Celebrant

by Cisco, Michael

  And what is it like—in there?

  Goose Goes Back comes about, a process that involves taking three steps. Raising his right hand and forming a circle with his forefinger and thumb like certain kinds of statues, and seeming to raise and lift back the head that isn’t there on his shoulders, with what has to be an expression of bliss, he says

  “—horrible—”

  He strides over to deKlend, the erection sweeping from side to side like a metronome wand. deKlend prefers not to remain seated as Goose Goes Back approaches.

  I wonder where Phryne is? (he wonders)

  Come with me (Goose Goes Back says)

  deKlend follows him through a low arch into a dark, foul room. When his eyes adjust, he can see bodies limned in the glow of their own luminous decay. Goose Goes Back is travelling around the room doing something to stir it up, so the lights gradually become more distinct, throwing multicolored zones up onto the stone walls. The mica in the stone glitters, as do tiny reflectors, and in a few moments the chamber is like a ghostly diamond, sparkling with dim, leprous gleams from the corpses.

  Goose Goes Back stands in the middle of the vault, hands clasped together.

  What do you think? (he asks expectantly)

  Swathed in the heavy silence of that room, deKlend turns around nonplussed.

  I’m—(he gags on the intake of breath)

  /It’s /astounding! (he chokes)

  In the weird light, deKlend watches Goose Goes Back lift from a granite tray two heavy, thick-lipped iron funnels, of which there are many more. He presses these like plungers down onto one of the bodies and turns to pick up two others—as he does so, a thin, reedy whistle, almost instantly joined by another, begins to sound. They are icy notes, gathering strength—the weights press down on the bodies causing them to emit corpse gas, channeled through the funnel to the rothorn in plumes, the coppery aroma of old excrement and rotted blood. Goose Goes Back sets out more of the weights on the bodies until the air swims with a stinging, vomitty-cabbagey perfume, while he moves proudly among the corpses. deKlend’s reeling senses conjure at random the image of a cheese-maker going up and down aisles of mephitically aromatic fermentations, complacently patting his pale cheeses. All together, the whistling begins to fashion an unsettling, fluctuating chord that steadily gains in volume.

  Come here.

  Goose Goes Back waves him over to a body that seems set specially aside, and he comes, intensely curious and full of misgivings. His senses are so inflamed he feels as though he’s been dipped in alcohol or mint, his skin, nostrils, eyes, and ears.

  This corpse is of no appreciable gender, with great volumes of thick grey hair. Fungus billows from the open cranium, like a crown of tawny, vermilion, and dark green tubular flames, some of which curl down to form transparent bulbs the size of oranges, in which are growing velvetty, ear-shaped, truffle-like gills. The cheeks seem cut back or torn in triangles away from the lipless teeth that give a look of anguish to the skull face. The body is a scabby mass, the skin is broken into countless flakes, like a forest floor in autumn.

  Goose Goes Back takes from a shelf in the wall above a pearly, conch-like hearing trumpet. He inserts the trumpet precisely into the dead ear, which deKlend now sees is vastly extended with hard waxy growths that make it look like a gold-orange nest.

  Listen (Goose Goes Back says)

  deKlend stoops, warily bringing his ear next to the trumpet Goose Goes Back is holding for him. A rustling noise comes from within the corpse’s head, like the rush of air sliding over a prairie. Somehow the drone whistling around him actually accentuates the sound—the sound in fact slots into that chord exactly. He is hovering in an icicle above a shadow landscape of soft, felty hills and crooked and recrooked black trees, high, barren mountains and black mist like frozen sea spray—from somewhere far away, a lone woman’s voice rises in melancholy song—

  He feels his heart stop, his body goes ice cold, and he yanks his head away into the full resonation of that droning chord. Turning he only comes face to face with the mummy, fingers around its jaws as though it were giggling madly to itself.

  deKlend staggers, retreating from Goose Goes Back.

  The whistling subsides. The music of the flutes stops and they huff and pop like old gramophone records as the gas is followed by liquid corruption, bubbling in crisp leathery foam from the mouths of the horns.

  deKlend flees, groping toward daylight. He stops when he feels relatively fresh air on his face, even if it is blowing off a salt flat. Around him, in the open now, are trestles with wind-blown carcasses laid out, and heaps of dead animals waiting to be inserted into exhibitions. Gravity thrashes in front of his eyes and for a moment it’s as if he were seeing animated water.

  Goose Goes Back, moving with the measured step that he seems unable to vary, appears. A complex knot of gravity is gathered inside him, centered in the barrel. The knot looks like a paralyzed waterspout.

  It’s good (he says) to hear Bardo music at least once, although it is also unwise to become too accustomed to it.

  He seems to take in the surroundings with appreciation, as if an invisible head on his shoulders swivelled and took a deep breath.

  How lovely it is! (he says)

  There’s music even there? (deKlend asks, with shock in his face)

  ...Yes. Space, time, and music.

  deKlend is not looking at Goose Goes Back. His eye happens to have fallen on a lean, warped little volume tucked between two desiccated gophers. Night Anthems of a Ghoul. It might be the same copy he’d seen at the Madrasa.

  Where did this come from? (he thinks out loud, taking up the book)

  The author left it here.

  The author? Adr—(he breaks off to check the title page)—Adrian Slunj?

  I have no memory for names, deKlend.

  By The Author Of (it says) The Book of Frenzie and Acts of the Dead Bodies: a Thanatodiatheke.

  The list seems to be lengthening as he looks at it.

  Author Of The Terrifying Bestseller TRANSMOG (it says)

  Author Of The Visit of the Armless Writhing Marble Torso, which is evidently a play.

  Have you read this? (deKlend asks lamely)

  I can’t read.

  deKlend flips pages for a moment.

  What? (he asks abruptly) No?

  This prompts him to face Goose Goes Back.

  I am unable to scan the lines. I see all the words at once but am unable to separate them into distinct moments. Instead, I must listen.

  From out of the air comes an exalted, disembodied voice, tremulous with the echo of some empty theatre, reciting:

  with thee fade away into the forest dim... fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget...

  How I love those lines (Goose Goes Back says)

  The voice repeats: with thee fade away into the forest dim... fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget... with thee fade away into the forest dim... fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget...

  How is it he came through here? (deKlend wonders aloud) Did they fire him?

  He worships the Bird of Ill Omen (Goose Goes Back says) and he came following his god.

  The Bird of Ill Omen is a god?

  It is for him. The Bird of Ill Omen could perhaps be following him.

  Where did he go?

  I believe he was going to follow him.

  Yes, and where?

  The Bird of Ill Omen is impossible to follow. He is only encountered in his past. Your present is his past, and his present is your future. He can be seen only as he will be, as the sign of something that is already returning to haunt you.

  But then he is like you, isn’t he?

  Yes.

  How would he appear to you, in that case? Have you seen him?

  I have not recognized him.

  deKlend pulls on the belts he uses to keep his shawls about him, ordering his thoughts with an intense effort.

  Can’t he always be recognized? I thought he always looks the same, or, one of
the two ways he looks, bird or man.

  No. Your friend asked the same question.

  Adrian?

  Yes.

  I haven’t the privilege of calling him my friend—but, you are saying he is incarnated in the way you are?

  He is incarnated. Not in the way I am.

  So, in this present (deKlend points at the ground) what is he?

  I don’t know.

  Then where?—Votu?

  You are going there? (Goose Goes Back asks)

  Yes!

  deKlend exhales his sword blade and holds it up.

  May I? (Goose Goes Back asks, lifting his hands, making a groove in the air for it between his fingers and thumbs)

  deKlend presents it. Goose Goes Back rubs it in his fingers, moving his hands over it like a blind man.

  It needs work (deKlend says) It isn’t finished.

  No (Goose Goes Back says, returning it to him)

  I don’t want to present it at Votu until it’s perfect.

  I understand. But there is no merit save in chance. There is no perfection but in chance.

  (That sounded like a quotation.)

  The Bird is ‘in Votu,’ you think?

  I suppose.

  Can you show me which way it is?

  Just there.

  Goose Goes Back gestures simply in the direction of the house.

  I will find what I need there? They sent me over here.

  Votu is just there (Goose Goes Back says simply)

  He’s speaking symbolically (deKlend thinks) I must do my best to understand.

  It is there (deKlend says, lifting his hand slightly out from his side and pointing)

  Yes.

  Just there. Only there?

  Only in that direction.

  Away from you?

  At the moment.

  Away from you now?

  Yes.

  Consequently not here—

  I don’t understand.

  —not, not present here and now. Votu.

  No. Votu is over there.

  So I ‘go over?’

  Over there.

  He would not be so patient with me (deKlend thinks) if he did not mean something by this.

  I must ‘go over’ that place?

  I don’t understand. If you wish to go to Votu, you need simply go that way.

  So it’s in the way I go?

  Not in the manner, but in the direction. That direction.

  Straight ahead?

  For a distance. Then you will curve toward the right.

  So I must ‘curve?’

  Not right away, or you will miss it.

  I must know when to ‘curve.’

  Where the road curves off to the right.

  The road is split, and I must know when to ‘follow the curve.’

  Where the road curves.

  Follow the ‘right road.’

  Naturally.

  Naturally.

  As he is leaving, going back to the house, to look for Phryne, deKlend turns toward Goose Goes Back again. The being he sees, for all its formidable size and power, looks preposterous at a distance.

  How long will it last? (he asks, thinking of the condition Goose Goes Back finds himself in)

  Some time longer. I feel that.

  The voice is very distinct, even this far away; and deKlend is suddenly unsure whether or not he spoke his questioning thought aloud.

  Then who will you be? (he asks—aloud, but almost not aloud)

  Perhaps you (Goose Goes Back says) I don’t know.

  In Votu:

  Long ago, pilgrims from all over the world would descend on the city in large numbers. They tended to arrive in homogeneous masses, and the citizens would watch them come from atop the walls with dread. Any attempt to deny them entry was cause for a blockade and the destruction of the trees and farms outside the walls. Admit them, and the pilgrims would trash the town, billeting themselves on people like it or not, molesting everybody, devouring everything, chipping and chopping the shrines up for holy souvenirs, rioting and fistfighting among themselves, bellowing unintelligible demands in languages no one knew, leaving behind whole neighborhoods in flames or ransacked and looking like the aftermath of an earthquake. They would bring swords as offerings, with lamentable consequences for each other and the town. There were also those pilgrims who flattered themselves they were different from their brawlier counterparts, and came on meek and fawning, but these pilgrims corrupted everything they touched because they were wealthy and came away each year loaded down with irreplaceable treasures. These quiet ones could always wheedle out which sacred guardian or devoted student was secretly in desperate need of money, and then that would be it.

  But when anemone came to Votu, all this was changed. The natural robots respond to people in their own inscrutable ways, but their behavior in response to certain kinds of human activity is consistent, though it varies from one to another. All of them, for example, are musical, but where urchin seems to be most excited by uptempo dance music, groper gives no indication of interest in rhythm but swings to and fro transfixed by human voices singing multi-part harmonies. Urn has an affinity for elderly men. Anemone seemed to bear an innate antipathy towards pilgrims in groups of greater than two or three, and stampeded any of them who came within the vicinity of the metronome.

  Anemone is a rhombus with a deformed, half-crushed-looking lower section. The upper section has an angular top that is canted forward like a ramp; in that ramp there is a large circular hole surrounded by a thick fringe of dense fur matted together into flame-like locks. The mass is dark and rocky, with some faceted surfaces, especially toward the top, smooth as glass, and it is banded by heavy, yoke-like rings which are roughly parallel to the ground. It looks a little as if it had been used as a gigantic peg in a ring-toss. These rings are studded with globular jets of bright metal, and tinted all different colors. Some are brilliant and some gleam as though they’d been enamelled. Each ring seems laden with steel grapes. Still more jets blister the tapering underside. These jets are in constant operation, so that anemone never touches the ground. They don’t blast air continuously, but they go off in short bursts on all sides, making a sound like rapidly popping popcorn. The yawning black hole in its mantle of fur seems to be the intake for them all, and the exhaust has a sharp, biting, sliced grapefruit odor.

  The jets are fixed in position, so anemone fires only those which, pointing down, keep it airborne, and those which point in the direction opposite to the one it goes. Swift, agile, uncannily smooth is its flight, at any altitude. Anemone weighs several tons, is about half the size of a small house, and the friction it produces as it zips over the ground causes a nimbus of static electricity to form around it. Never hovering in one place for very long, anemone only pays occasional visits to the shrine its mathetes have built for it, with a high towering pagoda growing from the spacious main apartment, and numerous large openings to permit its ingress.

  There is no telling how it senses the world around it, but anemone would respond to the approach of a group of pilgrims without fail, swooping down on them and chasing them to and fro like a dog herding sheep. No pack or riding animal could be kept from bolting at anemone’s approach. As with any other natural robot, anemone’s person was inviolate, but even if this didn’t dissuade the pilgrims, as it seldom did, anemone was hard to hit with anything and too sternly constituted to be damaged. Anemone’s vibrating invisible mane of intense static electricity made mere proximity to it unbearable, nor did anemone wait for the pilgrims to draw within running distance of the city walls before it struck. The city would be there, less than a mile away, visible across the plains and seeming to beckon the pilgrim to take refuge, but entirely too far off to reach under anemone’s inexhaustible, bullish onslaught. There were a few deaths, only two could certainly be attributed to anemone directly, and in both cases the pilgrim involved had tried to tilt at anemone like an equal.

  Their petitions for relief ignored, the pilg
rims stopped coming in numbers, and stopped coming openly, for, since they were now arriving in twos and threes instead of hundreds and dozens, this made them vulnerable to the just resentment of the citizens, who, from this epoch, began attacking pilgrims, on sight, with whatever came to hand. Pilgrims learned to come to Votu secretly, separately, to rendezvous only under certain circumstances, and to practice their devotions inconspicuously.

  Swords are no longer brought to Votu, but the pilgrims will bring, for example, elaborate drawings of swords, or swordless sword dances, or even materials for making swords in the city once they arrive. Modern sword offerings are made in a variety of ways. Most often the celebrant thrusts a sword into a wall. There are places in the older sections of Votu that bristle with swords; the swords stuck into a square named for Thwitharq Osxtier-Ponqus are so numerous they look like a rusty field of reeds. The walls of the buildings are like hedgehog faces and the equestrian statue is an invisible, formless swordcushion. Plumbers carry gauntlets—one would reach down a drain to clear an obstruction only to wrap hands around the blade of a sword stuck in the pipes. Swords would turn up caught in mouse traps, get tangled in people’s hair as they slept, rain down from long-disused attic hatchways. Whole buildings would rupture slopping swords out into the street. These places are swept aside as the city rolls down the slope, though, and now one sees very few swords, and these usually solitary, and usually with a bird perched on the hilt and gaily adorning it with white shit and song.

  The citizens of Votu don’t talk to people who carry weapons because it isn’t done. Plumbers carrying dripping swords festooned with crap are exempt. As a rule, a sword in Votu not stuck into a building is a cheap souvenir, an article of historical significance, or the kind of thing that crops up underneath other stuff in what once were known as rag and bone shops. There’s a word for them, useless old swords, “holbleins,” that means something like placebo and is derived from a term for a kind of spectre or goblin that appears as only a white brow.

  *

  Rabbit girls call to each other—

  Kunty’s better!

  She’s running again!