by Paul Park
The deputy administrator waited. After several minutes, the old man raised his head. His eyes glowed bright with comprehension. “Please submit your documents face down upon the corner of the desk,” he said. “Are you carrying liquor or illicit drugs?”
His voice was creaky and disused. Instead of answering, the deputy administrator climbed the steps until he stood inside the circle of the light. The old man stared at him with luminous eyes. And then he shook his head. “Sarnath,” he exclaimed. “Sarnath Bey.”
Mr. Sarnath took his bundle from his shoulder and lowered it to the floor. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. Leaning forward with his hands over the lamp, he indicated the three objects on the tabletop. “What do you see?” he asked.
The old man shrugged. “Three different kinds of death.”
They spoke in a Treganu dialect, using it gratefully and tentatively after so long away from home. The old man unwrapped part of his long veil and pulled it down, so that it hung around his neck. “Why are you here?” he asked.
Mr. Sarnath smiled. With his index finger, he reached forward and touched the stem of the dry leaf. “I saw a moth drown in a bowl,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“No. It was as if I almost understood. Yet it was enough—I’m going home.”
The old man didn’t speak for half a minute. Then he shook his head, and his voice, when it came, was softer, clearer, full of sadness. “They let you go?” he said.
“I was a volunteer. And they were all asleep.” Mr. Sarnath looked over the railing of the porch to the dark forest all around. “You must know what I mean,” he said. “What keeps you here?”
The old man sighed, a melancholy sound. “You have all the luck,” he grumbled. “Yours is the first face I’ve seen here in a week.”
“A moth was drowning in a bowl of light,” said Mr. Sarnath. “It is not the time or place that is important.”
“Even so,” replied the gatekeeper. He gestured toward the gate. “This can’t be what the master had in mind when he told us to go out into the world. If I see seven clients in a month, I’m lucky. What can I learn from them, or they from me? But you had boatloads every day.”
Mr. Sarnath shrugged. He gestured down the track the way he’d come. “They have a vacancy,” he said.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Mr. Sarnath looked away, and calmed himself by studying the effect of moonlight as it pierced through the forest canopy. This night was magical and rare, for only at rare moments in the voyage of his life had he ever sensed his forward progress. Now in everything he saw the traces of a new significance, and it was lurking in the darkness like a delicate and subtle beast, vulnerable and shy of controversy.
Here and there, bright beams of moonlight fell unbroken to the ground, a hundred feet or more. Insects spiraled up them as if climbing to the stars; on a sprig of manzanita by the trail, a polyphemus fly arranged its wings. “I’ll be going now,” said Mr. Sarnath. He rose to his feet and retrieved his bundle from the floor.
The gatekeeper ignored him and continued to sit hunched over the lantern, staring at the flame. Mr. Sarnath made a little gesture of farewell. Then he walked down the steps. The gate was a simple one, an X-shaped cross of wood set in a wooden frame. Mr. Sarnath pulled it open and slipped through.
But he hadn’t gone a half a mile before he heard a cry in back of him. The old gatekeeper was hurrying after him; he stopped and waited by the track. “Sarnath Bey!” cried the man. And then, when he got close: “Please forgive me, Sarnath Bey. Please—I wish you well.”
He too was carrying a bundle, a cotton knapsack covered with embroidery. This he thrust into the traveler’s hands, and then he bent down wheezing, out of breath. “Forgive me,” he repeated, as soon as he could speak. “My eyes were blind from envy and self-pity.”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
“No, but there is.” He wrapped his skinny rib cage in his arms, bent his head, and then continued: “Three thousand days I’ve lived there. More than three thousand, and I think that I’m as far as ever from achieving understanding. How long has it been for you? Not long—you’re still a young man.”
He stood up straight and reached his hand out toward the knapsack. “Forgive me,” he repeated. “I was jealous, I admit. Because I’ve been away from home so long. But perhaps it’s my impatience that keeps me here. Perhaps if I can overcome that. . . .” His voice, eager and unhappy, trailed away. But then he shook his head. “I’ve brought you gifts,” he said. He pulled the knapsack out of Sarnath’s hands, and pulled the strings that opened it.
They were standing in a patch of moonlight. “Here’s some food,” he said. “Sourbread and wine—it’s all I had. A flask of goat’s milk. Here, but look at this.” He opened a small purse and showed a handful of steel dollars, each one incised with the head of the First Liberator, Colonel Aspe. “These I confiscated from a merchant.” He shrugged. “I have no use for them.”
He drew out a cotton sweater and a quilt. This he spread out in the moonlight on the grass, and then he squatted down. “There’s a flashlight and a pocket knife,” he said. “And look.”
He unrolled a length of fabric. “Look,” he said. He flicked on the flashlight, and in its narrow, intense compass Sarnath could see a row of bones: the skulls and limbs and shoulder blades of various small animals, each one covered with a mass of carving.
“These I do in my spare time,” said the old man. “I find them in the woods.” He held up the femur of a wild dog, cut with scenes from the lives of the Treganu sages and set with precious stones.
The work was exquisite. Mr. Sarnath picked up the skull of a small child. Flowers and leaves were cut into the bone, and on the broad white forehead was engraved a single sign: the endless knot of the unravelers. “That one’s for my sister,” said the old man. He pointed to a piece of elephant horn, decorated with quotations from the nine incontrovertible truths. “For my mother, if she’s still alive. No, take them all. I have no use for them. Give them to my friends, to anyone who still remembers me.”
Mr. Sarnath shook his head. With careful fingers he separated out the food, the sweater, and the quilt. “These I’ll take,” he said.
The old man picked up a piece of bone. “Please take them to my friends,” he said. “And this one—look.”
They were squatting in the grass. The old man held the flashlight in one hand. He dropped the bone onto the others, and then he pulled a bundle of paper from the last recesses of the knapsack. “This is the finest one,” he said. “It is my gift for the master. Please.”
Mr. Sarnath uncovered the last bundle. There in a nest of ancient paper covered with ancient spidery writing lay another skull, with a curiously flat forehead and a curiously bulbous occiput. The eyeholes and the inside of the nasal cavity were chased with silver, the jaw rebuilt with silver and fastened with a silver hinge.
“Look at the top,” said the old man. He shone the light along the cranium, so Mr. Sarnath could see that its surface was covered with new carved figures, the new lines gleaming white against the dull brown bone.
They were scenes out of the master’s life. “It is my gift to him,” persisted the old man. “My finest work—the skull I took from an old smuggler—the papers too. They’re valuable—I know they are. The man refused to tell me what they were, and when the guards came he attempted suicide.”
“It is not valuable to me,” said Mr. Sarnath gently.
The old man squatted on his heels. He looked up into the darkness, and when he looked back there were tears in his eyes. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
Then he stood up. He left the flashlight lying on the quilt, but he had the purse of dollars in his hand. With trembling fingers he undid the cord, and then he was throwing handfuls of currency off into the darkness, until the purse hung empty. Mr. Sarnath could hear the coins clinking against tree trunks and against stones. He could hear the movement of small animals as they dodged away; then
there was silence.
The old man bent down to the ground. And then he was picking up the pieces of old bone and scattering them into the undergrowth. The small skull of the girl he tested in his palm, and then he threw it with all his strength against the trunk of a java tree.
“You were always a quick scholar,” he said. “But I’m just an old man. But,” he said, a tint of pleading in his voice, “you’ll tell the master about me? How I threw these things away? ‘All life is a journey,’ ” he quoted miserably. “ ‘The more I carry, the more difficult it is for me to move.’ ”
Mr. Sarnath put his hand on the last skull. It lay in the beam of the discarded flashlight, tangled in its nest of papers, staring up at him with hollow, silver eyes. “This I’ll take,” he said. “A present for the master. I’ll tell him what you said.”
“No,” repeated the old man. “Leave it. You were right, and I was wrong. It’s eleven hundred miles. Too long to carry an old bone.”
For an answer Mr. Sarnath rearranged the skull inside its bundle; and wrapped it in the quilt. Then he took the food, the sweater, and his own few clothes, and thrust them with the quilt and the knife into the knapsack. Last of all he turned off the flashlight and slipped it into a side pocket of the pack. “Thank you,” he said.
There were tears upon the old man’s cheeks. “Thank you,” repeated Mr. Sarnath, standing up. The old man was muttering and mumbling. Suddenly he seemed embarrassed, eager to be gone.
Mr. Sarnath slung the pack over his shoulder. The old man stood in the beam of moonlight, hugging his frail rib cage. “My master told me to give all I had,” he muttered plaintively. Then he turned away. “Goodbye,” he said, shaking his head, not responding when Sarnath embraced him, and kissed him with the kiss of peace.
* * *
Now the moon was rising, and the track wound gradually uphill. Sarnath moved his bag to his right shoulder. He walked quickly, for his breath was good. And toward three o’clock he broke out of the trees—a wide, sandy valley stretched away from him, and in the distance glowed the lights of a small town.
Here the wind was in his face, a cold new breeze. It came to him up from the shore. South and east between the hills a line of stars dipped low over the bay. It was a constellation known locally as “the cucumber”; beyond the village Sarnath could already see some lights upon the beach, as the fishing boats set out to hunt the most elusive of the deep-sea vegetables.
The wind blew up the valley toward him, and brought a mixture of fresh smells. After the dark and pregnant forest, Sarnath turned gratefully downhill. The air was full of salt, and there was sagebrush all around him on the valley’s upper slope. And something else: some hint of poison in the soil, some alkali that kept the trees away.
It was this poison that gave the place its character. A quarter of a mile down the slope the path traversed another wider way, which stretched east and west into the hills. An ancient monument stood near the crossroads, the tomb of Basilon Farfetch. He had been the patron saint of travelers before the revolution.
As was traditional in that part of the country, the crossroads was a barren, lonely place. It was inhabited, according to the local superstition, by ghosts and spirits who had cursed the soil so that nothing grew. They were the ghosts of all those who had died by violence in that part of the country—after midnight, travelers were rare. Mr. Sarnath, coming down out of the trees, hesitated in surprise to see a light at the crossroads, the flicker of a lantern in the wind.
He looped the ends of his veil around his face, concealing his mouth. Almost he was tempted to leave the track and go down through the bush another way. This area was famous for the depredations of a highwayman, a man who called himself Lycantor Starbridge—though his real name, Sarnath suspected, was much humbler. Since the days of reconstruction, when outlaw bands of Starbridge soldiery had terrorized these hills, it had been the custom for all bandits to wear silk and jewels, and to pretend extraction from the ancient kings.
Lycantor Starbridge had carried this tradition to extremes. A handsome man, he had treated women with flamboyant gallantry. But his reputation among men was crueler; a hundred yards from the crossroads Sarnath paused again.
A lamp was guttering untended on the sand. And for the first time Sarnath heard a noise, the sound of weeping in a woman’s voice, and a high-pitched cry. Then some soft words of command. Mr. Sarnath hesitated, and then moved forward, reciting in his mind the precept of his master, that fear is an illusion of the heart.
And in a few steps he was conscious of another noise, a subtle groaning in the wind and the small clanking of a chain. Wading through the sage, he came down over the last hill and out onto an open, barren place with the crossroads at its center. The tomb of St. Basilon Farfetch was on the other side, beyond the gusting circle of the lamp, and Sarnath could see the outline of the stone bulk of the tomb, and the statue of the ancient saint astride it. The stone stumps of his hands were raised up to the sky. Behind his head, the moon shone like a halo.
A gallows had been raised along the wider road that led off west toward Charn. Hidden before by some trick of the shadows, now it was visible, a twenty-foot shaft of wood surmounted by a short crossbar. The body of a man hung from this crossbar, suspended from a chain around his chest.
Ten yards away under the flank of the stone sarcophagus, a girl lay on her back, her head against the sand. The lantern cast a flickering shadow against the wall of the stone frieze; as Sarnath came close, the silhouette resolved itself into two dark bulges, one formed by the girl’s upthrust knees, the other by the back of someone else who was hunched over her body. The girl turned her face into the light so that her cheek was flat against the sand. There was sweat on her face, moisture on her lips.
“Easy now, easy,” came a voice. The second humpbacked shadow straightened up. Coming closer, Sarnath could see part of a face, a mass of long grey hair. It was a woman. “Easy now,” she said. She was kneeling down between the legs of a young girl.
She was talking to herself. The girl on her back was beyond listening, her eyes turned backward in her head. Sudden, wild convulsions shook her body, and the middle of her spine arched off the sand. “There,” said the other as the spasms quieted down. “There now, there, that’s all it is.”
She was an old woman dressed in black. She was crouching down between the girl’s knees, but when the crisis passed they lolled apart; the woman rose and pulled herself around, so that she could take the girl’s head upon her lap. “There now,” she said. With the hem of her shawl she wiped the girl’s lips and wiped the sweat from her face. A small crescent of sand was stuck to the girl’s cheek, where she had laid her cheek against the ground.
“Hush now,” said the grey-haired woman. The girl’s head rolled loosely in her hands. Since the crisis, all the girl’s muscles seemed to have relaxed—her knees and arms lay flat against the ground.
“Can I help?” asked Mr. Sarnath. He was standing at the crossroads. Now he came forward and squatted down next to the old woman, where she sat cradling the other’s head. She turned to watch him and turned back—a sharp-faced, hard-skinned woman, smelling of kerosene.
She shook her head. “No help,” she said.
By contrast, the girl in her lap was beautiful, with red curls around a delicate, pale face. “No help,” muttered the old woman to herself. “No help—she’s almost gone.”
With the vague idea of trying to find her pulse, Mr. Sarnath reached out to the girl’s arm, where it lay near him on the sand. But he stood up when the woman hissed at him and pulled the girl away. “Don’t you touch,” she said.
The girl’s legs were spread apart. There was a blanket thrust between them, partly hidden by her long red dress, which had blown up almost to her waist. Embarrassed, Mr. Sarnath stood waiting, and after a minute the old woman relented, and when she spoke her voice was softer. “Sleeping pills,” she said. “Poisoned herself, because of him.” She gestured with the point of her chin toward the gallows,
where the corpse hung creaking in the wind.
“Your daughter?”
“No, my sister. Who are you? You’re one of those officers they’ve got up by the border. Hunh—I’ve seen your face.”
Around them now, the night was full of noises. Sarnath watched a centipede next to his shoe. “I’ll go down to the town,” he said. “I’ll get a doctor there.”
“No. It’s good like this.” The woman’s hands upon her sister’s cheek were gentle and forgiving, but her face was not. “She used to come up here to meet him,” she continued. “Sneak out at all hours. This is where she met him. Hunh—Lycantor Starbridge. She’ll be with him now.” Again she gestured toward the gallows with her chin.
“Do you live near here?” asked Mr. Sarnath. “I could help you bring her home.”
“No!” repeated the old woman. Again, her voice was harsh and rough, but her hands were soft around her sister’s face. “No—just leave us.” She nodded down the western road. “Is that your way? Two miles on the left you’ll see the Forest View Motel. Tell my man to bring a shovel. He’s the owner there.”
Irresolute, Mr. Sarnath pressed his palms together. The girl’s breath was shallow in her chest, and there was a froth of scum upon her lips, which her sister wiped continually away. How strange it is, thought Mr. Sarnath. Perhaps the soul’s life has a natural end. The wise person knows when to desist, to seek out some new understanding. But to abandon life before that end, perhaps—
“Are you still here?” grumbled the old woman.
He stood watching the corpse of the highwayman, turning slowly on its chain. Then he stepped away toward the girl’s legs and kneeled down. “What’s this?” he asked.