Celebrant

by Cisco, Michael

  *

  Burn keeps her eye on the wire-gammed warrocksen, like a loudspeaker on insect legs, as it stalks by her hiding place, a steady, amplified mutter buzzing in its round, gridded mouth. Some officials are there by the gate, comparing badges, specifically the features that had come with the different plans assigned each badge. Burn is waiting for a chance to zip out into the trees, not wanting to be seen, but also not wanting to stir, and change the headblood and lose the mind it creates.

  She doesn’t think deeply; her thoughts, like pigeon thoughts, are the ephemeral concatenations of a moment. The day is brilliant, the buildings rebound with elastic light—a taste in the air—enchanted stillness—pigeon feet don’t break the leaves—girls in a tableau, the scene soaking into all their alerted senses—not just the holy city but the holy glade—buoyant autumn light—my hatred... my hatred... is it right? is it right?... cool trees against a caustic sky—whater weels, whater weels... a horizontal water spout, the passer-by makes shaping gestures with hands in front of the spout, a little like washing... clouds run errands in solvent haze—errands on Saturday, for virtue nor peace of mind nor dignity isn’t a luxury—those dark shapes up there are giant, lighter-than-air sloths that hang from the undersides of clouds and can be seen swimming upside-down through the sky with wheeling strokes of their shaggy forelegs.

  Burn walks with her hands behind her back. She passes a small cemetery beneath the walls. Movement attracts her eye. A number of graves have tiny mineshafts sunk into them, shored up with shaved sticks and thrusting out little tongues of railed tracks. Lights the size of pinheads are strung down into the graves. Almost too swift to see, little miners are at work there, bent forward pushing coal carts full of chipped buttons, fragments of jewellery, bits of fabric, shoe leather, gold fillings, teeth. A fragile-looking crane winches a brown femur up out of the earth with glacial slowness, as the shadowlike figures at the base wave their arms and call to each other in voices too faint to hear.

  She wonders about her parents from time to time. They all do. Sometimes there are tears and sometimes bitter words; or just the mouth and the eyes are bitter. Later comes the gallant little effort to turn aside to present things, which a moment later is fortified by the insistence that these bitter thoughts are what lie aside and out of the way.

  Burn remembers the outline in the corner, and the great bird she saw, the fierce female thing out in the snow like an exasperated leopard and the comet streaking remorselessly toward the horizon. Now buried far beneath or behind the world. She tries to imagine herself with her parents, looming above her like two tall trees or a building.

  All she can see are two dull black streaks, one with legs and one is a cone, fading out into broken grey sunlight. Part of her, all the same, but then this thought angers and pains her and above all she wants to know why they ran away. She doesn’t want to know why, exactly, she wants to know if it was her they ran from, or if it was some kind of mistake.

  Why do you always run from me?

  She yells it silently at them both like a frustrated interrogator shouting at an uncooperative prisoner. The words are a reproach and an accusation.

  Here are the meadows breathing sleep musk—the reverie assembles there—only walk into it—soft feet pat the bracken, a frond bows, a tuft is unbending slowly—openings going through the plants—all around there are sky caves you can hide in, drag along behind you by the rim like balloons—docile sky calves, partable sky buttocks just brushing over Votu’s towers half lost in sky milk, the high dairy sun. There she notices the black tupelo trees fringing the glade of the Long Figures—and there are some people tossing a hard ball back and forth. A big man is walking sombrely along a sunken path down the slope from them. The ball sails over outstretched hands and Burn makes no doubt it will strike that tall man, right in his head. The ball bonks against the trunk of the tree and drops to the ground, as the man appears again, having only just been obscured from view by that tree. Somehow she’d missed the intervening moment—she remembers the ball speeding toward the man’s head, and no tree but one beside the path a dozen or so feet away from him. And yet that tree, in that spot, came between him and the ball.

  Burn watches the man, who walks without looking around, without turning his head. He is wearing a high black velvet hat with a pair of wings outspread at the back, formed by two oblong loops of wire or something stiff and covered by black crepe. Two long ribbons trail in the air from the joint of the wings, which spread to either side of his ears. Which she can’t see, any more than she can see the rest of his head, because of course there is a veil sandwiched between hat and head, floating down over the shoulders. At first, she’d missed that veil because, in the radiance of the daylight, she’d caught a glimpse of the wan face.

  Cautiously, into cool darkness under the trees, she follows his path, nearly overgrown with large, soft, feathery shrubs eight or nine feet high. Through their motionless fronds she can see through the copse to the gleaming meadow on the other side, and no sign of him anywhere. Burn can thread her way through the shrubs in silence, without stirring them, and she prefers this to showing herself on the path, dim as it is.

  She freezes without a sound when the hands settle on her shoulders. Glancing down, keeping her head still, gathering her icy self for a spring away, the black rubber gloves and chilling power pours down into her body.

  Can I jump? (she asks herself)

  Somehow she is waiting for those weirdly calm hands. They seem to say, calmly,

  You are mine already, and always have been.

  The impulse to escape suddenly matures and, feeling many times heavier than she should Burn hurls herself forward. The fingers slip from her shoulders like the fringes of leaves and when she spins to see who it was there’s nothing to see but trees, and the daylight they break into spangles, and the still, downy bracken.

  Keeping to the margin of the path, Burn carefully rushes out of the copse into the meadow on the far side. She flits into the tall grass, looking around, but sees no one. When she emerges again, there is the mathete she’d met before, with the white hair and the single black forelock, sitting on a bench beneath a black tree all wattled with growths. He is smiling as if he’s been waiting for her, but that’s all he does. She vanishes with darting steps, leaving him behind, so she hopes, finding her way back among other pigeon girls.

  It hadn’t felt as if there were anyone back there but her.

  They’ve scattered themselves in the trees and bright clearings, scamper and play. Some are drowsily nestled in trees. The day you live... the screen of defocussed leaves waving like a jeweled screen of gem flakes... the boys all ate gem flakes and died... minute white flowers make galaxies on the black grass beyond the watchful black tupelo trees. The sky foams against the distant mountains and catches its hems in the trees, the bouncing of the bird in flight low to the ground. While they still go hungry much of the time, Burn has led them to more food lately, and today pigeon girls can forget about food for an afternoon. Their hair, their eyes, have new luster, their bodies are just a bit more suety, and they are livelier, playing like other little girls, snatching baubles from the jewelled bed of the day, stealing together the unwatched jewelry of the simple, unjewelled day, spiriting them away to drink.

  Someone’s washing has blown off the line and fallen here, sheeting some of the plants, curtaining off the shade into chance privacies. Monkeys scurry overhead without coming down to earth.

  Burn lifts aside a smooth, flexible bough all garish with pale new foliage—a slender ankle there, from behind a sheet caught in the branches of a sycamore—a sigh—she pulls the sheet a little and steps around it. Gina glances up sharply at Burn and then her eyes flick uncertainly from this to that to that, her hands where they had been, one spread over her ribs and the other between her legs. Burn can hear her breathing fitfully, very light and swift. Gina seems confused and strangely full of yearning. She looks away from Burn now, weakly, discomposed, firmly in the grip of a ch
aotic sensation, while every now and then move the fingers of the hand between her legs. Burn squats beside her. Gina turns her head back, facing down her body, with a weak will of its own her hand moves more vigorously and she makes two very soft, muffled cries without opening her mouth. Burn puts her hand on Gina’s shoulder, making Gina shiver; Burn sees Gina’s eyes shine under the half-lowered lids. Burn’s curiosity gives a stern look to her own face. Gina seems frightened of something, and confused. She gives a little call of fear, and Burn can feel her body hum under her hand. Like a bowed string.

  Burn sits on her side next to Gina, resting her weight against root banisters, looking Gina steadily in the face, and sets her other hand down on top of Gina’s, who looks at her in bewilderment, eventually saying something, a plea in the form of a non-word. The hand under Burn’s hand moves from time to time in little spasms. Each motion seems to pull the mind from behind Gina’s eyes down slightly further into her body, pulled in like falling asleep, then bobbing back up into the eyes again. Burn’s hand moves persistently, while she peers intently into Gina’s face. From under this steadily prolonged investigation of her hand Gina suddenly is trying to escape, but utterly without strength—then her body bucks wildly and cries out. Burn leaps to her feet and stares at Gina, who lies at her feet, wriggling like a little snake.

  Burn is gone, and Gina lies at the foot of the tree, slack and empty. She bathes there in the sluggish warmth by the ground, looking out at the leopardy floor of the wood, letting it pour into the still, light-filled pool of her mind.

  Burn sits with the others in a breeze that carries the smell of the light on the rose garden. Chernu, one of the most pigeonlike of them, is playing nearby with Sandy. The skin of Chernu’s face and the front and sides of her body is velvetty bruisy sfumato, while the skin of her back, the back of her neck, the backs of her gangly upper arms and legs, is caramel brown, and her Asian eyes are two perfect rings of brilliant orange set in black. Her sleek, oniony hair is black, too.

  Sandy’s is light brown and hangs in thick curls around her boyish, sweet-hearted face. She’s younger than Chernu, and more compact; her hands and feet are vermillion as pigeon feet. She has creamy pink irises and complexion; she has no finger nails.

  Desso, short for Dessomoya, has a sharp nose that points down toward her lips like an arrow. Her green eyes glitter and resemble a cat’s more than a pigeon’s. The skin around her face, and down her sides, has a dividing band of pearly grey with a white margin toward the back and minute, streak-like flecks of black toward the front. Only Burn has fewer pigeon characteristics, but Desso is the most pigeonlike in behavior. She tilts the top of her head to the left and right as she looks at something, and coos down deep in her chest as if she were clearing her throat.

  Dusk seems to contract the sky into a flame-like cone, binding the horizon while the summit plunges out into space. There is open sky behind Burn’s head, from Gina’s point of view. She looks at the weird light of dusk on Burn’s decisive face, the blues and purples of its planes, and the lifting and settling blonde hair streaked with dirt. Burn’s delicate, precise way of moving, her shoulders that reach across to join beneath her throat like the flexed steel laths beneath a carriage. Gina comes up without looking at anyone else and meekly sits beside Burn, lays her head on Burn’s shoulder, the smell of Burn’s not clean not dirty body, letting her gaze spill from her eyes into the stirring grass in the center of all the crossed and folded legs.

  (Kunty is lying half spilled out of the rug. It’s more than half-shredded from all her clawing and thrashing. Ester and the others timidly bring her food. Kunty’s eyes flash and seem to crack out gleeds of light. She snarls and froths with impatience, thrashes from time to time like a stricken shark. And she is healing, swiftly. The whrounim might have broken her back and left her paralyzed, but the spines of rabbit girls are hinged at the lumbar vertebrae, which makes running on all fours convenient for them. That hinge was wrenched by the whrounim, Kunty felt it, but it is healing, and she is already beginning to crawl on her belly. It takes all her strength of will to keep herself from moving too much—all she can think about is running, dancing, leaping—)

  blue night, red smoke

  blue and yellow fires wheel

  the trembling light on the plains

  the blues and the purples on the planes

  Around dusk, the ghosts come out of the city, or from somewhere, and infest the green boundary that surrounds Votu’s walls. They insinuate themselves into the foliage, like trapped beads of air. They roll magically along the undersurfaces of things and then pop up. They stretch themselves in ribbons and festoons, slinking just above the path, and flutter down on anyone who passes. Stretching out an invisible arm that palpates its way toward you like a leprous white anaconda... They’re not dangerous, but you don’t want to see them, you don’t ever want to see them. Apart from going back into the city, the only way to avoid seeing ghosts at dusk is to hallucinate. Fortunately there are enough pigeon girls here for that to be possible.

  Burn and the other girls begin hallucinating. A harsh chime merrygorounds in a loop around her temples, and the leaves, twigs, grass, the clouds and other girls all begin to melt and seep invisible smoke. Everything she sees is eating its way into the “background” like encaustic, that background is like a canvas, but it’s not two dimensional, it goes far back into dim transparence like gelatin or darkened glass. It can’t really be seen, only these brilliantly colored leaves and twigs, blades of grass, these riotous girls, eating into vision, their pigmentations separating into hued layers, hundreds of distinct, vividly different colors. The chime is also dividing into particular tones, coarse fibers of sound roughly braided into a drone pulsating between a centrifugal movement, tearing the noises open, and another that brings them back into stricter harmony again.

  A breeze riffles the grass, sparkling in the black air. The dark smokes from the ground, and the twilight is a shaft that goes straight up from the under crust of the sky to infinity like an irregular mesa. Seeing all this prevents seeing ghosts.

  Burn doesn’t exactly see herself—she sees a brief flash as if she’d momentarily glimpsed herself in the peripheral vision of the girl sitting off to her left. There is a gentle, starburst halo there with an empty center, on her chest just below the right shoulder. That’s where Gina’s bare head rests. And Burn can feel the side of Gina’s long throat laid along the skin of her chest, too. Gina has sleepily arrayed herself nearly in Burn’s lap, although she is not as large as Gina. The diamond-shaped patterns in Gina’s skin suddenly become conspicuous and seem to slide opposite each other, then disappear, come back and vanish and come back again.

  Other pigeon girls are shadowy around her. The smoke from the plants, the air they give off, fills the meadow. Each plume of air from a leaf or a blade becomes an air-stem to be forced aside if one is to get through. They press on all sides, and she feels the air trickle up from the crushed grass she sits on. Inside the chiming sound, which has a lulling rhythm, she hears her own voice singing faintly

  merry going round, merry merry going round,

  merry going round, now it’s merry going round

  over and over. The years wander by; there it is, a smooth breast of even snow like frosting on a cake, so white it’s almost blue, like the white of an eye. Looking more closely, she sees the snow really is laced with fine, threadlike red veins. As she breathes on them, her warm, damp breath, drawn in summery meadows, makes the veins throb perceptibly. The rich carnation color of the blood, glowing like embers glow, more vivid the darker the color, laced in those minute threads, so fine she can see them draped across the gaps between individual crumbs of snow, is confiding itself to her like a secret message. She has an impulse to swat snow over and cover them, to preserve the sight of them for herself only, but she doesn’t want to gouge up and disrupt the weird perfection of the snow. Eventually it will be the moon, blown like tinsel this way and that by an autumn wind. The thin crescent moon she
sees is plainly in front of the clouds.

  The white plaster walls, a hall door, there in the hall a person with a merry-go-round for a head. The merry-go-round revolves, the horses and hippocampi and griffons on it rise and fall on their poles.

  Down toward one end of the hall, where a number of doors open onto darkened rooms, two naked figures are kneeling, curled together. Mother and daughter. Mother is breastfeeding the girl, who looks ten years old and nearly swoons with sleep. Neither of them acknowledge the man. He kneels behind the young woman, and, reaching around her, takes the girl in his arms. The woman, nearly swooning with sleep, allows her hands to fall away and her neck to go slack, so that her head comes to rest against his shoulder. With one hand, very tenderly, he hold the girl’s head to her mother’s breast, which he lifts and holds out to her with his other hand. There is no sound but the soft, measured rush of air in the girl’s nostrils, and her mother’s breath feathering against the man’s jacket. The man is not breathing. With a little turn of the head, the girl releases the nipple and sinks into complete sleep. The man gathers her up in his arms, rises slowly, allowing the woman to slide gently back against the wall, and carries the girl into one of the dark rooms. Very carefully he puts her to bed and draws the covers up to her chin.