The Broken House

by Tom La Farge

  In any play the truth emerges slowly, relentlessly, rising to the surface like a whale. The characters’ characters collapse. Their bluffs are called, as yours will be, my dears. Their impersonations fail. Their wills are thwarted and their motives exposed, the shape of their fate appears to them even in the teeth of their furious denial. And so here, my dear Rhemots. The headquarters unit figures that Truth, doesn’t it—The Truth being that the City insists upon its performance being attended to. The Truth in the unlikely form of the Domestic of Walls and his profiteering staff of contractors, realtors, plumbers, and restaurateurs; but then the Truth is always not what you expected. The Domestic of Walls, his orderlies and aides-de-camp, his repeating rifles and howitzers, his troops and reserves, will move slowly towards you, growing ever nearer, ever harder to ignore. In your faces, my dears, we will play this piece in your faces if that is what it takes, and we will be doing you a favor. For Truth cannot be brushed off with wishful gabble about work. The ones who are playacting, my dears, with their antique drama of Working Man pitted against the Uncaring Sea—the ones repeating the old old lines worn to a mouthful of little bones that the meat was sucked off of long ago, these ones are you, my dear dear Rhemots, are you.

  No gradient of delight for Rhem, thought Root. Rather a gradient of truth. Were they contraries, he suddenly wondered? Truth and delight, different ends of the same scale? Outside the theater, maybe. In it, what could give greater delight than to see pride and power overtaken by truth? Someone else’s pride and power. My truth. Root raised his finger from the map. The Domestic’s strategy appealed to him.

  “Purple jodhpurs!” Drytung murmured, and Root looked up. There was Shandimus striding from the tower, the girl three paces behind him. Indeed, he had put on ceremonial riding-breeches. Lilac fabric, some light weave never meant to meet a saddle, billowed around his hams and then cinched in above the knee and plunged into stiff black boots. These rather impeded the Domestic’s progress and constrained him to a rolling walk, one notch up from a stagger on the gradient of stability; it underscored how bandy-legged he was. But, at the other end of the gradient of dignity, the Domestic’s physiognomy was everything martial: features composed, mouth still, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring for a snuff of powder. Oh look, she’s trimmed his beard.

  “Gentlemen, let us make our preparations,” Shandimus said simply. To Drytung’s ear the word sounded like perp-oration. Here came ’Nna. Her face impassive, the girl tucked back a lock of hair (as thick, black, and wavy as he’d guessed) under her cap. A crow set up a racket on the tower. Then more joined in, as if they’d seen the joke. A bee danced by.

  5.

  The Bee Wolf

  Eight months later, three hundred and twenty-nine miles away, Drytung stood coughing as the Corsator Annag’s motorcycle sped away. Its harmonies degraded to a whine then plunged into absence, and Drytung was left, dust settling on his sleeve, at the end of a driveway with nothing to do but look at what he did not care to see. Two lions rampant atop stone pillars. One had lost its head, the muzzle of the other had sheared off to expose an oval of black stone.

  The drive led him through half a mile of drifting smoke, and at the smell of burnt flesh he broke out in a sweat. Before long he was turning a corner and starting to see what can be done by high explosives to a house. This one had been built for aristocratic privilege, then converted to a Wildlife Refuge. It now quartered Shandimus, and Root, and ’Nna, the little cook with the long toes.

  Dread stiffens the air at such corners. The smells that reached him might grow from bodies he knew. He came to a halt at the sight of the broken house.

  Silent under early morning sunlight. Drytung checked the time. An army watch amidst the hairs of his mortal wrist.

  The driveway was blocked by fallen trees, so Drytung turned aside began to trace the perimeter of the destruction. Avenues of approach that he could have taken he passed by. Rarely looked at the house, so gashed and bitten, but walked, eyes down, along the limit reached by the wave of litter that had jumped from it.

  He picked up an arc of washbasin’s rim. The enamel skin of it was chipped and worn; the cast iron underneath seemed sore. He ran his finger along the arc, thinking of red faces with eyes squeezed closed reflected among suds, and let it fall back. Near it glinted a swan’s-neck bottlestopper, other crystal shards, spreading floral sweetness edged in musk. A singed loaf of bathsponge gaped, but he dared not look into its chambers. Here was half of a comb, cut from a single bone, and the black hairs caught in its fine teeth coiled and reeked of acrid oils. He let that fall and continued on his way, around and around the broken house, squeezing between the silent, fascinating fragments, full shapes of objects that grew out of their own shards. So he edged around to the back till he faced the buildings of the Wildlife Refuge.

  He saw, first, holes. Out flew spirals of dust and flashing wisps of chaff. Flies entered, lighting on masses sprawling on dim floors. Feathery clots strewed the grass below the dovecotes; the breeze fingered iridescent neckrings.

  Flattened saplings, berry-bushes, ferns, and toadstools radiated from a raw pit; beside it a tree lay down, a shock of roots stood up, bristling. A soldier of Walls had been walking there. Her body fitted in among the roots. He couldn’t see her really. She was in the roots. The roots twisted wildly, grappling one another, interlocking in a spreading disc, and she was caught up in that struggle, knees bent, arms uplifted. She had only one foot now, still in its heavy boot. Her face was lost in clay, her jaw jammed sideways in a fan of teeth, but she had an ear, intact. It grew out through a fall of fine hair and stood up and spread its complicated surface like a fungus on its foot. Taking his cue from it, Drytung listened.

  Birds were singing in a copse, their voices sharp, round, unfolding moods of birds. Drytung did not know the language. But he reckoned that birds know it. They were answering something.

  Now what he wanted to do, but he had not the strength, was to push up the tree till it tipped back in place. Then the flourish of boughs would be enlarged, and the dead soldier set where she wouldn’t have to listen to birds and he wouldn’t have to see her.

  Turning, Drytung saw the animals gathered to look at him. As he advanced, they edged away. A glossy jackdaw hopped closer, as if hoping for seed, taking no notice of the tractor burning in gouts of smoke, paint bubbling as its tires melted.

  A beast he had never seen before was nosing around near his feet. Its haunches swelled beneath a hide sparsely haired, but its torso tapered to slender forequarters, and a whiskered tube of snout probed the sand. But then he saw that its back was broken, its hindparts paralyzed. Drytung squatted, watching it carry on its business.

  He was pulled from sorrow by Shandimus’ screams. Hacked bamboo, trampled parterres, a pool of slashed lilypads. Shandimus brandished his sword, sobbing. He nearly sliced off Drytung’s head.

  “The sky was clear! No haze, nothing hidden. Why, across the bay I could see the Palace. I saw the cupola on the Banqueting House, the copper shingles of the Wardrobe.

  “My machine-guns were placed where they could traverse. My infantry was deployed, showing colors. Guns on the rise behind us, each with a full complement of gunners.

  “But the enemy came through! I couldn’t stop them. Intelligence, signals, provisions, supply lines, reserves, earthworks, I had seen to everything, Kyr Drytung! I know how to build a wall! My position was optimally defensible! But they came on in waves, and my line curled back on itself and unraveled like rotten string.”

  He inhaled with a gasp, twitched his arm free, turned and hacked at an oleander. Gently Drytung touched his shoulder. Shandimus gave one last jerk, then dropped his sword. Drytung, remembering the beehive at the sally-port, led him to look at the animals and on the way related his impression that they lived in a different world. Shandimus seemed to be listening, made no reply.

  They passed the backbroken creature, which was no longer squirming, and entered a shed filled with furious civet s
tink. It was hard to see much, except at the end where the tin roof had been twisted back like the lid of a sardine can. There light fell on a cage.

  A small mammal moved inside in spasms of squirming and lunging. Drytung saw teeth and blood. As Shandimus advanced, the animal stood up like a trooper coming to attention. An otter’s head on a cat’s body; it crossed its forepaws respectfully on its belly. “At your orders,” murmured Drytung, and Shandimus laughed pleasantly. “A mongoose. Give it something to eat,” he ordered. Drytung went outside and pinched a piece off a dove. Shandimus pushed it between the bamboo bars, and the mongoose arced over it and sniffed. Then it dropped to all fours and suddenly swung its hips to one side, growling over its shoulder. It returned to sniffing the meat, but then just as abruptly swung and growled again. But this time its swing caught its tail between its haunches and the thick bars. The tip twitched, it bared its teeth, the tip twitched again, it lunged and bit. The jolt of pain made it shiver, and it attacked more savagely than before. Drytung left the shed. Presently Shandimus joined him.

  “An innate aggressive response,” he commented. “He made his tail his rival when you brought him food. He warned off his rival, but it didn’t go away; he could still see it behind him. So he turned and attacked. Then it bit him in the tail; his rival became his attacker. He would have gone on defending himself till he’d bitten off his own tail. I let him out,” he added, unnecessarily, for the mongoose passed them in an undulating run, flesh dangling from its jaws, and its tail scored with gashes and caked with blood.

  They walked towards the house. Drytung heard a voice singing, ’Nna’s. Suddenly Shandimus doubled over. “Are you wounded?” Drytung cried. “Fascinating,” said the other. “Come and see.”

  Perched on a brassbound microscope blown out of somewhere, a light-green mantis, so huge it seemed the microscope had enlarged it, stood on four legs spread like a photographer’s tripod. It held up forelegs toothed like jaws that gripped a struggling wasp and raised it to the mantis’ viperlike head, which advanced in twisting pecks. “That’s a bee wolf he’s eating,” said Shandimus. “They hunt around our hive. Look, he’s got something too.” The wasp was indeed clutching a honey-bee, big, black-gold. Immobilized by poison, gripped between a pair of legs, the bee stuck out a long tongue. The wasp stroked and squeezed to force out honey stored in the bee’s crop, then extruded its own tongue and licked the bee’s, while the mantis’ delicate mouth descended upon the wasp’s belly, again and again, the movements coordinated like the motion of a watch.

  Shandimus straightened. “Fascinating. Do you think,” he asked, “that we could get something to eat?” Drytung led him toward the kitchen garden and ’Nna.

  ’Nna heard the Domestic’s voice and ran out to meet him through one of the holes opened by mortars. The Domestic was talking about bees. She guided him through the rubble and led him to a chair. Then she served them stew. “Good!” said the Domestic, and she was glad. “Where did you find fresh vegetables?” asked Drytung. Rubble and glass covered the kitchen garden.

  She’d found them by looking. Last night, before the attack, she’d gone out into the garden. She had felt concussions thicken the air around her. From the corner by the cabbages she had seen the kitchen belch out fire. Leaves and sheaves of flame had stood out from the windows till the whole corner fell. Another wedge of wall, where the sink for washing up was, toppled towards her. Behind it the gaspipe came wavering down, blazing green at the tip. She’d jumped. When what could burn had finished burning, smoldering, smoking, she’d gone back in.

  Since daybreak she’d been foraging. This stew was made of broken carrots, charred leeks and tomatoes, wilted cabbages, a can of chickpeas, a pickled lemon, some fish paste in a tube. She’d been making herself some tools too. She’d rigged a stove by straightening a wire grill and propping it over the fire she’d built from bits of wood, which were abundant. For a ladle she’d lashed a tin measuring cup to a length of snapped pipe. When she found the old well she pried its cap off and drew water with a jerrycan hung from suspenders. The jerrycan had doubled as stewpot.

  The two men were upset. Not ’Nna. She didn’t mind change. The kitchen was not a worse place now. Harder to work in; but the more openings, the better. The breeze blew in fresh through the new holes and drove out the stink from the meatlocker, whose contents she had shoveled out with a bent silver tray. One window had survived, and in its light she had set a rosemary bush she’d found and stuck in a pot. With some help she’d make the table she needed. She had her eye on the pantry door, blown inward against its habit. She’d cooked in worse places.

  The Domestic was staring at her. What was wrong?

  “What have you done to your uniform?”

  Her hand went to her chest: drat it, the makeshift brooch of twisted fork had come loose. She pulled the lappets closed, but the men’s gaze had traveled. The left leg of her trousers was nearly torn off, to tell the truth. It had happened while she was cowering among the cabbages. Four enemy soldiers, Old Believers with black veils, had pinned her to the wall. One had torn her trousers open, but then sniffed: “Unclean.” So then, while they held her, he’d ripped her tunic open, scattering buttons, and pinched her hard alongside her nipple, and he had spat. Then, hearing shots, the men ran out. She had searched for needle and thread but found nothing better than the fork.

  Her uniform meant everything to ’Nna. In it she could do her work without shame, for it was army work. She’d seen the chart above the adnomiast’s desk, back in the City. It accounted for her. Her place was in that box, the Cooks’ Unit of the Campfollowers’ Bandum. That chart laid down lines along which she could go ahead with her life without thinking twice. Her uniform set her on the chart.

  “Kindly go change uniforms at once,” said the Domestic.

  She said: “Kyr, there are no others here.”

  “Then wear something else.” His eye turned to the pantry. “What do I see hanging in there?” In there was hanging a peasant’s robe, a thick weave of unmarked brown wool. “Go put that on.”

  ’Nna was in the army. Her own uniform demanded of her that she take it off! She had no choice. ’Nna threw off her tunic and walked into the pantry. She shrugged on the hooded robe, and then, turning, caught Drytung’s eye. The brown robe draped itself on her as if she’d never worn anything else. “Domestic,” said ’Nna, and waited. “Kyr Root’s wounds must be washed. I must prepare a tonic.” She was holding a basket and a sickle. “I ask leave to procure herbs.”

  “Granted,” said Shandimus, and she left. Shandimus smiled. “Look at her: a peasant woman off to cull her simples.”

  “Yes, Domestic,” said Drytung. He stood up. Root was in a bad way, he knew. Bayoneted in the belly! “If you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I’ll just step out for a smoke.”

  Shandimus nodded. “We’ve nothing to do till Corsator Annag arrives to make her report,” he said.

  6.

  A Change of Strategy

  Later, ’Nna was squatting beside Root while he drank from the can she held to his lips. It tasted like turpentine, but he drank it, expecting it to leak out through some hole. He was riddled.

  She built up a pile of books beneath his head, neck, and shoulders, then set about washing him. He was a ruin. He had been sliced into. Something had been let out; pain, it might be, he felt none now. That was a strong drink. His mind cleared with a snap, and he looked down the length of him. The body he saw looked flat, mottled as a copper plate when it has been eaten into by acids. The taste of them was in his mouth. He was inked in blood, in sweat, in pus, in gunpowder, plaster dust, hematomas, ash. ’Nna swabbed at him. There it was, the gash. How it burned, how it itched, it was more alive than he was. Shandimus had stitched him up, driving a redhot needle while making tsk noises. ’Nna, more gentle, dabbed with some astringent fluid at the coarse white lines that sewed his belly shut. Her eye was roaming.

  “What are you looking for?”

  She excl
aimed, reached across him, and from between the pages of a medical handbook plucked a long needle trailing cotton. Then she was gone, after covering him with a rug, and Root looked about him.

  The room stretched away to a high mullioned window. The glass was all gone, but some philosopher’s bust still pursed its lips on the molded cornice. To the left a wall of books. Letters stamped in gold on leather caught the light as if nothing had happened. The books in their ranks stayed shut, holding in their words as tight as ever and fuck all readers. But the books that had lined the facing wall now mingled with its debris, and these were more interesting. They sprawled, pages flapping and turning. An iron stair’s tilted spiral climbed diagonally nowhere.

  Root closed his eyes over the image of a room, some private cabinet, dim beyond the rubble. He found he wished to meditate on rooms. The drink had dried his sinuses to resonant chambers. On balsamic fumes his thought floated out into rooms that led to other rooms and they on to others yet. Some were well known to him: a chamber where he had caressed his mistress, after she died, the greenroom of his theater. Others were rooms he’d never been in. Some he had seen in dreams; some were settings for stories he’d been told, which, listening, he’d made a picture of. Or had he told those stories? Each room had a distinct feeling. What feeling it was he could not tell, because he was not there. No one was there. These rooms were as empty as rooms get. A house broken open must draw to itself all the orphaned rooms. Housing nothing but a lack. The thought made Root so lonely that he opened his eyes.