by David Malouf
It is what the old woman has predicted. In the depths of his fever, at the crisis point, the Child has snatched away another soul. His suddenly speaking out like that, a word in their own language, proves it.
It is the boy Lullo they now turn to, since it is he who has, without knowing it, spoken from the Child’s mouth. The old woman immediately begins wailing over him, cursing the younger woman who has deserted her own child to care for an interloper, and in nursing him up to the crisis has made it possible for the demon to steal, if only for a moment, her son’s spirit. The younger woman is speechless with fear. She staggers about the rushes, holding her belly and making little wordless sounds in her throat as if she might be about to be sick. The boy begins to whimper, and the old woman tears his clothes off to search his body for marks, signs, some place where the demon may have got in. An hour later when Ryzak returns from guard duty, the room is in utter turmoil. Both women are hysterical and the boy is laid out on his pallet, sweating in the first onset of fever, while the Child, his own crisis over at last, breathes quietly and sleeps.
My mind is awhirl with all this.
At any other moment I might be overjoyed at what has occurred. The Child has spoken at last. In his delirium he has discovered human speech. The first step has been taken that will lead him inevitably now into the world of men. If this had happened six or seven weeks ago, out there in the marshes, I would be beside myself with joy. Now I am aware only of the danger he has put himself in. That first human word, drawn up out of the depths of himself in sleep, while his mind perhaps, his spirit, was far off in the deep snow of his forest, may destroy him.
He is innocent of all danger, his breath coming softly between his lips now as he sleeps; but the danger is real, and I dare not leave him, or allow myself to fall, even for a moment, into my own body’s hunger for rest. In their corner opposite, too occupied for the moment to pay us any attention, the two women are wailing over the body of the boy, whose moans can be heard, lightly, between the spaces of their howling. He is in the early stages of the same sickness the Child had. I recognize the symptoms.
How did he take it?
What comes to my mind is the look of alarm on the boy’s face, the terror of some unknown presence, as the old woman’s hands tore at him, searching his body for signs of invasion. Did he take the disease then? Catching her fear and making it his own? Who knows by what mysterious means the body moves to its ends? Years ago, on my travels in Asia Minor, I came upon a city that was visited by plague. What struck me then was the randomness with which the disease advanced, how it appeared in one house, striking down all but a single child, who remained quite unscathed, then leapt two houses to claim another victim. I came to believe then that as well as the plague itself, moving like a cloud over the city, there must also be some shadow of the plague that lives in the body or in the mind, and that only when the two meet and recognize one another can the disease break in. How else explain why one man takes it and another, sitting beside him, or sleeping in the same bed, does not? And what can that shadow be, that sleeps there in the body, but fear? It is terror that is the link. The body breaks into a sweat of fear, and in the dampness of that sweat, the plague begins to swarm, each drop is transformed and becomes fever sweat. What begins in the mind works now upon the body. So too, once, I saw the disease transmitted in the theater. A famous actor at Antioch, portraying the last anguish of a hero who had been stricken with a deadly fever, after insulting the gods, worked so powerfully upon the minds of the audience, reproduced so perfectly the burning, the choking, the paroxysms of the disease, that half a dozen spectators, out of their own terror, their own guilt, suddenly fell ill with it, dropped sweating from their seats, and had to be carried out. Their minds had so taken the impression of what they saw that the mere simulation of the disease, in the actor’s body, had communicated itself to their bodies and become real. The actor’s spirit, in imagining the disease, had so powerfully affected theirs that they had let the illness in, and immediately all its poisons flooded through their veins.
Is that how such fevers spread? Is that how the boy has been afflicted? Not through some wish of the Child’s to free himself by passing the disease on, but through fear, carried in the mind of his mother, imprinted upon his own mind by the old woman’s sudden panic, and immediately translating itself into sweat, into fire, into the fits he is now enduring. The point of infection was that moment when the old woman reached out her hand to touch the young woman, as she started away in terror at the Child’s speaking, and turned with a cry towards the sleepy child behind her. In this first shock at the old woman’s scream, he took the disease, his body opened to receive it from her hands, through his mother’s from the Child. Out of their mind into his. Though what the old woman believes, and has impressed upon the younger, is that the Child’s spirit has worked all this out of malice, and that the boy’s mother has indeed been made the carrier, but through her own weakness and pity. In turning aside to care for the Child she has betrayed her son’s life to him. She has permitted the death spirit to pass between them.
So hourly, the boy Lullo sinks deeper into delirium, shouting, muttering, allowing through his lips the same whimpering cries and growls of animal pain that the Child has filled the room with all this last week, and wrestling, so the women believe, with the same animal spirit, which will use him to gain entry among us. Meanwhile the Child, unaware of all this, grows stronger. Today he sits up, too weak to support himself as yet, but strong enough to eat again. And smiles.
Even Ryzak now regards the Child’s return to health with narrow eyes, and I see in him some real fear of what the Child may have done to them, though like the women he is too anxious, too torn with grief at his grandson’s suffering, to do more than stare and wonder. His feelings are entirely engaged with the small, pale figure on the rushes, who clasps his hand in fit after fit as the fever moves through its phases of fire and ice. It is only when the illness has done with him at last that the old man’s sense of shock will turn to resentment, to anger against us. For five days and nights he squats on the floor at the child’s side, his shoulders hunched, his face set, the tears occasionally, as the boy whimpers, wetting his cheeks. I know what he feels but can make no move towards him. I try to make myself invisible here, and take the Child with me. The young woman, the boy’s mother, is too stunned now, with grief, with guilt, to do more than sit with her head covered, staring at the boy, willing him back to life. It is the old woman who tends him. Should the boy die, I know, all this fierce emotion that surrounds us will break out into violence. There will be nothing I can do then to protect the Child or myself. Half dozing, I wait for the moment when it will come – the hoarse cry of rage that will tear through the old man and come hurtling upon us, the violence that, shaking the boy now, will come raging through the old man’s body to strike back at us, at the Child first, and then surely, if I try to protect him, at me.
But miraculously the fifth night passes, and the boy survives. As morning comes I hear the old woman make little clucking sounds, talking to the boy as if he could hear at last and shaking Ryzak out of the half-sleep he has fallen into, his head dropped forward, though his body, as he squats, is perfectly upright. The boy’s mother rises slowly to her feet, out of the place against the wall where for five days now she has been sunk in abject seclusion. Ryzak clasps his hands and utters big shouts of boisterous relief, teasing the boy, I guess, for giving them all so much worry, and he immediately comes to the middle of the room, grinning, and waves his hand at me. All his fear and resentment have vanished. He crosses to the window and lifts the bar. Bright light floods the room. It is one of those clear white days when the whole countryside is visible, glittering white under a sky of cloudless blue, and the sudden rush of cold air into the room is extraordinary. Ryzak stretches, utters another huge shout as he holds his arms out wide to the sky, and then, staggering back into the room, rolls into the pile of rushes that is his bed and immediately falls into the firs
t real sleep he has known for nearly a week. The boy’s mother also sleeps, stretched out on the floor at his side. Only the old woman, who is tireless, continues to crow over the child, offering him tidbits from a plate, occasionally laughing to herself, even once or twice calling across to me, though what she is saying in her toothlessness I can never tell.
The danger is past. We have come through. Suddenly I remember how tired I am. A great wave comes over me, and without even crawling the three feet to my bed of rushes, I allow myself to sink back under the flood of light from the window and sleep.
We are already past the worst of it. The winter solstice has long since come and gone, the dark of the year’s deepest place has been entered and the limit touched, the earth swings away towards the light again, and I feel my own spirits lifted as the days begin to lengthen. More and more often now periods of still bright weather open the whole country to our view, the sea glitters, the first birds return, the ice of the river on still nights can be heard grinding in the dark.
We can even begin at last to move about the house. I go down with the Child to the byre and we sit there with the animals, hearing them snuffle and snort in the half-dark, shifting, chewing, dropping the steaming heaps of dung that give the place its acrid odor, which seems almost pleasant after the stale air of the upper room, feeling their warmth as they crowd together in their stalls. They begin to be restless, scenting the spring. In two or three weeks now, when the ice has been cleared away, they will be led out into the fields again. Each day men are at work, chopping corridors through the ice, digging away the feet of frozen snow that block the narrow lanes between the huts, clearing yards to make outhouses accessible again. Even my own little house begins to reappear above the level of the snow. Soon we will be able to move back there, the Child and I, and our old life will resume. Then in a month or so we will return to our island in the swamp, to the birds, the moths, the new spring caterpillars, the vowels and consonants the Child has almost forgotten, it is so long since we rehearsed them; though now that he has spoken a word at last I know they are still to be found there at the bottom of his mind, that in some secret part of his being, deeper even than sleep, he has begun to speak to himself, and will eventually speak to me.
We go down each day to the byre because the room itself has become intolerable. We exist there only on sufferance. Only because Ryzak is responsible for me.
His power over the household has been deeply shaken by the events of the last weeks. It is the old woman who rules. It was her magic that saved the boy’s life – this is what she tells him – and his foolish trust, and the young woman’s pity, that exposed them all to destruction. The boy is, after all, his only grandson. When he watches him now it is with a quickened sense of how vulnerable the child is, how vulnerable he is, to extinction, and with some realization also of how little his strength of arms can do, and did do, at the moment of crisis. It is as if the old woman had found a way at last of poisoning his spirit, of stealing back the male strength she once gave him and which all these years has been the source of his ascendancy over her. There are moments when he seems almost like a child in her presence. One recognizes in the old woman’s face real hostility to this sixty-year-old man who has been her master for so long, and was once a suckling, utterly in her power. And mixed with hostility, a new sense of triumph. The house is filled with the glow of her magic, the smell of her herbs, her potions and the endless doddering syllables of her prayers.
At the first full moon she will sacrifice in the women’s grove outside the village, in thanksgiving for the boy’s life. Ryzak goes out alone to bring back the victim, a wild puppy, whose entrails will be burned on an altar of turf and offered up to the triple Hecate. The boy begs to go with him but is refused. The puppy will be taken from among the wild dogs, part mongrel, part wolf, that roam in packs through the undergrowth beyond the village and are, on occasion, since they are also sacred, fed scraps from the parapets. Lean, gray-black creatures, all ribs, they fight, tumbling in heaps over their strips of meat and rancid fat, then slink into the brush.
Ryzak returns with the puppy in a little wicker basket, and for ten days, until the full moon, it whimpers in a corner of the room, and is a source of real agony to the Child. Waking in the dark, to hear the soft crying, I have thought it was the Child himself, and finding him crouched over the basket in the dark, answering the animal’s cries with little high-pitched whinings of his own, have had the greatest difficulty drawing him back to his pallet. And all the time I was aware of the old woman, sitting bolt upright in her corner watching, and have imagined her invisible smile.
Does the Child know what is intended? Has she had the small creature brought here deliberately, and early, only to establish this communication between them, the Child and her animal victim? Is the ceremony she is preparing less an offering of thanks for the life of the boy than an exorcism of the Child?
As the time approaches the Child becomes more and more agitated and I fear he may relapse into his fever. The merest sound from the puppy sets him trembling now, and if I restrain him from going to the basket he will answer the creature from a distance, reproducing absolutely the whole range and pitch of its whinings, and the old woman laughs outright, her savage, crowlike caw. Does the animal sense what is to occur? Does he communicate it to the Child? Or is it simply the presence in the room at last of some kindred spirit, something other than our human presence, that disturbs him? Or some new realization, in the animal’s distress, of his own loss of freedom? Or is it, night after night, the growing brightness of the moon? For nearly a week now the weather has been clear, and we sleep with the windows unbarred and the moon’s light upon the room, picking out its familiar objects with a ghostly blueness, which is the moonlight striking off snow, and making thick, almost palpable shadows.
At last the night arrives. The two women go out just after the rising of the moon, taking the boy, and Ryzak carries the basket as far as the courtyard gate, then climbs the ladder again and suggests one of our games with the tablet and pegs.
From the window I watch the old woman’s party pass along the narrow lane, gathering adherents as it goes. All the women of the village will assemble at last in the grove. No man is permitted to see their rites. These are the offices of the moon, and belong to the world of women’s power and women’s worship, that are older, more mysterious, than the world of men. Ryzak, as we play, seems oddly ill at ease and I actually win a game. When the women come back they are silent, still wrapped in whatever power it is that the moon has over them, plucking as it does monthly at the tides of their bodies, swelling in them, waning, brooding over the darkness and transmuting all those things that we know by daylight in its softer, vaguer light. Almost immediately, without speaking, Ryzak retires to his pallet. Their silence oppresses him. The Child, who has made no move since the puppy was taken from the room, sits hunched in his corner, deep in one of his body trances, and refuses to sleep. I am aware all night of a strangeness that is upon us, a change, that may be simply the full moon, but seems rather to emanate from the Child’s dreamlike wakefulness, or the old woman’s, since all night she sits with her eyes wide open, unseeing, and the moon full upon her, taking its power deep into her and uttering, occasionally, great sighs, as if some stronger creature were breathing regularly through her.
In the morning there is a stranger, harsher breathing in the room.
Ryzak has been stricken overnight with some illness, which is not the same illness the children had. His body buckles and heaves in violent paroxysms, is wrenched, drained, flooded; and when the old woman examines him there is just the mark she expected to find, a half-circle of small teeth marks on his wrist, almost healed now – the wound through which the beast has entered. She utters a piercing shriek, throws her hands in the air, and immediately begins wailing for the dead.
This is what her rites of last evening were intended to avert. They have failed. It wasn’t the boy after all who was under threat, but the old man. Th
e boy’s illness was a diversion. Now truly, she discovers, the Child has worked his evil upon them. The animal spirit has deserted him at last and entered the old man, from whose lips come flecks of white like the foam on a horse that has been ridden too hard. The savage, animallike growls and roarings that burst from him make the hair stand on end, as hour after hour he writhes, and there bubbles in his throat a low grumbling that is like nothing I have ever heard before, and seems centuries from human speech. Between these passages of frenzy, he stiffens, all his limbs straining against the breaking out through him of whatever beast it is that is coming to birth in him, seeking its four hairy limbs, its fanged snout, its jaws clenched on the raw flesh of things. The end is inevitable, and obviously so from the first moment of the evil’s appearance. Even I see that. It is like a nightmare, as if we had all suddenly been swept up into his body’s drama, into the terrible process of it, the transfusion of his human energy into its animal form. The nightmare has its own momentum and takes us with it as if we were all participants suddenly in the same dream, waking together in our sleep to discover that the room had become a cage, and the air itself was an animal agency whose breath we shared, whose stench was ours, whose growls were our own choking attempt to cry out and shock ourselves awake.
The shaman is sent for. But even he admits defeat. One look at the gray, wolflike face of the old man and he starts back in horror, shakes his head, flees with his magic before it too is contaminated.
It is all so sudden, so complete, we remain stunned, unable to shake ourselves back to reality. For five days the noise is ceaseless. The old man’s spirit wrestles and writhes, his strength seems inexhaustible. When the young woman tries to wet his lips with water, a terrible choking comes from him, as if some new form of speech were trying to burst out at his lips. All the muscles of his throat contract to make the new sound, but nothing comes forth. It is, the old woman screams, the animal attempting to speak its name – the unknown monster who all these years has suckled the Child, and has now left him and is bringing itself to birth again in the old man.