The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  I’ve been sent to bring a message to Saskia. Everyone who has seen her can tell me immediately which way she went—they’re that careful of her. I find her where she does her target shooting, on one of the slopes where the gorse trembles close to the ground. Sitting on a stone with her right arm resting palm up along her thigh, opening and closing her fist with mechanical regularity, she doesn’t see me coming. Her eyes never leave her hand. Getting her attention is like being suddenly illuminated by a permeating, judging light.

  She looks up as I approach. I fix my eyes on the air over her head, stop within arm’s reach and hold out the note. It is snatched from my hand. I wait, trying to go to sleep or to find some soft way to resist the spell of her dominating, pitiless stillness.

  “No reply,” she says, and again I’m disarmed and shaken at the deep, incongruous voice. Despite myself, I bang my heels together in a gesture of efficiency I’ve always hated, and turn to go. To make up for it, I take my time; veering from the threadbare path I amble instead over the shrubby ground. After a few minutes, a movement catches the corner of my eye, and I turn to see Jil Punkinflake approaching Saskia. She is on her feet, her pistol in her hand. I imagine she’s been loading it. Now she holsters it and watches him.

  He is pale and puffy, with rings beneath his eyes. He also holds an envelope gingerly in his hand, and offers it to Saskia, the whites of his eyes very bright. Makemin must have guessed that he would be the one to find Saskia, wherever she might be. She takes the note, and he stands with his hands at his sides, a little more on one foot than another, breathing through his mouth, fear and yearning gushing from his stricken eyes.

  Saskia has read and replaced the envelope’s contents and shoves it slowly into her pocket, looking at him. Her back is to me. She slaps him. It’s a glancing blow, her fingertips knocking against his chin’s edge. His head jars, more with nerves than with the weak force of her hand, his eyes widen.

  She slaps him again. I hear the sound. This time his head swings to the side and back at once; he stares and pants, white as milk. She slaps him and advances a step, slaps again and steps again, and he recedes before her, with an astonished, joyless excitement in his face. Suddenly she pulls her arm well back and strikes him to the ground. He does not cry out, but falls on his side and elbow. He raises his head and looks up at her with such a bleak longing in his rapt eyes that I turn away. I leave them there, Saskia towering over him.

  *

  The wind grows stronger. A cave breaks open in the fog, sweeping into the ferns, and in a moment I see a form through grey transparence and then that fog is swept away and I see her plainly. She is clearly there.

  At the same moment you stride into an illuminated archway in my heart’s spot like a little goddess. You had had another name before, and I learned it from your lips. Your fine lips pressed each letter carefully into my ear. Later you ordered me to forget it, not to say it, think it, or remember it. I don’t, but I feel it stir anyway in the air in my open mouth, because your face glows through mine. I see your two eyes glisten through your veil—the intensity they stir in me stops and starts with my breath and grows like the intensification of light at dawn.

  I take a step toward you. As always, a great spiral foam of dreams spins out of you like a galaxy but what do I know about galaxies? Your arms hang nervelessly at your sides and you hold your head up and back straight. You seem to want to draw me in under your chin, raising it at me. I see again the swell of your dress at your waist, where it is broken up by so many creases, all bowed to you—near your throat there is always a warm lineny smell a little like lemon rind. I close my eyes, still seeing you, and the gauzy dreaminess of your house and body close over me like a cold spring, offering me a whole life in sleep. You would be a monumental hourglass towering over the landscape, sifting out my time without seeming to. I’ll resolutely stand here with my eyes shut dreaming myself out from under the hood of this nightmare with all my will until I find myself back in Tref, and Makemin dead and stinking in a ditch on the island, and you before me.

  Fog creeps up toward the peak, and mires itself in the trees.

  I have to escape.

  *

  I am beguiling my time sitting under a tree with a little blue guide to the city. A hermit lived here ages ago in a hovel built into the side of the mountain. Shepherds led their flocks into the vicinity and disturbed his meditations with their songs and their pipes and their bells and baas, and, in frustration, he picked up a piece of ice and flung it against a stone. The stone disappeared and water sluiced out of a “porcelain hole.” The noise of the water drowned out the sound of the shepherds and the hermit was satisfied. Unfortunately, the entire fabric of the slope was gradually undermined and soon water began gushing out everywhere, forming the many waterfalls that still provide the city with its water. The destiny of the hermit is not described. “In the beginning was the end,” someone’s written here.

  All around me are deep prayer platforms and mills, droning chants. They are eliciting the help of the spirits. I don’t really understand.

  I watch a Predicate form over the roof of the shrine. A lopsided gobbet, grey and lavender in color, spins there like clay on a potter’s wheel, and long carrot-like stalks begin to droop out of it. It flails, convulsing away into the air like a bundle of dirty laundry infused with an antic simulation of life. Glancing down, my thumbnail has inadvertently indented a line beneath the sentence “although some say this spirit worship grew out of a primitive monotheism, and did not merely supplant it” end of page.

  Flip the book aside and walk. Deep within the hood of this shrine is an enormous stone idol I’ve seen many times: a stone book. It is swarming with tiny, shivering leathery forms. Bats. Clappers and Spirit Eaters stand in rank and file before it, bolt upright with their feet together, chanting stanzas. Edeks tilt in and out of the slender wooden pillars, Predicanten perch in the dim rafters. One of them points to something with its lean bent arm, the wing hanging down like a voluminous sleeve, and it rasps a few observations to its glassy-eyed, ring-mouthed neighbor. A Clapper comes in from the right carrying blood in a paper basket, red soaking steadily into the white, and it is set down on a table beside the idol. With one continuous motion the bats begin to slither down the book, smelling their way toward the blood.

  Shadows crumbled into the branches of the majestically calm trees like galleries of dreaming statesmen see how the foliage breaks up the light; I could use its example to illustrate the action of scintillation to anyone who was not familiar with the meaning of the word. There goes a woman by me; her body stiffly shudders with each step as she carries heavy bags in either hand. I see a boy of about four years go by with an older boy who lets him push their modest cart along. With great profundity I note the pleasure one gets or takes in pushing wheeled objects, as opposed to the depression involved in pulling them. Everyone here wears a scarf over the nose and mouth—I ask a man going by, carrying a bag of tobacco, why this is, and he explains that today is a holiday and points toward a narrow, crooked alley not far from me. There is an algae bloom in the sea, and this puts something into the air—I have noticed it, a bloody note under the smoke and trash smells of the city. The air is slightly caustic.

  The alley is long and so irregular I can’t see more than fifteen feet or so at a time. The chanting dies away to a faint grumble, and through it I hear a cricket ... It’s nearby ... two thoughtful chirps and the beginning of a third, at even, medium-length intervals. Here and there I see silent people going to and fro in the alley, slipping into it from side passages that are even darker and narrower, while others just stand where they are, preoccupied, or lean against a wall. I have to wait for a while as others file past going the opposite direction. The cricket gets louder.

  Here’s a mass of people jamming the alley. I don’t want to start ramming my way in among them but others are bustling me from behind and I move in anyway. High over us, in a window under a pointed roof, there is a lofty cage. The cricket
, it seems, is in it, although I can’t make out the contents of the cage from here. Everyone is silently listening to the cricket, and a drowsiness is settled in among them so that even I, who just awoke after such a long sleep, begin to nod again. I look from one person to the next—almost all but I have kerchiefs over their mouths and noses.

  One fellow in particular catches my eye—a man right up against the wall. There’s something complicated about his kerchief. I’m behind him, and it takes me a while to figure it out: he’s wearing a wig. I wouldn’t have known, since he’s also wearing a shapeless cloth cap, but his wig has slipped a bit, and I can see he has a second kerchief or bandage under it. The bandage goes up around his head under his wig, which, along with the hat and kerchief, hides the bandage that binds his jaw like a corpse’s. I look again up to the cricket.

  When I try to find the pale man who hid his bandaged jaw so well, I have to force my way through the congregants. There is a door near the spot he’s just vacated, and hidden inside it there is a hall lit with gas lamps. The vast chamber or cavern that blooms out at its end is partitioned into many smaller rooms without ceilings, elevated on planks. All manner of activities, crafts, mostly, take place here. In time I fall in with a group of three men, who sit on benches leaning their elbows over watches on a gleaming glass table. One is bald, all of them are scruffed and unshaven, but their hands are clean, their shining nails are immaculately trimmed and dressed. They wear rough clothes of fine materials.

  In another room a ghostly-looking man sits reading; his cat, or a cat, is slenderly nosing along the edge of the floor, dabbing at the wood with its nose. The man looks up and gives me my first beckoning look from among them. I go through the doorway to him.

  “Are you lost or something?” he asks. His snowy smile is beautiful but it brings me no closer to him nor him to me.

  “No, I’m looking.” There are books here in low towers, piled on the floor. One stack stands in reach of his hand from the high-backed chair.

  In answer to his querying look I say, “I’ve been hearing much talk about the interior, but I don’t understand what I hear.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he answers at once. “There are ruins in the island’s interior whose foundations were laid before the Limiters; not at all a city in any way any one of us would recognize, but what would have been the past’s idea of a city. It’s all full of spirits now.”

  “From the ruins?”

  “In the ruins, and in the land.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Yes.” This did not sound final.

  “Other things than ghosts?”

  “Yes—any thing. Their Predicanten. Their Edeks.”

  He speaks to me for a while, without any special eagerness or any sign of boredom. He makes constant reference to a cemetery, deep in the interior, where the spirits gather together in great abundance and may be safely contacted by a medium. Some other people are called in, until the enclosure is packed with people talking to me, and I hear several versions of a story about a Pepecaui named Jidjikuk, an intrepid youth in some versions and, in others, a resigned old man, who leaves home to find the burial ground and petition the spirits there for assistance against the pirates that used to harass the islands before they confederated.

  One after another they tell me their versions, and when the last one has finished, they stand where they are in distracted silence. I’ve just had a thought—and I go, breathing excitedly, through their mass, and through the mass of congregants in the alley.

  I remember Wormpig’s neighborhood and I go back to look for him; I stand speculatively in front of a row of three houses there, trying to catch the eye of the few people milling, but they avoid my uniform. A woman emerges from one of these narrow houses and stands on the porch, her hands on her thighs, regarding me with neutral attention. She has dark pulled-back hair with silver needles shot through it, a square face with soft features; she looks practical and self-possessed.

  “You’re Low the interpreter, aren’t you?” she asks in a slightly lofty, airy way.

  “Low Loom Column,” I say.

  “I’m White Dead Nettle,” she says, lowering her eyelids a bit and speaking as if she were enjoying a private joke. In the same manner, she adds, “Wormpig is my husband, if it’s an audience with Pepedora you want.”

  “Pepedora is Pepecaui, isn’t that right?” I feel as though I’m speaking too loudly.

  “Yes,” she says, lifts her eyes to me with a small toss of her head and resets her mouth. “Won’t you come in?”

  A plume of steam runs from kettle spout to the rafters directly before me. After she has seated me on a padded wicker chair and put a mug in my hand, she resumes her place at the table by the window, sorting brass fittings with soft tinkles.

  Wormpig comes in without a sound, and she greets him in a flat, easy way. He noticed me as he came up to the open door, and strides over to me at once. I set down the mug saying, “I want to see Pepedora.”

  Wormpig smiles and swivels once back and forth from his hips. “I am glad to assist the foreign officer,” he pipes.

  So I am conducted into Pepedora’s presence a second time.

  Once he was a dandy. Now he sits where the shade covers him. Only his legs, one bent flat on the floor, the other leg doubled up in front of him, emerge from the bisecting diagonal of the shade. As I approach, he adjusts a white stocking with a piebald hand. A froth of dangling lace brushes back into the gloom as he withdraws it. Wormpig tilts his head and rolls his eyes toward the farmhouse where we waited once before, indicating that’s where I will find him when I’m done, and leaves us.

  I turn to the breathing, half-silhouette in the mill. He grinds his teeth. It’s a steady, automatic sound.

  “I want to leave the island,” I say. “Will you give me safe passage?”

  I watch the slow descent of Pepedora’s head; my eyes pick out the severely-tapering jaw, blurred spots on skin mottled as lichenous rocks, but smooth and shiny and firm as hard rubber.

  “You have no ship,” he says. The booming voice he’d used with Makemin is gone.

  “I can take one.”

  Pepedora says nothing. I wait.

  “If I give you safe passage, will it be for your use alone?” he asks eventually.

  “Mine, and anyone who wishes to accompany me.”

  “Who will defend my city if you take the soldiers away?”

  “Surely most will stay. And Wacagan are routed—they won’t come back.”

  “They will if they find help in the interior.”

  That stops me.

  “What do you mean?”

  I already have an idea. I know he’s not talking about soldiers, more of their soldiers, landing on the island’s far side.

  Only now Pepedora’s voice changes, dropping to a deep, purring baritone.

  “Anyone can win the favor of the spirits, if he petitions them in the right way.”

  “Is that what they’re trying to do?”

  “It’s what I would do,” he murmurs. He strokes the backs of his upper front teeth with the fronts of his lower front teeth. I can see his jaw slide up and down, and I can hear the teeth scraping together softly, like glass against glass.

  “Your commander knows. It’s what he would do, too. If he could. If they’d let him.”

  I feel a sharp thrill of fright at the idea.

  “He and the lady are determined to set out after the blackbirds, but the Predicanten, and the Edeks, won’t allow it.”

  He chuckles, nothing more than a gush of breath through dry nostrils.

  “Someone has to make a decision.”

  I’m thinking about the ocean, about being alone in a boat. I see myself discovering I hadn’t brought on as much food or water as I needed, unwittingly making one navigational blunder after another until I’m lost beyond hope of discovery. My hope, my plans, are withering away in me. They collapse from me like burning clothes. And the Edeks would know. They might even catch up to me on
the open water.

  Pepedora leans forward, so that his face is veiled only by the thinnest membrane of darkness. I know he’s narrowed his eyes, his upper lip risen toward his dagger-like nose.

  “Shall I give you my disease?” he says, deeply and softly.

  I take a step back, shaking my head. He said it as though he meant something other than leprosy, and I wonder if his disease, as he calls it, isn’t something else. He speaks as though he were offering to show me a secret, treasured property.

  Now he is reclining back a jerking piece at a time, each muscle flexes along his lip as he tips back. When he speaks again, he speaks officiously.

  “The harbor is closed. We’ll need all of those ships if Wacagan return with help.”

  “Can you hide me?”

  “From the Edeks?” The answer is in the tone of the question.

  After a moment, I lower my head and mash my fist against the rough ends of the floorboards, pushing down on my fist with my elbow in the air, breathing through my mouth.

  I can’t get away. There isn’t any way.

  Flat and neutral, Pepedora’s voice breaks in on me suddenly.

  “I have something I can give you, but you must agree to teach me ... me, and Wormpig ... some of your Alak language, and characters. I want to know what is being said in my presence, and what is being planned. You will have to be resourceful, to teach us quickly. And I want my own alphabet.”

  “I’ve never made one before. I’m not certain I could.”

  “Try. You have time. ... Some time.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  He sets a pearly blue vase on the floor in front of himself, removes the lid with a little porcelain rasp, and plunges his arm in to the elbow. Out he pulls a squat, faceted bottle a bit smaller than a fist. A bubble like silver lozenge at the top tells me it is completely filled with some thick, clear liquid. The stopper is neatly covered over with thick seal of black wax.