The Narrator

by Michael Cisco

  A wave from one of the scouts—they’ve found some empty ration boxes hastily buried in the loose earth. Makemin inspects them personally, then throws a sharp look at me.

  We go on, following the course the charm indicated. Makemin calls me to the front, takes me familiarly by the shoulder—he keeps me close—sends me out to scout ahead telling me to report back directly to him. I can run out ahead and check my charm easily.

  The day passes without seeming to. Nothing changes, not even the light. The land ahead is blackened, sprinkled with flat shapes, dark against the pale ground; they are slashed and bullet-riddled bodies of wild men, their upturned faces powdered with blue mold. Saskia strides indignantly among the bodies.

  “Those monsters!” she snarls, drawing a Yashnik sabre out of a dead body she holds down with her foot. No dead blackbirds, but here’s one of their caps.

  I orient us again and we move out, trying to put the site of the massacre behind us before the sun is gone. Makemin walks with me. I feel his probing eyes every moment, with hate. Finally, he orders us to set up camp on a low rise and the men collapse in silence. Makemin takes me aside and we stand looking out into the mist.

  “If you try to undermine my authority with the men, I’ll shoot you. If you try to leave us, I’ll shoot you. You will always be watched, and if you are shamming, if you are leading us into their hands, I will shoot you in the head. Understand—you are my man. You are not inexpendable.”

  He looks at me, preparing some further words he plainly does not want to say.

  “One more thing. If you guide us correctly, I will see to it that you receive whatever you want.”

  *

  Empty, colorless expanse.

  Sandy gravel under our feet. Damp, stale air in our mouths, that leaves a drably insipid film on the tongue, like rebreathing your own breath. The iron birds appear to make wide circles at the extremity of our field of vision, keeping us in a vast, invisible ring. They are not watching us themselves—they may not have eyes—but their circling seems to attract a monstrous gaze to us. As the interminable day wanes, trees break through the mist before us like ocean cliffs. We pass through them almost obliviously ... there’s that old clacking sound again, that until this moment I had thought I missed, and no reduction of the feeling of malevolent watching.

  The trees give way in a few hundred yards to an oblong, clear spot, like a barren meadow, open at one narrow end, trees thick all round. Despite the exposure of the spot, the sun is going down and Makemin feels we risk being divided if we camp in the trees.

  Camp again.

  *

  Shouts—

  —and something beating me—

  —rain is falling hard—men are veering this way and that in it.

  I lurch up and a hand yanks at me.

  Shots—a man slops up near me aims and fires—turn and see another firing in the other direction. Jil Punkinflake sprints by, face and eyes white, his black mouth open, groaning with a kind of rage again and again, like a stricken horse. Dark shapes run and shots snap all around—the night explodes in shooting.

  A despairing voice wails somewhere near me. “Where did they get guns?”

  I run, I get down, I want to ask somebody something—man splashes to within a few feet of me raises his gun aiming and it bursts in his hands swatting him to the ground and he’s clawing his face and kicking on his back. I get to him and start trying to stop the bleeding, sew his face shut. He screams at me the bone of his jaws bare on one side his eye is red black jelly his nose is a rag. He punches and rips at me gulping and crying a flurry of explosions comes down like an avalanche on top of me and I can’t think, I’m staring weirdly at my own sopping hands streaked with rain-thinned blood fingers pale thick and nerveless like sausages fumbling stupidly with the suture—a yakking face shoves into mine—

  “He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!”

  Figures dropping down onto their knees around me with heavy thuds thrusting out their rifle barrels like lances firing jubilantly and I swim past them in the other direction. I hear them sing out all around me like men at a wedding party. What are they shooting at in this pitch dark? Shapes in the rain. Saskia yelling “Press forward!” Which way is forward? All of them? The mud by my left calf shudders flying up into the air—dressed only in a long shirt, one of the women from the asylum staggers toward me making a convulsive animal sound in her throat, six or seven carbines hanging on straps from her shoulders and arms. She empties the smouldering one she has in her hands—and just shot at me with—firing now over my head into the mayhem behind me. She drops the empty carbine and unslings another still making that noise, a depraved giggle, firing into the movement, shooting anything that moves, and I know there’s no one back that way but our own. I throw my hand out toward her.

  Someone comes up from behind and to the side of her, opposite me; Nikhinoch, even in the mud he is neat and orderly his step still springs light as a jackknife. With one smooth continuous motion he pulls a compact gun from his vest pocket and fires a bullet into her head. She collapses in a heap of rattling carbines. Nikhinoch steps over to her body and checks the guns. He takes a loaded one and continues looking, his pursed blue face unhurried, lit sideways by muzzle flashes from the soldiers at the tree line. He takes another loaded gun and tosses it sideways to me, economically indicates I should follow him and walks toward the shooting with the same heron step he always uses.

  We stop by a clump of trees. Nikhinoch fires into the dark, I can’t see at what, but he aims with precision and fires swiftly and surely. Empties the gun, turns to me and for a moment his rain-streaked glasses, which must be impossible to see anything through, glint into me. His hand snatches the carbine I uselessly carry. He coolly aims and fires again, then walks back in toward the worst of it, flicking open his vest pocket pistol, pinching out the spent shell, and sliding another one in, snap it shut and pocket it again, all while picking his way unerringly through the puddles and stones. Not a glance for me.

  I spot a man cowering by a stone—he’s only nicked, but he lies trembling, staring. There’s a group of soldiers not far from him, gathered in a knot, guns pointing out in all directions, aiming and firing at who knows what. Silichieh is there among those men; I can see him searching desperately for the enemy. I can’t get near them for the shooting, pull away toward a rockier place. I cross toward the far tree line. To my left I see Thrushchurl hunching along the ground—he gives a sickening jolt and spin his hat flies off and he is on the ground with a cry—I rush toward him but the air is alive with bullets and the rain is blinding me. I search in the mud calling his name—I can’t find him. Searching toward the tree line—

  I can’t mistake Makemin even in shadow nor can I mistake his voice—“Spread your fire! Bring them down!” Shadows fan out from him and aim toward the group I’ve just left, blasts rip up and down their line. My pistol is there by my side, heavy, fully loaded. I want to see him cut down. I want it so much it shocks me.

  “Those are ours! They’re ours!” That’s the Captain’s voice, from somewhere nearby. “They’re ou—!”

  Cut off, as though he’d been struck in the stomach—I go toward the sound, but legs drive hard through the mud, racing men ram me back; I lose the direction.

  I run back toward Silichieh shots flying by me—screams in the dark—a figure silhouetted against a clot of firing men and their muzzle flashes, this one with something flapping from his shortened face—I follow the screams to the soldiers Makemin had shot at and find them rolling in the mud bellowing in pain pushed out from the bottom of the heap. They flail and claw at me, drag me down as I try to help. Hands shove my face down into muck and I taste the blood that soaks it, I twist and push my brow down to tilt my chin back and keep my mouth free, rainwater sluicing down into it and my nose. I kick wildly hitting out with the back of my heel and though I barely feel what I’m doing the weight is suddenly removed from my head and I haul myself forward with both hands.

&nb
sp; I’m in a broad, flat hole—I get to the brink and look back at bodies. A man falls spilling with a scream not six feet from me—I scramble over to him—he lunges at me trying to grab the front of my tunic drawing back his knife—tiny droplets of blood tremble on his eyes—“I’ll kill you!” he croaks, “I’ll kill you!” flopping toward me on his side, dragging himself over his own spilling bowels, knife shaking in his upraised grey hand ... then his eyes go out, and he slips forward, slowly, onto his face as the war leaves him. His bent arm stiff at his side. The knife presses into the mud by his limp features. The knife is driving its own blade into the mud under the weight of his hand, the night is exploding in the roar of guns all around me.

  We’re slaughtering each other—I catch sight of Makemin pointing, crying out his orders—I slap my hand to my side but my pistol is gone—Will I find a gun? I pull one up from a dead man’s hand—grip it—point it at Makemin and jerk back in anticipation of a shot but the gun thuds inert in my hands. I throw it down with a grunt of frustration and search the dim ground for another going from one corpse to the next—a rifle lies there across some stones—I seize it and turn. In the sluicing darkness I’ve lost Makemin. I rush off into the deeper part of the rain and dark hunting him, shouting his name ...

  *

  This is a dream of mine war took from me. It owns it now, and owns me. I am and have been leaning up against a tree, my shoulder at the trunk, with the carbine I shouldn’t have and that isn’t mine in my hands. The branches keep some of the rain off, but I’m drenched through, numb and heavy. Frail daylight is gathering in dense ropes of rain. I watch it, drone of rain alone in my head. I’m alone. I’m not alone. The rain watches.

  A sound of wet bracken breaking nearby. I turn abruptly toward it raising my gun—all my frozen joints squeal and I can’t stop myself pitching over onto the ground. I’ve stood there too long and my body has seized up. My mouth stinks. Gibbering in panic I thump the mud with dead fingers trying to find my dropped carbine with deadened fingers when the weight of a hand drops on my shoulder and flail weakly away from it. I look up at Thrushchurl’s head, rain ribboning from his viny locks, silver on broadcloth shoulders. He strides forward and shows me his upper teeth.

  “I’m not a ghost,” he says seriously. “You had better get back up again.”

  I find a carbine and climb it, regain my feet. I have many lives—the lonely one, that was just here, is melting, and the other, that I’ve lived so far, is returning, unwelcome.

  Thrushchurl has already begun moving off out of the trees toward the clearing, and I want to ask him something. Back in the open the weight of the rain pushes down on me. Gun in both hands, barrel lowered, I rush to catch him up. I raise my head, and beyond him see the struggling party. With desperation I feel it begin all over again—nothing’s changed.

  There is Silichieh, and I am happy to see his bearlike figure there swinging his arms in his sopping sweater. But there is Makemin, an inflexible blue shadow in the streams, pointing, shouting orders. There is Saskia—her arm launches out to catch a slipping soldier before he can fall, thrusting him roughly forward onto his feet. Jil Punkinflake’s face is swollen and rigid with freezing rain, drops fall from his dangling lower lip. Everything will go on and on the same—I’ve stopped in place—Thrushchurl brings himself up short a few feet away and looks back at me with an expression the rain smears out. Guns have been lifted. One of them cracks. I just stand and stare wanting them to kill me while I’m still numb with cold. Makemin’s arm flies up into the air and I hear his order to hold fire. His cruelly keen eyes have determined that I am one of his men.

  Thrushchurl takes my shoulder again with a glistening hand, and I go dumbly with him. The carbine I carry suddenly seems disgusting to me, like a runny rotten leg, and I throw it down. Out of the rain glare Makemin steps toward us, solid, compact, strong high steps, and I watch him come into my heart like a worm flopping over. His face is hard and severe as a block of wood. I am turning into nothing, just water. I know I will have to cling to him just like all the rest of them do, and even clinging to him will take all the strength I have.

  “Good, you still live,” he says flatly. “You will march with me. Your guidance is essential in this rain.”

  We go on. Behind us, there is a field littered with our own soldiers.

  *

  The carts bog down and force us to stop again and again. As we scrape through the mud, we come quickly to the flat, uniform surface beneath that it covers. I peer ahead, where another line of trees has gathered like a barrier, and above them a vast looming presence of something I can’t quite make out, like the shadow of a mountain. Looking back down the column from the front, I see the same behind us.

  Regular shouts through hard sound of the rain. One of the carts lurches forward as its wheels come free. An object jostles out from the back and drops at the feet of the Captain, who twists like a top, mud belches up in a cloud around him with a muffled splat.

  Muck plops back down to earth.

  I rush to him, my heart pounding. The grenade blew the Captain wide open.

  *

  When I was young I read a story about a madman who drowned two people, crept up behind one while he was at his shaving basin and thrust his head down into the water—for months I felt him behind me, I hated to get near to water. Now I feel him again. It feels as though it had already happened.

  I’m walking with Silichieh.

  “What do you think?” he asks me abruptly, tossing his head in Makemin’s direction. As usual his voice doesn’t go up at the end of his question.

  “He’s insane.”

  Walking.

  “I think you are right.”

  Walking.

  “I know it ...” he says gravely, his eyes downcast. “Because I catch it too, every time they shoot. It’s kept me alive I guess so far ... I’m maybe afraid to think how much farther though.”

  “Who’s alive? I don’t feel alive.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re more alive than they are,” he says evenly.

  *

  The trees come up around us again. The rain stops quickly, like a faucet shut it off, and the white ground dries, the pale grey mud that clings to us dries. Marching, the air space and silence staring at us as we grind ourselves down past nothing. We camp in three tight groups in line of sight around the base of some bigger trees, with more open space under their branches. I almost falling on my face, roll over and sleep, the last respite. It isn’t rest. Makemin and Saskia seem to have endless endurance—I can hear them still, from time to time, behind me. I’ve never known fatigue like this before, and I’m far hardier than the others. I gaze indifferently at the trees and their wonders ... and then I sleep, despite the rapping of the boughs.

  I awake in darkness with a heavy weight on my chest. I can’t see what it is—I take it in my hands, a weird, irregular, cold, thing, gritty, too—it moves, loathsome to feel under my hands like a slug. As I struggle, and breathe out, its weight keeps my chest from expanding. It’s crushing the breath out of me—I struggle—I foam, snarl madly and push off the ground with my feet and as I turn myself sideways I feel it topple from me at last.

  I pitch back gasping for breath, and two black pinions spread in the air with a glassy scream. The wings whip through the air and clash together—a blast of oily-smelling wind and I get a brief glimpse of flapping against the light between the trees.

  It’s gone. I sink down against the roots, shaking.

  *

  Crusts of blue mortar thrown up in waves show where outskirts of the city once were. The unnatural white soil is part of the ruins. We are already within the city limits, although the trees are just as thick. Between them, I see the shape of a black hare, ears up, motionless as a statue. From far off in the distance a ripple comes waving through the trees, though there is no wind.

  The branches clatter together. The black hare is gone.

  Men in Wacagan uniform hang from the trees here. We’ve wa
ndered right in among them. They dangle in space, chins on their breasts. I see some tangled in the boughs high overhead, as though they had dropped into them from a great height. Far ahead, I see a shape perched on one’s shoulder, picking fiercely at its head. The bird stops and stares at us. From its head rise two long leaf-shaped ears, and it flies straight up through the canopy of dead branches, disappearing into iridescent sky.

  Thrushchurl half-climbs a trunk to look at a hanging man. The body is covered with a thin integument of clear, shiny material, like clear amber, that seems to have dripped from the branch, down the rope. The swollen, discolored face shimmers like a bright mask. They’ll be preserved here forever.

  Makemin’s voice splinters the quiet, again and again. His barked orders press down on our exhausted heads and we blunder further, blunder further again. We are becoming stupid and forgetful. We are losing ourselves. Soldiers drawn away by the beckoning sunlight of golden afternoon that seemed to melt the trunks of the trees from behind, melt them into softness like candles. The soldiers melt into empty space that sucks up cries of “Come back, will you—come back!” One woman who fell ill said she saw a little wild pig, all naked, snuffling at the roots of the trees. Its brief grunts were loud there, as if she and the pig were alone together in a small room. She shot the pig in the head, and it flopped over on its side instantly limp; slaughtered the pig and tried to eat it, but the meat was bad. The flesh was layered with flakes of rust. Her skin turned a dingy yellow and she weakened, but she survived and marches on with us now, though all her hair has fallen out.

  Saskia stares out into the trees, by the carts—turns to me abruptly as I come up.

  “What do you want?” she snaps. I came to serve myself and wanted nothing from her. Jil Punkinflake stands, I notice, nearby, eyes on the ground; shot his dog and then became her’s. I choose to point to one of the bundles of rifles. She stares at me, then turns, removes one, inspects it with a glance, and holds it out to me. Her eyes probe me with a look so knowing or expectant I almost don’t take it from her. There’s the butt of the gun, steady in the air; my hand floats up and closes on it. The weight is transferred to my hand and arm, so that the top of my forearm goes taut. The trace of satisfaction in her eyes puts me off.