by K. J. Bishop
A grey fox trotted past. Mona was quiescent, and even Siegfried seemed, for the moment at least, to have run out of words both to say and to write. To her surprise, Vali felt the first touch of an unfurling peace.
St Anna Vermicula’s tomb was a colonnaded mausoleum housing a black marble effigy of the warrior martyr, standing on the farthest hillside in the oldest section of the necropolis. The Edge was only a few hundred metres away across the untended land that continued on where the graves ended at the bottom of the hill. It was visible as a sudden curtailing of the earth, with starry space above. On the hillside, the silence was replaced by the wind droning along the sky-coast.
Vali sat on the weathered steps of the tomb, her arm around Mona. Gwynn had lit a cigarette and wandered off. Siegfried, too, had put himself somewhere out of view. It was possible to imagine that she and Mona were alone in the landscape of marble and weeds.
She fell gradually into a sense of timelessness, as if Time were a woman and she a babe on Time’s back, and Time had put her down, until she felt as still and untroubled as the tombs themselves and sensed a mysterious familiarity with the stars.
As she grew more deeply immersed in this state she came to an understanding that the universe was alive. It breathed with the breath of multitudes, and it did not know loneliness. If it loved, there was nothing of need or desire in its love. The priests of this country would say that the night’s ravine was alive with God, but she couldn’t imagine their God inhabiting that enormous tranquillity. The state of grace flowed without regard for custom or for its own alienness to everything it touched.
Mona stirred, bringing Vali back from her reverie. She was whispering something. Still feeling calm and strangely adrift – had the stars moved? – Vali bent her head down to listen.
‘If you like,’ she said, and turned around and called out to Gwynn. He looked up from where he was sitting cross-legged on top of a sarcophagus higher on the hill.
‘Mona wants to go down to the Edge,’ Vali shouted to him. ‘I’m taking her. She wants you to come too.’
He crushed his cigarette out on the pitted stone and tossed the butt away to join the others on the ground. Swinging down, he looked across the ragged land towards the cliff. ‘Fine with me,’ he called back. ‘The dead are rotten company.’
The night wind out on the barren margin was a biting cold current that seemed to blow straight down off the stars. But the strip of no-man’s land was, in its way, a place as beautiful as it was exposed. Wildflowers grew among the untidy grasses, and these had the charm of things never cared for or interfered with by anyone, and the lonely stunted and wind-tortured trees possessed the shapeliness of driftwood. Birds came and went here too: wild geese, finches, nightjars, shrikes who had found ideal nests in the thorn bushes onto which they affixed the rodents and smaller birds that were their prey.
Vali and Gwynn made their way down the hill and across the delicate and brute ground, their hair and coats whipping in the wind, Vali carrying Mona bundled in her wrappings of velvet and mink. Siegfried followed several paces behind, scribbling in his notebook again. More than once he tripped over rocks and pieces of fallen masonry he had failed to see, but he hardly noticed his barked shins and stubbed toes. His hands were trembling with excitement. He wasn’t going to give this article to Verbal Nerve. Better publications would want it. He basked for a moment in the vision of a career reporting on the lives of the rich and dangerous, as one who had been admitted into their world. Realising he was running out of paper, he wrote as minutely as he could.
When they were still only halfway to the cliff, Mona insisted that she could walk.
Crossing wasteland, Siegfried jotted. Miss Skye a fragile pilgrim or refugee, Miss Jardine gallant. At Edge – long way down.
It was indeed a long way. For over a kilometre the giant escarpment dropped, down to a dead ocean of sand that was indigo in the moonlight. The silver maculae of salt lakes dappled the ground like oil lying on water. Here and there the sand surrounded islets of grotesquely weathered rock. The desert land was so distant that distance itself lost meaning – it might have been a hundred metres or a hundred leagues down. On the horizon the curve of the planet was clearly visible, an edge beyond the one on which they stood.
Siegfried stood next to Gwynn, close enough that he could smell the man’s spicy aftershave. He drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He was beginning to feel part of the team now, a companion to heroes. He narrowed his eyes and sucked in his cheeks a little, trying to copy Gwynn’s pensive scowl.
‘They say there are more bones under those sands than in all of the necropolis.’
It was Mona who had spoken, astounding Vali, who hadn’t seen her show such lucidity for days. She started to say something else, but abruptly broke off coughing. A thimbleful of blood escaped her lips and fell, a drop of human rain, to the dry world below. More drops followed.
Vali was grateful when Gwynn drew Siegfried away. Mona had been dying for so long that it seemed natural for her to go on dying – and living – forever. Vali lowered her to the ground. ‘It’s all a mess, Mona,’ she murmured. ‘It’s all a damned stupid mess. If we ever had control, we’ve lost it.’ But still she felt calm, and she wondered if she was developing apathy as an instinctive stratagem for survival, withdrawing from all care like a threatened snail retreating into its shell. Or perhaps Gwynn had been right about Sheol’s power to paralyse.
Gwynn led Siegfried further along the cliff to a spot where a flat granite boulder emerged out of the weeds, far enough away to give the two women privacy but still within earshot. Gwynn sat down on the rock, flicking back his coat-tails, and gestured for Siegfried to sit as well. Siegfried shakily complied. He was weak-kneed with excitement. Following celebrities was one thing; having a famous person actually invite his company was something else entirely. He had never had the experience before, and he found it intoxicating. He was expecting Gwynn to speak, but the man’s attention was fixed on a nearby thorn bush, a shrike’s abandoned scaffold where numerous tiny skeletons still hung. A spider as white as the bones themselves was busy among them, spinning, moving with opulent flourishes of its limbs.
‘Look at that,’ Gwynn said softly. ‘How precisely that spider moves, how delicate she is. A natural and exquisite mathematician. Do you ever take time to contemplate the wonders of nature, Siegfried?’
Siegfried shook his head. ‘Not really, sir.’ He was surprised by the question.
‘You should. Nature can be very inspiring. I’ve always found it so.’
Siegfried put pen to the notebook’s last page. ‘I guess I’m too much of a city boy, sir. I mean, I’d miss trees and things if they weren’t there. But this place is pretty bleak. There’s not much out here.’
‘A man about town. You must know a lot of people.’
‘Yes, sir. A journalist needs contacts.’
‘A network of informants? Very commendable. By the way, there’s no need to call me “sir”. I’m not a gentleman, despite what you may have read in the serials.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Siegfried said, shifting his seat. ‘I think being respectful helps calm my nerves.’
‘Really?’ said Gwynn. ‘I prefer to use drugs, myself.’ He reached into the breast of his coat, producing a chased gold case which he flipped open, displaying long cigarettes with crimson wrappers. ‘Smoke?’
Siegfried tried to appear nonchalant as he took one. Usually it fell to him to buy smokes and drinks for his sources, and like their container the cigarettes looked fine and expensive. The fancy case had a lighter in its side, with which Gwynn lit for them both.
Siegfried inhaled with abandon. The tobacco was smooth and richly aromatic and was joined by the pampering effects of some discreet additive. He jotted a note that Gwynn was indeed a gentleman, whatever his own claim.
Siegfried smoked and put to paper various thoughts that came to him, until Gwynn asked, ‘So what is it that you’re nervous of?’
Siegfried
paused in his writing. ‘In general? Or right now?’
‘Let’s start with now.’
‘I’m not really afraid,’ he said, ‘just excited, I guess. You know, butterflies inside? Well, maybe you don’t know the feeling. Anyway, you’re famous, and I’m not anybody yet. Like you said, I know a lot of people, but most of them aren’t very important. I suppose I’m starstruck.’
‘Starstruck?’ Gwynn smiled. ‘Answer me another question, Siegfried. What do you think it is about people like us – Miss Skye, our profession at large, even my unworthy self – that so fascinates the good citizens of this town?’
Siegfried had been setting down his views on exactly that matter, here and there among his other notes, since he had first followed the three into the Amber Tree’s basement room. He answered eagerly. ‘There are lots of reasons. You’re artists. You’re heroes. You’re not chained by ordinary fears. You have freedom and power most people only dream of. Some think you’re angels, sent to wipe away the faulty so the upright can survive.’
‘Ah. A generation whose teeth are like swords and whose fangs are like knives, to devour the wretched from off the earth, and the weak from among the people.’
Siegfried felt stirred. ‘I didn’t know you had the poet’s gift too.’
‘I don’t. That was something I heard a holy man say once, out in the canyons. You like it, eh?’
‘It’s great. I’ve always liked predators more than prey.’
‘Is that a fact?’ Gwynn blew a smoke ring for the wind to ruin.
‘Yeah, all you gunslingers and swordswingers and knife-fighters and all – well, you’ve got the power of life and death, right? I guess I’d like to be able to put holes through people, too, sometimes. I’ve always admired you folks.’
‘Well, thank you, that’s very nice. But tell me, do you agree with those who believe that we’re instruments of some kind of divine judgement?’
There was a change in the man’s voice, an undercurrent which Siegfried heard but could not identify. He hesitated, pen arrested over paper. ‘I’m not really sure.’
Gwynn put his cigarette down. He plucked the head off one of the wild white poppies growing around the stone and carefully poked the flower into his top buttonhole. He gave Siegfried a foxy look.
‘Choose a number between one and five.’
‘A number?’ Siegfried was nonplussed. The man hardly seemed the type to play parlour games. He shrugged. ‘All right. Four. But I don’t–’
Gwynn drew one of his twin revolvers. He emptied two rounds out of the chamber, leaving four in. After appearing to give it a moment’s second thought, he removed a third and a fourth round. He spun the chamber and snapped it shut.
‘Stand over there,’ he said, gesturing with the gun at the open ground past the thorn bush.
Siegfried swallowed hard. Was this some kind of ceremony, an initiation ritual? Perhaps he had to survive it in order to be admitted to certain secrets. He had heard of such things happening.
‘Over there. Now.’ The muzzle pointed.
Siegfried’s heart vibrated as if someone had struck a gong inside his chest. Slowly he put the notebook away in his pocket. There was nowhere he could run to, except over the cliff. He had no doubt that Gwynn’s other gun was fully loaded. He had no idea of what else to do, so he got up and stood in the indicated place.
The revolver waved again. ‘Further back.’
Siegfried walked haltingly backwards, toward the sheer escarpment. He felt sick and weak-gutted, and wished he had relieved himself back at the café, which now seemed to belong to another world.
‘Further… Further… Stop!’
Siegfried didn’t dare look around, but he knew the end of the ground must be right behind him. Have I been a fool? he wondered. Gwynn was taking aim. The gunman’s hair lifted suddenly in the wind, floating up to form a black halo radiating around his starkly moonlit face.
The shot was very loud.
Blood and matter erupted from the back of Siegfried’s head, and his body fell backwards into the empty sky.
Gwynn stalked to the cliff-side and looked down. He caught a vertiginous glimpse of the dead kid, a barely visible speck that soon diminished out of sight. He reloaded his gun and holstered it with a philosophical shrug. Perhaps we really are instruments of divine judgement – or divine humour, he thought, smiling to himself. He considered the idea for a moment, but decided he didn’t care for it. He had masters enough on earth.
Mona did not die, and seemed embarrassed. Soon afterwards she resumed taking her medicines, claiming publicly to have grown bored with Death as a lover, but admitting privately to Vali that she felt a fresh enthusiasm for life.
‘What made you change your mind?’ Vali asked one morning. The early sun was shining gloriously through a vase of glass flowers on the windowsill, throwing a kaleidoscope of colours onto their bed.
Mona stretched her back and legs, luxuriating in the mild sun and the feel of the crisp linen sheets on her skin. Her malady was slowly but steadily going into remission. Her adventure in illness had been worth it, almost, for the pleasures of convalescence that were now hers – those delicate, slightly abject delights of the reawakened senses. Milky tea and chicken soup, innocent aromas of bread and soap, the daily sounds of the street below, all joined the stream of enjoyment she took in her recovery.
She hesitated over Vali’s question. She still felt sensitive about the farcical night at the necropolis. She rather thought she had looked into the eternity beyond the Teleute Shelf and had, at last, feared it. Nor could one discount the stupid kid – dying as if just to remind her that death had little to recommend it.
She smoothed the bedspread over her legs. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I lost my nerve.’ Wanting to give Vali a better answer, she said, ‘And then, sometimes the witless leaf drifts far away, until it sees love coming to pick it up.’
Vali smiled, unfooled but not uncontent, and rang for their boy to bring breakfast.
On a clear day early in winter they took a picnic lunch to the necropolis. They sat outside the mausoleum of St Anna Vermicula. Mona had been taking her various physicks like a model patient. She was less pale, and had begun training with her sword again.
‘I’m feeling much better,’ she said, chewing delicately on a sandwich. ‘Wanting to die was some strange summer madness that lingered on out of season, I think.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ Vali agreed.
She couldn’t recapture the sense of timelessness she had felt a month ago. The world was marching on. Bigger factories with more and taller chimneys were growing on the Volta’s east bank, giving the whole area the appearance of a huge fortress perpetually on fire. Chic new bars attracted the in-crowd on Arcade Bridge. The days were frosty now, and although snow rarely fell on Sheol, Vali felt this year might prove an exception.
Munching on a biscuit, she watched the tiny figures of a tour group standing near the Edge, peering down at the sands which covered Sheol’s other graveyard. Closer, in the middle of the no-man’s land, a group of children were playing ‘Masked Avengers’. Their high voices carried on the wind:
The men in the masks,
The ladies in the masks,
See how they kill, see how they kill–
Six-shooters and switchblades,
Swords, daggers and poison,
We all fall down,
We all fall down.
THE LOVE OF BEAUTY
Some souls lose all things but the love of beauty;
And by that love they are redeemable
– P.J. Bailey, Festus
Near the middle of the night, Seaming dithered in front of the brick arch – formerly a minor gate in the old city wall and now a decoration in a lane. If there existed a main entrance to the Ravels, it was that arch. It stood only half a furlong from the glitz of Cake Street, but the short distance marked a change of register from the demimonde to the underworld proper. Behind the gaudy theatres and beer halls the streets became
dark, the buildings closely pressed, the walls bare of signs, posters, paint – of everything except light-absorbing soot.
Seaming smoked a cigarette, a last procrastination, while a polka spinning down from a loft somewhere invited him to head back, spend the rest of the night with friends, and let that be that.
Act as if you belong, she had told him, and you’ll be safe enough.
He took three slow breaths, then stepped through the arch.
Immediately he was struck by cold, a sensation he remembered from his single prior excursion into the Ravels. He had gone in with a few others after an evening of drinking, and they had ventured only a few blocks into the worming scrawl of alleys before their liquid courage ran out.
Tonight he had to go in much further, and all alone. His poet friend Stroud had urged him to refuse the commission, but Seaming had argued that an artist should welcome all experiences, even dangerous ones. Stroud had solemnly clasped his hand and promised him a flattering elegy.
Seaming had no intention of putting Stroud to the trouble of composing any such work. Indulging a secret taste for cloak-and-dagger aesthetics, he had prepared a disguise, scouring the riverside flea markets until he found a heavy black coat and a stovepipe hat which, he hoped, combined to give his unimposing person a grim and sinister air. To add some further menace to his costume he had borrowed an imitation pistol from an acquaintance who ran a small theatre, and a sturdy knife from Stroud, who had a fetish for sharp objects and owned a collection of various blades. He felt more secure knowing that he had one real weapon, even if he had no idea how to use it. With his small drawing case clutched under his arm, the other hand shoved in the trouser pocket where he had stowed the knife, he plunged ahead.