The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  ...

  “She says she has seen no other soldiers here.”

  ...

  “She did not see the effect of the influence.”

  ...

  “The old men did not see the effect of the influence. No one who went to see came back to tell.”

  “What was mined here?” Makemin asks through me.

  The woman smiles loosely and holds up an arm bangled with bright gold, thick bracelets and engraved rings fretting her fingers and thumb.

  Makemin looks up as magenta grains appear in the fog. I see his thinking—sunset coming on, we’re safest camping in town. I am instructed to thank the woman for her information and to offer her some reward. She and the two men behind her are like a kind of trick picture, appearing to move but not moving at all.

  “She wants a gun.”

  Makemin calls to Nikhinoch, who goes and comes with a rifle. Makemin takes it, gives it to me, I give it to her. Her fingers brush mine lightly as she takes it, her eyes invariably on the gun. As we return to the column with our gratitude still hanging in the air her gaze remains with us like mist resting on the water.

  “Do you believe her?” I am asked.

  “Of course I do. They always use a particular inflection when they lie.”

  “I can’t say I see the use of that.”

  “Oh,” I sigh, “it’s conventional. You use it when you want to seem to be lying, and so then you can tell the truth.”

  The men abandon their resting postures and though they are tired I can see they are very interested in getting to safety, like Makemin. Descending with the path away from the house on the slope I feel oddly clearheaded as though my mind were a wiped-clean glass. We pass between two hills and into an exposed place. Its openness eyes us unnervingly. The grey ground is dimpled over with puddles that reflect the sky’s moving seams like a mirror pelt of milky spots. As we venture out onto it, like spirits answering an incantation the first buildings appear opposite us, looking silver and blue as pink radiance percolates down through the fog. As I walk, my eyes on these foggy buildings, I find I cannot make myself step in a puddle—no one can. I hear no splashes. To my right, ahead, I see an arch standing alone, two slender columns and a delicate span. There are many, maybe too many, lined up here in rows, as though someone wanted to make tunnels through the air. They are too attentive to us to use for cover.

  House coming up ahead. I feel a knock against my boot and there’s a twang of metal fleeing me on the ground—as I look down to see the rusted can I’ve kicked the house turns and disappears into the fog—I stop. There is no house in sight. Was it an animal? There are no animals as big as houses, not on land. Fog magnifies things.

  These structures are gathered here in isolation. We do not draw near to them but march instead between huge mounds of displaced earth. The light, or the air, is soft, grey shining through grey. Icing the odor of damp stone and the breath of the clay, a smell like onions. No nothing like onions—a chemical smell, like waterproofing chemicals or bookbinder’s glue, musty as old hair, but with something reeking in it that puckers my nose.

  Thrushchurl points. “The mines,” he says faintly.

  There’s a long shallow scar immensely chiselled into the ground. In one of its sides is a series of low arched openings in a canted wall extending away from us. Each opening is lined with stone. The rails for the ore carts glimmer unrusted in each arch, like bright-sided fish in a row of black wells. Before these openings a scurf of white powder, like wheat flour, lies tamped in crescents. The excavated floor otherwise is meticulously swept, unlittered and without so much as a single stone. Not even an irregularity or crease in the surface. The ore carts that ran on those rails are lined up neatly against the low far wall and the side facing the openings; their wheels still glint showing white strips of reflection. These points of light, the wheels and the ends of the rails in the openings, are the only intensities my eyes trace. Around the steel of the rails and the wheels a transparent light trembles like water.

  “Masks.”

  Hurriedly we pass the spot, and the town is not far beyond it, materializing building by building out of the fog, behind many lower mounds of earth, so that I am walking a cobbled street before I know it. Everything is made of tiny ash-colored bricks, like metal ingots. Dusk, and these black doorways and small-paned windows, one precise edge after another as we walk up the street. Houses and low-walled square yards, a shop on a corner. The street is bare, though many of the houses show doors fallen in flat and broken glass in the panes. I don’t feel sheltered by these buildings, they have only added their dead stares to the dead stare that might as well be the fog, all around.

  From somewhere above me and to the right a sound like the glass chimes that used to hang from the eaves of the old narrator’s house, and something else, like the noise of coins poured out spattering in a heap. It whirrs and peters out almost at once; an alarm phantom.

  We are to break up and take shelter in the houses, as though the pretext of our being soldiers were abandoned. My fingers reach out and touch a piece of metal that has been welded to a window frame, as a patch or crude decoration maybe. Unlike the frame, this metal is unrusted; I brush irregularities on the surface and, bending near, I see stamped there characters I know are ancient. I touch the metal again, thinking this was made by human hands since turned to dust, before the Limiters. In the metal or in the fingers I feel that age feebly answering my thought; it stirs, then sinks too quickly away again.

  Black doorway before me and I have to force myself to cross the threshold. But I am stupid and weary, not my legs they never tire, but my mind is too tired to sleep but then I will. I enter, my feet scraping loudly on the floor, and lie down not far from the door. My gaze wanders out over these tiny, carefully laid tiles, leaves and fishes; I wonder about the hands that laid them, what a waste now. Thrushchurl tosses and lifts his matted head looking for mice. A wind I don’t feel makes the metal casement creak, the window sways. I close my eyes and feel a familiar rushing sensation, like canting forward down a steep hill, just begin to.

  Now I am asleep. My breast rises and falls, pulling and tossing little mouthfulls of this spellbound air. My face has slackened, and the night’s lustre confuses my face and makes it a corpse’s—if I could see myself how horrifying I would find this sight, I look like someone who’s been broken on the rack.

  The sound of my breath, stealing in and out of my empty nose, is the same breath going over itself without stifling me—but I do sink a little each time—the breast falls deeper, rises lower; not dying away, but almost sinking into the ground. What I am is seeping up like wisps of vapor—remember placing drops of alcohol on small pieces of ice, watch, the viscous steam ooze from the alcohol bead ashen with frost and just so the essence of me climbs in a suppressed breath from snow white writings and flows among the marks.

  You are made of the strongest stuff, icy matter and black ichor, and as a follower you are always the first to arrive. You were summoned to be an eyewitness, but in being summoned you were cut off from the underworld that is the only place you actually can live in, that allows you to enter any place and see any scene. Some witnesses are called to see and testify, and others to be watched and kept, although it’s not always only the one way or the other.

  Now he’s asleep—draw near—your life is in him—draw on it, with rootlike fingers outstretched, and the wrenched crescent of your sickle mouth slopping ink down a scored face.

  A hand on my shoulder wakes me and I gaze madly up into the lieutenant’s quizzical face, sallow and blue in the dark.

  “It’s only me,” he says a little irritably, some sleep still in his voice. “We’re on duty now.”

  No Thrushchurl there on the floor as I collect myself—where has he gone?

  Back out into seeping chill, soft crush of our feet on the clay between the houses. The lieutenant seems to know everything, leads me to a thin track that runs along a broad river of clear water lined with streamin
g, almost glowing fronds of green. Despite their luxurious growth I can still make out the rows; the only plants that grow around here grow underwater, and these were cultivated. The current is swift and lays flat the vines, but the riled surface is silent. Likewise we are silent, baffled in sleep and fog.

  Our path takes us through an enormous brick building with empty arches and a vast floor of tamped clay. The roof has vanished without a trace, if there ever was one, but the fog respects the walls and remains above them. These bricks are red, and of the usual size. The place feels imported. The lieutenant looks around avidly, but he and I both are awkward and nearly stagger against each other so that I can make out the sparse bristles on his cheek, the little circular scar on his forehead. He chuckles a little.

  “How stupid we are,” he exclaims softly, and yawns so that I can hear his jaw creak.

  We emerge on the other side of the building, the lieutenant curves back toward Cuttquisqui, and something white drags itself out the mouth of the second mine shaft there in the distance. It pulls its bulk on long spindly arms, stops, straightens its arms pushing its shoulders and rearing head up. Far-away black eyes stare at us. It holds this posture as it sinks into the ground no more rapidly than a candle burns down. It tilts back, so that its face is the last of it to disappear.

  I can’t see the lieutenant’s face. He is not moving, looking back toward town, and he sounds like he’s choking. I take a step toward him, and he swallows and says, “Is it gone?”

  I look unnecessarily.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did it go—into the mine?”

  “Yes.”

  He pauses. Perhaps he turned away after it started to sink.

  “Let’s get back,” he says.

  Back among the brick houses, the small-paned windows swing just a little in the fog.

  *

  Yours are the eyes I see open wide. Nothing in these images of you touches me until the moment I glimpse you from the side and a bit behind, and see a little fold under your chin; that melts my heart. I hear my voice speak before I know it is my rolled jacket whose folds my eyes are searching, “How do you feed stone fishes?”

  Thrushchurl rubs his head, sitting up grinning as always. The long stringy hair he keeps under his top hat is pressed into two mats that sweep back from the peak of his high, narrow brow.

  We sit gloomily in the street, straggling in and out of buildings, forking food out of cans. The light here is silver, haggard as rain and retarded by the fog. I join Thrushchurl as he slips into a narrow alley. He stands himself on top of a sizeable rock and gazes off toward the mines.

  “They’re so still,” he says. But everything here is still.

  Makemin stands with the Clappers around him, conjuring us to gather and hear his orders. This is not something I am eager to do. The loonies are there already—they seem cowed, and dislike to leave Makemin’s vicinity. They sit together in rows, looking around with mouths open and slumping eyelids. The Clappers’ tattoo struggles to make itself audible in the muffling air, and the rhythm begins to click and patter, its regularity to break.

  Only now, as they start to their feet, do I realize that it’s bullets that click and patter around us. I turn and push Thrushchurl into the nearest doorway with both my hands on his broad flat chest. He turns suddenly and plucks at the latch, teasing it with his fingers, his other hand flat on the calloused wood, and then the door subsides and we are covered—I hear the bangs against the wall. Do I go to the window?

  Thrushchurl fingers the air, saying “It won’t last long.”

  My thoughts are all out of order; I numbly ask my eyes on the light from the window to restore me. The banging has stopped, come and gone like a summer shower down in the valley. I turn to the open door. Voices in the street, men emerging from cover.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  “I didn’t,” he says, going out into the street.

  They hit one of the loonies, who had generally needed someone to lead him by the hand and had not had that someone just then, when the shooting began.

  Makemin gathers us in a few buildings at one end of town, where the land rises. We can’t all fit inside one. I am present when the scouts report signs of the enemy moving back and forth on a spur of high land thrust out from the foothills and overlooking the town. Twice I hear the ping of bullets again, and now I see, in the fog, a blur here or there, that flits from rock to rock, or sways as light as a ghost swinging to and fro, guns banging far away ... Saskia wants to go after them—Makemin won’t hear of it in this fog. He takes my arm and tells me he is suspicious, he has intuitions, and doesn’t wait to see me nodding obediently. As the afternoon comes on, and there’s been some time with no shooting, the scouts go out again. Signs the soldiers have withdrawn—dusk is coming. We stay together in the houses until darkness falls, and leave our lamps unlit. We crane our ears into the silence, knowing the enemy is there in the dark and the fog, hidden in the rocks, high over us.

  *

  On patrol that night, again with the lieutenant. We fall in step with few words, following a street on the thin town’s thin edge. The houses loom larger than they are.

  He’s looking away from me, at the windows we pass on his side.

  “Any more riddles?” I ask.

  “What?” he turns. “No,” he smiles faintly, looking away distracted.

  I can go on walking these streets of fog for eternity. I look at the lieutenant, so when I hear the distant snap from above, when he stops and I hear him abruptly make that soft, sad “oh” as though he’d just blundered gently into something in the dark, I also see: his head dips, his face splits, his mandible swings wildly from his head on a strip of ligament, like a helmet’s loose chin strap, and blood cascades down his uniform to the ground. His feet take two little steps to the side, in the direction of the force, toward me, his body shudders and with it the jaw hanging by a scrap of left cheek, and now he makes and indescribable sound his eyes starting from their sockets, raising hands around a wound he dare not touch. Flinging out his arms he disappears into the house to his right.

  I call and run after him—his shadow before me arms flailing, jaw swinging, the shape of the doorway as it runs feet loud on planks. A raw voice whoops out from the cavity, flying back to me from every wall in the dark as I’ve lost sight of him, the voice riots from everywhere as though the night were belching out its entrails.

  A crash of water directs me and in a moment I am outside again, and there is agitation, a writhing black thing crosses the river away from me.

  “Come back!” I stand on the bank. Where do I go?

  Not even a streak in the water shows where he has been. I run in the dark, following the water’s edge; here a gravel mound spans the flow and I can ford across. My splashing legs make a great noise in the dark. I climb the opposite bank peering in all directions. The bank levels then swings up again. Moving from one boulder to another I gain height, hoping to find a good place to stop and look around. The slope is fractured ahead of me—a path. I head toward it.

  I stop. These are the heights, where the enemy is. Dropping to a crouch I start dithering sideways below the level of the path, kicking down thick earth but not too noisily. This is a kind of spontaneous compromise between going on and going back—I think in confusion I will arc down toward the river, pausing along the flattened apex at intervals to search for the lieutenant. The path should be avoided, but it seems to draw me, and all the obstacles displaced to clear it now lie in my way. A rocky space like an ingrown wart comes up to me, and, still defying the path, I begin working my way down in among the rocks, holding on with hands and feet. It’s important to keep an eye on the path; it wants to trip me up, but it is the only landmark I have to gauge my height and position from here.

  I look up to the path, and see barrel and gun, hand and half-hidden face ... the enemy uniform ... the eye at the sight.

  The rain hides them from me. I have to walk with my head down. One goes ahead
of me on my right, the other behind at my left, about six feet away. The one behind me took my gun and my pack. I don’t like the disembodied, light feeling that being disburdened gives me. I’m afraid, and there is no ballast of gear to hold. The path is satisfied, its personality is gone.

  I don’t want to move my head, let the one behind me know I keep glancing about me, and at the one before me. A filled black uniform shiny with rain, a pale hand waving by the left hip. They are taking me toward the heights. Stuck in a vice I can only stare helplessly at my profuse and hasty thoughts none of them any good, they’re only making me crazy with the rain driving down on top of me. Will I panic? A sure way to die, how wise. How can such inane thoughts be possible now?

  They conduct me between two large boulders as the path begins to curve around to the high place overlooking the one end of the town. I see a few tents bowed by the water, and the rags and ends of many others there; the camp is littered with trash. Enemy soldiers look up from their shooting places among the rocks, where most of them lie flat under grey sheets. Rain is gathering in a broad ribbon, widening to sheathe the end of the path before frothing over the edge and down the slope through a rough, fresh notch in the rim. The soil is crumbling as the water saws away at it. A bit of surprise keeps the fear from flashing too strongly over me as we come into camp—there are no more than a dozen or so of them. The rest have gone—I can see their tracks, the flat grooves the cartwheels left now bubbling with rain. These skirmishers remain to hold us down and convince us the enemy are massed on the heights, while the bulk of their number are already on their way and are now between Vscriathjadze and us.

  Inside a spacious tent the rain has made into a drum, a man lies groaning on a cot. One of my guards talks to me and points at the man. He turns and puts my pack on table, sifting roughly through its contents. After a hasty inspection, he pulls out the sharper implements then shoves the pack into my hands and points to the wounded man. I don’t want to have to put up with his injuries or his weary suffering any more than they do; I set to work at once.