The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  Again Thrushchurl smiles. He shakes his head admiringly, and gasps a little.

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No,” Thrushchurl looks disappointed. “I don’t feel he could speak.”

  *

  The giant, the slovenly glutton who has his straw stuck down into my chest, sucks idly at me with a rattle in the tube, and my whole body is weighted down like under a lead blanket. He swings his tassles back from his head; he has a mouth of fishhook teeth in swollen satiny gums, an unearthly inhuman voice, the haunting, disembodied third-person talk that never stops slobbering. “The book of life.” It always needs an avenue like that.

  He eyes me sadly and explains, with hopeless malice, “This isn’t my true language, or even the language I’m speaking to you now, you know. My real language is fo di spurdzem mo mon fi litourn ap—”

  And where I had lain paralyzed all this time now I struggle wildly to escape this gibbering, as if it were the quintessence of all horrors, all my strength rising in me only to be consumed instantly ...

  A blizzard—snow falls from my face like soap bubbles, as though I were fizzing away—and everything screams memory memory at me, but it’s as though memory doesn’t work unless it’s all in one piece, so that one memory depends on all the others like a house of cards. This one, now, doesn’t. This is somebody else’s memory—it is someone else’s memory of being me.

  The snow coils and bounces as it falls, the whole mass rippling gelatinously in a beautiful, sourceless snowlight. One—not me exactly—imagines a snow world saturated with limpid lightsyrup and light shining through light. Imperturbable trees in a swarm of light shed by a milky low sky. Buildings seen from the train emerge and vanish in intensely calm, shimmering white ... in a silent activity I’m being hollowed out. It’s a village. Silhouettes, anonymous and uniform, stagger by the walls, stiff arms swinging in streets the snow has erased. I wake and escape through the door into the dim day; cross to the rail, and see a patch of slush, or some white thing, on the waves.

  This brutal sleep pushes everything else aside, bullying me with its demands. A soul in this body, or is there only body? Once a crisis, but now that I’m older, these two ideas lie locked together in an iron sleep. Back in my bunk I can’t get away from the heat of my pillow and my blanket, and I can’t tolerate the touch of the air. I shake out of my skin and back into the darkness, close, hot-and-stifling. I hear the dark; it drones at me.

  Alarms jangle me awake even though I wasn’t asleep and I stagger again to the door. Soldiers streak this way and that, crane over the railing and then dash off frantically. A woman I don’t know pulls me from the doorway and propels me a little along the wall, saying “Come on.”

  Her level voice kicks away the last drugs of sleep—“My medic’s bag—” I mumble, rushing back for it.

  She’s gone when I return, and I proceed in the direction she took. Through the alarm I hear faint thuds and now my heart is pounding. I come round the paddle wheel cowling and out to the foredeck—a warship in the distance. Crash of spray as a ball gouges the water between us.

  I look up. Cold air, white fog, white dark sky, dark and bright at once. Soldiers near to me pointing and shouting in alarm—past their pointing fingers spots are moving deliberately on the horizon. Two far off and one in the middle distance and we’re heading nearly straight into them. Angling away from us, a steel-flanked cruiser larger than our ship is trying to bring its broadside to bear. Its outlines shiver a moment and now crashing erupts on all sides, gouts of foam as the sea face is mauled by their shot, rags of spray all over, but no jar, no hitting. I dash for the steps trying to find my usual refuge with Makemin, running half doubled over—as I climb, a flapping mass flies past the top of my head arcing down over the side. Saskia strikes the water feet-first and sinks only as far as her waist. She kicks her feet vigorously and begins to rise and move weirdly along the surface as I look down on her from nearly over her head. She has on her Yeseg legbands, and she bounds sideways across the water in a long arc, swinging her out toward the nearest enemy ship.

  A couple of soldiers are trying to force or unhinge the hatch to the wheelhouse, and another looks speculatively around to its front windows, meditating an attempt to climb in? Saskia has a loyal following among the former asylum inmates; she’s set one of them at the helm, and he has locked and wedged all the hatches, sealing himself in. He stands singing and cackling gaily as we streak in toward the enemy ships, cannonballs splattering all around. Every now and then he seizes hold of the clapper belonging to the brass bell that hangs near the wheel, jangling it and screeching. A ball rips the froth within ten feet of the bow on our side and even Makemin jerks. I see Nardac scramble crabwise from her bed, crawling and keeping the weight off her injured leg, to duck into the mess.

  The hatch gives way. The mad helmsman spins, a knife in his hand, his eyes glassy, his mouth a line. He looks back and forth—a thud I can feel in my gut and the boat wallows from side to side.

  Makemin shouts, “Bring us around!”

  Saskia’s man steers us hard on the enemy. From the window I see Saskia herself darting across the water. The blackbirds are shooting at her. She zig-zags with astounding speed and in the next moment is right alongside them. She whirls around toward the rear of the boat, gesticulating wildly, then suddenly hurtles back toward us in fantastic back and forth curves, her legs pumping. Blackbirds on the deck behind her—sharpshooters’ guns crackle from our upper decks. I see silent bodies drop on the distant enemy ship. Then an eruption in the back of the ship, and a second and third—grenades she’d thrown. She’s halfway back now, and in all the grey and blue and tossing white froth there is a shock of livid red, fire snickering up from the battered rear deck of the enemy ship. Something whips down in a short arc and the collision throws me from my feet—I grab the wall. I scuttle away from the window. Loony at the wheel is jumping up and down hooting and laughing and ringing the bell. I still haven’t heard the forward battery. A rattle on the roof, Saskia drops in through the broken hatch slopping with water, is nearly flung aside as another jolt bats us in a roll to port. She strides haggardly to the helm and peels her man off of it—

  “Tell them to get stoking down there!” she rumbles, her voice tired, body sopping.

  Another bang—this one hard, I can hear splintering. I cower by the floor, clutching at a pipe in the wall.

  Makemin’s face in mine—“Get down to the battery!”

  I know I’m looking at him as though he’d asked me my favorite dance, but I go, scrambling down the steps and the boat that had been so steadily solid yaws freakishly under me. Panicked faces and the leers of the madmen screeching imprecations from the deck. Silichieh’s head and shoulders plunged into the gun truss or whatever it is—an X-shaped brace with a gun at each extremity and a pivot thing in the middle and that’s what seems to need work at the moment. He pulls his head out to switch tools, sees me, and tells me to hand him this and that. The ship jerks violently to the side as though it weighed nothing and I hear his head knock on the metal. He curses. I help him work. Suddenly he snaps the compartment closed and races past me.

  “Help!” he says, his breath fast, his eyes glassy.

  We’re loading shells into the gun. I’m to toss the shells to him from the box they come in and he’ll put them in and shoot the gun. He jams two lumps of wax in his ears and hands me a pair—I do the same. There’s some business with a lever and a kind of trolley-cart that carries the shells over to him and I have to pull them down by hand from the cart, keep the next cart ready etc. The guns are loaded, and he springs up on the X his legs spreadeagled standing on the guns, back bent, aiming somehow. The barrel ends protrude from the deck, but we can’t see anything outside the hold—a targetter has to direct the fire from above. Thrushchurl is up there, not looking especially alarmed, staring through the site, and Silichieh is breathing with his whole body, his thick arms hold him in place over his head as the boat rocks. Another stiff one and t
he ship groans loudly, feels like it’s listing back.

  Thrushchurl sings something and Silichieh instantly yanks a lever firing the first gun—the crash deafens me my ears ringing. He is whirling wheels and adjusting his aim frantically, his face drawn, grinning, his movements electric—the second gun fires, then the third—I am clutching my ears—but I remember to ready the next shells. He fires all four guns, then reloads all like lightning and pulls the one trigger that will set them all off at once, the chamber dips—like a demon Silichieh is laughing reloading and firing all four guns at once again and again, standing right in the crossing of the X as they go off and shunting back with them as they fire.

  *

  ... He’s sitting with his legs out, his belly rolling in and out, his eyes staring, his back to the greasy base of the smouldering guns. I stagger out, shaking my head. There’s cavorting on deck. Feet dance among motionless human forms. The enemy ship is a clot of flames and smoke. I’m splashed with brine as I pass the men dumping buckets to cool the Bremml guns. Numbly I respond as I am waved over to help an eviscerated man who dies under my hands. His eyes are white as snow, in a face the color of grey felt. A few other injuries to see to. I can hear again, mostly. Overhead our stepping grasshopper legs are still unscathed, and lunge and soar driving us forward at our top speed. Saskia is gripping the wheel, her face ashen, her mouth tight, confronting Makemin who lours down at her. She steps toward him raising her fist and he seizes her under the arms and shakes her so hard her helmet flies off.

  “We can’t fight them all! at! once!” he roars.

  The other two ships are much closer now—it’s not over—they’re coming on with a speed that’s terrible to see, and both of them warships. Already they’ve begun firing their bow guns at us.

  Makemin thrusts her back, and she turns angrily to the wheel, gripping it so tightly I can hear the wood creak in her hands. Her head is down.

  “They will die some day,” I hear her say in a bitter undertone. Makemin stands in the middle of the bridge like a post.

  “We aren’t fast enough,” Jil Punkinflake says—I hadn’t noticed him. He’s been hiding by the other hatch, and watches out through a loophole toward the aft end of the ship.

  We all turn our heads at once to him, and I think we all realize he’s right at the same time. No sound now but the groaning of our engines, and the distant, irregular but constant effusions of the gaining guns behind.

  “There’s that fog bank over there ...” Thrushchurl says, softly through his grin. He points with his long duelling-pistol of a hand.

  Again all our heads turn—a fogbank ahead and to port, with a black thread underlining it. I feel something nameless and freezing blanket my face and front like a chilled mold. This is a fear utterly unlike the fear of battle that I’ve been getting used to not getting used to. Makemin takes one step forward—

  “We’ll make for it.”

  Saskia angles the ship into the bank. I watch, paralyzed, as the point of our bow turns, and that black underline begins steadily to approach, to broaden, to extend toward us.

  The fog closes around us with a flap. It’s dense and warm, with a heady, iron smell, nothing like the sea. We churn forward, and in the greater silence of the fog, the reports of the enemy guns are muffled.

  “There,” Thrushchurl says, starting forward suddenly and pointing again, his face rapt, “Look there!”

  I would have thought it was a thunderhead sweeping low to the water if I hadn’t seen it before. Through sheets of vapor my eye discerns the faint silhouette of a dome the size of an island, moving in the fog. It is going across our course.

  “Call to it ...” Thrushchurl murmurs.

  Nikhinoch is in the hatch, his eyes enormous in his glasses.

  “It’s veering toward us,” he says flatly.

  “Turn,” Makemin says in the same tone in the same instant and Saskia’s turning is simultaneous. The fog before the bow lightens; we are turning out of the bank.

  The fog thins. The engines are still pumping all out, though the planks of the decks are smoking. I stare down the length of the ship. A round blackness is there in the fog behind us, and suddenly I’m dizzy ... I have to get back inside, step over the threshold stumbling, nearly falling, but Thrushchurl is there, my arm in his sinewy hand, holding me up. His breath is a little short, his grip slightly trembling, his grin wavering with billows of an overpowering feeling.

  A confusion of cannonfire from behind us. We emerge from the fog as the sun is setting, a brilliant silver scar opposite the cloud in our rear. There are no more enemy shots trailing after us. A ragged chuckle escapes slowly from Saskia’s unsmiling lips.

  “I told you they were going to die.”

  A voice is calling to me. It shouldn’t be so still that I could hear such a soft voice, calling out so quietly, but just at the moment things are truly still. I step onto the deck.

  A wall of water is coming. I can hear it absorbing all sound. I turn from it, with no feeling or thought at all.

  Halfway on the stairs to the upper decks I am slapped to the bulkhead churned up in darkness I spin and a great sucking indrawing pulls me back—air and light burst about me again as the water sluices away in recoil from our alien boat leaving me where I cling to the twisted handrails, a hacking in my throat like a hand chopping and chopping at my neck.

  The ships rocks and shouts out from everywhere. A hissing mass of infuriated water seethes up onto the deck again breaking its teeth against the metal and the deck—Tabliq Quibli’s drawn face flashes by in its suction his hand reaching for one of the railing’s slender posts and fails to grasp it I lunge through the railings and seize a fistful of his jacket yanking him back, watch his frantic hand snap tight on a bar and together we pull him onto the stairs and up toward the bridge as the next wave wells up from the lower deck to engulf us in its weight—we are buoyed up a moment, then hauled down. My body is half in the rails and the rail is cutting me in two. I can’t think for the racing along my head, the icy fingers of water raking my face—Thrushchurl’s long-wristed reach has me as the wave gathers itself in again and he pulls strenuously, helping Tabliq and I up to the bridge deck.

  Sea wrack and foam flock in the air around us up here. The sky is calm, but the sea around us is suddenly insane and the ship is wrenched and buffeted. A report like a cannon shot and I turn in time to see the mast break off and drop sickeningly overboard. We huddle together against the sealed bridge, bracing ourselves against the boxes welded to the deck and spray barks and sizzles at us from the brink and rampages on the steps we’d just escaped, but little of the water as yet can make it this high.

  The bridge is filled like a basin with seawater. Suddenly Saskia rears up out of the water—I can hear her hoarse and straining breath rasp deep in her chest. She plunges braving water and tilting unlevel boards beneath her feet throwing herself on the wheel and turning it wildly into the waves.

  The next blast of water throws us nearly sideways and Tabliq’s knee bats my solar plexus. We roll back as the water recedes and now as I gasp for breath I look down at black anger laced there with white steam—the next wave strides beneath us and the ship lurches revoltingly but with less violence; we are hurtling along now against the grain of the waves—Saskia will hold us there.

  The bow slashes open the waves like an axe and the shreds are bashing back against us on the upper deck. A wallop swats me against the bulkhead knocking my head angrily against the metal. I cry out, and gesture to Thrushchurl that we might try to get into the refuge of the wheelhouse. As the prow dips into the gulf between waves we drag ourselves over the sills and are immediately tossed to the rear of the compartment. Saskia has her feet planted forward and is holding the wheel braced there, snarling half-choked curses at the froth that belabors and bruits her to her face as she holds the bow into the ridges. The deck suddenly jerks to one side and I hear a cry near at hand—Jil Punkinflake is cowering with his dog in the corner, sobbing uncontrollably, his arm
s around the dog, who looks up plaintively at us. Thrushchurl moves at once to Jil Punkinflake, crossing the flooded bridge with apelike swings of the arm grabbing pipes and struts whatever will keep him. The ship pivots down into another trough.

  In the light flashing between tufts of flying water I see Jil Punkinflake has a bad gash in his forehead—I make my way over to Jil Punkinflake and lash my kerchief to his wound. He calms a bit more at my touch, but he is cold as ice and trembling. The ship bucks forward and I am flung headlong toward the bow, water rummaging in my eyes ears nose mouth—my outflung hand finds a purchase on a windowsill; I pull myself back into the air with gushing sinuses and streaked eyes.

  I am looking up and along the ship, aft. As my ears drain I hear explosions, shouts—I look for fire, smoke, wondering about the boiler. Makemin is up there, lashed with lengths of chain to the rail of the bridge deck. Below, I can see men roiling on the decks in confusion and some of them are making movements toward the lifeboats on that side.

  “Cowards! Cowards! Get away from there!”

  Shied to and fro by the motion of the ship, and rammed against the railing again and again, Makemin is screaming at them and blasting holes in the lifeboats with his pistol. My grip fails me—for a moment the water is in retreat and I am bizarrely weightless. I scamper back to the rear of the bridge and am forcing myself down between the radiator and the wall as the next blow pounds the ship ...

  *

  ... One by one, things gradually are falling, fall back into certain places. I am one of these things. The story will have first no person at all, and now a person is coming back.

  That I will start with the unhurried, the casual, pausing now and then to reflect or to collect itself, approach, of a visitor: a pain, which is drawing nearer by hasteless degrees.