When I woke it was dusk, and our fire had burned low, the mound of grey ash delicately embroidered with scarlet threads. As I tried to rub some feeling back into my legs, I looked up and saw a full moon balanced on the ridge above me, a moon so huge that I imagined for a moment that both the land and all the life in it had shrunk. The colour, too, astounded me. A lavish, creamy pale-gold, it had the gleam of antique satin or newly minted coin. Glancing round me, I saw that people were rising to their feet as if they had just received a signal.
I watched them move towards the rectangle of earth. Arranging themselves around the edge, they started taking off their clothes. I had no choice but to join them and do the same. Once undressed, we stepped out on to mud that had a particular coldness of its own – far colder, somehow, than the grass, far colder even than the air. Our flesh gave off the pale, almost transparent glimmer of a puddle when it freezes. The people nearest me were scooping up the mud and plastering their bodies with it, their faces too. As I bent down, a light seemed to flare inside my head, and I saw a lorry reversing towards a wide, deep trench. Its tail-lights glowed, then faded. Glowed again. Then the back end lifted on hydraulic rods, and the load began to spill … All this I received in a split-second, then it went dark again, and there was only my bare arm reaching out and the mud below, and the hairs rose on my skin, but not with cold.
I started covering myself, then stopped, aware of a sound coming from the people gathered round me. They were calling out, not to each other, but to some larger thing, or even to the void, perhaps, their voices tentative, enquiring. Slowly the volume grew, the voices becoming less distinctly individual, less obviously human. I thought of a swarm of bees, a reverberation that was partly music, partly noise, and I found that I had been caught up in it and that my voice had merged with theirs. I was ridding myself of burdens I had been carrying for years – the collusion, the deceit, the lies I had told to others, and to myself as well; everything was being dumped on this rectangle of ground, and I could leave it here, I could leave the whole lot here. The sound made earth and air vibrate, and that was all we were just then, a single voice raised against the elements, a resonance, a kind of harmony.
When I woke the next morning, I didn’t know what to believe. Were the images I had seen the product of my own fevered imagination? Or could it be that I was beginning to receive the pictures that the others were receiving? Was I gradually gaining access to their peculiar, unspoken language? If my vision of the night before could be relied upon, it looked as if White People had been slaughtered in their hundreds and then buried here. I hadn’t actually seen the bodies tumbling out of the truck, but somehow I knew that that was what had taken place. We were camped on the edge of a mass grave. In covering themselves with mud, the White People had been remembering their dead, and the chilling, unearthly music had been both requiem and homage. If that was true, they were more conscious of the past than people said.
Another possibility occurred to me. Though I had been living among the White People, I hadn’t actually become one, and that had given me the license to create my own mythical version of their lot, which wasn’t something they were necessarily capable of doing themselves. After all, if my own feeling of release was anything to go by, then the removal of their white clothes and the smearing of themselves with mud might simply have been their way of ridding themselves of the abuses to which they had been exposed, a ritual that enabled them to go on living as they did – from hand to mouth, from pillar to post. When the singing came to an end, we had walked down to a brook that ran between two banks of heather. Stepping into the ice-cold water, we had washed off the mud, then put our cloaks and boots back on, and I remembered how clean I had felt, how light, how free.
As I packed up our few remaining provisions and scattered the last embers of the fire, I decided that it didn’t much matter where the truth lay. They could have been reliving the agony of those who’d gone before or shedding pain they had themselves endured. The ritual lent itself to a number of interpretations. In the end it seemed likely that it was part of a process of purification and renewal. It was also part of their own unique culture, which was relentless in what it required of them. To suffer. To continue.
Just as they didn’t greet one another, so the White People didn’t say goodbye. There was no leave-taking, not even so much as a backwards glance, only a gradual dispersal, a miniature diaspora. Along with Ob, Neg, and Lum, I joined a group of about twenty others, setting off in a north-westerly direction that would bring us, sooner or later, to the sea. Lying a few miles offshore were several holy islands, most of which belonged to the phlegmatics. Some distance further north, the border with the Green Quarter came curving round to meet the coast. I wondered which of these destinations the group had in mind.
The land quickly became harder to negotiate, the fells much higher and topped with splintered crags, the woods thornier, more dense. Though deserted, the moors had had their dangers, but the country we entered that day felt all the more hazardous for being populated. As we passed through a village during the afternoon we were pelted with manure and bits of coal by a horde of vicious, foul-mouthed children, and then a bucket of slops was tipped from an upstairs window. We suffered cuts and bruises, nothing more serious than that, but I still thought we should be circling places like these, especially since the terrain now offered so many opportunities for concealment – or else we should hurry through on light feet, while everybody slept. I had no say in the matter, though. There didn’t seem to be any decision-making as such. There was only a momentum, which was neither questioned nor explained.
Some miles beyond the village, the path we were following began to loop back on itself as it coiled down into a gorge. Far below, I heard the breathy race of water. Growing sideways out of walls of rock were trees whose branches had the look of flayed limbs, the flesh stripped away, the sinews and tendons all exposed. From somewhere to the south came a muffled roll of thunder. On reaching the floor of the valley, we crossed a stretch of spongy turf to the edge of a river, its waters running thin and green across great beds of pale stones. I watched as my companions settled on the ground. Some dozed off almost immediately. It was strange how their expressions never altered, their faces as blank when conscious as they were in repose. Lum sat on a bank below me, studying the crooked gash on the front of her calf. The wound was black with dried blood, but I knew it to be free of infection; I had cleaned it myself only a day or two before. We exchanged a glance. When I looked into her eyes I was aware of neither emotion nor intelligence. My gaze could find no purchase. Instead, it travelled on into a kind of dizzying infinity.
I lay on my side, facing the river. The cold seeped up into my hip. I turned over, on to my back. These days I could sleep almost anywhere; I could even sleep if I was shivering. Once it was dark, Lum came and lowered herself on to me. Opening my underpants, she coaxed me into her. She began to move up and down, slowly at first, then faster, more rhythmically, her hands spread on my chest, her teeth clamped on her bottom lip. Afterwards she fell asleep beside me. Her breath smelled of onions and sour milk. Though I was tired, the rush of water kept me awake, and when we struck camp several hours later I didn’t feel as if I had slept at all.
It seemed we had chosen to ignore the one road that led through the region, and for once I approved: we were in the heart of the Wanings, and it paid to be cautious. Still, there were repercussions. One of our number was attacked by a feral cat, which tore at his throat and hands. We bound his lacerated flesh as best we could, with strips of cloth and crushed dock leaves. Later, we found our way blocked by a rock-fall, and we were forced to retrace our steps. With its steep climbs and its sheer drops, the land itself appeared to be against us. The injured man wouldn’t stop whimpering. A few more miles of this, I kept telling myself. Just a few more miles.
Towards dawn we filed down a farm track into a clearing. I saw no dwelling of any kind, only a barn and a wrecked white car. The wheels had been removed, and
the sockets that once held its headlights were empty. I walked over to where Ob stood. He was staring at the barn door. A rat had been nailed to the wood in a manner that made me think of crucifixion. I heard a steady crashing noise behind me and turned quickly, thinking people were coming through the undergrowth, but it was just the rain. A few of us took refuge in the barn. There was nothing much inside, only straw bales piled against one wall and some broken tools. The rain drew a heavy curtain over the doorway. I made a bed out of several old sacks and tried to sleep. The world beyond the barn was murky, indistinct.
Only seconds later, it seemed, I woke to see men standing in the entrance. Shotguns lounged in the crooks of their elbows. Their hat-brims dripped. Without saying a word, they hoisted their rifles and fired over our heads, and the air filled with sawdust, feathers and straw. I managed to roll sideways and duck through a gap in the wall where a board had come loose. Outside, I found Neg and Ob. As the three of us plunged back into the rain-soaked trees, Lum rose up out of the bracken where she’d been hiding. We moved deeper into the woods. All sounds came to me through a loud, insistent buzzing. It was hours before I could hear properly.
We didn’t sleep again that day. Though we were able to link up with some other members of our group, there were, ominously, fewer of us than before. For the first time I sensed a loss of heart. Our supplies were running short. Every time our clothes dried on us, the clouds would open, drenching us in seconds. We could find neither food nor shelter. We continued to move in a north-westerly direction, but there was a drifting quality about our progress that did nothing to reassure me.
In the afternoon the clouds thinned to the west, and the sun slanted through at a low angle, its white light laying the landscape bare. The rest of the sky hung above us, a weighty, marbled grey. It seemed likely that the rain would sweep down again at any moment. As we rounded a bend, with farm buildings on our left and dark woods bristling to our right, a kind of stockade showed about half a mile ahead, the top as jagged as newspaper torn against the grain. What could it be for? Why block a thoroughfare like that? Drawing closer, I lifted a hand to shade my eyes. In the pale glare of the sun the structure stirred and shifted, and now, at last, I could see what it was, not a stockade at all, not a barrier, but a line of people stretched across the road. A cry went up. I turned around. Neg stood motionless, his eyes pinned open, his skin congealed. The sound he was making was like no sound I had ever heard before, no consonants this time, just a note, soft and yet high-pitched, monotonous, and I was suddenly aware of my spine, the entire length of it, like something hard and cold inserted into me against my will.
I started running. Then we were all running, fifteen or twenty of us, our cloaks flapping round our legs. The road offered no hiding place, no protection. We made for the woods instead. A grass track led off to the right, trees closing overhead. We stumbled, fell. We scrambled to our feet. We were ungainly, almost comical, like a flock of birds that has forgotten how to fly.
Turning, I saw Neg behind me. His mouth gaped open, a black hole ringed by mangled gums and stumps. He had been beaten once before, somewhere down south. I knew that now. They had threaded his teeth into a necklace and hung it, bleeding, round his neck. His own teeth. They’d made earrings too. He had showed them to me in a picture, flashed from his head into mine. I watched him run. He seemed to be leaning backwards, both hands clawing at the air as if it were in his way. Beneath his clothes, his breasts and belly hurled themselves about. He was carrying too much fat. One look at him, and you knew he was done for.
They’d been waiting for us. Dusk hadn’t fallen yet, and us in our white cloaks. A cruel colour, white. No mercy in it. We had passed through a village only minutes earlier, its doors and windows shut. Eyes to keyholes, though. Curtains twitching. Then a crowd of figures looming, the winter sun behind them. Men mostly, though I saw women too. And children. Heads shaved on account of lice. Or was it the custom in these parts, to shave the heads of children? They must have been told of our approach. They had weapons. The kind of things you end up with when you don’t have too much time. A bicycle chain, a tin of paraffin. A scythe.
Once, I could have reasoned with them, perhaps. I had the words back then, the charm. Not any more. Only noises issued from me now. I could do a cow in labour, rain on leaves. I could do a foot sinking into a bog. None of that would be much use. But even if I’d talked fluently, I doubt they would have listened. They’d worked themselves up to something, and they weren’t about to be denied.
I looked for Neg again. He’d fallen back. I heard him calling me – Gsh? Gsh! – but I faced forwards and ran faster. Trees jumped out at me. Trunks moist and black as if they had risen from a swamp, roots like tentacles. My breath burned in my throat. Soon, please God, it would be dark.
In my veins my blood was chasing its own tail.
A shriek came from somewhere, and I turned. They had him now. I heard them laughing as they ripped his clothes with vicious downward movements. In the half-light his naked body had the texture of a mushroom. The delicate, creamy underside – the stalk. They bound his wrists behind him with fencing wire, his elbows too, then they stood back. His eyes were closed, and his feet stamped up and down in the mud, but in slow-motion, almost tenderly, as though he was trampling ripe grapes. Making wine. They unleashed one of their hunting dogs, a blunt-looking thing, all jaws and shoulders. It tore at his genitals, and then, when he pivoted in agony, his buttocks, then his genitals again.
It’s hard to run with your hands over your ears.
Was I complacent once? Was I too full of myself? I don’t know. I don’t remember. If I was, I regret it. I take it all back.
I denounce myself.
One of our number had been set on fire. No, more than one. Deep in the woods, white birds were sprouting bright-orange crests and wing-feathers.
On I went, the spit thick in my mouth. Trees jolted and staggered as ships’ masts do in a storm. The earth heaved, threatening to unburden itself of all its darkest mysteries. Any moment it would vomit blood-stained treasure, murder weapons, human bones. It was just me running, though. Just me running. The world stood still like someone frightened or amazed.
Over to my left I saw a woman go down, two men in hunting clothes on top of her, their mouths split open, red and wet and grinning. You’d think somebody had taken an axe to their faces. One of the men had pulled the woman’s head back by the hair, as if she were a horse and her hair the reins. Her throat stretched tight against the air, the crown of her head almost touching her shoulderblades. Was that Lum? I couldn’t tell. In any case, I didn’t want to see what followed. It would be worse than I could possibly imagine. There were more of my companions among the trees, most of them with dark figures fastened to their heels or curved against their backs. We were trying to outrun our shadows.
I’m not sure how I came to lose my balance. In taking my eye off the path for a moment, I missed my footing, perhaps. Then I was rolling and sliding down a steep bank that was slippery with mud, wet leaves and ivy. Down I tumbled, branches whipping at my face and arms. A tree brushed one of my legs aside. I even turned a somersault, the sky whirling like the skirts of a woman doing some old-fashioned dance. At last I reached the bottom. I lay on my back next to a track, my heart about to spring from between my ribs, the breath crushed out of me. I stared at the bare branches laid out peacefully against the clouds. All the cries came from high above me now. I got to my feet. My leg hurt, but not too much. I didn’t think I’d broken anything. On the other side of the track were more trees, then a river, and in the wide green field beyond I saw a building that had the look of a ruined church or priory. As I stood there, uncertain what to do, the sky appeared to shift and then disintegrate. Out of a heavy charcoal greyness, something incongruously light and soft began to fall.
Snow.
It was as though bits of us were falling through the air. Bits of who we were. A snowflake landed on my sleeve and promptly vanished. If the snow settled, I
would vanish too. A disappearing trick. This was more luck than I could ever have expected. Just then, though, I heard a shout. Several figures had paused on the ridge above me, motionless and wizened. They were staring at me through the snow, one in a cap with ear-flaps, one in fatigues. A third was looking back over his shoulder, his arm raised, beckoning. I hurried across the track, then climbed down to the river’s edge, its water the colour of beer, its flow interrupted here and there by smooth round boulders. Weeds stretched full-length beneath the surface like a drowned girl’s hair. I began to splash through the shallow water, my boots skidding on the smaller stones. I was alone, I realised, alone for the first time in I didn’t know how long. I felt a flicker of something against my stomach walls.
On the far side, hoof-prints showed in the mud. Sheep, I thought. Or deer. This was where they’d come to drink. A bank rose in front of me, red earth bound in roots. Above it, outlined against the sky, I saw a battlement. I climbed the bank and found myself in the lower reaches of a field. There was no cover here at all. I glanced over my shoulder. Two men were scrambling down the slope towards me, cursing as their feet caught in the brambles. One had a pitch-fork and a coil of rope. The other was carrying a pair of shears. At least they didn’t have a dog. I couldn’t explain the calm that welled up in me just then. Was it the snow, which was falling still more thickly now, flakes the size of oak leaves sticking to my cloak? Or did I have an inkling of what was about to happen?
As I set off across the field, a girl jumped out in front of me. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. I let out a cry. She put a hand over my mouth, then placed one finger upright against her own. Her face was covered with freckles. I’d never seen so many. She gave me a queer blurred smile.
‘This way,’ she whispered. ‘Quick.’
She wasn’t one of them. She was somebody else.
Divided Kingdom Page 33
