by Hal Duncan
“What did you find in the skins? What did you learn? What was that word?”
“We found a complete phonetic script so precise, so perfect, that to read it was to hear the words inside your head exactly as they would have been spoken fifteen thousand years ago, to hear the concord and discord between articulations, every harmony and clash of stress and intonation. The challenges and exclamations, the pleading, the menace, the hatred, the horror. How about you, Pechorin, old chap? Don’t you remember it?”
“Enough.”
“You speak this language. Both of you. You will teach it to me.”
“I can’t allow that, old man.”
“Carter. Enough. There is no need for this. You should take your men and leave us now, Herr Strang. You would be well advised.”
“How dare you—”
“Need? No need, Pechorin? You know there is. You brought us here. You hear it in his voice too. You can’t help it. For twenty years you’ve heard the need in the voices of everyone around you, everything they were feeling, even what they masked to themselves. For twenty years you’ve been notating it into that damned script, somewhere at the back of your head, and reading it. Feeling it write itself across your soul.”
“There is no soul, Englishman. Only the will. You know this just as I do.”
“The will to power. Yes. The command of fear and fury. That is the nature of this tongue, yes? This is how you’ve turned my men against me. The two of you. You’re working together. You’ve always been together.”
“You’re a damn fool, Strang.”
“You will teach me this language. You must.”
“Listen to you, Strang. Listen to the tone of your own voice, the pressures, the tensions, the strain. You have no will! You bully, you plead, you whine. You couldn’t speak the language even if you tried.”
A COLD, INEVITABLE LOGIC
12 April 1921. Pechorin shot the two Brit soldiers today, ruthlessly and without sanction, for suggesting that the supplies were low and needed restocking. He said they’d questioned his authority. The strange thing is that when he said it, I agreed with him. I knew exactly what he meant, exactly. I felt the same cold bite of hatred and disdain, could have killed them both myself. Perhaps it’s only that I knew they were deserters. I should not let my contempt for men like that affect my judgment. I begin to appreciate his position, in command of such a mob; peasants with guns, all of them. How long before they all turn bolshevik?
13 April 1921. Progress on the translations is amazing. Working, as a start, on the principle that the circles represent lip-rounding, we began applying other such ideas to commonly occurring signs. Curves appear to show the shape of the tongue, or the flow of air over the tongue. The peak of the curve would therefore define the place of articulation. Smooth and wavy lines might represent voiced or voiceless sounds, even creaky and whispering voices. Hobbsbaum thinks the relative positions of these lines may even represent the tone of the sound, the musical pitch. He says it is like sheet music for a Wagner opera.
A “voiceless” sound, as the term is used in phonetics, is not silent; rather it is produced with the glottis wide open rather than flapping so that the sound does not have the humming, buzzing quality of a “voiced” sound—the /b/ sound, for example, is produced in exactly the same way as the /p/ sound, except that the /b/ is voiced, while the /p/ is voiceless; likewise with /d/ and /t/, /g/ and /k/. I have been learning some of this phonetics, as I travel in my grandfather’s footsteps. Little parts of the translations begin to make sense to me now; I can hear them in my head. The writing itself, the language itself—it is inside my head now. I know what they must have been feeling, what they must have been thinking and I’m glad I’m traveling alone.
Pechorin:
Strang begins to see the world the way that Carter and I do. From the few phrases Carter has muttered at him, already he begins to sense the sound of buried emotions in voices, the shapes and shifts of the psychology behind an utterance. Fears and desires. I believe Carter plans to kill him. I know he is capable of it, and it has a cold, inevitable logic. We will not leave here, although we could, because we do not want to. In a way the three of us are now one side of the equation and the soldiers another. We all know that they stay only out of fear, under threat of death; the only language these fascists know is the language of intimidation.
Ten seconds ago, Carter leaned over my shoulder to read what I had written and said, “Maybe we should teach them another.”
THE STENOGRAPHER
25 September 1942, 02:30 hours, Kur.
“Fury. I could feel it as you said the word. I heard it. I knew it.”
“Can you hear the echo, here, in your gut?”
[Interrogation disrupted by commotion outside]
“Sturmman. Go outside. Send them away.”
[With forceful certainty] “Herr Strang, I cannot do that.”
“Tell them to go to hell. They forget who is in command.”
[My hands shake as I type this. I do not know why.]
“I am under orders, Herr Strang. Everything on paper. You yourself—”
“I am in command here.” [Strang walks to canvas partition, throws it back.] “I am in command here!” [He walks outside. More voices. A gunshot.]
[Pechorin, out of sight] “Let go of him now. The next time, I kill you. You understand me?”
“You will all obey this man. He has my authority.”
[Carter laughs. He is looking at me.] “He has his own authority.”
“You will listen to him. You will obey him. Or I will have your rank, your uniform, your name, your number.”
[I have to write this all down. This is my function. This is my only function. But I am a simple man and all I pray for is my safe return to Hamburg, to beautiful Hamburg. What is happening to us here?]
16 April 1921. What if you found a language that sent information like a gun sends bullets, direct to the heart? What if you learned how to decode it, but you couldn’t read the content, didn’t know the exact definitions of the words, only their import, their function as emotive triggers? What if you knew that someone else, though, knew exactly what it meant, every word, every phrase? What if they were writing it down in notes, that ancient language, transcribing page upon page of that archaic tongue?
What if you had gathered together a book out of the skins of the dead, and somewhere in that book were all the words that never should have been said, the secret meanings that no one was ever meant to hear? What if, when someone spoke to you, you knew exactly how they felt about you, the distrust, the fear, the envy? The things best left unsaid?
What if you could hear that in your own voice, every doubt, every vanity? What if you could hear the latent racism in your words, could feel the…discord of it, but still feel it, as a soft, pink scar? What if you could hear your own reflection, sense your own echo inside? This is the language of the fallen angels that we’re learning how to read. This is the language broken in Babel, born in Hell.
[Sounds of an argument—angry, resentful, self-pitying, loathing.]
“We will break you.”
[There is a quiet warning in Carter’s voice] “Pechorin.”
“I will break you.”
“Pechorin. It doesn’t have to happen again.”
“Sturmman Macher. Silence the prisoner.”
“Sir?”
“Do it. Use a knife. Cut his tongue out.”
“Damn you all. Macher, sit down and…” [He says something I cannot transliterate]
“I—Sir—I—”
“Let’s end this now, Pechorin. Let’s end it all, right now. You want to hear a word of real power, Strang?”
“[cursing, invoking] hyawve [?]”
We are in Hell.
A LETTER FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
The letter from Miguel de Santiago of Cortes, Santiago & Serrano, 13 Straza Columbe, Menendez, Peru, arrived long after the package, long after I had made my decision, though it is dated July 24th,
1998.
Dear Sr. Carter, it says.
I write to you with grave news, for it is with great sadness that I must inform you of the death of one whom I am understood to have been a close friend of your grandfather, the Professor Samuel Hobbsbaum. Your sadness might be lessened as I tell you he died peacefully in his sleep on Sunday 19th July this year. As executor of his estate it is my duty to impart to you the informations he, in his life, entrusted to me.
As he was without family, he expressed to me his wishes that your grandfather, Jonathon Carter, or any surviving relatives, should inherit the sum of his wealth and assets, which I understand to be in the sum of one and a quarter million pounds approximately. Upon his death I am to find and contact said inheritor regarding this matter, which I now so do, enclosing a sealed communication which he urged to be passed on to the Carter estate. I am also dispatching separately certain documents he wished to be passed on to you. Please contact me at the above address that we may arrange a suitable transfer of the monies in question.
I send you my sympathy in this time of mourning.
Yours sincerely,
Miguel de Santiago
Why the package of journals and notes arrived before the letter I don’t know, but I already had the plane ticket by the time I got the sealed communiqué from a dead man claiming to be Hobbsbaum himself. I don’t believe in coincidence. I don’t believe in fate. I can’t. Not after reading it.
Dear Carter, it says.
Atonement. Penitence. Redemption. What hope do I have of these things? I expect damnation, and I die unmourned. I have murdered, destroyed, and worse. In my arrogance and conceit, I dragged you back into a hell from which you thought you had escaped. I led many young men to their deaths, and I myself live on through the money of slaughtered families, stolen from the Jews and stained in their blood. I have even stolen the name of one of our victims, your Professor Hobbsbaum, perhaps to remind me of what I am. I have thought of him, of you, and of Pechorin, every night for fifty years, and I have wept. An Englishman, a Russian and a German. The three who walked away with our lives, and you alone deserving.
So, in my death, I give to you the blood money, unspent because it is a measure not of my material wealth but of my spiritual poverty. Do good with it, for I could not. I would not wish to be remembered for a single act of kindness or charity. I do not deserve that. Let them remember me as I truly was, as you knew me in the war, in Kur, as a traitor to humanity. Remember me with hatred and loathing, and if you ever talk of me to others, curse my name.
Reinhardt Strang
Childe Roland
As I step down into the caverns of the City of the Dead, the halogen lamp burns bright as day, and still is only a star amongst the blackness of the vast and hollow night inside. The carved stone stairway curves down under me into the depths of Kur, into a cold and chemical air thick with a smell of salt, urine and blood and something sharper, more acrid; if death has one smell, sex another, this is a stench more rich than either, and every bit as old. A smell of animals. A smell of gods.
I put my hands out to steady myself against the archway I am standing in—huge ivory ribs, cathedral scale, ornate with carvings, complex as clockwork. The steps of stone sweep down beneath my feet into a city of biers of bone and leather, bleached wood, paper-thin skins both dark and light; fine etched lines trace everywhere across the engraved grave city, and the stinking vapors curl in vortices and whorls as intricate as the inscriptions on all the huts of hide and banners of stitched skin. With the light of the lamp gripped in my hand I can see perhaps a couple of hundred yards into the Kur, and I can see it stretch beyond that, back, back…back.
Corpses lay thrown across the cavern floor like filthy clothes, broken and bent things, torn and twisted. I step down toward them, step again, walk one step at a time, down into Hell. The uniforms stripped from their naked bodies are scattered in the dry dust all around them; the Second World War Soviet grays I recognize, the rest unfamiliar, but I can guess that these are the White-Nationalist mercenaries hired by Hobbsbaum in 1921. The scattered remains of two expeditions, twenty years apart, a world away from my time. I try not to see them dying, being peeled, rent.
The dead flesh is immaculate, undecayed; it is a scene of carnage pristine as the day it happened, but for the drained, dried blood soaked into the dust all around. Some have been speared on pikes of ivory, some simply opened from the throat to the balls, rib cages torn apart, postmortem cadavers, birthday-present wrappings. Many have been scalped. One has been draped by the arms over a wooden crossbeam as silver as the moon, head dangling to one side, a sordid christ. I kneel down to another, on the ground before me.
His peeled-off face is lain across his chest, held in his clasped hands like a prayer book—dried blood under his nails. In his savage, rictus grin, between his teeth, he clenches a mouthful of skin, a dozen scraps or so, holds them with that grin, like victory, like a shit-eating dog. I notice that the inside of his upper arm has a patch of torn-off skin the same size as the scraps. I glance around; many of the others have the same wounds on their shoulders. Prying his jaws open, I pull out the skin scraps and look through them, see division names and serial numbers. Ironically, there were two groups of people tattooed by the Nazis—the victims of the “Final Solution” and the SS men who carried it out.
Beyond these dead, a solid wall of bones weaves round the city but through the gates ahead a road leads in, straight as an ivory lance, into the heart of Kur. Paved with skulls. I feel drawn toward the center, toward the core of Kur, wondering what might be there, if this is what drove some two dozen men to literally tear each other apart, if somewhere in there is the Hell my grandfather had seen twice and somehow lived through, somehow left behind him those two times and walked out, harrowed by the sights he’d seen. Alone, I start down the road.
Childe Roland to the dark tower came.
The Book of Names of the Dead
It is an avenue of skinsuit banners; twisting sails stretched in the turning liqueous air, billowing. There shouldn’t be a breeze down here, I think, but there is, and it’s a quiet howling—distant, like the echo of time itself. Empty faces stare down at me, empty eyes and empty mouths, their “names,” if you could call them that, tattooed across their foreheads. I remember reading within my grandfather’s journals, or perhaps in Hobbsbaum’s notes, the line: The word for “face” must be the word for “name.” They do not make a distinction. Such a concept of identity.
And I remember reading that this archaic writing, strange and subtle, was the sum of all its wearer’s wisdom and understanding. The designs were added to, made more complex, involved, as the individual’s experience and ideas grew and complexified. The first tattoo youths received was their own name, woven into an intricate design across the face that signified not only who they were, but what they were, where they had come from, their role, their status. As the name fit into the designs upon the face so the youths should fit into their society, their world. And true enough, the few blank skins that hang amongst the rest are smaller, younger, those of children who had never come of age. They seem more gruesome in their nakedness.
I walk down the road of bones, toward the center of Kur. Between the billowing skins, other roads branch off into the city. Structures of stretched skin on bone form tents, huts, bizarre faceted buildings on these streets. Inside them, through tied-back doorways and sliced-out windows, I catch glimpses of racks of hanging, tattooed skins, piles of them, neat stacks of folded human hide. Every one of them containing the coded information of fifteen thousand years ago. A library of the dead.
What if you found a language, my grandfather wrote. What if you gathered a book together out of these skins, a book inscribed with the names of the dead, the essence of their lives, a book you’d stare into, see their faces looking back? Would you end up with a world of people insane, catatonic like the one man I know who read and understood a few pages in translation? I walk down into the Kur, determined in my choic
e of certainty, truth. I won’t believe that any feeling is unspeakable, that any thing cannot be named.
As I walk I pass skins that have been cut off at the waist or thorax, that have had large sections hacked out of them, stolen by looters, and I wonder. They might have been here any time in the last fifteen thousand years. These were the pharaohs of their day, the great chieftains and shamans of the paleolithic era. There were no riches in the sense of gold or jewels, no artifacts more precious than the things the dead themselves had now become. But they were enough, and somewhere now, out there, I wonder if there exists some arcane and esoteric text, written in a lost language, on human skin, bound into a book, a book of the names of the dead. I walk on.
The Dead God
It stands at the center of the city, just under an hour’s walk from all the carnage at the doors of hell. The tent is maybe twenty feet in height and stretched out like a spider’s web, but folded over on itself in all the wrong places. The entrance is covered in the thinnest, smoothest skin I’ve ever felt, layers of it, veils. I flick them aside and to the back of me, push through them, in toward the center. There’s a bier of sorts.
He, it, lies on the bleached bone framework—his own bones?—stretched on it by taut sinews and ivory hooks, stretched out in all his glory like some crimson shroud stained with rivulets and splashes of a deity’s scarlet blood. The tattoos are red against red skin—colors of clay, terra-cotta, blood, fire—and they are as much scarification as tattoos. And he is strung. The strings of gut that weave him into the frame of bones vibrate in the breeze, resonating with some distant sound. I feel the chords resonating in my own guts, fear and fury. I’m afraid to even speak because I wonder if that language so pure, so precise that it rewrites the thoughts of those who hear it, might rewrite reality itself.
