That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

by K. J. Bishop

  I turn around, ready to deal with the runt.

  But he isn’t here.

  My kid isn’t here.

  The door’s swinging on its hinge.

  He wouldn’t look very badass on a trophy wall, but maybe he’d look funny. And I’m thinking of all the things the volk might do, just for kicks, as I run out of the house, blundering through the trees, trying stupidly to look for him when I can’t see more than ten feet in front of me in the rain.

  I yell for him. Fuck it if the volk hear me. No answer. The smell of the cat’s blood is so strong that I almost can’t smell anything else. But my nose does it, in the end. My runt has pissed, and I can smell that.

  I’m going for it now. I remember to yell purity slogans so the volk will think I’m other volk.

  And I hear them – their voices, volk jabber, and his, snuffling and yipping. They’re over a rise ahead.

  His mouse dad is going to save him. That’s how this is going to be. His mouse dad is going to save him, and he’s going to be so grateful that there won’t be any more talk about his mama, or any more prayers. He’ll see that the land of samurai is right here, in my heart, waiting for him to come and join me.

  I have to be quiet now, which means being slow, and I’m grinding my teeth as I creep uphill, wet branches scraping me, a pain I hadn’t even noticed till now in the ball of my left foot – it feels like a glass splinter. I must have driven it in deep while I was running.

  So I count the slow stabs of pain as I climb, and I don’t stumble. I reach the top of the hill and I see them in a ditch down below. Two torches, jerky movement, ugly sounds. I’m halfway down before I can see. The torches are on AKs hanging off the shoulders of the two volk. One’s holding my kid and it looks like the other’s pushing something into his face. The runt’s making choking sounds that turn my guts to water.

  My brain feels like it’s stuck in a swamp of adrenaline. The need to act versus the need to act intelligently. Kill them, miss him – it’d take some fucking luck even if I wasn’t purblind. First I decide to put the AK on full auto and try to sweep through their heads. Then I undecide. What are my chances of hitting them that way? I’ve never even used full auto – waste of bullets, too much noise. For all I know the mechanism will jam.

  I don’t have time to think, so I have to use the first plan that comes into my head. First I piss down my own leg so he’ll know I’m here. Then I turn my gun torch on and hold it in front of me so that I’m behind the light and shout a couple of slogans as cheery as I can.

  They turn. They jabber.

  And I’ve fired, and I’ve missed – missed them both.

  Now there’s bullet hail all around me, chips flying off the trees, and I can’t see shit but muzzle flash.

  The trees are skinny, no solid trunks to get behind. I drop to the ground and turn the fucking torch off. If my kid has any sense he’ll run. If he can.

  Then one of them howls and his torch beam swings down suddenly. He’s doubled over, clutching his crotch.

  My runt. His gopher teeth.

  But now the other one’s going to shoot him dead, just put him down for his bravery. I hear myself holler and wail as I fire.

  It isn’t just me.

  The wings of the dream are like a ship’s sails booming in a storm. Immense. Romantic.

  I can’t see it clearly, and for that I’m grateful. The volk hear it too, and their instincts tell them to shoot it, that’s what they have to do, they can’t think of doing anything else. I dimly see them grabbed by their heads and lifted up, up and away.

  There’s more gunfire and muzzle flash in the air. Sonofabitch. The monster lets out a mighty multi-shriek, a slaughter floor mixed up with a playground at lunch time, and I’m worried the wounded thing’ll fall right on top of my kid, but the firing stops and the only sounds after that are the wings flapping away and a hairless gopher making a noise like a cat bringing up a hairball.

  I don’t know if it deliberately took the volk that hunt its kind, or if it was only thanks to luck that it didn’t take my runt too. Maybe it just went for the two biggest pieces of meat.

  My kid is shaking and coughing, puking up dirt. That’s what the volk was mashing into his mouth. So he still might die. Anything but pig…

  I pick him up and carry him. Not to the hut. Not with the fucking dead cat there. I know these woods pretty well now. I run until I’m over two more hills, checking him every so often to make sure he’s still alive.

  The ditch is full of bracken ferns. He’s stopped upchucking. I wipe his face. He’s beaten black and blue, much worse than I ever beat him. He’s in no state even to cry, so I just leave him be while I dig the glass out of my foot. That’s a whole lot of fun.

  I’ve got time now to be proud as hell of him for biting the volk. I’ll tell him so later, when he’s more together. We stink for every critter in these woods to smell, so I mustn’t sleep – as if I could.

  I lie on the AK to protect it from the rain.

  VI.

  My pack’s right where I left it. We found our way back easily, by the smell of dead cat. It’s foggy and freezing. I’m not complaining about the cold – it numbs my foot.

  My pack’s there, but not the hut. The tins and the turds and the feathers are lying on the ground in mud puddles. The TV and the shoe are gone along with the rest of the stuff from the hut. Even the woodlot isn’t a woodlot anymore. The trees are there, but they’re not coppiced, though a couple have broken branches, so at least in some way they’re the same ones as were there before.

  I explain to him about leftovers, how some things took a while to punch out, and how the hut must just have been taking its time. He doesn’t make a fuss about it. He doesn’t even make a fuss about the cat.

  He looks at me like he knows how I feel – the whole works of being relieved we made it yesterday, exhausted despite popping a couple of my faithful bennies this morning, sorry we’ve lost our home, worried about the future. What I’m worried about most of all is that now we don’t have the hut anymore, now we’re back to where we were before, he’ll change back, lose the brains and guts that last night’s episode proved he’s grown, and the sensitivity I’m seeing in him now. And that I’ll lose what I got back too. I don’t think he understands that, though. He’s only a kid. And I’m not going to mention it. He’s got enough monsters in his life without me adding namby-pamby abstract ones.

  The volk have cleared out. I’m thinking they must have got what they wanted – and they have. The dream’s lying beside the road in a field of weeds a couple of miles past the kennel town, its tail snaking across the asphalt. It’s bigger than the angel. It has a lot of broad shorn-off stumps where big heads used to be, but the volk have left the little heads and the faces without heads.

  It isn’t dead yet. Its faces all look pained, in a badass, I’m-not-going-to-show-this kind of way. Twenty-odd pairs of eyes are looking at us. It would be humane to kill it.

  It saved us, says my kid.

  Yeah, so it did.

  I don’t even know how to kill it. Actually, I’m fucking scared of it and I want to get out of here.

  Studying the faces, I think I can see glimmers of real intelligence in some of them. But maybe I’m wrong, since when I lift the AK and mimic firing, cocking my head to try and show that I’m asking a question, they might as well be the faces you see in clouds for all that they show they understand.

  I tell the runt it’ll be a big waste of bullets, and even if I shoot every forehead, I don’t know if that’ll do the job. And it’ll be noisy.

  He says, So what?

  Vomit with a fart chaser. Bactyl. Coming from the hills across the field. Which means everything else around here will clear out or lie low. So I can risk making some noise.

  We count the bullets off together. Twenty-two. And now at least it looks pretty dead. It, they, I don’t know.

  With our whiskers shining in the morning’s frozen sun, it’s time to go further on down the road to
wait for a pickup.

  SAVING THE GLEEFUL HORSE

  For Aaron Hunter

  Children are cruel. No one who has lived in the world need ask for proof of that. So it is nothing for them to beat a living creature – a rare, marvellous creature at that – to death. They do so in order to seize the treasure inside it, but one sees the pleasure they take in this assassination of life, even before the plunder starts. Their laughter bounces from yard-wall to yard-wall and their eyes shine darkly as they beat the animal, which has done nothing to them, with wooden sticks and swords, until holes open in its body and the prizes – caramels, toys, game money printed with pictures of wrestlers and cartoon characters – rain down into their hands.

  I am Molimus. I live under the bridge where the day-boats go from wet and wooden Bracklow to the foot of the sweeping stone stair going up the hill to Firmitas and the military school.

  I am called Molimus the Great by some here in Bracklow, in recognition of my height and strength. My shirt is made of four men’s shirts sewn together, and an eight-pound cheese wheel fits in the palm of my hand. By profession I trade in flotsam, which I catch under the bridge in these great hands of mine and sell at the Pauper’s Forum up by Shindy Estate.

  Because of this occupation, which keeps me under the bridge watching the water from morning until late at night, I oftentimes see the dead animals. If the husks are not burnt, people toss them into the river. I see them on holidays, especially, when the slaughtered numbers are high, but they are killed all year round.

  To look at them! Never did dreams supply such a zoo of little spotted and striped horses and chequered gazelles, sky-blue lions, dawn-pink bears, gallant golden beetles, chivalrous silver anteaters! I have even seen elephants amongst them, and star-shaped beasts that must have come from the carved waves of the sea before they were captured and hung up to be put to death.

  To see their poor empty bodies makes me cry into the water – sometimes so much that I think the tears of Molimus could turn the river salty.

  I can’t even salvage them for trading. The bodies last for very little time after they have yielded up the ghost. The husks are as diaphanous as cellophane, and any part submerged below the water dissolves like bread in soup.

  I had never thought to see a live one that wasn’t already hanging in a yard, soon to die. But that is what happened. It was an October night, a while after sundown, when the day-boats were back at their moorings and the water was full of the dark medicinal colour of an overcast sky. I saw the head of a little horse, banded in red, blue, white and gold like the flag of some merry knight, tossing on the river waves – another dead victim of a party, I assumed, until I came to see the striped legs that were churning the water.

  Despite his predicament there was nothing frightful about his looks, as I saw when his head turned towards me. Far from showing panic, he gave me a game sort of grin and rolled his eye as if to say, ‘It’s the world! What can you do?’

  It was a simple thing to reach out and carry him into my little hut of boards and bark, where I wrapped him in a blanket and set him in front of the oil stove to get dry and warm.

  I had saved a life and that life therefore became my responsibility. I did all I could to nurse the little striped horse, who I named the Gleeful Horse, but I could see my efforts coming to nothing. He was as full of holes as a sieve and his legs were twisted. I bound his wounds with clean rags and tried to feed him, but he had no appetite, despite his steady good cheer.

  It became clear to me that I would have to take the bus out to Barrage Cross to get help from near there. I went in the early morning and carried the Gleeful Horse in a string bag. He seemed to enjoy the sight of the green market gardens of Shindy Back through the windows of the bus, and as we drove through the chalk hills that roll away behind the gardens his fiddle-shaped nostrils and his round hindquarters twitched, as if in his own mind he was galloping about out there on the world’s green grass.

  From the Barrage Cross shops I walked out of the village, into the trees, and down the little grey weedy paths through the birch and buckthorn, going by the way that leads to the Garth of the Aorist: where trunk and branch turn, by and rumly by, into pillar and vault, and the path passes into the shade of stone arcades forming a four-sided cloister around a garth choked high with enormous brambles.

  As you must, I walked around the cloister with the sun a certain number of times, then against the sun another number, then with the sun again, so that the brambles withdrew underground, all the thorny bundles coming apart and slithering below in one rush as if a giant in the earth had them on a rope (the effect on the eye is striking). After this, where all was a wild saw-toothed muddle just a moment or two ago, in another moment the lawn of trefoil and clover grew, which grows no matter the season – as dainty a green spread as you could wish for a picnic or a wedding. Upon the grass, as settled as a hen in the middle of the sweet-smelling lawn, there appeared the dwelling that appears: a round, rose-bosomed hut of dry-stone, having a chimney at the rear and one doorless doorway at the front, facing the coming visitor across the green court.

  Entering this shelter, half-house, half-dovecote, as it were, with the Gleeful Horse in the string bag under my arm, I tugged my cap to the White Ma’at, the last Ma’at.

  Whoever first painted the omen-card where she is shown as a figure seated with legs crosswise in front of a painted hearth must have seen her, or been advised by someone who had; at any rate, I have never found her arranged other than in this wise when I come to her house.

  The White Ma’at: a woman, or a woman-shaped thing, built in a long and heavy way, with a tall forehead like a white wall and a knotty blue vein labouring up it. What lies on the other side is a great store of irregular, wonderful knowledge; a cellar provisioned with all the vintages of magic. What she doesn’t see through her milky cataracts would fit in a baby’s sock.

  She already knows about the Gleeful Horse.

  ‘That is a treasure animal,’ she says, even before I’ve finished pulling him out of the bag. He has no fear of her; he gives even the White Ma’at his qualmless grin. Nor does he mind that she doesn’t grin back. When she taps on his bandaged belly with a sharp knuckle he only rolls his eye and winks at me. He makes no fuss even when the Ma’at prises his mouth open and squints inside. Her parsnip-white fingers find something under his tongue. A toy – a plastic ring with a false emerald. She shows it to me and puts it back.

  ‘When all their treasure is gone, they die,’ she says simply.

  My poor horse, having to hang onto that uncomfortable lump. I suppose that if he swallowed it, it might fall out one of the holes in his side when the bandages I put on come loose, as they not infrequently do.

  I take him from the White Ma’at and sit with him in my lap, expecting her to offer me a healing charm or a recipe for physick. But instead, she tells me:

  ‘You mustn’t blame the children. They don’t see that this is a living thing, Molimus.’

  ‘They do see,’ I say in reply, uncomfortably, for it isn’t really safe to argue with the White Ma’at. ‘And they enjoy turning it into a dead thing.’

  ‘Molimus,’ she starts, and I know she is going to defend them, and I can’t fathom why – ‘Molimus, you have a foot in both worlds. And in one world this animal has life, and you see it, and I see it, but in the other world it has no life, it is a thing. You see more than most persons, true, but that’s damning with faint praise. Your eyes have a picture of cruelty on the inside. You see that picture clearly, and because of it, see other things unclearly.’

  I think of what I might say and choose silence. When I think of how that picture came to be there on the inside of my eyes, I am certain beyond any possibility of error that children know what is alive, and moreover that they are disposed to do harm with this knowledge. I’m surprised that the Ma’at doesn’t know.

  But in any case, I don’t see what this has to do with my horse and his needs.

  Then, rare for her, sh
e asks a question: ‘Why do you want to save that thing?’

  I feel like answering that I didn’t come all this way to talk to a town matron with ordinary vulgar ideas. I wish I could hide the thought, but she says, ‘What do I care about your dull thoughts, Molimus?’ Her hands fall at her sides after she speaks. The unstrung gesture is not one that should belong to her. She isn’t like herself at all today, so that I dare to ask:

  ‘Is anything wrong, Ma’at?’

  There’s nothing to like about the distracted way she pinches at the folds of her clothing, as if the white wool were full of seeds and burrs, nor the way her jaw goes around like a cow’s chewing cud. Thankfully, both motions cease and she retires her hands to her sides again – they look better hanging than twitching.

  There’s no reason why the Ma’at shouldn’t be tired, of course. She was old a long time ago, and her life has certainly had its ups and downs. But it’s too much to believe that she is actually infirm in either body or mind. Or that she is changing. The world changes. The White Ma’at doesn’t.

  ‘The White Ma’at doesn’t,’ she echoes me aloud. I can’t tell whether she is agreeing or mocking me.

  I try to think of nothing, while her eyes move back and forth under the cataracts, probably following the movements of figures she sees in her head.

  It comes to me that she would surely have dismissed me by now if she didn’t have any magic for the Gleeful Horse. So perhaps she wants to bargain, after all, and has a peculiar way of saying so today.

  The White Ma’at is a great one for bargaining. When she was young, as they tell it in Bracklow and Shindy, she lost a battle that she shouldn’t have lost. Rather than blame herself she blamed her armies and cursed those of her loyal men who were left alive. She cast a spell that pushed them into the chalk hills like raisins in a pudding, so that they all died in the white dark.

  After that she slept, and was captured whilst asleep. She was to have been hung and burnt, but she escaped – by means of a bargain with Prince November himself. That’s why she never leaves her house in the midst of the cloister. Prince November keeps her there. He knows she’d escape from him forever if he let her wander even as far as to the paths in the birch wood, never mind to the bus stop at Barrage Cross. Gossip says he drinks knowledge from the vein on her forehead at night and uses it for his business in the world.