The Vorrh tv-1

by B Catling

  The map should have been informative and authoritarian, but its poor execution ensured that it had the opposite effect. It looked like a lost insect had fallen into the cartographer’s inkpot, crawled out and made its bedraggled route across the paper.

  Seil Kor put his finger on the largest of the lines that faded away to blankness and said, ‘This will be our way.’

  His finger rested in a small grey crater, almost a hole in the map, where countless other pilgrims had indicated their journey in the same manner.

  They stepped outside and smelt the air, looking at the clear, even sky before turning onto the track. Behind them, three of their fellow passengers, insignificant until now, stood staring at the map, one with his finger on the same indentation identified by Seil Kor. The Frenchman saw this, and increased their pace into the waiting forest.

  * * *

  I have been forced to kill one man and wound another, for their attempts to trap, rob or assassinate me. I have truly left the sanctuary of our home behind, as I wade back into the ways of men.

  Este is strong and forthright at my side. When I carry her, slung against my back, I feel her touch, ebbing through the rocking bow, feel her fingers on my spine, her palm between my shoulder blades. She whispers continually and spots my foes, hiding in the trees, or across the river. Together, we have seen the one who follows; a tall, dark-clad man, who looks like a shadow. He keeps his distance, but is in some way attached. She says he is the most dangerous, but we will be safe in the Vorrh: he will not dare to enter the great forest.

  I begin to recognise this country where I have never been: small corners, tricks of light and sound; odours that find recess in me, a cup to sit in for a second or two; enough to weigh down an indentation, an impression; the echo of a memory that is not there, or should not be.

  I have stayed close to the river and found a boat to take me into the trees. The boatman is called Paulus. He is of unknown age, haggard from travel and nightmares, worn out by strong drink and imagination. He tells me stories of gins he has made, complex mechanisms that try to mimic the sounds he has heard while sleeping on the water in the Vorrh. He is an easy companion, because he asks nothing of me; I must only be his sounding board.

  He is the only one who navigates these waters, taking his boat, The Leo, alternately powered by wind, muscle and steam, further and further into the core and further from the voices and ears of men. In this, we have much in common, and the small, objective part of his racing brain that still exists knows it, and thinks it well. I ask him how far the river will take us, and whether it is possible to pass through to the other side. He does not know, but thinks he has been deeper and stayed longer than any other could claim to.

  He explains that he suffered from narcolepsy from an early age, but that it ceased when he first entered the Vorrh. Now, he stays here and makes continual trips, to balance his malady. He says that the water is in sympathy with renegade sleep; it protects him from being rubbed out and made transparent by the voices of the beings that he hears. This is not reassuring, but his commitment is. He promises to go with me until the river runs out, to the place where it is swallowed back into the earth or climbs the mountains. He says there will always be new sounds for him, that they have become his food. I do believe this is true. In the four days that we have travelled, he has eaten almost nothing, only picking at the fish I have caught and cooked from the vast abundance that lives here. He drinks much. ‘To dream’, he says, ‘to fold at the bottom of the well and listen’. He drinks until he cannot speak. His scarlet-veined eyelids work independently, like slow spoons attempting to sagely wink and taste the passing night. Yet each morning, when I awake, he is already at the engine, preening it into life.

  I discover that ‘the cooling system’, a tangle of brass and copper pipes that sits above the boiler, is in fact a still. His fastidious care of it suddenly makes more sense, and I am left to wonder whether the boat’s engine is as reliably maintained as his alcohol supply. Paulus had come here from the lowlands of Europe, the depression where Germany meets Holland and Belgium. He had been a Kahnführer on the mighty Maas, an industrious bargeman, pushing every cargo through the then-neutral, neighbourly lands, before the Great War. But that was half a century ago. He never says why he left, and becomes vague when his motives for being here are questioned.

  Paulus only once asks me about the bow and why I do not use it to hunt or fish. I explain that it is not for use, being frail and of unsure design. He accepts this, and we change the subject back to his inventions. He tells me of another gin[1] he once saw; not his invention this time, but a gin that projected light, chopped into pieces to coincide with blinks, so that an impression of movement was achieved. Always the same movement, endless. The same woman on the same stairwell, taking the same three steps, continuously; a horse running to nowhere; a naked patriarch, swinging an axe. He says the more one watches, the more their time becomes real, and the watcher’s time leaks out, becoming insignificant, the same as watching the water for too long.

  I can see that shadow play written on a wall. It matches our movement as we edgily drift on this monotonous tide. I feel my body recognise the spaces between the significant throbs of life, as if it has been cut into sections and rejoined in a crooked line, cut on a rough surface with a dull blade, and spliced together with the wrong glue.

  By the fifth day, I am detached from the boat. Discorporate, I can see him, her and us from the trees, as if a bird has framed the boat’s path between branches, high in the wooden trellis, close to the sky.

  Paulus is no longer talking, and spends more time watching the river ahead. His loose expectation is infectious, and we both look at the tiny horizon, guillotined in the moving trees. She holds my hand from the end of passage, as the ‘I’ of me is shaken loose, absorbed by meeting the other, who was born here.

  Unexpectedly, the river straightens, making a long, unflinching channel, without bends or turns. He says it is like the canals of the Maas, that he has never been this far in before. The engine chugs and propels us just above the speed of the water; the surface is clear and highly reflective. As evening unfolds, we become mesmerised by the forest, which grows from the water and rises up to the clouds, ploughing down into its depths in absolute sameness; a perfect symmetry, unwound in perfect perspective. Nothing changes for hours; the dusk moves slower than our eyes, and we are pulled into the glimmering reflection without any sense of self. We are dissolved.

  Both men had lost their selves. Such is the price of all trespass: clever men and dolts give it up with joy; others struggle and claw against it, burning their hand bones to hooks, until fatigued or abased to nothing.

  The boat turned grey and the men glowed in the vespertine current. The Bowman gave his voice to the waters as his name floated into the branches, and his brain-tree turned to match those in the inverted sky, which was brimming with shy stars. The boatman thought of a new type of gin, a kind of water weaver, a loom for folding the sea. His imaginings brought the angels in. They awoke to the density of such trespass, to the vibration of the mechanism of thought, even when the idea it produced was of little consequence.

  They came in with awareness and observed with caution, seeing the selves float against the stream, away from the men. The angels kept their distance, for fear of being caught in the amber of the human auras. Sticky sunlight stuff, not made for here, and shedding profusely.

  * * *

  Seil Kor raised his hand at the end of the journey along the three-hour track.

  ‘We must turn here,’ he said. ‘Either back, or to the right.’ His body strained towards the right, one foot already on the track.

  The Frenchman looked up into his friend’s gleeful face. ‘I think we are going right,’ he said.

  They headed down the narrow path, wanting more of the wonders they had already seen. The day was unpredictable, but the allure was worth a dark return. They had witnessed the flowing winds of the Vorrh, long, singing currents of turbulence t
hat flew and rippled between the contoured ground and the vast canopy of still leaves. Its profound, limited hurricane was still in their lungs, the cleanest air ever breathed; sharp as lime, soft as new snow. It bore youth and purity in its rushing particles, setting the eye clean and level. When it first hit the Frenchman, he choked, as the corruptions of the cities and his own store of malice were dredged from his tarry crux. Scales fell from his cemented being, and he gave up all in a cough. There were no words to glue the two friends’ experience together; it was all shared, in moments that existed forever.

  They entered a small clearing that felt virgin, untouched – the animals and plants seemed surprised to see them, and dropped their normal attention, their continuum, to acknowledge the presence of the strangers, before vanishing into the sound of parting leaves. Seil Kor walked ahead and into the middle of the clearing, looking intently at the ground.

  The Frenchman examined the perimeter and was amazed to find dozens of tracks leading away from the space. They were regular, but overgrown, like paths leading out from the centre of a clock face. The path at four o’clock was the widest, as if made by a beast much larger than the others. He assumed the assortment of animals had come from various directions to drink or eat at the clearing, but he could find no trace of water or food, nothing that might obviously attract them. He turned to his friend, and found him standing in the middle of the space, a yellow book in his hand: here was the answer. He walked over to the black man, who was gleaming blue in the mottled light and wore an expression of agitation tinged with magnitude.

  ‘Seil Kor?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’

  ‘This is the place,’ the black man said quietly. ‘I was here before. This is where he lived.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Saint Antonius,’ he said, barely whispering. ‘See the ground, look! There is still a scar of his shelter.’

  The Frenchman’s eyes examined the space, which did seem to have an indentation, or a scar. It looked like the rectangular footprint of a hut or small house, drawn in the plant growth of discolouration, faint and without significance. He might have walked straight across it without noticing anything was there.

  ‘This is where he lived, centuries ago; his simple home was in this place.’

  ‘How do you know?’ questioned the Frenchman, uneasily.

  ‘This is the place I told you about, that my father brought me to, when I was young; he told me the story, showed me the signs, just before I was confirmed into the true faith. We prayed here together that day.’ Seil Kor looked at his friend. ‘This is why I agreed to come with you here, so that you might touch this sacred place and see the way. We can pray together here. That is why I brought you.’

  The Frenchman was astonished with this revelation. He felt a shiver of anger against his friend, an emotion he thought he had shed, something that felt most out of key in this place. The moment was a towering mistake that shuddered louder than the trees and longer than the metal rail that brought them here, to the centre of nowhere.

  ‘I came to see the forest,’ he said, with controlled limpness.

  Far too quickly, Seil Kor answered, ‘This is not a place for seeing, for curiosity! Nor is it a place to be observed and then forgotten. It is sacred and all-knowing, men must give themselves here, sacrifice some part or all of themselves. You cannot walk in and out as you please; it is not a park, or a city garden.’

  There was a pause, when only the ringing in their ears was present, sounding the sudden iron in their distance. The jaw locks at such moments, as if waiting for the noise and hurt to stop resounding. The animals and birds that first held the clearing had long since departed, the rising tidal wave of conflict driving them out through the trees. Seil Kor’s next words were far too loud, but they snapped the tension.

  ‘I told you, journeys here are limited; this will be my last and I give it to you. I have never met a more needy man. I bring you for salvation, it is your only chance.’

  He then knelt, opened the book, and began to read out loud; the book was of vellum and loosely bound. He read about Eden, after the expulsion; it was a different version of Genesis that the Frenchman had not heard, dense with local details and obscure references. His patience waned; he was disappointed by his friend’s motivations. Their expedition had been spoiled for him, turned into a grotesque, evangelical ruse, a trick to convert him to a gibbering Christianity of Old Testament nonsense. He turned his back and walked out of the clearing, leaving the droning voice to recite the names of angels. He would wait for him at the station and there explain his inbuilt resistance to this kind of thing.

  He marched down the track, talking under his breath, rehearsing all the lessons he would have to teach Seil Kor if their friendship was to last. Low vines and abundant foliage dragged at his ankles as he stormed through, and he faltered on pebbles and flat stones that had gone unnoticed on their smooth, leisurely walk here. He pushed harder against the path and its growing resistance, all the while muttering his embarrassment of the situation. The dialogue stopped when the track ran out. He stood, silent, eyes wide open, staring at the blank wall of vegetation before him, at the end of this, the wrong track. A tiny trickle of panic sped coldly through his blood. Looking around, he heard his own laboured breathing. He struggled to see the track he had just walked, though he had not deviated from it, and stood on it still. He knew he must control the moment. Closing his eyes, he tried to remain calm, laying his hand on his heart and letting his blood flood the fear away. He opened his eyes to an impenetrable jungle. Slowly, he began to walk back the way he thought he had come, expecting at any moment that the path would clear and become smooth and straight like before, that it would blossom out onto the chanting Seil Kor and the way home. But his footsteps led him to the trunk of a vast, dark tree, the path ending in the way that paths never do. He turned with his back to the tree and stared into the tangled forest, dread now rising like fumes from its pathless floor.

  Over the next tangled decade, which must only, in fact, have been hours, he shouted and called until his voice ran out. He had walked in all directions, seeking a path or a sign, but there were only trees and the growing wind. Surely his wise friend or one of the workers would find him? Even the Limboia would be a welcome sight. He thought he heard calling and had hurried towards it, but it had faded back into the other sounds, leaving him no closer to an escape.

  He was irretrievably lost, with very few provisions, the main bag being in Seil Kor’s possession. He stopped to ferret in his shoulder bag, expecting to find hope, along with solution, in its cramped interior. Instead, he found the secreted Derringer, loaded, and with two extra bullets in the snug of its holster. He could afford only one to signal his position; the others he would need for protection. God knows what horrors lived in this matted place; he had seen the paintings, had heard the tales.

  He took the little gun out, carefully cocked it and held it above his head. He fired into the sky, or where the sky must be, on the other side of tons of leaves. The sound stopped the quiet and gave him silence back for a moment. He bellowed ‘SEIL KOR!’ with the last cracked and serrated edges of his voice. Then the quiet gushed back in, carrying the small foam of a sound: the long distance whistle of the train. It seemed miles away and unfocused, without direction. For a few moments, he thought it must be in response to his signal, that they had heard the report of his gun from this dismal patch, determined his whereabouts and begun their search. Then it sounded again, and in its reverberation he heard movement – it was leaving the forest, laden with wood and a few exhausted passengers, and he had been left behind, forgotten, maybe never seen at all. All those who cared and knew he existed were in another time and place, all except the one he had walked away from and would now never find. His legs buckled and he slumped against the ancient tree, sliding down into the hard, veined nest of its serpentine roots.

  * * *

  The jaw now worked in a sideways motion. The Wiseman who had performed the repair was a healer name
d Nebsuel, who lived in the outcast isles, just inside the mouth of the great river. Tsungali had visited him on his way into the Vorrh.

  Nebsuel possessed a great knowledge of the body, of its fluids and lights. His services could be bought, but were better given. He was not a kind man; he did not apply his knowledge for the wellbeing of others. He performed surgery and operated the chemistry of plants to see further inside the workings of the human animal. His true ambition was to isolate the gum that joins flesh to mind, and mind to spirit. His tools and procedures for such work were simple. He would divide and subtract, add and multiply the pain and its relief, while probing the interior of structure and sensation. He was not a man to be taken lightly, and Tsungali knew he might be killed or rearranged by his practices. He also knew that if he did not get help soon, his jaw might never heal. Starvation and blood poisoning seemed a far worse conclusion than Nebsuel’s intrusions.

  The outcast isle had been a leper colony. Nebsuel’s family had lived there and suffered the relentless disease, but he had not. Some potent resistance in him had kept him ‘clean’, while he watched all around him suffer. He had seen how the outsiders had treated his family and friends; on trading expeditions to the outside world, he had witnessed open disgust and cruelty against his loved ones.

  How he became a Wiseman was not known, but the legends were thick and terrible. Some said he cut open all the dead of the isle and read the complex tales of their mechanisms; others said he travelled away, to collect the wisdom from many tribes, some from beyond the sea. He was rumoured to commune with forbidden spirits, and unspeakable creatures that came to trade knowledge for the souls of men he kept in jars. None of the reports could be confirmed, and they grew more fantastical in their ambiguity. But his powers of healing were not so unclear. They were the only thing about him that was certain, and they were worth the risk of contamination and agony.