The motley herd passed into yesterday’s translucent evening and the sun rose backwards in a glowing arc. Larks shot downward from their airy stages, their songs sinking in a thin stream back into their beaks; the flowers in the grass, which were closed up, stretched their petals wide; and the motley herd of living, dead, and imaginary horses galloped on, the flag-flourishing Ima hard behind. Gry’s brothers called to Leal,
‘The Horse leads us where we want to go!’ and Leal shouted back,
‘He knows what he must do!’
The Ima had no leader themselves, unless it was the Red Horse, far in front with the grey stallion and white mare. Fathers and sons rode as if in a race and brothers and cousins looked challengingly at each other, wondering to whom would fall the title of Imandi; yet they, while anticipating contest, worked together and still believed it was they who kept the herd on course. Sunlight, hot and high, beat down upon them so that they began to sweat, great drops, which they dashed away, appearing on their painted faces. The lather built up on the horses’ necks and shot from them into the wind where it fountained up and filled the clear air with cloud. The herd ran into a fog of its own making and rocks and areas of stony ground passed under it like old memories as it penetrated the new night.
The enticing smell of the white mare filled the nostrils of the Red Horse. He nuzzled her crest and the long slope of her neck as he ran and, feeling a sharp pain in his side, turned his head from these pleasurable delights and saw Winter, teeth bared and eyes malicious, closing in for a second bite. The Red Horse snaked out his long and muscled neck and let his teeth sink into the grey’s tender ear until they met; the grey squealed defiantly but he dropped back out of sight. Mud and water surged up under the hooves of the red. Deepening water slowed his pace. They were afloat and swimming, his steaming wet flank bumping against Summer’s streaming shoulder. The effort to swim was huge: he would have rolled upon his back and floated, cradling Nemione in his arms. He would have drowned Koschei in the water and in his keen and puissant mind; except that they were horses all. He plunged from the river and the fog into a warm morning. The town of Flaxberry lay before him, its empty streets calling out to be invaded. He looked behind: the herd, brown, bay, dun and black, was pressing on behind him, each horse a sudden, sparkling fountain as it shook the river from its coat; but the star-beasts, the birds and starry horses were gone and the equine figments of his imagination fled, extinguished perhaps in the water; there were no dead but only living horses and the Ima shouting at their backs and cracking the air with their huge sheets of blue silk. The Red Horse and Summer led them into the town.
The herd swept clattering through Flaxberry and brought its citizens running to their doors where they cowered, amazed. The Abbess screamed a prayer from her abbey steps; but her words were lost in the storm of noise. Polnisha leapt, too late, from her bed of stone. The herd was in the fields trampling the blue-flowered crop. It swept through groves of mulberry trees and brought the green fruit down in showers. Nothing could stop it and the people of SanZu stood by and watched the Ima and their wild horses wreck their quiet farmlands.
The Red Horse saw and recognized the Rock which, though it reared steeply up from the gentle fields, was the place he sought. He turned towards it and his herd followed. Up there was perspective, knowledge and fulfilment. It had the shape of a great, safe haven, a huge cart which might soar up and away with him and the white mare its only passengers, forsaking all others and leaving Winter behind in shame and want.
The long back of the Rock sloped upwards to the far horizon. The Red Horse hardly felt the greedy fingers of the puvushi he broke under his tread and his herd, hastening behind, crushed them to a fine powder which drifted up between the furious hooves and reformed into attenuated, grasping hands which beat and pinched the horses and made them mad. The wide body of the Rock was hardly able to contain half the herd; yet still the Ima gave chase, dividing their ranks to ring the Rock and to pursue. The horses crowded, faster, wilder. Winter reared in the mêlée and brought sharp horn down on the Red Horse’s back; hot blood spurted from the wound. The grey closed, seizing his advantage. He harried Summer, nipping her to make her turn with him; and the Red Horse stumbled.
Winter swung and reared again. Every good spirit held its breath and every evil screamed in triumph. The Storyteller was fast in his own snare; but so, as the two worlds lay motionless in conjunction, the Red Horse saw the precipice and halted above the terrible drop, his four legs braced. Nimbly, he pushed the mare aside and she staggered and stood safe in his protection, her beautiful white head low. Crest firm and proud neck arched, he shielded her from the force of the oncoming herd. Winter could not stop. His legs made hopeless bounds in the air before the weight of his body carried him down and, mane and tail streaming, he fell from the Rock. A group of Ima stood amongst the mass of tumbled rocks beneath, Leal and Gry’s brothers amongst them. Unsheathed knives and butchers’ cleavers glinted in their hands.
PART FOUR
PARADISE LOST
I have come forth alive from the land of purple and poison and glamour
G. K. CHESTERTON
The brown limestone of the Rock of Solutré was warm in the afternoon sunshine and the entire outcrop a playground for tourists, holidaymakers and climbers. Some were in the underground museum looking at the model of the site in prehistory or reading the legend of the Rock that, fifteen thousand years before this summer afternoon and maybe on exactly such a sunny day, hunters used to drive the wild horse herds from the rock to death, butchery and the spit. Other visitors picnicked or admired the view; still others, roped together, climbed the south face of the Rock. Past these fell a scatter of dark shapes which might have been the memory of a dying horse-herd, rocks, a man – or just the drifting shadows of the small white clouds which occasionally interrupted the steady shining of the sun. One climber called out involuntarily, ‘Avalanche!’ and, laughing at himself, listened happily to the derisive shouts of his companions, for there was nothing there.
Koschei picked himself up from the bushes into which he had fallen and looked up, back at the Rock. It was so like the Rock of SanZu that he suffered a pang of fear and longing but, collecting himself straight away, bent to rub some dry dirt from the knees of his jeans. His legs, inside the tough cloth tubes, were firm and ready to walk or run wherever he desired; his body was lithe and limber, likewise good for any challenge or activity. It was a fine, complete body and he was pleased with it and with his skill at summoning it from the Fifth Circle of Limbo, that many-coloured, timeless dimension on which Parados had so carelessly abandoned it. Ha! Koschei snorted as forcefully as the Red Horse, and laughed. It was a strong, fit body and would serve him well.
These strange garments which he had conjured to clothe the body – economical and practical, excellent! No need of chafing breastplates, dragging robes or the encumbrance of tasselled shoon. Koschei laughed again, more softly, and looked out across the rolling Burgundian landscape. The sky was a gentle shade of azure and the distant hills a darker hue; a river, mountains (not as high as the Altaish) far away; closer and below were crowded fields of vines, all in heavy leaf, and small villages of stone houses. A tall tower rose from the nearest – it had no aura of magic or of alchemy, but a golden tissue of peace and veneration lay over it and he supposed it was the dwelling of some god of seasons or other agricultural deity. The god of wine perhaps. He brushed his legs again and stretched as if he had just woken from a nap beneath the sweet-scented myrtles. These, glossy green and white-flowered, he knew, for their like grew in the cruciform garden of the Memory Palace and he had used their black berries not to perfume meat or bring a subtle savour to game but to distil a strong and aromatic liqueur in which to disguise and administer his poisons. He broke off a sprig for old times’ sake and, after crushing it between avid fingers and inhaling its scent, dropped it to the ground. In Malthassa the breaking of myrtle wood was said to mark a new epoch.
The sprig had fallen a
mongst the roots of an older myrtle, whose trunk was grey and split. There, beside it, almost touching one of its bruised flowers, the lamia lay, resplendent in her scaly, banded coat of scarlet, orange and black, the jewels on her head gleaming dully in the broken light beneath the tree. Her tongue flickered out to touch the myrtle twig and she turned the full force of her mirrored eyes on him. Equably, he returned her gaze.
‘So, my Lady,’ he said. ‘You cannot resist me – after all.’
The snake uncoiled herself and rippled forward, nearly to the toe of his shoe; but she did not touch it, nor fawn on him nor otherwise abase herself, but only passed her agile tongue once over her bony lips and began to swell and bloat as if she were full of eggs or live, writhing young, and let her colours slip, one into another, until they all were faded and her skin was dry and papery and hung from her long body in rags and tatters. Koschei himself stepped back a pace. The lamia reared up and moved her head about in agony while diamonds, emeralds and rubies showered from it. Koschei was not deceived: he recognized the scattered wealth for what it was, Illusion – and that the transformation was not. Aghast and sickened, he nevertheless kept his eyes upon the lamia’s belly and so witnessed (with an oath: ‘Asmodeé!’) a terrible birth. The hard belly-flesh tore slowly open with a soft noise like that of a cook’s hand grasping the heart of a fowl and, first, a brown forefinger whose nail was a perfect, lustrous oval and then five brown toes were extended from the red intestines of the snake; next two elbows, two slender knees, the belly and the dark pudendum, the heavy breasts, the neck, the face, and finally the drenched and stinking hair, the entire bloodstained body of Helen Lacey, the gypsy witch. Her hair flew out, was clean and glossy, settled in wave after wave on her drying shoulders, thick black hair exactly like the lock of dyed hair he used to keep by him at all times. The witch exhaled, seven tiny tails and gobbets of mouse-skin and flesh flew from her mouth; she retched and hawked and spat and wiped her mouth on her hand, lifted both naked arms in the air and instantly was clothed, her familiar and extravagant skirts flying about her in a red and orange typhoon and disposing themselves correctly, her rings and beads and bangles clashing into place. She also, Koschei observed, summoned a plain white vest of the kind he had appropriated, and he watched it arrange itself to cover the deep and glorious breasts he had seen naked but an atomy’s breath before. Anticipation of the love of which he had so long been deprived (‘Nay, starved!’ he whispered) awoke in him and filled him with delight and lust for her newborn, comely body.
Helen looked at him, her snake’s eyes shallow, capricious waters.
‘Guy!’ she said and laughed. Then, flourishing her skirts as if they were a fan and dropping Koschei half a delighted and flirtatious curtsy, ‘Master!’ she said, ‘Koschei.’
The magician laughed with her and bowed in return. Their conjoined laughter billowed about the trees and swept the wooded hillside and the blue skies like a sudden squall; it was surely heard in stone-faced, secretive Lyon and glittering, mutable Pargur. They were quiet and the vines and all the summer vegetation settled with them into a happy stillness. Koschei spoke. His voice was not the even and melodious tenor of Parados, but deeper and shadowed with malevolence.
‘Lady,’ he said, and laid his healed and borrowed hands possessively on Helen’s shoulders. ‘My Lady – what will you and I not do together?’
Helen did not answer but stepped closer to him, laid a brown forefinger on her lips first and then, caressingly, on his.
‘Where shall we go, my Love?’ she said. ‘Look, on the road there – beyond Solutré village. Dominic speeds to greet us.’ She gestured towards the valley below, which was as full of roads as of vines, narrow grey ribbons which climbed among the fields and wound between village and village. The glass of a windscreen flashed briefly in the sun and the vehicle itself could be seen, a bright and swiftly-moving blur which, as it came rapidly nearer resolved itself into a shiny, blood-red car which halted at the roadside below.
‘Your chariot of fire!’ said Helen triumphantly and bent to retrieve her lamia-skin from the myrtle-root at which their gale of laughter had deposited it. She rolled it carefully into a tight and rustling ball and tucked it under her tongue which, Koschei was intrigued to see, had retained its snaky, cloven shape.
One field of vines lay between them and their earthbound car. Quickly, Koschei straddled its wire fence and catching Helen up in his arms held her there, between heaven and earth. The cross, false earnest of fidelity, which she and Nemione had both worn first as an honourable badge and then as unregarded trinket, had undergone a final transmutation and become flesh, a small but obvious scar beneath the septum of her nose. Its southernmost arm almost touched her upper lip and made her supernatural beauty all the more compelling.
‘Chov-hani, Witch-woman,’ Koschei murmured and kissed the witch-mark first and then the curving, sensual mouth itself. Time, by his will, was suspended while they kissed and Dominic, standing in the road beside the car and looking up at the sun-haunted rock, the trees and the enchanter and enchantress frozen on the margin of the wood and field, saw the high, drifting clouds come to a standstill and heard the rustle of the leaves and the insect-hum cease. Then Koschei set Helen down in the vineyard and life and living started up again as they strolled hand-in-hand down the hill towards him. Koschei, as they approached, surveyed the boy eagerly and he stood up, straight and tall, his fair head shining in the sun, his brown gypsy eyes unfathomable.
‘Dominic, my son and his,’ said Helen. ‘Or ours, perhaps, since you have his body, blood and mannerisms all.’
The familiar stranger gave a broad and charming smile. He made a figure in the air with his hand, as if he removed a hat, and bowed.
‘Koschei Corbillion at your service, Dominic,’ he said. ‘A fine substitute for my own dear son. Dominic – the name means “Sunday”, does it not? – was that the day on which you were born to serve Zernebock?’
‘Or Satan – he has many names and titles,’ said the boy. ‘Where will you travel, Koschei? Where shall I drive you?’
‘But I shall drive!’ the magician exclaimed. ‘I have the body, mark you, and no doubt it will remember all that in the past has made it what it is today.’ He turned to Helen and repeated her words on the hill: ‘Where shall we go, my Love? You know your world better than I. Shall it be to his place, the old priest’s house in Albion?’
‘You are premature, Koschei; do not let immediate ambition get in the way of prudence – besides, do you want a wedded wife (who waits for him there) and six more children to go with this one? Accusations, recriminations, grief?’
‘I do not fear any of these.’
‘Let me be your guide. As you say, I know this world and its ways. Let us follow my spirit which goes, like the traboules of the Croix Rousse or the twisting streets of Nether Pargur, in as many directions as the compass needle. As for my heart which also has its yearnings, for my past incarnations and my future selves, but most of all for the Unknown Paradise – I will give it in charge of blind Fate and take the road. We’ll go where this drom leads us, my fine rai – eastwards first, for I am tired of this great and civilized country. Let us travel to older, wilder places and retrace my people’s long journey, back into the night of their birth.
‘Come, Master, step into your chariot!’
Footnote, Koschei to his Journal
I write this sitting at the cedar-wood table in the small white temple with the gilded roof which is the satellite of my Memory Palace locked in Malthassa. It is a fair room and I can see the pink siris and the smaller Tree of Heaven from my seat. Beyond, in the ‘real’ world (as some say) it is a Holy Day, the day for the propitiation of the great Naga or cobra snake, and the people have laid food and water at the round doorways of the snakes’ houses. My Lady smiles and says nothing; she has kept her human form since we first met on the slopes of the Rock at Solutré; she has been Helen and Hélène for two whole world-years. I travel gladly with her, my knowing Mistr
ess, dark shadow of my older Love, whose brown body and lustrous witch’s hair, whose forked tongue and pitch-mirk eyes are the counter of Nemione’s fair pallor and golden showers, soft corals and sapphires set in pearl. How does he find her, pure white mare? – is she slender, fast and willing? Has she borne him a filly or a colt to bless their thunderous union? Does it favour her, ethereal, tender, or him, solid, red-coated, vigorous? His discarded body works hard for me, by day and by night. I have a fount of brute energy! New life, new landfalls and horizons, new mistress; but the same misspelt name, Koschei, which he – or I – trawled from the infinite world of the imagination, collective memory, universe of tales.
Here they think it is a gypsy name and that is what they take me for, one of themselves, dark-skinned from the hot sun of this land, a Rom colourful and canny.
Our lives are simple, Helen’s and mine. Our angel-haired son left us a while ago in a cold country, in winter, the snows and the mountains calling him – he drove away in the wheeled firebird to whatever dissolute or physically punishing pastime best amuses him and we travel on. Our conveyance now is a creaking cart with a canvas tilt for the rains or worldly privacy; once it was painted in gold and red and black and decorated with suns and moons. A few streaks, weather-ravaged, of this old coat remain, for we fashioned it together (one starlit night in the Yellow Desert) out of the material of her vardo, her gypsy caravan. From the skewbald horse we made a brown and white ox to draw it. We love and laugh and live as gypsies, the last of the true vagrants, and tell fortunes when we are asked. Helen reads hands while I pretend to scry in my little prism – I found it lying in Limbo beside Parados’s abandoned body. It is a useless, shiny bauble now, the only souvenir I have of Malthassa, its compound, magnifying eye fixed firmly on the last thing it saw, the dove-woman Paloma flying (in her second apotheosis at my, or should I say ‘the cruel hawk’s’ talons?) into Malthassa’s sun.
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