by John Bowen
She had not even paused to arm herself with cutlery. She seized Gertrude’s wrist, and twisted it until the fork dropped to the floor. Gertrude bit Muriel’s shoulder. Muriel howled, and pulled Gertrude’s hair with both hands. I moved protectively towards Sonya’s chair, and so did Tony. “Ladies! Ladies!” Banner said again. The door of the temple opened, and Arthur came into the cabin.
He was wearing neither his frowning nor his smiling mask. His beard had been cut, and his hair combed; his spectacles glittered. His voice dominated the confused noises of the fighting women. “Mrs. Otterdale! Miss Harrison!” he said, “Stop it at once, and behave.”
Muriel and Gertrude rolled apart; their faces were scratched and bleared with tears. Gertrude was the first to recover. She curtsied, and said as steadily as she could, “I’m sorry, god Arthur. The woman provoked me.”
“I am not the god Arthur,” Arthur said. “The god Arthur has gone back to heaven. I am the god Arthur born man.”
In the silence, Banner began to pick up the broken pieces of the cup Muriel had thrown, and put them on the table. We moved back to our places, keeping our eyes lowered. Muriel stepped on the pieces of fish with which Gertrude had struck her, and they made a loud crunching sound.
Arthur took his place before the altar. “You can take off that silly sheet,” he said to Banner, “I shall be the god’s high priest from now on.”
*
Life went on. The inner cabin continued to be used as a temple, and only the high priest Arthur was allowed to enter it. First fruits were still offered to the god Arthur, and the whole of our evening meal was placed on his altar to be blessed before being distributed among us. The first fruits themselves were now cast into the sea. High priest Arthur would put on his vestments, walk briskly to the edge of the raft, lift the dish in the air, say, “God Arthur be pleased to accept these first fruits,” and into the water the fish would go. The gift was always accepted.
In the evenings, the high priest Arthur would often read to us from the Sacred Books. These had been much rewritten since he had first begun to enter up the log; indeed, he would often make alterations in the manuscript as we went along. I am sure that the first sentence of the log did not originally read, “In the beginning the god Arthur came out of the great rain,” but that was how it read now. Mixed in with this sort of apocryphal statement, there were still traces of the old Arthur. “The god spoke to the people about the functions of rational man,” he had written, and followed it with a string of Arthurisms; there was also a long piece about the god’s concern with sanitation when it should have pleased him to bring us safely to land, and a discussion of the value of tabu in maintaining standards of cleanliness. His account of the storm was very highly coloured. “There came a great wind over the surface of the waters,” it ran, “and the face of the sky was blackened by the waters, and the voice of the god was heard in the wind, crying ‘Woe, woe to the sons of men’, and many of those who were not of the Chosen were swallowed up by the waters, but the god held over the Chosen the shield of his hand, and all save one were saved.” (Here the high priest paused, and continued reading on a different note.) “Tidal waves have, of course, been known from the earliest times, and have done great damage to life and property. There is a natural explanation of their occurrence, having to do with the activity of underwater volcanoes, but never before have tidal waves followed each other in so long a series, and in this was the hand of the god shown.” (He wrote in a sentence.) “In any case, the god would have created the volcanoes in the first place, being the prime mover of all things.” The high priest looked up from his reading, and said to us, “Thus we may see that the god Arthur may appear, either, as in this case, as the immediate cause, or, as in the case of most other natural phenomena, as the ultimate cause, but cause he must be, and is.”
The Sacred Books are lost now (I think Harold burned them), so I do not know how Arthur described the night of the squid. We had seen squid before, of course. Indeed, I had once tried to cook one in its own ink by a recipe only partly remembered from Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Cooking; it had turned out to be one of the dishes Muriel did not fancy. But we had never seen a squid like this.
Let me remember the date; it was on October 24th, and Sonya was within a month of her time. Though the weather was still warm, the evenings were shorter now, and supper had turned into high tea, for we continued to eat a little before sunset. The sea was calm, and the only happening out of the ordinary was that Hunter reported that all the fish seemed to be swimming in the same direction. We thought little of this, and ate our meal indoors as usual. Arthur read to us for a while from the Sacred Books. Then we went out on deck into the dusk to take the air.
We saw that the sea was no longer smooth. It looked like cobblestones. The water was covered with squid, little squid, harmless squid, cuttle-fish that we had caught and tried to cook, but now blanketing the surface of the sea all around us in the dusk. Many of them were eaten by the fish that their presence in such large numbers had attracted, so that it was as if the cobblestones were under a mock shell-fire; wherever we looked, we could see them seeming to disintegrate in a swirl and a flash of foam, yet the surface remained unchanged, and there were always as many cobblestones as before. The sight was fascinating, but not frightening. Gertrude said, “It’s almost as if you could step on them, and walk to land.”
We remained on deck for a long time, watching the squid. Dusk thickened into night. The moon rose in a clear sky, and the bodies of the squid gleamed, a silver-grey in the moonlight, and we sat there, silently watching.
“But this is ridiculous,” Arthur said. “It is past your bedtime. There is nothing to see.”
“Please.”
“Oh, you may stay if you wish.”
In the silence we could hear each splash and gulp quite clearly. A little thread of wind came up, a little cold thread that seemed to pass from one to another of us, and then die. Sonya shivered. I put my arm around her shoulders, and felt her stiffen for a moment before relaxing within its warmth.
I said, “A clock ought to strike or something.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s as if we were waiting for something to begin. Don’t you feel that?”
“We are always waiting, Mr. Clarke. We should be waiting and ready at all times to do the god’s will.”
A long black serpent uncoiled from the water close to the raft, rose for a moment in the air, regarded us, and then returned to the water.
We did not speak. I think each of us felt that as long as we kept silent, we might be able to believe that we had seen some private hallucination, and there would be nothing. The serpent reappeared, and was joined by another. In the moonlight, we could see that the surface of their skins was not smooth, but rough and indented like tentacles. Gertrude said breathlessly, “Lord Arthur, tell them to go away”.
The serpents fell back into the sea. Arthur said, “I must consult … I must ask….”
Muriel said, “Tell the god to make them go away.” Sonya turned her head in to my shoulder, and I could feel that she was shaking, and hear the tiny chattering of her teeth. One of the serpents began delicately to explore the edge of the deck.
Banner said, “High priest Arthur, please exorcise the demons before they eat us.” None of us had raised his voice at all up to now, but Gertrude said, “I’m going to scream. I can feel it inside me. Please do something, Arthur, before I scream, because if once I start, I don’t think I shall be able to stop.”
There was a disturbance on the surface of the water some way from the raft. The serpent on deck was whipped back like a fishing-line, and was seen to be part of a nest of serpents, clustering around the head of a sea creature which lay not more than sixty feet away. There were eight other serpents as well as the two we had already seen, but they were much smaller. They writhed above a hooked beak of a mouth, as the creature raised its head to look at us.
Banner said, “Medusa!”
> “If I’d been turned to stone, I shouldn’t feel so frightened.”
“Arthur! Arthur!”
Hunter said, “It’s a squid. A giant squid.”
“Make it go away.”
We could see the creature’s body now. It must have been about twenty feet long, and perhaps six feet wide, tapering away to a tail from which sprouted two vestigial wings. It was longer than any squid we had ever seen, or could have imagined. One of its tentacles flicked again towards the raft, lay for a while on deck, and was joined by its mate, which vanished again almost at once below the waterline. The two tentacles found a purchase, and began to pull, and we felt the raft shudder and then move towards the squid.
“Arthur!”
But Arthur could do nothing. His body was rigid. Only his hands moved, and they seemed slowly to be pulling the squid towards us, just as it pulled us towards it.
“Arthur!”
The movement stopped. The squid had amused itself by playing for a while with the raft, but perhaps we were not texturally interesting enough to be sport for long. We saw again from a much closer range the great horned beak and the vacancy of an eye. All ten of the serpents writhed again, and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the creature was gone. Slowly the tension ran out of us. Sonya stopped shivering. Banner cleared his throat. Only Arthur remained as rigid as before, staring at the place where the squid had disappeared.
“You’ll talk to the god?” Muriel said. “You won’t let it come back?”
Arthur turned slowly to look at her. “Woman,” he said. “That was the god. And he will come again.”
*
He would come again; he would come again.
When would he come? Arthur did not know.
What should we do when he came? Arthur did not say.
What did the god want beyond the worship and gifts he had already? Arthur could not tell.
“But it’s only a squid,” I said next evening after supper. “You heard Hunter say it was only a squid.”
Arthur said, “The god can take many forms. He can take the form of a man or of a squid. But in any form he is terrible.”
“You don’t really believe in all that?”
Arthur lifted his hand, and slapped my face. It was not a slap to hurt; it was no more than an instinctive gesture of shock, but it told me how deeply Arthur did believe what he was saying. There was a silence. “You had better leave the room,” he said, and I rose, and went out on deck.
Banner joined me there shortly afterwards. “He’s very angry,” Banner said. “He wants to see you in the temple. He says there’s no place for blasphemers among the Chosen. You’d better tell him you’re sorry.”
“You think he’ll have me thrown overboard?”
“Oh, I hope not.”
I had tried to make a joke, but Banner took the words seriously. Now I found that I was afraid. Nobody questioned Arthur’s decisions. If he were to decide to have me thrown overboard, then over I should go. Thinking of this, I became very frightened indeed. I wanted to say, “You wouldn’t let him?” but I dared not, because I knew what the answer would be. When I am frightened, the tension in my throat makes it difficult for me to speak. “I’ll … I’ll tell him I’m sorry,” I said at last.
“You’d better. It was a very foolish and wicked remark.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Banner went indoors again. The high priest would let me know when he was ready to see me. The moon shone steadily on water which was clear again, for the little squid had long since dispersed. I stayed on deck, trying to collect my thoughts and my confidence. If I could stop myself shaking, if I could establish some sort of physical control, it would be a beginning. I wanted to make water, but the lavatory was indoors, and if I were to piss over the side, I might be caught doing so when they came to summon me to the high priest.
“You can come in now,” Banner said, reappearing. I walked through the main cabin to the temple. They were all sitting round the table, watching me, but I would not look at them.
I knocked. There was no reply from within the temple. Banner said, “I think you’d better enter.”
Arthur was wearing the frowning mask. I made a low obeisance, like a man in an Arabian Nights story. “I’m very sorry, god Arthur,” I said, “I am truly sorry that I have sinned.”
‘Ha hee ho ho,” said the god. High priest Arthur took off the mask, and the god went back to heaven. “The god speaks through me,” he said. “The god is angry.”
“I’ m sorry.”
“I have told you before, Mr. Clarke, that sorrow is of no practical use without the intention of amendment. The god has borne with your doubt for a long time. It is necessary at the beginning that there should be one among the Chosen to doubt and rebel, so that his chastisement by the god should be remembered by the people.”
“I’m not rebelling.”
“Not at the moment, no. Although even now I think that in your heart…. However, you are not to be blamed for that. You do no more in your way, Mr. Clarke, than we all do in ours; you express the will of the god. He has willed your fault, because he wills your expiation.
“Expiation?”
“Everything has come together in my mind, Mr. Clarke, since you asked that foolish question. Do I believe? That you should doubt my belief for a moment indicates that I have been at fault. Do we all believe? If we believe, do we believe strongly enough? Will we make a sign of our belief? Will we make a sacrifice to the god?”
I did not know where this was leading, but I was less frightened than I had been. If Arthur were to have me thrown overboard, it would be as a punishment, not as a sacrifice, so that whatever he intended to sacrifice, it was not I. I said, “We do make a sacrifice, high priest. We give our first fruits to the god.”
“That is an act of devotion, not a sacrifice. It does not hurt us to give them. And yet … ‘first fruits’. That fits the pattern also.”
“What pattern?”
“When the god came out of the sea, what did he want? It was not clear to me then. Although I am close to the god, since I am part of him, born into mankind, his intentions may not always be clear to me, Mr. Clarke; I see that now. I did not know that he would … I had thought foolishly that I was the only incarnation, the only interpreter. But I was powerless, Mr. Clarke; it was the god himself.”
“The god Arthur?”
“Yes, the god Arthur. But in another form.”
“It could not have been…. There is no possibility that it was … an anti-god?”
“No. Or I should have prevailed. It was the god—made squid. When the god wishes me to know his intentions, Mr. Clarke, his revelation comes with the speed of lightning. I had one such moment when I struck you. It was all clear at once. First fruits…. The god’s appearance in the likeness of a sea creature…. Expiation…. The delay in coming to land…. Your own reference to Iphigenia….”
“A sacrifice?”
“Yes.”
I gathered together all the courage I had. I was certain now that Arthur did not mean I was to be the sacrifice. And, even if I were wrong, at least my offer would make no difference. I said, “You wish to sacrifice me, Arthur? I am ready, of course, to do as the god wills.”
“No. Not you.”
“Later perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
I was sweating with a relief; a drop ran down my nose, and splashed on my chin. Arthur seemed to be waiting for me to say something else. What? Suddenly, it seemed to me, the sweat turned cold. I had been so concerned with my own fear that I had not asked myself the question which Arthur now waited to answer.
“Who then?”
Arthur chuckled. “Why do you ask?” he said. “It can make no difference. We are all equal in the eyes of the god.”
“Of course. Of course.”
“The mechanics of the thing may need a little arrangement. That is often the case in matters of religion, is it not?”
Was he trying to trap me? It seemed
better not to answer.
“I may need your help.”
Sonya! Now I could see his drift; now it was clear. He aimed at Sonya, and my punishment was to be trapped into helping him. Sweat broke out again all over my body, and fear was like a thin sword in my bladder. I said, “I have to go to the bathroom. I’m sorry.”
“Return at once then.”
They were all there, still sitting round the table in the main cabin. My demeanour as I came out of the temple must have seemed a testimony to the power of the god in punishing. I saw their faces—Muriel glad and Gertrude pitying, Harold righteous and Hunter vacant, Tony puzzled, and Sonya—I could not see Sonya’s face at all; it was just a golden blur. I had to think; I had to think of something. I leaned over the basin of the water closet, and was sick. For as long as I dared I stayed there, but nothing happened in my mind but fear and fog. I came out, closed the door slowly behind me, and returned to the temple. I had to think of something.
Perhaps the two of us together … Arthur himself could not prevail against the two of us, standing together. Hunter and Tony would not help him to—A pregnant woman! Sonya’s disability was our strength. Surely they would not harm a pregnant woman, even if the god himself were to order it.
“The pregnancy is much advanced,” Arthur said.
“Yes,” I would buy time. “Would it not be better to wait? Some of the others might feel——”
“They would feel nothing and know nothing. A sacrifice need not be public to be effective; only the will to give and the decision to receive are important. Later the others would be told. That is the god’s will.”
“But how could they not——?”
“The delivery will take place here in the temple. As the father, you may expect to be present. Later, we shall take the child——”
“The child?”
“An innocent life. Unblemished. For the god. The firstborn of our new society. An offering, and an expiation.”
The relief! I was filled with relief until it almost ran out of my ears. Not Sonya. Nobody would hurt Sonya. I was not to be tested, not to be required to fight for her. Only the child. Nobody could ask me, nobody could expect me to fight, to risk both our lives—risk them? to lose them certainly—to lose both our lives for a child a few hours old, something without even a personality; nobody could do that. It would not be pleasant, certainly, to sacrifice the child, not be easy to explain to Sonya herself (here began the first disquiet), but it was not so bad, not so fearful; it could be borne. “She’d better not be told,” I said. “We’ll have to say it died or something.”
