By now I had grabbed Natty by the hand, shooing birds out of my way, battering them, shouting that we must collect our things and our ponies, and quick, quick, get them out of the wood before they panicked and broke away.
They did not panic. They rolled their eyes and snorted and tugged at their reins, but they came with us, then let us climb onto their backs again and ride off with our heads bowed down because a hundred, five hundred, a thousand more birds were still swirling toward us, aiming at us apparently, diving at us with their wings extended on their final glide, until we reached open ground and turned round to watch how it ended.
With branches snapping inside the wood like gunfire, and these broken spars and timbers all turning white as the birds relieved themselves, the wood was no longer a wood but a snow-field. But still with more birds arriving. An enormous scarf of them stretching all the way to the horizon, wavering and undulating and blackening. Flesh and blood, feathers and bone, and all as fluid as pouring grain, cascading into a store that could not possibly hold such a quantity. Any more, I thought, and the wood will explode, what remains of the wood, and we will be showered with feathers and leaves and bones and bark and claws and beaks and little shining eyes.
Yet I still could not turn away, not until the last light had faded from the sky, and the last few thousand birds had squeezed into their places, and the whole immense flock had finished its arguments and conversations, its greetings and goodnights, and fallen asleep. Quite suddenly, in a second or two. Fast asleep. A moment later, and the silence of the wilderness rolled back. A silence that felt complete and boundless, but in fact was stitched together with sounds belonging to other, quieter creatures, which knew the tempest had subsided, and now they could continue with their own more secretive lives.
Natty and I looked at one another amazed, as if we had almost been destroyed ourselves.
“Passenger pigeons,” I said; I had learned the name from Hoopoe, when we had seen them flying in smaller flocks.
“Indeed,” she said. Then added very sensibly, “Have they made us lose our way?”
“Not at all,” I told her unsteadily; I still could not escape the noise of the birds, or their feathers tumbling together. “That’s the east,” I said, pointing toward the moon, where it rode on a chariot of cloud.
“Our cooking pot,” said Natty, in the same practical way.
“What about it?”
“We left it behind.”
“I know.”
“And our meal.”
I smiled, which she did not see in the darkness. “We didn’t start our meal,” I reminded her. “But I’ll fetch it now.”
I slid off my pony, passed Natty the reins, and ran back toward the wood. Not one of the birds noticed me coming, or cared when I got close. Even when I chose a brace and wrung their necks, not a single one of the rest of them stirred to look at me, or warned the others.
By the time I returned to Natty she had already made our fire, and soon we had prepared our supper and eaten it. Then we settled down in the lee of a large rock—it had a profile, I remember, that reminded me of a witch with a hooked nose. Before I fell asleep, I looked around at the wilderness with no great curiosity; so far as I could tell the ground nearby was covered with the same thistles and scrub I saw every night, and every day as well. And those long shallow ridges in the dust, which were the last things I saw before my eyes closed: I decided the wind must have made them.
CHAPTER 18
The Entertainment
Next morning I woke under a waterfall. No, not a waterfall. I woke in the air—swept up by the angels of heaven all beating their wings together and singing. Then not singing but whispering. Whistling. Cooing. Gurgling. Crooning. Because they were not angels any more, they were pigeons, the same as last night, and now leaving with their mess drizzling beneath them in a continual white rain, first with laborious flusterings and squabblings, then twisting and looping and swaying and swerving until they had formed a gigantic letter S which held its shape…and held its shape…before it slackened and became a smoke-cloud blowing toward the horizon.
“Do you see?” Natty was propped on one elbow.
I continued gazing at the splintered branches and shattered trunks; the wood looked as though it had been pounded by cannon-fire.
“Not there,” Natty went on. “There.”
For the first time I looked at her; she was not facing the trees at all but staring at the ground, at the bare earth I had thought was nothing last night. Now I looked more closely. The little runnels and gullies I had decided were made by the wind were quite clearly hoof prints. Hoof prints and wheel-marks.
I forgot the wood at once: the wood, and the pigeons, and everything behind me. If I was right, and these were fresh, there were people nearby—or had been, anyhow. People with a wagon and horses. As Hoopoe had taught me to do, I crawled forward on my hands and knees, pressing one ear to the ground to listen for the echo of hooves, and the sound of weight passing.
I heard a soft boom, which I reckoned was the sound of my own pulse, then wiped some grains of dust from my eye and asked Natty whether she thought Hoopoe had known about this road.
“It’s hardly a road,” she replied.
“Track, then.”
“He knew there’d be people.”
“And the river?” I asked, still kneeling on the ground and squinting up at her.
“What about the river?”
“Do we turn here and follow this track?” I said. “Or do we keep straight on to the east?”
Natty looked first north, then south, as though the land itself might give us some clue. It was equally deserted in both directions.
“I think straight on to the east,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what Hoopoe told us to do,” she said. “The river is in the east and it’ll be easier for us when we find it—easier than all this desert.”
“Provided it’s not too far away,” I said. “Provided we can find a boat.” I was surprised by my stubbornness and wanted to shake it off; I thought it must be a sign of fear.
Natty picked up her sleeping-blanket, folded it, and carried it to her pony where she arranged it like a saddle. “Besides,” she said, turning to face me again, “we’ve no idea about who we might find on the trail. They might be friends or they might be enemies.”
“They’ll be friends,” I said, still determined. “They’ll be pioneers like us.”
“Is that what we are, Jim?” she said, quickening a little. “Pioneers?”
“In a way.”
“So you think we should follow the trail, then? You think we should forget the river?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But it’s what you think.”
“I think a trail must lead somewhere,” I said. “It can’t just end.”
“And you’re happy to ignore Hoopoe.”
“I didn’t say happy. I didn’t say ignore.” I paused. “It’s just that Hoopoe has never been here himself. He’s heard stories, that’s all. And his stories were all made before…before this.” I climbed to my feet and gestured along the trail.
Natty shaded her eyes and stared toward the horizon—a strip of flimsy white, trembling in the heat. I thought: in a moment she will round on me; in a moment our quarrel will continue. But as she opened her mouth to speak we were suddenly interrupted by a new voice, a third voice, very faint and far-off and singing a sea shanty of all things, one I recognized:
Oh the billows roll and thunder
And we think we’ll follow under
Where the dead men roam
And the fishes make their home.
It had to be a hallucination; an illness the sun had boiled in my brain. First it had made us bad-tempered, now it made us imagine things that did not exist.
Then Natty heard it too. A cheerful song, not in the least frightening. Exuberant, in fact, and with an orchestra, too; a full accompaniment of groans and rumbles and squeaks an
d sighs and jingles and judders.
But a madhouse: that was my first impression when they swung into view at last and stopped a few yards away from us. A band of lunatics escaped from their institution, and now as amazed by the sight of us as we were astounded by them.
I stared at each in turn, starting with a Red Indian who was no more red than I am, but smeared in charcoal paint from head to waist except for a white stripe on either cheekbone; he was wearing trousers made of brown leather, and moccasins, and riding a pony about the same size as my own, but black not chestnut and itself smeared over the shoulders with blue dye.
Next to him, sitting astride a mule, was a man who might have been a woman; I could not be sure because the body was entirely concealed by a loose yellow costume, and the face colored with paler yellow paint (except for the nose and lips, which were red as carnations), and the hair hidden beneath a wig that was also bright red.
Next to this freak was another, but stranger still because her head, her exceptionally large and completely hairless head, bulged as if she had developed a kind of skull-attic to hold her brain. This deformity, combined with very protuberant and shiny eyes, and lips that were almost purple, made her like a soap bubble, which she accentuated by wearing a voluminous oyster-colored dress. A dainty and fragile soap bubble, balanced on her pony and holding tight to the reins so as not to drift off toward the sun and expire.
Beside her rode the chorister—or rather, the specimen who had been the chorister, since the moment he saw us his sea shanty died into a gargle, then ceased altogether. Not a chorister now. A heavy and four-square man with a sunburned face, wearing a bushy mustache that curled into his side-whiskers, a sailor’s blue coat with shiny brass buttons, and a sailor’s three-cornered hat crammed onto his head.
For a while we gazed in silence, assessing and estimating. I thought they must be lunatics as I say: travelers driven mad by sun and loneliness. At the same time I realized we must look equally surprising, bursting out of nowhere with our Indian dress, our hair chopped and matted, our faces scorched, our lips cracked, and our manners almost forgotten.
Savages! I thought; they will think we are savages and kill us and leave us in the road behind them.
Kill us now in fact—because the fifth and last of the strangers to appear turned out to be a dwarfish fellow driving a covered wagon, with a rifle resting across his knees. As he tugged on his reins with one hand he picked up his gun with the other and pointed it straight at us.
Our chorister, who seemed to have eyes in the back of his head as well as the front, instantly woke from his astonishment, snapping his mouth shut and doffing his hat to reveal a deep thatch of inky hair.
“Good morning!” he boomed, as if he was a hundred yards off and not ten. “What, may I inquire, brings you to this charming spot in the heat of the day?”
This was so unexpected I sat thunderstruck. The moon-woman drifted a little higher into the air. The yellow clown scowled. The Indian was impassive. The midget driver ran his hand along the barrel of his gun as though it was an animal with a mind of its own, and needed to be kept quiet by tickling.
“We’re looking for the coast,” I said at last; my voice sounded small and unconvincing.
“English!” came the reply, like an explosion.
“London,” said Natty, who had pulled herself together more quickly than I had, and spat out the word fiercely, as a kind of defiance.
“London!” The big voice scattered over the rocks on either side of us and the red face turned to the freak riding beside him, whose eyes were bulging so much I thought they might be about to fly out of her head.
“Did you hear that, my love?” the stranger went on breathlessly. “London! London!” He swung back toward us, once more flourishing his hat in one hand. “Never did I think I would hear that word in the desert. Blessed word. Blessed plot. But…” He shrugged, or convulsed rather, then controlled himself by cramming his hat back onto his head. “But why are you here? Why are you so far from home?”
“We told you,” Natty replied. “We’re looking for the coast.”
Her voice sounded clipped compared to his own, which was hardly in the spirit of things. But our stranger did not notice. “Why would you want the coast?” he exclaimed. “Inland is the only direction. Inland! That is where the future lies! Cities of gold, boys, cities of gold. Golden rewards, at any rate, for such as ourselves.” Still holding the reins of his pony with one hand, he tugged off his hat once more and hoisted it toward the sky as if he expected the clouds to part and the Almighty to confirm this opinion.
“But we are traveling home,” Natty persevered. “Home to London.”
This word, so magical to the stranger, made him lower his arm and look at us more thoughtfully again, with the clown and driver muttering under their breath.
“Some of us have worked in London,” he went on. “Some of us have loved London and her fogs and rain. Some of us have loved her very much.” His head sank down, as if a sudden shower had swept across us and softened all the strings in his body. Then he looked up again bright as ever.
“Yes, some of us have loved her and some of us have enjoyed a great reception there. A great reception!”
“As what?” said Natty, still with enough boldness to seem rude—but again the stranger paid no attention.
“Why, as entertainers of course!” he replied, squaring his shoulders so his coat-buttons flashed in the sun. “We are the Entertainment, the Entertainment, and always ready to do our entertaining, as you can see from the fact that we make a habit of traveling in our costumes. And wisely enough, for are we not even now entertaining you as we speak?”
Natty tried to brush this aside. “Possibly,” she said. “But surely there can’t be much to entertain hereabouts. Surely…”
There was a scandalized pause, then another explosion. “Not much to entertain? My dear young person, there is the world.” The stranger flourished his hat at the canyon walls on either side, as if to indicate the infinite horizons that stretched beyond them. “The world, the world, the whole wide world, and us to fill it. Oh yes, we are the Entertainment, and now…” He paused, licking his lips as if preparing to address the largest audience of his life, then rushed onward again. “And now, without further ado, I shall introduce you to our number.
“First, and bringing up the hindmost, with an eye to all our possessions, is the Wee Man.” (Here he indicated the dwarf who sat scowling in his wagon-seat, and was apparently not at all pleased to be identified by this name, for he made no acknowledgment except to stroke the barrel of his rifle even more lovingly.)
“After him, and furthest in this line on my left, is our latest friend and a most estimable performer on horseback—the Rider. Do not ask me his origins for I do not know them. On the eastern side of this great country is all I know, because that is all he has told me. On the eastern side which he has abandoned—for we met him on the southern coast just recently and took him into our service.” (During this longer introduction he pointed to the Indian whose face and chest were smeared with charcoal, and who did not bow or smile or make any sign of knowing he had been mentioned, but regarded us with a calm and steady look which I could not decipher. His face was like a mask carved out of dark wood, lean and severe and handsome and watchful.)
“Next, and preserved in what I might call the uniform of his trade, though costume is a gentler word, and worth his weight in the same gold that he resembles, is our clown, whom we call simply Clown.” (Here the hat was wafted toward the butter-colored, red-wigged fellow sitting astride the mule, who remained completely still and so avoided giving any sign that he was associated with good humor.)
“After that, and closest to me here, and by no means the least of us, in fact the most of us, our paradigm of beauty and interest, who also does me the honor, the extraordinary and unexpected honor, new every morning, of living as my wife, Miss…Mrs….” (Here he suddenly lost his way and seemed uncertain about how best to summarize al
l his feelings in a single word, then found his direction again and announced very loudly: “The Spectacle!” At which point the gleaming lady adjacent to him broke into a blissful smile and seemed to inflate so much with pride I thought she might actually rise up to heaven in a gust.)
As this enormous speechification ended we also discovered the name of its maker, which was simply Boss, who once he had made the announcement pressed one hand to his chest to show that although he took pride in his identity, he was also embarrassed to carry the burden of being such a formidable genius. This confirmed the impression we had already received—that he was a ridiculous person. Yet that was not all. For despite his huffing and puffing, and the absurd eruptions of his speech, he had an air of good spirits about him that was in its way very likeable. Furthermore, he had so far brought his troop through the desert in safety, which was a skill of a kind. Such a considerable kind, in fact, I thought his little band of followers reckoned he must be a prophet, and they were his disciples.
Not that any of them had much enthusiasm for the role apart from the Spectacle, who still beamed continually at all and sundry. Indeed, as Boss finished speaking, the Rider, Clown and the Wee Man did nothing that showed they felt any pleasure whatsoever in their association, but only narrowed their eyes and waited for us to speak, and in this way to return the favor Boss had just shown us. Since Natty now sat tight-lipped, staring from one face to another, then settling on the Rider, this task fell to me.
I performed it as simply as possible, giving our two names (our English names, not our Indian names), and saying we had been blown ashore, been imprisoned, escaped, lived with certain people who had become our friends, and now were homeward bound. I thought if I amplified these details I would only provoke other questions, which I preferred not to do. My reward for my discretion was to hear Boss say that he too had been sailing through the Bay of Mexico when a storm struck, and after coming more or less safely ashore was now proceeding inland toward the missionary town of Santa Caterina, following the trail made by others before him. Here, he was assured, the Entertainment would find a welcoming audience, and also a gateway into the more northerly, settled and affluent parts of America. “We shall be among the first of our kind in this great land,” were the words Boss pinned to the climax of his story. “And the first in quality for many years to come.”
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