingly fragrant row of tobacco women with barrels and great swatches of the leaves, cured and fresh, camphorated or spiced. In the meat market, they have whole ambuloceti for sale, hunted by the unusually brave and well-armed in the marshier land down river where the camphor grows.

Representatives of the Embalmer’s College wander among aisles of corpses, heaped in pyramidal piles. They’re soft and spotty like overripe fruit, the students and masters pinch, sniff, and squeeze with judiciously long faces and expertly-seeking eyes. The merchants sit wooden-faced on stools impassively fanning away the flies. Barrels of hands, feet, and genitals quiver as heavily-laden carts rumble by, and here a beefy woman dressed in a black leotard and brown leather apron sells skin and hair. On her foot-long wooden spools, ranged upright in a sort of abacus along the back of her stall, are glowing, convex cylinders of lustrous blonde, umbrous red, slick black hair glistening like onyx, feathery curls and hair straight and thick as wire, and sheets of skin in various widths from tapes to broad sheets, from sheerest transparency to skin like granulated oil over a barely-perceptible, delicate pink. Gland dealers are set well to one side, with the intestine men, who wear their wares in discrete coils around their arms and legs. The smell among the gland dealers is a cool sour haze of pungent ammonia, deep biting musks, rancid cheese reek, and woven in with the rest is a weird platinum note that glides through the sinuses like a love spell, casually drawing all attention and will together into a long elastic cone pulling me along until I blunder transfixed into the nearest counter. Steel trays and salvers, jars, metal urns, strings of dried gonads like bundles of garlic hanging in the drafty air.

An embalming professor from the school is tying up a tall stack of severed hands with twine, her veil held in place by a black petalled chaplet. She snaps the fingers on her own hand, the tips exposed by the fingerless lace gloves, and Jil Punkinflake appears from one of the aisles adjacent, pulling the ladder from his vest and smiling unctuously. The death’s-head moth holds its wings out at full length.

He helps her carry her parcels to her phaeton standing by and winks at me. She clips away, and he ambles over, hands in pockets.

“Well? Are you an army man?”

I explain.

“It stinks,” he shrugs. “Let’s go drink some of your scrip, Low.”

*

I find unaccountable difficulties always arise in searching out the narrative sections of any marketplace, but of course how could I know that? Anyhow there always seems to be some distraction, or the sort of wrong turn that, having drawn you into the trammels of its mischief, dodges behind the innocent turns and loses itself among them like an absconding pickpocket. No shortage of the real ones either—at the wine store, Jil Punkinflake took my wallet slowly from my hand as I was about to restore it to my pocket, and deftly slipped it into my shirt, where my vest holds it now against my skin. I ask him about the narrative market and he gives me a swift, canny look. With a nearly invisible toss of his head I realize he is one of those go-betweens who are involved with the narrative merchants, the storiers and letterers and calligraphers and abecederians. We flit out into trough-like stone lanes.

“I’m one of many at the college,” he avers. “Our work and their work can be compared. Properly compared. A feel for one is a feel for the other, often.”

Past the indigo dyers and a suave aproned ink maker, and here is the narrative section, a long row of small, elegant shops with teak fronts adorned with gleaming brass and magnificent tumbling window displays. Here all the world’s alphabets, abjads, and syllabaries are sold. Jil Punkinflake’s face grows tight and sharp, he seems etched in the air. His eyes shimmer. There’s a casino atmosphere here; I can see great whirlwinds of invisible loss and gain churning in the sky down into the earth. But these stores sell only the general sort of alphabet, the vast majority of which were created long ago by a handful of ancient masters and gods. The current alphabet makers are skilled copyists, and talented embellishers—at least, this is true of those who sell their wares in these stores.

Another class of symbolists exists, who conduct their trade in secret, against both city and royal law, meeting clients in clandestine assignations, fashioning unique, customized writing ways for them. Hidden as they are, their presence is palpable everywhere, and accounts for this heady atmosphere. These underground artificers, trained by anonymous teachers, read copy and circulate books long lost to memory in the perfectly ordered, perfectly maintained, perfectly complete, never-read archives of the Alaks. The creation of a new symbola is not simply a matter of drawing a series of substitute markings; it is a magical undertaking, in which an ordination must be created that will allow for the improvisation of signs that will become permanent, and which must be commensurate with the client’s requirements and expressive, at every point, of a rigorous internal coherence. Some clients will get phonetic alphabets, others syllabaries; some symbols, others pictures, depending upon their needs, wants, personalities, whatever exigency is expressed in their need for a writing way of their own. Furthermore, the characters must
seem appropriate
to their sounds, or concepts, and this is where no amount of unassisted technical ability avails. The association of symbols is conducted in often gruelling, if simple, rituals that can last for weeks; some accomplished artisans have died in pursuit of them. There is no telling at the outset what will cause the most difficulty; in some cases, extreme refinement of nuance may bring the symbolist to the point of complete collapse, while in other cases it may be an intolerable simplicity and directness that suffocates her.

Jil Punkinflake hops up on a sawhorse, and leaning forward looking into my eyes he tells me the story of a prodigy who sat in the grass by the wayside of the capital road in a shapeless black garment of many different materials and dashed off in the dust of the road immaculate alphabets on the spot, even sometimes for every single passer by. People looked down at the rows of letters and saw so much of themselves they broke down then and there, or instantly decorporated. One is better advised to be alone when one first looks on one’s
own
alphabet, even those specifically designed to conceal the nature of the buyer from himself always show too much in showing too frankly this desire to hide in the letters.

Suddenly a look of detestation, such as I’d never imagined he could be capable of, let alone see myself, creases his face; his eyes darken and he hops down from the sawhorse. It’s as if his expression were being corrupted by the effect of a corrosive poison.

He is looking past me—I follow his eyes, I see the crowd, the stalls, the buildings, but I don’t know what, among these things, he is glaring at so fixedly. He touches my arm, and pulls me a little way aside, into the mouth of a narrow alley, still looking beyond me.

“What is it?” I ask. I must have been asking that for a while already.

Jil Punkinflake is actually panting with emotion, and his grip on my arm is uncomfortably firm. I begin to get alarmed, and try again to align my gaze with his. Now I’m sure—a young woman, or a girl, maybe twelve years old, oblivious, composed, her head flowing with dense, long dark hair, is walking past us. She looks neither right nor left, but down toward the street, and people seem unconsciously to recoil from her. Some glower, but most simply move out of her way without apparently being aware of her at all. She is dressed in a white nightgown, and, though it hangs still and straight from her shoulders, it seems to undulate, and now she seems older than she had at first.