by Hal Duncan
I don’t have to look at the name on his face to know that this is the first murderer and the first rebel, the first among these mortal angels, the first to declare himself above all else, to turn on those around him and, with his own name, carve a terror into their souls that was beyond all reason. I’m only glad that where I’ve read his name transcribed by Hobbsbaum or by a poor stenographer, it had been done poorly, incompletely, lacking the pitch and stress, lacking the cold precision of its full saurian grandeur. I’m glad that when I look upon the symbols scarred into his forehead, all I know of it is the transcription /hyawve/, only the skin of the word, the bones, and not the flesh. Yahveh or Jehovah, the Jewish God? Jove or Jupiter, the name for the Deus that Aeneas brought with him in his flight from fallen Troy on Anatolia’s shores, to Rome? Or Japheth, Noah’s son, who lived in the time of the flood? Iapetus the Titan, father of Prometheus? All these are only approximations, corruptions of the original, echoes of the true name. Language changes over time, and maybe that’s a good thing.
A small scrap of paper lies on top of this creature called /hyawve/, placed there by my grandfather perhaps, or Hobbsbaum; but it’s blank, the silence of it somehow strange within this world of words that whisper themselves inside you even when you don’t know quite just what they mean. I’ve read translations, rough transcriptions, but I’ve never learnt the system, the simple phonetic key that makes the words themselves come clear. And even despite this I can feel the language, like a quiet presence at the back of my head, the rattle and hiss of a coiled snake.
I find it hard to describe exactly how I feel, standing here. Before I came here, I spent some time researching, amongst all of this, the life of Samuel Hobbsbaum after his 1921 expedition to “Aratta.” As my grandfather had written in his journals, the professor never published another word, from that day on. However, the Nazi archives in East Berlin revealed that when he was seized in 1940 he had in his possession a “manuscript of over a hundred pages or more, handwritten.” I’ve seen perhaps twenty or so of these, sent to me by Strang upon his death. The rest of it—I don’t know where it is.
So I stand there looking at the skin of a dead god, at the blank paper on top of it. I listen to the sound of the quiet breeze, and I can hear in it the whisper of the language, the resonances and echoes. If a sound can have a shape, the song-script of Kur is sound made flesh.
Hobbsbaum did die in a concentration camp, as Strang had told my grandfather, my namesake, Mad Jack Carter. What he didn’t say—or what my grandfather didn’t write down perhaps—is that sometime after the ’21 expedition, Hobbsbaum had traveled to the Far East, where he received some exquisite tattoo work from an oriental master of the art form. According to those who had seen it, they were beautiful but abstract, fine graceful curving lines, dots and circles. One person I talked to compared them to Feuillet notation, used by choreographers to “write down” a dance. But everybody that had seen them remembered them.
I can hear the word, the breath, the frictions and aspirations now. I can hear it all through the cave, and I realize now that I’ve been hearing it every step of my journey, the tension of it, the menace, the threat. I realize I’ve been hearing it all my life.
His Tattooed Skin
Hobbsbaum was interred in Auschwitz in July of 1941, receiving the prisoner number 569304 tattooed on his left forearm. His actual death is not recorded, but we can reconstruct it—the way the Nazis stripped their prisoners of everything they owned, even gold teeth, the way they took a person apart, spiritually as much as physically. There were tables covered in wallets, tables covered in watches, rooms filled with shoes. If he managed to survive the day-to-day ordeal eventually he would have been stripped naked one final time and gassed and burned. There is a strong possibility, though, that somewhere in that process, he would have received “special treatment.” His tattooed skin would have been flayed from his body to be tanned, preserved, and perhaps made into a lampshade.
I still don’t know what happened to my grandfather, my namesake.
I touch the skin of the dead god only lightly and the tone of its low hum tightens, heightens. If a sound can have a shape, this is the twisted vortex of a distant tornado. If a shape can have a sound, does making that sound reshape the world? That sound, that faint echo of another Jack Carter’s voice reading out the name of God—I think that if I spoke it here and now the world itself might peel apart, shedding the skin that hides the flesh and bones beneath. And if a shape, a sound, can have a meaning, an emotional meaning, then this thing, this skin, this sound it makes all through the Kur and all through my body, is dread—or rather, something far subtler and far more complicated that can only be compared to dread.
So can I put into words what I feel now looking down at this fleshless intricated skin? Horror? Yes, but not the horror of the unspeakable, the unnameable. I think my horror is of the things that must be said, the things we have to face, to name so that we’re not consumed by them. Some things, my grandfather wrote, are better left unsaid. Some things though, I would say, cannot be left unwritten.
I can only say I stand in Hell now and I can hear the song of every damned and dying soul who ever breathed their last breath in unbounded terror, from the paleolithic to the present, and it frightens me, knowing that when I leave this place, like my grandfather before me, I will carry it with me. And maybe it will haunt me, drive me mad like the rest of them. But I know this much. I will not leave that sound unwritten.
Jack Carter
Kur, 1999
Errata
Over the Pit of Skulls
“Look,” I say eagerly, snapping my fingers in Puck’s wandering gaze to draw his attention back to the matter in hand. The Book lies open over the steel grille that I’ve placed back over the pit of skulls, after laying the skulls in there to rest again, for want of any better idea. There doesn’t seem much purpose in giving them individual burials, mouthing empty words over these strangers’ remains; at best they’d have a shallow grave, alone and unmarked, so it seems somehow more fitting to lay them back in the crypt they came from, where they at least have meaning among the multitudes beneath.
“Look at the contours here, these little squiggles on every fifth one. Those are obviously height markings. You can see it better here.”
I flip forward a couple of pages to the map that shows Oblivion’s Mount pretty much in its entirety. The numbers on the maps, although they transform in script in tune with the terrain, looking pseudo-Cyrillic here or almost-Arabic there, have always been fairly easy to translate. It doesn’t take much work to relate the markings to the ups and downs of one’s surroundings, order them into linearities, reckon out the numeric bases of the systems. It may take a while but what do we have here in the Vellum if not time?
“See how the numbers increase with each contour as you move in toward the center.”
“Amazing,” says Puck. “You mean it’s a…map?”
I glare at him.
“Yes. But the map is wrong,” I say.
And I start to point to the discrepancies. There aren’t that many of them, to be sure, but they’re there—a ridge that juts out where it shouldn’t, a valley with sides a little steeper than they should be. They’re so minor that I had written them all off as simply products of the layer of garbage beneath us being deeper here or there, masking the true shape of the land. It is the numbers that are wrong.
“You see, as you move in toward the center the numbers go up in leaps and bounds, bigger and bigger. I thought it was just a matter of them using a strange scale, but I’m not so sure now. Who knows why? I’ve come across some strange numbering systems in these pages. This one’s rather similar to Sumerian hexadecimal at first sight, multiple bases, six and sixty, three hundred sixty and—”
He whirls a finger in the air—get on with it.
“They’re damn well exponential,” I say. “The numbers go up exponentially, and this little symbol here, right on the summit of Oblivion’s Mount, is not s
ome bloody triangulation point, as I bloody well thought; it’s the bloody symbol for infinity.”
Puck looks up toward the summit of the mountain. As hulking and monstrous as it is, Oblivion’s Mount is not that tall.
“And this little symbol here,” I say “the one on top of all the numbers—that’s a negative sign.”
And Puck and I both look at each other and then slowly look down, thinking about the very big hole under our feet.
Dusk on Oblivion’s Mount
“It might be full,” I say.
“It’s a fucking bottomless pit,” says Puck. “How can it be full?”
We ride full tilt along the ridge, cart rattling our bones and bouncing us side to side and up and down as I skitter my gloved fingers like a madman at a piano, driving the waldo-wing-things forward as fast as they can go. I can’t help thinking with the grotesque and gothic quality of our clattering cart, it’s like some Transylvanian carriage ride away from Dracula’s castle.
“Well, there are different levels of infinity,” I say. “So the pit is infinitely deep. You’d need an infinite amount of crap to fill it, and putting that in piece by piece would take an infinite amount of time, so the pit should, theoretically, never be full.”
“So it can’t be full? You said it might be full.”
Jack howls as he runs behind us, leaping from hump to hummock, hurdling bushes and dodging trees, skittering straight down slopes we have to navigate; I don’t know how he manages to keep up with us, but he does.
“But suppose you have an infinite amount of worlds and all of them are producing infinite amounts of crap, and all of them are putting it in piece by piece; well, that means there’s an infinite amount of garbage going in at the same time. So then it doesn’t take any time at all to fill the pit up.”
“So it is full?” says Puck.
The cart skids on scree as I take a hairpin bend at speed. The mountain is directly east of us now and we head pretty much due west. It will take us days out of our way but it will take us days to get the pit out from under us even at this speed. It would be nice to think that the pit was full.
I’m thinking of the otherworlds of the Vellum—the Veldt of Evenings, Oblivion’s Mount, the Rift, the Bay of Afternoon. All the tiny villages and vast cities, the archipelagos of continents that I’ve been traveling in so long that I have no idea, I suddenly realize, how old I am anymore. Christ, how long has Puck been with me? I’ve often considered the possibility that the Vellum is not so much eternity as the sum of all possible eternities, like all the heavens we might want are here as well as all the hells that we might fear, it’s just that no one’s actually in charge of making sure we end up in the right place. So maybe all these eternities have all dumped their garbage in the bottomless pit under Oblivion’s Mount, and we’re panicking needlessly.
“So it is full?” says Puck.
“Well…”
“No. Not well. No well. I don’t want to hear well.”
“It might be full,” l say, “but there should still be room for more.”
I try to explain that, well, see, if the hole is full then that means that there’s garbage, say, one foot down, and two feet down, and three feet down, all the way down. But if that garbage were to all drop down to double its depth, suddenly, like—if the garbage one foot down drops to two feet down, and the garbage at two feet down goes to four feet down, and so on, well then you have room for another whole infinity of garbage, and because the pit is infinitely deep, well there’s nothing to say that it couldn’t do that.
Ahead of us, the sun is setting, burning on the horizon of the Veldt like a bushfire, while behind us dusk gathers in twilight-gray mist and purpling sky and black clouds, around and behind Oblivion’s Mount, like an army called to its colossus of a general, preparing to advance.
seven
ZEUS IRAE
OF MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD
“Wait. Please, now,” says Maclean and “thank you, thank you,” as they settle down. “I’d like to say again how much of an honor it is to have Ms. Pankhurst and Ms. Messenger here with us to speak tonight. As you’ll all know, there’s few has worked as hard in the cause of universal suffrage as Ms. Pankhurst, so I’ll do what’s right, right now, and hand the floor to her without more song and dance.”
The crowd applauds again and Ms. Pankhurst steps forward to the podium on the small stage of the Labor Club, looking down at the area that’s filled to the brim so it is with the folk sitting on all the folding metal chairs and standing round the edges and the back. A sea of people, it is, and Seamus only wishes he could drown in it because all he can do is look at Anna standing up there on the stage behind Ms. Pankhurst and hope she doesn’t see him. He’s too close to the front, standing here at the side of the hall, behind the fellow in the flat cap. Hand shoved in his jacket pocket he fiddles with a box of matches, like an embarrassed child kicking sand under his feet.
“First let us hear this woman,” says Ms. Pankhurst, “tell her tale of her terrible fortune.”
“Then let her learn the rest of her trials from you,” the bitmites hiss in Seamus’s ear. For a second, the Labor Club flickers, shimmers.
Shut up, he thinks. Yer not fookin real. This is what’s fookin real.
Pankhurst is speaking quiet words of sympathy, encouragement, to Anna.
“It is your place to do this, for all the sisters under the same patriarchal yoke, and for all the other reasons. Remember, it may be worth the pain, even to weep again for your misfortunes, when to do so teaches sympathy to those who hear.”
And Anna nods, quiet and nervous, steels herself she does, and Seamus sees the spark in her he always saw, as she steps forward.
“I don’t know how,” she says, “how I can find the strength to trust you with this, but I shall try to give you all you ask for in plain speech, though I’m ashamed even to speak of it, that…storm sent by the saints above. And how it swept away all my decorum.”
And Anna tells the crowd about her fine upstanding English Army officer—a gentleman, he was, a hero of the Great War with his noble bearing and stiff upper lip. Seamus listens, pushed back against the wall. He doesn’t really hear all that she’s saying though, as he’s too busy remembering it the way she told him on the beach at Inchgillan.
“O, Seamus, he sent me messages night after night, and when I read them I could hear his voice moving about my room, as if he softened me with his smooth words. Seamus, you have to understand.”
O greatly happy maid, he’d written, why be a maid forever when the highest marriage could be yours to take. A Duke’s heart has been warmed by you, by love’s dart, and wants only to be one with you in love; Anna, my child, my dear, my dove, do not disdain the bed of Dukes. Go out to Lerna’s meadows, to the stables of your father’s fine estate, and I will meet you there, only to see you Anna, that the eye of this Duke may be eased in its desire.
With such messages she was distressed each night, until…
Until one day she found herself pregnant and her fine fiancé lost on some damnfool boy’s own adventure in the middle of nowhere.
ARGUS-EYED HUMANITY
“I dared to tell my father of the dreams that plagued my night, and all I dreamed of was the same as any young lass dreams, marriage and motherhood.”
And she was foolish, yes, and she should never have let him do that to her, should have waited, yes, she should have waited, but she had the ring on her finger—just not the right finger—and—and she had looked at Finnan there on the beach, the cold wind whipping his hair across his face and bringing tears to his eyes—and she said, “It wasn’t the first time, was it, Seamus?”
But Enoch Messenger had tried to make things right, to do right by his daughter, even though she’d brought such shame upon them. He had tried to track down Carter’s family or friends, this noble hero’s roots. But he’d found nothing. He sent letter after letter to the man’s commanding officer, to friends or colleagues that he’d mentioned, scatter
ed far afield, as far as Pytho and the oaks of the Dordogne, that he might learn what it was necessary he should say or do, to do right by the lords of tradition. But they came back with dark, ambiguous and indistinctly uttered riddles. Her fiancé had not been heard of, hide nor hair.
“Till finally,” she says, “a plain report came back, as clear and sharp as any order given to an army underling, telling my father that my shame was mine alone. A fine upstanding man, an officer and a gentleman, why he would never, never…I was a liar, so they said, and if it was the reputation of his family my father cared for, he should do as any good man would and send away his shame, expel me from my home and country, if he didn’t want to see his family’s good name…wiped out.”
So she was sent away to have her child—“to wander to the earth’s ends,” Seamus hears the bitmites say, and as he looks at her onstage he has a vision. He sees Anna as she is now but with images of other selves laid over her, like reflections in a window that she stands behind. He sees a slightly younger girl but with the same red hair and freckled face, wearing a sort of zipped-up leather jacket like a man’s, a pilot or a motorcyclist’s; and there’s another Anna who again is different, this one dressed in a simple robe of white, some Grecian maid of olden days. He sees her as a triple being, past, present and future. Seamus blinks and rubs his eyes. He squeezes his eyelids shut, his fingers squeezing the bridge of his nose, trying to force the old nerve trouble back down into the depths of him where it belongs. When he opens his eyes, the world is normal again, without the whispering ghost images of his turns pressing in on him the way they do. He’s calm.
