by Merl Fluin
TJ kicked dust over the triangle of bullets as she scrambled backwards. “Then what the hell did you tell me for?”
“Because it’s important. And because I think it’s about time I levelled with you about why I was so ready to ride out with you. It wasn’t just for the money, and you’re not the only one hunting for lost property in this desert. There’s another secret, deeper and deadlier than the Tetractys: the Golden Thigh of Pythagoras, plucked from the ashes of his body after the fire that murdered him, and carried away by the wise. It’s the container of all numbers, monad and dyad, odd and even, sameness and difference all pumping away together like a golden engine, and it’ll trump the Tetractys itself if the right person gets their hands on it. If I can find it and bring it to the Eleven Twenty-Threes, it will change their fortunes beyond anything they can imagine. Beyond the price of a return from the dead.”
“And this Golden Thigh is out here in the desert somewhere?”
“Somewhere. I know where. And I have a hunch we’ll find Cowhead in the same place.”
“Jesus, Cantos, you know where she is? Is it close?”
“Close? Depends. Are the two ends of your gun belt close together or far apart? Depends whether you’re dressed or undressed, don’t it?”
19.
Mirages roiled in the sky in shades of violet and blue. Cantos and TJ faced each other across the fire pit, their eyes locked. The kindling was a coil of rattlesnakes that rumbled and hissed.
Slowly Cantos raised his hand and placed his fingertips on his forehead, just above the meeting point of his brows. A flame twined about his feet.
The horizon grew tall and twisted around itself. Flashes appeared at the swaying rim of a tornado. Cantos raised his fingers towards TJ’s face. Sweat poured down her arms and legs and darkened the ground beneath her.
The cone of the tornado mutated into a cube, then a pyramid, then a sphere. It exploded into snakes that shrieked across the desert towards them. TJ’s hair and beard crackled.
Cantos leapt to his feet, grabbed a stick from the fire and gouged a series of geometric shapes into the earth: a point, a line, a triangle, a pentagon, an octagon, a thirteen-sided crystal, and finally a mandala of squares and triangles within a frame of twenty sides.
The fire leapt out of the pit and erased it all in a jet of steam and ash.
TJ howled at Cantos across the infinite space between them: “Invisibles!”
Silence fell. The horizon was still. There on its curving edge, beneath a clean blue sky, lay an enormous hacienda. It gleamed in the daylight with a fungal sheen. Spores rose like smoke from its many roofs and towers.
Cantos slumped to his knees. His face was smeared with dirt and cinders.
TJ sat down beside him. She peered into his face, wiping the grime from it with hands that were just as dirty. He caught one of her hands in his and held it to his thumping chest.
After a long time a black bird landed a few feet behind them. They turned at the sound. Beyond the bird there still stood the hacienda.
“There it is,” he said. “Alexandria.”
***
“Is it ice?”
“No,” said Cantos. “Salt.”
An expanse of white lay before them, hard and glistening and flat all the way to the horizon.
“No way around it. We have to cross.”
TJ glanced at his impassive profile. Then she placed a foot on the salt. She shifted her weight onto it, then moved the other foot, holding her arms out to her sides. She stopped and twisted from the waist to look back at him. “Well, aren’t you coming?”
He stepped close at her side, then smiled and walked on.
She crouched down, rubbed the white with her finger and put it to her lips. “It is salt.”
When they were so far out that they could no longer see clean earth behind them, TJ slipped. Groans rose from beneath her. The shadowy outline of a human face, flesh stiff and eyes closed, was visible under the salt surface. A few yards ahead she could see fingertips pressing up from below. A few feet from that, curving shapes like a thigh and buttock flattened on glass.
Tendrils of weed or hair waved as Cantos took another step. TJ gazed into the face beneath her.
Cantos gripped her by the arm. “Keep walking and don’t look down.”
He stalked on, leaving her behind. She looked again at the salt masks below. Women and men, children and animals, faces and limbs and shreds of clothing, loose shoes and torn books, some pushed up tight against the surface, others shifting as she moved her weight, all accompanied by a salt-white noise.
Cantos yelled without changing pace: “TJ! Move! Eyes front!”
She fixed her eyes on his back and picked up her feet.
20.
The hacienda ushered them through open gates into a square courtyard. Cool colonnades surrounded the courtyard on three sides. A fountain in the centre fired water from the breasts of an androgyne astride an orb. Trees bearing cones of pink blossom shaded the path to the fountain. Bright birds and insects darted between the branches. Their chirrups and buzzes mingled with the plashing.
TJ removed her boots with a sigh and sat on the rim of the fountain with her feet in the water. Fish scattered and returned amid clouds of green that reflected the clouds in the sky. Air and water, plant life and sunshine: an intersection of four worlds. The eyelid on her thumb fluttered like an embryo.
Before her rose a white two-storey mansion that shuttered its windows against the sunlight. Fleshy, heavy-scented plants tumbled over the colonnade arches in ropes of colour. Cantos wrapped himself in one of the vines and buried his face in the blooms. TJ grinned.
“Never had you down as a gardening man, Cantos.”
“Oh, I’m strictly spagyric.” He plucked a star-shaped yellow flower and inserted it into his buttonhole. “But science is beauty and beauty science.”
He came over and sat thigh-to-thigh beside her with his back to the fountain. A peacock called from somewhere not far away.
“So now what?” said TJ. “I feel like servants in funny costumes should come and take our visiting cards to their mistress. Either that or throw us out on our arses.”
He gave her an amused look and adjusted his buttonhole. “Alexandria is her own mistress.”
“I’m going looking for Cowhead.” Suddenly all business, she tugged her boots back onto her wet feet.
She ran into a walled garden where pink and white roses slithered up trellises and down walls. A low archway led to a yard where hens scratched at dirt under an awning. The awning billowed in sun-faded stripes of indeterminate colours. A black cat lazed in the sun on the other side of the yard, watching the hens through slitted eyes.
A row of white-painted outhouses led off towards a gated paddock. TJ peered into each outhouse, opening doors and craning to see through windows. The sweet dry smell of hay hit her like sherry, but the stables were empty. The paddock was lush and green and full of rabbits and crows, but there were no horses.
She turned as Cantos crunched across the dirt behind her. “If she’s here, we’ll find her,” he said, putting his arms around her shoulders. TJ pressed her face into his chest.
***
After the glare of desert light on adobe, the stairs inside the hacienda were a dark abyss. TJ rubbed her forearms against the walls on either side as she lowered one foot at a time onto invisible steps. Eventually a dim haze below them shed gloomy light on the staircase, silhouetting Cantos like a ghost in front of her.
The staircase ended in a small, low-ceilinged room lit with candles and oil lamps. Glass-fronted cases lined all four walls, interrupted by doors leading off to the rear and right.
Lamplight was warm on the polished wood of the floors, ceiling, cabinets and shelves. A large table surrounded by heavy chairs almost filled the remaining space. In the tallest of the chairs, at the head of the table, sat the stuffed body of a lion. Its head and jaws leaned over as if it were reading the book that lay between its massive paws. Its
body ended abruptly behind the ribcage. The flat end of its cylindrical torso was propped on the chair seat.
More books were heaped on the table in piles, strewn around the chairs, spilling onto the floor. Cantos stooped to inspect them, checking their spines and turning the pages between his long fingers.
TJ drifted to one of the cabinets. Shelves of yet more books and papers, but also objects and images, some labelled and classified according to an unknown taxonomy. One case contained a preserved human finger embedded in a cube of glass. Above it hung a miniature oil painting of a young man with red hair and green eyes. Arranged on the shelves around him were an ostrich egg, the skeleton of a horse’s lower leg and hoof, a plug of tobacco, a bamboo flute, and a display of humming birds posed around a porcelain flower under a glass dome.
Another case displayed a series of drawings of men and women having sex in groups of twos and threes, raising their skirts and presenting breasts and buttocks to each other with expressions of inscrutable amusement. The bottom of this cabinet was given over to serried rows of artefacts all sized to fit snugly into one or two hands, slippery and rippling against red silk cushions.
A sound like rustling or whispering came from behind a door.
“There’s someone here,” TJ said, also whispering.
“I doubt it,” said Cantos without looking up from the books.
She stepped through the door to the right, into a long panelled gallery. Glass-lidded display tables ranged its length on both sides, but no one was there.
She returned to the first room and tried the other door. It led into a carpeted chamber. A long bench bore flasks, tubes, glass pipes and other scientific equipment, some of it smashed or even ground into tiny fragments that littered the tabletop like gemstones. Beyond the bench a huge empty fireplace was flanked by cylindrical glass jars, taller than TJ and filled with thick opalescent liquid. In one of these floated the fully dressed body of a gunfighter. He was preserved in every detail, from the eyelashes that rested on each pale cheek to the rip in the side of one of his tooled leather boots. The only imperfection was a forefinger missing from the hand over his holster.
The other jar contained an ape. Its body was covered with red hair, and its green eyes were open. The room smelled of jasmine.
TJ went back into the room with the lion. Cantos had gone.
She headed down the long gallery. Some of the panels above the display tables shone with shapes and colours: geometric patterns, triangles and spirals, like the petroglyphs in the desert but somehow transmuted, conjoined and convulsed into less rational, more impure forms. Beneath them lay animal remains, burned and twisted, bones and teeth amid shards from the broken glass lids.
TJ lingered before a pellet of smeared and charred fur. Then she hurried on, past flowing tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, out through a door at the end of the gallery.
The light here was the colour of tequila. Shelves of glass jars, all filled with glowing liquid. Floating inside every jar, a specimen of repellently curvaceous beauty. A card at the base of each gave terse information. A ribbed and twisting flower that folded in on itself through impossible planes was identified as an ostrich’s rectum. Delicate feet and ears, tender and sweet, were identified as rats. An organ as large as a woman’s forearm, and more flexible and muscular than any beast’s tongue, was labelled “torpedo”.
Row upon row of microscope slides lined an alcove near the entrance. A large magnifying glass lay on a desk beside it. TJ lifted it to her eye and inspected iridescent wing casings, trembling membranes, crazy limbs and jaws, midnight-black undergrowth eyes.
She rounded another corner. A new row of jars, each bigger than the last, charted the evolution of the animal within. A meatball in the first jar changed in frozen somersaults of development to become a blank human baby in the last. On the shelf above, a round, squat jar revealed sleeping eyelids, lightly pored skin, curving nostrils, a flowing moustache, soft lips, and nothing more: “the face of a Spaniard”.
A cupboard of bones stood ajar by the exit. The next room was dark and bare, save for five life-sized dolls or puppets without strings. One of them was suspended from the ceiling on long ropes, not vertically but horizontally. TJ stood face-to-face with it. Its body and legs were parallel to the floor, the long unkempt wig its only perpendicular plane. Its hands were tied behind its back and its feet pushed towards its buttocks. It was carved from wood, its contours smooth to the touch. The grain bore smeary finger marks, signs of pawing around its breasts, but the groove between its legs gave splinters.
Another doll lay on its back and gazed up at the first from below. Its legs were slung one over the other, its arms akimbo. The other three slumped against the walls. TJ did not stop to inspect them.
She was in a corridor that ran from left to right. Snatches of music came from her left: a plucked string instrument, a female voice. She hesitated, then headed right.
The corridor twisted and dog-legged for several minutes. It ended in a brick wall with four closed doors. The doors were marked with symbols:
She opened the door marked
and walked in.
The room was an immense inverted cone. Rows of panelled wooden seats spiralled up and out to the rim, brightly lit with gas jets. The small area where she stood was dominated by a flat bench equipped with leather straps. To one side was a chest-high cabinet. Its top was cluttered with knives, needles, a saw, mirrors and other instruments of silver or glass or rubber, all nestling together as if to protect a secret.
She left the room and tried the door marked
It was an enormous dressing room. Cantos was in the bath.
“Find anything?” He swirled the water with his hand.
“Not yet. You?”
“No rush. Clocks don’t tick in Alexandria.”
He lay back and sighed. His wet hair draped itself over the edge of the tub. Long stems of water ran down it to the ground below.
“I thought I heard someone.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder.” He pulled himself out of the bath. Sparkling water trailed behind him as he walked to a couch. The sunflowers on his shoulders were ripe and full. “Care for something a little naughty?” He stretched out his wet body.
TJ dropped her coat onto a pile of clothes by the tub. “What did you have in mind?”
“Why, little huckleberry, I thought perhaps you might like to sleep with me.”
***
They sped through dark twisting tunnels, Cantos in front. TJ followed him into a brightly lit area that ended at a revolving metal gate. Beside the gate was a booth with glass windows. No one was in the booth. Cantos barely broke his stride as he pushed through the gate and continued through two large plate glass doors.
The doors opened into a circular hall. The walls and domed ceiling were pale blue; the floor was carpeted in red. In the middle of the room stood an octagonal vitrine as big as an aviary. Dark wooden reading desks radiated from it like the spokes of a wheel or the rays of a child’s drawing of the sun. Softly glowing glass lamps punctuated each desk.
Cantos was inside the vitrine. TJ circled it, pressing her palms against the glass, feeling the surface with bare fingers. He watched her. His head was tilted and one hand was on his hip, and he smiled. Then opened a door, took her hand and pulled her inside with him.
He folded her into his arms, put his mouth to her ear and murmured. TJ moved her head to gaze up into his face. Her hands rested on the leather binding of a book. The book was taller than she was, and was propped on a stand inside the vitrine.
She stepped back to read the cover. It was inscribed with four symbols:
She heaved the book open.
The pages were handwritten and illuminated. Intricate calligraphy twined with illustrations in blues, reds and golds. Some pages displayed coloured diagrams of animal bones, feathers and shells. It was all beautiful, and all illegible.
Cantos’s breath was hot on her neck. She turned towards him. The room beyond the
glass behind him was now lined with specimen jars. The specimens glowed: a tiny armadillo curled into a ball, an eel, a lion’s paw, an ostrich’s head, a human breast, a baby that could have been any kind of ape.
