* * *
—
In the clearing that had been called the garden, Ishmael and Modesta separated, slowly, and let the forest settle back into its rhythms of life. They were both jet black now and bathed in an immense powerful calm.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
As Seil Kor said “We are here,” the crown began to slow. Its clockwork motors unwinding for the last time. The only luminescence it was catching came from their eyes, and the reflections swam like lazy plankton around them. Marais’s last crippling fear was unfounded. It had not inflicted Cyrena with the same vision that had seared his soul. She never saw Essenwald and Pretoria and every other city in the world become empty desolate husks, with all traces of humanity vanished forever. She had not witnessed the rotting books and the entire archive and memory of Homo sapiens disappear. Without a single smut or particle of the smoke of its extinction remaining. Her vision was seated before and after mankind in a world without human malice and invention.
“Here?” she asked as if remembering the meaning of words for the last time. Her vision had sealed her origin and her outcome into one. The words and meaning of her last questions sounded far off and made only for a ritual of leaving.
“Yes, the shelf of our embedding, where we become the long time of the plural. The Vorrh will grow and cover the world. The Rumour will vanish and we will return to the garden of beginnings.”
“Like Adam and Eve?” she said absently.
“No, my lady, they were a mistake, we will start again and another couple will guide us in God’s good ways,” said Seil Kor, gently removing the crown, which became silent and dark.
“I can see nothing now,” she said and waited for his response that never came. Instead a great warm satisfaction rose up inside her body. A tide of all-embracing blindness, guided by the invisible from the foliage of the distant tree of her trance. She understood everything. It had always been so clear. She laughed without sound as she dissolved in it. Nothing more was said and he helped her climb into its recess and began to fold her breathing, guiding her in farther where she stretched out and he snuggled in beside her. It was pitch black and the hewn stone felt warm and impossibly soft. There was no barrier of self or body between the inner and outer darkness, and everything settled to the same temperature. He put his arms around her as they drifted into what would become the longest sleep of containment, while above all manner of human conflict raged in all manner of violent light and heat in a growing open land of ignorance.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The Vorrh had been changing the composition of its transpired gases over the last two years. Gradually shifting and increasing the components of the new air. Its effects were beginning to become obvious to all but its chosen target: the occupants of Essenwald, who had become the guinea pigs because of their proximity. Both old and recent citizens were becoming more angry and dissatisfied. Restless and self-obsessed. Minor conflicts had taken on a more brutal and unrelenting quality and the major conflicts had been swallowed live by the military infestation. The division between the tribes had worn itself raw, and all defensive gates between the black and white had fallen. Families with younger children were already leaving the township. Omens of disillusion and contempt were found in the entrails and stars of prophecy. Stories of new sicknesses were rife. It had even been said that the despicable plague called “the Touch” had returned: a contagion that had swept through Essenwald before, causing terrible injures and blights and producing paranoia and suspicion in all its citizens.
No one even notices that the Limboia were slowly waking from their somnambulism, which had been so convenient to their masters for so many years.
Now all the remaining Limboia had left the slave house and made their determined passage into the Vorrh. They followed the railway lines until they became torn up and dangerous. Uniformed bodies of dead and dying men were strewn everywhere. One of the officers was gathering the less maimed and able-bodied, constructing stretchers, and generally trying to make some order out of the wreckage. When he saw them approaching, he barked orders, telling them to gather here and begin to help carry the lame and dying men back to Essenwald. They all ignored him, as they did everything else. The officer shouted again, spitting blood, insults, and deformed German because all of his teeth had been broken. He choked in a coughing fit as the Limboia just walked past without registering him or the plight that surrounded him. The engine was still steaming, its torn hot steel festering in pools of drying water. It looked as if it had been stamped on, like a tin toy under the foot of a careless adult.
Sturmbannführer Heinrich Keital ran out of words as the blood dripped onto his uniform. How could this be, what was it about this accursed forest and this impossible country that insisted on defeating him? He could not let this happen again. He would get the wounded back to Essenwald and start again, only this time he would not bother trying to make sense out of their antiquated railway. He would build a road, tear up their tracks and build a road. He would burn down every tree if necessary to open the route from the estuary to the edge of the Congo. It would have his name stamped upon it. He planned this and said it out loud, spraying blood in his epistle. He would bring in more troops from the coast and they would break the barrier of this place. Nothing would stand in his way. There was no one or no thing that could quench or halt his determination and his path. Most of his living audience were in too much pain to hear it, but it attracted the attention of a small interested party who found the sound of vigour and the smell of his blood most attractive. They sidled along the blind side of the torn wagon that he was using as a podium. Their faces oozing with saliva that made their yellow skin appear bright and optimistic.
Closer to the garden and picking through the shredded track was a much taller figure that had no interest in the Limboia’s approach and they had none in his. His body was covered in long bristling spikes. His hands were pointed and looked as if they had been structured from the torn-off wings of ravens or some other large black carrion bird. He was shaking his bristled, quilled head from side to side and lamenting over a ripped picture in a mangled frame. He had heard about such things that lived outside the forest: permanent reflections made by Rumours of what they thought he and the other Erstwhile should look like. He looked at the mangled print of one of William Blake’s bright angels that had once graced the cabin of Hoss’s prized engine. To have one of these mirrors meant that he might become it: the looking going both ways, the light shared. It might even mean that if he left the forest then he could take his visibility with him, rather than have it follow on later. God in his wisdom had made that separation so that the attendants of the tree might not become distracted by the outside world or any notion that they could become part of it. The only way to ever escape was hibernation. The shattered picture he held might allow him some dimension, even though it was spoilt, its perfection ruined. His hands were incapable of repair, even if he knew how. Only Rumours had those skills. For a second he looked up at the passing Limboia and thought about asking them to mend it. Then he saw their eyes and did not bother. As the Limboia passed, each made a sign to the tall being before continuing their journey to find their own mirror of perfection. Then he saw another Rumour among the wreckage staring at him. As it approached, he saw that its gaze was not on him but on the broken picture he held. The Rumour was covered in blood and grey ash; it held out its damaged hand and started to cry. The tears dissolved the ash showing the wet black skin beneath, making two straight parallel lines down his large face. The Erstwhile had no choice but to give the picture up, he would have to find his conversation of reflections elsewhere. He gave the picture back to its owner. Hoss took it and held it close to his chest and then moved away, limping back to Essenwald.
* * *
The guard at the slave house had fallen asleep. Now he awoke to see the door had been open. There had never been any need to lock it; the Limboia had no place to go and no
reason to find one, until now. He looked inside to find it empty. They had gone. In a panic he grabbed the rope of the fire bell that hung outside at the edge of the building. No one had ever used it. No one had ever tried. He tugged at the rope and pulled a muffled clatter out of it. He tugged again and a spindly translucent creature cascaded down, landing on his shoulder and the back of his head. The almost exhausted partial diagram of the half-alive archaeopteryx dug its brittle pencillike bones into the guard to prevent itself from falling any farther. It had flapped and crawled its way from the river and back through the forest floor, seeking the tranquillity of the warehouse where it had lived in gentle silent stone for so long. The bluish haze that had so animated it was growing dim and weak. It had gotten only as far as the slave house on the outskirts of the city before fatigue and transparency made it stop and hide. Its longing to be petrified back into nothing had not been supported by the flickering energy that was running out. It had found the old bell and climbed the rope and nested in the cobwebs, hanging upside down in the protection and density of the thick red-painted brass.
The guard danced and squawked as he pulled the clinging Urvogel off his shoulder, his other hand still tugging at the now-resounding bell. He did not know what it was, this thing that was gripping him, but was aware of all the disgusting and lethal animals that lived in the bush. Also of the vermin of the Scyles and the legendary horrors that thrived in the Vorrh and occasionally crawled out to inflict wounds and malice on innocent workingmen. It flapped weakly in his hand as the bell rang and the Limboia dispersed without paying it any attention. Wirth appeared at the door of his house.
“What’s going on?” he barked up to the dancing guard.
Amadi was not with him; she was attending to some matter in the breeding rooms on the other side of the enclosure. He turned his blind eyes back into the house and shouted, “Domino.”
The guard had finally plucked out all of the Archaeopteryx’s spiky holds and was now trying to shake its clinging web off his hand. He let the bell rope go to peel it off with his other hand. Domino was at its master’s side, ready to take on any who dared approach. It looked around and sniffed at the emptiness of the compound. Then it saw the guard and his huge flapping hand. Its grimy nugget of a brain calculated this was the only possible assailant that it had been called to chastise. It looked at its master, then back at the dancing man and remembered the sweet taste of human fingers. Target and delight ignited in its huge bony head. Wirth, having no idea what was happening, sensed only discord and possible personal danger, so when the hyena growled and thus indicated the imminence of his fear, he gave the command that unleashed the beast’s fury.
“Seize,” he said and backed into the house.
Domino leapt from the porch and hurtled towards the slave house. The guard had finally shaken the Urvogel off his hand and onto the plank boardwalk, where he now stamped it out under his feverish hobnailed boot. The white blur saw its target divide and decided to take out the big one first. What was already mangled would be going nowhere, and she could lick that up after feasting on the jumping man, who was now curiously still.
* * *
The Timber Guild had broken apart. Its esteemed senior members gathered everything they could and left Essenwald to its own ends. Only Talbot and Krespka held on to a belief of salvation and renewal: Talbot because of his inflexible faith in organisation and command, and Krespka because he could not face the reality of living anywhere else, where the horrors of respectability were pinching and severe. He was too old to grow a moral code now; he knew where and how he was going to die, and what kind of pleasure he was going to indulge and saturate himself in during the process. But that was before he had seen those creatures of the forest at the edge of the city.
Most of Krespka’s family and friends had already deserted Essenwald, and he was down to his last two whores, whom he paid to be drugged and were without any meaning except to him. And one ancient servant who brought him daily news and gossip about what was happening on the other side of his locked and bolted doors. It was he who proclaimed that the forest had grown into the ends of the northern streets and the trees there were not saplings but fully grown. Krespka grew sick of all this nonsense and decided to go and see for himself, taking a large-calibre pistol for protection, just in case. He walked fast for the first five minutes then sagged into his normal puffing pace. By the time he had reached the beginning of the northern streets he was fighting for breath and needed to take pauses in his slow progress. The air had changed. It was almost dark when he saw the shadows of the forest overwhelming the end of the street. He swore at its impossibility, imaging it to be some kind of optical illusion until the overhanging vines caught in his hair and scratched at his face. His bleary eyes widened and he stared in openmouthed disbelief. It was true, it was all true. He rubbed his eyes violently, and as he did, other eyes lit up in the darkness of the forest. First only two, then four, and then hundreds. Eyes that contained their own illumination, which was growing in a fearful intensity. The first four eyes moved forward, revealing themselves as two humans, a man and a woman, he thought. He was about to scream abuse and command at their black glistening bodies when they melded into one form. Then the other eyes gathered about them, giving the impression of a shapeless but solid knot of vast sentient power. He was frozen to the spot until something moved in front of the them, something on all fours, a dog or worse. He remembered Wirth’s savage pet hyena and what it had done to Fleischer. He fumbled for his pistol but his hands were shaking too much, and he dropped it into the dense grass that concealed his shoes. The naked animal on all fours looked up and Krespka turned white, seeing total insanity in the eyes of what had once been the Reverend Father Gervasius Lutchen. His wild tangled hair and beard had lost all colour. His teeth, toenails, and fingernails had grown into sharp and broken fangs and talons. His naked body was mottled and broken by a network of knotted veins that writhed beneath his peeling skin, which was also laced with vines and crumpled leaves. Without any warning the Lutchen-beast sprang at Krespka, climbing up and over his body, forcing the old man backwards, screaming in pain and fear. Then it ran off into the dark, empty streets.
Krespka was sobbing when he turned his back on the depth of the forest and all those that had come to its new perimeter to look at him. He felt their eyes on him as he tried to escape. He was halfway down the street when somebody punched him hard and low in the back, just above his kidneys. It took the wind out of him. Now he was prey and each abuse would shrink him further. He did not look around to confront his attacker, he just continued to plod and stagger on and away. But with each step he felt something move inside him, an indigestion of spiteful proportions becoming a pressure of blind gnawing. Then the tip of the arrow passed through his intestines and pushed through the fat and skin of his bloated belly and tore out of his sagging shirt. His eyes bulged and his terrified hands fluttered, unable to touch the instrument of torture as it slowly revealed itself. With each step the arrow shaft exited more and more until the fletching caught in the exit wound and torn cloth and the arrow dangled like a starved pendulum that swung jollily with every stagger of his draining life.
* * *
When Talbot heard about the destruction and humiliation of the German garrison, he demanded to know why all of Fleischer’s promises had failed. Somebody had to be named to relieve his embarrassment and possible repercussions back in the fatherland. Talbot’s normal icy composure had boiled over into a teeth-clenched attack on the worthlessness of Fleischer, who stood in grave humiliation while Talbot paced and spat. Fleischer did not know where to look and dared not lift his eyes into his superior’s rage. Then he saw the long maroon arrow lying on Talbot’s impeccable desk. It was totally out of place, which helped form an enigma to stanch the outflow of the young man’s pride. He left his superior’s immaculate office defeated and exposed. But with a need to extract payback from somebody else. By the time he was in the hot stre
et he knew who was to blame, and he would suck every pleasure from the sweetness of revenge.
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