Watson, Ian - Black Current 02

by The Book Of The Stars (v1. 1)

  The wretched thing was that he knew this perfectly well. He just couldn't help himself. Previously, our amorous intrigue had been like soft clay, spinning freely on the wheel of those happy weeks, moist and malleable, changing shape, able to flop down afterwards. Now this same clay had been fired by my dramatic arrival, and was a hard pot instead—within which Tam was trapped, as surely as if he had stuck his fist inside and kept it there during the baking. The pot of his passion was strong, yet it was fragile too, liable to break into tragic jagged shards.

  I didn't encourage him—either on that day or on various subsequent days when we saw each other, days when I couldn't think of an excuse not to. Certainly we didn't make love again. Tam seemed to find this abstinence logical, preferable. I believe he feared he might disappoint me—I who had tamed the current itself.

  But though I didn't encourage him, I fear he encouraged me—in my proud notion that I had saved him and Aladalia and everyone else in the east. He bolstered my self-esteem almightily, when I should have been volunteering to spend my next few years resoling worn-out boots and portering the wounded on my shoulders all the way home to Jangali.

  Or did he really?

  Maybe it was his dewy eyes fixed adoringly on mine which finally made me wake up from my delusion. Maybe his hands held bunched by his sides—so as not to touch me—at last made me grasp the actual situation.

  In which case, thank you, Tam. Though that wasn't quite your intention.

  Meanwhile, of course, the war was going on. Our army massed in Pecawar. Riverguild vessels ferried stocks of newly-forged weapons, and made ready to accompany the army in the role of supply boats.

  And here we come to another twist of the screw concerning my heroic intervention: one which explains, when I look back, why the guild (in the person of the Aladalia quaymistress) treated me so gently despite my having trashed the original war plan. For what had I done in reality but largely restored the monopoly of the river which our guild enjoyed before the current withdrew? I'd restored the status quo all the way from the Far Precipices to Aladalia.

  Once more, women only could sail the major part of the river; and maybe the guild calculated that this easily balanced off any amount of inconvenience to the army; any extra delay, any additional deaths.

  Naturally the guild could never admit as much! And I would be the last person they would admit it to; especially when I was writing a book destined for publication. If they could have marooned me in the desert to write my book uninfluenced by current events, from their point of view this would have been even neater. Yet as it was I managed to maroon myself in a cocoon of falsely modest heroism. Maybe the one thing that did rankle with the guild was that I hadn't indeed gone the whole hog and ridden the Worm all the way to Umdala and the ocean! Strange to realize (as I finally did) that whatever my own motives may have been, to my guild perhaps I was a secret heroine ... of conservatism.

  Oh yes indeed. I could well imagine some slick guildmistress telling an angry council of the 'jacks: "Look, fellows, let's be reasonable! She did stop the Worm as soon as she could. Well, okay, a hundred leagues past Verrino—just to be on the safe side. But you'll have to agree she cut the Sons' supply route at a stroke! She stopped them spreading out."

  There would have been truth in this (imaginary) advocacy. The Sons had indeed been stymied. What could they do thereafter but batten down tight in Verrino and environs?

  And so the war proceeded (without any courier or spy balloons coming into play, that I noticed)—and presently the war was won.

  How messily, I was to learn before long. (Though perhaps the war wasn't so much messy, as simply a war.)

  And so I wrote my book. And finished it; then delivered my manuscript to the quaymistress, minus my private epilogue about the Worm's dream contact with me—that, I kept about my person.

  Quaymistress Larsha was a neat, composed woman in her late forties. She was neat in speech and neat in her turn-out, maybe to compensate for a weak eye which wandered if she ever got upset. She wore a pair of Verrino spectacles with gilded wire frames.

  "Your manuscript will be off to Ajelobo early next week, on board the schooner Hot Sauceboat," she assured me, having locked my work in her bureau for safety. "And how about yourself, Yaleen?"

  "Me? I want to go to Verrino. I'd like to help tidy up, and I have a message for somebody there: a message from a dead woman. When you read my story, you'll understand. After that I want to go home to Pecawar. I haven't seen my parents for years. I'd like to leave as soon as I can."

  "The day after tomorrow, if you wish." Larsha hesitated. "Don't you perhaps feel that you need to pay a visit to the head of the current first? If you wish, we could sail you out."

  "There? No fear!" But I checked myself. Larsha knew nothing of what the Worm had told me the other night. "Don't worry, it'll stay where I moored it."

  Larsha adjusted her spectacles and peered at me primly; the mannerism reminded me strongly and suddenly of Doctor Edrick. "You're sure of that, child?"

  "As sure as I am of anything." (Which didn't, come to think of it, amount to very much.)

  "Our guild will have to think long and deeply before we advise in favour of any attempt to move the current further downstream. If indeed such a move is possible or desirable."

  "I'm sure I don't know if it's possible. The Worm thinks it's a God now."

  "Well, at least we don't have to worship it. . . ." Larsha's glasses caught the sunlight streaming through the window, as if winking some message at me.

  This prompted me to ask, "Is there a list of prisoners, Quaymistress?" Andri and Jothan would likely not have been with the invasion force. They would have been assigned to the wormpoison project. But Edrick could well have been one of the invaders. If so, I was wondering whether he had been killed or caught.

  I do wish I hadn't thought of that man as still alive and kicking. I do wish Larsha hadn't adjusted her glasses, just so. Later on it was to seem to me as if I had recreated Edrick by thinking about him just then—and by setting out for Verrino with him in the background of my mind, hiding behind Hasso who occupied the foreground. As if I had brought him back into existence, out of the chaos of war and death.

  "A list? Maybe so. You'll be in Verrino in a few days. Ask there."

  "I may. It isn't important."

  It was, though. It was deadly important.

  Before leaving town, I dithered long about whether to go round to the pottery to say goodbye to Tam; but decided not to. I started a letter and tore it up half a dozen times. Now that I'd finished my book, words seemed to have deserted me. I even fancied, for half an hour, that I might send Tam my diamond ring wrapped up in a little packet by way of farewell. A grand gesture indeed, when I'd worn that ring all the way into the belly of the Worm, and back! However, Tam would never be able to slip my ring on to even his smallest knuckly finger. So I might well be taunting him by such a gift. I might be saying in effect: "You can't slip me on, either!"

  In the end I sent him a flower in a little box. I chose the "farewell" Fleuradieu which blooms from midsummer almost till winter in the northern towns. The Fleuradieu starts out with light blue summer flowers but these grow deeper in hue and darker through the autumn till the final blooms of the year are violet, nearly black. It's the last flower to bid farewell to warmth and fertility.

  With my remaining half-pot of ink I carefully painted the petals black before putting the bloom in its box.

  Having thus solved the problem to my satisfaction, I decided to repair to the concert hall that evening. No point in brooding, eh? So directly after sharing dinner with Milian and his wife, I set out.

  I'd no notion what sort of performance was billed for the hall. Some orchestral music, I supposed. But when I entered the lamplit lobby amidst a fair crush of other patrons of the arts I discovered posters announcing "The Birds: an Operetta, by Dario of Andaji". (Andaji being a large village not far south of Aladalia.)

  What could this be? Something legen
dary? I certainly couldn't imagine any of the birds that I knew inspiring an artist. Tiny dowdy things they were, and rare; far less noteworthy than your average flutterbye. And as for birds singing—which I presumed "operetta" implied—well, that definitely belonged to the land of legend. Yet to judge by the chattering throng in the lobby, Dario's The Birds had struck some chord.

  I bought a ticket and went into the dim domed hall where I found a vacant aisle seat and parked myself. Presently a slim young man excused himself and sat next to me. He wore a long blond pigtail, bound with cord, which he arranged across his heart and held in one hand for a long while as though this was the tassel of a cap which might blow off. His skin smelled of grated lemon peel. But despite my neighbour I still felt private. The hall was dark; all the illumination of the oil lamps was concentrated on the half-circle of stage.

  The musicians took their seats: two guitarists, a harpist, a fiddler, a flautist, a drummer, a xylophonist and a bugler. A canvas backdrop descended, depicting a farmyard with a rainbow arching overhead. Then from out of the wings strode the singers, extravagantly costumed as ... a giant rooster, and a turkey-cock, and a snow- white goose.

  Oh, that sort of bird! I giggled, and my neighbour hushed me. The music struck up, the overture sounding eerie, plangent and resentful.

  "Man is of the shore," sang the goose. "Woman is of the river. Only birds are of the sky!"

  "So, bird brothers," the turkey answered, waddling about the stage, "let us fly!"

  Which they attempted, with no success.

  The plot of the operetta concerned the plans of this trio—ridiculous, grandiose, and poignant by turns—to reach the rainbow, with ever more melancholy consequences. A farmwife soon put in an appearance, though actually this was a man—a sweet tenor—wearing big false breasts; and on her head "she" wore an enormous starched white hat looking for all the world like the sails of a boat. The wife soliloquized tunefully to herself about how she would kill and cook the birds, and what sort of sauces she would serve them up in. Her arias on the subject of cookery were lovely, but so weird.

  The Birds ended on a note of gaily ironic acceptance of circumstances, with the feathered flightless trio singing their own paean of praise about those parts of their bodies which the farmwife's cuisine would transfigure from rude nature into brief-enduring art.

  In short, The Birds was a fantastical satire, at once absurd and hauntingly melodious. But I had soon decided that the operetta wasn't about the problems of domestic birds at all. It was about men—penned in the farmyards of our various towns, while women sailed forth freely. The subtitle of the work could well have been: Frustration. Gaudy, lyric, manic, celebratory and comical by turns, Dario's work at heart was one of rebellion; and I wondered how many people in the audience saw beneath the surface to the tortured feelings which I thought I sensed.

  After the finale the young man next to me burst into wild applause. Several voices chanted out, "Author! Author!"—and soon Dario of Andaji stepped on to the stage.

  Dario was short and tubby with little piggy eyes. He tilted his head back while surveying his audience, a mannerism which made his chin emerge more pointedly but also made him seem to squint disdainfully from under half-shut eyelids. He took several bows, resuming the same seemingly arrogant, pretentious posture after each. Maybe the truth was that he was nervous; yet I don't think that, had I seen him beforehand, I would have much wanted to see his work.

  I couldn't help wondering, too, whether Dario's satire and lyric pain perhaps sprang from disgruntlement with his own body; whether his own uncomeliness made him resent women. (Had he ever made love?) Of course, I sympathized—and I guessed that crusaders in one cause or another must sometimes be inspired at base by personal inadequacies and frustrations. But to be honest the sight of Dario on stage did rather modify my appreciation of The Birds.

  And maybe I was being utterly impertinent, devaluing his achievement because part of me resented its basic thrust.

  Dario also wore a pigtail. His was much shorter than my enthusiastic neighbour's, tied tightly at his nape with a red bow.

  As Dario withdrew offstage followed by the performers, my neighbour said to me, "By the way, that's my brother."

  "Oh." Apart from the pigtail they didn't seem to have much in common. "Do you mean literally your brother?"

  The young man stared at me. "How else can he be my brother?"

  "Well . . . maybe in the sense that every man's your brother, if you share his sentiments about men and women. Maybe," I joked, "you wear pigtails as a sign of solidarity?"

  The rest of the audience was rising to leave, but the young man reached across me and held the arm of my seat so that I was imprisoned. "Wait," he said. Other people in our row were forced to exit by the far end.

  "Okay," he said, "we do just that. A lot of men in Andaji wear pigtails. We have our own little artists' colony."

  "I had a brother," I said, rather stupidly.

  "Amazing. Does that make you my sister?"

  "Dario resents women, doesn't he? What about you? Do you follow his lead, just because he's a good artist? Are you a good artist too?"

  The young man shrugged. "I paint."

  "Paint what?"

  "Goose eggs. I paint nude figures around goose eggs, after first sucking them out and cooking omelettes. Highly erotic they are. Each egg's a world of men and boys. If I don't like them afterwards, I dance on them. The fragility appeals to me. So easy to crush." I didn't know if he was serious. "My eggs appeal to women connoisseurs in town here. They think they're titillating, but oh so clever too, so that's all right. A friend pointed you out to me when I was last in town. You brought the current back, damn it."

  "Damn it, indeed? And how many good fellows would rather I'd steered the Worm all the way to the ocean?"

  "They're women-men. Not true men."

  "Like Dario is a true man?"

  "You scorn my brother, don't you?"

  "No I don't. I just have mixed feelings about his work, that's all."

  "That's because you can't understand it. No woman can; because a woman doesn't share the same circumstances."

  "Look, I sympathize."

  "We in Andaji don't need your sympathy."

  "Sorry."

  "Nor your woman's sorrow."

  "That doesn't leave me much to offer."

  "A person who can offer things is an oppressor, lady. We don't want offers from women. Of themselves, least of all. Men can love other men beautifully. Dario and I love other men."

  "And plait each other's pigtails? Sorry, that's unworthy." I thought of Tam. "If what you're saying's true, then you're really in a tiny minority, Dario's Brother! Frankly, if the world was a bit different you probably wouldn't feel this way about other men at all."

  He shook his head. "You can't understand."

  By now the hall was almost empty. I pushed his arm aside and stood up. "In that case I suppose I wasted my ticket money. But honestly, how many people in the hall tonight saw The Birds this way?"

  "Perhaps not many," he allowed. "Just those of us from Andaji. We who know the signals. The others saw other things. The art. The frolic."

  "Then I'd say I did understand. Even before you decided to rub my nose in it, friend. Because Pm already aware of the problem."

  "But we aren't a 'problem'."

  "I think, Dario's Brother, that maybe you're your own worst enemy. What a shame you can't paint gander eggs! What a pity male geese don't lay. I'm not your enemy, though, however much you wish to shock me and alienate me from . . . from a memorable performance, because you recognized me. So goodbye. Try to be happy."

  And I left, though there was a sour taste in my mouth as I walked back towards the weaver's house. Andaji sounded such a bitter place—though no doubt the artistic men there, who loved each other, felt that they were pure and free and astringent. Small wonder that Dario and company didn't live in Aladalia proper. Aladalia was too generous a town, too ample.

  A week
later I arrived in Verrino aboard a caravel.

  From the river Verrino looked much the same as ever, superficially. (Already new signal towers replaced those burnt, to north and south.) Once I went ashore, though, I found the wounds of war unhealed everywhere.

  The town was seedy. A lot of windows were broken and unrepaired. Footbridges had been hacked or burnt down, compelling long detours. Terra-cotta fuchsia urns were smashed into shards. Some buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble or heaps of ash.

  Worse still was the spirit of the populace. No longer did Verrino folk scamper about, chattering like monkeys. Now they slunk hither and thither shiftily. Many of them appeared ill-fed, even diseased, while the vine-arbours harboured drunks—not a few of them Jangali soldiers getting smashed on crude liquor. Indeed no one seemed to be drinking wine by choice. So where had the fine vintages of Verrino gone? Into hiding? Looted by the Sons? But perhaps Verrino wines were too subtle for the men of Jangali. Soldiers wanted something fiercer to remind them of junglejack. And perhaps wines were too subtle for everyone, these days? These boozing 'jacks were amiable enough, yet at the same time they seemed lost, like tipsy ghosts drowning their sorrows at having lost contact with their own world. Verrino town was quite crowded, yet despite this the place seemed strangely uninhabited, as though people couldn't quite believe in it any longer, even while they went through the motions.