He found a cleft in the tree where he would sleep and set watching charms along the length of the trunk before settling in for the night.
Nocturnal creatures began to wake, climbing and slithering through the trees, rustling in the undergrowth. He knew their sounds and found them comforting: It meant that neither man nor demon lingered nearby. He set his hearing for silence or flutter and drifted into sleep.
He dreamt of his grandfather and his carved house. He was a boy again, in the time before the outsiders came; in that house, no foreigner would ever tread. They sat together, his grandfather humming while braiding a cover for his sacrificial spear; they would sit like this forever, because the outside world, with all its dangers and strangers, was sealed off by an invisible sheet of magic; those who stared into their space could never get past its tense, crystal barrier. He and his grandfather would ignore them and go on with the business of their day, or else stare through them as though their faces were shadows, lost reflections of a remote and meaningless fiction.
The dream was a good one, rich and secure. It must have lasted all night long; he awoke in the morning with it washing warmly around in the waters of his head.
As dawn broke through the foliage, he found their tracks under the dew and followed up behind them. It was only then that he sensed it, saw the signs in their very footfalls—the earth and the broken twigs in his passing left no doubt: One of them was his target, and he was finally certain of who it was that he followed. It was not a descendant, or a memory, or a ghost of another time; it was the same man, the same physical being who had first placed the rifle in his hands and trusted him to use it so many years ago; the only outsider who had ever understood some part of the True People; the one who was just, in blood and words. He had been with Irrinipeste all this time: That was why he had been so difficult to kill. At last he understood how this man had overcome him.
They exchanged names the next morning and set about travelling on together. Theirs were the first conversations Ishmael had conducted with a human man, other than Mutter and a few carnival utterings: He had to learn more.
“Why are you not repelled by me? Do you not find my face offensive?”
“I have seen worse,” said Williams.
“Your answer surprises me. I was once told that everybody I met was certain to be disgusted by me.”
“And who told you that?”
Ishmael found himself recalling memories that he didn’t know he owned: of Ghertrude and Mutter; of the house and its high walls. As his explanations tailed off, he insisted on his question until Williams gave in and answered.
“Yes, back in the city you would be an oddity. Nobody has seen a real, living cyclops for thousands of years. Life would be difficult for you; you would have to hide. But here it is very different; you are but one of a multitude of strange things in this forest.”
Ishmael limped along behind Williams, leaning heavily on the stick that the tall man had cut for him. He felt compelled to press the issue further.
“But you could have passed by when I was attacked back there. And you still help me now. Why is that?”
“I suppose I could easily have left you. But everything here has meaning: All my purpose seems to be locked into the secrets of the Vorrh. I don’t know how, but it’s possible that you are a part of that. And anyway, I would leave no creature to the mercy of those man-eating monstrosities.”
“But what if it was they who were a part of your destiny here?” asked Ishmael intently.
“Then it was their destiny to die and my destiny to help them do so. You were simply the trigger to the event.”
The cyclops fell quiet; being a trigger to somebody else’s event was far beyond his experience, and he was not sure how comfortable he was with the notion.
—
They walked for three hours on a high ridge that petered out into a solid plane of trees.
“There is the centre,” said Williams, “the core.” He pointed across into the middle of the dense mass. He unslung his bow and looked around. “Stay here. I shall return in a short while.”
Before Ishmael could protest, he walked out of sight, using the shoulder of the ridge as a screen between them. The cyclops sat down and examined his bandaged leg. He heard the arrow loose and felt the strange emptiness in its wake. Ten minutes later, the Bowman came back to stand over him. The same look of loss and confusion had stolen his confidence again. His hands were stained black from the bow and he was searching Ishmael’s face for an answer to which neither of them could find the question.
Tsungali always completed a task once he had undertaken it, but something in him had deserted him this time; his purpose had dwindled. His prey had power and identity, and he was not alone. They were ahead of him, and all he trusted was behind. Last night’s dream had coaxed him to another place, a place that no longer existed. He stopped suddenly and looked at his hands, holding Uculipsa. The old rifle with its inscriptions and dents, with its recently splintered stock, suddenly looked as tired as he. The talismans that lined his body felt heavy and sullen. His age and the strangeness of this country passed through all his protections. For the first time, he understood momentum and it stopped him in his tracks. Why was he doing this? For whom? He sat down and forgot his function.
A soft footfall was approaching behind him, and for the first time in his adult life he did not hear it as fear. He stayed still and waited.
“Little one!” the old voice said. “Little one, why are you lost here?”
He could not turn but did not need to. He looked at his hands and the wrinkled blue sheen of the skin. Behind him, his grandfather said, “Come home. This place is full of demons and forsaken ones; there is nothing for you here.”
Before him, he heard voices. Williams and his companion were within easy range.
Their silence had become dark and uneasy. Ishmael glanced at his sullen friend apprehensively. “Is something wrong?” he asked. Williams looked into the distance.
“The shot was flawed,” he said quietly. “The arrow curved and fell short.”
Ishmael did not know how to respond; something in him instinctively preferred to keep the subject of the bow at a distance. In an attempt to change the subject he asked, “Are we walking into the core?”
“In that direction. The arrow leads in that direction.”
Ishmael looked back and forth from the slippery path to Williams’s face, trying to understand the mood and colour of the other man’s introspection.
“She is struggling,” said Williams to himself, ignoring the limping cyclops at his side. The sun was becoming strong again, and the breath of the trees was coagulating with it to make the air soupy and moist. “This has never happened before,” continued the Englishman. He looked at the bow in his outstretched hand, disregarding the path beneath his feet.
Ishmael did not understand, and the man’s mood swings were worrying him. Doubt had crawled into their relationship; the offered protection and care were threatened by Williams’s disengagement.
“I think the bow wants you,” announced Williams, and the squirm of fear in Ishmael’s gut increased to a shudder. “She bleeds and strains towards your hand.”
Williams stopped dead in the track, his arm outstretched, the black bow quivering.
Ishmael blinked at the now-terrifying object held towards him. Williams had shut his eyes against the touch, and the bow swayed slightly, as if its horizontal curve was trying to match the cyclops’s straining eyelids. Ishmael had no intention of touching the eldritch thing. “I don’t want this. It’s your bow; I don’t want it.”
“It’s not about what you want,” said Williams, his eyes still pressed shut. “Come; take her from my hands.”
Tsungali knew that the voices of men, like their breath, did not always live in this world alone. He knew they could pass into others and sometimes bring back different sayings. That was what the child, Irrinipeste, was so wondrous at doing: Her voice had passed into many worlds and
brought great wisdom back. So it could be the voice of his grandfather behind him; but it could also be the voice of a ghost or demon that had stolen it. If he believed and turned to confront it, he would be lost.
“Come, take my hand,” his grandfather said.
In that moment, he heard the echo of those words spoken above him, in the mouth of his prey. Without looking back, he looped up towards the track ahead of them, no longer caring about the noise he made in his approach.
He crept with speed to the edge of the track and saw them in his path, unprepared and engaged in a type of bizarre whiteman’s game. They had become silent, and the Bowman, the one he knew, held his weapon away from his body, thrusting it in the face of a smaller man.
All this Tsungali saw in a fraction of a second. Whatever this ritual was, it had left them exposed and unprepared: The field was his. He attached the long-bladed bayonet and bolted a round into the breech, then climbed up onto the track and began to charge, head down like a bull, the blade cleaving through space towards them.
So intent was Williams in his self-imposed blindness that he did not hear the fast rustle of leaves or the velocity of the twigs breaking behind the cyclops. But Ishmael did, and he swung around, glaring down to where he imagined he would see the squat yellow bodies of the attacking anthropophagi. To his shock, he was confronted by the charging blur of an enormous black warrior carrying a rifle, a vicious knife gleaming at its snout. It was coming fast.
Ishmael did the only thing that he knew would awaken Williams into that lethal moment: He snatched the bow from his hands with such force that it jarred the Bowman’s eyes open and alert.
The cyclops turned again to the assailant, and his glare was like a slap across the hunter’s eyes. This was not a white man—it was not a man at all. Ishmael’s glaring eye hit his sight and he faltered, slipping on the sticky path. He slid almost to all fours but never lost his momentum or his grip on Uculipsa. He caught himself without falling and stumbled forward, pulling his lope upright and back into a charge.
Williams saw the charging man, watched him lose focus and slither in his approach. Lifting his hand to his shoulder bag, he pulled out the hefty, eager weight of the Mars pistol before the hunter had righted himself and gathered speed.
As he ran, Tsungali saw the creature raise the bow over his head; he saw the quick, unfolding movement of the other man and he knew the voice he had heard below really had been that of his grandfather, not a demon or a ghost. The monsters did not whisper below: They were up here, with him, and he was running straight at them.
Williams cocked and aimed the pistol as he saw the black man’s eyes.
The point of the bayonet was within two metres of Ishmael’s chest when the great roar put a stop to all motion; all, that is, except for that of the birds, who threw themselves from every branch and beat their wings upwards and out of the forest, into the bright, dazzling air and away from the terrible sound.
Ishmael had dropped the bow, letting it spring away from his fast hands as he grabbed at his ears, a hot, white flame passing over his shoulder. He sank to his knees, howling.
Williams stepped past him, the pistol never wavering from its attention. He stared down the track to where Tsungali lay, lifted off his feet and thrown back to the exact spot where he had regained his momentum only seconds before. He writhed in an excruciating tangle while Williams slowly walked the narrow distance to stand over him, the smoking barrel at his side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Charlotte watched him as he stared out to sea from the quarterdeck of the great white-and-silver ship. He was motionless and uncommunicative; every day spent on the endless water made him drift further and further away. She tried to be close, but a barrier was forming as he fell inward. She had never felt so lonely or so helpless as she did while watching the sea turn from blue to green, pondering its unfeeling and enormous depth.
At night, under fierce stars, they ate in silence, with all her attempts at gentle conversation ignored or rebuffed. She knew he could not help it, that it was not vindictively aimed at her, but it still wounded her. She told herself that her hurt was nothing compared to his; his most overwhelming feelings were attached to an irredeemable absence. Every hour of his waking and sleeping life was given to searching the recesses of his blank memory for a face or a moment to hold and flood with his tidal wave of emotion. But all he ever found was a distant, grey, empty shore, and by the time they had reached Marseille, he barely noticed she was there at all.
He no longer shared his hurt with her. Instead, she became the recipient of the brunt of his disappointment and his growing, aimless anger. Their return to Paris was peevish and numb. He refused to be enlightened by her happiness of homecoming. Every effort she made was wasted and disregarded. He was punishing her inability to solve or reduce his misery, demanding rather than asking her for things, especially his fastidious meals and his increasing supplies of barbiturates. She had to keep a record of his experiments with these, so that he might calculate different alchemies of unbeing and find the limits of his nonexistence to balance against the volume of his pain.
He was listless; he could not settle or write. He roamed the rooms, peering through the curtains into the diminished City of Light; he talked about travelling again, used movement as a surrogate for thought. For the first time, she seriously considered breaking their contract, giving up his mother’s money, and fleeing his baleful presence. But she stayed for him, knowing that without her, his life with the indifferent servants would be even worse. His death was the enigma that stalked her life, and she came to recognise that it was not the tangled weight of responsibility that made her care and kept her close; it was something stronger, something strangely unnecessary and totally essential; a kind of love; a constant need to contain and guard with unflinching proximity. It was not maternal and was certainly not fed by perversity from the injuries of his brutality. It was her presence, which had become entangled with his, beyond circumstance and sometimes even personality. She would stay until the end and remove all judgment to do so.
She remembered a conversation she had once heard in her childhood. She was nestled under the thick legs of dark furniture, while a Jewish relation explained stories of his faith. He talked about many peculiar and difficult things, but one stuck in her young mind: the division of day and night, and how dusk and dawn had two characteristics, the twilight of the dove and the twilight of the raven. She now understood that the rest of their time together would be like this, a constant dusk. She would maintain it and work on its luminance. It would be the twilight of the dove, and the raven would never be allowed in.
Part Three
In some country everyone is blind from birth. Some are eager for knowledge and aspire after truth. Sooner or later one of them will say, “You see, sirs, how we cannot walk straight along our way, but rather we frequently fall into holes. But I do not believe that the whole human race is under such a handicap, for the natural desire that we have to walk straight is not frustrated in the whole race. So I believe that there are some men who are endowed with a faculty for setting themselves straight.”
NICHOLAS OF AUTRECOURT, Exigit ordo
The grandiosity of “paper buildings” like Brueghel’s tower of Babel, Boullée’s funerary temples, Piranesi’s prisons, or Sant’Elia’s Futurist power stations have been realized, and by an amateur, a fanatically motivated little lady from New Haven whose dream palace was crafted with Yankee ingenuity.
JOHN ASHBERY
…and as the disputational .44
occurred in his hand and spun there
in that warp of relativity one sees
in the backward turning spokes
of a buckboard,
then came suddenly
to rest, the barrel utterly justified
with a line pointing
to the neighborhood of infinity.
ED DORN, Gunslinger
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Muybridge stood before the
oval mirror, combing his beard. Now back in America, he had lost weight again, and the furrows under the white strands looked dark grey, deep rills and valleys in a late, gaunt sliver of moon. He wore his finest shirt, one he had bought in Jermyn Street, at London’s most renowned tailor, the consort’s own shirtmaker. There was a flicker in the peeling glass, tarnished silver curling away from the polished transparency, the shadow of a woman passing. He ignored the unimportant flicker of the past and looked closely at himself, catching the roaming eyes for a moment and holding them out of focus, not wanting to see into their meaning. The glass had warped since the time of his wife, become thin since her fatness had moved away. Perfumed colour and greasy powder no longer wallowed in its gilt frame; now it was only the empty grey of his eyes reflected in its shallows, sphinctered tight against search or understanding.
The doorbell rang: His carriage had arrived. He donned his surtout coat, picked up his cane and his new formal day hat, and hurried for the door, his old bones creaking against the speed. He was on his way to meet the grand dame, and he must not be late.
The carriage rattled as he held tightly to his stick, jittering with excitement and nerves; he had always wanted to meet her. She had sent the request through the Stanfords, inviting him to take tea with her on this bright March day. He was fascinated by her diminutive beauty and gigantic wealth, having seen the former many years before, across a ballroom as he passed through the garden. She was not a classic beauty, like one of the willowy Long Island sirens who fluttered and coiled in the gleaming white of society’s grandest parties. Her attractiveness came from within and radiated her every movement with grace and charisma; not a polished diamond, but an energetic nugget of strength and robust dignity. Since then, she had been overwhelmed with money and grief. The wasting death of her only daughter and untimely demise of her husband left only her loneliness to break her, and her vast inheritance to haunt every hope of an afterlife.
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