by B Catling
Ishmael now has his own life and will be left alone to use it.
I will contact you again after the birth.
* * *
Cyrena sat on the balcony looking out at the city, beyond the city walls, to the distant Vorrh. Ishmael brought her a glass of wine and gently laid his hand on her shoulder.
It was difficult to believe that so much change was occurring. Everything looked the same. Ishmael thought of the camera obscura; Cyrena watched the swallows. Their skin was warm in its contact and reassuring. Between them, they would endure.
* * *
The wind is at my back and I feel a great uplifting as I walk swiftly into a new landscape of roads and broken spherical boulders. The pitchy shadow of before is being bleached away by the oncoming light. There is a meeting of tracks ahead, a kind of crossroads with a tiny roadside chapel. A figure stands there, waiting. Is this the companion I sensed before, somehow ahead of me? It watches for my arrival, and I increase my pace to draw near.
It is a man, and not what I expected. At this distance, I can see there is something wrong with his face. His posture is sprung, and displays an agile, defensive confidence that puts me on guard. I sense ferocity and purpose. At least I have the gun, which I cock inside the bag before I get any closer.
* * *
The figure at the crossroads tensed his muscles and drew himself up to full height: there would be no passing this day.
No one had ever passed through the forest untouched; the figure before him had lived in it, and traversed it a second time with apparent effortlessness. He had worked hard and suffered much to keep the man before him alive – soon, he alone would possess all elements of the knowledge and their connotative power.
In his altered condition, the cleric had taken weeks to circumnavigate the outskirts and reach this point of interception. His anxiety to be enlightened peaked and crested within his broken body, sending tortuous spasms of adrenalin into his healing wounds. He tolerated the sensation unflinchingly: it would not last long. When he finally entered the sacred ground, in command of the Erstwhile and able to touch the most sacred centre, all things would be put right.
* * *
My God, this man is a leper. He has been half-destroyed by some terrible disease. There is a gaping hole in the middle of his face, which is covered with wounds, sores and loose flaps of skin. His mouth has been eaten and dragged to one side, and his eyes have almost disappeared. It is the face I saw on the ridge, the negative image of the ink-drawn map.
* * *
Sidrus had not reached the vial in time. The Mithrassia had begun to thrive before he had even reached the outskirts of the city: the evil old cunt must have lied about the hours he had to spare. When Sidrus had the knowledge of the Vorrh and was properly healed, he would return and slowly split the medicine man apart, at a far, far slower pace than he had ripped open the dove with the antidote.
The contents of the bottle had stopped the horror from finishing him, but his body was a shattered wreck: his genitals were gone; three of his toes had fallen off and only two of his fingers were left intact; most of his teeth had been eaten away and his face was a putrefied mess; a quarter of his adrenal system was blighted to smithereens. It would all be rectified when he entered the sacred core.
The Bowman had stopped, as if jarred by the sight of him. Sidrus had seen this before, and made some quick mental adjustments.
‘Come closer, friend, I mean you no harm,’ he slurred, his twisted mouth diffracting the intensity of his words. ‘I am Sidrus, a Boundary Holder of the great forest. I hold warrant for these lands.’
Williams stepped closer to the insatiable hunger.
‘I will not shake your hand. It is no longer a custom in these parts, and anyway, you would find the sensation displeasing. As you can see, I have been the victim of a terrible illness. It is not infectious and I am not ashamed of my injuries. Please, do not be worried about my appearance.’
‘I am not,’ answered Williams, almost truthfully.
‘You do not know me, but I have been aware of you for many years. I have protected you from much danger at the hands of hired mercenaries.’
Williams seemed blank and disinterested in these facts, and did not show the slightest degree of gratitude.
‘You no longer carry your bow?’
‘Bow?’
‘The living bow that guided you for years.’
Williams shrugged and said, ‘I have no knowledge of these things. I think you are speaking to the wrong person.’
Sidrus was astonished at the effrontery of these lies; Williams saw the eaten face shift into the same expression of the spectral vision from the slip of vanishing paper. He understood it as a warning and held his bag closer to him.
‘You can trust me; I have done much to protect you.’
‘So you keep saying, but why? And from who?’
Sidrus only enjoyed games of cat and mouse when he was undeniably the feline; this display of churlish arrogance was beginning to annoy him, but he played along, the act of ignorance not distracting his sights from the end goal.
‘You have enemies and adversaries who did not want you passing through the Vorrh again. Your previous colleagues branded you a deserter, a murderer and worse. They wanted you dead or banished, not wandering through the lands of uprising. A bounty was put on your head; all manner of scum have tried to slay you and collect the reward.’
Williams realised that this man’s disease had gone deeper than his face; it must have chewed at his brain. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘About the Possession Wars?’
Williams shook his head, writing disbelief and disinterest in deep marks around his eyes.
‘About the Vorrh?’
‘The what?’
‘The Vorrh. The great forest.’
‘What forest?’
Sidrus’ face could no longer be described. In fury, he pointed behind Williams, who turned, looked and irritably slumped back.
‘I see no forest.’
* * *
He was a world-famous celebrity; now others were taking photographs of him. His vast portfolio of human movement had been a colossal success, and he knew at last that it had all been worthwhile: his place in history was assured. The century was turning, and his work was on the crest of it.
That night he was lecturing again, and he could hear by the muffled roar that every plush seat had been taken. His new evening suit creaked as he combed his titan beard, which dazzled white against the lustrous blackness of the fine cloth. He checked the mirror again: ‘justified’. The stern dignity of science rested on his strong shoulders.
He strode upon the stage to waves of applause. He had the newest batch of movement photographs ready to project, as well as some old favourites, which he had turned into glass slides that he was looking forward to seeing projected large for the first time: everything from elephants to studies of dancing girls, modelled in classical poses. He had made lantern-slides of all of his studies to share with a wider audience, and to advertise the desirability of purchasing the published works. He felt the vast audience sway closer and closer; sensed their appreciation and wonder as tangibly as one feels heat or smells the sea.
Looking out across the hundreds of faces staring at the screen behind him, he could watch their concentration without being seen. So fixed were they on his magnetic images that he became invisible. He saw his fame in their wide-eyed wonder, heard his applause in their startled sighs. They were all his devotees, his prisoners of illumination.
And then he saw the impossible, sitting in the audience and staring directly at him, ignoring the screen and its changes of animals and humans: Gull. He was supposed to be dead. The doctor’s demise was supposed to have coincided with Muybridge’s last departure from England, wasn’t that what everyone had told him? Had everyone he trusted lied to him? Even the fellow he paid to read the British newspapers?! He did not have time to read every bit of tit and tattle the
papers printed; the man had been instructed to scour newspapers for articles about him, or letters of his that had been printed. He had been provided with a list of men of interest to spot; he had reported Gull’s passing two years ago! Even the hospital had said so, yet here he was, large as life, his dense, rectangular face flickering in the projection light.
In more private circumstances, Muybridge would have had a few things to say to the good doctor: questions about the use of his machine instantly sprang to mind. But the animal slides had finished; he was on. He had a short time to fill with explanation as the next set of pictures was loaded. The spotlight moved to him and he could no longer see the audience or the doctor. For a moment, he was lost and forgot what he had to say. There was an uncomfortable shuffling; murmurs could be heard. He coughed and hummed, spluttering the flywheel into action. It turned over and his speech began, recapturing the attention of his audience.
Five minutes later, he got the nod from the projectionist and brought his dialogue to an end; the spotlight went out. The slides flickered into life; Athletes From the Palo Alto series; Men and Women in Motion. He looked back at Gull. He was gone, but two blurs remained in the darkness where he had been sitting. Muybridge strained his sight into the auditorium. The blots looked like eyes, made from smears of light. It rattled him and confused his next speech. He waved the projectionist on, not trusting himself to speak, wanting only to peer into the audience and make some sense of his sight. Women and Children; Running and Jumping with a Skipping Rope; Miss Larrigan Fancy Dancing. He stepped forward to observe the empty seat with greater certainty. They were still there, glaring back at him; amorphous balls of glowing intensity. Why did nobody seated see them there, floating so close? Was Gull playing tricks on him with his mind-mechanics, or was he imagining it? Had he become sick again? He searched every face nearby, but they were locked onto the figures on the screen that rattled past their measuring lines, their muscles and curves bracing against the stillness, the same old charge of strangeness echoing between the bodies and the time they were clad in.
He felt the eyes even after they had gone, as afterimages, scorched into his retinas. He rubbed at his lids, turning the blurs into dark stains, so that when he opened them and looked at the illuminated screen he saw two dark, unfocused holes; pits, like Marey’s dug-out cameras of slowness. He rubbed them again, growing angrier at the irrelevance.
He thought he saw something move at the back of the hall; a shadow that ducked down to avoid detection. Could it be? Was it Gull? There must be an intelligent solution; he would hold no truck with ghosts. The latecomer scratched a painful scramble to his feet, his bruised knee exacerbating the embarrassment of his mid-aisle tumble, none of which Muybridge’s blinded logic registered.
Miss Larrigan danced on the screen, her costume made to resemble the garments of ancient Greek friezes and lofty temples. Its diaphanous nature displayed the elegance of her rhythmic dance and the sensual contours of her body. Projected to this size, it also clearly displayed her erect nipples and the shadow of her pubic mound; her nudity danced gigantically, out of the accepted space of the naked and into the highly charged arena of the erotic. Muybridge had not anticipated such an effect; his audience was noticeably taken aback.
The fallen man at the back of the auditorium stood with his back to the screen, wholly unaware of the delightful vision playing out to his companions. His friend reached out to help him, and the fallen one let out a short chuckle, to show that he was perfectly alright; by some acoustic whim, the laugh carried and was heard everywhere. Muybridge spun towards the noise, peering down like a wrathful Jehovah.
‘Who dares to snigger? These are images of art and science, not brought here to titillate prurient minds! I have not slaved over their perfection so that they might be debased; I have crossed the Atlantic to demonstrate my technique to an educated audience, not to entertain an insolent rabble with the morals of a Turk!’
There was a stunned silence. He looked at the empty seat again.
‘NEXT SLIDE!’ he bellowed at the cowering projectionist.
At the end of his lecture he stalked off the stage, the audience over-clapping as a means of apology. Muybridge left the theatre to the sound of their applause. When he did not reappear, the claps gradually petered out and the crowd left in silence like hunched, mute sheep.
When he had eventually cooled down, he vowed to never again give a public speech in England. It was clear that he was not appreciated in his homeland; he would return to America where they knew how to treat somebody of his worth. Before he left, he found out that Gull was indeed dead. What he had seen was obviously somebody playing an elaborate hoax in an attempt to undermine him and turn him into a laughing stock. He made another pledge to himself that he would only return when he was too old to work any longer, when his dignity demanded that his bones be laid to rest in sceptred soil. Only then would he let these wretches celebrate him properly and share in his genius.
* * *
‘I have given flesh, money and years to save you. I suffer like this and you mock me?!’
Sidrus was in a rage of tears.
He drew two black canes out from beneath his coat.
‘I mean you no offence,’ said Williams, ‘but what you speak of holds no meaning for me. There is nothing like a forest out there; I know because I have been walking for days. There is only a vast, dismal mire.’
Sidrus, so eternally contained and controlled, was finally undone. The truth that he had sought for so long, and come so very close to, slipped further from him with every word. Had the Bowman really forgotten all and been blinded into an illusion? Was this the ultimate effect of exposure to the forest, its greatest defensive irony? Or was this all a foul, vindictive game, a vicious lie to keep him from a life of riches and wealth beyond all imaginings?
‘Have you ever travelled through or lived in a forest?’ asked Sidrus, searching out any avenue that might separate truth from lie.
‘I have the dimmest recollection of a forest destroyed; broken stumps and hacked roots; a place of mud and death, illuminated by thunder and lightning, which tore men into pieces. But that was a long time ago and far from where we now stand.’
More lies.
‘Were you alone? Apart from men, what other creatures dwelt there?’
Williams paused, as if in thought, his hand moving slowly into the corner of his canvas bag. ‘I can think of only two: mules and angels.’ The pistol clicked into gear and he swung it up, letting the bag drop to the floor. But he was no match for the speed of indignation. Before he could commit to a shot, Sidrus bounded across the space between them, arcing one of the sticks up and over, its practised blade exposed. It severed the bag and its strap, slicing through the tendons of Williams’ arm. Sidrus spiralled around him in a blur; he was standing behind the Bowman before his cry had reached the cleric’s ears.
‘I have had enough of your mocking lies!’
Williams grabbed at his bleeding arm; the rest of the world fell away from under him.
When he came to, it was darker; the shadow, which seemed to construct the room he was in, smelt rank. He gagged against his consciousness and tried to move. Nothing shifted; he was held in some sort of constraint. He could hear the wind nearby; it sounded as though he were outside, on some desolate landscape. Then he made out the snapped lead and its fringed remnants of light: a stained glass window, long, meagre and broken, its coloured frames all stolen years before. He recalled the tiny chapel behind the figure at the crossroads; its description fitted his rudimentary assessment of the space he strained against: he had been tied to the simple altar.
Sidrus’ voice had changed: there was no sign of his earlier emotion. The anger had been distilled.
‘I mean to have my answer from you today. I will not tolerate any more of your foolishness. I have been a servant to the Vorrh all of my life; I have tended to its needs and commands; I have engaged with its watchers and culled its predators. I know that the child they cal
l The Sacred Irrinipeste opened your soul to it, and I know you carry its essence locked in your heart and head. My knowledge of it is extensive; yours will make it complete.’
Williams choked against his restraints of rope, throttled by his own ignorance.
‘If you will not give it to me,’ continued the cleric, ‘then I will take it.’
‘I have nothing to give!’ spluttered Williams with all of his strength.
‘Then I shall cut you down and peel you away, until you are only your voice. You will have no choice but to tell.’
The wind cascaded through the broken window, flickering the last of the afternoon light. It bent the puckered fragments of clear glass and the fatigued lead arteries that held them in their tenuous position.
‘It is said by some that parts of memory reside outside the brain, saturating themselves into the muscles and running the length of the spine. I believe that to be true, and so I am going to dig them out, one by one; wake them and release them, so that what you know of the core will be free to reach my ears.’
The purposeful cleric attached a tourniquet to Williams’ upper thigh. A small brazier smouldered nearby, a quenching iron glowing in its heat. Sidrus saw the Englishman’s terrified eyes staring at it.
‘Not a drop of your precious blood will be wasted. By the time I finish, it will exceed the organs it has so faithfully served. It will rush and buffer your brain with over-rich oxygen; only your pain will equal its need to empty its power. Together they will shriek the truth that you refuse to give.’
The first cut only felt like pressure, until he skinned the nerve and everything in Williams’ mind turned white.
He did not know how many times he had passed out or how many times he had come to. New agonies awaited him with every breath. The night arrived and the wind dropped; he was about to scream again when he felt it change, its velocity fluttering and calming into a whisper.