“YOU WILL PUT AN ENNND-UH TO THIS ACT OF FAITH-UH! YOU WILL ACT TO RESTORRRE! / YOU WILL NOW / YOU WILL NOW ACT TO RESTORE ORRRDER! YOU WILL PUT AN ENNNND / TO THIS ACT OF FAITH-UH!”
The Ghuard turns at once and, his armor now bright and cool, rushes purposefully back into the town.
You grope along the sandy bottom, bizarrely red and flickering in the firelight through the water. There above you, the aid leads the Edek onto the empty pier. The Edek keeps hold of a pinch of the aid’s smock, just above the right shoulder, as described.
The Edek’s black eyes pick you out at once, and the mouth begins to work violently inside the cloth sack.
“NAR-RA-TIVE SPIRIT-UH! COME FORWARD-UH AND LISTENNN! I HAVE SOMETHINNG-UH TO SAY-UH! COME FORWARD-UH AND LISTENN!”
You climb one of the pilings until you are able to raise your streaming head from the water. Heat billows over you from the land, and you rise and fall with the water. The Edek bends stiffly at the waist to stare down over the side of the pier, down at you. She drops to her knees, thrusts a finger into one of her black eyes, and brings it out all streaked with black.
Now she is writing with it on your face. You feel the light, scraping sensation of her fingernail spelling TRUE TO OUR MONARCH.
The Edek straightens up and points to where a few lights dwindle away on the sea, toward the horizon.
“NAR-RA-TIVE SPIRIT-UH! FOLLOW NOW / FOLLOW NOW AND ATTENND-UH! YOU WILL SERVE-UH THE ONE MASTERR! FOLLOW NOWWW-UH AND ATTEND-UH!”
Daylight discloses land already far out of sight, blue profundities below, and a sky thickly striped with clouds that cross our line of travel at a right angle and high overhead. The clouds are curdled white and grey or fine black like dirty little heaps of slush, all in rows. Nothing all around but a mind-cancelling low hill of water sloping off to the horizon, its subtle peak travels along just beneath us. I can’t tell if it is really peaceful or not. I mistrust it for its own sake and not as someone from the mountains.
I’ll describe the boat, but I lack nautical language. It doesn’t seem more than medium-sized to me, with a bridge up two or three ladders from the deck, that is the main deck or the one with the greatest area. There is a towerlike mast aft of the bridge, with a great profusion of riggings on it, but the ship really is powered by two impressive paddle-wheels amidships or nearly, covered in majestic sweeps of metal cowling. Paddleboxes is the word. These are driven by hinged pistons that periodically and in alternation thrust their acutely bent knees fantastically high into the air, rivalling the height of the mast; they look like the hind legs of grasshoppers taking slow thoughtful strides in alternation. The rhythmic churn of the wheels is lulling, the rotation of the frothing paddles is hypnotic, the meditative striding of the pistons is dreamy, the soft and fragrant air is narcotic. Across this reverence Saskia’s voice often cuts as she barks orders from the bridge. We seem to go in one reliable direction, and we seem to move fast.
While some of the madcaps in the ranks are seasick or huddled below decks, terrified of all the open space, the majority are beside themselves with delight and excitement. They rush from one end of the boat to another with their faces wide open to every sensation, dangling from the ropes, yipping and cawing, their clothes flapping and sloughing often in defiance of decency. We’re confined to the boat, smaller than the asylum was, with limitlessness all around us. After the first man overboard is retrieved at some expense of time, Saskia thunderously harangues the others:
“Go into the sea, and I swear to you you’ll stay there!” she bellowed.
So far, no new splashes. Now we’re pushing through a field of sea lungs, and the loonies are pointing and singing out and going ape. The boat is heavy and the strong engines lumber us forward so we seem to flatten the water as we go. The drone is oppressive. At first, I imagine I’d prefer to spend my time in the open air, but between the pummeling of the wind and the eyebrindling glare of the sky, I find myself staying inside. I can’t open myself to impressions of the sea. Whenever I try, impressions of dying are what I get. Me dying. I dying. Among many others. As an officer—and that’s a laugh—I am entitled to a bit of privacy. I bunk with Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake who is not an officer but counts anyway as a standard bearer, and a sleep-happy sergeant named Zept, who adheres to his berth like a clam.
The great monarch of the Alaks alone dispenses licenses to hunt the silver woodland lion. Whenever one is killed, only the head is taken. The body is carefully buried with a uniform draped over it. In exactly three days, an Edek will appear at the spot. Anyone unfortunate enough to witness this, I guess, sudden appearance, asphyxiates, and so no one can say exactly how it happens. Who cares?
Night falls, I go to the rail for some air. Up into the air, back down out of the air. Back up into the air, back down out of the air, always pursued by distaste. There is a ragged blue satin band on the horizon between the clouds and the black water. The ship is turning into a huge solid shadow, tricked out in a constellation of little lamps. Their light seems to twirl in the wind, and creates intimate, miniature islands in all the howling wildness. I’m not sick, only leaning.
I hear footsteps, and suddenly Saskia is beside me. Her hand drops heavily onto my shoulder.
“Don’t be forgetful, narrator,” she says. “You will remember it all, won’t you?”
“Sure. Sure I will.”
She’s looking earnestly at me. I imagine she’s thinks she’s improving my morale. Has she been tapping each of the officers in turn?
That hand pats my shoulder twice, firmly.
“You will have the distinction of witnessing our glorious triumphs against the usurper, and the just punishment of traitors; and you will have the honor of telling all the world about it. And don’t worry—” she raises a finger—“All are equal together in this great task. No one will hold your color against you. There is no room for bigotry amongst us.”
She strides away.
I look out over the grain of the water, forgetting all about her, and a pang goes through me. I’m thinking miserably about the school, Twisse and Spiena, that each passing triangular wafer of water is separating me from. From whom each passing etc. I see the Edek’s eyes glare like two cold suns—they dilate at me through holes ripped in the air, and I gasp with fear and unhappiness.
*
Jil Punkinflake tells me how Thrushchurl had been institutionalized after he set fire to a wing of the Embalmer’s College.
“He kept seeing mice everywhere. Of course, there were a few. But the ones he saw were in the corners of his eyes, not in the rooms. I think he set the fire to get rid of them.
“I wasn’t in attendance at the time,” he adds. “Anyway, we should keep an eye on him ...”
He looks at me seriously.
“Just in case ...” he adds, and his face goes a little irregular. “I don’t mistrust him—I’m just thinking of the safety of the unit.”
Thrushchurl has taken up residence under some stairs; his long knees and shanks protrude into the light. I’m looking, not watching. He’s removed his silk hat; his backswept hair, split up the middle, is still pressed into a winglike pair of pancakes. The yellow gleam of his fluorescent grin is intermittently exposed, while he turns this way and that, his back to the wall, straightening out blankets, and pausing motionless from time to time, peering into a corner, or at the line where the wall meets the floor.
As Thrushchurl readies himself for sleep, he spreads his oarlike hands over the fabric of his blankets until they’re perfectly flat, smudging the bypasser air with that somber rag of song that has taken up residence in his mouth. Often, he barely articulates the syllables; you get a melody of vowels only. I don’t think he knows he’s singing it.
“Little mice, little mice,
Even cats have got their lice,
Run-run, run get yourself away—”
“Dead as cinders, grey as ashes,
Cold as ice, now its eye flashes,
Too too late to get away—”
*
Who else has had anything to say about Meqhasset? Silichieh tells me the island’s whole interior is haunted.
“It’s supposed all to be ruins from another war, hundreds of years ago. Whole forests have sprung up from spilled blood.”
Makemin has plenty to say, not about the island but about the enemy, their tactics, his career. He deputizes me to copy out some of his financial papers—naturally he had no trouble taking them along—into one of the empty ship’s logs, so he’ll have all the information indexed, etc. The work is intolerably dull and draining. When I get the time, I set myself on Nardac, but she plainly avoids me, retires when I come near. She knows my narrator’s star, maybe, and doesn’t want to give her reasons for joining us. Jil Punkinflake made hesitant and breathless overtures to her, but he she spurns. At his approach, Nardac strikes the deck before her with a hand as numb and hard as a knot of wood, and he hops away in alarm.
Her preferred place is in the bow, where she has some shade and calm from the wild air. Once, as I sat waiting for Nikhinoch to give me something unimportant to do, and Thrushchurl was nearby, singing his ditty, I noticed she was looking at him, with no particular expression. With interest. But she sets herself among the idiots, who congregate around her in the prow. They mill and mewl and roll about on the deck with each other like huge, groggy kittens, as the wind dries the spit on their chins. From far away I have seen her lips moving, and I know she tells them things. Such a calm as hers doesn’t need to speak, but she does speak, eerily.
So I eavesdrop, and hear her brief relations rapped out against the ocean’s grain. The stories she tells have nothing to do with history. I provide a sample:
(An unhurried, slow inhalation.)
She was an artist (she says this in a matter-of-fact way, her eyebrows going up and her lips frowning a little). I followed her in that. I invariably begin by saying that she was an artist. I say that, but I mean that backwards. It’s not that she made an art of executing, but that an artist is that, executioner. There’s a kernel, a way of saying what I mean more simply than what I mean, which is that she was no functionary. The task was handed to her, but she did not merely receive that as a, as a task. (Her voice dropped there.)
Looking into her face, you wouldn’t know that. You had to see her doing it, because I don’t think you can imagine that. She did it with a look. She didn’t look—her eyes saw everything from the inside ... when she was at it. That was like cold fervor, but no that wasn’t. That was (she shook her head just a little) two things at once, you can’t imagine. Enthusiasm, or mania, maybe, and dreaminess at the same time. None of it was not real to her, though. I knew that not one single thing about it was unreal. Or vague—or anything but sharp and distinct. It’s ridiculous to say sharp but that’s the word. When she was at it, her eyes were like black wells, with glistens all over them. (She caressed the air by her knees with stiff old hands, seeming to coax the guillotine blade out of the sparkling air so that I for a moment actually saw it.) All pupil, that seemed, staring, and seeing backwards.
And I saw her, or I watched her, you couldn’t have observed her more closely than I did. I had my perches there to watch her from, that gave me a commanding view, unauthorized though. Never paid much attention to them, only to her. I saw them, naturally, but as she saw them. Or would have seen them, if she saw them from the outside, and she didn’t, didn’t seem to. No, she saw them inside, and I saw them outside, but I saw into her. She knew exactly how that was done, and she lived that through each of them, or that was her fantasy.
The door bursts open, taking the man completely by surprise, and almost at once the hooder claps the hood on him—they are superb at that, getting them right away. No amount of preparation on the man’s part, unless he kills himself. And how can he? There’s that explosive struggling. The sudden pinioning and muffling. The smell of the hood, and the brush of frayed eye holes. Pulled out in that hall, that moves forward like a ratchet one man’s spot at a time. That stops. Starts. Stops. Starts. That hall has a long gap in the wall at the top, and they can see the top of gallows in the yard. They can see the chopper rise there. See it drop. See it drip. See it streaked and dripping. That smell from the door, the hall’s full of it. The men struggle between their pairs of—helpers, as we called them. Cries, all of that tumult. Scraping feet. Now there’s that unrelievedly plain metal door in front of him. He looks down and smells that puddle spreading out from under the door into the hall and he recoils from it. He wants that his legs would shrivel and curl up to his body in the air rather than touch his feet to it. And the smell is right up in his hood.
When that door opens, there is only the empty space between him and the gallows. All there is is that. The yard is empty. The gallows, spattered. The chill basket. It must be shattering cold. His knees buckle and his helpers hold him up. When that board indents the fabric of his trouser knees he recoils again without a sound. Or with not more than that strangled sound. They lay him down. They strap him there and stand away. He lies there on that board, his head turned on his cheek.
And now she glides across his path. She’s tall and willowy, wears that loose, rough black thing. She’s stately and calm, and he watches her shadow loom past him and he convulses, makes sounds. He struggles on that thirsty plank. She leans over him with the dreamy eyes and lightly checks his bonds with lean fingers. He won’t hear the breath that darts swiftly in and out of her nose.
With a slam he is rammed forward, his head between the rails. His scream is all but lost in his mask. He is looking down through the mask into the sop basket. A balance is tipped—this is the part no one is ever told about—and the board spins him around face up and he sees at once that livid line and her, looming over with that well-eyed look. He sees her pull that lever. He sees the line streak down with a loud rattle.
A searing jolt. A blur. No sensation. One event. Frayed holes in the hood. The rim of the basket. That smell. Taste of blood. The light all seeps away.
She would always fling her arm around his shoulders the moment after it happened, pull that body back to keep the blade from spraying blood everywhere. Always listened eagerly then for that last exhalation of breath from the viscous stump. Then she stands back, and those two who brought him take the parts away quickly. Stuff blubbers out the cut neck, that always looked like a stuck pigskin, or wine skin, is that what I mean? The head is heavier than it looks. She takes it by the bottom of the hood, that’s a bag now. It doesn’t occur to her that she has blood on her gown until it cools; that’s body temperature when that gets on. As you would expect.
And that’s how they got her, during the fighting, when many were brought there to be executed. She was at it all day. At night she sharpened. On and on. She started to tell them to hurry up, and crowded them together. All decorum went. For the first time, she became sloppy. She stayed, panting, by the lever. Then she climbs on that slick plank and reaches for the lever. Giggling. She was stretching her neck across that groove and groping for the lever. Stretching it out and stretching and stretching, giggling inanely. That’s when they replaced her. She went to the madhouse that day, or soon.
After that, she wandered. Where is she now? (She shrugged.)
I go on eavesdropping after that, but my heart isn’t in it. I don’t like to listen to her any more. But, inside me, my heart is calm. Unaccountably calm. Wrongly calm. I’m remembering the fruit frozen on the trees back home; maybe there will be a thaw for me, but what will thaw me? I’m afraid of what it will take.
*
The loonies are beaming down at me from the upper deck as I stagger mindlessly to the rail in unsettling morning light. Not seasick, but I had a bad night.
“Did you enjoy the night air?”
“Refreshing, wasn’t it?”
Last night, after I’d spent a full day of copying his damned papers, Makemin kept me up late telling me all about the exact nature of the enemy and their tactics and whatnot, all for the record he presumes to us
e me for, until my head spun. Despite my fatigue, I had a headache coming on and I thought a wash might make me refreshed enough to sleep.
I remember starting ... dimmer and dimmer in a delirious fatigue ... and then nothing.
My throat now being completely closed, I can only make my way forward again in ignominy, with mockery at my back.
...
I see myself standing in the two hoops of my trousers on the floor, the top of my head foremost in my sight. I sink down into the boat like a ghost, until I’m through the hull and down in the water. I can feel a trivial bump as I penetrate the wood, and now I’m wafting with the errant, sluggish movements of the current, looking out into the dark fathoms. There are breasts beneath the waves, and ribbons of milk slipped in the brine, or so I think—I don’t see them. Maybe a web of milk, so thin I miss it in the gloom, breaks over my face; I scent milk, and the taste appears on my palate anyway, not strong. She and I are walking down the hall.
The cloister is one section copied again and again. At the block, which overlooks a starry atrium, she is leaning thoughtfully on her elbow. I see her from a distance, and approach her reluctantly. I’d rather be alone, but the block is the only place I can go, even the spot I occupy right now is impossible, so I join her and she either doesn’t notice me or accepts my presence there without any expression.
The fountain in the atrium is dry. The light in the hall is banded by strips of shadow from the stone lintels over our heads, and so her face pulses in and out of the dark, both soft in the depths. That and her hair drifts in the current and keeps falling past her face, interrupting my view. I hang on her every word, my attention riveted to her unfamiliar features. She avoids my gaze. The hall goes on and on without turning, like the same pair of doors, strictly opposite each other and both shut firm, copied over and over. There’s no current, but I have to force my way through heavy water. I’m not getting tired, because I don’t much feel my body, or perhaps because my attention is so entirely devoted to her, even though I am not able to follow what she says. I’m not following what she says. Her breasts brush the stone block as she turns to walk away, but the motion includes me and I know we are to walk together. The cloister has no end or turning that I can see. Only the same arches, striped dark and light, more dark than light, the same, one after another. She and I start walking down the flooded cloister, and while she talks talk I can’t follow, her voice is so muffled anyway, I wait and watch as her body walks in and out of the shade. I’m trying to get a glimpse of her nakedness entire, or nearly, which is hard to do. I slip my hand around a supple waist as smooth as air, but she doesn’t notice, or nothing changes, and this discourages me, so I’m no longer holding her waist anymore.
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