The ground is elevated here, the view is unobstructed and full of wind. The sheer black trench of the Idle runs away from me, black wrinkles in a grey ribbon, and on its far side is the spiracle mound of the death precinct, from which on some nights it is recounted one can see the titan form of a grinning mortuary student rearing up to set a green death taper in the sky. There’s the Embalmer’s College, crouched like a toad dropsically bloated with venom and warted over with cupolas; its presence exceeds its size, and draws attention to it among these other buildings as the eyes draw attention in the face.
I walk toward the river, and in less than a quarter of a mile I find a bridge to cross into the death district. Shreds of black crepe, and the dried husks of flowers that might have come from funeral wreaths rasp along the ground, are toyed with by the air. The bridge is encrusted with what look like brass teacups broken in half, like scales growing out of any order, embedded in yellow solder. I cross the empty bridge as the sun begins to slide down toward the backs of the mountains, and night’s elaborate mechanism whirs to life all around me. It’s just tuning up.
So this is the death precinct. I find willows sighing over strewn empty streets, dust and attentive calm on the other side of the bridge. Sunset takes hours, and there are no lights lit anywhere yet. No sound but rustling skirts of air, the half-hearted whine of a shutter’s hinges, crickets who chirp two or three times and stop. I wander without thinking, and as the darkness falls I am picking my way through unlit streets with bushes growing from the pavements; in the gathering night, everything is felty and dim, the stone buildings luminous pink and silver with bare lividity, patched with lichen and veiled in ivy. I am thirsty, but the stone trough I find is too scummed over to drink from. I haven’t eaten since the morning, and so imagine the state I am in. I have wandered too long to go back, and my mind is unclear. I start pushing in at doors and even windows, and here one door opens. For a moment my thoughts are sharp again. Charred beams and broken plaster on the floor, smashed furniture, walls glow white-blue like cheeses. Here on the window sill a chipped tin cup with a little sand at the bottom is nearly full of rainwater. I drink it down carefully so as not to drink the sand. I can feel it pouring down cold into my empty stomach. There’s even a thin, narrow mattress or pad here folded on the floor. I pull my jacket around myself and lie down on my side. My body groans with fatigue but it takes me a while, or so it seems, to get to sleep, listening to the wind, and the faint sound of settling dust.
*
Ravenous morning. I am already in the streets before I wake up all the way. I hear the voices long before I begin to see people, and then only a face here a face there. Mostly white people. I am blinking all the time, but it’s hard to see. There are mortuary students everywhere, the males in vested suits with cutaways and cravats, silk hats with black crepe around the band, and the females in black dresses and flowered hats. Only those who have matriculated may wear veils. I wash my face in a fountain and take another drink—a belly filled with water doesn’t hurt so much. I decide I have to spend something; two rolls vanish without a trace. I sit for a while and wait for them to percolate through me. Then I spend the rest of my money on a proper meal.
The cemetery gardens of Dusktemper truly are the finest imaginable. Every few blocks the land opens up in stately rolling green and dark cypress yew and willow, lawns spangled with lank stones, peopled with sculptures and mausolea. Some are in immaculate condition and some falling into picturesquely complete disrepair. The eerie serenity of these places hums with an undercurrent of menace that I find appeals to me. What is the nature of this oddly soothing feeling? I have seen the gardens of the life priests and they are tranquil and beautiful, but these fantastically still, entranced graveyards fascinate me.
So now I am moving among these monuments, trembling phosphorescence in the pale stones beneath lost grey sky. The path descends across the cemetery, and now the few distant visitors and groundskeepers drop out of sight. The path cuts into the ground, and becomes something like a stone-lined trench as I follow it around the base of a low hill. I am thinking of dead men, and the stories that they leave behind for us to repeat. It was to this task that I had proposed to dedicate my life, and now the fiat of someone I’ll never know or see has quashed that purpose.
I catch sight of a woman laying flowers on a grave. The lane I walk is baffled by a stone retaining wall on my right, and as I pass I keep gazing at this woman. The grave is marked with an upright stone, and she, the stone, and the colossal beech that overhangs it, are stark against a cream sky. No I didn’t actually see any flowers; she had been bent over the grave and straightened her back gracefully as I came. Only now does she notice me, turns her entire body toward me. An impenetrable veil is draped across her hat’s extremely wide brim, and gathers into the grey lace of her chin-high collar, and hat and veil together look like two saucers stacked mouth to mouth. A voluminous sooty cone from the waist down, her dress is cinched tight around her, blooming out from waist to taper back into her long neck, a grey fabric with a darker shell of transparent gauze web, dotted with tiny black flowers like evenly-spaced flies. She stands with her arms at her sides, staring at me with her invisible face. I think of charred wood burning black in the grate, creaking and whispering with cryptic fire deep beneath the scorch, when I look at her black and grey shape against the lividity overhead. I must be at or below the level of the occupant of that grave.
As though a string tugged it, my head keeps swivelling back to the woman, who seems to turn in place to follow me with a gaze emanating from the entire front of her body. Further on down the lane as I look back a little light shines across the veil and I glimpse the contour of a tapering face—there it is the green flash I’ve heard about that happens just at sunset in this part of the world, trickling around this tapering face through the veil. I seem to see or imagine two intense round grave stares like a pair of black pits or pools fixed and sucking at my image greedy as quicksand. I hurry to get out of her sight—I don’t enjoy this feeling, being watched, and this looking and hurrying, all too affected by someone else, and here I am mangy with poverty uncertainty and lostness.
The cemetery peters out into long-weeded lots and listing stone buildings shaggy with vines, all under the sprawling dry shade of ancient black-leaved beeches. Everywhere the cool air is settling gradually toward the earth like dust, tugging almost imperceptibly at me. In the wan light of this drugged day I pick my way through grave wrack tumbled up in lots, broken stone basins filled with clear rain water and brown scum at the bottom like a mat of tea leaves, watched over by stone angels their faces half-lathered with moss.
A sickening recollection of my reason for being in this city washes over me, nearly buckling my knees. These sharp sensations of coolness, quietness, beauty, all to be stolen from me for no reason, for nothing—I don’t even know what this draft is for. Epitaph collage of broken slate and granite tombstones knitted together by the weeds, “Rest In Autumn Loving Wife,” “Where We Shall Be Killed In Fire,” and protracted lines of numbers. The iron-piked wall is interrupted by a partially collapsed house and as this is the only exit that presents itself I part the curtain of vines and enter the house through the wall, setting my feet down with care on the slippery floorboards.
I hear voices near me. In the next room, three mortuary students are throwing dice against the far corner; a fourth lies with his head on a split cushion along another vine-draped hole in the wall, the day’s beaded light gleaming on his long legs and checked vest. He is watching the dice players and smiling. They turn to nod and grin at me, bent cigarettes at their lips, then return their attention to the dice. A fifth student lies nearby in the room’s darkest corner, his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles and his shoulders propped against a door in a deep doorway.
I can see the whites of his eyes, and the dim motions of his face as he speaks.
“As you honor death, buy me a drink!” he calls, smiling. It sounds like a quotation. If I were
a wit, I’d know from where and give the countersign.
“I have no money,” I say, pinching at my empty pockets.
“Then you are my brother,” he replies at once, and lithely rolls himself into a crouch with his arms between his knees like a frog, but still sitting on the stone jam of the doorway. His face is round with a slightly tapering chin, skin white as custard and a sharky grin on red baby lips, faded grey irises in eyes like yellowed ivory. Straight pale brown hair bells from his top hat in a bowl cut.
“I’m Jil Punkinflake.” He says this as though he expects me to have heard of him, smiles up at me and offers his hand. “Go ahead and laugh if you like, but it’s my name.”
I don’t laugh, but we smile at each other.
“What’s yours?” he asks.
“Low,” I say.
“Just Low?”
“Low Loom Column is my complete name outside the country.”
“What country?”
“My country.”
“Mm,” he says. “What is it inside?”
“I can’t say it here. I’m not inside.”
Jil Punkinflake gets up and tugs the ladder from his vest. A large death’s-head moth, clinging to his lapel like a boutanier, opens and closes its wings meditatively. We sit down together on a piano bench by the wall. I explain my problem, how I come to be here.
“An exemption?” he asks.
“A narrator’s exemption; they’ll give it to you if you’ve already done your obligatory service, or trained for something.”
“So you get out of it if you’re a veteran?”
“No, I mean you go into the army when you come of age and serve a year, war or peace. It’s a standing army.”
“That’s what you did, Low?”
“No, I took medical training. The Sodality in town made me an award of the fees, because my marks were good in school.”
“But what possible good is it to the army training you if you can use that to get an exemption?”
“I imagine they reckon on being able to entice you to stay, having you right there. And there’s always the chance war will break out during your training period—there’s always one going on somewhere—then they can enlist you for a full tour without discounting your training time.”
“And just to whom are you assigned, Low?”
I have to check the ticket to be certain.
Jil Punkinflake’s head tilts back as though he’d just been lightly buffeted on the chin. “Makemin’s unit is understaffed. Half his troops have deserted already. Why don’t you run? Your chances are good.”
“I was seen by an Edek,” I say with a sheepish smile and toss of the hands.
“An Edek saw you?” he asks sharply.
“Yes.”
He shakes his head.
Twilight shows violet fire in the sky as we make our way to the dormitories. Skulls hang in net bags from the street lights, which are not lit.
One of the students grabs my arm and points, and the other students are watching in rapt attention as a hearse rattles by in the square terraced below this one. The horses are large and burly, with glistening curried hides and quivering tails painstakingly bundled atop their buttocks. Their plumed heads bend in the same direction at the same time, their dishevilled manes seem especially wildly to contrast with their otherwise impeccable grooming. A hatless man in a plain black suit is driving them. I crane my neck to see inside, but the windows are curtained. A veiled black wreath adorns the back. My comrades sigh and coo to themselves over it, and sagaciously evaluate the style of the brass fittings, the magnificent lacquering of the wood.
“It’s built low,” the one who took my arm says, “because the coffin rides in a compartment above the passengers. Isn’t that dreamy?”
We go on. Now, here and there, I see a few faltering lanterns. Most of the people of the district seem either to be old or ill, but not for that reason lacking in street vigor. There are no doctors in the death precinct, only morticians; if you get sick they’ll be happy to embalm you. We stop on the way before one of the many haunted houses that line this route. I am told of strangled voices from mouths clotted with earth, bellowing curses and prophesies from the basements and stairways; a stirring of the embroidered hem of the arras, and a certain object no one has ever seen because it is shrouded in darkness even in the noonday sun. The students hang on the gate, looking eagerly from one black window to the next. Finally, having evidently seen nothing, they straggle back into the street, ragged yellow smiles kneading faces that glow blue as though dusted with lead powder.
“You’ve seen ghosts in there?” I ask.
“Naturally. There are ghosts all over the district.” Jil Punkinflake turns one of these hyena grins on me, his eyes like luminous toadstools in the fluorescent dusk. He waves his hand at his three dice-playing companions. “There were five of us, you know.”
We spin through brilliant salons of butter-colored candle light and twinkling crystal, straight-backed lady plays remote music on the spinet as the room darkens with burgundy shadow, and a breath stirs webs in the empty hallway. As we pass the mouth of a sunken arcade lined with heavy wooden doors, a crazed pounding breaks on the air, resounding down the long arcade from somewhere out of sight. One of Jil Punkinflake’s friends, a plummy-voiced boy named Nectar, explains adipocere to me. “It’s an entirely distinct variety of decay, and quite ubiquitous, but you seldom see it expressed because the other, more common variety seems to drive it out. In those rare circumstances in which it does gain the ascendancy, it transforms the flesh into a kind of wax. We have a little girl at the school who’s all adipocere; eighty years ago, or more now, she died—and hasn’t changed a hair since.”
“She’s gone the color of weak tea,” Jil Punkinflake adds.
Nectar points to a sunken burying ground about the area of a modest house. The grave markers are tumbled in disarray and half buried in firm mud, marbled throughout with a thick pale substance that in places has oozed onto the surface in smooth, flat wads.
“There’s a real welter of the stuff down there,” says Jil Punkinflake. “Water main broke a few years back, when all of those—” he flips his hand at the stones, and now I see fragments of coffin, a dull bronze handle “—were just in.” And we pass by. “Wouldn’t you love to have a cake of that?” They grin at each other. “Fine laaadyyyy soooaaap.” “Or make candles, for a slow steady cremation.” “Remember Cinto’s—with the flower candles?” “We haven’t had one as good as that this year. Did you go to Tehute’s? Wasn’t very good. Just two mutes at Tehute’s.” Drain pipes, slimy soot-blackened brick, clouds hurtling past far overhead. I feel as though I’m all muffled up, stifling warm but not sweating, not hot. Why am I so warm? Jil Punkinflake and the others all seem warm too, in fact they give off a palpable, febrile heat. They lead me back through streets and derelict houses, over a broken mausoleum, its marble dimly radiant in the starlight, to the Embalmer’s College. A bearded man in a black skull cap or is it a toque is waving in a cart laden with bodies, puffing a blunt black cigar. Students dash excitedly from cellar doors and collect the bodies, carrying them inside. My companions saunter toward one of the wings, full under the gaze of one of the gaunter deans, who sits on horseback veiled from the crown of his silk hat down past his knees in nearly opaque black gauze.
I follow through dingy halls lined with matted dust, grimy wallpaper whose pattern is nearly browned out by years of smoke. The whole place is impregnated with an oppressive odor of stale smoke, rotting meat, embalmer’s preparations, clashing with my hunger so that my head spins and I don’t know whether or not to be disgusted. Banging lockers—the halls are thronged with students. Jil Punkinflake takes my hand in his hot dry fingers and leads me to the refectory, yellowed tiles over every surface in the room, over the elaborate groined vaults and niches, even the cenotaphs are tiled. I am shown to a bench at one of many long steel tables whiskered with tiny scratches, and presently Jil Punkinflake brings me a steel tray of food.
Black bread, a bowl of brine to season it with, hard dry cheese that thankfully is not too ripe and the mold is all on the outside and easily cut away, leathery preserved meat dished with stewed prunes, a beaker of thick porter so bitter my eyes tear up drinking it. Jil Punkinflake bangs his beaker against mine and toasts, “To the Cannibal Queen!” A few of the masters enter veiled, glide past us, receive their trays of food and set them in niches hewn like dictionary tabs into the sides of the cenotaphs. They pull up their chairs and raise their veils, eat soberly with their heads thrust into those niches. Now my head really is spinning, and Jil Punkinflake leads me by the hand to the dormitory room he shares with Nectar and a few others. I am guided into a nearly invisible bed and I can barely see Jil Punkinflake’s broadcloth back lying down beside me.
There was a remote time when long darkness fell, when I fell—I saw snow, and the snow glare dimmed ... some first darkness came over me in something like a fit—it lifted, and soon I was enrolled in the College of Narrators—I don’t trust these words ... A vibrating metal grate in falling asleep behind my eyes behind my face, a vibrating or a shuddering, in and out through fixed stations, blurring or accordioning back into sleep in the dark. Still the weird feeling of being just slightly too warm, not enough to perspire, and my throat is parched.
The next morning I rise and somehow get out of bed without waking my companions. I climb onto a chair and peer out the high window, watch a speckled black and white pigeon fly along the ground with a twig in its beak. A puff of air as I open the window; I try to smell some fresh air but the breeze misses my nose and taps my bare shoulder to say time to go.
*
The Narrator Page 3