by Jeff Kamen
He tore around the settlement howling outrages at all who came his way, cackling and grinning and wheeling back on himself and speeding on again with no thought for his safety, no thought for the storm at all until ahead of him the skies began to blench and flicker.
When he looked up, the skies darkened again, rumbling. Then, with a huge resounding crash and a brilliant sear of light, they shattered open.
Before he could turn away, something grasped hold of the glider. He was dragged aside against his will and with his burnt eyes unable to distinguish east from west, he span and lurched away in the gathering vortex, hooting no more, jeering no more. Over the rising sea he went and into the rain, dragged away further and further. He tried to call off the thing he’d summoned to drive him on, but it seemed he was locked in the breast of its fury. Out he went, hurtling into the storm.
And what anguished heavens he saw then, the wind screaming in his ears and the glider frame rattled this way and that. Below his feet the huge waves were turning like a field of iron scrolls. The frame was shaking violently. He battled on, leaning and stretching himself, getting soaked in the rain as it squalled and swirled in the blackness. On he flew, tumbling and rolling as he turned himself around, and then he was flung on like something catapulted, a bag with legs blown backwards, towards the coastal towns.
There was another slamming crash, and in that terrible play of light he saw fissures running up the sky like fractured moonscapes, broken and granular structures chained to whatever channels linked the halls of earth to the dark etheria swarming above. It was in this bleak and stony radiance that he saw the outline of the headland a few miles distant, and flew struggling towards it.
The cliffs disappeared for a while, then loomed unexpectedly to his left. He tipped his wings and wheeled across to them. The winds were blowing him on faster than he wished and he tried to slow himself, began riding the air like a horseman, braking and sidling and then all direction gone as his feet slipped from the tailstraps. He kicked and thrashed and bent himself but there was nothing he could do, his legs were swinging helplessly beneath his trunk. Round he circled, one hand off and out as he span, turning faster with each new revolution and the world slowing to catastrophe in his sight.
The headland reared jaggedly. He saw that the wing was hanging at an angle but he couldn’t stabilise it. Something had come unlocked. He span again, travelling in such a tight and sickening spiral that he lost his bearings altogether, and he cried out in his fear, snatching at the bar. This time he caught hold of it, and he reached overhead with his fingers racing and spidering and managed to click a few joints into place. Fifty yards or less to the brutal jawbone of land. As the glider dropped away, he yelled. Down below were cold shards of rock, the black waves slavering. ‘No,’ he begged, and he gripped the bar with both hands and with a fierce rippling sound he elevated.
Up he flew over the cliffs and on he went and gladly, beginning to brake and turn, a bird drawing in its broken pinions. He was almost ready to descend when the winds whipped back around, and this time he could not adjust himself. Black trees leapt up at him and he screamed, entering them headfirst. The wings were speared clean through. Slamming to a halt he heard them rip; his skull jolting on his spine and his legs torn from the harness, heels flung overhead.
He hung there like a bat, coughing and bleeding. Trying to move himself. Trying to reach upwards, his free hand dark against the clouds pulsing overhead. Out at sea the storm hammered back and forth and the wind howled in the branches and at some point the cries he made were lost even to himself.
Chapter 69 — Mona
‘That’s it, turn off here,’ she said, and Radjík followed the bleached sign pointing the way downhill.
River surges and changes in sea level had left this part of the coast badly ravaged over time, slashed through with waterways that made fraught islands of settlements which had once crowned the peninsulas. They crossed a timber bridge leading to one such eroded location: Mona’s home of a century and a half before.
The town as they entered it appeared to be composed of two parts, the upper area undergoing some kind of excavation and the older section with its face half eaten by the sea. A pale dust was scattering in the wind, and in much reduced visibility they passed what appeared to be an open quarry, with clutches of small hovels and runs of tents smoking at its outskirts. Limestone blocks were being lowered from the split shelves where they’d been hewn and strawbound and tethered in ropes. Slowing, they watched teams of straining men as they hauled the blocks along on rollers, some loading the smaller lumps onto flatbed carts led by strings of mules.
The dust billowed up again from the works, and in the thick of it they could see chalklike labourers clearing mounds of oldworld glass and bones and charred rubble. Some were carrying tools from place to place on short wooden drags that threw up yet more sediment as they rasped along. When the dust cleared, they saw a party hammering away at the broken head of a buried engine. Aflame with rust, it was being attacked on all sides by a powdered crew that crawled over it like big white ants and who were tearing strips of plated steel from its flanks and from the fallen sections of the front, exposing its black and incomprehensible gizzards. They drove on, coughing, Radjík demanding to know where they were heading to and Jaala unable to answer.
‘Thought you knew the place,’ Radjík muttered.
‘I don’t know it. It’s just ... I’ll know when we’re there, okay? Keep going.’
Shortly afterwards, she felt it, a subtle inrushing of significance. Mona was returning to her, the woman who’d unwittingly brought the tyrant into the world; someone whose own life could not have been more different. ‘Go down there,’ she said as the crooked street divided. ‘Towards the sea.’
As the cart bumped on, it was as if she could feel an old hand alight upon her heart. Strange, she thought, that for once it should not be Grethà’s. On they went, to where as Mona she’d walked before, and now it seemed she walked again, the stone dwellings appearing to shimmer and multiply as they drove past them, the familiar settings doubly layered, the scents and sounds of another life blending strangely with her own. As they entered a narrow run of streets, the people passing by seemed to alter faces, to shudder and blend forms with others who had gone from the world. Voices of the dead began to echo through their mouths, their words distorting. She saw children playing on a balcony no longer there, that was no more than a slab of hanging brick. Cries coming from no one, bells ringing from years before that at the same time faded ... faded. A woman stood in their path and vanished and reappeared up ahead. A town flickering like static, everything jumping, moving without movement.
Erik, darling …
She saw gaps in the wall of a shopfront newly built and an open street blockaded and half of it on fire and the night sky merging with the real and tangible day. Streets that Mona had gone along so many times, often with her adopted children, all of it natural and everyday back in that ancestral realm. Once again she wondered at herself, wondered why she’d been chosen. Wondered what reason there could have been in making such an unnecessary creature — in making something that would go on and on like that. A copy of a copy; a lost moon circling the centuries, circling round and round ...
Erik, fetch the boys will you?
After meandering for some time, and with the pair of them beginning to argue, they finally reached the place she was looking for. The old courthouse building. Her expression as she surveyed it was anxious but determined.
Then, as she climbed down off the plate, disappointed.
Little remained of the building now, and she half thought to climb up again and leave, but by this time Radjík was demanding to know what the fuss was about. Leaving the cart and mule to stand in the old abandoned square, they entered the site together, walking around stumps of columns and smashed steps, and eventually approaching what at one time had been a walled courtyard.
Chains forbid them entry, and the gates they tried were barric
aded. Jaala studied it all, turning, her dark eyes shining moistly. ‘It’s changed so much,’ she said, finding within the flickers a stone bench where Mona had sat in rest periods to read, to chat with colleagues and friends. An image of an elderly man feeding birds came to her; then one of Mona sitting alone, watching a child’s kite swoop and dive over the rooftops. All of it gone and all of it still present in her, dead chatter chattering ... today overlaid with other days … frames coupling and uncoupling … people long gone eating and drinking together as if everything they knew was served from the table of eternity; as though life was imperishable, never to end.
Checking that no one was watching, they forced a door open and went through, cautious in their going. Worn steps took them down through heaps of sandy rubble, and as they descended, they came to a sunken garden that had once been surrounded by lofty balconies. Pale shards encompassed the garden now, and just a few trellises stood upright in the toppled masonry. Jaala took it all in silently, wistfully, then led Radjík down to where the fountain stood.
‘It’s still here,’ she said, with a catch in her voice. ‘I didn’t think it would be. I thought ...’ She sighed. ‘I can’t believe it’s here.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘Just decoration. But it was beautiful. Beautiful.’
It was tall and bulbous and grey. Just as she’d known it before; only now it stood kissed with ruin. The base still squatted in a pool, but the water was clouded and stagnant, a breeding ground for mosquitoes and flies. She went closer, Radjík glancing around uncertainly as she followed.
The column that formed the fountain’s centrepiece was carved with lifesize engravings of four female subjects. They were looking outwards, standing shoulder to shoulder around the column like smiling canephorae, their upturned fingers extending into delicate flutings around a heavy stone cup where once fresh water had spattered and gushed and flowed.
Each figure carved perfectly to scale. Women of cool grace and beauty. Each chiselled face unique to the individual, although no longer intact. Cream-coloured once, they were now a hoary grey, disfigured by growths of what resembled some terrible airborne disease. Nothing as it was then, she thought, the folds of their garments, the poise of their chins, the subtle details of their features chipped and broken; smashed in places. ‘This is her,’ she said, gesturing to one of them. ‘Mona.’
Radjík had been eyeing the column suspiciously up to that moment, like someone afraid that a dreadful joke was being played on them. Now, as she approached the figure that Jaala was indicating, the doubt on her face was overwritten with confusion. She stared at it a moment, then in a strangled tone said, ‘It’s you. Shit, it’s you,’ and all Jaala could do was nod in agreement, for the dead stone face was identical to her own. As if it was she standing on the rostra, not another, long fallen. As if it was her own cool and sepulchral gaze.
‘This is what they all looked like,’ she said, wiping her eyes as they filled. ‘Just like me. Like twins, all the way to the beginning.’
Radjík seemed all but defeated, was shaking her head. ‘But how …’ she began, ‘how did they …’
‘It’s like I told you. They must have taken someone and done something. Something that made the rest of us the same. It was what they did. Their science. I ... I talked to Nina about it, but she didn’t have an answer. She thought it was connected with medicine. Making things the same in different people, to make a cure or something.’
Radjík went to speak again, but couldn’t, didn’t have the words, her hands falling to her sides like someone terminally exhausted.
Jaala too fell silent, and as they stood together, staring at the antique features, there came to her mind another memory. A day of brittle sunshine. One of her husband’s two boys bringing her a shard of red glass he’d found. Look at it, Mama. Look …
Mona holding it to the light. Closing an eye. Held in that crimson frame a limping puppy, bony and grotesque, its tongue lolling. She then turning to see a dark red tree; the red walls of the house; red smoke pouring upwards into a menacing sky. A sky like the end of things ...
Later, on finding a bench, they sat and talked for a while, Radjík still staring at the figurine while Jaala recounted what she knew of Mona’s life — as a lawyer, as a married woman, and as a person who was happy in many ways, and highly popular to the end. ‘I don’t think the people who adopted her said much about where she came from,’ she said. ‘Maybe they didn’t even know. All I know is that the one before her was a nurse. Tamara. Maybe she set things up so it would be easier for her child.’
Radjík nodded slowly. ‘And she ... this one here ... she gave birth to Vadraskar?’
‘Yes.’
‘She didn’t know?’
‘No. It just happened. Bad luck, I suppose.’
‘You remember them all, right?’
‘In a way, yes. I feel them all, put it that way. And I’m sure I’m the only one carrying others’ memories. Sure of it. Grethà maybe, perhaps a little, but I don’t think so.’
‘You know all their names?’
‘Not all. Some. Mostly the recent ones.’
Radjík peered at the fountain as if exploring its details anew. ‘Shit ...’ she said. ‘There any more of these?’
‘I don’t think so. Not of her, anyway. I might remember other things as we go.’ Jaala shrugged. ‘It’s like following clues to who you really are.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.’
‘It’s why I want to go back all the way. To see if there are any clues there. Things like this. Memories. Some reason why it happened.’
Radjík eyed her doubtfully. ‘What if you don’t like it? What if you don’t like what’s there?’
‘Well. At least I’ll know.’
‘Think you should be careful.’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to be.’
As they left, she saw in the flickerings a tall mirror in a cracked stone hallway; a swarthy figure approaching, the dark eyes rimmed with kohl.
Good for you, she thought, catching a glimpse of what love could bring, sensing the laughter of Mona’s life, the happiness she’d known, the love of her family. She turned to view the fountain a final time, then followed Radjík away.
From somewhere a quiet and breathless giggling arose like a breeze, following her airily, dizzily up the steps.
Chapter 70 — Clifftop Grave
‘I … I wonder if you have some water?’ he said.
The old man looked up from his fire, scratching back his greasy white hair as if the better to determine Moth’s form within the shade. ‘Water? Heh. I’ve got water.’
It was morning, calm and quiet. The ground was pale as salt and the day felt equally crystalline. As if a dry snow had fallen overnight; some silent dusting everywhere of quartz or powdered rock.
He limped round to the steps of the pitch-coated shack and rested against the porch rail, his features racked with effort. He was carrying the bedraggled glider under his arm, his face and body laced with cuts and his clothing ripped from where he’d dropped through the tree before climbing up again to retrieve the stranded craft. The man watched him a moment, then returned to poking at the embers. ‘They usually come from the road,’ he said. ‘It’s a rare one comes that way, mister.’
Moth stood with a hand to his ribs, inhaling carefully. It would not be long before the sun cleared the ridge, sealing the world in its glare. ‘Your water,’ he said. ‘Where should I ...?’
The man waved aside. ‘Well’s over that way. Can’t miss it. Take all you need.’
‘I’ll leave this thing here, if that okay.’
‘Leave it where you want,’ the man said, and watched as he limped off towards the trees.
He returned with his hair dripping, his waterskin wet and full. As he neared the shack, the man said, ‘Share some of this corn, if you like. If you’re hungry.’
Moth unhitched his bag. The old man had built up the fire and was rolling corncobs back a
nd forth over a blackened griddle. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that. If you can spare something.’
‘I can spare it,’ said the man, and he turned from the fire and spat.
He dropped his bag beside the glider and went to the fire and eased his beaten body down in stages until he was sitting across from his host. The old man watching him all the while, rolling the cobs with his stick. ‘Goin to be warm today,’ he said.
‘Yes. I can feel it already.’
‘Warm as hell.’
Back and forth the old man rolled the cobs until they were striped and blistered. Then he took up a scoured wooden dish and flung the steaming cobs onto it one by one and set it on the ground. Next he took a small speckled lime and cut it into quarters and picked up each cob by its blackened stalk and rubbed it with the lime juice until it glistened. When they’d all been rubbed he sprinkled a red dust over them, and when they were smeared in a thin bloody paste, he gestured for Moth to help himself.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘They look good.’ He picked one up by the stalk and blew on it. When he bit into the studded corn his lips contracted with the acid, the burning spice, but then he overcame it and ate gratefully. The man watched him and nodded. Moth nodded back at him.
The smoke drifted into the glare. Somewhere along the cliffs, gulls cried thinly at the morning.
After a while the old man looked up, wiping his fingers on his trousers. He motioned towards the porch. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ he said.
Moth tried to swallow, the hot powder catching in his throat.
‘They rods? You a fishing man?’
‘I … I do fish. But they’re not rods.’
‘What’s in it, then?’
‘Nothing, really. Just some wings.’
