The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  This had ostracised him from the company of the brothers long before the abomination was first put into practice. He no longer felt comfortable with them. The last evening he had brought his singing glasses to their workshop was a disaster. Of course they let him play, but after only a few minutes his wet finger could not keep up with the innuendoes of minor notes, the inflections of doubt and pause that slid in under the clarity of his firmness. He saw the creak in the mouth of the younger brothers and knew that he had become a joke to them. The intimate resonant language of their previous exchanges were slapped aside, nothing remained, and he stopped his regular visits. Since then he had seen them only in church, where they were aloof, indifferent, and embarrassed.

  Then the case came. The brothers brought it to his door.

  “Father Lutchen, we have made this for you.”

  They removed the packing and the restraining bolts and put the wooden casing aside. The brothers opened the curved hood that protected the line of glass bowls that diminished in size as they continued along the length of the spindle on which they were threaded.

  The bowls sat above a curved lead trough that was being filled with water by Ernst, the eldest Valdemar brother. Each curved glass touched the fluid. The spindle was connected to a treadle mechanism below, so that the action of the player’s foot would send the bowls spinning through the water and allow both of the player’s hands to finger the lubricated vibrating glass. They stood back so Lutchen could see their fine handiwork. The old man just looked at it and recognised it as an instrument of isolation. Of solo separation. He thanked them and was surprised that they did not leave.

  “Will you play it?” said Walter, the younger brother.

  Lutchen was confused.

  “We hope you might play it with us and take up the counter-harmony.”

  The old man was amazed; the instrument was a crafted bridge, a way back into the company that he so sadly missed. The only intelligent company in Essenwald that he could master. This gift was an orchestra in comparison to the simple tuned glasses he had given them, and he could not wait to hear it sing in their company. And this also meant he was closer to initiating them into the esoteric mysteries of sonic prayer and the door that it opened onto the core of many different religious beliefs.

  Their playing together could counterbalance the perverted quality of their last invention and reinstate his guidance on future, more spiritual work.

  * * *

  Mumt’r and Blincc had both been here before but not at the same time, not together. They drew strength from each other’s company and tried not to show the world around them and each other their fear. For both had been abused and maltreated in this hateful place. Mumt’r had escaped slavery by the skin of his teeth and had been severely beaten in the process. But worse, he had been imprisoned underground for many days. The lightless pit was an extended cellar of one of the grain houses of the place called Scyles. The place where it was rumoured their prey was living. He who was a demon hiding in a white man’s robe. The cellar was a holding house, used by the nomadic herders of men who passed with great frequency through his quarter of the city. After his escape, Mumt’r never slept in a building again. Not even the simplest huts by the all-cleansing sea. He would never wake in containment again.

  Blincc’s story was less traumatic but equally unpleasant. Fate had made him the only witness to the Frenchman and Seil Kor returning from their disastrous journey into the Vorrh. Deep in its interior the Limboia had mistaken Seil Kor for another and unleashed the Orm on him: a hollowing of the soul that no other creature had ever survived. Blincc had seen this dead man move, slithering back into the forest and his true identity. He had been very young when he had been taken to Essenwald by his elder brothers, who after only a few days had caught some infectious illness, making them useless for the work that they so craved. Blincc had to take up the task to find money to feed them. This he had achieved, sweeping and carrying things around the office of the lumber station. He had taken the job without a word of the language that all seemed to speak. His brothers were sleeping at the edge of the bush where the iron tracks ran. He bought and stole simple rations to keep them alive, but had no money to pay for a healer or charming to banish the demons that gnawed at their groaning guts. He was doing his best and felt some pride in his warrior-like control of the situation. He kept his head down and his eyes averted, only occasionally receiving a blow from the overseers who ran the station. All was fine until the train arrived. It had been five days before he heard it calling out from the edge of the Vorrh. The other workers laughed at him when he looked so scared. They pointed to the track and made signs of horns on their heads. One jumped and hissed loudly. Blincc tried to ignore them. But when he thought he could not be seen he touched the black metal line. It was alive. He snatched back his fingers from its trembling surface and looked around. When the screeching, hissing monster entered the station he froze, the short hair on his young head standing bolt upright, hot urine running down his dirty leg, making a clean path on its journey. One of the hysterical men lobbed a tin can at him to break the restraint of his terror. Suddenly there were dozens of people everywhere, led by the white bellowing Men Without Substance. The vast black wagon stopped like a monstrous shadow held inside clouds of smoke and steam that rolled and hissed from its massive hot interior. Nobody else paid it any attention; they were too busy with the endless line of flatbeds that were strung out behind it, each laden with massive trunks and limbs of trees. He walked along the noisy line of wood and metal that clanked and shuddered as men attacked the sea-serpent-like chains that kept it all bound together. Ten flatbeds down, the slave carriages had been opened and the blinking occupants were spilling into the chaos of the platform. He approached them for a better look, his forgotten broom dangling from his hand, his body walking in mesmerised strides. When he got close, he stopped. His misunderstanding hitting a new level of impossibility. The men, if they were men, who stood before him had no souls. They had lost the light that should live in their eyes and were attached to nothing. Again, fear and curiosity became his engine and he stretched a hand out to touch one. He had seen many of the living and the dead and knew that these were different things. All his senses said so. He could not yet smell them. The smoke, greasy iron, and bleeding trees had overpowered the air in all directions. So he stretched forward to touch one.

  “Outta da fucking way,” barked a voice in his ear, just before his head stung from the blow of the brass end of the whip that the overseer held in his hard pink fist. “Move yourselves,” he shouted down the line of soulless ones.

  All obeyed, which was not surprising because this one was another kind of beast. The whitest white man he had ever seen, it was ferocious and red-haired and called Maclish. All wisely leapt to the side of its pointing whip and shouting commands. Blincc scrambled upright, holding the demanding confusion of his minor head wound and shambling out of the way of the massive activity that was taking place around him. Cranes had been winched over the flatbeds and machines were starting up to unload the trees. He looked back to see that his slender cheap broom had been snapped under the boots and solid naked feet of the workers. He walked away from the clusters of action, farther down the train to the untenanted flatbeds that lay outside the station’s attentions. The train was so long that he was almost out of earshot of all the voices that shouted around the action of the cranes. He was openmouthed and admiring the gigantic trunks and sensuously twisting ivy, each seeming more impressive than the last, as he slowly moved from one carriage to the next. He thought he could now see the end of the train and strained his eyes into the morning mist, which still held some of the cindery smoke. Then something moved. Something that he thought had been a tree. It moved again and turned itself into a small man sitting upright and holding on to a gnarled and stained branch. Blincc had no fear of this apparition because it looked more startled than he. It crawled on all fours to the edge of
the flatbed and then tumbled down the side. It was another species of white man. Much smaller and dressed in the shredded clothes of the local people, which were discoloured and ragged. It could barely stand but seemed determined to make its way back towards the station. It stopped once along the track and stared at him with huge eyes that showed how lost and confused it really was. It looked at him and then turned and staggered back towards the engine, falling once or twice in the process. Blincc almost smiled. He had seen a white man who had less than he, and such a thing was unheard of.

  The dazed young man put his hand on the flatbed to steady himself against such a tide of strangeness. He looked at the trees and chopped branches where the white man had nested to reassure his understanding of the meaning of the world. His eyes grazed over the twisted forms, unfocussed for a while, and then snatched back at the wood that was suddenly a man. A dead man contorted and chained down like the trees. His long filthy robe and his black skin were saturated with thick congealed sap. Blincc did not jump away from such a startling find. In many ways this dead man was much less scary and abnormal than all else he had seen since the monster smoked into the station. He brushed leaves and vines away from the face and found the startling, completely black eyes. Still he did not recoil. There was something about this lost brother that held him in fascination and not fear. He started to undo the chains; it seemed the most natural thing to do. For surely the body needed to be taken back to its people and aligned towards its ancestors. The sap was everywhere and made the process of unbinding him difficult. The mottled blue of the dead man’s robe was now showing under the grime and muck that Blincc’s hands and the chains were pulling off. His fingers were slipping on the chain and his strength made him slide about on the flatbed as he applied leverage and force. Eventually the chain was off and he bent the corpse over the edge of the carriage, its head hanging downwards and almost touching the track. He had it only by its feet when he felt it slither out of his hands and fall loosely down and under the wheels. The sliding weight had also unbalanced him and he slid towards the edge of the flatbed, which suddenly jolted. The train was moving, shunting farther down the track to unload more of its huge precious cargo. Blincc quickly grabbed hold of a restraining bar as everything shuddered and jolted forward. He pulled himself firmly towards the edge, looking down to see how badly the wheels had maimed the body. It was nowhere to be seen. It must be under the carriage, being mangled by the juddering movement. He began to fear for his job and the beating that might be coming his way. He should have left the thing alone, let somebody else be responsible for this accident, maybe even the dishevelled white man. He gauged the movements and stops and jumped onto the gravel and crouched down low to look under the train. Nothing was there. He walked back down the track still bent over, looking beneath the shifting carriages, expecting to find the tattered body any second. But it was not there. He scratched his head and looked up and down the line. Smoke and steam at one end and the shadow of the Vorrh at the other. He was just about to walk back to the station when he saw a glimmer in the scuffed ground. He bent down again and lifted a small silver crucifix out of the oil-stained earth. This must have been where the corpse landed. He stood up and examined the find, turning it against the sun; that’s when he saw it, out of the corner of his eye. Far down the line near the distant end of the flatbeds. Something was moving. Snakelike between the train and the living trees. He knew there were giant pythons in the forest. Had heard the tales of them eating men alive. He had even seen their movement near the water. He tried to reassure himself that that was exactly what he had seen. Nothing more than a large snake moving from under the train into the trees. But he knew it wasn’t, for in those few seconds he had recognized the patches of blue in the slithering motion just before it vanished into the trees. Then a question jolted him. Was this the shapeshifter that was foretold? The Black Man of Many Faces? Had the Men Without Substance been stealing him from the forest? Chained down?

  He stood rooted to the spot, staring towards the infinity of the Vorrh.

  “Hey, you!” bellowed the white man with fire hair as he marched towards him, an armed overseer at his side.

  “Hey you, what you got there? Stay right where you are.”

  Blincc watched horrified as they approached. The whip was still thrashing in the loud man’s hand. Then he did the only thing possible—he ran.

  His eldest brother was standing in the clearing at the edge of town, looking down at the prone body of his middle brother who had died of the horrible sickness of the city. They buried him in the bush and limped out of their failed adventure in the white man’s land and began their long and weary journey home towards the healing sea, Charlotte’s little crucifix nesting, hidden, in Blincc’s deepest pocket. The cross that the Frenchman had taken to give as a present to his native guide, Seil Kor.

  * * *

  —

  But that was all in the past when he was a youth; now he was grown and hard and stood equal beside the sturdy bulk of Mumt’r. They were in the Scyles and asking questions about Father Lutchen. It took less than thirty minutes to find the courtyard and the door to where he was said to live. They had their weapons ready and the sack folded across Blincc’s wide back. They had been stopped dead in their tracks by the weird plaintive music that came from an upper room. It was like the songs of mermaids that the older Sea People told of. Voices coming clear and beautiful out of the night sea, when the ripples of the full moon lulled the sleeping waves. Some of the elders believed this was where the first Oneofthewilliams had vanished, being lured beneath into the depths by the enchanting song. How could this holy man capture the song here, so far from the sea—did he have a mermaid imprisoned in his upper room? The warriors looked at each other and feared they were taking on a sorcerer whose magic was unexpectedly powerful. He was supposed to be only a Christian shaman, who also practised in darker realms, not a master of oceans and lures. They whispered for a moment and took on a brave resolve; they unsheathed their short spears and charged up the narrow staircase, kicking in the flimsy door with great force. The two ex-monks and the old priest sat close together, empty glasses in their astonished hands. Whatever spirit they had summoned was nimble and quick because it had escaped the transparent pots, which now hung silently in the hands of their immobilised captives, or spun sideways in a trough of water. Behind them stood a wooden man half covered in copper strips, a long gold trumpet in its hands. Blincc threw his spear at it while Mumt’r shouted at the monks. The figure fell backwards and the men shrank. They had been working all week on the mechanical trumpet player—a small commission but complex in its clockwork timing. It was to live on the silver bridge and spare the terror of the live musician who had the job of sounding the moon every month.

  The younger two were bound and the older one led out of the house on the shark-toothed leash Tyc have given them. Should he intend to escape or run away, the lead would be yanked and the three-layered rows of the razor-sharp teeth would tear into the flesh of Lutchen’s thin neck, which was already bleeding from the first lightweight demonstration. They walked out of the Scyles without anybody seeing them. They took the least-known path and soon came to the high reeds where their boat was hidden. The old man was tied sitting up between them, his hands firmly bound to his scrawny ankles and the middle seat of the canoe. His mouth was stuffed with a dried pinecone and tied in place so that he could breathe but not utter spells during his journey. They waded the canoe and their prize into waist-deep water, then climbed aboard and paddled into the fast stream that hurried towards the coast.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later Mumt’r and Blincc paddled into the streams of the Sea People with Father Lutchen bound between them.

  “This is he?” gasped Tyc as she looked at the dishevelled old man sitting on the wet sand, the lead back on his scrawny neck. “He is worse than the last one.” She was speaking to Yuuptarno, who said nothing. “As
k him if he is the priest who told the other one not to bring the sacred child here, but to take her to him instead.”

  It took Yuuptarno a good while to think how to say this in the pale words of Men Without Substance. When he did, Lutchen suddenly paid attention and denied any knowledge of the accusation. This was explained to Tyc.

  “Is he lying?” she asked of the translator.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then beat him,” she said.

  Yuuptarno walked out of the surf into the village and selected a stick of the appropriate weight and brought it back to the beach.

  Lutchen thought it was a staff to help him stand or walk and was about to smile when the young man swung the stick and brought it down hard across his back and the side of his neck. The stick broke and Yuuptarno walked back to find a stouter one.