The Wanderer (31 page)

I think I must have blacked out a short time, for I can’t recall the barge’s landing. Then I was being hefted by two tribesmen across marshy ground towards a palisade of tall pine stakes, with a gate of another pale wood, perhaps maple or birch, all white as new ivory. Hide tents circled this stockade. The tribeswoman, in a faint, was being carried alongside me. As we neared the camp, I saw a number of ebon knobs mounted above
the gate. I thought them finials in a different wood, set there to temper the pallor the façade. Drawing closer, though, I saw I’d been wrong: they were not ornaments, but warnings, a row of shrunken heads on spikes, leathery skin, sparse tufts sprouting from scalps, raw staring sockets, knife-slash mouths. I stared aghast.

Elliot, noting my gawking, gestured for the tribesmen to throw down my companion and me, then crossed over to where I lay, stood, his hooked nose beetling over me.

‘I’ve found these brutes more tractable when the threat of bloody death hangs over them,’ he said. ‘Recognize that one over there?’

He pointed out the head on the far left. Though fresher, less shrivelled than the others, it was still sere, festering, and it took me a moment, but then I realized: it was the chieftain who’d not given me away, who’d let me escape.

‘No doubt you feel a pang over that,’ Elliot said, sneering.

I groaned, slammed my head against the earth.

It wasn’t only remorse over the chieftain’s fate that troubled me. I was sickened by how I’d thought of the tribe; I’d not, as Elliot had, sought to subjugate, but I’d too seen them as other and base, as not fully human.

Elliot, peering down at me, then said, ‘Killing a few keeps the rest on their toes, you see.’

‘King Stork,’ I murmured.

‘Huzzah, huzzah!’ my captor crowed, then grinned. There were wooden teeth in that mouth, brown and higgledy-piggledy.

The tribeswoman started at Elliot’s crow, opened her eyes. I don’t know what strange ancestral dreams she was roused from, but she uttered then, weakly, barely a whisper, a word in the tongue of her ancient forebears, the language of this typescript: ‘Help.’ It panged me, but I could not. Then her eyelids fluttered closed once more.

Before long, I felt the tramp of feet in the ground. Then it
could be heard, and chatter, and song. It was the rest of the tribe approaching. They reached us, halted. Then Elliot turned, threw open the gate of the stockade, and directed the men who’d borne me before to take me up again, heft me inside. They did so, though they seemed scared of entering the place, paled on passing through the gate, did not go far before they threw me down, fled. Elliot then entered the compound, started towards where I lay prone, face in the dirt, but stopped, and, turning back, stood staring at the tribe, who huddled a little distance off, as if afraid of drawing near the stockade, quailing under his gaze. Then he gave vent to a series of howls and grunts, a victory address perhaps, and slammed the gate closed. There was a moment’s quiet, then a hushed counsel in the native’s tongue, then grunts of exertion, blows, and the tribeswoman’s feeble cries and moans.

‘Don’t leave her out there,’ I croaked.

‘Why not?’ Elliot asked. ‘It’s none of my concern. I’m happy to let them exact their own vengeance. No doubt it’ll lack subtlety, they’re a barbarous lot. But I’m sure it’ll be grim enough, if not as artful as your death’ll be.’

I lifted my head to look up at him. He began capering about, clattering his wooden limbs, swiping his huge nose from side to side. Then he stopped, looked up, his eye caught by something. I followed his gaze, straining, cricking my neck, saw a lynx padding atop the stakes of the palisade. Reaching the end of the row of severed heads, the cat batted at the chieftain’s with a paw, then began gnawing at it. Elliot frowned, then sent a long pink tongue whipping from between his wooden lips through the air, lassoed the lynx, pulled it down from the fence, and dragged it struggling and screeching across the ground towards him. As it neared, he got down on all fours. Then, when the cat was close, he loosed his tongue and pounced, took a hunk out of the lynx’s belly with his wooden gnashers, slurped up its spilled guts. The creature yowled, then fell still. Elliot stood, kicked its bloody
body away.

‘That’s the way to do it!’ he yawped.

‘W-w-w…’ I stuttered.

Elliot cackled. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘W-why?’

‘Why do anything?’

‘What do you mean to do to me?’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he jeered.

Then he paused, scratched his head before continuing.

‘Actually, I’m not sure yet. I need more time. To be inspired. Most had something I could seize on. Made it easier. You saw the body of the young man, the heavy smoker from the gathering you arranged, I believe?’

I shuddered, nodded.

Elliot turned his eyes on me; set in Punch’s outlandish face, they burned with mockery.

‘Unless I just bore you to death. Though I suspect your tolerance for boredom outstrips my ability to inflict it…’

Then he squinted, scratched his head.

‘What was he called?’ he asked. ‘The smoker.’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You too, eh? Yes, I forget names. Forgotten my own. Well, forget pretty much everything in truth. Save how to be cruel.’

Walking past me, he entered a log cabin. I watched, waited a while, but he didn’t come back out. I tugged against my bonds, but it was futile, the knots held; I was enfeebled and had been tied tight.

I found that by squirming, turning my head this way and that, craning my neck, I was able to piece together, from glimpses, the space enclosed by the palisade. It is a rough square, with two small buildings at its heart: the cabin I’d seen Elliot go into (I persist in calling him Elliot for the sake of consistency), and a small roundhouse of open-faced flint with a limpet-shell slate roof. A curtain of dark heavy fabric hung in the entrance to the
cabin and it was drawn most of the way across, but I could still glimpse the interior through the slight gap, and, from what I could see, an iron cot and a wooden table, I gathered the building Elliot’s living quarters. The roundhouse’s door is sturdy, pale wood, again maybe maple or birch, with a wavy grain, reinforced with iron battens, and was secured with a large antiquated padlock. The stone walls have an air of some age, are ivy garlanded, beset with mosses and lichens, but the door and the roof tiles are clearly new, though where Elliot got the materials, I can’t think. Who built the roundhouse, and when it dates from, I’ve no idea, but it must have been its ruin that attracted Elliot to the site; as it’s exposed, and near to mephitic marshland, I can see no other advantage to the place.

Within the compound the ground is hard-packed bare earth, with the impressions of many unshod feet. As the tribesmen who bore me had seemed scared to enter, and the rest of the natives loath to approach, this bewildered me. The tribe’s fear did not; those impaled heads, with their wisps of hair, their leathery skin.

I lay there hoping against hope for a quick death.

I lay listless, eyes closed, turned to torpor by the sun, a while. Then Punch’s grating, shrill voice startled me.

‘You’re the last, the very last, of my quarries, you know. The rest are dead. Slain.’

I looked up, squinted. Stark against the glare, I saw Punch’s monstrous profile, hooked nose, jutting chin. Elliot leant over me, peered closer. Though his mouth was fixed in a cruel smirk, there was a hint of frailty in the set of Punch’s features, that mollifying trace that allows the audience to laugh at his outrages. This I found grotesque; Elliot, I was sure, was without such weakness.

Turning my head, I stuck out my tongue. Elliot reached down, seized hold of the rope tying my ankles, started hauling me towards the roundhouse, lifting my feet high so my face
dragged. The rough earth skinned my nose, my right cheek, my forehead.

‘You should pride yourself on having evaded my clutches so long,’ he said as he trudged, red-faced, breathless with exertion.

I sneered.

‘Why? It wasn’t difficult.’

Elliot let go my feet, stood with his palms in the small of his back, stretched out his crooked spine. Then he spat in the dust, stepped forward, kicked me in the head. All went black.

While out, I had an uncanny vision. In it, I perched on the top step of a large marble staircase that jutted bizarre from a barren grey waste girded round by sawtooth mountains. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, away to the west, as if driven before a gale, though I couldn’t feel a breath of wind. Rents in the rack gave glimpses of a pale winter sun. A brass handrail, supported by marble balusters, ran down each side of the staircase. The lower ends were ornamented with intricate clockwork orreries whose planets and moons described eccentric orbits.

A lone horseman was crossing the plain towards me from the west, slumped forward in the saddle. With a knife far too large for the task, he was paring an apple, dried, withered, worm-eaten, mould-flecked. He wore a suit, a long wool overcoat, and a hat with a wide floppy brim, which he’d pulled down low over his eyes. He and his mount, a skittish starveling stallion, were so greyed by dust thrown up by the horse’s splayed and bloody hooves, they seemed moulded from the stuff of the waste they passed through.

On reaching the staircase, the rider dismounted, tethered his horse by its reins to one of the orreries, put his knife into a pannier slung over the animal’s flank, and sat down on one of the lower steps. Then he bit into the bad apple. I watched as he ate the fruit slowly, painstakingly, all of it, even the blackened core.

Then, getting to his feet, he crossed over to the stallion again,
reached into the pannier, rummaged around, drew something out, concealed it in his coat. He turned, began climbing the stairs. As he did, he raised his head to look up at me under his hat brim. I saw it was the young chieftain whose act of kindness towards me had cost him his life. But his face was that of the severed head on the spike, not the living man, resembled the apple he’d just eaten, its skin puckered, rot-speckled, flesh-grub pocked, its orbits, hollow pits.

It was only when he reached the top of the stairs and stood over me, I realized how tall he was; he towered over me, blotted out the stars. I stood up, came only to his knees. He took out the thing he’d hidden in the folds of his coat. A fish of a kind I didn’t recognize: big lumpy skull, flat wide tail, droopy barbels. It was putrid, reeked. Hunkering down, the chieftain shook it in my face, spattering me with stinking gleet from its mouth.

‘I wanted to show you this,’ he then said. ‘Look here.’

He pointed out four appendages hanging, limp, from the dead fish.

‘These are vestigial limbs, not inchoate ones. Do you see!’ Suddenly he was shouting, and I was bowed over backwards, a sapling in the teeth of a storm. ‘The creatures of the land are returning to the sea. Creation is in disarray!’

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t this the end of the world, anyway?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, quiet once more. ‘It was too much to hope you would, I suppose.’

He shook his head, weary, went back down to his horse, unhitched it, clambered into the saddle, rode off. I watched him crossing the plain, back the way he’d come. The sun hung low over the mountains in the west, and he and his mount cast a long scraggy shadow behind them, the shadow of some spindly monstrosity. Then the orb impaled itself on the peaks to the west, went down gushing blood, and the light grew dim, then gloomy, then dark. I stood, mute and motionless as a stone, in that utter
black.

Then I was riding a tiger loping swift through the air, flat grey ocean below. I clung on with a fierce grip, hands buried in the beast’s fur. Looking ahead, I saw we approached a range of vapour like a limitless cataract rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven. When we were almost on this pallid veil, I came to. Just before, I saw a giant shrouded human form looming in the mist…

I found myself lying on my back, on dank earth, pain making an uproar in my skull, a glaring ray falling across my eyes. I turned my head out of the dazzle, looked about. I was in a circular cell with stone walls: the roundhouse. All was gloom save the bright sunlight spearing in through a gap where the door had been left ajar. Gyves were chained to the walls, and though they were new, gleamed, it occurred to me the place was probably originally built, at a time long past, as a lock-up.

Elliot hunkered in the dark near the door, breathing hard, glaring ireful. Seeing me stir, he grinned.

‘Well, finally got you. The most cunning of all. Much more resourceful than you seemed. I thought you so unworldly.’

‘But what of…the young man, the smoker?’ I’d almost called him William. ‘He held out nearly as long.’

‘No. I found him centuries ago. Holed up beneath the ruins of London. In ancient sewage tunnels. I thought he might be my last remaining beguilement, so I toyed with him a good while before killing him.’ Elliot smirked. ‘I wondered if I’d been mistaken about you, thought perhaps eternity hadn’t been wakened in your breast. If you hadn’t come back here, I mightn’t have ever realized you were still living.’

I cursed bitterly. Elliot cackled.

‘Yearning for home wax too strong, did it?’

I cast him a sullen glance.

‘Where’ve you been hiding all this time?’

I turned my head away from him, spat.

‘No matter. Soon you’ll be telling me everything for just an eyeblink free of pain.’

I was rattled, but shammed bravery, laughed, taunted him.

‘You aren’t frightening, you know. More…Ridiculous.’

His face clouded. He crossed over, taking a stubby knife with a wooden handle from a sheath hanging at his belt. I guessed it was the Tartarean blade he’d spoken of that night in the Nightingale, and hoped, enraged, he’d plunge it in me, finish me. But that wasn’t to be, he was in command of his temper. Instead he used the knife to cut through my bonds, then, twisting his fingers in my hair, hauled me to my feet. I stood there tottering, reeling, queasy.

‘Come on, you poltroon, you pigeon-hearted prick!’ he bellowed.