Later, I see Saskia stride deliberate and cool among them, everywhere extinguishing life with her sword.
*
The outskirts of the city and the heights are blanketed with flies; their buzzing is so loud it can be heard in the harbor. Looking up from the streets I can see, through the buildings, the bodies on the slopes. The slopes look as though they’ve been daubed with tar, so much blood is there. I can’t find a clean spot.
The Edek found me, dragged me to my feet and glared my will out of me, brought me back to the camp. From the city come monotonous bells, four notes, four lower notes, one of the first and one of the second twice, then a final low note before resuming again from the beginning, all the same lengths and intervals, endlessly repeated. To their noise I saw Saskia returning, so weary she barely could walk in a straight line, so drenched in blood that only the whites of her eyes broke the red that covered her.
I hear raised voices sing out in Yeseg. They praise Saskia’s beauty and ferocity.
An Edek’s gaze emerges from every dark spot, like a mask of insane hate, riveted to me, as though the hate were mine.
No reasoning with Makemin is possible—this wasn’t a mistake.
There is a bellowing bull-like insanity striding up and down here that I am desperate to escape. Its every step lands in blood, crushes out life. And I didn’t tell them Makemin is a liar and a murderer and I don’t know why. Did I accept the false idea that it was necessary, too?
I can only escape by sea. Looking down I see my hands are shaking. Now I feel the tremor. It’s going to shake me apart.
*
In these few hours I see the soldiers are changing and becoming hostile to the natives, brutal and domineering. That I know the language seems to make me a lesser being myself. They are becoming machines. I saw one of my unit dash a local man to the ground with the butt of his rifle to the face. The more heavy-handed my comrades get, the more deferential and even fawning the natives get. Will that last?
From the attendant, appointed by me, I learn Nardac had dragged herself from her bed during the fighting. He frankly admits he abandoned her and fled toward the harbor; he left her unconscious, near death, and on his return saw the traces—he points to the sheet trailing on the floor where she’d left it, the crablike drag marks written in the dust. How did she pull herself out through the window?
“Did you find her?” I ask.
The attendant waves at the doorway and a compact woman with red-brown skin steps in seriously from outside. He points to her, and she talks to me.
“I was up on the slopes gathering casings. I saw the woman crawl out toward the bodies. The flies began landing on her leg. More and more came, and covered her all over. She took no notice of them but kept on crawling to the battlefield. There were so many flies I couldn’t make out her arms and legs. Even more came, and she was like a hill of flies. But she kept going. Then I didn’t see her any more.”
I quit them and walk a little way to a place overlooking some of the battlefield. The flies still inundate it like a pitching mat, dense on the ground, undisturbed and busy in windless day under an egg shell blue sky, a phrase I’ve never understood.
I have heard that there are blue eggs, but I’ve never seen one.
Makemin even now is in his tent, still sending back punctual bulletins to his lawyers, full of meticulous instructions as to precisely how he wishes the most recent phases of the suit and the divorce to be conducted. I stare at him, through the mosquito screen. I think of the enormity this man, who now sits before me, efficiently writing documents, committed in my sight, and a spur of detestation drives itself into me.
Getting away from the battlefield I see Saskia lying asleep in her tent. The peace that hovers over her sleeping face is so strange, and the streaming, flat hair, like silky brown straw, that I’ve never seen undone from its braid, draping over her shoulder, and across the bed to the edge, looks somehow impossible.
Later I lie down and look into the fire.
I tremble with hatred.
I think the expression of grief that would come over my parents’ faces when they would get news of some crime, no matter who suffered it. They seemed to take a measure of shame on themselves whenever they were forecefully reminded of the base acts people are capable of. Burning shame is being forced on me now, by this situation and by that man, if that’s what he is. I wipe my eyes. He has to be killed.
Did I think that? If you hate him and kill him you—who am I to think that? If you hate him because you kill him he killed because he hated and you will be no better. That’s not true. He killed two men. He killed them with horrible coldness and all because of some scheme or other. If I kill him I will be doing what’s right because he committed an atrocious crime and he must suffer and die for what he did. It isn’t the same. But there’s no crime in war there’s no crime out here, crime is for nice places and nice people and if I believe that then this shame falls on me too.
But you’re no killer.
I’m no killer. I’m no killer. Who else? If not me?
If I could make Saskia believe he’d turned on our own, she’d think he was a traitor; she’d kill him for sure.
There I am, telling her, even convincing her. And she’s taking his side, telling me it was necessary; the men were losing heart and talk talk talk. She’s telling me I’m the traitor. Would the blackbirds have taken the town if—was Makemin right?
Would the blackbirds have killed everyone in the town, or anyone in the town, if they’d taken it? They wouldn’t. Why would they?
Who cares who owns what? What possession is like life? What possession is like life? I’m surrounded by idiots! All these crazy whores have sold their bodies and souls to the war.
I’m looking out at the fire.
The scene flashes in my mind again. I hear the man below call “help!”
I contract, and clutch my hands to my chest in terror. I hear that shattering cry for help and see Makemin’s cruel answer; that man cries out for my help now. What is humanity if isn’t help? It’s simple.
My mind clears and my body relaxes. When Makemin killed men who had called on him for help, he stopped being human. The back of his tent. His shadow. It’s all a fantasy. The back of his head is good enough for me if it was good enough for him I’m not interested in proving anything.
I don’t move. I don’t budge. I hear that cry for help fall away from me and the night swallows it.
*
Jil Punkinflake drinks his whiskey and sneezes.
Thrushchurl kneels, bends his cheek nearly to the floor, and rattles his long index finger in the mouse hole.
We are in the crypts whose backs line the cisterns. The two funeral men were drawn here reflexively and, as long as I stay underground, I find relief from the feeling of being watched. The light of our lamps, though dim, is warmer and more enlivening to colors than the washed out grey light of the day—I’m greedily looking around at the richly yellow fringes of the woven mats, and the paprika red poms that adorn the picture frames.
Night returns outside. I feel thunder through the stones. Jil Punkinflake slumps against oozing slate, a greedy, vicious light in his look.
I also have drunk, and I’m stupid, like a ghost, but disembodied simply as an accident of perspective since I do not bother to sway my eyes to see the rest of him, Thrushchurl’s hand deposits a candle on a packing case. I look at the flame boring into space; it’s like a hot coal burning a path through a snowdrift. The base is a misty blue cup, and I see a mote, like a grain of pollen, trickle up its curve toward the hollow mane. The tapering upper part of the fire kernel is the color of buttermilk. The flame plummets into a dark opening at its center, hovers over it, and is held to the wick by its suction. I imagine standing at the base of the flame as it ignites, seeing it column up and close around me like a multicolored alembic.
Thrushchurl is gone again, and I don’t want to be alone with Jil Punkinflake now. I hear the clink of liquor in the glass as
he raises and lowers the bottle with mechanical regularity, and in between these sucking pauses a soft, mirthless chuckle takes his place.
I get up, thinking that, should he ask me where I am going, I will say either that I need to piss or I am trying to get back to the tent before the rain no that would only encourage him to join me and what I most want is to get quit of his company. He does not address a word to me, but, as I climb the narrow passage to the surface, stagnant chill air daubing my face, the noise of his step slides in behind me and a stripe of repulsion sinks into my backbone. I go toward the bushes working my fly open and he drops his bottom onto a porch stoop. I will have to pass him to escape.
A honey-colored young woman is sulkily pacing up and down. A man, who might be her young father or her older fellow, comes and goes, bringing parcels out of the house and loading them into a wheelbarrow. Getting out, or something. She is impatient and urges him on with grim looks. Jil Punkinflake is eyeing her with a look at once intense and glazed. His face is five other faces at once. She’s noticed his look and is adding extra movements to her pacing, turning away and folding her arms, her gaze scampering nervously from one object to another. Every time her man comes back she throws him a demanding look. Finally she says something and points to Jil Punkinflake, who is reclining limp against the stoop, bottle in his hand. The man stumps over to him.
“You want something?” he barks in accented Alak. All the work, and her fuming, has made him short-tempered.
“I want to make off with her,” Jil Punkinflake says softly and fondly with a dreamy smile. Almost bonelessly he slithers upright before the man, driving the smile of his dreamy teeth into the man’s vision. The man swats at him like a bear, and Jil Punkinflake is knocked down. He smiles and picks himself up, eyes glittering weirdly.
It’s not until he’s on his feet, though smeared with dust, he says, “I answered you.”
But the man is already lumbering off. I don’t believe he cared much one way or another, but felt he had to make a gesture.
“That was unkind, friend,” Jil Punkinflake says into his teeth.
I take him by the arm and guide him away. We’re barely out of sight of them when I feel his face mash into my shoulder and he slumps limp against me. The next moment he pushes me roughly away with a sob he can’t hold in, and leaves me.
*
Another storm hurtles down the mountains at us, a cloud black as smoke. I take refuge in a small house, raised as most of them are here above the ground on short stilts.
It sounds as though every joint in the place adjusts to my every step. Empty except for a few cushions on the mats, a table, a lamp. I get the lamp going nicely—it has an adjustable wick that can be dimmed out to nothing at all but turned up again to full brilliance without relighting—and lie down to listen to the roar of water. It’s hard to stop my mind, or to rest, because I am not certain someone with a better claim to the place might not appear at any time. I keep hearing the fumbling of what is trying to become a knock at the door, the sound of footsteps—a visit just barely trying, and failing to take shape, failing to compose these intractable elements into an event.
I decide I want to sleep. I turn down the light and the room shakes with deafening laughter. I turn the light up at once. The room reappears as it was, silent, unshaken. I listen to nothing but pounding rain.
Presently, I extinguish the light again. The laugh explodes in the room and when I turn the light on it illuminates only a face inches from mine from which is pouring that shattering, mind-annihilating laughter.
I rush outside and the ground is dry—there is no rain. I walk in haste. The city is deserted. Ruined buildings, litter, bones in the street.
The sudden appearance of a red lantern draws my eye to the brothel whose window I am passing, and through the window I see the Lieutenant lunging back and forth in uniform on top of a cooing woman whose dress is gathered high above her waist like froth and whose hands are widely splayed on his back; he is facing in my direction the circular eyes rolled up in blemished rings as she kisses his exposed upper teeth with dreamy abandon. His dangling lower jaw leaves viscous dabs the size of thumbprints where it flaps against her chin and throat.
I recoil from the sight into the blackness of a side street. It takes me past many brighter streets that I feel I must avoid, and I continue to follow this dark side street until it gives way, expels me into the utter darkness beyond the city altogether. I stop and start, go forward and stop again.
I look out over the battlefield again with a feeling of terror brimming in me at the idea of the bodies lying there in total darkness.
In the darkness I dimly spy a form dashing purposively here and there, gathering the bodies of the enemy in its arms and tumbling them with a kind of hasty decorousness into several heaps. This figure works tirelessly, moving with almost fantastic speed in its work. Then it alters its activity. It goes from one heap to the next, with long intervals at each. Then it retires I don’t know where. I get up higher to search it out but my eyes are baffled by so much dark.
A pale and glowing tendril slithers up from within one of the heaps, fluttering its wormlike end against the sky. More rise around it, and from the other heaps. The fires are seeping up around the sodden clothes and catching the short hair. I watch every blaze expand and do its work.
*
Always the sickening feeling, like a lid dropping down on me, to shut me forever in the dark.
I was just asking someone for something—paper, I think—and someone said—
“Was that yesterday?”
I am looked at incredulously. I realize they mean the battle I witnessed—but that was days ago, weeks, wasn’t it?
How many nights?
I climb to the spot again. I can see the marks I made in the earth, my knee and foot prints. Still there even after the rainstorm. I wander here and there, looking away from the stinking ravines ahead, streaked with blood and swimming with flies whose drone rumbles like far away thunder. The charred heaps of bodies still smoulder there, and from time to time a whiff comes this way.
What’s that? I have been staggering a bit—it makes sense, I haven’t eaten. I am on my knees, looking straight ahead no doubt stupidly and there before me I see a heap of those ferrous rocks and a crevasse there, the size of my hand, made by a jumble of smaller stones in among the larger ones. This crevasse has bewitched my attention so that I can’t look away from it. I draw closer and peer in—there’s something tickling in my head. I push the stones apart and peer more intently into the little crevasse, and a blue light begins to sift down among the veering edges of the stones ... only a bluish dust, but it catches the light strangely, because that light doesn’t illuminate anything else. My own breath becomes audible to me and switches on its own to my open mouth as I look, because the arrangement of these edges, the pebbles, the fine-grained light, the chalk white, is what I want but can’t deny precisely corresponding to the arrangement I would see every time I returned to my home from the town as I would look down from the pass—I don’t know what to do—
I see my home again, the serene-looking College. I feel my breath stop and start, and hot lines down my face, but what do I do—it is too painful to go on seeing but it’s too beautiful to push away—I can only fall into my seeing it until I am exhausted?
Then noises well out of me and I paw at the little stones as though I could reach out and stroke the vision, ruining it. I expect I’m making a disgusting racket.
*
I can’t do it. Let’s say I come away, back to the city, and I eat, eating badly. I push food into my mouth chew and swallow it as though it were all still new to me. The mechanical action of eating as I am eating now has no relation at all to whatever it is I feel the irritable, kinked feeling in my middle. Walking away from the table, whosever it was, I can feel the jagged food lodged in my stomach; the effort I had put into gagging it down has drained me of my strength. I sag into a cellar doorway and lie down at the base of the s
tairs.
Now I am sleeping again.
Our characters are all crudely stamped on us along with our silly names and our tics, and now that I’m forever brushing first my left and then my right cheeks I have mine as well. Try explaining, rather than being understood, I think profoundly. How do you feed stone fishes?
Now it’s a story—around the little farm house the young man calls on the eldest daughter, and they refer to him by a name that’s never quite the same way twice; first, Taddy. Then Keddy. Then Kedded. He’s talking with the girl as he stands in the tall grass by the window; they all love him there and the family is gazing fondly at him through the window. Deep blackness swollen up in the treeline beyond the high grass, shaggy branches make a line like the side of a half-melted candle. He’s still chatting happily with them, and blackness stands now only a few feet behind him like a night wall. A cloud dims the sun, and when the light returns the two of them are gone from the tall grass and the family calls from the windowsill “Kaddy! Where are you?” He’s gone forever.
“Thrushchurl? I thought he deserted.”
“He’s around here somewhere.” Setting fires. Placing fires. Putting fires. I gesture halfheartedly; I’m being asked to shake off powerful fatigue in order to explain something with many parts. I see the beating lights before I find the flames. Everyone has come unmoored from the ground and hurtles around me in the air, like Wacagan, but without the stopping and starting, back and forth.
Rumor has it Makemin is unhappy. Well fancy that. He wants to pursue the enemy into the interior but the Predicanten are holding him here until reinforcements from the mainland arrive. So we are waiting and he is fuming. Let him. I stay in the cellar until a few other soldiers blunder in bickering. I go looking for another hiding place like an elderly dog looking for a moment’s peace.
The wind blows the battlefield stink into town. People light torches day and night and march brandishing them in the street, trying to thin out with fire the plague of flies. The fog returns from the sea, and in it the flies look like black leaves swirling in milky tea.
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