She is the least changed of us all—or is she? I can’t tell. But her face is, it now strikes me, white, and drawn; the doughty oratorial spirit of her is frayed to threads.
Something unnameable, with many layers or many heads, suddenly returns my gaze from her eyes; her brow contracts a little as she turns to go.
Jil Punkinflake’s face is blank, like a corpse’s, eyes glazed. He snaps his arm out and punches me. His fist drives into my chest making a disc of pain there, and I go down, off balance.
“Stay away from her,” he says hoarsely, his eyes barely focussing on me before he walks away. At first the sounds make no sense. I have to think about them for a while before I understand them. I’m not hurt. The cold and the rain have cured me, made a numb rind of my outside.
*
Thrushchurl and I are chosen to scout together. No one leaves the group alone. We leave stakes to mark our path back, while the others regroup in one place. Thrushchurl turns his face like a dog catching a scent—he rushes forward, leaving me to hurry after planting stakes. I call to him, but he is preoccupied. I rush up to him, and as I catch him I see a shape loom ahead of us; the shape draws Thrushchurl to it. He is panting for it.
The trees have not encroached on the structure, which is a many-angled squat shape buttressed with tapering, inverted cones whose regularly-spaced flat round tops form a crown. The roof is irregular, with many gable-like shapes. The white enamel skin is like a tea kettle’s, cracked and flaking to reveal a drab black subsurface. The whole thing sits on a raised, smooth stone foundation that runs on into the wood shadows showing where the much vaster original edifice had been.
Thrushchurl, open-mouthed, rushes forward and lays his splayed hands on the stone as if he were placing roots there. He caresses the surfaces in rapture. I follow him, now oblivious to my presence, around to the opposite side. Here the building has been ripped open, and the rest of it is gone without a trace; not even a single loose stone or bit of broken glass, nothing but the unscarred, unmarked foundation to show it was ever there. The exposed edges of the small remnant’s walls and ceiling are shockingly jagged where the building was ripped away, with long triangular edges projecting out into space and many fine needle-like teeth in between.
We face a rounded inner wall that folds back on itself to make an aperture. Passing through it I feel a sudden oppressive vibration, like an organ droning at its lowest registers. We enter a hall-like space tall for its width, its floor strewn with cinders, tools lying in discs of dried grease, broken glass vessels and shards shoved rudely aside to form a rough path lined with curled bundles of green wire.
Now into the colossal main room. Thrushchurl dashes forward arms flung open. Everything is slightly phosphorescent. The floor is springy metal with a rectangular central panel of a glossy hard black substance like glass. Set into this panel are thick, transparent hexagonal tiles a little more than two feet across, and a corpse floats upright, head up, beneath each one, in honeycomb-like cells filled with a grainy scarlet fluid. Thrushchurl kneels crooning and running his hands over the tiles, his palm sweeping a dim shadow over dark heads.
Tables are bolted to floor around the walls. There’s a dark booth projecting from an upper story with a spiral staircase drooping from its underside. The dim glow of the chamber illuminates a few dials on the back wall of the booth—I see their needles flicker convulsively every time Thrushchurl touches the cells. I point this out to him, and his reverie breaks. He crosses to one of the tables and picks up a pink-red vessel of glass or ceramic; the vessel is heart-shaped and pearly, like a red conch turned inside-out. There is no lid, and Thrushchurl sniffs at the contents, then pours out some of the thick scarlet fluid onto the table. Setting the vessel aside, he crouches down and peers at the stuff, sniffing and prodding it with a piece of metal that might once have been something. I detect a thin sour odor, like the smell of rotting brawn that came from the square structure on the tower.
Thrushchurl withdraws from his pocket a pinch of mercury—where did he find that? has he always had it?—and drops it into the center of the dish-like pool of scarlet fluid. The shapeless mercury gathers itself in the center, its blue-white radiance brilliant against the red. I’d barely noticed how his hands shake now. The grooves in his fingers seem all filled with dark mercury.
I notice that the scarlet fluid on the table has coagulated into a single layer, with the mercury resting like a wafer on top of it, without mixing. I feel the steady earthquake of the building and dizzily suggest we get outside.
Thrushchurl breathes, “For a moment ...”
Our going is interrupted by a machine sound, and sharp knocks.
The black panel in the floor sinks a foot or so and slides out of sight moving in our direction evidently under the floor. A few of the cells on the edge opposite us emerge a bit from the floor, their lids tossed back. A body drops from an enormous ragged hole in the ceiling and, flashing down, lands in the capsule with a thud. The capsule slides into the floor closing itself, and, I can see, filling from below with red fluid. This happens until there are no more empty capsules.
Another sound of distant machines. The bodies drop down out of sight as though each had been tugged down by a single hand, and withered black hares rise through the fluid, are squashed against the transparent upper panels.
From the hole overhead comes a familiar sound with no perceptible beginning. I recognize the drone of the tower Thrushchurl climbed, but the timbre of this sound is clearer, with many transparent layers like sheets of breath. The tone is deep at its heart, and wind stirs through it. It’s as if the sensation of being watched, like barely palpable wisps of air slithering on the skin of my back, or creeping just below the skin, were given a counterpart in sound. It billows over us like a sail. It’s the drone I heard the tower make, but I’d recognized that too—now I remember Keen howling on the floor of the house we’d visited outside Tref, and the inhuman drone, like the deep groaning buzz of a resonating box, inside his howls.
The laughter suddenly erupts from him again.
“The war!” he raves, “The warrr! We won!”
His head snaps up on his neck and he stares into my eyes, hissing “We won!”
Keen subsides into idiot chuckling, his face folded down against his throat. He’s laughed himself out. His laughter trickles around the room, his voice comes from the walls, the furniture, the fireplace. It jumps from the window, runs cackling into the distance. We can hear it go, we can hear it for a long time.
From outside, through the wall, I can hear an even, answering note, like the whisper of air escaping from a reedless organ pipe. Let me be there, let all of this have been a long vision and I am back in Tref.
“That’s the trees ...” Thrushchurl says.
I almost believe I see something like an envelope of light in the open space between the floor and the ceiling. The note from overhead elongates me, as though I were being pulled off the earth.
It’s music—that comes in a flash to me. The idea makes me smile. Who would have guessed, who else would have guessed, that they made this to make music—and the tower as well? Dead body, music, and Predicanten, always associated. The dead hares against the floor haven’t changed at all, but they seem to peek out at me with an expressive look of mutual understanding. Thrushchurl stands abstracted, listening; I can’t tell what he’s thinking, but a secret has been entrusted to me and I intend to keep it. Let him find out on his own.
*
“What do you see?” Makemin is barking.
“I don’t know yet—” I bark back.
“Well use those slanty eyes of yours damn you,” strangely tired there. Weary of me, not too tired to go on with his war.
“It’s a clearing like any clearing.”
Brightening up for a change, icy light although the day is ending, brilliance soft on the eye, not dazzling.
We camp again. My legs don’t want to bend as I lay myself on the ground, observe the droll spectacle around me
. Dry voiceless laughs are shoved out of my trap with each contraction of my diaphragm; it’s an interesting feeling.
They’re all paralyzed. I see, on every face, blankness, just blankness. That blankness is on every face now.
“Little mice, little mice,
Even cats have got their lice,
Run-run, run get away—”
“Dead as cinders, grey as ashes,
Cold as ice, now its eye flashes,
Too too late to get away—”
That’s not Thrushchurl but one of the privates, drooping on a flat rock right by me. His face, a moment ago inert, cracks open with a fierce, berserk energy. He leaps up again, slapping his canteen, rapping it smartly each blow quick on the last, and he gives a short laugh with a schoolboyish gaiety his eyes seem only barely able to contain, and I know he’s gone crazy.
Now Thrushchurl is beside me after all, perhaps he sang or perhaps his appearance behind me ...
He sits, light streaming past his face turns it half to ether. Puddles everywhere. Aren’t I good at describing things? Thrushchurl stares at them, like the mercury he enjoys playing with, and they are bright and shiny enough to be mercury. It doesn’t take long to see reflected in them things that aren’t occurring outside of them. In them I see four or five identical objects fixed in a motionless row high in the sky above us. They’re like the white squares of a box kite.
The crazed soldier comes back and sits again. He’s making note of something on an official form like an old rag. I can tell he’s not writing the sort of thing they’re intended for; he finishes his statement, and, trying to insert the nib of this pen into the cap, his eyes gleam, and he deliberately jabs the nib into his left hand, in the flesh between the index and thumb below the joint, his teeth set in a grinding smile like a slot. Blood spurts across his right hand as he pulls out the nib and drives it deeper into the wound, pulls it out and dumbly thrusts it in again, then watches the blood, turning his dripping hand this way and that, smiling fiercely.
It’s dusk, when lights and darkness seem to form small scurrying shapes ... lie down certain a sticklike dwarf with a long thin knife will bound up, perch on my back and stab and stab. At the edge of the clearing beyond my bleeding friend, I see a black hare observing us, half in shadow—the shadow darkens, and it disappears. No one else saw it.
*
Silent shapes wheel around us with long nasal shrills splitting the air like bugles—figures detach from the trees ahead swinging crazily back and forth in the air. Shots patter all around us and our guns return fire—Makemin leads the snipers and Saskia is whipping through the air already flashes over my head firing, her voice cuts under the screamed alarms. Soldiers and trees flash by my sights but I can’t line up my shots, fire always too late. They stay in the same area directly ahead of us, dim flashes in the trees, pale moonlight on their shoulders and helmets, caps. Suddenly the flying shapes break and fly toward the enemy still wailing, and Wacagan retreat.
Makemin snaps to his feet and we are charging headlong through the dark and dark trees against the white ground—still firing at the retreating figures I see Makemin run his rifle level and the enemy are being cut down, punched in half, wrenched round and torn apart. The carbine butts and jolts in my hand like a bucking snake but I’m not shooting at anything, I can’t manage it somehow. I glance around—the enemy shoots back at us but not one of us has fallen, a mob erupting with flashing guns like a churning thundercloud ...
... ahead and to my left the Captain stands in a plume of brass fire with his arms flung out, warding me off with his hands in a flash that leaves a shadowy scar in my vision, blotting him out. Did I see him? What did I just see? The blackbirds ahead scatter and bound off to the left—a few of them stand out distinctly in the moonlight—they are not swinging back and forth as they usually do: they are leaping with both legs, like hares.
Around Makemin, Saskia and the others, I see the wan dream tremble in the air like diamond haze, the chance at last to crush the enemy, hammer their bodies and break them open, dash them to smithereens—the same dream drove me forward against my exhaustion and flooded my arms and legs with miraculous, fresh strength, but now it recedes from me, though it wheels all around in them. No one is really dying.
Those aren’t people. Their guns aren’t guns. None of our number has fallen—what kind of ambush works like that? Following their charge a body of our soldiers on the left plunges after them and I don’t see them any more. From out of invisibility ahead I hear them scream. The screams are cut short, each one.
Makemin suddenly drops to a walk and calls “Halt! Halt!”
Saskia barrels up to him in a flash demanding to know why we’ve stopped—he wants us to advance slowly, expecting a trap.
“They may have found help. Those birds warned them we were coming.”
In the dark and the cold the bitter grin on my face goes unremarked—they aren’t they.
We close on them carefully.
“They’ve carried their bodies off with them,” Saskia says hoarsely.
There are no bodies, no arms to carry bodies.
I hop up on a stone and see it, wave Makemin up to this higher vantage and show him the chasm standing there hidden by bracken and heaped scurf. Chasing “them,” we’d have plunged right into it.
Three of the “enemy soldiers” stand there between us and the gap, all their impersonated Wacagan lightness gone, staring coldly back at us their eyes like stars shine with piercing light.
“Those aren’t people,” I say. I sound like a boy.
Silichieh half raises his rifle jerkily—
“Don’t shoot them,” Thrushchurl says without taking his eyes away, and Silichieh looks, and seems to understand, lowering his gun again.
The figures turn together and calmly walk over the chasm’s brink, dropping out of sight.
*
I listen carefully to the slightest motions of the air in the branches, the sifting noise it makes as it slithers along the ground. My every spare moment is spent like this, in a painful effort to hear the music. Saskia tramps by making an enormous racket; drawn as she is, she never seems to get tired. I wish she’d tire right out into thin air, and wishing tires me. They created those vast buildings, that are musical instruments, to sing a neverending spell over all the land here. The soldiers we found hanging from the trees in mineral varnish were the “rests,” I suppose. The song is performed by all those dead musicians, and its notes are also moments in our story, like that bit of improvisation with the counterfeit soldiers. The hares and the birds, their Predicanten, are conducting. It’s so tidy I can’t quite believe it. But it couldn’t possibly be as quiet as this if there weren’t some great booming sound shoving the quiet down into our ears. The music shakes its vast body of wind over me, and the quiet between us only intensifies until my breathing interferes with my hearing. The musicians must be dead, with no breathing or pulse, to be able to hear what they play. The soldiers hanging in the trees, or lying smashed at the bottom of that chasm, so far down we couldn’t see them, are all listening to the music now.
Sometimes I think Thrushchurl hears it. He loves it here.
Dusk coming on. A Yeseg corporal near me gives a sudden yelp and snatches his gun from his back—I follow his eyes to iron wings high in a tree. The wings gape apart and the shape leaps aloft. The corporal starts blasting at it wildly, gibbering curses. I only watch him do it with cold curiosity. Silichieh rushes up, slows as he approaches the corporal from behind.
“What is it?” he yells. “Stop shooting!”
The corporal empties his gun, oblivious.
Thrushchurl is leaning against a tree. He catches Silichieh’s eye without unleaning his head from the trunk.
“Oh, let him shoot, if it makes him feel better,” Thrushchurl lowers his eyes. “It won’t do any harm.”
The corporal stands panting and glaring in the silence his shots made. Nothing has changed, except that some bullets are gone.
“You can shoot birds but not soldiers?” Silichieh asks suddenly. The smile that scales my cheekbones has to strain against my creaking muscles.
Thrushchurl answers him calmly, “It’s not the same thing a bit. You don’t shoot where your form and the Predicate’s form correspond. It doesn’t go through.”
And I add, “If they model themselves on you then—injure the image, injure the original.”
Silichieh looks from me to Thrushchurl and back again. I see plainly he has his own struggling understanding, and for some reason I feel abashed as though I’d just pulled a trick on him.
Seeing his confusion, suddenly I stop trusting this knowing, collected feeling; I stop forgetting the danger we’re in.
Through sparser tree tops towering, irregular spars, impossibly high mounds, crossways are dim blue grey against slate sky. We’ve stopped, and a cart wheel is being repaired; I lie down on my side facing away from everyone and gingerly draw the charm from my pocket. This fragile thing is my life. I don’t dare even hold it, and my hands shake. So I slide it along the ground up to my face. The figure inside points unerringly in a single direction, toward the high silhouettes. Tatters of sky are reflected in its glass, grow blurry, now I see a sort of a gateway, a rubble road by a titanic pinwheel-shaped building sprouting hoses, and the cemetery beyond. Has this thing all along been thinking pictures silently to itself in my pocket?
Soon I am pointing the way again, Jil Punkinflake glowering at me over Saskia’s shoulder. He should thank me for the opportunity to feel something different.
The Narrator Page 33