The Cloven

by Brian Catling

  Now she staggered back, shaking the low altar in her haste. She rushed from the temple hut with the excitement of a girl, bursting into the breeze and sound of sea, its low waves rejoicing with the bright palm leaves and the fluttering birds. She shrieked and turned towards the village and sang out with all her might that he was near. He was alive and near. At last returning. Everyone ran towards her and looked in every direction for a sight of the sacred one returning.

  * * *

  Sidrus was out of their range but moving towards them. He had left his canoe in the mangroves and was now on foot. The matted roots and swollen mud made it impossible to paddle forward, so the land was the only way. He did not trust it and had the Mars pistol stuck in his belt and his machete in his hand. His eyes flickered ahead watching for movement. He could smell the sea and knew he would find his bearings when he reached the coast.

  The scouting party heard him approaching, cutting through the bush. They stopped and waited, crouching in the spindly grass. They carried a charm Tyc had given them, a delicate contrivance of substance that held the power of the entire tribe. It twitched in the young warrior’s fingers, matching the footfall of the approaching stranger. Sidrus walked into their midst without ever sensing their presence. They all stood up together, holding their arms and spears above their heads, laughing and saying the words of welcome.

  Sidrus snatched the gun out of his belt, cocked it and aimed it point-blank into the chest of the first warrior before him. In a quick stab the young man pushed the charm snugly into the pistol’s massive bore. Sidrus pulled the trigger. The gun roared. Its horse-stopping power was no match for the twisted strands of leaves and fair human hair. The pistol’s heavy slide bucked back against the restraining bolts and sent them asunder. The shock wave travelled down into the slenderest part of gun and wrenched the trigger guard away, its brutal velocity and brittle snapping hardness ripping off two of the fingers of the hand that held it. The slide of the breach kicked through Sidrus’s abdomen and disconnected his solar plexus, the last membranous web that had held Williams, the Bowman, trapped inside. It continued and shattered his spine, crushing him out of consciousness.

  They carried the broken man back into the core village of the Sea People and placed him before the wise woman. Tyc placed her wrinkled hands over the body. Every inch of her visible skin was tattooed. Many of the designs had lost their sharpness and definition. Age had folded and smudged the insignia while increasing the power of their meaning. She was annoyed by the wounds that he had sustained but was too busy to apportion blame and the necessary punishments. Greater meanings were at hand. She had no doubt that Williams was here, but he was enfolded in the bleeding, wounded body of another. All her skills would be needed. She must release the sacred one from its imprisonment inside this other man, the soul of which she knew was cantankerous and vile. But right now the sacred one needed the blood and the nerves of this monster to stay alive. She must stitch and pray him back into health. So she began on what remained of the right hand, finding that miraculously the three remaining digits still worked. She bound up the other wounds and structured some of the circulation back into function. The splintered spine she could not touch. There were no painkillers in her wide arsenal to quieten its fury; every time her fingers slipped into its disaster zone, the body shook and screeched in agony. She had it strapped down against movement and never again attempted to heal that part of its damage, hoping that in time it would settle and heal over. She and the tribe would have to wait for some primal healing before the true cleaving could finally take place.

  Tyc and her neophytes and servants constructed an elaborate frame that worked as a series of adjustable splints and resting platforms, so that the shattered body that held Williams could not move and damage itself further. Feeding and bodily waste could thus be dealt with in a more convenient way. The device also functioned as an altar. Once the body had healed closed, Tyc would start the complex and exhausting work of speaking to the sacred one trapped inside the foreign devil. She intended to enter his unconscious condition and awaken him to gain direction on how the other might be peeled off. The rot and vileness dissected. The Sidrus part eliminated.

  * * *

  Sidrus awoke in the middle of a star-filled night, a warm breeze flowing over his near-naked body, which ached intolerably. He tried to move but nothing happened. He closed his eyes again and opened them more slowly. The same result. He squeezed them tight shut and clicked them open and shut like a camera, as if to paddle away the bad dream with his lids, but it would not go. His head was fixed down and felt strange, as if it had been extended upwards, elongated like a snake egg. A cold, bald, fragile one. His body was also immobile. He was restrained or paralyzed, and he could not tell which because he could not move his head and catch sight of the rest of his body. He could only stare straight up at the infuriating sky. He remembered nothing and feared the worst. He closed his eyes again. He could hear the sea. He was not in the Vorrh. He opened his eyes again. Of course, the sky was so big because there were no trees to obscure it. He became aware of the taste of fish in his mouth. Who had been feeding him and why? His tongue and mouth felt burnt and dry, and his voice sat in the middle of it like a bald chick in an empty, prickly nest.

  “Help me,” he feebly said. “Help me.”

  There was stirring beneath him and to his left side. Suddenly a face entered his vision. The face of a young boy. He instantly noticed how large and white and mercifully unfilled the youth’s teeth were. The boy ran away shouting, and he waited and prayed for survival or a quick death. It must be remembered, however, that the Sea People are a patient folk, and Sidrus would be given neither.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After any execution, the city always became a party, and it was no different after Ishmael’s.

  The great theatre was over and the city and its horde sank back into normality and quiet. The mechanical tree and the wooden figure of Adam were disconnected from the stark verticality of the state guillotine. The handmade leaves of the tree were lovingly packed away, their wires unhooked and coiled to wait for the next time, when they would turn the velocity of the wind into the tug that would trigger the falling of the blade. The sliding muscles and the locked jaw of Adam’s sculpted face were oiled and reset. The wooden apple extracted from his wooden teeth with a noise like a rusty hinge. All the small sounds had come back after the intimidation of the bellowing crowd and the parties that followed the execution had worn out. The beer halls and street counters did more trade in those few hours than they did for the rest of the year, and the guttural tide of noise had touched the real leaves at the edge of the Vorrh, so far beyond the city wall. Now the tiny fleeting shadows of sparrows and mice darted and pecked at the emptiness of the main square. It had been the greatest spectacle so far, because it had sacrificed a hero on its bloody stage. A man called Ishmael Williams who had saved the city by finding and bringing back its lost workforce. A man who had been held aloft before falling from grace, charged with the butchery of a dancing girl and sentenced to be cut in two in the hunger of the public eye.

  Ghertrude Tulp had left the celebration early and now sat absentmindedly holding the hand of her servant, Meta, in her bedroom in 4 Kühler Brunnen. Ghertrude had lost all perception of Meta. It was only when she touched her that Meta became real, visible and tangible again, and Ghertrude knew this was some kind of perverted miracle, and that its strangeness and mystery now seemed less than any other in this old dark house. The loss of her daughter, Rowena, overshadowed all else. In some way she was able to share the aching hollow of it with Meta, especially after her return from the warehouse on the other side of Essenwald. She had never been there and never wanted to go, but knew that it was tied to her life through Ishmael, the Kin, and even Mutter himself. Nothing had been said after Meta’s return, but Ghertrude knew Meta was also seeking the beloved child.

  Ghertrude held Meta’s hand. This also had the add
ed advantage of heightening the clarity and pitch of the world. They discussed Rowena, and who could have abducted the infant from under their noses. Meta was grinding her teeth and increasing her grip. Ghertrude tried not to think about Ishmael, her former lover, who had just had his head cut off. Meta tried to comfort her companion. The execution had been over for more than an hour now and soon she would release herself and make them both tea. Which would help clear the way to the conversation about the path of the rest of their lives.

  Then they both heard the latch of the street door. Someone was turning a key and coming in. Very quietly. They heard the soft footfall in the hall below and strained to hear more without admitting and acknowledging the fact to each other. The sound stopped for a while, as if whoever was there was also intently listening for their movement.

  It was not Meta’s father; Mutter could never be so careful. His clumping arrival was a long way off spilling in the taverns. Ghertrude’s father also had keys, but Deacon Tulp would never make an entrance like this, and even when creeping he dented the air in a different way.

  The only other person with keys to Kühler Brunnen was Cyrena Lohr and she was defiantly elsewhere, struggling with the traumas of the day.

  The unknown entity below stopped listening and moved through the hall to the basement stair. It was going deeper into the secret parts of the house.

  Ghertrude abruptly jolted into action.

  “I am going downstairs. You must not come, wait for me here. If there is a problem, find Mutter and tell him.”

  Ghertrude moved quietly across the room to the door and the stairs below. The whole house was quiet and bathed in bright energized light. The vast and ragged sky outside was filled with luminous gigantic clouds that rolled soundlessly around the buffeting wind. Each carpeted stair suddenly seemed to have a voice, and she hoped that the active wind that occasionally rattled the house might conceal the sound. She passed the hall stand where she kept the crowbar and retrieved it on her way down. Her hand automatically stretched out to where the key to the basement door was hidden. It was not there. Nobody knew about its hiding place. Nobody went down there anymore except her. The door was open and she stepped through it and descended.

  * * *

  Quentin Talbot had his trembling arm around Cyrena Lohr’s rigid shoulder in the upper room with its view across the square. They both held small glasses of brandy in their limp hands. He wanted to say something to comfort her but could not find the words. She had not cried when Ishmael was decapitated. Even though he was once her cherished lover, the opposite of tears had happened. She had spoken his name once and it was astringent. As if alum had been applied to the moisture of her bountiful soul—the inner shrivelling making her taut, parched, and brittle. She wondered how Ghertrude felt.

  They had both tasted and loved Ishmael’s body and heart, and both been repelled by what should have been his soul.

  She had not even noticed Talbot’s nervous intruding arm, and when she did, she certainly did not want or need it.

  “I have had enough of this place, would you please take me home, Quentin,” she eventually said, standing and putting the untouched brandy down on the silver tray.

  “Yes, of course, this very moment.” His arm sprang back, as if slapped.

  They remained speechless on the drive back to her grand house. She had no intention of inviting him in. She wanted the horrors of this day sealed with him outside her home, until she saw Guixpax standing on the front steps. He looked dishevelled and confused.

  She leapt from the slowing car and called to him as she approached. “Guixpax, what’s wrong, what has happened?”

  His crisp diligence seemed to have been doused in vagueness.

  “The door was open, madam,” he said, explaining nothing.

  She moved past him, with Talbot quickly following. The house seemed normal. She moved from room to room. Everything was the same. Nothing was touched, nothing stolen. She went into the kitchen; the cook and housemaid were asleep at the table—their mop-capped heads resting on sprawled arms. This was most unusual. Cyrena sped back to the hall and then up to her bed and dressing rooms. She removed the concealed jewellery box from its new secure place of hiding. Nothing was gone, nothing had been touched. She quickly checked the other rooms and found them secure and void of intruders.

  Talbot stood with Guixpax in the hall and both looked equally confused.

  “The door was open,” Guixpax said again. His eyes were bleary and his speech was slurred. In any other man this would have been a sign of drink. But with him that was impossible.

  The three of them sat in the living room without any refreshments because the kitchen staff was out cold.

  “This is all most peculiar,” said Cyrena.

  The men nodded. Guixpax was about to explain again about the door when Cyrena announced that she needed rest, which instantly dismissed her companion and sent the old butler back to the kitchen. She saw Talbot to the door.

  “Thank you for being so supportive today, Quentin. I am sorry my homecoming was dramatic and meaningless.”

  He bowed and almost clicked his heels together. The moment he was gone she ran up the stairs to recheck all her possessions, after which she picked up the internal phone and called the garage. It was instantly answered by the chauffeur, who was obviously not under the same influence as the rest. She explained the situation and told him to come over to sleep and guard her house. He grunted a reluctant consent, and she went to bed fully clothed after locking the bedroom door.

  * * *

  —

  By nightfall the big parties were breaking up. The crowds were settling into their clans to continue more serious reveries and talk about the day. Only in the gullies and pits of the Scyles did the bacchanalia remain, where the decadent and downtrodden of all races and tribes and religions interbred and mingled. The noise of their festive parties could be heard well outside the crumbling boundaries of that infested community. The drunken glee shuddered and bellowed by the old city gate where the pale wooden execution suit hung in the cooling breeze, flapping lopsidedly like a crashed gull dangling stupidly from a tree. Only fizzing was heard in the sack where the headless body of Ishmael Williams lay. The porous open weave of the material was already encouraging the reaction between the white lime and the vacant flesh. In the corner of the hastily filled-in pit the wooden masked head lay upside down. Lime and dry earth sucking the cold blood in the darkness.

  * * *

  Farther west the rabble’s songs rattled the windows in the small, almost decent homes ten streets away, where in one Thaddeus sat glumly on his bed looking at his hand-drawn calendar that was pinned on the wall of his narrow room. The machine being in the warehouse had said: Bid your father well, our sympathies we give. His work is ours and five more moons he has to dwell and hereby live.

  Today’s date was one of many that had been circled in red pencil. One of the days that he had calculated might be his father’s predicted last day. He stared at it while the rich smell of homemade oxtail stew levitated up through the thick and absorbent floorboards. Nothing was wrong. His mother was busy and happy. His sister, Meta, even though disturbed by recent events, was back with Mistress Ghertrude. His baby brother, Berndt, was in the front room, stacking and toppling coloured bricks that he could hear fall in the quiet, normal, secure house. And his father? Well, Mutter was where he wanted to be, snugly settled among drinking cronies in a post-execution discussion about the niceties of this particular day compared to all the others. He knew his father was going to really enjoy this one, and it saddened him. But the condemned man probably was as bad as Mutter had said. So why should he care? His father was going to have a happy day and there was nothing on the horizon to suggest his demise.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fifty percent of Anton Fleischer’s plans had been successful. Fifty percent had failed miserably. The problem was that
he did not exactly know the proportional divisions and the positions of their weight and balance. True, the main outcome had been achieved and the lost workforce of the city had been returned, and their previous dwelling of the old slave house was now cramped with their mournful occupancy. But they showed no desire or intent to work, instead spending their time sleeping or staring at the peeling walls.

  Fleischer’s rank in the Timber Guild depended on his scheme to find and return the Limboia to active service. The first part of which had been achieved not by him but by the recently executed murderer Ishmael Williams. He had stolen all the laurels of the expedition before his most unexpected downfall. So great had been his triumph and demise that the glare of it had blinded everyone to the fact that the genesis of the expedition was indeed Fleischer’s original concept.

  Only now when the Limboia refused to work did the guild start to look towards him for an answer to his problem. The secret of Ishmael’s success had died with him. Whatever he had said to them to make the Limboia willingly leave the Vorrh and return was totally unknown. Fleischer’s only answer to the growing monotonous accusations was to busy himself in the day-to-day workings of the constipated system. He had found the kitchen staff and restarted the gruel machine that fed the vacant mass. He had advertised for overseers and a warden to supervise them, desperately seeking anybody who might kick them back into action.

  Fleischer had spent the morning in the slave house looking at each one of the Limboia until he was convinced that these hollow beings had never been men at all. The fearful depressive weight that they gave off like a miasma had saturated him, making all his hopes and previous achievements nothing but limp and insignificant doubts.