Celebrant

  Tussling is visible from where girls are.

  Buurrrrrrrnnnn... (they murmur)

  Rabbit girls come out to see what’s going on, led by Kunty, who’s gotten wind of Gina’s abduction.

  Gina is trying to pelt the whrounim with rocks without hitting Burn. A rock flies at the whrounim’s head and with only a momentary glance it bats the rock at Gina with a backhand that’s almost casual. The rock has a sharp end and as it grazes Gina’s arm, it slashes her skin. Gina yelps and clutches her arm, then tips back and looks into her crimson hand in distress. Her cry grabs Burn’s attention, she sees the blood on Gina’s arm and turns to ice. The motionless arm, the hand, the shapeless red stain on her butter-colored skin, the pain and dismay on the face, and as she looks Burn gets colder and colder. Air wafts past her cheek and she turns to the whrounim, who looms over her with an upraised hand to strike her. Her whole body becomes as hard as a statue, and, snatching at its left arm with her free hand she kicks it in the face. The whrounim staggers back whirling its arms to keep from falling.

  The whrounim’s dhole bursts in among the rocks and corners Gina, barking explosively. She cowers, retreating against a huge boulder in alarm.

  Kunty follows eyes and fingers and in two or three bites takes in what’s happening. She launches herself toward the rocks, her rag dress flapping around her haunches like a banner in a stiff gale.

  If anyone beats a whrounim it has to be me! (is the tenor of her thoughts)

  The Whrounim, half crouched, is moving in trying to get hold of Burn, like a man trying to catch a chicken. Gina is crying and curling up against the rock when a sudden shadow blots out light and sound. A big dark shape seems to be moving through the air, and something else, brownish and throbbing, with it. Now something dropping, she can feel the weird suspense of it as the weight drops in the air. A depraved chuckling swings just over her head.

  When it lunges in at her, Burn jerks back bringing her hands together like pigeon wings over the whrounim’s ears. Recoiling with a bizarre exclamation the whrounim lands a glancing blow toward her sternum, knocking the baton from Burn’s hand and slamming her back against a flat rock so that her teeth clap shut and there’s a flash in her closed eyes.

  The dhole lands on its belly, draped over a rock, not ten feet from the whrounim. The bandana is gone, the tongue lolls out, the animal is dead, its eyes staring, its head dangling from a slack and twisted neck. The whrounim stops. Burn blearily glimpses a silhouette with long donkey ears flick past the moon in silence. For an instant, an unseen mass seems to trouble the air, passing overhead.

  Erupting from the rocks Kunty flings herself at the whrounim and directly onto its left arm with both her hands and both her feet, clawing and snarling. It thrusts its arm out turning its head to Burn and Kunty, swinging her head around, bites into the whrounim’s left eye with a plunge, and worries at the socket, not letting go. The whrounim exclaims several distinct syllables and, freeing its left hand, grips Kunty by the bottom of her spine and snaps it like a whip, tearing her away and knocking her head against the ground. She falls convulsing.

  People! (Gina yells, pointing)

  The reeling whrounim, turns its ravaged face to the figures, arms and legs pumping, fanning out from the beneath the city’s ramparts. Many are carrying what look like boards or clubs, impromptu weapons.

  Burn is almost sadly picking up her baton, trying to nerve herself to go for him again.

  The whrounim, its face streaming with a brilliant red blood whose fragrance Burn can smell from many feet away, gazes a moment at the dead dhole, then takes off. With a long leap it sails out into the dark, away from the city. Burn watches it go, every dreamlike, weightless bound is longer than the last, the white shirt tails and sleeves trembling like dimming mirages.

  Gina comes tripping down to Burn, holding her arm. Kunty is writhing and screaming in pain. Burn rushes over to her.

  Let’s bring her (Burn says, blinking cold sweat)

  Gina looks at her without understanding.

  I want her! (Burn says)

  As Burn draws near and stoops, Kunty lashes out with her claws, hissing and frothing, her eyes blazing white.

  I’ll kill! (she sobs) I’ll kill!

  Burn withdraws without turning her back on Kunty, who lies where she is, staring, her body taut and trembling. With a look toward the mob, Burn and Gina turn and run away, disappearing into the gloom.

  Where she lies, Kunty can hear, with her ear against the ground, the tattoo of the feet. Wracked with pain, barely able to use her legs without a feeling like knives slicing into her back, she burrows herself dripping tears into a dark hollow between two big rocks and hides there, gnawing the earth to stifle her groans as the people wash over and past that spot, following the whrounim.

  Burn, drawing Gina by the hand, heads back toward where pigeon girls wait. A few stragglers are still charging after the whrounim, shouting erratically to each other in short barks. Burn trots past pigeon girls waving them to follow. From not far away, Ester pops up onto her feet.

  Where’s Kunty? (she yells through cupped hands)

  She looks nothing like she normally does. All the animosity is pushed down by dread in the whites of the eyes, the loose mouth and knit brows.

  Burn points hastily at the rocks with her free hand. Pigeon girls flit into the trees and disappear. Rabbit girls whine and turn in circles, rubbing their faces with their long fingers.

  Some private police are bickering fiercely with a number of the more aggressive people in the crowd. Kunty, groaning, smiling crazily with intense pain, mashes herself deeper into her hole and listens.

  Pigeon girls swarm together in a lot framed by old beehive-shaped granaries. The moment they feel they are safe, the moment Burn comes in among them, still drawing Gina by the hand, Burn is swept from her feet into the air with a kind of rushing, voiceless cheer. They brandish her high over their heads like a flag, with desperate joy.

  What? (Burn asks, completely off guard, looking this way and that) What?

  The police and the crowd are arguing about who let what get away and you’re supposed to protect us from these pilgrims and how did he get into the city in the first place and what is going to be done are pilgrims going to make off with our children now?

  Things are heating up. A low, rattling chuckle wheezes not far from where she lies and Kunty jerks her head back in fright. Perched on a stone and half-melted into the blackness of the air is a huge long-eared bird, eyes like two fixed, unblinking moons. It hops down to the ground and walks over to her slowly.

  Until now, pigeon girls have never had anything of their own to celebrate. Pride is so new a feeling to them they’re not prepared for it and go to pieces, in tears and feverish shouts. When they set Burn down, Gina fastens herself on Burn’s neck nearly sobbing with emotion.

  Oh—(Burn says) Oh—

  The private police are incensed. They’re pulling out their clubs.

  Kunty forgets herself and starts forward—checked instantly by a searing blade of pain in the back. The bird chuckles again. It’s huge. It has a leering muzzle instead of a beak, and tiny, pointed teeth. It walks on its big, inky hands—where a bird would have bird legs and talons, it has human forearms.

  Kunty growls at it in sheer fright. It stops a few feet away and tilts its head to see her face right side up.

  There’s a sound of feet padding stealthily toward her.

  Kunty!

  Wait a minute, (Yolk Eye says to the crowd)

  He and Knosp Knoak had come unnoticed from the direction of the shaded pool with little white fish on a line.

  Yolk Eye turns to look from one side to the other, in confusion.

  Wait a minute (he says again, walking between the lines)

  He keeps looking back in Knosp Knoak’s direction, his eyes swivelling.

  You’re crazy (he says at last, turning to go to the city) You’re all crazy (and mumbling)

  I’m here! (Kunty whispers harshly, ea
ch phrase comes in a rush between silent gasps of pain) Stay out of sight!... I can’t move!... Wait till they go!

  The thing is backing away from her. It vanishes in a silent flurry of motion that seems to throw rags of shadow in all directions like lightless confetti.

  Suddenly Yolk Eye’s voice rises again, It’s no stoppers way to be crazy! (and mumbling)

  Pigeon girls have found a small building with a marble floor, most likely an old public bath, close enough to musicians to be able clearly to hear the drums and chimes and booms. They’ve stolen a dance carpet and some bottles of pumicia; they’re all dancing and they’re all drunk. Burn dances with the others, feeling the cool, plummy flavor slippery inside. She begins to smile, showing her teeth, and get merry with the others. They run up and embrace her and give her kisses and go on dancing, looking out through the broken wall at the city rolling away below. Burn dances, her feet following the pattern in the rug more and more precisely without bothering to look, and watches the vines that froth in at the holes in the ceiling as they turn translucent green, like rubbery candy. The bottle is pressed into her hand and she gulps greedily from its trumpet-like neck, passes it on, gasping. A sudden jerk and thud, Gina has flung herself on Burn’s neck yet again, her pale body lit from inside, lips dark red, eyes glistening and bright. She kisses Burn all over the side of her face with loud smacks, laughing.

  Did you see the bird? (Kunty asks Ester and the other girls)

  No!

  They are wrapping Kunty up in a rug—she sucks air through her teeth and growls deep in her throat as they roll her up. They carry her away while the police bicker with the crowd.

  Kunty is biting hard into a great mouthful of carpet. Tears criss-cross her face.

  Now Burn is dancing by herself for the moment. As she dances, she looks up into the sky directly in front of her, and sees in it, completely alone, a large, solitary bird hovering in blue space. It floats like a kite in the intensified blue before dawn, unbroken, even blue, without a single cloud, and looking more like dusk, the bird there in its unhorizoned expanse framed by the broken wall. Burn imitates its soaring posture, turning around and around. Her muscles ache, but the pumicia makes the aching feel half good. The bird undulates up and down in the air, holding its place by carefully angling its wings, and all without effort. She sees the blazing, frigid light of its fierce white eyes and she feels the muscles in her arms pull against the bones. It wheels and dips, infinitely alone, high above the ground, surrounded by nothing but empty blue space, and she feels its spirit rushing into her body from within. All at once she is so overwhelmed by her own feelings of strength that tears fill her eyes and the Bird of Ill Omen warps, stretches, and twists in them. What she sees there is majesty, power, animosity, and absolute solitude.

  Still later, with the weak ache in her head from the drink, and nearly dropping with fatigue, she wanders through the rooms marvelling at the endlessness and fullness of what was only one day, all that had happened.

  In one room, Gina is sitting by herself on the floor with her back against the wall. There are some rags on the floor, but she is still naked except for the cloth that’s bound around her injured arm. Her head is lowered, so that her neck is a long, swanlike arc.

  Burn stares at her. The oil lamp tosses its light up onto Gina’s placid face.

  How beautiful! (Burn thinks)

  Burn has never before been able to contemplate a person who seemed beautiful to her up close and at length. The feeling is almost too strong; it grows and grows as her attention falls into being more and more riveted on Gina’s features.

  Beautiful!

  Burn approaches Gina timidly.

  We’ll get some clothes for you (Burn says)

  Gina looks up at her, not at all surprised, and says, That’s all right. I’m not cold.

  Burn looks at her, then squats, kisses Gina’s cheek, and stands again in one continuous movement.

  Gina smiles at her.

  Burn feels love.

  deKlend and Phryne:

  Don’t look at me (Phryne says)

  He sits up crosslegged, rubbing a sore ankle thoughtfully.

  When she next appears, she has made herself up completely, and comes back to him wrapped in a sheet. She has long gauze tapes around her forearms and calves.

  She sees him looking at the tapes.

  I’ll take them off in a moment.

  He raises his hands from his ankle to take her face in them. She pulls back and clasps his wrists, lowering his hands to her body, so they part the sheet.

  He says he wants to kiss her. She sits next to him, his hands slipping from her a little reluctantly, and she won’t meet his eyes.

  If you kiss me too much, anywhere (she quickly gestures at her body) you’ll slowly be poisoned. I’m... saturated... with lead.

  deKlend makes a contemptuous noise in his nose that causes her to raise her head in alarm. He inhales deeply through his nostrils. He breathes in for a long time, his eyelids fluttering, as Phryne looks at him, wanting to understand. Then he opens a corner of his mouth and spits out a volume of smoke in one puff, his eyes open and his eyebrows lift. He shifts his attention to rubbing his sore ankle some more.

  So don’t worry (he says)

  Phryne stares at the smoke. There are tiny specks of lead in it that glint dully as they turn in the light and sink. He can just puff it back out in a cloud of smoke. She pounces on him and devours his face with kisses. (Then! Then-THEN! Then kiss me everywhere!) The dark divinity of their love appears again, like a figment of outer space unfurling, tying itself up in knots over them, they’re its pets, and it is radiating... bathing the rib cage from the inside... with a sensation sometimes like heat, lightness, fear... my hips cradled in her muscular bottom, squeezing it. She lies on her stomach and I lie among her completely, taken into the floating feeling, along the deep curve of her spine. I grip her by the shoulders. I have her pinned, a quiet equivocal call from her, from the distance, travelling across a landscape that surrounds me like a kind of rain, by driving my head down, keeps me from seeing. A stir of orgasm in the wind like a different rain coming slowly in off the sea, off the wilderness, then the wave lifts, and I spear down—a warm gust washes over me and our whole body clutches each other. The moment they form, I send every particle of my hardness into her, eagerly making myself empty and hardening her, hardening and hardening, sending her my hardening, silvering her. It goes on, it hovers nearby, the haunting wafts up at the crest without breaking it while I keep on going to pieces and finally it collapses. We brim, we silver, we churn, we brim, I am silvering, I kiss her shoulders, the back of her neck, get her firm body to harden my lips and teeth, smear them with her aliveness and try to crush from her flesh some green elixir of just her, I want to feel that, and I want to listen to it fizz and dissolve in me.

  *

  You’re mnemosem?

  Of course! (she says)

  He really doesn’t know anything (she thinks)

  In her years as the mistress of a successful political adept, she had seen many people give themselves away to the General in casual conversation. She had watched as he set out his snares, and this, as well as the secrecy enjoined on her by the nature of her relations with him, made her habitually circumspect. Now disclosing or explaining things seems to her like a return to something she’s outgrown; it was so much better when she was Medusa, everything was already understood at a glance.

  Every mnemosem is marked. Uniquely marked. Lead, in my case. In your case, it’s the epilepsy. You were invited to the party weren’t you?

  He was, and it is the same party.

  Are you on the way to Votu as well?

  She just looks at him.

  He really doesn’t know! (she thinks)

  We are in Votu (she says)

  Ah, hm (he says)

  Always a metaphor (he thinks) Like saying we’re in paradise, this is nirvana. Everywhere is nirvana. Everyone makes the same mistake, and there’s no point tryi
ng to make them understand you mean the real place, the actual physical spot. They’re just lost in metaphors.

  He looks at her lingeringly.

  You are so wise (he says)

  That hit the mark (he thinks) She likes that.

  You don’t know how wise (she thinks, smiling)

  After a moment she asks him what he wants to do in Votu, and he explains he intends to bring a sword there.

  Ah (she says) Yes there are many swords stuck into the walls and buildings.

  He exhales a cloud of smoke and produces his sword, causing her to sit up in amazement. The blade is warped, even half twisted in one spot, the edge is scalloped with irregularities. deKlend holds it up in both hands and sighs ruefully.

  Look at that (he says) Months of work—who knows how much time? And it’s still a hash.

  There’s no handle? (she asks, bending forward to look at it)

  I won’t put a hilt on it—

  Hilt (she says—the word has exotic, liquid sexiness in her mouth)

  —hilt, yes, I won’t put a hilt on it until it’s finished.

  And where do you work on it?

  Phryne is sitting back now, propped up on her hands behind her back.

  deKlend makes a fist with his right hand.

  Oh, anywhere. First, I make my hands as hot as possible.

  His fist radiates heat, like the mouth of an oven billowing over her skin.

  And then I simply work it with my fingers.

  deKlend begins to pinch up and down the blade, plucking, and making little circles. Where he touches the metal, it acquires a dull, matte sheen and then turns pale as it cools again. She can see the metal changing as he works it; deKlend looks like a man playing a long thin stringed instrument. The blade makes faint noises, like flexing metal.