The Wanderer (22 page)

Reaching higher ground, the other side of the reed bed, we halted, gulping air, peered back over the canes at the Ark. Dense black smoke rose from it, roiled. As we watched, the lean-to
collapsed, sparks and ash puffing up. Some of the tribe, who’d climbed on board using grapnels, darted hither and yon, scouring the deck, ragged forms stark before the flames, roisterers at some dark revel. They weren’t long searching – I suppose, as I had, they tried the companion hatch, found it wouldn’t open – then shinned back down to the flats, crossed over to where the remainder of the tribe awaited them. A small group broke away, walked a little distance off, sat in a circle. The clan elders, I surmised, conferring. After a short while, council over, they rose, rejoined the rest. The chieftain began gesticulating, giving orders. The tribeswoman and I didn’t wait longer, but turned, stole off.

We fled north through a land of weald and sward; of woods of oak, maple, birch, alder, elm, beech, and ash, where finches twittered, pheasants strutted, woodpeckers drummed, and swine rooted; and of pastures where rabbits frolicked, hares loped, grasshoppers chirred, sheep and goats bleated, and cattle grazed, their lowing the region’s only sorrowful note. Not that, running scared, we’d time for the country’s gentle charms.

But the land had a dark side, portended the dread place we were soon after to come upon. On the second night of our flight, a howl woke me. Against the full moon, just kicked loose of the earth, its big round face like a ball of tallow moulded by sooty fingers, was, stark, the shade of a wolf, muzzle to the sky. The tribeswoman, also roused by the noise, sat up, rubbed her eyes. I pointed out the beast to her, but it had slunk off. She fell back into slumbers, but they were troubled, going by the whimpering she made. I couldn’t sleep, lay awake watching the moon cross the sky on its rod, ears straining for the whirr of gears.

We broke camp early the following morning and, after walking only a short way, came to a brook. Turning, we saw smoke furrowing the sky to the south: the tribe were on our trail. At first, I was bewildered, we’d covered our tracks well, but then
I heard the hounds. We stood there, stricken, harking to the frenzied yapping. Then the tribeswoman let her pent breath out in a rush and pointed at the watercourse, walked her fingers through the air. I was bemused a moment, then realized what she meant; we could perhaps throw off the dogs, baffle their noses, by wading in the stream a way. I nodded, she removed her sandals, hitched up her skirt, I took off my boots, rolled up my trousers. Then we entered the water. It was shallow, came only to my knees, but was bitingly cold, my toes went numb almost straight away. We headed upstream, where briar thickets hid the stream from view. After trudging against the coursing water till fatigued, till breathing ragged, we clambered out onto the north bank, lay down to rest. The sky was clear, the morning had waxed warm, and, worn out and careworn we fell into a doze. On stirring, looking up, I saw the sun had reached its zenith. At first I was held rapt by the weird bands of vermilion, puce, viridian, and mallow shimmering in the sky, then I cursed the lapse; we’d doubtless lost any lead our ruse had gained us. I shook the tribeswoman awake, and we hurried on our way.

Mid-afternoon we sighted a forest of gloomy firs up ahead, tall, close-seeded, dark. I thought it a grim enough place, but the tribeswoman seemed in terrible fear, shuddered whenever her eyes fell on it. I supposed it a place of fabled evil for her folk. By dusk we’d reached the treeline. We spent the night there, the pines looming over us.

The next day, rising before sunup, we saw, not far off, the fitful glow of a fire, and had to press on into the forest. The tribeswoman shook her head, shivered, but I cajoled, brought her round. Knarled boles rose stark till far above, where twined black boughs and sprays of dark needles all but blotted out the sky, leaving only flecks of light, strewing the canopy with false stars; it was as if the place had seen a battle between the forces of night and day, and night had won a decisive victory, routed day’s troops, and the land had been forever ceded to it. The undergrowth
was dense, if sickly, tangles of wan ferns, clumps of sere nettles, snares of brittle bramble, and crawled with stagbeetles, cockroaches, ants, spiders, writhed with worms and grubs. Of higher creatures, we saw none, no birds, not even a rat or snake, though in places the brake was trampled, and we heard, from time to time, in the distance, the noise of a large animal crashing through the scrub.

We pressed on into that wretched forest, where I hoped the tribe would be loath to follow. By nicking the trees with my knife, small blazes low on the trunks, I marked our path. After a few hours, afraid to go on lest we lose our way, we halted, made camp, bodging a shelter from thicker fallen boughs and wadded moss.

Stuck as to how to go on, I’ve been musing abstractly on my tale a short time. It’s occurred to me I am, at this moment, and have been many times in the writing of it, in three different places at once. It’s uncanny. Just now, I’m huddled with the tribeswoman in our makeshift hut, peering wary into the gloomy pines, but I also sit gawping at Jane, in the Nightingale pub, and at this battered rusty iron desk, in a cabin in the ravelled guts of this hulk, rhapsodizing all these affairs. It’s disconcerting; I hope, by the end of my tale, I’ll have collected myself. But, now, I’d better press on.

I must return, then, to that drear forest, that place so dismal, so apart from the quick world. The writhen limbs overhead, needle rank, clot the sky. We felt oppressed by them, though were glad of their thick shroud on the second day when we heard thunder, wind threshing the treetops, saw rain running in rivulets down the trunks, realized another storm had broken over the region.

Foraging in that place yielded little, just some bland mushrooms with dun caps, a few grouse and pheasant carcasses, maggot-ridden, but edible, though barely, only if we choked our
gags. The supplies I’d grabbed before fleeing the Ark dwindled and, within a fortnight, were used up. I realized we’d have to return to the rich land we’d left behind, or else the tribeswoman would starve. I just hoped the natives wouldn’t be lying in wait for us on the edge of the forest (I was almost certain they’d not have followed us in, sure, from the tribeswoman’s reaction, the place was a haunt of boggarts for them).

Early one morning, we set out, following my blazes. But then we came to a place where patches of bark had been stripped from many of the trunks, perhaps by beasts whetting horns, antlers, tusks, and too many of my notches were lost, and so was the trail. Given that I’ve spent millennia poring over books, it might be supposed my brain is crammed with lore. The truth is, though, as I’ve previously written, my memory’s unfitted to the aeons; I couldn’t then dredge up any learning to aid us in getting our bearings. Had I been alone I might have wandered that cursed place for weeks, even months, but the tribeswoman had some survival know-how, discovered where south lay by peering at the dull green and orange mottles of lichen on the bark of the tree boles, and, by dusk, had led us to the edge of the forest.

By certain landmarks I saw we were close to the spot where we’d spent our last night before entering the gloomy pines. The tribe had clearly camped there, bided for us, for scattered ashes and cinders, cornhusks, apple cores, and the picked carcasses of sheep and fowl, strewed the meadow. But it seemed they’d given up their watch. They’d left behind some parcels of nuts, berries, and dried fruit wrapped up in spinach leaves; we supposed, at the time, they’d just been missed when the camp was packed up. Famishing, the young woman and I fell to eating these sweetmeats.

They were poisoned. The bane coursing through our wasted frames, maddened us. Though it was cold, we tore off our garments, cavorted, clinched, danced a grotesque shuffle, then,
stumbling, fell to the floor. I groped the tribeswoman, kneaded her breasts, pinched her dark nipples, fumbled between her thighs. She arched her back, parted her legs, groaned. I was hard, the first time in many ages. She pulled me to her, and I drove into her, pounded, animal, abandoned, lost. Then she retched, spewed bile from the corner of mouth, her eyes rolled back, she shuddered, squirmed, but I held her tight. Then, howling, she elbowed me, hard, in the face. Tears blurred my vision, blood gushed from nose, she wriggled free, got to her feet, stood a little way off, trembling, glaring, arms wrapped about her. Holding my broken face in one hand, I staggered to my feet, yelled something nasty at her, advanced on her, priapic, enraged. She turned, ran naked and wailing past a holly bush growing on the forest’s edge, its bright berries red gouts against the firs, yelped, she’d passed too close, the prickles of the dark green leaves had scratched her, then entered the gloom. I made to follow, but gripes flared, and I went to the floor, clutching my gut, passed out.

I’ve pledged to write only what is true; wondering how most faithfully to relate the time that came after my poisoning, I find myself facing a crux. Things took place that were so gruesome I believe them most likely bred out of the venom’s delirium, but I’ve suffered strange horrors in the past, and they could have been only the simple truth. Equally, I can’t be sure that, of the entirely mundane happenings, some were not delusive, indeed, one of them, though not eldritch, many may find hard to credit: an act of genuine altruism.

But now I muse on truth, I realize, having listened in my long, long life to many, many conceptions of it, spouted by wizened philosophers, mystic crones, foolish striplings, mendacious tyrants, &c., &c., I’ve lost all faith in the idea. Born and raised during the Age of Reason’s dotage, in the city, which, though not its cradle, had been the beating heart of the nation that spawned
its most fervent torch-bearers, my youthful education was based on its central tenet, the idea truth could be approached through the painstaking observation of phenomena, a second-hand idea taken from antiquity, first proposed by a scholar who wished to refute his teacher’s mystical idealism, just a taunt in a squabble, or so the legend goes. After attaining adulthood, though, I was disabused of the notion; by the late twentieth century, empiricism was discredited, little more than a pedagogical tool, a fable for children. As a way of understanding the world it had proved untenable. After its ruin, folk, frantic to make some sense of their lives, sought solace in myriad wayward metaphysics whose divers assertions about the nature of knowledge and truth led to an epoch of warring systems, and the silent and apparently immobile soil of the Enlightenment era was suddenly riven with flaws, and the ground once again stirred under humankind’s feet.

Since that time, I’ve realized history is rife with disparate ways of making sense of things, each with its own definition of truth, that it’s only the brief span of mortal life that gives it the appearance of stasis, stability…Well, perhaps I can best explain by giving examples.

I once spent many years in Naufana, a place that lay amid sun-seared tracts of red sand. Just east of it, on the other side of a long dried-up river, was another city, Ghadis. They’d both once been thriving stops on the Silk Road, famed for their wealth and the richness of their cultures. But Ghadis had been laid waste by pestilence centuries before I first saw its ruined minarets and cupolas fretted from the rising sun, was then desolate save small lizards, with electric blue markings, basking on its roof terraces and in its public squares. And though Naufana still thrived, it was no longer rich, in wealth or culture; its fine skyline of spires, copper domes, azure-tiled roofs, belied the peril, filth, and wantonness of its streets. The city’s rulers adhered to a doctrine, established at the time disease stalked Ghadis, which proclaimed all illusory and nothing true; therefore, everything was
permitted.

At another time, I lived a while in a city sprawled along one bank of a broad river delta, a city whose name I cannot recall, a place also infamous for vice, though its obscene carnality arose perversely, not due to the permissiveness of the regime, but to spite the diktats of despotic leaders, who, in thrall to a school of philosophers that proclaimed the truth of all things, in terror of that fullness, and intent on maintaining the submissive ignorance of the populace, prohibited everything. When the tyrants fell following a popular libertarian coup, and were hung, along with their associates, senior military personnel, and members of the secret police, from the city’s famous green, fluted lampposts, all descended into sheer turmoil and licence, and the place, formerly so gross, so solid, waned to a wraith. A few, perhaps a lucky few, were struck down by a wasting sickness; their innards putrefied, they aware, in great pain the while. A sallow smother of fog settled like a pall on the city; it was hardly possible to see your own hand in front of your face. Then came the sleeping plague; swathes were struck down. I fled.

Though its name is lost to me, my recollections of that place are perhaps starker than those of any other I’ve ever lived in, save London. I think of it, and the memories come glaring, clamouring, jostling, reeking, tanging.

The Olde Market, with its colonnade, its roof, panes of grimy glass, the bustle of the crowds, the babel of the butchers, grocers, fishmongers, and spice vendors crying their wares, the pungent scents and garish colours of the produce. The frieze over its entrance, of a horse floundering in a mire, flies pouring, in droning mass, from its gaping throat, an incident from the city’s foundation myth, whose meaning no one ever managed to make clear to me.

The rooming house I stayed in, which was on the edge of the city, in the gloom of a stark bluff, Promontory Wall, its ramshackle Carpenter Gothic, turrets, steep gables, leaded
windows, warped cladding, flaking discoloured whitewash. Inside, the air was stale, there was a film of dust over everything. My room was shabby and drab, the bedclothes were tattered, the sash window, filth-rimed, bulb, bare and dim, carpet, threadbare, the soft furnishings, reeking of tobacco smoke, the maple wardrobe and bedstead, stained the shade of old bone, the dressing table’s veneer, badly chipped, the mirror, dark-specked. The sole ornament, an icon of St Christopher, the dog-headed St Christopher, hid a peephole, a squint into the squalid bathroom next door. The ancient landlady, whose shrunken head and wisps of stark white hair brought to mind a dandelion clock, gambled away all her savings, all the rent she was paid, playing rummy with a bizarre antiquarian, couldn’t afford to keep the place up. The sole other long-term tenant of the place, the rest of the rooms were let by the hour, and then but rarely, was a leech of some kind, who carried his doctor’s bag, black scuffed leather, always, and looked always forlorn.