‘All right,’ Wall said. ‘We’re in the shit, and we can’t just stand around. Only way we’re going to get home is to find one of the little bastards and make him show us a safe passage. We know they’re in here somewhere. So let’s go find ’em.’
He said this with such relish, such apparent delight, as if what had occurred was exactly what he’d been hoping for, that—dismayed and frightened as I was—I found it kind of off-putting. Maybe his words affected others the same, because he didn’t get much of a response.
‘Do you wanna die?’ he asked us. ‘Or is it just you’re scared of the dark? Well, I can fix that!’
I felt him push past me, saw the ruby stalk of the laser swing out into the blackness. In an instant several fires sprouted in the dark. Bushes turned to torches by the laser, their light revealing an uneven terrain of moss or fungus or maybe even some sort of black grass, like a rug thrown over a roomful of lumpy furniture. Bushes and hollows and low rises. Here and there, barely visible in the flickering light, thin seams of gold were laid in against the black ground, and once again recalling The Black Garden, I realized that these likely signalled the location of doorways into secret rooms. There were no signs of walls or a ceiling. Even with the light, we had no way to judge the actual size of the place; but the fires gave us heart, and without further discussion, we headed for the nearest of those gold seams. When we reached it Wall burned down the door and we poured inside. By chance more than by dint of courage, I was beside him as we entered, and I had a clear view of the opulent interior. A cavelike space of irregular dimensions, considerably higher than it was long or wide, with a terraced floor and slanted ceiling, a golden grotto draped in crimson silks, stalks of crystal sprouting from the floor and a miniature waterfall splashing down upon boulders that looked to be pure gold. Silk cushions were strewn everywhere. An aquarium was set into the wall, teeming with brightly coloured fish as different from the drab brown trout and bottom feeders with which I was familiar as gems from common rocks; the ornament of the aquarium through which the fish swam was a human spine and rib cage.
But what held my attention was the presence of three Captains lying on the cushions: two men and a woman, their pale, naked, hairless bodies almost childlike in appearance. There were also three collared women, who had apparently been sexually engaged with the Captains, and showed bruises and other marks of ill use, and a collared man who was obviously dead; his chest and limbs were deeply gashed, and he was lying arms akimbo by a wall, as if he had been tossed aside. When we entered, one of the Captains, the larger of the two men, put a knife to the throat of a collared woman; the other two reached for what I assumed to be weapons—short metal tubes resting on the floor at arm’s reach; yet their movements were languid, casual, as if they were not really afraid of us. Or perhaps they were drugged. Whatever the case, they were overwhelmed before they could pick up the tubes and dragged from the room. The Captain holding the knife looked at me—directly at me, I’m sure of it—and smiling, slashed the woman’s throat. She began to thrash about, clutching at the wound, and the Captain pushed her off to the side. He was still smiling. At me. The daft little shit was amused by my reaction. His androgynous features twisted with amusement. Something gave way inside me, some elemental restraint—I felt it as tangibly as I might have felt the parting of my tissues from a knife stroke—and I rushed at him, ignoring Wall’s order to hold back. The Captain kind of waved the knife at me, but again he did not seem overly concerned with any threat I might pose. Even after I kicked the knife aside and yanked him to his feet, even after I grabbed him by the throat and shoved him back against the wall, he continued to regard me with that mild, dissipated smile and those wet purplish eyes that gave no hint of what might lie behind, as empty as the eyes of a fish. I had the notion that I was doing exactly as he expected, and that my predictable behaviour was something that reinforced his feelings of superiority.
‘Let him go,’ said Wall from behind me.
‘In a minute,’ I said, tightening my grip on the Captain’s throat. I was still full of loathing, but it was a colder emotion now, albeit no less manageable. I fixed my gaze on those inhuman eyes, wanting to learn if anything would surface in them at the end, and I plunged my knife hilt-deep into the top of his skull. His mouth popped open, the eyes bulged, and thick blood flowed down over his head like syrup over a scoop of vanilla. Spasms shook him, and a stream of his piss wetted my legs. Then it was over, and I let him fall. It looked for all the world as though his head had grown a bone handle. In some part of me that had been obscured by anger, I could feel a trivial current of revulsion, but most of what I felt at first was satisfaction, though not long afterward I began to shake with the aftershocks of my violent act.
I turned to Wall, who stood regarding me with a thoughtful expression. ‘You got two of ’em,’ I said. ‘Two’s enough.’
Behind him, they were trying to remove the collars from the surviving women. Neither was doing well; blood was leaking from their ears.
‘There’s more,’ Wall said. ‘You gonna kill ’em all?’
The question did not seem in the least rhetorical, and I did not take it as such.
‘Long as we’re here,’ I said.
But I did no further killing that night. The vengeful, outraged spirit that had moved me gradually eroded as we passed through the Black Garden, led by the two collared Captains, our path lit by burning shrubs and doorways into golden light left open to reveal scenes of luxury and carnage, like a score of tiny stages mounted on the dark upon whose boards the same terrible play had been performed, and I only watched the others do the bloody work. The violence I’d committed had worked a change in me, or else had exposed some central weakness, and I grew disinterested in the outcome of our expedition. Maddy had to urge me along, or else I might have just stood there and waited for my end, displaying no more concern for my fate than the Captain that I’d killed; and I wondered if the fact that they had done so much violence was at the heart of their dismissive attitude toward life and death—but I don’t believe that. To imbue them with human qualities would be assuming too much. They were no more human than the apes, and the apes, despite what I’d said long before to the man in the bubble car, which had been something I’d said mostly to impress him, were in no way human.
Apes came at us now and again as we went, singly sometimes and sometimes in small groups, flying at us from dark crannies, their knives flashing with reflected fire, and they succeeded in killing three of our people; but they were disorganized, without slaves to support them, and this gave us hope that the other three parties had done well, that the battle, if not yet finished, was on the verge of being won. We killed them all, and we also killed every Captain whom we came across.
Wall was in his element. He burned and burned, and when the laser gave out or broke or whatever it is that lasers do when they go wrong, he killed with his hands, in several instances literally tearing the heads off scrawny white necks. There was a joyful flair in the way he went about it, and I was not the only one who noticed this; I saw others staring at him with a confused mixture of awe and distaste as he carried out the business of slaughter. It was not that the Captains deserved any less, nor was it that vengeance was inappropriate to the moment. No, it was instead that Wall did not appear to be carrying out a vengeful process. Watching him was like watching a farmer scything wheat—here was a man engaged in his proper work and enjoying it immensely. The minor wounds he accumulated, the red stains that flowered on his rough shirt, his arms and face, gave him the look of an embattled hero, but the sort of hero, perhaps, whom we—who were ourselves the pitiful result of laws that heroes had written thousands of years before—no longer cared to exalt; and we moved ever more slowly in his wake, letting him run ahead of us, separating ourselves from him, as if this would lessen our complicity and devalue our support.
Still, we made no move to keep him from his pleasure. The things we found inside those golden rooms, the flayed bodies, bits of
men and women used for ornament or more perverted purposes yet, the collared dead, the few that survived, shaking and delirious, all this legislated against our reining Wall in, and we might have let him go on forever had there been a sufficient number of Captains and if there had been nothing else to capture our attention. But then there came two explosions, distant, the one following hard upon the other, and a ragged cheer went up.
‘We got it!’ Maddy said; she sounded happy yet bewildered, as if she couldn’t quite accept some great good news, and when I asked what the explosions signified, she said, ‘The ship. They must have blown up the other two. They weren’t supposed to do that until we had the ship.’
‘You mean they flew it away and all?’ I said.
‘I think so!’ She gave my hand a squeeze. In the garish orange light of the burning, she looked like she was about to hop up and down from excitement. ‘I can’t be sure ’til we see for ourselves, but I think so.’
Wall was prevailed upon to break off his hunt, so we could determine what had happened, and with the two collared Captains still in the lead, we began to make our way back toward the crater.
But Wall was not yet finished with death.
As we came out from yet another hidden door into the chamber where we had been ambushed, we spotted an ape squatting by one of its fallen companions, rocking back and forth on its heels in an attitude that seemed to signal grief, though—again—I can’t say for certain what the thing was doing there. Just as likely it had gone crazy over something I could never understand. Someone fired at it, and with a fierce scream, it scuttled off into the tunnel that angled up toward the crater.
Wall sprinted after it.
A handful of people, Maddy included, followed him at a good clip, but the rest of us, governed by a weary unanimity, kept plodding along, stepping between the bodies, friend and foe, that lay everywhere. I’d seen so much dying that night, you would have thought that the scene in the chamber would not have affected me, but it took me by storm. That red fountain and the woman of stone and the bloody hieroglyphs figuring the tiles, and now the bodies, more than a hundred of them, I reckoned, scattered about under benches, in the ferns, their pallor and the brightness of their blood accentuated by the glaring light—it was such a unity of awful place and terrible event, it struck deep, and I knew it would hurt me forever, like a work of art whose lines and colours match up perfectly with some circuit in your brain or some heretofore unmapped country in your soul, all the graceless attitudes of the dead’s arms and legs and the humped bodies like archipelagoes in the sea of red.
I found Clay Fornoff lying under the lip of the fountain, his chest pierced innumerable times, eyes open, blond hair slick with blood. Something, an ape probably, had chewed away part of his cheek. Tears started from my eyes—I don’t know why. Maybe because I couldn’t disassociate Clay from Bradley, or maybe it was just death working its old sentimental trick on me, or maybe I’d hoped to reconcile with Clay and now that hope was gone I felt the loss. I don’t know. It was no matter any more, whatever the reason. Feeling as tired as I’d ever been, I kneeled beside him and collected his personals, his gun, a silver ring of Windbroken design, a leather wallet, and a whistle whittled out of some hard yellowish wood. I intended to give them to his folks if I ever saw them again, but I ended up keeping the whistle. I’d never figured Clay to be one for making whistles, and I suppose I wanted to keep that fact about him in mind.
I couldn’t think of anything much to say over him, so I just bowed my head and let whatever I was feeling run out of me. I recall thinking I was glad I hadn’t seen him die, and then wishing I had, and then wondering whether he had been brave or a fool or both. Then there was nothing left but silence. I closed his eyes and walked on up the tunnel.
Wall had caught up with the ape—or the ape had let him catch it—at the end of the tunnel, right where the canopy of foliage began, and he was fighting it hand to hand when I straggled up, while the remainder of those who had survived the ambush and the Garden stood in a semi-circle and watched. Without much enthusiasm, I thought. Their faces slack and exhausted-looking.
Wall had killed apes with his bare hands before; he was one of the few men alive strong enough to accomplish this, and under different circumstances it might have been incredible to see, like a scene out of a storybook, this giant locked up hard with a six-foot white-furred ape in a leather harness. But as things stood, realizing that this was just more of Wall’s…I’m not sure what to call it, because it was more than him showing off. His folly, I guess. His making certain that the world stayed as violent and disgraceful as he needed it to be. Anyway, recognizing this, the sight of the two of them rolling about, tearing and biting, screaming, grunting, it did not seem vital or heroic to me, merely sad and depressing. To tell the truth, despite everything that had happened, I had a fleeting moment during which I found myself rooting for the ape; at least, I thought, it had displayed something akin to human emotion back in the chamber.
There came a point when, still grappling, they came to their feet and reeled off along the canopied pathway; mired in that green dimness they seemed even more creatures out of legend, the ape’s small head with its bared fangs pressed close to the great shaggy bulk of Wall’s head. Like insane lovers. Wall’s arms locked behind the ape’s back, his muscles bunched like coiled snakes, and the ape clawing at Wall’s neck. Then Wall heaved with all his might, at the same time twisting his upper body, a wrestler’s quick move, lifting the ape and slinging him up and out higher than his head, its limbs flailing, to fetch up hard against a tree trunk. The ape was hurt bad. It came up into a crouch, but fell onto its side and made a mewling sound; it clawed frantically at its own back, as if trying to reach some unreachable wound. Finally it got to its feet, but it was an unsteady, feeble movement, like that of an old man who’s mislaid his cane. It snarled at Wall, a grating noise that reminded me of a crotchety generator starting up. I could tell it wanted to charge him, that its ferocity was unimpaired, but it was out of juice, and so was waiting for Wall to come to it. And Wall would have done just that if Maddy, who was standing about ten feet away from me, hadn’t taken her pistol and shot the ape twice in the chest.
Wall stared incredulously at the ape for a second, his chest heaving, watching it twitch and bleed among the ferns lining the path; then he spun about, and asked Maddy what the fuck she’d had in mind.
‘We got better to do than watch you prove what a man you are.’ She looked drawn and on edge, and her pistol was still in hand, trained a little to the left of Wall.
‘Who the hell put ye in charge?’ he said.
‘You want to argue ’bout it,’ she said, ‘we’ll argue later. Right now we got to get movin’.’
‘Goddamn it!’ Wall took a step toward her. With his hair falling wild about his shoulders and his coarse features stamped with sullen anger, he looked every inch an ogre, and he towered over Maddy. ‘I’m sick right down to the bone of your bullshit. There ain’t a single damn thing we done, you ain’t stood in the way of.’ He started toward her again, and Maddy let the pistol swing a few degrees to the right. Wall stopped his advance.
‘You don’t care who you kill, do you?’ she said. ‘Can’t be the ape, might as well be one of us.’
Wall put his hands on his hips and glared at her. ‘Co on and shoot, if that’s your pleasure.’
‘Nothin’ ’bout this here is my pleasure,’ she said. ‘You know that. Just leave it alone, Wall. You’ve had your victory, you’ve got your ship. Let’s go home.’
‘You hear this?’ Wall said to the others, none of whom had changed their listless expressions and attitudes. ‘I mean have you been listenin’ to her?’
‘They’re too damn tired to listen,’ Maddy told him. ‘Death and killin’ makes people tired. That’s somethin’ you ain’t figured out yet.’
Wall kept staring at her for a few beats, then let out a forceful breath. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right for now. But we’re gonna settle thi
s later.’
And with that he strode off along the path, ripping away a big rubbery leaf that hung down in his face with a furious gesture; he quickly rounded a turn and went out of sight, like he didn’t much care if any of us were to follow.
‘Son of a bitch ain’t gonna be happy till he gets every one of us dead,’ Maddy said, holstering her pistol; the lines around her mouth were etched sharp, and she looked years older than she had earlier in the evening. But then maybe we all did.
It wasn’t my place to say anything, I suppose, but since Wall had been part of Edgeville for a time, I felt an old loyalty to him.
‘He mighta got carried away some,’ I said. ‘But you can’t deny he’s done us all a world of good down there today.’
Maddy dropped a little thong over the hammer of her pistol to keep it from bouncing out of the holster; she gave me a sharp look.
‘You don’t know nothin’ ’bout Wall like you think you do,’ she told me in a weary tone. ‘But you stick around, you gonna find out way more’n you can stand.’
When at last we reached the surface and took shelter among the rocks, we discovered that only about hundred and thirty of us had survived the Garden. Brad and Callie were fine, as were most of those who had stayed with the flying machines; there had been scant fighting in the crater. But of the nearly four hundred who had gone deep into the Garden, fewer than seventy had returned, along with a handful of men and women who’d been saved from the collars, and five Captains. Wall wanted to ride out immediately, to return to wherever it was they’d set out from; but Coley, Maddy, and others told him, Fine, go ahead, but we’re going to wait a while and see if anyone else comes out. More than three hundred dead had shaken people’s faith in Wall—that was a sight more than what you would call ‘light casualties’, and resentment against him appeared to be running high, even though we’d managed to steal the flying machine. I had thought the argument between him and Maddy was personal, but it was now obvious that politics was involved.
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 20
