The Vorrh

by Brian Catling

  She was becoming distraught again, and Cyrena wanted her confidence, not her fear. She reached out and held her hands, looking intently into her anxious face.

  “I will do whatever you want. I am with you in everything; you can trust me in this. We will put this whole horrid business behind us and face the future with your child together. I can help in all things.”

  And so they rebuilt the previous weeks with vigour and companionship. They rolled up their sleeves and scrubbed away all the images and stains of memory that were attached to their dealings with Hoffman and Maclish. They burnt the Gladstone bag and incinerated the days where the monsters, humiliations, and violence had dwelt. In their growing, joyous friendship, Ishmael was almost forgotten.

  Mutter watched their daily laughter and the endless tidying and rearranging of furniture; the buying of flowers, the intimate lunches and dinners, their closeness; he knew that she had been told. The haughty outsider was aware of his crime, though she feigned a clever ignorance. He started to observe her more closely, wondering how he would dispose of her when the time came.

  Yet Cyrena’s gleaming, overactive vision missed nothing; she saw the simple, wicked plans being knotted together behind the old servant’s red, veined eyes. If she did not deal with this now, it would soon be permanently out of her control.

  —

  Ghertrude was out shopping when Cyrena arrived at the gate. She was let in and made to cross the cobbled yard, coming to a stop on the exact spot where Hoffman had been dispatched.

  “Herr Mutter, I think we should talk,” she said, peering down at the bunched and ready man. “There is a great secret,” she began, ignoring the clenching of his fists and his boots bracing the ground. “A great secret that I think you should know. I am telling you because I know of the loyalty you have for your mistress. In the future we will need your help even more, and that is why I am telling you, because Ghertrude is still too shy.”

  Mutter frowned and relaxed his attack stance.

  “The truth is, your mistress is going to have a baby.”

  He had known it, had felt it days ago. He had smelt the glow, the warmth hidden in milk. His house and his life had been full of it for years. He had known it and put the idea aside as being impossible.

  “Only the three of us know about this. She will tell her family later. I know this places an extra burden on you and I think it only fair that you should be remunerated for all you have done and will do in the future.”

  The old yeoman had no idea what she was talking about—“remunerated” meant nothing to him.

  “So, Herr Mutter, please, accept this for your troubles.”

  She handed him a small cloth pouch, which he took gingerly, holding it in uncertain hands.

  “Do open it—it is for you and your growing family.”

  He pulled a document out from inside the pouch, awkwardly unfolding it into his blank stare. She suddenly realised that he could not read and was ashamed at her own ignorance. How could she have been so stupid?

  “I am afraid it is rather a complicated legal paper. Essentially, it is your house. It is the ownership of your home. It is now yours and your family’s, forever.”

  Mutter stared blankly at the paper, her words beginning to stick to it with an uncomfortable mixture of amazement and distrust. He wondered if it was a payoff, or some sort of lever, to prise him away from his job. But no: His father had always paid rent to the Tulps, and so had he, endlessly. His cynical heart began to understand that it was, in fact, a gift. A gift for saving Ghertrude from that foolish man. A gift of freedom for his children and their children to come. He stared at her, changing gear from silence to awestruck speechlessness. She smiled at him from the bright clouds and said, “You are not to work today, Sigmund. Go, tell your good wife the news.”

  She fluttered her hand towards the door and he slowly started to move towards it, walking backwards in a crablike fashion. His smile began as he reached the wall and grew with every step that brought him nearer to home. He did not notice Ghertrude pass on the other side of the cathedral square as he hurried along, cap clutched to his chest.

  Ghertrude entered through the side gate and found Cyrena still standing in the courtyard. She looked at her friend in bewilderment.

  “I have just seen Mutter rushing through the streets, with an insane expression on his face.”

  Cyrena beamed at her. “Perhaps he is happy?”

  “I have never seen him like that before, I do hope he is all right.”

  “I am sure he is fine,” said Cyrena, opening the door of the house and motioning for her friend to enter.

  —

  Mutter was out of breath by the time he reached home. He stumbled inside, through his narrow door, catching his rigid boot noisily on the frame, dislodging minute traces of the vanquished Dr. Hoffman. The commotion made his wife stop her duties in the kitchen and rush to see what was going on.

  “Whatever’s the matter, Sigi?”

  He laid his cap aside, still grasping the crumpled paper and cloth bag. “What on earth is the matter? You look like a giddy ox—look at the colour of you. What is it?”

  He could say nothing through his breathless gasps, but his scarlet face looked as though it was ready to burst. He placed the paper on the dining table, which was the focus of the small room. He lovingly flattened it out, caressing its folds into careful submission.

  “Thaddeus! Is he in?” he asked his wife excitedly.

  “Yes, my dear, but what—”

  “Thaddeus!”

  The young man loped into the room, bending almost double to avoid the low doorways and sloped ceiling.

  “Thaddeus, please read this for us.”

  They crowded around the nervous paper, Thaddeus skimming the document to see what he was dealing with, before moving into oratory mode. He stopped short and looked at his father.

  “Father, do you know what this is?”

  “Yes, yes, read it!”

  Thaddeus read it slowly and carefully, announcing the long legal words carefully.

  “Oh, Sigi, what is it? I don’t like the sound of it. Are we in trouble about the rent again?” said the frantic wife, who had screwed her thin apron into a ball.

  “No, Mother,” said her son. “It says that we now own the house. It is ours forever. None of us will ever pay rent again.”

  The other children now joined the table, having been attracted by the unique sounds and vibrations in the room. The wife looked back and forth between the paper, Thaddeus, and Mutter, waiting for one of them to speak.

  “It’s been given to us by Mistress Tulp and the Lohr woman. It’s a present for my loyalty to them and for being quiet about the baby.”

  “Whose baby?” said his wife quietly, the hope draining from her face.

  “Father, this is overwhelming. Your services must have been remarkable to be given such a generous gift.”

  “Whose baby?” she said again, suspicion furrowing her brow.

  Mutter blushed through his cooling face; praise was an experience previously unknown to him, and he looked shyly at his son.

  “Your grandfather and I have cared for that house for years, long before these good people arrived. It has been very different working for them in there.”

  “Whose baby?” squawked the infuriated wife.

  Everybody looked at her in surprise and Mutter said, “I don’t know whose baby it is. It’s a carnival mite, I think.”

  He saw her confusion crush her accusation and realisation set in. “You thought it was mine? With one of them?!”

  He started to titter, which very quickly turned into a roar of snorting laughter. They all joined in, the children not knowing why and the wife no longer caring. Under his mirth, Mutter felt a great pride that his wife thought him capable of siring another child, of tupping those genteel ladies, pleasuring them with the girth of his masculinity. He grinned again and opened a bottle. It was much better to think about being paid to bring new life into the
world, especially when his real reward had been for dragging life out of it, screaming.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The silver bell rang, and again its glitter rained into the lower part of Sidrus’s dwelling.

  But this time the bird was ignored, as was its message from Nebsuel saying that he had been wrong about these strange ones. He told Sidrus to come in peace and talk gently with them to find the answers he wanted. The bird pecked at its food tray, jumping from the perch into the cage. Again the bell chimed, and its sound melted to nothing in the quietness of the empty house.

  Singing: Somewhere in the beige, vague world outside of his sleep, there was singing. His mouth was full of clay and dry holly leaves; he was aware of a dull throbbing and itching between himself and the melody. He tried to speak, and the itching turned to lines of glittering tinsel: shimmering pain. Ivy? No! Scarabs! Running under his skin! Encrusted and fast. Glass decorations. Christmas; a tree in a house?

  He touched his face, expecting the soft contours of normality, but found only a huge, misshapen ball of rags where his head should have been. It had all gone wrong, but how? Think, remember. “Him’s,” she had called them, the endless dirges; him singing. Pine and wax smoking inside the room, where? The singing stopped.

  “It is all well, master. You are well, and you are safe.”

  The voice was close and without meaning. Something touched his lips; it was wet and cool, and he sucked hard on it. The knife! His throat cleared and his horror dispersed. The knife; he felt its pressure, and then it was gone. The knife to carve a feast, or him, or hymn. Hymns. Or a place in life and a socket of death.

  “Tsungali,” he said feebly, touching his bandaged head again.

  A larger hand closed over his and he felt its radiance and smelt pine again—the pine of disinfectant, not Christmas. As he slid back into a painless sleep, Tsungali continued to sing an ancient chant to keep the ghost bound tight in the body.

  “Hold him,” ordered Nebsuel.

  Ishmael was propped up on the bed, Tsungali’s rock-like good arm bound around him.

  “The last layers of leaves and bandage might hurt when I take them off.” In the fetid darkness, Ishmael braced himself. The drugs had kept the pain at bay, but he knew that it was only sheltering, that it would emerge with vengeance when given half a moment. He was weary and mute; his body strained for experience, and his brain was exhausted through a lack of dreams. Now he could feel it all focusing in his itching face, sense it being rubbed awake under Nebsuel’s unwrapping.

  Murky, stained light seeped in, and his hackles rose as the dressing tugged at the split nerves and sewn flesh. The final mass came away in one piece, letting the raw light play on his open wound. With the stained mass in his hands, Nebsuel silently studied his handiwork. He touched the new eyelids, and Ishmael yelped. It wasn’t pain, but a curdling flinch of nausea that made him jump.

  “Hold still now,” said Nebsuel, nodding to Tsungali, who gripped the swaying patient more firmly.

  After ten minutes of probing and squinting at his face, the medicine man smiled and said, “It is good, young master. Welcome to the mundane world of normal men.”

  Ishmael wanted a mirror but was denied. “Not yet,” ordered the shaman. “You must wait for the swelling to go down. Your first impression is very important. It will stay in your mind forever; you must wait so that you will retain a good image, not a half-healed one.”

  Ishmael saw the sense in this and decided to allow his good eye a few more days to be alone.

  “I am leaving to fetch provisions, news, and wine,” announced Nebsuel. “My senses are tired and I need time away from the smell of your raw flesh. Look for me in a day or two, and do not look on or touch that face; let the air and sun mend it.”

  Ishmael thought about threatening him over his return, but it seemed wrong, so he simply waved and said, “Be careful!” through the lower, working part of his face.

  He settled back in the bed and allowed himself to imagine a new life, one without strangeness and hiding, a life full of lessons and couplings, of carnivals and friends. Unexpectedly, the Owl rose in his memory on silent and elegant wings, wings as white and pure as her silk bed linen; as powerful and soft as her hungry body and her lessons of kiss. He would see her again. She would not know him, but he would know her. He refused the pain-killing potion that Tsungali had been instructed to feed him. He had been dull for enough time. He wanted to focus on whom and what he knew, and who he was ready to become.

  —

  Tsungali was cooking in a small alcove behind a hanging carpet. He was still getting used to his new hand and forearm, and he muttered occasionally at its errors over the stove. The rich smell of simmering grain infused with thyme was settling across the room. Ishmael had found a book containing images of gardens, hand-coloured woodcuts printed on thick, crafted paper that itself still showed plant fibres crushed into its surface. He believed them to be fabled gardens from all over the world. He was looking at one from Tunisia, turning the book sideways to gaze at the interior depth, when he heard the door open.

  “Nebsuel!” he called out. “I have taken one of your books to look at.”

  The wrong kind of silence greeted his statement, the kind that made the house suddenly brittle. Tsungali sensed it, too, and quickly drew back the carpet screen.

  “What is it?” said Ishmael. “Is there somebody here?”

  Tsungali reached forward towards his weapons, then stopped, yanked upright, standing to attention. Ishmael nearly laughed but could not understand the expression on the grimacing face. They looked into each other’s eyes, both seeking some kind of solution, and then Ishmael saw it move: Midway down the old man’s body a small, silver fish twitched and shivered. It was growing in length, and Ishmael could not take his eyes from it. Tsungali, seeing his master’s stare, looked down at the point where the bright blade protruded from his chest. It turned and lengthened again, and he gave out a terrible cough as his heart was sliced through. He fell to his knees and landed facedown. The fish vanished.

  Behind him, in the shadows, stood a man with a floating white melon head. His face looked like it had no bones beneath: a puffed-up bladder, smooth, immaculate, and totally unnatural. Had Nebsuel constructed this face? Is this what he would look like in a few days’ time?

  Sidrus stepped over Tsungali’s body, keeping the long, razor-sharp blade held before him, never wavering from its aim at Ishmael’s neck.

  “Don’t scream. Open your mouth and I will open your throat,” he said in a clear, foreign accent. “Answer my questions quietly. Where is Nebsuel? What have you done to him?”

  “Done? We have done nothing; he is out buying wine.” Ishmael’s voice shook, but his new face held its defiant composure. The blade moved closer.

  “Don’t lie to me, freak. Why would he trust you and this old dog, alone in his home?”

  He kicked at Tsungali and the sound of his death throes rattled so loudly that his last words were obscured. Ishmael’s heart contracted in mortal fear of the cold-blooded killer, but he managed to scratch out an answer.

  “He has been operating on both of us.”

  This made no sense to Sidrus. Why would the healer bother with them after what they had done to the Bowman? And yet he could see the raw, stitched meat of this one’s face. He twisted Tsungali over with his foot and saw the strap that held his new arm. He nicked through it with the point of the blade and the hollow wood tumbled off. He put the flat of the blade against the stump and brought it up to his face. He sniffed at the fresh sutures and knew it to be true.

  “Did you injure or kill the Bowman?” he asked.

  “Do you mean Oneofthewilliams?”

  “Yes,” said Sidrus, startled at the creature’s knowledge of that name.

  “No. We left him in the Vorrh. He left without us.”

  “And the bow?” Sidrus’s blade twitched.

  “He…he gave it to me.”

  Sidrus was dumbfounded; how could any
of this be true? Why would Oneofthewilliams give the sacred thing to this meat-faced youth?

  “I will have the truth!” he said, drawing another blade from concealment and advancing towards Ishmael’s shrinking bed, his small, cold eyes calculating where to cut first.

  There was a sharp, metallic click from across the room, like somebody standing on a twig of iron. Sidrus knew what it was, even before he heard the voice.

  “Twelve grams of splinter round at four metres,” it said. “Put the blades down where I can see them, old friend.”

  Sidrus obeyed in slow motion, sneering at Ishmael.

  “Nebsuel, I thought this scum had disposed of you.”

  He started to turn towards the rifle’s muzzle, which peered at him from across the room.

  “Very slowly, old friend. I know your ways and I am not alone.”

  “But it was you who summoned me here,” said Sidrus.

  “Yes, but I was wrong, and so were you to slay a man in my house.”

  A rope was swiftly lowered from the ceiling, a loop tied at its end. “Put your hands in the noose,” said Nebsuel.

  “There is no need for this; you can trust me. It will be better for you in the long term if you do.”

  “Put your hands in the noose.”

  “You tempt my anger,” snarled Sidrus.

  “Put your hands in the noose! You are tempting your death, and you know I will do it.”

  Sidrus thrust his hands into the looped rope; there was a small tug from above to tighten it and then a great wrench, which lifted him from the ground and high into the space above. A dry, rumbling sound filled the room with its mechanical power. It halted, and Nebsuel shouted up.

  “You hang between two great wooden drums. If you displease me, you will be mangled through them and crushed to a rag before you can take a breath. Do you understand me?”

  “I do!” came a faint voice.

  “Now, tell me exactly what weapons and charms you have about your person.”

  Sidrus began to recite an inventory of his possessions; Ishmael was astonished at the length of the list. When it was over, Nebsuel stepped out of the shadow; he held a black dove in his hand. He winked at Ishmael and threw it into the air.