Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  ‘Don’t go for a walk. Please,’ said the botanist.

  ‘I won’t go a long ways,’ said the girl. ‘Not that some people would care how far I did.’ It was a remark meant for absent ears.

  *

  ‘So our ship is gone. A hijack is possible, though it’s more likely they fled. There were quite a few slug tracks around. I’m afraid, for the time being, we’re stuck here. Also, have I mentioned that we’re living in the belly of a giant beast?’

  He had not.

  Fabrigas had returned to the camp and now strode around behind the small fire, swimming and vanishing in the smoke and heat, oblivious, it seemed, to the blinking, uncomprehending eyes of his friends.

  ‘You said you had good news!’ said Miss Fritzacopple. ‘How is being stuck inside a beast with no way to escape in any way good news?!’

  ‘Well, the good news is that the Ubuntu have had a meeting. They have no chief, as such. But in this tribe everyone believes themselves to be the chief, and no one contradicts them. Isn’t that wonderful?’ No one said anything. ‘But they decide everything by meeting, and they have decided that we can stay for as long as we like. So isn’t that good news?!’

  *

  They had a service that night to remember the bosun. They gathered near the swamps to float lanterns. The captain said a few words. He said that their bosun was a courageous sailor, and a fearless human being. He said this even though he knew, from years spent in his company, that he was none of those things. The bosun was not brave, courageous or fearless.

  The bosun, you may not have realised, was afraid. Deeply, deeply afraid in a way that you or I could not imagine. Now, you might think it strange that a man so afraid would choose to travel on ships which venture to the most dangerous parts, but the bosun did not think it was strange at all.

  ‘The best way to deal with death is to keep him right beside you, where you can see him.’ That was what the bosun used to say.

  It is worth briefly describing the life of Jacob Quickhatch. He was born in an insignificant mountain town to a watchmaker and a schoolmistress. He was the largest baby anyone had ever seen: even the local farmers were impressed. They came from all around to measure him. He nearly ended his mother on his way into the world – for which she forgave him – and he grew a foot every year for his first six years. But despite his size Jacob had been a terrified child. His mother recalled him crying at the sound of a cricket on his sill. No grown-up could speak to him without him breaking into tears and running to bury his face in his mother’s skirts. His father had had the idea – if you could call it an idea – to scare the fright right out of his bones. He prepared a set of wooden boards with scary demon faces on them. He rigged them with bed springs so that they leaped from the floor when the boy passed, and hung leering and bobbing before his hysterical face. The boy couldn’t open a cupboard door or use an outhouse without meeting one of those grimacing faces. As a consequence he went to the privy half as often, but twice as much, if you get my meaning. The boy did not lose his fear of scary faces, but he did develop three brand-new fears: bed springs, boards, privies.

  But Jacob was a clever child who did his family proud. By eight he’d taught his mother to read the Holy Books, and she was most happy. His father complained of rats in his workshop, so his son made snares and trapped them. Trapped all the rats. His father was so happy he made him a watch; he poured all his soul into making the finest watch he could for his only son. Jacob would make snares to catch the rabbits who ate their vegetables. He would bring them home for his father. ‘Son! Are you not afraid?’

  ‘No, Father, they are small.’

  ‘Good boy!’

  But when his father put a rabbit upon the butcher’s block his son would cry out, ‘Father, no!’ His father had to release them all.

  But the boy could make a snare in under eight seconds, and that was something.

  Around the boy’s tenth birthday, a local priest, a close friend of his mother, began to teach him the finer points of scripture. At twelve he made the decision to join the seminary. He travelled to the Black Mountains and spent four blissful years in peace and quiet, learning all about the universe he lived in. The brothers called him ‘Gentle Giant’. One afternoon he and the other brothers were picking strawberries in the fields when they heard cries and saw a large wolf carrying a baby off into the forest. Without thinking, Jacob ran after it, covering the ground with astonishing speed and cornering the beast in a rocky crevice. The wolf dropped the child and leaped for Jacob. There was a furious battle. The two rolled around the glade, both barking and snarling, but when Jacob got to his feet again he had the wolf limp by the throat. Later, when asked by a senior brother to recall the experience, Jacob could not remember a thing, and when witnesses described to him what had happened the boy began to wail.

  The baby was fine.

  Word of Jacob’s deed spread through the country and one day he got a visit from two papal guardsmen. The guardsmen are awful men: large, brutish, the worst kind of bullies. They told Jacob that because of his bravery he was to be enlisted as a guard in the Fleet of the Seven Churches (as it was called then). Jacob was distraught. He loved life in the monastery. He didn’t want to go into space. He pleaded with the monsignor to send the men away, but there was nothing that could be done. ‘If I defy a papal order, I’ll be killed,’ he said.

  And so Jacob was led away and soon found himself in a galley with a hundred other recruits. It wasn’t as bad as he’d first imagined. For most of the time they just floated around, waiting for trouble that never arrived. He got to see deep space, and that pleased him. He thought the stars and galaxies from a distance astonishingly beautiful. His faith, if anything, deepened and richened. Then one day he was told to prepare for battle, and he felt the blood stop under his skin. ‘I’ll surely die today,’ he thought.

  And he said that same thing every day of his life. Every morning when he woke in the darkness on one of the Pope’s great ships. He said it when he was forced to embark on his first crusade. He said it on the day he came to escape the Pope’s clutches, and on the day he got his first job aboard a freighter ship, and on the day he first looked into Lambestyo’s eyes he said: ‘I will certainly die today.’

  He’d even said it the previous morning, when he woke to learn that his captain and the old man had been taken prisoner and were to be executed. And on that day he was right.

  The bosun knew, as you and I perhaps do not, that there is a big difference between being afraid, and being a coward, between feeling horror creeping up your legs and ordering those legs to run. An attentive observer might have heard Jacob Quickhatch whisper as he stood on the deck of the Necronaut and heard his captain speak of certain death; and she might have observed a faint wobble in his knees as he turned to face the ravenous plants in the tunnels on Bespophus; and she might have even heard him say a faint ‘Oh, Mummy’ when the horde of death-crabs had descended. And even when he threw himself into the mouth of the idol, as he blinked within the ashy darkness and saw two great red eyes, each as big as portholes, he had not made his last words ‘Don’t hurt us, please’, as he had desperately wanted to. He had said, in a voice that made even the fearsome creature take one small step back: ‘These children are not your meal to take!’

  And he was right.

  ‘Our actions tell our story,’ said Lambestyo, ‘and when we die we leave our bootprints for everyone to see: bootprints that run towards, or away, from people less fortunate than us.’

  The Ubuntu, sensing their unspeakable sorrow, abandoned their own moon-party and gathered to sing. Their song was low and mournful, part hymn, part wail, and it rose and died like a wave.

  *

  Lulabelle said goodbye to Roberto at the edge of the camp. Not to his person, because his person had vanished (along with the Necronaut), but to a vague picture she’d drawn in the dust. She couldn’t explain to him, obviously, or to anyone there, her reasons for returning to her people, that they too woul
d be mourning, and looking for a way to rebuild their broken lives – now that the strange tyranny of the master was over. She might have explained how her mother and sisters were probably already mourning her, thinking she was lost, and that she missed them. She couldn’t explain any of that, so she simply pressed the coin Roberto had given her into Lenore’s dirty palm, and walked off into the darkness.

  Lenore sat for a long time, sifting through some of the more confusing questions a young and green girl can have. Why life was so painful and confusing, and why she even cared about a stupid boy. It was all stupid. Boys are stupid.

  Soon, Fabrigas came and sat next to her and for a while they rested in silence, listening to the warm beat of the drums and gazing into the starless wall of black whose only light came from the portal which hung high above them, and which resembled, at least from a distance, a moon.

  ‘I hates him,’ said the girl.

  ‘They’ll come back to us,’ said the old man.

  ‘I hopes so,’ said the girl.

  SKELETON YARD

  ‘There is one more thing I need to do before we leave,’ announced Fabrigas the next morning.

  ‘Do?’ said Lenore.

  ‘Leave?’ said Miss Fritzacopple.

  ‘Yes. It’s time for us to leave,’ said Fabrigas. ‘I do not know how. I do not know to where. And I still don’t know exactly for what reason. But I think you’ll all agree that anywhere in the universe is better than inside this beast.’

  ‘And what is the “one more thing” you need to do?’ said Fritzacopple.

  ‘I’ll come to that.’

  The Ubuntu were surprised to learn that their guests wanted to leave. It turned out that they knew a lot of important things about the land they lived in. They knew, for example, that the moon whose fullness they were currently celebrating in a week of feasting and singing wasn’t really a moon. They called it ‘the hole of fog and air’, and they also knew that it was a portal to another world, because they’d been up to inspect it. ‘It seems these people are fine navigators,’ said Fabrigas, as he squinted at the illustrations the Ubuntu had carved for him in the dirt, ‘and they have confirmed my theories about what this world really is. They say that travelling in these parts is challenging. They say that everything a person could want is right here: food, drink, man–bear wrestling. We may not have translated that last one right,’ said Fabrigas. And it was true. It turned out that the Ubuntu are descendants of a tribe of great navigators. Their ancestors had been to every corner of their cornerless galaxy. But a few generations ago this tribe stopped their roamings of a sudden. This generation had been up to the great hole, peered out, and realised that they didn’t even recognise the stars they saw. It was very strange. They also discovered that they were inside the belly of a giant beast. In the end they decided that leaving the beast to explore a whole new universe would be a lot of trouble, and that they had everything they needed right here. It was a dark, quiet and bountiful world. The problem was that it had turned out to be a bit more busy than they anticipated. Strangers were frequently crashing here, starting fights, forming flesh-eating cults, engineering horrible beasts and generally disturbing the peace.

  ‘So how do we get to this portal?’ said the captain. He had calmed down now that he was back in camp and receiving some of the Ubuntu’s hospitality (and frankly, hospitality doesn’t come much better).

  ‘Well, that is the question. We could always go back and steal the Prince Albert from the cannibals. It is a fine ship,’ said Fabrigas. But that idea was quickly thrown out. Whatever state you were in, it was wrong to steal another tribe’s ship.

  So Fabrigas, through Carrofax, asked the nearest chief if he had any ideas, and he was extremely surprised when the chief replied, ‘Oh, we have spaceships.’

  *

  Ships. Ships upon ships upon ships. The guts of ships strewn on the ground, rusting skeletons, groaning bulks. There is a word for this in Ubuntu which roughly translates as ‘skeleton yard’. When the Ubuntu arrived, this is where they dumped their old ships, and whenever a strange ship crashed here the Ubuntu would help the injured, bury the dead, and drag the broken vessels here. There were cargo ships, still with their containers of toys and tinned brains. That’s what I said, tinned brains. There were racing ships, some still with a pair of skeleton hands wrapped desperately around the wheel. There were prison ships, pleasure ships and pirate vessels. ‘Our botanist found a haunted saucer ship. Why wasn’t that dragged here?’ Fabrigas wondered. Carrofax replied: ‘They’re too scared to go near it.’

  And that was exactly the ‘one more thing’ the old man had to do. ‘To perform this duty I’ll need your assistance,’ he said to Lenore.

  ‘Oh no, no, no. I don’t want to there go back!’

  ‘You can’t possibly expect this child to go into the marshes again,’ said the botanist.

  ‘I guarantee no harm will come to her,’ said the old man.

  ‘And what exactly are you going to do there?’ said Fritzacopple.

  ‘We’ve had help from a stranger, and now we must return her favours. We are going to perform an exorcism.’

  THE EXORCIST

  This man, the hero of our story, was a man of science, a child of his universe(s). He did not believe in magic, or astrology, or ghosts, or poltergeists, or any supernatural phenomena that he was not able to see and test for himself. Yes, he had a phantom butler, but life is filled with contradictions. It is sometimes possible for a man or woman of science to observe the effect of the supernatural, and to apply to it his or her own principles.

  That’s how Lenore found herself standing in the centre of the familiar dead clearing, inside a set of symbols burned on the ground with petroleum distillate, surrounded by a circle of fine brass reeds pressed into the mud, while Fabrigas stood to one side with a small harp. The harp was brass with copper strings and, like many of the artefacts he kept hidden within his cloak, it was very, very old.

  ‘And why are we here again?’ said Lenore.

  ‘I made a promise to one of these phantoms that I would free her and her family from this place.’

  ‘Oh. And how does that involve me?’

  ‘You seem to be a fine conduit for trans-temporal vibrations. Or, as many people crassly call them: ghosts.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It is confounding the kind of junk which can collect over the years,’ the old man said as he placed more of the brass reeds around the edge of the circle. ‘This whole world would have been clean and fresh once. Then, a stray seed here, a lost spaceship there. Before you know it, jungles, peoples, the walking dead!’

  ‘The walking deads?’ The green-skinned girl glowed so brightly tonight that she seemed not to be part of this or any familiar world. She was from elsewhere, of elsewhere, belonging nowhere. ‘I think you mentioned that they are not ghosts,’ she said.

  ‘They are not. They are echoes in the valleys of perception, they are counter-moving waves in the quantum seas, and they come as much from within our brains as without. Everything we perceive is created by our minds. Our minds collect this phantom noise and turn it into shapes we can understand, just as we see familiar objects in clouds. And then we take it one step further: we build stories around them. We call them ghosts because we like to think our loved ones haven’t vanished for ever, you see?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It really is amazing where life can spring up, and how hard it is to vanquish it, even after death. But we must, or it hangs around and causes untold damage.’

  Lenore gave a sharp yelp.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Our guests are arrived.’ One of them had whispered right in her ear.

  ‘You again,’ it said. ‘Don’t you know you aren’t welcome here?’

  ‘They are saying that please we aren’t welcomed here!’

  ‘That’s splendid, please keep them talking. We need the whole family to arrive.’

  ‘You cannot see them? Miss Lady could see them.’


  ‘I cannot, but they may not materialise until they feel under threat. Keep conversing with them.’

  ‘So … how are you all? Everything is … well?’

  Lenore heard a hissing from the darkness.

  Fabrigas had finished setting up an array of amplifying speakers made from parts he had salvaged from the skeleton yard, and he had wired them up to his small harp. It looked as if he was about to perform a recital.

  ‘Who is that man? We don’t like him.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about he,’ said Lenore. ‘He is a crazy old thing.’

  ‘The strange thing about the so-called spirit world is that it really is just a wave, after a fashion,’ said the crazy old thing as he finished wiring his instrument. ‘And every wave can be cancelled by another wave. Are they all present?’

  ‘No. Still some to arrive.’

  ‘I’m here,’ said a girl’s voice. ‘I’m Judy.’

  ‘Please to meets you, Judy.’

  ‘Oh! You’re wearing Gloria around your neck. I was wondering where she went.’

  ‘Gloria?’

  ‘My starfish. We’ve been lost here for so long. Though not as long as Gloria. She will be looking forward to travelling again.’

  ‘Oh, Judy, your head is so full of strange ideas,’ said a young man’s voice, and now more voices entered, a cast of phantom players, their words overlapping and colliding like waves in a pool. ‘Children, I told you not to play with strangers.’

  ‘Oh, darling, this place is all strangers. Strangers upon strangers.’

  ‘I want to take the rover out, I’m bored.’

  ‘I’m bored too, can we get a monkey?’

  ‘We don’t want you here.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘We don’t like you.’

  ‘We don’t like you at all, you frighten my children.’

  ‘These voices are making my head hurt!’

  ‘That’s good, we are nearly set!’ Fabrigas was hooking up his amplification array to a large ship’s battery. Then he struck a chord on his electrified harp and suddenly the whole clearing was lit by sound. They heard it far off in the camp; the Ubuntu looked at each other and grinned.