I attended the hunting party. I was given a horse that I was unable to ride. The sheriff, whose name was Yestyy, came up to me and handed me a pistol, telling me to “shoot Wite at first glance.” Wite was described to me, very badly as I know now, and a number of different gestures and spoken signals were discussed. Yestyy assigned himself to me as my partner, and in pairs we entered the forest, following a number of chasers on foot with their bloodhounds, and led between the trees by the Prince.
Whenever I picture Wite to myself, I picture him running in the cold humid air between the trees. We caught sight of him time and again, always in front of us, sometimes off to one side and then almost immediately he would be off to the other side. I could make him out only as an obscure patch moving in and out of view in the distance. There was no place he did not seem to be. He appeared and disappeared. I saw him only intermittently, but despite this, I could see very clearly that he was somehow on fire. He was enveloped in fire. A transparent flame played about his body from head to foot, and his body seemed to emit, even in complete silence, as I discovered later, a thunderous, inaudible roar that made the air shudder rigidly as he passed through it. At one point, he appeared close by. He jumped from a high bank overhanging a dry riverbed, and landed on his feet with a deafening report, and the sand around his feet flew back in all directions. Wite merely straightened himself and vanished into the trees again. The men pursued him, and I followed. They were frightened, and eager, and carried rifles which they held low to the ground. We were all going faster every moment. At this point we had fanned out in a long line several riders deep. The dogs, and the birds in the trees, together with the hooves of the horses and the random shot, were all I could hear—except that at times I would hear Wite scream from far ahead, this from the great effort he was making. Wite’s screams were brittle and metallic, and they hung motionless in the air, they hung motionless in the air like hanged men. I was terrified, but unable to control my horse, and it followed the others. We were so deep in the woods that on all sides there were nothing but trees, very old, very black, and their boughs closed out the sun, whose light was gray. I only wanted to escape. Wite was all around us, he seemed to flash in and out among the horses, and I saw his pale ghostly face, glaring, furious, flashing past ahead of me in the shadows of the trees. Wind flooded over me and I saw it brought with it the flavor of something invisible that was coming, and then I heard men and horses screaming ahead of me, and dogs howling, my horse jerked back as if he’d been shot and I was nearly knocked from my saddle, leaving me hanging from its side, and I jumped down. My horse staggered back past me. I was terrified and I went to hide myself behind a tree. Riderless horses fled by me, the whites of their eyes showing on all sides and their mouths stretched open and frothing, and the dogs raced between the horses. The screams had already stopped, but for just a moment I had heard a sound of pounding and thumping, and the ground had shook beneath my feet. I buried my head in my hands and heard nothing but shrieking birds and more screaming from all sides.
I found myself at the edge of a small clearing, hiding by a tree. A number of the men who had ridden out ahead of me were lying dead on all sides. They had been smashed to pieces against boulders and trees. Yestyy was there, mortally wounded. He had been crushed; he was covered with blood. I looked up, and Wite was standing in the clearing, his profile turned to me, glaring now at Prince Eskellde, who was standing, unhurt, a dozen paces from him. The Prince was petrified. I watched Wite raise his hands, and I saw the flame burst out all over him. The Prince was seized up, all his muscles went rigid, and his eyes were growing wide. As I watched, his face became unrecognizable, and disappeared, it became nothing but features. Wite’s face was also disappearing, becoming strange and transfigured, as if he was receiving a revelation. Yestyy called to me as he died, in a voice thick with blood, pointing weakly at the pistol I held in my hand. “Shoot him! He is distracted!”
“Shoot him!”
I did not shoot.
Chapter Three
I was the only survivor. I survived because I had put the pistol in my coat pocket and fetched my horse for Wite. I had watched him tear Prince Eskellde’s soul from his body, and snuff it out like spitting on a spark. He then devoured the Prince’s dead soul, which he had killed. It was only after he had finished devouring the Prince’s dead soul that his face resembled itself again. His face shone with sublime ruthlessness; he was wan and exhausted from the chase, but his obvious frailty only made the strength his will shine more forcefully. Looking at him, I was afraid he would suddenly fly apart under the pressure of his own will. The prospect of Wite flying apart terrified me; it’s the most terrifying thing in the world to watch someone disintegrate in front of you. Someone collapses in the street, an epileptic, and right before your eyes you see his face dissolve, and you are suddenly looking at someone who isn’t anyone in particular, who is suddenly no more human than a statue or a cadaver. No one who hasn’t seen such a thing with their own eyes can imagine what a shock it is, how a shock like that can ruin you. Only a moment before I had seen the Prince’s face ebb out of sight, and become inhuman, as Wite drew his soul out. In the same moment I had seen Wite’s face convulse and become inhuman. But I had not been paralyzed, Yestyy had distracted me with his words. I chose not to shoot.
I put the gun away, and I turned to fetch my horse for Wite. I was not afraid that he would kill me, not afraid to turn my back on him to get my horse, which was standing nearby, watching us both. I led it into the clearing, and it followed passively. I remember thinking what a good horse it was, and that we felt alike then as we re-entered the clearing. Wite watched me approach, and I asked him if he wanted my horse. He had not moved. He stood still in the clearing, and the body of Prince Eskellde was lying in front of him. Suddenly, he said, “No, I want the Prince’s horse,” and went off to find it. He called over his shoulder, “You can keep yours.”
I saw him mount the Prince’s horse. Prince Eskellde’s horse allowed him to mount, and turned with him toward the foothills. I mounted my own horse and followed him—he rode awkwardly and it was not difficult to catch up and ride with him.
What a lot of nonsense I’m writing! You can’t understand why I didn’t shoot! I wrote that I chose not to shoot—a stupid, irresponsible thing to say! I watched him turn to Prince Eskellde and rip his soul out, extinguish it, and devour it. He was demonic—don’t look to me for explanations, I can only say that he was demonic, he was filled with demonic ruthlessness, and I could not shoot him. Even exhausted, as he was, he was demonic, he was supernaturally strong and overflowing with this strength—it was a miracle, and no one who has never seen a miracle can understand what it means to see one. It means that something impossible has happened. Anyone could say that a miracle is something impossible, but they say it thoughtlessly, mindlessly, because most people have such weak imaginations they couldn’t possibly understand what they’re saying when they say that a miracle is something impossible. Ask anyone what that means, what it means to see a miracle, and they will say that it’s something impossible, but they mean that a miracle is something formerly believed to be impossible that turns out not to be, not to be impossible, in other words, but possible after all. If this were really true, then miracles would be the most ordinary things in the world, the most uninspiring things in the world, and what can one expect from people who have never been anything but ordinary and uninspired.
I have seen a miracle—I saw something that was impossible. This happened and I saw it with my own eyes—I saw Wite there in the clearing, standing in a sheet of flame, and I saw him devour the Prince’s soul with strength showering out of him, and this wasn’t what was impossible, I knew such things were possible, though I had never thought for an instant that I would ever witness such things. Wite was impossible. Wite was a miracle. I did not shoot him then because I worshipped him then. From the start, I was somehow in awe of him, to think what he had done, but when I saw him with my own eyes, in the clearin
g, I worshipped him. I put away my gun and offered him my horse, and it was entirely natural. Inconceivable that I should then turn my back to him and fetch him my horse, that I should hear him speak normally to me, and that I should ride along with him as he fled toward his own country; inconceivable that he should have a country, that he could speak normally with anyone after what he had done, that anyone who had been a child, who had had parents and a hometown, that anyone human could have done what he did, and not simply that, not simply doing it, but being what he was. Now do you understand, do you have any idea at all? How could you?
He did everything I described, he was everything I have said he was, and he was like a divine being. I rode alongside him and talked with him, ate with him, when he ate, slept near him, when he slept, I held his head when he had to vomit, as he often did, and at the same time I worshipped him. So, for the duration of our time together, I was impossible. How could I speak to him normally, after seeing what he was? I can’t think how. I can’t understand myself with him any more than I could understand him. It would be more correct to say that I have always been impossible, and the same was true for Wite, but for him that meant strength, because he was selfish—he was inconceivably, impossibly selfish; there is nothing anyone could compare his selfishness to, there is no conceiving this selfishness in ordinary terms; but for me it meant impotence, because I was not selfish, not in any way, because I practically had no self at all.
I remember, Wite and I rode the rest of the day together and well into the night, well after dark. He seemed to have no need for light, and he urged his horse on through the forest, which was of course absolutely black—nothing at all was visible. We were passing through rough, invisible terrain, blind, seeing only the few objects nearest us as patches of denser darkness against the darkness. We stopped when Wite fell from his saddle. At first I did not realize he had fallen—I was nearly collapsing myself, nodding and tilting nearly from the saddle, jerking myself awake again only to peer in confusion at the featureless blackness ahead. I knew Wite was near, because I could hear his horse battering through the bracken. The bracken rose up as high as my stirrups, we had unthinkingly plowed into it. I was so tired I leaned forward and pressed my face against the stinking mane of my horse, I had to put all my trust in my horse and gave up directing it. A moment later I was awake again, feeling alert but unable to think, and it took me a few moments to understand that my horse’s head was bobbing, it was nuzzling Wite’s horse. I spoke without thinking, and Wite’s voice came from below and to the right. He said, “I’ve fallen.” From the tone of his voice I knew that he was exhausted and unwilling to move again. I dismounted and fell unconscious. All of our days ended like this, all of our days took shape along the same simple plan of flight until collapse. Wite was like a train, he could only go on and on, and when he spoke he had the same quality of bearing down on me, his voice would fall on my ears barring all other sounds. And in his manner, there was the same shocking shrill mineral quality of a train whistle, when he would stop and turn his profile to me in the cold humid air between the trees.
He was entirely blue and white, like the upper atmosphere where the air is thinnest and the clouds are frozen. He was as clean as the upper atmosphere, and his body and clothes smelled like ice. When we needed food I would be dispatched to the nearest city. These cities were all alike, with clean hands and faces and filthy under their clothes. Even as a so-called citizen of the capital I had slunk down the street with my head between my shoulders, and through these tiny cities I passed, beneath notice. I would bring the food back to Wite, and he, revolted at the sight of it, would insist that we ride as fast as we could manage for several hours, at least half the day, before he would consent to stop and eat. Waiting for me to return, he would get anxious; he would literally nearly lose his mind in his anxiousness to go, and he would look at me with hate, for keeping him waiting, when I came back. The strain of waiting offended his impatience, and that he should then have to wait for food, which repulsed him, was unbearable. But he also needed to exhaust himself to the point of being nearly incapacitated with pain before he would consent to eat. When Wite ate, he would cram as much food as possible into himself without chewing, or with as little chewing as he could physically manage. Wite needed practically no food at all; he was already at the point when a soul-burner becomes more dependent on spirits than on food. Wite ate in a fury, and he was ashamed that he still had to eat. I believe he could have survived on even less food than he ate, but he vomited so much of it back up again that he was forced to eat more than was necessary. He always waited until the decision to eat was taken out of his hands, until he had either to eat or collapse entirely, permanently. He hated his own entrails, and gave them as little satisfaction as he could—all spirit-eaters have something like this feeling, imagining the nerves and all the clean parts of the body pulling away in revulsion from the entrails, imagining a solid body with no separate internal parts, of wholly the same substance, and this is what I discovered when I was a boy, when my body suddenly seemed to me to be only a sort of wooden leg. Wite would say that he was armored in his own body. He expressed himself in childish ways. He would tell me that eating was an addiction, and this word “addiction” was especially hateful for him. Anything that compelled him was hateful to him. Wite said that he hated smokers, he had particularly bitter hate for smokers, for anyone who cultivated special needs and smokers above all. He called smoking the most disgusting habit of a civilization that is nothing but disgusting habits. Eventually his disgust became so acute that he, as he said, would retch every time he smelled smoke.
This was how he became a soul-burner: he loathed smoking. The smell of smoke indoors is hateful but it’s possible to escape it by going out of doors, but when one is out of doors in the so-called fresh air the smell of smoke is intolerable, and one day when a man walked by in front of him on the street and a cloud of smoke came in his direction Wite reached out in a very simple way and snatched the man’s soul from his body like a long plume of smoke, extinguishing and devouring it like he extinguished and devoured the soul of Prince Eskellde. I had never heard such a beautiful story. I was fascinated at the new idea of selfishness. I cannot say this without failing miserably, I can only say over and over again that I worshipped him because he was willing to go to the furthest possible extreme over a trifle. He was absolutely intolerant of anything, no matter how small, that offended him, and he was entirely willing to risk his life like that, to avenge the very least of infractions.
As a spy for the Alaks I conducted a thousand experiments on the people around me, and without exception I was unable to deny the childishness of these people. In every case, the parents are simply craftier versions of the children, but with the same childishness. I could not deny that I was the same. As I would walk down the street, and I seem to remember doing nothing else, I felt precisely the same as I had once felt looking up at my father as he struck me back and forth across my face. The colossal buildings that loomed on all sides had the same expression as my father’s face had had, set to crush the life out of me with nothing but brutality and indifference. I knew other people who felt this way, and who slipped out from under by becoming reckless, or ridiculous. Wite got out from under through simple, thorough, selfishness. It takes a light touch to be that selfish. I had never had a light touch, I had never had the courage to be reckless, so I was left to struggle, using every ounce of my desperation, just to keep my head above water. At every moment I was in danger of being swept underneath the ice, crushed under a glacier—I’m overdoing it, but there was forever this sense of catastrophe hanging over me, I mean the risk of strangling on my own resentment. Now I lie in this cell and feel the weight of my tombstone crushing my chest, with resignation and fear, but with no giving up. I had walked the streets of the capital as if I had my coffin around my shoulders already and I felt it bearing me down to the ground, gradually wearing me away. When I met Wite, he and I fled together through the trees like erran
t cadavers.
Once we nearly blundered into a small village, farther up in the mountains. We had to reverse ourselves for a mile or so and take a higher, more tiring route through the trees. After a time we descended past the outskirts of the town, I never learned the name. By this point Wite and I were both of us completely exhausted. Below us, in a depression between two bulges of rock, there was a cemetery. By instinct Wite and I immediately took refuge there. Cemeteries are always the only refuge. The slope was steep and the grass was slick with dew, so that we were at great pains to make our way down to shelter behind the row of mausoleums. Covered with clumps of earth and grass, I had been the first to make it to the level path between the mausoleums, and Wite was coming along behind me, moving slowly and in great pain because he was starving. I looked up and saw a gravedigger standing below us, and both Wite and I stopped. The gravedigger had noticed us at once, and was staring up at us with a shocked look on his face. I felt as if I had an instant rapport with this gravedigger, as I have always felt with every gravedigger I’ve met. This was the first of a long series of identical gravediggers who gave us shelter as we traveled to Wite’s country. Gravediggers and spirit-eaters do complementary work, we dispose of human refuse, the most human sort of refuse, and the most intolerable sort of refuse. Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again. Wite horrified people because he was dead but they could see him, and because he wandered, was everywhere at once, even when he was with me. A spirit-eater must make himself into a graveyard for spirits. Wite, as a soul-burner, had obviously become a graveyard for spirits. He had become a mausoleum for spirits. He had become his own grave. The gravedigger is also the one who keeps the graves, and it is expected of him that he will see to it that the graves remain closed and the dead are kept down. This gravedigger recognized Wite and me at once, and we recognized him. I believe that he knew who we were. Now he led us to one side, to the mortuary chapel. He entered through the side door and deliberately caused the door to swing wide open behind him with an outstretched hand, allowing Wite and me to follow him inside. Like all gravediggers, his body was ponderous, and he smelt of the soil. He had large hands, and, when he turned to us in the chapel, his face had an unusual, cagey look. Like all gravediggers he was a grave himself, filled with the dangerous and unwholesome secrets of the people he buried, clearly preferring the helpless and embarrassing cadavers the townspeople hastily delivered into his hands with disgust to the people themselves. He offered us the hospitality of the mortuary chapel and brought us water. I watched him through the windows lumbering back and forth between the chapel and the shed where he lived. He moved awkwardly when he moved fast. I later saw him digging another grave on a hummock above the chapel—before this, I had never been in a cemetery where it was possible to walk below the level of the graves. It was twilight. The gravedigger seemed to be working in a blue haze. The sun was shining up on the clouds from below the horizon. Our arrival had refreshed him, because he dug into the ground remarkably fast, first rolling back the sod and breaking up the clay with a pick, then ripping up enormous clods of earth. The pile of earth beside him grew quickly. He struck the ground with such force that I could feel the reverberations in the wall of the chapel.
The Traitor Page 4
