“It does not say that in any Bible. Because it does not dare, you have to look elsewhere for a truth that you will understand. The tree was made for trees. Its leaves and branches semaphored the first language, constructed of the spaces made in time and shape, the vivid utterance running between shade and light, wind and rain. And that was only the surface conversation. Deep below, the white roots worked hard to expand their territory and drink from the waters that are so full with the memories of futures and pasts. The root tree is twice the size of its surface self and its contours follow the twigs and branches of those above, forcing the crust of the earth and the forest floor to be the dividing plane. Man was told to keep clear and ignore it. But instead he bit into its fruit. An act of blasphemous stupidity. The first crime between the kingdoms.”
“But Satan caused that crime.”
“Satan caused nothing, he was nothing then, just another kind of Erstwhile, a mistaken failure.”
“But now he is a god and abroad in the world.”
“What makes you say that? What makes you think he ever left the Vorrh?”
“Because he is everywhere now, the cause of evil all over the world.”
Nebsuel spluttered and laughed out loud and then said, “This is why I have separated myself from humanity. Why do you think the Erstwhile call them Rumours? It is they that carried evil out of the forest and have evolved its huge spectrum and power. Satan could never have done that. He is no more or less than gravity, a weak force that is constant in all things. There are worse things to fear than his slender dimension. Have you heard of the Black Man of Many Faces?”
“Yes, but not in detail. I assumed it to be a tribal myth about one of their lost gods.”
“It is not that,” said Nebsuel, an uncomfortable weariness meeting a dread in his voice that seemed to blunt all the previous cut and trust of his diatribe.
“This is a new entity on this earth. A man unwound and remade in the knowledge and likeness of the tree. Something to step forward when the Rumours have gone. The Black Man of the Forest will write the new Bible, and not a trace of wood will be found in its paper nor in its ink. If it has physical form at all, then it can be made only of human skin inscribed with human blood. And it will be buried in the deepest, driest earth, so that its passing will never touch an atom of water and the great memory of the sea will forget everything about the moment of the Rumours.”
* * *
—
Now Nebsuel sat alone. On the other side of Essenwald the cathedral bell sounded the hour. It was hours past the agreed time of Ishmael’s return. Their conversation had dried up before the old wizard had time to explain more about water and its properties of memory and how one of the great unspoken prophesies told about a world without men; all the Rumours obliterated to leave a future where the forest stretched and was imagining in endless time and the oceans, seas, and rivers reinforced all in the distance and depth of its memory.
Ishmael was not coming; he had given up on Nebsuel.
“You must be getting old,” he said out loud to himself and started to prepare to leave. A sadness rumbled inside him as he stretched his bones in the house of his sworn enemy, ready for departure. He looked about the tight rooms as he stood up. This was truly a horrible place, he thought, and he would take nothing from here.
He left the house silently, trying to disperse the clinging image of Ishmael by his side. He had so much more to tell him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sidrus saw Tyc looming above him. He closed his eyes. Seconds later she pulled one open and stared into it, a flaming torch being held close; he could feel its heat scratching his sight. She mumbled something. The flame was gone and he started to move. Not on his own. He floated up and forward on his frame of handcrafted wood, being carried into the row of huts where the ceremony had been prepared and was waiting.
She had been inside him three times before this night. But her rummaging had been confused. She had not found the clear instructions she wanted. His injuries had produced a resonance that distorted her seeking. The unconscious state of the host was also blurring the definitions between him and the secluded sacred one. Tyc had been praying for an awakening and now it had happened. She was ready, shaking off the residue of her sleep, where she had been dreaming of a running horse. She had only ever seen one once, when she was a child. It came with a party of invading forces, who had no real interest in her or her village, they were just passing through into the interior. The rider and the horse had walked in the surf, cooling the animal’s hot hooves. At first she believed that the man and horse where one creature. The horse of her dream was a very different beast. It was made of shadow and flickered as if seen through windy foliage. It was kept captive in a wheel where it ran in circles, its hooves never touching the ground. When the boy had arrived shouting “Mother Tyc!” the horse had vanished as if a flame had been blown out.
The frame was carried into two of the huts that had been restructured into one. It was placed on an angled trestle of the same wood. The eyes of the damaged man were working wildly, as were the flaming torches that illuminated the dancing walls and the hoard of effigies and talismans that looked from there towards him.
“We will wait till dawn this time,” Tyc said to the men who lined the room. She then crossed the space to the frame and placed her rough, lined hand gently on Sidrus’s head. She leaned close to him, but her words were not for Sidrus.
“Very soon, sacred one, very soon we will have you free and in the heart of your people.”
She moved her hand from the forehead to the back of his head, where she had previously removed the bones at the back of his skull. It was there that she squeezed her hand into his brain. Slowly, so as not to tear and injure the soft tissue. The swellings that had distorted his head had occurred because of her intrusions and the softness of his previously diseased anatomy.
Sidrus prayed again to his savage God to whom he had given so much. He had understood nothing of what the hag had said and hated her sickening touch. If ever he slipped this obscene pantomime, he would butcher her, break her idols, and raze the village to the ground. The other inside him was weary and angered by this continual hubris, the bile of which poisoned their shared blood and left him feeling exhausted.
Tyc wallowed out a stream of sung commands as the daylight slanted through the gaps and windows of the long hut. The men who lined the walls standing between the staring deities changed the dirge that they had been singing for days. This one was faster and swayed layer upon layer of sound. Sidrus felt sick as his frame was lifted and turned into the sun. He felt even sicker when Tyc began sliding her hand into his brain. She did it with the very slow caution of a nervous lover, easing her fingers between the folds and layers where she had been before. The limp light that would soon roar filled his eyes with a yellowness that he would never forget.
Tyc knew that Oneofthewilliams was in there waiting, that he was shivering under the brain and sleeping in the long bones, even though they had been dented and bruised. She knew she had to gather and assemble him and that he would know how. Know what could be taken from where and how.
By her hand she had tools made of steel and iron, but most important she had tools made of grass, hair, and feathers. These were the ones that would do the real work after the metal ones had slit the tough fibres. She would feel the whisper lines and be told where to grip and pull the brain apart. To cleave the two minds, one precious beyond gold, the other to be sealed back to boil and rage in its own vile juices.
She needed all the strength she could muster. What she had been asked to do would take at least two days and nights and the fingers of many strong hands, entranced and guided by her. She assembled her assistants and supplies. She took a mouthful of a slimy substance from a sealed jar and put a reed to her lips. The other end she slid into Sidrus’s brain where her hand had been. Slowly she blew the substance into
the folds, knowing that her own charmed mumbled spittle would enhance its potency. When it was absorbed she lay down to sleep, waiting for it to take effect. Some hours later she was awakened by a faint high whistle that seemed to be coming from the prone figure’s eyes. Her helpers had stepped back from the frame, terror seizing them by the throats, their own eyes staring and whatever hair they had standing upright on their shining heads. Now it was time to bind them to her will and begin the operation.
All the signs and omens were right. It was just after midday and the sun outside was ferocious. Everybody in the long village that bit into the contours of the beach and coastline was silent. The day-to-day chores had ceased. The Sea People sat in the shade without speaking. Some smoked palm-leaf cigars, others chewed crimson nuts. Even the children were quiet, infected by the weird concentration of the adults. They listened to the continual murmur of the sea, occasionally looking at parents and elders to check that all was well. The only sound in their world now came from Tyc. She sighed and grunted with the effort of her labours and gave commands to those close by. All were covered in blood and the smell of warm open flesh filled the room, only suppressed by the pungent vehemence of the scorching irons and the high burning note made by their intermittent usage. Cauterisation and the binding spell were the only methods she had to contain the fleeing blood and lymphatic fluids.
At the end of the next day they separated the frame, having to make some new cuts along its axis. The sawdust fell to the hard ground like innocent snow after what had leaked and pumped across it before. The two halves were taken to two separate huts, each with their own attendants. Tyc collapsed and slept for another two days only after giving strict instruction that should anything go wrong she was to be awakened immediately. It was unlikely because great sleeping draughts had been administered. The tribe slowly began to go about its normal daily business of fishing and talking, mending nets and cooking the fruit of the sea. It seemed odd to all of them after the weeks of waiting. The hourly chanting and the smoking sacrifice. Each time any one of them passed either of the huts they could not help but squint inside. Only the very old, with few syllables, averted their eyes completely. Even the great ocean stayed quiet and poised, not allowing the winds to rise and trouble its lingering swell. The fishes flopped into the nets without conflict or struggle as if they too were so engaged in listening that they had not noticed their incidental drowning in the thorny air.
A week or so later chaos broke loose when Williams crawled out of his restraint and dragged himself to the ragged door of the hut. His sleeping attendants quickly lifted his bandaged form and carried him between them into the sun and instantly rising wind. Tyc waddled up from the sands and the children followed her. A great crowd came to meet their saviour and the fact that he was only half a man did not concern them. They were overwhelmed to have him returned, finally to live with them forever.
The occupant of the other hut slept longer and remained passive and silent. There was more to mend and the length of him was now grafted onto bound wood. When he did awake he was unable to sit up because he did not understand the form and asymmetry of what once was his body. So he rolled back and forth on the surface of his world, attracting the attention of his attendants, who heard the shuffling grunts and the rudimentary words (which was good considering he had been given the vocal cords and one of the lungs). The anger that drove him forward identified him clearly as what had been called Sidrus. The wrath and memory had been contained exactly where it could be easily determined. The body that had grown so strong, and renewed into a virile healthiness that could have competed with his brother, was now gone. The bandaged shard was an invented slither nailed to a permanent ingrown splint. He was now a kind of puppet, a scarecrow: a head and rib cage supported by an invented spine and a semi-working leg. A turnip on a stick. With the help of the shy attendants who well understood his evil self, he was propped up dizzily on the frame, which now looked like a rudimentary bed. He twisted his tightly sutured neck and lifted his arm to touch his head. But no arm came to do the work where the ghost one probed. Nothing was there on either side. He no longer possessed arms. He looked down to the numbness in his legs and found he had only one and that it had been modified and changed beyond recognition. They gave Sidrus a new name. He was now Wassidrus, and he was alive and as well as he was ever going to be.
CHAPTER NINE
Up in their Heidelberg garret, V.Ess.43/x and V.Ess.44/x, commonly known as Hinz and Kunz, were sitting in high-backed leather wheelchairs. Their hands and heads were now fully pink with the innocent inflated blush of infants. Their lips, eyelids, ears, noses, and fingernails were yet to develop and take on a more human appearance; these had obtained only a grey crispy quality that seemed more like the rest of their bodies, which still remained in the jet-black atrophy of the forest bog in which they had been found preserved. They enjoyed or endured long days of static silence and long nights of unimaginable sleep, and possibly dreams. Some of the more dedicated night staff had observed movement behind the grey eyelids, indicative of mind activity in slumber. There had been some reports of whispering. But nobody had actually seen or heard them talking. As the months turned into years, Superintendent Capek, the medical administrator of the Rupert the First Retirement Home, became less and less interested in their inactivity. Their attendants, monitoring, and care were running like clockwork and that was the way he liked it. Even the officious Himmelstrup had stopped visiting and sending memos, his Department of Internal Affairs having been renamed and its growing profile in the rapidly changing politics becoming far more important than before. The dawn of the Third Reich came with greater and greater powers being given to Himmelstrup, his powers expanding under his beloved Führer.
All conversation about the disappearance of Professor Schumann had long since ended. That subject was an embarrassment to them all, and Capek suspected that the old meddler had simply died somewhere in London. It would be better for Schumann if he had. Schumann’s mission in London to find another Erstwhile, one that had been fabled to have a voice and a working intelligence, had failed. Patient 126 turned out to be just a lunatic. The other two, Dick and Henry, or whatever their names were, had vanished. Compton, the London overseer of the project, had been attacked and grievously injured. Some said by the decrepit old Jew himself. Himmelstrup found this difficult to believe. Compton had been a large, solid man who could have swatted the frail old man at will. Then there was the dilemma about the money. Schumann had found a way to withdraw the entire allowance he had been awarded to complete his task. Every pfennig had been drained from under Compton’s nose, even before it had been sliced off. Himmelstrup’s immediate response was to send a posse of his elite to find Hector Schumann and drag him back. Himmelstrup knew how to treat such treachery, and his growing power and the evolution of his department into what soon would be called the Gestapo had both the means and the desire. But ultimately his name was pinned to this minor disaster, and it would benefit his ascent to have it known. Fortunately another shift in emphasis was coming from the Führer himself. There were greater issues at stake in Africa than a few shrunken corpses. It was time to unite the German domain in all its colonies. Especially in the vastness of Africa. Finances were changing direction, gaining magnitude and velocity. Best to write off and forget one thieving Jew until after the triumph was achieved.
A week later and Capek’s complacency was dumbfounded and overturned when Hinz and Kunz also vanished from the indifferent scrutiny of his staff and their shuttered attic ward. How would he tell Himmelstrup and what would be the consequences?
During his last infuriated visit, Himmelstrup had mention that all his other researches had paid off and that he had received excellent levels of intelligence about every other subject dealing with Africa. When he was asked why Africa was suddenly so important, he had turned on Capek.
“Because it will be ours soon! We already own four colony states and have control over
the mineral wealth of another three. Africa will be the storehouse for the Reich’s war machine. We are sending troops there now and nothing is in our way.”
“How did Professor Schumann’s contribution help in this conquest?” asked the baffled Capek.
Himmelstrup had no answer because he had no idea. The Führer’s own vision had guided this ridiculous quest. What a few living corpses and a crooked old Jewish professor had to do with mining the wealth out of a continent, he never knew. So he responded in the only way he could and bellowed into the superintendent’s quaking face, “What fucking contribution!”
He then stormed out of the retirement home and had not contacted them again. So perhaps the whereabouts of the “living corpses” was no longer of interest; perhaps Capek did not even have to report the event. The recent news of ships full of troops being sent to Africa had verified everything that the officious little man had said, and his growing rank may have even moved him into a more important position. Capek was beginning to think he was off the hook; then he reminded himself that Hinz and Kunz might be human. In which case his moral Christian duty was to care and, even worse, to set about finding them. Three days later news of their whereabouts came to him via one of the female nurses who had access to the upper floors.
“Standing about on the corner they were, just awaiting like.” She sniffed through a long winter cold, her red nose and wet words snuffling into a soggy handkerchief.
“But why there? Where do they think they want to go?” Capek asked himself via the coughing nurse.
“Don’t know, sir, but they are there or abouts all the time, day and night.”
* * *
—
It took Capek almost an hour to cross the misty damp city. The recent snow had turned into frozen slush, which made walking slow and hazardous. There was more than the usual amount of military activity in the streets. The weather had given permission for them to use their more robust vehicles to carry troops and goods into civilian territories. Monstrous half-track caterpillars crunched and groaned their way through the frozen snow, leaving black oiled lines gouged into the silent streets. The marshalling yards seemed to be the focus of all the efforts.
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