The Fourth Circle

by Zoran Zivkovic

  This was a new miracle, no less than all the foregoing ones, but these had so blunted my capabilities for amazement that I spent only a few moments staring at the blank ceiling, no longer denied. I went back out into the courtyard, leaving behind the brethren who had rushed into the church to cross themselves and re-joice at yet another sign of salvation. Salvation, yes, for them, but not for my Master. What hope is there for servants, when their masters lose the battle? The inflexible finger of God had driven the dreaded Sotona back into the excrement of the underworld, and my Master was left alone to account to both of them.

  Awareness of the cruel fate awaiting my Master and that his long shadow likewise covered me—the servant of the servant of the Devil— with a heavy pall of sin filled me with fear and trembling as I hastened across the now deserted courtyard to the damp cellar under the iguman's residence. From the opposite, eastern side, the rays of the sun were beginning to drive out the thick gloom that reigned there. Gripped by fear, which beclouds reason, I was going to seek from my Master deliverance for us both, though he was in prison and I free, trusting to the sinful, unforgivable hope that he might still have concealed about him some of those gifts with which Sotona prepares his chosen ones to avoid the traps set by the guardians of the Lord.

  But as soon as my gaze penetrated my Master's dreary lodgings, I bitterly repented of this blasphemous thought. The sight that lay before me, although the hardest of all for my old man's eyes to bear, nonetheless offered an undeniable sign that the Almighty had taken mercy on the Master, forgiven his sinful pact with the Devil, and spared him the earthly torments by which he would have had to atone for his sins.

  Under the window slit, on the bare earthen floor, lay the Master, his blank gaze directed toward the worm-riddled wooden beams of the ceiling. I knew that gaze well—had seen it countless times throughout my long life—but never had I beheld such beatitude upon the sullen face of death: a smile, so seldom on his lips in life, now lay there, arrested forever by the rictus of the moment of dissolution, illuminating his face with a radiance that did not conform at all to the ugliness of death. What else could turn dying into joy, but the whisper of God at the last moment that all the sins of the dying man, both great and small, had been forgiven, and that the gates to the elysian fields had opened to him?

  With mixed emotions—of utter sorrow that my Master had released his soul before due time but happiness that he had gone to his eternal rest at peace with God, thus lifting from myself the burden of his sins—I transgressed the strict order of the iguman and entered the cellar, lifting the creaking iron hasp, which held fast the door on the outside. No one, now, was there to escape.

  At first, while my eyes were yet accustoming themselves to the dense gloom, I thought some white, angelic light radiated from the place where the Master lay. Drawing closer, I realized that it must be the mere dance of cellar dust in a beam of morning light, streaming down from the narrow window, crisscrossed by rusty iron bars. A strange, improper thought came into my mind at that moment: I remembered the trouble my Master had taken to paint just such a beam, dappled with dust and shadow, on a monastery wall, as a heavenly sign sent by God to His chosen.

  I stood thus over the earthly body of my deceased Master, confused by this unexpected, melancholy memory, when a sudden sharp sound from the door startled me: the relentless scrape and clang of the bar shooting home, making me, too, a prisoner of this dreary dungeon.

  In the bewilderment of the first moment, I rushed to the door, once more sealed fast, and began to hammer on it with my fists, but since no one responded or opened it, I went to the window-slit, raised myself on my toes, seized the bars, and began to call out, imploring them to release me, an innocent man.

  After a long time, a bearded, monkish face appeared at the high window and informed me gruffly that it was the iguman's will that I should stay there until they decided what to do with me. I set up some lament in defense of myself, but he rudely interrupted me, saying a pail of water would be brought to me so that I might wash the Master and prepare him decently for a true Christian burial, which would take place after I had held wake one night over him.

  This news returned a measure of peace to me. If the iguman's intent was to bury the Master with the rituals of the true faith, then he had received not only God's but also the Church's forgiveness, which meant that no great sin could be laid to the soul of me, merely his miserable servant.

  With that consoling thought, I undressed the Master so as to wash the earthly filth away with a linen rag wetted in the cold well-water, thus making sure that he went clean to the Lord. Remembering how I had rendered this same service countless times when he was alive, usually in the evening when he was so exhausted from painting that he could not even wash himself, I felt tears well into these dry old eyes of mine.

  When these sad ablutions were finished and when I had clothed the Master in a linen robe, which would now be his shroud for all eternity, I laid him out on a bed of half-rotten wood that stood in a damp corner. Then I sat near the head of this bed, for there was nothing more for me to do. The diakons who had brought the pail and the shroud for my Master also gave me a cracked bowl with a slice of yesterday's dry bread and a piece of cheese, very salty, which they got from the peasants in these hills. But I had no wish to eat, and so the food remained in a corner, untouched. Sitting thus by the gently resting body of my Master, I gave myself up to the sluggish passing of the hours. I listened to the familiar, monotonous sounds of the monastery, muffled, and watched the slow crawling of the dusty beam over the earthen floor of the cell, closer and closer to the window, until it slipped away at noon, when the sun shone on the other, western side of the iguman's residence.

  Several times I slipped into sleep, but I could not remember afterwards what I dreamed. I only remember that twice I woke with a cry and looked fearfully around in the growing darkness of the cellar. My calm returned, both times, only when I saw the peaceful form of the Master, his face still radiant in that stiff smile of death. Once, to make sure I was not alone in that forlorn place, I even caught him by the hand, cold but not so cold as I had expected.

  The bell clanged for vespers, and soon after, as dusk was gathering outside—inside the cellar it was already dark as night in a dense forest—the hasp on the door scraped harshly again and lifted. A, tall faceless form in a long monkish robe, its hood pulled down covering the head, appeared in the doorway and silently entered. A diakon peered out from behind the figure only long enough to inform me that this was a new brother, just arrived, who would of his own free will spend the night in vigil over the Master with me, but that I must not start any conversation with him since he was bound by a solemn vow of silence.

  The diakon, still unused to the monastic rituals of death, said this all in one breath and in a single motion closed the door and slammed the bolt home, as if one of us meant to escape, or as if that silly bar of iron could keep death out.

  As soon as the sound of the diakon's timid, hurried steps had faded away, the monach sworn to silence humbly approached the Master's wooden bier and bent down to see, by the light of a small candle that I had lit a moment before, the face of the deceased. As if that look brought recognition, the monach turned to me, came a step or two closer, and in one short, resolute move flung back the hood.

  And I saw....

  12. STAR SONG

  FOR GENERATIONS, THE pack had been coming to the shore.

  This would always occur in the fifth month, Tule, when the young ones were strong enough for the long trek down from the mountains and when the small, white, soft-furred hamshees were most numerous and easiest to catch. The pack reached the coast of the Big Water when Tule was at its zenith because it was only then, and only there, that the presences appeared.

  The wraith-like forms, composed of the sparkling of the bluish air laden with the scents of evaporating waters, could be seen by all the members of the pack, but communication with them could only be established by the marked ones.
For many generations, before the cubs who bore the mark discovered their talent, ordinary inhabitants of the distant Highlands used to make these pilgrimages to the coast. Seated in a great circle on the rough grains of black crystal, they would begin to howl a monotonous refrain, waiting for the presences to materialize out of nothing before them.

  The wraiths would wander about in apparently aimless fashion, passing through the bodies of the members of the pack, whose fur would bristle, and through large rocks along the shore as though they had no substance and were unaware of them. Their broad, clumsy feet reached down to the black sand, almost but not quite touching it, remaining just a few hairbreadths above and leaving no impression.

  This spectacle would not last long. As soon as Tule began to set above the bay, changing the wrinkled Big Water from dark blue to turquoise, the presences would evanesce into the nonexistence from which they had emerged for a brief spell, leaving behind only a faint crackling and a deceptive smell of burning, which soon vanished. The pack would remain for a long time yet, sitting in a circle, keeping up the slow chanting, until the color of the Big Water changed once more, this time to light green. Then they would begin the slow return trek to the settlements in the Highlands, across the swampy bottoms and steep mountain-sides with their many perilous rockslides.

  The birth of the first young one to bear the mark passed unnoticed. If anyone in his clan observed the regular band of white color above the fifth paw, he saw it only as a distinctive marking, nothing out of the ordinary among the multicolored pelts of the members. Its special properties only became evident the next time the pack formed a circle by the shore and sat down, singing the song of invitation, to wait for the apparitions. A few moments before the ephemeral forms began to coalesce from nothing into the air, the white band on the young one's paw started to glow brightly.

  And then a new event occurred. Although the wraiths, as before, passed ef-fortlessly through the solid bodies of the pack and through the rocks along the shore, evidently oblivious of them, they began to gather closely around the young one with the mark and then extended their high-placed forelimbs toward him, cautiously and tentatively. The cub did not shrink back. The clawless hands of the apparitions could not go through him; his fur resisted them with a shower of sparks. The hands slid down to the white band, which seemed to attract them.

  Guided by a vague impulse, the young one then rose and walked into the center of the circle formed by the sitting pack. The wraiths followed him without hesitation and soon formed another, smaller circle around him. This would have hidden him from view if they were opaque, but being transparent, the pack could still see him, although not so clearly, as if through a layer of water that allowed a wavering glimpse of the bottom.

  The crackling and smell of burning that accompanied the arrival of the presences suddenly increased, making the bristling fur of the pack members sparkle and glow. The cub, whom they saw through the bodies of the wraiths, now reared up on the hindmost of his three pairs of legs, making him almost half as tall as the ephemeral forms around him. If an adult member of the pack had reared up in the same manner, he would have been as tall as the presences.

  The cub spoke to the apparitions, and they responded. The language spoken was neither the language of the tribe nor the thin squealing of the hamshees, but a speech never heard in the Highlands—a choppy, jagged language full of strange utterances and sharp intakes of breath, to which the throats of the mountain tribe were unaccustomed. Yet the cub, who hardly knew the basics of his mother tongue, spoke this one distinctly, communicating easily with the wraiths, sounding as though his mouth were full of sharp gravel from the slopes below the Highlands.

  There was not much time for this rough, sharp-edged talk that resembled the echo of a rockslide down the cliffs. Tule was already setting and the Big Water, which had never known waves, was becoming suffused with a different color.

  Although clearly unwilling to go so soon, the apparitions began to dissolve around the upright cub, accelerating their brittle speech in a feverish attempt to tell him as much as possible. When the last wraith dissolved, talking without pause to the last, rasping breath, the marked cub suddenly collapsed onto the wet sand. The band over his fifth paw lost its brightness, but also its previous white color, turning dark and apparently singed from too much exposure to the sparks and the tentative touches of the presences.

  He fell into a fitful, troubled sleep and they had to carry him back to the Highlands. Along the way they listened to his sharp-edged ravings in the unintelligible language of the wraiths. He woke only after the pack had left the lowlands, which were swarming with wingless, buzzing insects that unsuccessfully tried to push their long, poisonous stingers through the thick fur of the denizens of the mountains. But his awakening did not bring any explanation to the pack, eager for knowledge: the cub, no longer marked, remembered nothing, and the memory of the conversation with the apparitions never returned to him.

  The pack learned nothing from the next two marked cubs, either. Males also, they, too, could never remember the meetings on the shore, although in their sleep they occasionally spoke the gravelly, incomprehensible language of the wraiths. At such times the band over the fifth paw would again glimmer a little, but only briefly. Otherwise, the marks remained permanently darkened. When the previously marked traveled again to the Big Water, they were as invisible to the crackling, intangible forms as any other member of the pack. Only once could the mark function as a link.

  The fourth cub to bear the mark was a female. From her, the pack gained their first, albeit limited knowledge of the presences. She, too, had fallen limply on the sand after the glimmering forms around her evanesced into the nonexistence from which they came, but she regained consciousness soon after, while the pack was still on the shore, and retained a vivid memory of the encounter. On the journey back through the wet lowlands, under attack by swarms of wingless insects, the pack listened to her story. Very little could be understood—not so much because the young female still had only an elementary knowledge of her own species' language as because the many aspects of the strange wraith-world did not conform to anything in the language of the pack.

  Only after the passage of many more generations and a long succession of useless males and far fewer females whose stories, however scanty, could be added to each other and gradually built up, did a single story begin to emerge.

  This was a grand, marvelous story, an adumbration only, far stranger than all the legends preserved from ancient times and told in the mountain dwellings while the gloomy light of Lopur flowed from the sky, legends told to divert everybody's thoughts, if only for a short while, from the terrible hunger that always came with the fourth month. This grand story was about a strange pack of four-limbed, one-headed creatures who lived on the Other Side (of the Big Water, presumably, since nothing else had another, unreachable side). These creatures did not hunt hamshees or communicate in any of the dialects of the Highlands, but they were still somehow related to the pack to the extent that they were constantly haunted by the need to establish a connection. This urge for connection was irresistible, for after each successful communication the alien kin would lose a member. The fate of these unfortunates was unknown, but worse than anything that could be imagined in the Highlands.

  This sacrifice had to be endured, however, in order to achieve the ultimate purpose: the total union of the two packs, in some place that was neither the shore of the Big Water, although it would begin there, nor the Other-Side world of the strange kindred, but some third region that had only three differently-colored moons in the sky, a region without water and without hamshees, as the Highlands were in the ages before the ur-pack, before even the stunted shrubs and mosses.

  And yet that repulsive, lifeless place possessed a single feature that made it very familiar to the pack—so familiar that its members, who never trusted anything alien, were neither anxious nor hesitant to undertake an uncertain union with such different cousins and the certain
loss of the safe haven of their native world under the many colors of light that shone from its five moons. That feature was a circle, similar to the one the inhabitants of the Highlands formed when they came down to the shore or when, during the short period of darkness between the setting of Tule and the rising of little Kilm, the first moon, they raised their ritual star chant, which they ended with a mighty yell to the spangled heavens, as a greeting to the new cycle.

  Song arose from this alien circle, too, but a song incomparably more delightful and more inspired than the monotonous howling of the pack; a song full of mighty ascent and high flights that branched out, sounding considerably more harmonious and perfect than their final shout in the darkness of the Plateau, a shout that terrified the small hamshees. The vital need to take part in that song pushed aside all the ancient instincts of the pack, forcing it to accept as its own the purpose suggested by the strange kindred who sacrificed themselves and journeyed to the shore from the unimaginable distances beyond the Big Water. So did the pack agree to the union.

  According to the Great Story, however, spun by the young females— each adding a hair to that luxuriant fur—the union could be accomplished only when three marked cubs entered the circle on the shore at the same time to serve as three bases and movers of the union in which they themselves would not take part.

  And so the pack waited from generation to generation, as patient as their moons of many colors, which changed places in the heavens with faultless accuracy, commanding the rise and fall of the meager life on the world they illuminated: small, ruddy Kilm; yellow, pock-marked Borod; Morhad, enveloped in a dense green veil; dark Lopur, crisscrossed with fiery threads; and the greatest of them all, blue Tule.

  At last, without any hint of what was to come, just before one of the countless moonsets of Lopur, while the inhabitants of the Plateau were alleviating their hunger by contemplation of the forthcoming feast of Tule, the final yell of the star song sounded simultaneously before three different abodes, announcing that three cubs bearing the mark had entered the world.