Following the ship’s wake, now something in your mind bursts upward like a bird startled from its cover, to where thick clots of vapor batter the glowing and heatless moon. Now you are dragging yourself painfully, but with the weird strength of your emaciated arms and clawlike hands, across a broken crust of chalk, perforated everywhere with little cones that emit plumes of acrid steam. The landscape is like a fractured mirror, and dusty fires shake out their rags from its crevasses, scattering dust and cinders like beaten rugs. You pass a number of boiling clay bogs, and a place where scalding tar gulps in a long gouge in the ground.
We drift hand in hand down from the balcony to the floor. The ceiling here is immensely high, and that and the walls are utterly dark. In the far distance ahead there is dim moonlight, falling from high above on to a jumble of big furniture, like pews and upended wardrobes. There are windows around here somewhere as well, above and just behind me I think, that shed a blue glow with strict edges on the floor, the muted and worn scarlet carpet, plain and paper thin, beneath our bare feet.
My eyes travel up her legs. Her head is silhouetted against a window with a sill higher off the ground than I am tall. We’re floating down to the floor. The water is dry and clear, with only a few grains hanging here and there. She leads me on to a suspended atrium where enormous halls converge. I think she speaks, without interruption; I hear her voice, but her words don’t occur in my ear, rather I quote them back to myself as though she were reciting something I once had memorized. All the halls are dark, except the one from which we emerge, where there is a little light, and the one we face, which, after a dark interval, is illuminated with a glowing mist like the light of the full moon, shining down from what I imagine is an opening in the roof. There is a round window above us, or nearly, and off to one side, and this spreads a milky blue fluorescence around the floor here. There’s a paper and glue smell, of bindings and dust, not much. The place is not in ruins.
She leads me, not especially urgently, to one of the capacitous tables, to set her bottom on the soft, brown wood. She has never once stopped her murmuring. The table is near one of this atrium’s corners, which seems like the corner of a smaller, more intimate room, grafted onto this austerely magnificent one. Bars of shadow seem to hide the incongruity, the actual seams, and in the obscurity I can dimly make out a conical dung pile there. It all seems very domestic; I do detect a faint, barnyard smell coming from it. She walks a few paces ahead of me, heading for one of the tables. Now she goes around the other side of the table, and, as she turns her back to me for the first time, I notice a letter printed near the base of her spine. What’s that doing there? She has another, by her shoulderblade.
From across the table, she talks to me with a businesslike, with a serious, look on her face. For a moment she seems to be spreading out a map on the table, but there is no map, and she has not leant over the table, or smoothed her hand across the thickly varnished wood. But her hand is all smeared with the brown varnish of the table. She’s just talking to me, and as she turns to something behind her, some piece of furniture I can’t really see except as a dark indistinctness, I notice a letter on one of her shoulderblades. It’s too small for me to identify which one it is, but that it’s a letter is completely obvious. Now I see she has letters all over, as neat as printing. They’re small cerifed letters. As I wonder a bit about this, she is retrieving something from the tall cabinet or lectern behind her, lifting her arms and arching her back for it as the water teases her hair around her shoulders. I think about getting closer, to have a look at the printing, but I don’t do it.
Just as you arrive at the lip of a crater you see a figure emerge from the pool of molten rock that fills it. The lava is hidden under a thick layer of fine grey ash, like the kind you knead in your palms here at its edge; the figure who emerges is someone you know, and who has already been speaking. You observe this figure walking along the brink, detestably talking without the slightest motion in his face; you know his whole body is a charred and brittle black mannikin. You are repelled by the heat of the melted rock, and by the stink of burning flesh this mannikin gives off; you must not be seen by this thing. You move carefully, but for all your strength you are awkward, and cannot move it seems at all without displacing tell-tale puffs of fine ash. Can it see? You were asked a question. You don’t know, but it, he, just barely a he, is coming for you now. He has seen you. You are struggling to escape—he has you in his arms—
She looks at me haughtily, a sabre in her left hand. The opal, the size of a hen’s egg, hanging from her throat, disappears in her bosom as she, having raised the weapon to shoulder height, sweeps her arm level, slowly across her body, until the tip of the blade points off to my right. I study the blade carefully, bending over the table so that its thick edge is like a bar across my thighs. I think she expects me to appraise it, and I find all sorts of information about it is coming up in my mind. I’m gauging its value; it’s old, and well-made.
She is asking me something, if I know her name. I tell her I don’t know it. She says tell me my name. Well, narrator? Give me a name.
I look up, and for a moment I can’t find her. I hear the scrape of her bare feet on the dry stone flags, my eyes follow the sound, and I see the silhouette of a lock or two of her hair drift across a shadow boundary into the light. She’s crouched in a corner, not far from me, facing me, and totally invisible in the dark. The corner is intimate, and seems too small to be the point of convergence for such massive walls and floors. It’s like the corner of someone’s parlour, or bed chamber, wedged into this larger structure. I can hear her catch her breath. She draws air in deeply, and then, after a long moment, lets it out again in a barely audible gush. Then another held breath, and another. I can hear a liquid, crinkling sound as well. There’s a protracted, trembling, faint, fluid sort of noise, like a foot being extracted exquisitely slowly from thick mud.
I draw aside the heavy arras and enter the corner. She is standing in a windowed alcove lined with a tapestry. A woven man with tan eyes behind her seems ready to lean forward out of the fabric and drag her back into it. One of the windows is ajar, and the wind it admits lightly brushes her hair and the lace at her neck. She turns as I come in, locking me down with a glare of astonishment, and disrecognition.
You’re the third person voice of fate, I tell her with certainty. She shakes her head, staring.
You struggle, and his body is tearing open, the brittle char is breaking up like densely packed snow, and the cooked and steaming entrails are dripping from his side, in fat, glistening white loops. You are shouting “Louce!” “Lou!” “Lulom!”—he is pressing his muttering lips to yours, and you burn and strangle, clawing wildly at him. He’s trying to put words in your mouth.
Low stands naked at the rear of the boat, soap suds clinging to his skin, his right arm raised but not rigid. It’s as though he were leaning it on an invisible bannister. Wind tousles his hair. The ship’s wake smoothes out to nothing.
In the distance, a white something bobs on the water asleep. It slobbers and mutters as it bobs up and down. Its slobberings wriggle through the water like black eels. In a vision no one present can see, the ocean turns to fluid mirror, like mirage, where it crashes over the white figure, the mirror froth rolls away across the surface of the water like mercury and Low’s outstretched hand draws the black saliva from the glistening antiseptic mouth of the sleeper to form elegant, calligraphic loops and ornate signatures of unreal sharpness on the reflecting surface. A down of phosphorescent ash spins from them as they move, forming glowing coils that sink into the black below the silver, whirring and snapping like whips. They seem to drag Low’s arm to and fro.
Who is narrating this?
Hear the companion writing their reciprocal dreams made. Read the companion voice that is prosaically called the powers of the air. Conjure with them the third person, to whom this is addressed. Address the third person with them. Do it all as sniffed by a dead arm, as seen by a silent mouth
, as heard by a stopped nose, as fingered by a deaf ear, as tasted by a blind eye, as undergone by a missing person nobody missed in the first place, and related by a ghost who somehow manages just about every time to persuade you that it presides over this switching operation between stories. Who is not dead and not alive, and who, the ghost, and this ghost was born a ghost not a living person, appears in Low when he does all its work for it, as the unknown knowledge of its name which remains hidden inside that knowledge, or as the owner’s tag, hidden deep in the fur, attached to that work. These things are everywhere, one is speaking now, and its speaking is a writhing on the floor, twisting its lithe, sleek body this way and that, on its back and on its belly, as hands try playfully to seize it. It gambols. The third person squirts and slips from those hands like a lathered cake of soap, squirms like a intestine, one admires the gleam of its lushly oiled fur. And all the while it squeals out its speeches, revealing to you what it is, or what that is, as it is as sniffed by a dead moth, as kissed by a silent guest, as heard by a stopped charm, as fingered by a deaf parson, as tasted by a blind rose, as seen by an eye that was most often finally a ghost, and undergone by a tear or a tear who somehow happens to preside over this switching operation, if only because it can persuade you this operation happens between stories.
Pink light crimps the horizon, and there’s a sudden wind. The white figure wakes and plunges out of sight. Low’s arm drops. Still asleep, he walks to his bunk and pulls the sheet over his head. The third person cries out in terror at the sight of this sheeted form.
*
We’d left in a hurry, with many more on board than would normally be permitted, so we find ourselves inadequately supplied. I have to pick my way from one side of the boat to another, as the decks are jammed with sprawling madmen and soldiers with visors down on their noses. They get to rest; I have to copy. Nikhinoch pertly informs me we are making for Uithui, already visible a low broad mound in the indigo shade by the horizon, there to replenish our water reserves and lay in fresh and more copious food.
Thrushchurl is sitting with the loonies, Jil Punkinflake is puppy-dogging after Saskia, and Silichieh labors nearly every waking moment below decks, putting the forward batteries into better working order.
Makemin’s fanaticism is nothing like Saskia’s. She is a true believer; her way of seeing things is so abstract it’s frightening. To her way of thinking, the other Yesegs, who simply remained loyal to Tewsetonta, as anyone would have, are traitors whose mere existence is an unbearable affront to her personally. Makemin strikes me as a man incensed to ruthlessness by a neverending succession of frustrations, disappointments, and thwarted ambitions. An intense, chronic irritability never quits him, and for all his collectedness and self-possession he nearly always seems only a step or two short of desperation. These are the people in command here.
In the mess ... I take in a traditional slogan, printed on a banner that sways a little on the wall. “I’m not hungry!” It refers to an old melodrama; someone must have dragged me off to see it when I was still at the orphanage. One of the asylum soldiers sits in the corner diagonal to me. He is neatly dressed in civilian clothes, with an incongruous metal gorget and a broken-butt pistol shoved in the band of a broad belt around his hips. His presence is discouraging, and I saunter dejectedly from the mess and back to my uninviting bunk. I have to take advantage of this brief respite from Makemin’s papers.
Lying there, again I feel stifling warmth, just this side of making me break into a sweat. My hand drops to the floor, and brushes there a litter of books. I take one up ...
... the book slinks to the floor from fingers. I let my eyelids droop, and fantasize a warm round-shaped lizard or dragon, with a body like marzipan ... peach yellow and flame orange and dusted all over with powdered sugar, it slithers happily along a bank of fire grooved into a green mountain ... The disaster is that the end has already happened, and we have survived it, no one knows when or what it was, there was no event—over time, the world ended, and yet here we all are with no world.
*
The island is about ten hands’ breadths wide now. I’m on deck, watching it grow; I smell petals, and moist green, in with the scent of fermenting brine and creosote from the ship.
Now my eye is drawn to something in the water, that’s white but not brilliant, not a flash of reflected sun, and no piece of foam—and from where, when all is so dim and still? It’s only just beneath the surface—it rises and falls in place with the current. And now it’s moving, suddenly and deliberately, in a straight line, diverging sharply with our course, going off to my left, whatever that is—starboard I suppose. It’s alive—is it getting itself away from us? I scan the approaching beach. A dark meltingness by the tops of the trees there at the edge of the beach, at the corner of the island. Now it’s gone. I peer ... and there it is again. Black smoke. I stop Nikhinoch, who is smartly trucking to and fro as usual—he screws up his face and squints out past the tip of my pointing index finger through his glasses. He starts, and at once we are both, for some reason both, going to Makemin. He peers through his goggles—
“I see ships. More than one. On the far side,” he says, turning to climb to the bridge.
I notice we are shifting course. Now the island, which had been approaching us a bit to the right, port?, is creeping to the center of the horizon ... now to the left of us. But we are not approaching—we must be going around to the far side ...
Here the shore is pinched out into a short tongue protruding into the ocean and as the trees that line it thin out our motion reveals a small bay with two steam launches at anchor not far apart. One’s half our size, the other slightly smaller.
Saskia bellows at sight of them and our prow immediately swings hard upon their direction. Smaller steam launch is the farther of the two, and as we round on the bay its stacks gush smoke and it backs water. The other ship is slower getting started. Makemin gives my shoulder a squeeze and turns his attention to the other sharpshooters, arraying them with gestures along the railings in those places where the rail is solid. He clearly wants me by him, watching for posterity. The men charge the rail actually colliding with it guns already level, eyes straining down the barrels. They’ve been drilled to death for this kind of thing. Looking down I can see Silichieh through the open bow hatches, stripped to the waist and covered with grease he is loading the forward batteries with amazing speed. Thrushchurl above him on deck, holding the gun site; it’s a brass thing like a tube with a wire across the glass. Thrushchurl’s vision is keen, and I suppose they know it.
The bigger steamer wallows around away from us and a few puffs of smoke dash off on the wind as the guns on its decks fire on us. I hear a sharp crack somewhere behind me. Saskia is cursing them—her voice shakes the wheelhouse like a trapped animal. The loonies are capering and running from one end of the boat to another, except where the soldiers beat them and drive them back. Nikhinoch is trying to put up a barrier to cordon off the sharpshooters’ area, where I am.
Thrushchurl sings out in a strange voice and the forward batteries explode, shaking the boat. I clap my hands to my ears and fall down, but I don’t miss the big steamer buckling up the middle and then our ship lunges and a sound slaps my face, the water around the bow thrashes and the blow rips the big steamer’s sides and topples its stacks toward the water. Makemin puts his goggles on his eyes and then ratchets down his visor sights, the next moment, he gives the shooters the command to open fire. I see blackbirds drop from the rails, another eruption that knocks me back to the deck so that I stay there—the big steamer is listing hard to one side exposing the hull below its waterline. Our bow is heavily grinding out to sea again, that’s to port. Figures race along the beach and bound into the tree line. The sharpshooters are still firing and I see some dark figures drop on the sand, flop half in the bushes or half in the surf. The men are crushing themselves against the rails to get their guns closer. I see Saskia leaning out of the wheelhouse emptying her pistol at the shore—h
er mouth is pulled back but her lips are slack, her eyes staring and blank. A figure on the shore is running to and fro uncertainly and flings up its hands. Saskia lowers her arm and shoots it. Even from here I can see the tuft fly from its head before it sinks backward to bloody the sand. It seems impossible she could have hit him from so far away. They’re all shooting wildly at the beach like they must unburden themselves of the mercurial killing power that they were charged with, and until then, no real words, spoken or unspoken. Only grunts and curses.
We are passing the big steamer—I can hear it groan as the timbers split, it is breaking in half. Cries of anguish rise from its flooding decks, faces sink into the sea.
Distant horns are audible now the shooters have stopped. Makemin drags me with him as he makes his way angrily up to the wheelhouse. Saskia is barking insults and random commands to an empty bridge.
“Make for their station!” he points to the island, to a pale regularity dimly visible through the trees. “Before they man their batteries!”
The Narrator Page 15