by Linda Talbot
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The woman is pliant. Baezok moves, an unremitting bulk in the black room. Brief moonlight spills onto his shivering flesh. He slows.
He rolls off the woman, who might be bloodless as she lies enveloped by the moon. "You've seen too many ghosts Pila," he says. She is silent, aware that this may be her sole opportunity to procreate. A few weeks later she tells Baezok she is pregnant.
The Somnoi sat in a circle, arms raised round the dead tree hung with the possessions of the murdered. Through the Somnoi's consciousness, suspended by vegetation drugs, filtered knowledge of the genocide. No one could recall why it had happened. But the belief that the ghosts of the millions who had died haunted the living, was sacrosanct.
Everyone saw them; some, more suggestible, encountered them constantly and an unfortunate few relived the last moments of those who had suffered most. These people were thought contagious and liable to pass their horrific insights through the generations. They were forbidden to have intercourse. But enforcing the ban was impossible.
Pila was one who too often entered the anguish of the dead. Her experiences included the agony of a mother who had seen her two children axed to death, and who had then been raped and left to die. And a man who had been swung for a hour and then dropped into a pit of burning bodies.
Three times a month Pila was compelled to undergo ritual cleansing with the Somnoi; a ceremony of trance with a form of exorcism. But still the ghosts came; parts of bodies, mutilated or marred, drifting through the night; hairless heads with mouths sealed open in soundless pain, broken arms and legs borne grotesquely on polluted air.
Pila did not disclose their persistence. She wanted to re-enter the society whose dread of the past prompted ruthless rejection of those consistently haunted. But she was betrayed by the fear in her face.
"Excellent!" Baezok clasped Pila to him as she confirmed her pregnancy. He was in charge of a shattered white city on the edge of the sea. He had no contact with the rest of the mountainous land, although envoys from there and further afield periodically arrived with bleak reports of a world struggling to subsist.
Baezok was less affected than most by the hauntings. He had little conscience. It was not his fault his predecessors had committed genocide. He was victim, not villain.
He had been a cloth merchant in the city, that in prosperous days had manufactured textiles to caress the flesh like a second skin. Now he commanded the women to make him an extravagant wardrobe. The robes fell in folds over his ample flesh onto which he forced the gleaming stones of stolen rings. He let his greying black hair grow to flow onto his shoulders and had complex leather sandals made to pamper his fat feet.
Then he viewed the remaining women of the town. Most were traumatised, even if they saw few ghosts. The men, their numbers decimated, were equally abject or numb with shock. Men and women moved like automatons through the essentials of survival. But none registered pleasure and only those constantly haunted, conveyed pain.
So Baezok took the women whose apathy confirmed infrequent hauntings. But their acquiescence offered no challenge. He was about to seek girls awaiting puberty, when he saw Pila in the covered market where barter had replaced the ravaged economics of the past. She was slight, solitary, her face inscrutable and pale as chalk. She was young, yet during the atrocities her fair hair had turned grey. She barely brushed it but let it straggle to flow over her shoulders and down her back. Yet she had a presence by which Baezok was enthralled.
He took her to the half ruined house he had furnished with other people's goods. There were deep chairs, carved tables, rich rugs.
Baezok was wary of the ghosts haunting Pila. They came in daylight, especially at noon, the time of no shadow. Pila's face darkened and her mouth opened in a cry she could not utter. Even in hot sun, she froze and her temperature dropped.
Baezok could only imagine the blighted beings she witnessed. He was convinced the creed of apparitions was generated by guilt, fostering ghosts within the psyches of the susceptible.
He knew better than to touch Pila when she crouched motionless in the street or in an echoing room of the decaying house.
If she failed to recover within the hour, he fetched a member of the Somnoi who muttered incantations and moved beseeching hands before her face.
She did not resist Baezok. Through her stultifying misery she wanted to give birth, to leave behind some being with the courage to confront and overcome the hauntings.
Baezok was in charge but even he feared the Somnoi. They had uncanny insight, had instigated moral laws, against which his practical domination was futile. Even in their apathy, the people would support them and if they found him with Pila, with whom intercourse was illegal, he would be forced to leave the city. So Pila was released to wander within its confines. No one knew whose child she carried.
The birth is imminent and Pila is surreptitiously ushered into Baezok's house. She lies in a darkened room, aware of indistinct figures gliding in slippered feet about her bed.
Baezok waits in an adjoining room. When Pila cries out he claps his hands to his ears. Pila strains to release the being bursting her flesh. After expulsion she is beset by calm but even as she lies exhausted, feels the spidery hands of babies who have died but crawl still among mortality, seeking maternal protection.
The small hands that subsequently grasp her are warm and wet. She opens her eyes to see a bewildered boy child on her breast.
Baezok enters the stifling room. Awkwardly he approaches the bed and peers at the mewling child. He will teach him to defy the Somnoi and succeed him as ruler of this lethargic land.
Pila lets him take the child. Briefly, he cradles him and as the woman closes her eyes, walks out of the room to descend a dim staircase. At the bottom is a dishevelled cellar stacked with goods snatched by Baezok from abandoned houses. A wet nurse sits on a simple bed. She takes the child and the crying stops.
When Baezok returns to the hot room, Pila has ceased breathing. At last the ghosts have claimed her.
Baezok named the boy Linus and watched him grow with eyes that widened in the dark. The child needed sunlight. Ensuring he was not overlooked, Baezok grew a small garden behind a shattered wall where weeds flourished with straggling flowers. Here he took the child to play.
Linus believed the nurse to be his mother and when not playing with other children's toys, he was taught by Baezok. With reading and writing came clear instruction in dominance and coercion, until Linus was convinced he had the right to covet and control with impunity.
Outside the city the Druesim gathered. They were the dispossessed, who had allowed those who still had strength, to take what was left of their possessions. All knew someone who had been a victim of genocide. All were haunted.
They knew Baezok had taken over the fallen city. From their shanty town they watched him shambling across the broken ramparts. They could see the damaged house on the hill where he lived and the dazed women who followed him through the door. The Druesim waited, as though for a sign, to make their move. One day they decided to send in a spy. Baezok had not appeared for weeks. They wondered why.
Sylus, the spy, slipped through the wretched streets swept by a dry mountain wind. It was dark and people were already indoors. He kept close to the damaged buildings, working his way to the hilltop house.
A child's brief laughter carried on the wind from behind a ruined wall. Reaching it, he heard a man's deep voice relating a parable of blatant immorality. Finding a fallen stone, Sylus climbed onto it and cautiously looked over the wall. He saw Baezok's back, and crouching in a tangled bed of wild flowers, a boy of about six. He was listening closely to the story Baezok told of a raid on an unarmed town. Baezok's approval of the subsequent massacre was clear.
Sylus slid back behind the wall and, recalling the genocide, was brushed by the ghost of his slaughtered wife. He reached emaciated arms to grasp her, but only the wind whistled through his fingers. He had been in the cellar of his home a
nd was unable to conceal his wife before one of the murderers broke in, raped and knifed her. Then the house was looted. No one came into the cellar where Sylus remained, sealed in fear for another hour, before creeping upstairs to find his wife's body.
Now outrage replaced fear. He hurried back through the silent city to the camp. The Druesim met and decided to kidnap the boy. He would be held hostage until Baezok gave them back their rights and distributed the stolen goods. Two of the stronger men were selected and three nights later left for the city.
Linus sleeps near his nurse in the cellar. He dreams of conquests by men in metal masks who plunder cities weakened under siege. He has specific heroes who commit the worst atrocities and imagines himself leading men to storm a town where soon no one is left alive.
He feels a huge hand lift and bear him from the blood-filled streets and opens his eyes to look into those of a tall man with a lean face. His dark hair is unkempt and he smells of ditches.
Before Linus can cry out, the man claps a dirty hand over his mouth and other hands grab his thrashing legs. They carry him up the steps and into the house.
Baezok is sleeping with a young woman from the town in a room near the cellar. Silently the men pass the closed door as Linus continues to struggle for release. They reach the door to the garden where the child had played. Linus lies quietly, then thrusts with all his strength against his captors and, taking them unawares, is suddenly free. He dives into the wild growth and crawls through the dank roots. The men thrash in his wake but he squirms out of reach in the dark. He finds the wall and scrambles up to be lit, like a pallid night creature, by the moon.
The men lunge for his legs, yet again he slithers clear and runs along the moon white path down the hill towards the city. He has not been out of the house before. The night air excites him, the sharp stones beneath his bare feet are enchanted. He enters the way that winds to the sea between the battered buildings. No one stirs. Only the moon and the lonely wind witness his running.
Linus hears the panting men behind. But he is swift and fired by the unforeseeable.
He hears the water; its white-flecked waves like the tossing of headstrong horses. He gasps to catch his breath, pausing at the dividing of two ways. He chooses the path that leads to the hills.
The last buildings slide away. Damp moss grows softly under his feet. The hills loom; black interjections against the star pricked sky.
Linus pauses. How can he know if the men are still following? The moss muffles sound. He turns, but can see nothing as a cloud obscures the moon.
The wind has dropped and a faint mist begins to weave from the ground. It softly consolidates into a haggard human form. Empty sockets lie where eyes once gazed and the ghost's unearthly arms extend unnaturally, its hands, missing several fingers, reaching to touch Linus.
The boy backs away. But other hands pass like spiny whispers over his body and he turns to see men, women and children materialising across the plain. They are more mist than flesh, weaving in weary integration, voiceless yet with a faint scrape of dry bone.
They pass through Linus and move on as though, having examined him, their curiosity is satiated. They drift towards the hills.
The hands that next grasp Linus are heavily human. The Druesim lift and bear him back towards the city. But his encounter with the ghosts has left him as light as a feather. He floats from his captors' grasp, feeling the cold air enter his ethereal frame. He rises as the cloud clears the white face of the moon. The men watch, helpless, as he lifts higher towards the hills.
Nayia sat on the mound of ancient stones before the wind-cleaned bones of her father. He had ruled the province before Baezok claimed the city. She had seen him murdered by the city wall.
Now the bleached bones spoke to her. They were hung to catch the wind and when it shifted them gently, Nayia heard sentiments of reconciliation to the barbarity that had been perpetrated. But when the wind rose they swung wildly, warning her of retribution from those left alive. Then she rose and, consumed with anger, began a deep dance, expressing her intention to avenge her father's death.
Often in the damp dawn, haunted survivors stood in a long line, stretching from the city to Nayia's oracle. They had elevated her to a priestess who could reassure them in the face of fear. When they were with her, the ghosts dissolved.
With her fair hair coiled with perennial plants, she spoke with quiet authority, breathing her intention to avenge the deaths like a pious prayer. The ghosts would go, she affirmed, when tyrants like Baezok had been destroyed. And she would vanquish the oppressors with magic.
Her mind was bereft of reason; fractured by the shock of witnessing death. The voices of the bones spoke only in her head.
She lay her long hands on the people's lice-ridden hair, exerting a pressure and murmuring assurance. They returned to the city with eyes looking inward; their psyches cleansed until the insidious seeping of dusk brought back the ghosts.
With Nayia's unreason had come an eerie insight. Within a wide radius, she sensed the unfamiliar. The air stirred or, resting her ear to the ground, she heard footsteps that did not belong to the semi-conscious community.
A middle aged man with bedraggled white hair and phantom-filled eyes, had wandered past, crying pitifully. He had not even seen Nayia by the swaying bones. On another occasion two women who had found liquor in the city, had staggered, singing and shouting obscenities, over the plain. They had seen Nayia, her arms raised over the bones and had lurched close to the oracle, but Nayia's insanity had penetrated even their impaired perception and they had veered towards the hills.
Now she heard a faint whirr like fairy wings on the air. She peered across the plain but saw nothing in the moonlight. Then a boy was standing before her. He was dressed in night clothes, his dark hair dishevelled and his brown eyes wide with the wonder of how he had got there.
Nayia had long lost her power of speech and Linus was too bewildered to speak. They stared, uncomprehending, at each other. But instinctively, Nayia knew the boy was being followed. She put her ear to the ground and heard the pounding men's feet.
Wildly she pointed to the hills. Linus followed the direction of her trembling finger and shivered. The hills were hunched like sullen beasts. The lightness left his limbs. He was again a simple boy pursued by the unknown. He took a last look at wild-eyed Nayia and began to run.
He might have been dreaming; for every step forward, he seemed to take two back. His pursuers closed in. Linus peered ahead, hoping to encounter ghosts again and perhaps assume their ethereality. But only moss undulated in the darkness.
The men grabbed his legs and dragged him to the ground. Nayia heard his cry and reached in agitation for the bones. In her addled mind the men were synonymous with those who had ransacked the city and killed her father. She could not know that, like her, they were victims.
The men bundled Linus up like an inconvenient parcel, folding his flailing arms and legs and pushing his head into his chest. They hurried to the camp near the city.
The Druesim had gathered in an expectant circle. A fire burned in its centre; a flaming focus into which they gazed as though for enlightenment.
All looked up as the men arrived and dropped Linus, whimpering, by the fire. Thoughts of holding the boy as ransom were abandoned. The Druesim began to taunt him as the son of a tyrant. Linus was confused. He had been taught that tyranny was a noble aspiration. Some men and their ragged women took sticks, and, shuffling close, prodded Linus, until he ran shrieking round the fire.
The Druesim began to chant; a low resentful sound from deep in their throats. Its intensity increased and the men closed in.
Linus fell to the ground deafened by the pounding feet. He lost consciousness at the first knife blow. The weapons fell on him in a frenzy. He was cut into pieces which were handed among the men and eaten raw.
The fire died. The men, encrusted with the blood of Linus, slept.
Baezok heard the nurse wail. He ran to the cellar. Re
alising that Linus had gone, he hit the nurse hard about the head and scrambled up the steps to mount a search.
Nayia had not slept since Linus left. She asked the bones where he had gone. They were mute. She rose and listened to the murmurs that filled her head; senseless sounds of her own creation. But she interpreted them through intuition and they told her to walk towards the city.
She set out in the sharp-aired dawn, her bare feet starkly white on the slumbering moss. In her head she heard the hapless crying of a child. She hurried as the sun rose and lay liquid gold on the somnolent land.
She found the dishevelled camp outside the city with random sleepers around the embers of the fire. She drew near and saw dried blood on unshaven faces. She knew the men had killed Linus.
No one woke as, tearfully, Nayia cast about, seeking the boy's bones. Picked clean, they were widely scattered among the sated men and women. The people had been starving. Nayia collected them. Then she saw the boy's heart lying near the fire. Incredibly, it had been overlooked. She stooped, dropping some of the bones and gently lifted the heart that quivered in the morning sun. She rose and as the people began to stir, walked softly away.
At the oracle she hung the bones with those of her father. She lifted the heart and held it up to the sun. Within, she saw the boy's face; paralysed with fear and incomprehension; a victim experiencing the savagery Baezok had praised.
Nayia lay the heart near the bones and walked towards the hills. The springy moss grew sparser and the black dust, shot with mica, began to glisten.
A strange geology had worked through the land, intermittently turning common stone to a substance of shining ambiguity. It alleviated the blackness of the hills.
Nayia scrambled to where a sheet lay shining in the strengthening sun. She bent and lifted a large piece with ease. It flowed through her hands and she bound it lightly over her arm. Then she turned and walked back across the plain.
Crouching by the oracle she lifted Linus's heart and placed it on the undulating sheet. Of its own volition the substance rose and softly enfolded the organ. Within hung the heart, shot with sunlight.
The night is cold. Unfamiliar winds wander from four directions. They whisper inaudible words that Nayia strains to hear. One wind, from the north, lifts the bones so they rattle in agitation. Nayia interprets this as an indication of someone's approach. Her fevered mind moves faster. It is someone of personal importance.
Raising her eyes she sees the vague form of her father; head bent as he looks closely at her. He is speechless, his body a half established shadow in the intermittent moonlight.
Linus's heart lies by the bones; an ordinary organ transformed by the lunar light. The man folds into a crouching position and reaches towards it. The strange substance encasing it shivers as though with stars. Then the heart begins to quiver and slowly beat. The man, losing identity, steps back and slowly fades.
When Nayia looks up from the heart, he has vanished. She drops her head into her hands and weeps. Eventually she looks again at the heart. It beats strongly.
Baezok led the search for Linus. He smashed through the ruined homes, pushing aside emaciated people, overthrowing the remains of their belongings. He went to the sea, walked along the shore, stared long into the water. He turned for home, shouting abuse at the Somnoi accompanying him.
The house shifted with shadows. Baezok regretted his treatment of the Somnoi. Within his cynicism lay apprehension. He half believed in their rumoured powers. If Linus was dead he would rather be haunted by his ghost than never see the boy again. Could the Somnoi conjure his spirit?
Baezok shook himself. Linus was probably roaming somewhere beyond the city. He would resume the search in the morning. Then he recalled the Druesim. Had Linus wandered into their camp?
Baezok had watched the starving Druesim from the walls. He despised and feared them. He had heard they were consistently haunted. And, again, in spite of his cynicism he had a sneaking suspicion this might be true. Without support, he dared not approach them in daylight yet he could not dispel the thought that Linus might be among them.
Night consumes the house and Baezok, deep in thought, lights no lamps. The darkness thickens and begins to breathe; a regular yet laboured sound issuing from walls and floor. The nurse lies on the boy's empty bed, bruised and too terrified to stir.
Baezok dismisses the Somnoi and leaves the house. On the city walls he sees the Druesim's flickering fire defining the cowed people who sit or aimlessly wander in its light.He waits, immune to the cold wind and the voices that murmur in the dust.
At last the fire dies and the people sleep. Baezok descends the steep steps from the wall, watching the flapping shanty town that seems alive in the moonlight. The makeshift homes might be great grey birds about to take flight.
Baezok enters the camp. Some people are restless in their sleep, others unmoving, welcoming oblivion. He steps cautiously among them, straining for a sign of Linus. He lifts flaps and looks inside but finds no sign of the boy. He turns for home.
He is about to leave when a great wind gusts from the hills. It slaps him squarely in the face and he hears, in his heart, the recriminations of Linus. The boy does not use words, yet Baezok suffers the brunt of accusation. The spirit of Linus berates him for his elevation of brutality.
Linus is no visible ghost. His heart beats at Nayia's oracle. While there is a physical vestige of him, he will not assume a ghostly presence. But he enters his father's being and Baezok falls in fear to his knees.
He knows Linus is dead. And he knows, beneath his bluster and the suffering he has inflicted on others, he has been wrong. Painfully, he pulls himself up and stumbles from the sleeping camp.
The wind still probes his flesh, as though seeking the bones beneath. He is compelled to turn in the moonlight and sees two shadows at his heels. One is his own, the other a faint replica.
He hurries. The shadows keep pace. Malignant murmurs move through his head. He climbs the steps into the house, shaking his head to release the pressure of conscience. But the sounds increase to a roar; the words inaudible yet the meaning plain, magnifying the accusations of Linus.
Baezok descends to the cellar where the nurse lies. He kneels by the bed where Linus had slept, clutches the sheets, then the nurse's scant clothing in a bid for comfort. She opens her eyes, sees his terrified face and, forgiving his brutality, takes it in her hands.
The roar in Baezok's head subsides yet he cannot rest. He staggers to his feet and back up the steps. Moonlight spills through windows into the house. More shadows spread across the floors and climb the walls; half human shapes with endlessly agitating fingers.
Baezok runs past them, hearing the faint intake of breath. His head is filled again with accusations; a washing sea of sound. He turns into the main room filled with looted furniture. A mirror with a fine wood frame carved into fantastic foliage, hangs on the far wall.
The moonlight floods the room and Baezok sees his unshaven face, distorted with fear, in the mirror. He stares, as at a stranger, then slowly walks towards the mirror. The reflected eyes are his, yet seem alien. They have seen things Baezok has not. They have known truths Baezok has never suspected.
As he reaches the mirror they begin to accuse. They penetrate his soiled, uncaring soul and he flinches. Yet he is compelled to look into them. He hears again the recriminations of Linus.
Baezok is almost touching the mirror. His reflection begins to faintly fluctuate; an unearthly pallor draining life from the flaccid flesh. Baezok confronts his own ghost.
Horrified he backs away. The ghostly eyes remain immutably on his. He turns from the mirror, only to be faced by the full figure of himself after death. He is the colour of earth and indistinct at his extremities. The same eyes relentlessly meet his.
He leaves the haunted room and gropes into the bedroom. Here there are no mirrors, yet as he looks sideways, the wraith undulates by the bed. Baezok feels its cloying dampness as though it has recently risen from the
earth. It smells of dead lilies, the most lovely flowers in life, but overwhelmingly foul in death.
Baezok crouches, head in hands, on the floor, but the dampness and death enter every pore of his frightened flesh. By morning he is dead.
Nayia watched the swaying bones. They told her tyranny was ousted. Suddenly the shuddering ghost of Baezok appeared. His eyes had dimmed, washed with remorse and the knowledge that he had relinquished the damaged land of the living.
He looked at Linus' s heart beating within the shining substance and reached towards it. But he could not move from where he stood and the heart remained beyond his grasp.
Tears of the dank underworld welled in his eyes and he slowly faded. Tentatively Nayia touched the wetness of his tears on the blackened ground.
She lifted the heart of Linus and walked towards the Druesim's camp. The people looked up as she entered and, holding the heart high, she told them to return to the city. They could reclaim their possessions from the house on the hill. The owner was dead.
Initially, they did not believe her and had no idea she held up the heart of the boy they had eaten. Then, one by one, they followed her from the camp and up to the city. Some ventured into the house where the bodies of Baezok and the old nurse, who had died from her wounds, had already, by the ghosts, been turned to dust.
The people sought their old homes. Some were barely harmed. Others were uninhabitable. Shelter was shared.
Nayia returned to the oracle, detached the bones and took them with the boy's heart, to the house on the hill. There she assumed spiritual authority, as the people continued to come to her to alleviate the hauntings.
Gradually, they lessened, until ghosts were rare and then to be more pitied than feared. The Somnoi became redundant. Nayia placed the bones and Linus's beating heart in the centre of the open court of the hilltop house. A fragile civilisation resumed.
But while victimised ghosts decreased, as the people forgot their fear and the guilt that they had survived while others had died, Baezok's wraith remained, sometimes whining with the wind through the walls or stretching frail fingers that would never reach the boy's immortal heart.
Nayia was unafraid. She watched him dispassionately. He could not harm them now.
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