by Tim Robinson
‘What is it like?’ whispered Springrice. So’s voice had been taken away from him by the glow of her body; it was a moment before he could reply.
‘Like smoke, drowning.’
‘And what does it mean?’ she said, still more quietly.
‘What does it mean?’ repeated So, blank before her troubled eyes. ‘Does it mean something?’ He caught her in his arms and kissed her. ‘It’s the footmark of the legendary bird that carried you off as a baby and has now brought you to me, who will keep you forever!’
But So found out what it meant, that night, as they lay together in the moonlight. Springrice slept curled up like a child, clutching in her hand the curious bit of bronze So had rescued from the blazing forest; now he saw how like it was to the sign on her back. With the tip of his finger So parted her hair where it flowed over her shoulders; the mark glowed in the shadow with a pulsing, cloudy light. He leaned across her and gently disengaged her fingers from the bronze key – he remembered the phrase from the bone – and held it where the moon turned its edge into a tiny frozen lightning flash. The two shapes were different in detail, but they were the same size, the length of So’s hand from top to bottom. He put them side by side; together they formed a column of script. It was as if a hand came out of the night to tear So’s hopes from his heart. Written in the darkness was the fact that Springrice was the daughter of an Emperor.
At dawn, So led his lost love down the mountainside to the royal camp. Springrice was troubled by his confused bearing, now that of a lover at parting, now that of a servant so humble as to be nearly invisible, but she could not persuade him to tell her what was wrong. As they entered the broad way between the gay pavilions of the Court, a gong began to throb so slowly that after every stroke they thought it had stopped. The sound seemed to spread ripples of anxiety across the sleep of the camp; guards became alert at the doors of tents, servants appeared running with the furs and footgear of their masters. The sudden uproar flowed towards the grandest pavilion of all, over which hung the banner of the Emperor. Here So showed the Governor’s seal to the captain of the guard, who ushered them into an antechamber where several high officials were conferring in agitated whispers as robes were flung about their shoulders and their jewelled belts were fastened by crowding servants. One courtier came forward with a distracted look, listened to So’s story of the barbarian invasion in silence, and then disappeared into an inner room. A minute later he reappeared and beckoned to So. Leaving Springrice he followed the official, and found himself facing a brilliant figure whom he supposed at first to be the Emperor; but when So prostrated himself, this personage dragged him to his feet with an almost hysterical shriek: ‘This is no time for ceremonies, when fate brings you and your news of invasions on this particular morning! The Emperor is dead! Do you understand? The Emperor died in his bed after last night’s feasting; the fact has just been discovered – and you come now to warn of rebellion!’
‘Then his successor must be begged to muster the armies of the Empire,’ cried So.
‘His successor? There is no successor named. The Emperor died childless. Now can be said what many have always known; he was an usurper, and from that flaw in the chain of succession comes the imminent collapse of our Empire. The son and baby daughter of his murdered predecessor were smuggled away into exile, and contrary to our hopes and plans never returned. Thus there is no true descendant of our first Father to defend us now.’
‘That daughter is miraculously returned from the outer lands!’ said So. ‘She is in the antechamber now.’ And he told the story of the inscription in flesh and bronze. At that moment Springrice parted the curtains that hung at the door, and peeped in. The chamberlain sprang up, staring at her. ‘The likeness to her mother is extraordinary,’ he whispered to So. ‘And who, sir, may you be, who travels with such a companion?’
‘He is my brother,’ cried Springrice, running to his side.
A look of utter disbelief spread across the chamberlain’s face, was checked, and replaced by one of frantic calculation. Then he flung himself to the ground before So, and crept backwards out of his presence.
*
The new Emperor was enrobed that same day, with what magnificence could be mustered, and in accordance with ancient tradition was married to his sister Empress immediately. That evening he took leave of his bride and set out through the provinces to raise the Imperial forces. Every mountain farm sent down its man to the village, the tiny bands united in the market towns and marched to join the columns that flowed out of every valley. By the end of the winter the land was armed. The invader was said to be lurking in the northern mountains.
The forces of the Empire moved slowly; in the foothills their endless baggage-trains were ambushed again and again. Further north, the poised accumulated snows of winter were loosed upon them by single horsemen on high skylines. The Emperor led his groaning armies up to the mouth of passes where the wind struck at their faces with an emerald whip. In the great battle of the crests, storms of arrows broke upon them out of rolling banks of mist; the Imperial host became a shapeless thing striving to hide itself in the crannies of the precipices. Months later and half a province away the Emperor refounded part of his army, but was forced to cede town after town in a great southward circuit of the kingdom. Watching from a hillock the nomad hordes burning down one more of many hundred villages, the Emperor knew that among the distant fleeing figures too tiny to be recognized were the parents, brothers and sisters of So. From that village the remnants of his bodyguard hurried him away, down a road choked with autumn leaves. The army had broken and fled; the horsemen were close upon them. In a minute his last soldiers were struck down by the flights of arrows, and So was alone, face to face with the great Lord of the Grasslands himself with his curving axe-blade swung high. So drew his heavy ceremonial sword and flung it up to defend himself. At that moment his foot turned on something buried in the leaves, he looked down, and the axe fell on his neck.
The invaders swept on towards that capital So had never entered. His body was stripped by scavengers, and later dragged apart by wolves. By the time peace had returned to the Empire, only his skull remained, lying near that other skull, the two in mutual unknowing.
The River
The city is a poor place; its starved imagination holds out a beggar’s palm to the river that comes by from far-off regions of profuse eventuation. There, where the river has its gigantic infancy, the earth’s exuberance often shakes off mountain-tops which fall into the torrent and are washed clean by pounding cataracts. Drifting down calmer reaches under a potent sun, these islands soon bless themselves with forests and the song of human beings. In their generous hastening into existence the animals and blossoms of these conical floating gardens often catch up each other’s properties of passion or languor; thus motionless tigers adore each other from a distance among flowers that twine and kiss. The river’s breezes keep the initial inspirations fresh; the brown girls that flock beneath the trees have never hit upon the idea of wearing anything but sunshine and leaf-shadow, and the holy men on the island’s peaks, for all their wisdom, still tremble with the ecstasy of birth.
These islands pass by night. Men of the city, crouched on the dark waterfront, enduring the mosquitoes, strain their eyes to make out the gleam of firelight on the breasts of the drowsing girls, and sometimes think they hear the bell-like voice of a saint celebrating the eternal rebirth of desire. By day, however, the river is a vast liquid desert, bringing to the city nothing but a sluggish procession of abominations. A dead rat swollen into a slimy bladder by the gases of putrefaction, a rusty canister oozing yellowish oil, a trailing wrack of torn polythene sheet; such are the objects that linger in the stagnant shallows where the children play.
The city has no buildings as tall as a grown man. It is a cringing, furtive place that expresses its claim on duration only through the hopelessness in the eyes of its people. The houses are built of things already condemned by another world as beyond u
se: burnt-out vehicles, torn sacks, holed petrol-cans, buckled cardboard boxes. Nearly every surface has writing on it, often slanting or upside down, stencilled in red or black or white in the urgent, abrupt script of this other world. The inhabitants smear mud over these discarded words, fearing their incomprehensible power. The little hutches are pressed closely together along the crest of the river-bank, which is broken down in several places by streamlets of sewage. Farther back from the river the shelters are more scattered over the worn earth, and the boundary of the city is loosely drawn with a strand of barbed wire on metal stakes. The people often cross the wire to hunt for fuel, following empty irrigation ditches across a plain of dried mud fissured into a pattern of crippled hexagons. Black shadows of villages erased by fire are visible on the ground here and there. The sky, always hazy, meets the plain in a flickering horizon not very far away. Once a day a food-truck comes out of this horizon, trailing a cloud of dust and followed by a pack of skinny, quarrelsome dogs. Just short of the barbed wire, under the eyes of the patiently queuing people, the truck swerves round and begins to hunt the dogs, scattering the pack, circling, skidding, jolting and roaring until a smashed body is left lying on the ground. Then it drives up to the wire; the driver and another man leap out, grinning and swearing, and unload the food. The waiting crowd never show any interest in the spectacle of the hunt; they take the food in silence and return with it to their shelters, while the dogs snarl and fight over the bloody wreckage out on the plain. After the truck has gone, the dogs come into the city and maraud around the cooking-fires for a while. Their running and fighting, mating and excreting give the place an animation which is unusual, for the inhabitants generally move very slowly, look at each other as little as possible, rarely touch, and seem to disgust each other and themselves.
The truck usually arrives in the morning and is gone long before noon, and the dogs soon exhaust the interest of the city and lope off towards the horizon in twos and threes. Then the day begins to unfold its tedious cruelties at leisure: bluebottles, the smell of burning rubber, blown sand, itching sores. By evening everyone has drifted to the river’s edge. The women, wrapped in dark cloths, perch along the top of the bank, the men squat here and there on the slope below them, and the children paddle in the mud and squabble over the day’s finds. There is usually a shallow mist on the water near the bank, and the farther shore is a mere equivocation between water and sky, but between these limits are vast expanses of clarity and a majestic progress that only reveals itself in the steady driving-on of great driftwood rafts. In the evening light the river bears a cargo of space and silence as necessary to these people as the daily truck-load of food. After nightfall their thwarted desires build wonders out of the murmurous breeze-filled darkness, and the islands of holy delight begin to float by.
Among these solitaries there used to be one, now forgotten, who kept himself more than usually separate from everyone else, because he had no family, because the skin of his right arm and part of his cheek had become scaly and abhorrent, because he was tormented by longing for a life worthy of his longing, and because he was secretly building a boat on which to leave the city and intercept one of the night-islands that obsessed its people. At the city’s downstream limit, where the barbed wire comes down to the water’s edge, there is a little bay formed by the collapse of a length of the river-bank. He used to keep this stagnant backwater to himself, driving off the children by throwing stones and handfuls of mud. His cabin, hardly more than a bundle of matting he wrapped around himself at night, was just above the bay, against the wire. Every day he used to squat at the margin of the water or on a flat stone in the shallows, and fish with a bit of stiff wire for any floating object that could be added to the boat he was assembling: lumps of polystyrene foam the size of his fist, a metal cylinder from an insecticide spray, a piece of car-tyre, a few sticks. His boat was a sort of raft made by threading these things on lengths of electrical flex or lashing them together with strips of rag; it was more like a basket or a net than a boat. He kept it rolled up in his shelter, added to it when he could, and each night took it down to the river to see if it was enough yet to float him.
Time, for the city, has no forward motion. The same day passes again and again like a lost dog roving the streets. For this man, though, a day did come that was different from the rest. He recognized it instantly when he woke, but it took him a few moments to realize he bore its distinguishing mark on his own body, which remembered the pliant and responsive web of the boat; for the previous night he had spread it out on the water and lowered himself onto it, and it had borne him up. He could have left then; why had he chosen to endure another day? He asked the day that question, and it did not answer. Once again he swallowed the food that he blamed for his infection because it came across the scaly plain, and waited under another afternoon filmed over like a diseased eye. He told no one that this was his last day in the loathsome city. At sunset, instead of joining the watchers on the river-bank, he crept into his hut and lay there like a man waiting for his mistress, feeling the imprint of the boat throughout his body.
When it was almost dark he dragged the boat down the broken river-bank and laid it on the water’s surface. The lumps of plastic foam glistened faintly, but he had to grope blindly for the rest of the network. Pushing it in front of him he waded out a few steps and then knelt down, his knees sinking a little into the mud. Very carefully he leaned forward and rested his body on the boat; the water welled up through it, the pieces strained apart, but it held together. He plunged his hands down into the mud and drew himself forward until his knees were off the bottom. The boat sagged beneath him: he thought it would let him sink right down to the mud, but it didn’t. He felt it yield and adjust itself under his weight, and when he lifted his hands from the bottom it floated him free. It revolved slowly on the stagnant water, showing him first the black silhouette of the river-bank and his little hut, then the faint glow of a cigarette among the group of men further upstream, then the mist shifting and billowing out on the river, and then his own hut again. He put his hand down into the mud and held the boat still as he stared up at the land. The water made little sucking noises around him. A spasm of doubt made him stagger to his feet, straddling the boat, sinking ankle-deep in the mud. He splashed ashore, went up and peered into his hut as if he thought he had forgotten something. A little flame had broken through the crust of ash on his cooking-fire; he stood and watched it flickering in the darkness for a while. Then he turned abruptly, kicked down his flimsy shelter and bundled it onto the embers. As he leaped down the bank and into the water again the matting blazed up brilliantly. The boat was waiting for him. He waded out with it till the water reached his thighs and threw himself onto it. The sudden burst of flame had attracted the attention of the people further up the river; he heard them calling and running, and when they gathered round the blaze he saw them outlined against the light like the little figures of a shadow-play, miming amazement. As the little boat spun and drifted the plume of fire seemed to swing around him in wider and wider circles. Then mist enclosed him and the bright little scene vanished.
The pounding of his heart, the afterimage of the blaze, both died away. He lay half-submerged in the water with his head on the buoyant metal canister, and closed his eyes and opened them a few times to see if the blackness was the same inside him and out. He felt that the boat had stopped turning around, but there was no way of telling whether it was moving or not. The mild warmth of the water and the silence soon made him drowsy; he lapsed into a passive state, feeling himself suspended in time between the act of tearing himself out of the city and whatever ordeal the river might impose. It seemed to him best to wait, to become part of the stillness.
After a while he was aroused by a gentle undulation of the water which separately stirred each piece of the boat; through the gaps between them he saw, very far below, little wisps and knots of light coming and going. He looked up. Stars, such as he had never seen before, lay in a broad
band across the sky between the huge vague darknesses above either river-bank. Prostrate on his boat, which conformed to the water’s surface like a patch of scum, he twisted his neck to marvel up at this glittering population bound together by love for the law of its own fantastic geometry. Among its millions, perhaps a hundred greater lights distilled the worship of tremulous hosts into the serenity of gods. As he watched, a particle of burning truth was flung the length of the river from one jubilant congregation to another. He began to realize for the first time the magnitude of the claim he was making by his presence in this self-rejoicing world, and the searching purification that would surely be required of him before he could be part of it. He felt the encrustations of his arm and cheek, remembered the making of his boat from the litter of the shore, and knew himself to be a creature of mud, smelling of that realm of things rejected first by man and then by the river. But now the materials of his boat were transformed by starlight and flowing water; the lumps of spongy stuff were glittering silver, and fleeting iridescences played around the metal drum. He laid his cheek in the water; the cracked skin was soothed and healed by the dark salve. He let his diseased hand down into the current and it was instantly sheathed in diamonds. It seemed that the river, generous beyond his imagination, had washed him and his abject boat with a cool luminosity that made him visible to the stars. With his transfigured hand that trailed vague colours through the water he wrote wordlessly in the liquid script of his people. The veins of colour began to rise and fall in the black depths, to wind about each other, divide and run together again; he saw that the river itself was many passionate bodies that embraced and twined their supple limbs together, gliding and turning under him as he lay like a lover on the surging water. He was filled with joy at knowing that the intensity of his longing had been sufficient to draw him out into this dance of the world’s delight in itself; he began to look about him for his place in the tranced onrush, knowing that to lie among these lovely water-beings would be death for him, and that for his kind the pilgrim islands had prepared every fulfilment: a banquet of bodily purity, a language of caresses, a journey of praise across the holy earth, a distant blissful foundering and resolution into a boundless sea. Soon he saw the gleaming curls of water around a tangle of driftwood grounded on a shallow. The current brought him gently up to it – he was not travelling as fast as he had imagined – and he reached out and held on to a projecting limb. The two walls of impenetrable darkness rising from the banks of the river seemed to be equally distant from him; if an island came past him here he would see it outlined against the star-filled band of sky while it was still upstream and he would have time to paddle the boat with his hands out into its path.