by Jeff Kamen
‘You sure about that? Looks funny to me.’
‘Listen. She’s here, the woman I came for. Everything’s here, damn it, it’s where she lived.’
The old woman passed beneath the torches and turned away, soon to be lost among the other figures milling there. Soon afterwards they too passed beneath the torches, entering a great burnished chamber of flickering alcoves, each lit by candles and lamps and attended to by what appeared to be people at worship. Overhead, populating the high overarching walls, were huge flame-coloured paintings forming a terrifying panorama. In each were depictions of people on fire, some exposed to the bone, all wide-eyed and howling at the moment of conflagration.
They stood together, staring upwards and around, for it seemed that they’d indeed come to a temple, yet of what kind they could not comprehend.
‘Shit,’ Radjík whispered, as a little humped beast padded by, not more than three feet in height. It was tawny brown in colour and looked like some tiny misshapen horse, the bells it wore jinking quietly, foot, neck and sash. The boy leading it turned to look at her, then continued on his way.
‘Camels,’ Jaala whispered, in one language and then the other, noticing a number of such diminutive creatures within the hall, some bedded in straw within hallowed niches, where people were kneeling before them in homage, perhaps even adoration. Elsewhere, in the larger alcoves, there was such a strange array of objects on display that she could not take it in at first, until she began to understand that they’d been conserved somehow, salvaged from the remote past.
There were metal contraptions on wheels, hooked up or mounted on heavy plinths; and there were objects framed behind glass, some badly burnt, some only lightly tarnished. She saw tools glinting there, many of unimaginable purpose, others more familiar from her time with the Nassgruben: fan blades and rotary arms and complex wreaths of tubing; engine blocks and coiled springs and trolleys suspended by ropes. Turning, she thought there must be thousands of them altogether, making up a darkened gallery of broken and nameless things that cut or swept or assisted in the doing of tasks that no person had performed in centuries, many still attached to their wires. Then to one side she noticed a series of rectangular panes that resembled photoplates. She touched Radjík’s arm and they went closer to look at them.
They were without doubt photoplates, the images behind the glass featuring massive engines crossing the desertlands, some with dartlike wings that flew by air, others with giant roller-like wheels that threw up pillars of dust. There were great shining houses crammed with thorny foliage. Spiked heads were rearing up in places, their roots piercing the dry and crumbling ground for miles.
They studied them for some time, murmuring their observations, then moved on to look at other items in the chamber. As they circulated, Jaala noticed that in certain niches people were depositing small gifts, or pouring liquids onto the stone walls from what she took to be sacred vessels. Some were placing sketched portraits before these glistening shrines as though to transmit to the absent person something of the mutable power of that earlier age. To aid or comfort or even bring back the dead, she thought, and with a kind of numb fascination she stood watching them while Radjík continued staring around, whispering questions.
The prayers and singing continued unabated, the voices overlapping in an antique and mysterious lullaby. ‘Look,’ Radjík hissed, for in one area there was a lamplit trove of rotting metallic forms of vaguely humanoid appearance, some complete enough for them to see the likeness of that bygone race in their features, with fleshy tones still visible on the casings. Rusted figures like huge dolls clad in tissue-thin rags, their polished eyes gleaming blandly above the mouth slits.
‘What the hell is this place?’ she said, to be quietened by Jaala as she thought of something — no, she realised, remembered something — and she gazed round once more, her eyes lit zealously as she sought out portals in the collapsed roof and upper galleries, portals that the other woman had seen and known ... doorways and entrances leading to a dense warren of bunkers and laboratories and offices and halls of audiences in masks and uniforms that put into her mind the jagged recollection of bright white tiles ... blood in a dish ... a timer counting down; the steely clatter of instruments. A bearded face looming over her as the operation began ...
Then, as though slammed into, she thought she understood. She swung round wide-eyed and looked behind her, seeing the first woman’s shape as she entered a rubble wall, on her way to start the final procedure. Striding determinedly. Her swarthy face set firm. None to stand in her way but herself, her own fierce will. None to judge her actions but whomsoever fate preserved afterwards, should anyone be spared at all. Should there be anything to consider but what must be done.
‘No,’ she said in that other’s language. ‘She couldn’t have ... she couldn’t ...’
‘What’s wrong?’
She was staring wildly, still turning, her hands raised as if to fend off unseen forces. Across the walls, huge painted faces were screaming across time at her, arms raised and shrieking, burning effigies of terror.
‘Hey. Hey, what’s wrong? Look at me.’
‘She couldn’t have ...’
‘Stop this,’ Radjík snapped, but Jaala sank to the floor gasping, clutching herself; seeing before her a scene she could not, did not want to, comprehend. Within it a woman with something to save that would cost all that she was, running from the cries and mayhem, a clockwork code of sorts that might be the salvation of those to come ...
‘No, no ...’
A woman moving beyond herself towards new states of being; a woman prepared to change herself inside so she could run on forever …
‘What is it? What you sayin? Talk to me!’
Jaala seized her, aghast. ‘Oh god,’ she begged. ‘Oh god oh god, get me outside.’
~O~
Daybreak. They drove down from the crest of the hill and stopped in the sands not far from a pool covered with pale algae. A few children were playing nearby, throwing sticks and rubbish into the discoloured water.
Radjík sat tiredly, looping the reins around her fingers.
Jaala looked at her, her head heavy. Her eyes. Everything felt laboured, unreal. All the destruction she’d ever surveyed originated from back then. All of it. And she, that once-blameless ancestor, one of the makers.
Dogchild. Bitchling. Foresthag.
Talker-to-herself. Witch.
‘She may as well have been a Nassgrube,’ she said at last.
Radjík looked at her questioningly.
‘A Versteckts.’
‘Yeah. Sounds like it.’
‘She worked at a building near there. I don’t know our word for it.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Can’t think. It was a building where they made food. They used special treatments. She knew their science. She ... she worked with it.’
‘Do you hate her?’
‘Hate her? I don’t know.’ She shrugged miserably. ‘No. Not hate.’
Radjík looked back towards the dark and sombre blocks outlined in the haze. Huge even from there, a few miles distant.
‘She ... she didn’t know what would happen. She thought she was doing good. Keeping the good knowledge alive.’ She smiled grimly as she said this. Like a Versteckts. Her own blood. The irony of it. Perhaps the children at Ansthalt had been right after all. Right about everything. A few lines of verse arose in her mind, the image of herself inside a faraway smoky tent.
Break me, change me, and you will surely live.
Break me, change me, and you will surely die.
Which will you choose? Which is in your mind?
Ivy or Ivory? How will you know until you try?
The same scenes had been going through her head all night. The same infernal words. Yes, she thought, always the same, a tyranny of repetition. The emblem of that contrived existence being her dark little stone. The thought of it made her shudder. As so often in the past, she could picture Vadraskar smashing hers after fitting it in he
r sceptre; Grethà using hers as a paperweight, then giving it away. And then her own, lying unwanted in the back, an anchor to that hateful past that threatened to drag her to the bottom.
An anchor which must go.
‘What you gonna do?’ Radjík said eventually.
‘Get rid of the stone. Like the others did. It’ll be a start.’
‘Yeah? How?’
‘I’ll leave it here, where it belongs.’
Radjík nodded. ‘You alright? You don’t feel sick?’
‘I don’t know how I feel. I just need to be very careful, that’s all. With everything.’ She smiled tightly at Radjík, then put her hands on her knees and forced herself up. ‘I’ll do it now,’ she said. ‘Just need to make sure those kids don’t see. I don’t want it found.’
‘Then that’s it? We go?’
‘That’s right. We go.’
Chapter 83 — Unleashed
Winter faded and he took to living aboard the ship again. He spent much of his time staring from the tiller into the distance; until at last, guided by shadows, driven by melancholy, he packed up and travelled further round the island, stopping in coves and crude villages, where increasingly he came across signs of the coughing sickness. Entering one such settlement in the north, he went among a broken and haunted people living in a torment of fear of what might come to them — and yet he barely noticed their suffering, focussed as he was on sufferings of his own.
Lying in bed, he tried to fight away the thoughts that were surfacing, but it was getting harder.
Intrusive thoughts.
Lord of Fires ...
Threatening.
... we make this offer to you in awe and song ...
Thoughts that were not so much thoughts as stark memories he could not shake away.
Make him pay! This cannot stand!
Moaning, he saw an impression of himself running to a dark hole in the rocks, a hole shaped like a doorway. He caught a sudden moment of abhorrence moving in a blur, and then from the darkness came such an unwelcome wreath of voices. He saw a crackling fire. A great covered head turning. A thin high shrieking by the flames and in the heart of it an eye that terrified him, an orb of cracked agate glaring and probing and investigating, feeling and measuring him and altering his strings as if he were a broken instrument, one to be placed dumbly before its audience and wound up and left to play ...
He sat up bellowing, reaching out in desperation. His yells echoing throughout the ship, then falling to silence.
Silence. The sound of a new realisation ... an understanding of what the rest of his life had in store.
A sense of dread and death was building in him that bloomed all the more foully as he lurched through the empty streets. Acrid smoke was billowing through like some utterance of the plague itself. Bells rang dolorously from the mudtowers, and from the steps of a stone temple he watched as wrapped bodies were carried inside. Further on his way he saw the dead being burned along the waterfront, and he walked with the stench of it rising over the sewer smells and smells of the sea. He walked faster, muttering, snatching glances behind him.
In several places he saw scales being weighted with wood, the families of the deceased paying for what it would cost to burn their loved ones. On he went, breaking into a run. He saw mourners trailing everywhere and sanitation crews marauding around the shuttered dwellings like gangs of assassins, burning powders, painting walls, armed and wary of all they surveyed, every onlooker, every doorway. He ran to his ship and sailed out with the tide, steering an uncertain passage eastwards.
Eventually he found himself heading back to where he’d first come drifting before the winter. He weighed anchor away from the rocks and retreated down the ladder to drink, aiming to rid himself of his discomfort.
... this debt shall now be collected ... and collected well ...
He wondered why, wiping the sweat away.
We are owed! Owed ...
What was the debt? What had he done? What had happened to him?
He sat staring. Drinking.
Whose bartered souls have for many moons evaded you, in spite of what was owed ...
And yet ... did he want to know? Did he want to run through that hole in the rock, only to have something spring at him? Something grab him and haul him away? Something tear at him?
The stove crackled and the light of it guttered dimly in his eyes as he pushed back the recollections. Then another image came, small and struggling. He fought it away with a strangled noise and climbed to the deck. From there a week of hell followed.
He went adrift in this time, too frightened to stay on land. Going on bearded and desperate, hearing disembodied cries in the wind, cries of peril, of arcane warning. Plaintive cries he’d known from somewhere before, in some unwanted time of waking, in a place which was dim and crowded and malevolent, squirms of movement in the fire and blood on a scraped board and a small thing lifted there, burning in those hideous clutches like a doll of human wax, its tiny features sunken and betrayed and its torn mouth slit apart like it was screaming, screaming and screaming.
He sailed on round the island as he’d roamed in the tunnel, with the sense that some nameless figure was following him — chasing him, hunting him without mercy until it had claimed its dues. At last he saw a port ahead. Mooring abruptly at a rotting quayside, heedless of the other boats, he jumped from the deck and went at a run to the nearest tavern. ‘Drink,’ he panted, slapping down a coin. ‘Get me a drink.’
Long before closing time the owner was forced to shut the place amidst a wreckage of broken chairs, his dog barking frenziedly behind the counter.
He stumbled away into the darkness, bleeding and confused, suspicious of everything, shoving away the hands before him before running off to the slatted houselights. He was seen at other drinking dens that week, the chaos following him nightly. Everywhere he went, he seemed to find himself surrounded by lunging figures and broken glass and threats muttered viciously before the inevitable swinging of fists. He knew that something was out of place but was unable to correct it, put it right again, and he continued with the bedlam until finally the inhabitants drove him off at knifepoint. He sailed off cursing them, laughing crazily. A few miles out to sea, he drew up alongside an incoming craft and traded most of what he owned for a barrel of strong liquor, then set off into the rolling swell.
Fresh winds blew him further eastwards and he did not resist them, nor did he care where they led to. He planned to sail until he knew that nothing was coming up behind him. No more fear, he promised himself, no more acting like a clockwork toy afraid that the coil would wind down; no more looking back. He would outrun it, whatever it was, this invisible jinx, this demon of bad luck, outrun it or die in the attempt. He would wreck himself if necessary, charge like a battering ram into that final crash of inner glory. He filled an empty bottle and climbed the ladder and lifted the bottle to the skies and the pact was done. He drank, closing his eyes. Then he drank again.
The winds blustered daily and his charts told him he was making progress in the direction of Kríti. Hollow cheeked, his lips cracked, he tried to sail all the faster, sail like a machine, no longer partnered to humanity but inured from it, his heart like a rock in his chest, cold and brittle and heavy. Each morning he was there at his usual place by the tiller. He’d fix his gaze and watch the cold sun flashing off the waves without flinching, eyes glittering like malachite, sensing that all his earthly bonds were finally severed, the lands he had known forever closed to him. Sensing he was closer to a solution to it all, one which lay ahead of him, only ahead.
He sailed on beneath the skies of early spring, the seas around him lying immense and brilliant and empty. Determined not to be caught out in his sleep, he sailed on by dark and by day until his vision was swimming, until his life was unravelling before him in fragments, terror flashing in every shard. On he went, with the stars echoing in icy black firesong and his laughter ringing like a cry of agony, knowing nothing but that he had
to sail.
The storm when it came caught him not so much offguard as disordered, close to collapse. He was drinking in the hold when a pot overturned and he found himself struggling to keep upright. He climbed the ladder to find the sails snapping back and forth. A fine spray blew up at him as a wave split against the prow, and as he supported himself against the mast, he looked about charily. It was midafternoon, and when he sought the sun, it was passing into a long reef of cloud that was one of many such reefs layered far into the distance.
He’d seen such skies before, and with scant regard for it, spitting aside, he returned belowdecks, only to be roused again some time later when half the contents of his tiny galley crashed to the floor. His hooked cups swinging, cracking together. He got up haggardly, and putting out a hand for balance, he wove a path back to the ladder and climbed up again, unable to tell from the sky what time it was. There were waves spattering the deck, and upon climbing out, he stood a minute searching blearily around.
Things had changed since he’d last peered out. The air temperature had dropped; the birds had gone. He turned, squinting. The horizon in every direction was wreathed in a continuous wall of cloud, and high above him only a few panes of blue were visible. The seas were rising heavily, the waves cresting white as they rolled by. He turned again, realising he was alone in the middle of something so enormous he could barely detect it moving. Licking the salt from his face, he made a smacking sound. ‘Well, well,’ he said, assessing the way ahead. ‘Just you and me then.’
On he sailed, and before long a deep rumbling sounded from the south. He looked aside. A strangely banded glow was cast across the sky. He was taking its coppery tones as a good omen when even these clouds began to darken. Then, on turning to the west, he saw that something had sucked away the sun, leaving a trail of red tendrils hanging in the clouds like a dish of nerve endings. A minute later these too were gone, drawn into the blackened lips of a thunderhead that began to glower, to pulse electrically. He took a swig from his bottle, and then grinning with defiance, he tied off the tiller arm so it would hold his course, determined as he was to reach the island. There he could weather the storm in comfort, could take on fresh supplies before continuing on his way.