Grimus

by Salman Rushdie

  Liv lying down on the bed.

  —Come, she said. Come and consecrate your bond.

  As Virgil Jones stumbled around in the night, Flapping Eagle moved towards the body of his wife, towards the clean bed, past the glowing candles and the spiders and the mould.

  She could arouse him as Irina never had. Then, he had been in control, a part of him always detached, choosing his next course of action, watching her come to her peak, deriving most of his satisfaction from the giving of pleasure; now it was he who was driven, uncontrollably, by the touches and movements of her body. She spent a long, slow while discovering his preferences and taboos, whispering all the time: —Do you like that? Is that nice? Shall I do that harder or softer? Shall I lick or nibble or tickle or scratch? Is my hand good there? Shall I be like this, or this, or this? The new, quiet gentleness in her voice softened interrogation into intimacy, and it was only later that he realized he had never asked if she, too, liked what he chose.

  So that, when she did what she had always intended, it caught him with every defence down, open, helpless.

  He lay on his back on the bed. The candles flickered closer to guttering out. The time of exploration was over, and the kissing and stroking and squeezing and she knelt over him, the golden cornucopia covering her face like a lavish thatch, the aquamarine eyes hidden, the long hands kneading and working at the small tilted breasts, the thighs quivering gently as she descended, and then he was in her. Slowly still, making it last, the living strike of flesh in flesh, slowly, slowly gathering force, building, slowly gathering.

  She was groaning now (— groan, she had said) and they were striking hard at each other, near, so near, the shudder growing within him, and the moment had…

  She wrenched herself off him then, hard and without warning, and stood on the bed looking down at him, composed, unruffled, and the aquamarines were filled with triumph.

  —It is Liv who breaks the bond, she said.

  Liv’s revenge on Grimus, plotted in centuries of darkened, still-seated brooding. Now, possessed, entranced, she had wrought it on his Spectre. It was a very final humiliation, hitting him in the core of his carnal pride, the only pride he had left. He looked up at the towering Valkyrie, staring at him with the full force of her century-festered hate, and helplessly, miserably, his body roused beyond his control, spilt his sterile seed upon the sheets.

  Virgil Jones had slept squatting on the outcrop. Flapping Eagle was curled into a foetal ball against the wall of the black house. When they awoke, the damp had seeped into their bones. They shivered.

  It was the cry that woke them, a half-frightened, half-elated yell from the wood. Flapping Eagle was awake at once and running in the direction of the voice. Virgil, slower, bulkier, followed him, blinking rapidly.

  Media stood at the edge of the wood, her arms trembling but her hands clasped rigidly together.

  Trapped between her arms was the surly, draggled figure of Bird-Dog.

  Brother and sister stood still a moment, taking stock.

  —Tell this stupid woman to let me go, little brother.

  Her voice was unfriendly.

  —I saw her appear, Flapping Eagle, said Media tremulously. Like a spectre. I saw her appear so I caught her. I thought you’d, you’d want to see her.

  It had been a brave thing to do.

  Bird-Dog said: —If you saw me appear, don’t you think I could just as easily disappear? You’d be left clutching thin air.

  Media looked doubtful, but didn’t release her hold.

  —She’s right, Media, said Flapping Eagle. If she’s here, it’s because she wants to be. Let her go and perhaps we’ll find out why.

  —I don’t want to be here, said Bird-Dog roughly. If he hadn’t sent me I would never have come.

  —Grimus sent you? It was Virgil’s voice, blank, disbelieving.

  —Not for you, she said. For him. Little Joe-Sue. It’s none of my doing, little brother. Remember that.

  Grimus actually wants to see me, thought Flapping Eagle. There will be no battle of wills.

  —Why? Again, it was Virgil Jones who spoke Flapping Eagle’s thoughts.

  —Don’t ask me why, said Bird-Dog, shaking herself free of Media’s constricting embrace. I have a message to deliver, and then I am to take him back with me.

  Media was about to speak, but remained silent, She looked worried.

  —Well, then, said Flapping Eagle. Deliver your message.

  As Bird-Dog began to speak in a memorized, sing-song voice, a figure in a black robe and hood came out of the black house to listen.

  Grimus says: —Thank you all for your efforts. I have derived a great deal of pleasure from watching you. To Virgil, I owe my apologies. I have been playing a game of hide and seek with him. Slightly cruel, possibly, but necessary.

  It is to Liv Sylwan Jones that I owe my greatest thanks. She has set the seal on Mr Eagle, who is therefore prepared at last to meet me. He knows about me now, intimately, I think. And more important, he has moved from a state of what I should call self-consciousness to a state of what I would humbly term Grimus-consciousness. That is a good state in which to meet me, and I must once again thank you all: the absent Nicholas Deggle for making the meeting possible, you, Virgil, for leading him so astutely towards a confrontation with me, and you, Liv, for breaking down the last barrier to that meeting: his masculinity. In a sense, Liv, you were the Gate, as far as he is concerned. Now that he has passed you, he may come to me. I am very thrilled: perhaps this is my Perfect Dimension, after all.

  Bird-Dog stopped and lowered her head. —Shall we go now? she said. To Flapping Eagle, the sight of this servile Bird-Dog, a grumbling, malcontented but totally subservient menial, was a shock and an upset. This was not the sister who had foraged for his food, who had raised and protected him. This was a shadow of the Bird-Dog he had known. What had Grimus done to her?

  Liv raised her hood a small way and spat viciously on the ground before her.

  Virgil Jones fussed at Flapping Eagle: —Don’t forget. Wait your moment.

  But life no longer seemed entirely clear-cut to Flapping Eagle. Curiosity and last night’s humiliation were creeping over his resolve.

  Media came up to Flapping Eagle and said quietly: —Take me, too.

  Flapping Eagle was no longer surprised by anything. —Why, Media? he asked.

  She shrugged.

  Flapping Eagle found himself saying: —Yes. All right. Come with me. Perhaps it was because he felt the need of a friendly face on the journey into the unknown. Perhaps it was a reaction to the night with Liv, a need to reassure himself. He didn’t bother to examine his motives, but he realized he was glad she was coming. As for Media, her face had suddenly broken into sunlight.

  Bird-Dog said: —Not her. Just you.

  Flapping Eagle found a drop of strength.

  —Big sister, he said. You’re supposed to lead me to Grimus. Now I’m not coming unless she does. So You’ll just have to take us both.

  With bad grace, Bird-Dog gave in.

  —Follow me, she said.

  Flapping Eagle clasped Media’s hand, tightly. The returned pressure was even more fierce. —I will think about you, she said, and only you. While I do that, nothing can harm me.

  He realized that she was exactly, precisely right.

  Bird-Dog walked ahead of them to a spot just behind the first trees. She closed her eyes and muttered: —Sispi, Sispi. She became transparent. She nearly disappeared, but the faintest outline of her moved a step to the right and waited. Media’s eyes widened; then she closed them and tightened her lips.

  Flapping Eagle led her to the Gate.

  Virgil Jones and Liv watched the three faint outlines walk away up the rising slope of the mountain, walking miraculously where there was no path to walk on, until they were lost to sight. They were so slight that it did not take long for this to happen.

  Liv turned and went back into the black house, slamming the door.

  And Vi
rgil? Virgil knew that there was no longer anything he could do, that after all the Gorfs prophecy had come true. Flapping Eagle had reached Grimus without his help, and who knew what the result would be? There was nothing to be done now.

  He started down the mountain, back to the beach, back to Dolores O’Toole and the jigsaws, the rocking-chair and the shreds of his helpless dignity.

  *I should note that the Arabic letter in question has no exact parallel in the Roman alphabet. It is more usually rendered as Q (Qâf)—but it is, in fact, a glottal-stop for which there is no accurate rendering. I have chosen to refer to it as K (Kâf) and risk confusion with the quite distinct letter Kaf, for the simple reason that it is the only way I can pronounce it. A purist would not forgive me, but there it is.

  LV

  FLAPPING EAGLE AND Media (when she opened her eyes) found themselves on a strangely transmuted Calf Mountain, a Calf Mountain in which Virgil, Liv, Liv’s house, even Liv’s donkey were reduced to wraith-like wisps, in which the outcrop remained, and the forest, both feeling different though they looked the same. Perhaps the most shocking change, harder to accept even than the ghosts of Virgil and Liv, lay above them. The clouds had vanished from the mountain’s summit. Flapping Eagle was surprised to find that the mountain was lower than he had imagined; the cumulus cocoon had made it seem much higher than it was. The summit lay only a few hundred feet above them.

  —Grimushome, said Bird-Dog, pointing without turning to face them.

  A sprawling house, long and low and castellated, looked down at them. It was a stone house, a miniature fortress. Somewhere in that stone home, thought Flapping Eagle, lies the Stone Rose.

  The house was wildly irregular, its walls anything but straight, no corner a right angle, but it was a designed eccentricity, a deliberate folly. The zigzag patterns it wove on the mountaintop were purposeful, reflections of their creator.

  Reflections: the house gave them off in all directions! for every window in its wandering walls was also a mirror. This combination of undulating stone and blind, gleaming windows made the house curiously difficult to focus upon, as if his eyes refused to accept it, as if it was an illusion that would not harden into fact.

  Possibly it was a question of size. The house was large, but, in an impossible distortion of scale, it lay in the spreading shade of an inconceivably huge tree, an ash which dwarfed its venerable sibling in the Gribb garden by comparison, as if the swing-bearing tree had been a mere sapling. It was more than gigantic; it inspired awe. Flapping Eagle remembered Virgil Jones’ description of the Ash Yggdrasil, the mother-tree which holds the skies in place. And wondered what monsters were gnawing at its roots.

  Another shock. Flapping Eagle had a clear memory of the upper slopes of Calf Mountain. They had been steep, more arduous even than the ascent from K to the outcrop, and densely forested. He had had severe doubts about the possibility of scaling these heights without proper equipment. It was stunning, then, to see before him a neatly-cleared passage up the mountain, a whole flight of narrow stone steps sweeping effortlessly to the very door of Grimus-home. And yet they were there. They were real. Flapping Eagle shook his head, forced into admiration.

  They were climbing the stairs now, Bird-Dog leading, Media bringing up the rear, and the birds swooping and swarming all around them. More birds than Flapping Eagle had seen in his life, birds from every climate and of every imaginable feather, birds as common as crows and birds he had never seen before, with uselessly twisted beaks and strangely contorted shapes, flocking and squawling up the mountain to the peak. Often he had to shield his face against a spread of beating wings. He glanced back at Media; there was fear in her eyes, but she forced a smile.

  And the whine was still all around him, loud now and pervasive, but the marvels surrounding them took far more of their attention. Eventually they were near the peak. Bird-Dog had maintained a hostile silence throughout the climb, but now she broke it, whirling to face her brother from her higher position.

  —Leave us alone, she cried. Why did you have to come here?

  Then, equally suddenly, she turned around once more, and there was resignation in her steps as she resumed her climb.

  For a man at the end of a quest, Flapping Eagle felt extremely unheroic.

  Engraved in the stone over the door of Grimushome:

  THAT WHICH IS COMPLETE IS ALSO DEAD.

  Birds crowded the branches of the giant ash as Flapping Eagle and Media followed the surly Bird-Dog in.

  The house was a kind of rough triangular labyrinth, the face which it presented to the ascending steps being the jagged base of the triangle. The main door stood towards the left-hand corner of this base. The two other faces were even more jagged than the front; a sharp protruding sub-triangle stuck out on the left and a blunter but larger sub-triangle distorted the right side.

  Inside, Flapping Eagle and Media found a bewildering series of interlocking rooms. First of these was the stone hall in which they found themselves upon entering, a bleak spartan room, lit only by oil-lamps until Bird-Dog flung open a mirrored window. It contained no furniture, but variegated pieces of rock, boulders and two beautifully-detailed erotic sculptures in stone stood lining its walls. Flapping Eagle found it an unfriendly room.

  It was roughly square, though it grew narrower at the far end, where a door stood closed against them. Bird-Dog moved towards this door and flung it open. As they followed her, Flapping Eagle heard the creaking for the first time.

  A regular, rhythmic creaking. The walls were full of it, but they were stone walls and there was no obvious source for the sound. It seemed to grow louder as he listened; he turned to Media. She, too, was listening. Creak … creak… creak … creak. They hurried into the next room.

  And momentarily forgot the creaking at the sight of an army of birds.

  —Birdroom, said Bird-Dog curtly and unnecessarily.

  This was the room which stuck sharply out from the left side of the building. Through an open window poured the birds, a steady stream of comings and goings. Various feeds stood on small pedestals around the room and a large birdbath was the room’s central feature. Peacocks strutted on the floor.

  But not all the birds were alive. Stuffed creatures stood in glass-fronted cases all around them, immobilized for ever in typical scenes from their lives: birds eating, birds courting, birds breeding and hatching, birds in flight, birds dying, birds swooping on other birds, in a dazzling series of eternal tableaux.

  And on the walls, the portraits of birds, an audubon profusion of feathered heads, some real, some imaginary, serried in ranks around the central picture which took up almost all the wall to Flapping Eagle’s right. One look at the glorious particoloured creature depicted there was enough. This was the Roc of Sinbad, the Phoenix of myth: Simurg himself.

  The creaking broke through Flapping Eagle’s fascination. Bird-Dog was hurrying on through yet another door at the far end of the room. They followed her rapidly through an electrifyingly beautiful dining-room, on whose walls hung ancient tapestries and on whose floor lay ancient carpets. Silver plates and candelabra glinted everywhere. This was the room which stood at the apex of the triangle. Bird-Dog did not pause.

  Down the right side now, Flapping Eagle told himself, concentrating on orientation. The fourth room stood in darkness, a number of white shapes looming through the shades. As his eyes accustomed himself to the poor light, he saw that a number of podia were scattered about the room, bearing—what?—things, hidden by white, shrouding sheets. These silent ghosts—none large enough to be the Rose—were in some way worrying. And the creaking continued here as in all the previous rooms…

  This time the door was not in the far wall, but in the wall on their right. Following Bird-Dog, they came into a small room, entirely empty, oil-lamps flickering on the walls, the first room they had been in without an outside wall. On the wall facing them, red against the grey stone, was this shape:

  —The letter Kâf, said Bird-Dog brusquely.

/>   Flapping Eagle did not understand the purpose of this room, unless it was an anteroom, for their journey was near an end. Bird-Dog went through a door in the wall to their left and they found themselves in a bright, airy, well-furnished room: their room. The large bed wore fresh sheets and had obviously been expecting them. There was a deep, soft divan and an ornate low table inset with ivory squares.

  His sense of direction told him there was still an unexplained area on each side of this room. One was rapidly clarified—a door on his left as he stood just inside the entrance from the Kâf-room led to a bathroom and lavatory; and on the far side of this were Bird-Dog’s small, dingy quarters. She had her own door to the outside world, as befits a servant. She was retreating now, into this small shell.

  Flapping Eagle called after her: —Where is Grimus?

  —Wait, she said, and shut her door. He heard a bolt being shot.

  Sounds: a range of unfamiliar, disturbing sounds. The whine, the loud combined conversation of birds, and the creaking.

  —Are you all right? he said.

  Media lay on the bed, her hands over her ears, trying to shut out this new, frightening world.

  She is a resilient woman, thought Flapping Eagle, but very near breaking point.

  He was retracing his steps to the main entrance. The unexplained area towards the front face of the house, south of their room, must be Grimus’ own quarters, he had decided; but he had seen no doors leading into that area. He went outside and circled the house; but other than the front door and Bird-Dog’s back door, there were no entrances; and the windows of Grimus’ room were closed and reflecting. Puzzled, he returned to the stone hall.