The Vorrh (43 page)

‘Ishmael?’ she said quietly, and an attention was sensed in the far side of the room. ‘Ishmael, we have come to take you home, Ghertrude is here with me.’

There was a distinct movement from under the straw, and everybody strained their eyes to make out the crouching figure. Maclish changed the whip from one hand to the other.

‘Ishmael, we have missed you, you will be safe with us when we return home,’ said Ghertrude, his proximity oiling the mechanisms of her voice.

‘Yes, we can leave now, please come with us,’ said Cyrena. ‘Do you recognise me? I am the Owl. I am the one that you spent a night with during the carnival.’

Maclish curled his lip and he and the doctor exchanged an astonished glance. The figure moved out of the shadows towards them.

‘Yes, that’s it, come to us,’ said Cyrena and turned to Ghertrude, beaming and shaking. ‘He knows me!’

Smiling with tears in her eyes, she turned back as the figure moved forward into the ray of light, which came in through the barred windows and divided the room. He looked up at them, and both
women started to scream.

* * *

Tsungali tripped over the pot. He had not seen it sitting clearly on the path. How could that be: he was an experienced hunter who normally missed nothing. Then he realised it was because his attention was focused on the movements and sounds around him, drawn by the trees to identify who or what was watching him. He had been doing it subconsciously; now he was aware.

He cocked the Enfield and stood stock-still. The shards of the flimsy pot cracked beneath his boots. Something was here with him, there was no doubt. He said a spell and spat into the undergrowth. There were all kinds of beings here, everybody knew that. He hated this place, and never dreamed of pursuing a quarry here. The circumstances had changed and the spirits moved against him; his twitching wounds continually reminded him of that. He should have been able to kill the white man before now, should have been able to stop him from entering this haunted realm. But he was no ordinary white man. Tsungali thought he might even be a ghost, or one of the creatures that steals the bodies of the dead to wear, or takes their faces. He had recognised Williams as soon as he’d seen him, but could not believe it possible. He should have died with all his company of lying invaders in the first days of the Possession Wars. Even if he had escaped, he should be older than this, not exactly the same age as he had been the day he returned from the beach. Tsungali looked for a moment at his gnarled, knotted hands. He felt his years ache in the hinges of his joints.

Was it the Bowman that he felt watching him beyond the trees? Was it he who left this dish in his path, to spook him? He spoke another charm,
whistled and spat. There were worse things than the Englishman, even if he was a ghost.

He continued to tread slowly forward and, after some hours, he saw another pot. It was full of steaming, fragrant food. He savagely kicked it off the path and moved on. He was going to tear the throat out of this enemy who played games with his hunger and his fear. The Erstwhile and the demons entered his thoughts, but he knew that they did not prepare food, not even as a sick joke to mock him. No, it was something else, something with human tendencies, which, of course, made it terrible in a different way. He was becoming more and more unnerved, when he suddenly heard the faint whistling in the sky. He had heard it before and it made his blood run cold. Then it came down through the leaves and branches directly above; he dropped Uculipsa and clasped his hands over his head, not daring to look up. The arrow shrieked and trembled to a halt, piercing the path six feet before him.

* * *

Ghertrude was holding Cyrena, one arm around her sobbing shoulders. She was glaring at Hoffman and holding back her own tears, which were slowly distilling from shock to rage. Maclish had dragged them out of the cell and into the small office where they now sat.

‘What’s wrong with ye?’ he snarled. ‘We got your cyclops and now ye scream at it?!’

‘That thing is not Ishmael,’ said Ghertrude, gritting her teeth and pushing away from her distressed friend, standing to match Maclish’s aggression.

The doctor moved towards her and, in a puzzled voice, said, ‘Not Ishmael?’

‘But ye said ye slept with it,’ said Maclish, pointing at Cyrena.

She looked up and out of her tears. ‘Slept with
that
?’ she said, each word turning from disbelief into anger, so that the questioned inflection at the end of ‘that’ sounded like a blacksmith’s hammer striking a flame from a frozen anvil. She was on her feet: her eyes had become terrible. Every part of her previous pain and her immediate disappointment was hurtling in a tornado of fury. She was ready to fight and her stance – her eyes, teeth and nails – were sprung for the next word; even Maclish took a step back. Ghertrude had never seen a human being like this, let alone a close friend.

The doctor shrank. Maclish recognised the sudden animal; he had seen it in the war. It had been rare and lethal, and he held it in respect.

‘I am sorry, miss,’ he said in clear, cold words, lowering his arms to his side. She panted for a few moments and her humanity and her colour flooded back. Ghertrude moved to her side and guided her towards the door.

After they left, the shaken doctor sat on one of the creaking chairs, and mopped the perspiration from his forehead with a large handkerchief. Maclish came back in. ‘She said we can keep the money, but we aren’t getting any more.’

The doctor just nodded and said, ‘What are we going to do with that thing?’

‘Take it back or kill it. Nobody wants Loverboy here,’ said Maclish, guffawing at his own joke.

Doctor Hoffman saw nothing to be amused about.

Loverboy stood naked, four feet high, in the straw at the back of the cell. His skin was deathly pale, with a yellowish tinge. He had long, thin limbs, and his torso was squat and square. His head grew out from his chest, so that his forehead sloped into his shoulders, putting his tiny mouth level to where human nipples should be. His single eye was level with his armpits, and it blinked, sphincter-like, in the gloom. He did not think much of humans; their only value was in terms of food. He had
eaten one two years ago, and their sweet flesh was greatly prized among his people. But they were dangerous to hunt, and many of his tribe had died in the process.

He knew he was the first of his kind to be taken bodily out of the forest, and he did not understand how it had happened. Unseen from the dense undergrowth, they had watched the humans devouring the forest year after year; nothing had ever entered and dragged one of his kind out before. He feared what he had seen so far, and did not understand the cave they kept him in. He did not understand the actions of these tall, ugly creatures; they seemed to use all their emotions at once. He hated the one with red fur: it was known to be cleverer and faster than the herd that it kept for work and food. The screaming ones intrigued him, females he thought, with hideous, extended heads. He became erect thinking about them, and it surprised him. He would have liked to undress one and play with it before he cooked and ate it. But that was for another time. Now he must escape and get back into the Vorrh.

* * *

The Youngman sat on a tree stump by the side of the stream. He was large and quiet. He had his father’s strong nose, but it looked out of proportion in his long, weak face, which had only recently given up the heat of acne; it had begun to cool to a moon-like paleness of craters and dead eruptions. He came to this place to think, to get away from the bustle of the city and the snug, noisy chaos of his family home. He stared at his hands; the little fingers were working again. So were the thumbs, and he rotated them like surprised puppet worms from a meaningless children’s play.

He had just been involved in some accidental street complications;
at least, he thought – he secretly hoped – it had been accidental. The Touch, or ‘Fang-dick-krank’ as it had become known, was sweeping the city. It was said that it first came from the touch of miracle: the laying on of hands, the purification of the unclean and the malformed. Then it turned malevolent, eccentric and dangerous. Qualities of kindness were exchanged for vengeance. Some who had been outcast because of their disability had turned malicious after they were healed, and their magic touch was passed on as a curse. They fingered the healthy, and the healthy became impaired; they then carried the taint, not knowing if their touch would injure or aid. It cut them off from their families and friends, making it their turn to become outcasts. A terrible fear of contact spread through the city, locking its inhabitants into themselves, hands in pockets, walking quickly away from all others.

The Touch had become so random that it reached fanatic proportions, causing a plague of the injured and the healed to spread chaotically throughout all of Essenwald. It wreaked havoc among the promiscuous, ruined families and made treatment virtually impossible. It changed social decorum on all levels and, in a city based on commerce, where guilds and classes were firmly demarcated by etiquette and formal social meetings, things started to fray when the niceties were removed. The shaking of hands was no longer a reasonable form of greeting; more arcane forms of meeting were now fashionable: bowing and heel-clicking had returned, as had arm-crossing the chest with a clenched fist, which had not been seen in civilised communities since the Roman Empire. A Teutonic rigidity had returned to this far-flung outpost of a long-dead empire, one that had until then prided itself in stepping away from stiff ancestral history and revelled in its ‘modern’ outlook.

The blacks and the poor were devastated by the Touch. Their ranks exchanged over night, the sick becoming bright, the clean becoming ill. A great madness rose up out of the confusion, and the growing wave of paranoiac fear was far greater than the actual number of those
genuinely injured.

* * *

The two women travelled home together in silence. Cyrena dropped Ghertrude off at 4 Kühler Brunnen, and the pair quietly said goodbye as Ghertrude was admitted by a gleeful Mutter.

In the back of the lilac car, Cyrena’s tide ebbed between wrath and frustration, after the shock of seeing that abomination step into the light and look directly at her. She doubted all her memories, and the strands of tensile fibres that normally made her invincible unwound and came apart for a fraction of a second. In that blink of time, she mistrusted all of her pre-sight experience: what if that disgusting creature actually was the person she had slept with in the carnival night? What if it had been his groupings, suckings and penetrations that she had accepted with pleasure and gratitude? What if, worst of all, it had been that thing which had healed her before creeping off into the night?

Yet again, sight had trampled everything else, and she had been lessened by it. Doubt nicked the circulation of her energy and bled her internally, so that now she did not understand why she had been so enthusiastic about seeing Ishmael again. Why had that become the centre of her life? How had she managed to expose her hunger and show her will to these foolish men, what was really in it for her? Had Ghertrude not warned her? Well, perhaps she had, but it had come too late and too weak.

By the time she arrived home, she was exhausted. She wanted to wrap herself in the darkness of the bed sheets and banish all visual memory, to only remember the luxurious depth of her stored library of touch, sound and scent.

Mutter began to fuss around Ghertrude. It was out of character and grotesque, and she could see straight through it. He was delighted that she had come home alone, and did not even want to know why.

Her annoyance quickly turned to indifference as she felt a tickling movement in her abdomen; something tiny, not a kick – it was far too early for that – but something uncurling, becoming awake after a long period of hibernation.

She left Mutter fluttering in the hall, like a heavy, damp moth without a flame. She went to her bedroom to rest; to hold herself tight and to pray that this was not really happening.

* * *

When he awoke, the cow was gone and Charlotte was sitting by his bed. It took a few minutes to remember her name. She brought tea and talked quietly, while he nodded and frowned at her version of the last few days.

The drug that the doctor administered to him was Soneryl; he would use it, and others, for the next thirteen barren years of his life. As its effects wore off, a great, hollow pain opened out inside him. He stopped nodding, and Charlotte’s words lost their meaning. Her voice was like a song, a chanter that made tears rise up and fill his flickering eyes. She stopped when she saw her companion’s growing distress. Moving to his side, she held his small body in her arms. He sat forward, and she saw that his pillow was blotched pink with perspiration and blood. Beneath his silk pyjamas, his wounds and abrasions had been bandaged and covered in lint.

‘It’s alright,’ she said, ‘you are safe now. You are tired and bruised, but without any real injuries. Do you remember what happened to you and your friend?’

‘Friend?’ he said, in a voice that surprised him. ‘What friend?’

Charlotte explained that he had left to meet a man who was taking him into the Vorrh. They had planned to be there for only one day but, in fact, he had been gone for four. She told him of her growing panic and the plans she had been ready to put into place, before she had seen him on the street.

‘What was his name?’ he asked weakly.

‘I don’t know, my dear, you called him many things. I think you said Silka, or something like that?’

‘Silka,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘Well, what did he look like?’ he murmured.

‘I am sorry, but I did not see him. You said he was young and black.’

‘Did I?’

Charlotte nodded and he thought hard, but there was nothing there. Not a single trace of the last five days existed between this stained pillow and the previous one, which had been bloodied by dream; not even a rind of memory clung to the empty space in his skull. What boiled and hollowed him was below, in his heart: a vast, pleading hurt that sucked at his being, a loss beyond all other feelings, an overpowering sadness that should have been an overpowering joy.