The Mutters sat in the kitchen, the domestic normality making it possible to talk of impossible things. They exchanged their experiences of the warehouse and Thaddeus marvelled at his little sister’s courage. They talked about the explosion that everyone had heard and about the pillar of smoke that was still rising from the gutted shell of the building across town. Their shared excitement and Meta’s triumph subsided as they both became very tired. The warmth of the kitchen drew out the hollows of fatigue into a safe and now-reasonable place. Meta slid across the table and her weary brother picked her up and carried her to her high room, below the attic where the soft strings played all night to guard her against memory fisting her dream or dream recalling nightmare. So that she slept in a smooth haze of nothing, which erased everything of the last thirty hours.
* * *
In the smoking rubble and steaming glass something moved, flickered like a bird in a zoetrope illuminated by a faulty lamp. Its movements were staccato and chopped by light and shadow. It looked like a drawing made of broken dried reeds or thin metal rods, incorrectly joined and falling out of any natural delineation. It seemed dazed and tattered, trailing its bent-double body like a ruined Japanese fan. It was small and electric and half visible, bits of stone embedded between its impossibly delicate wings that fluttered in a blue residue. A half-burnt paper tag was still attached to a chunk of the stone that imprisoned one of its feet and made it impossible for the thing to escape. The label said: ARCHAEOPTERYX.
Running and calling activated the wrecked street as the first hot daggers of rain fell from the blackening storm that swirled high above the city. Anxious citizens burst into the devastation, looking for victims and answers. Some came to filch, picking among the rubble and pocketing weird treasures, while showing a mask of concern. The limping skeletal shadow stitched its way into the skinny alleys of neglect and finally shook off the remnant of stone and the label of its previous meaning. In the same crate that housed its astonishingly rare fossil was a reproduction of a drawing of what archaeopteryx, or as the Germans call it, the Urvogel, was supposed to look like. It showed a perky magpie-like creature with its wings outstretched. There was something very wrong about its appearance, something incorrect in its stance and believable existence. This can be said even in the knowledge of such awkward wonders as the duck-billed platypus, the giraffe, and the much-maligned hammerhead shark. This reproduction was one of the infant Ishmael’s favourite things, and Seth and Aklia had had a great deal of trouble trying to retrieve the picture from the petulant child and send it back with the box of specimens. He’d bounced the paper around the floor of the cellar trying to make the bird-lizard hop, while emitting very convincing screaming noises. The strident sounds suited the strident image that looked like a nimble, effete dancer dressed in a feathered leotard and cape, his hands gloved in claws and head wearing a toothy beaked mask. It was a long way from the shivering tattered fist of silhouetted sticks that was flinching away under the heavy hard rain that fell into the smoking epicentre. It was a fossil of a fossil. Bent over and folded back, now wet and compressed into an abstraction. The smoke that rose from the devastation was spiralling half a mile above the streets.
A storm had come in from the ocean and been heated by the Vorrh; it now brooded in a growing vortex that would eventually suck up every particle of soot, loose glass, stone, and all else that was not welded or nailed down, including the scattered slivers of the Travesty and the squealing, animated fossil of an Urvogel. It is said that the seas and oceans are the memory of the world. The gulp of water taken from the sea to make the storm had its essence of memory twisted and confused in the vast suction and the acrid explosion, so when the broken and now-living fossil was sucked up in the maelstrom and forcefully slipped between the fluctuating plurals of continuum, when the storm spat it out it arrived in the depopulated lands at an earlier date. It rained down into a muddy puddle in Carmella’s courtyard, where it was hastily and incorrectly recognised as their promised long-awaited heavenly messenger. It never had the dogmatism of the real seraphim and certainly not its unfailing sense of direction. In its spluttered passage to find its way back to the Vorrh it had lead Carmella to her death and Modesta into the mouth of the river that would lead to her destiny and Ishmael.
Part Three
Bacteria have been, are and will remain the dominant group of organisms on our planet.
Essentially subterranean, living off the chemical energy contained even in rocks, they are also sustained in the atmospheric milieu through the subterfuge of intracellular symbiosis in two unimportant superstructures: plants and animal. In this vision of evolution, even human beings are a sort of efflorescence of bacterial origin!
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face
that can bear everything.
MARQUIS DE SADE,
in PETER WEISS, Marat/Sade, act 1, scene 12
The eyes have fallen into disuse in their method of stringing them. Nor is the notch placed frontally in the middle of the ends of the bow staff….
LEO FROBENIUS, The Voice of Africa, vol. 1
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They had come as far as the great stone mount that rose out of the heart of the forest, the origin of the river and the end of their journey together. It was here that the rowers happily turned the canoe around and would let the fast stream take them back to the estuary and the healing coast, home, Oneofthewilliams, and the Sea People. Father Lutchen had been ordered to go on with the idiot Kippa and his writhing burden, the shredded man-flag of the Wassidrus. But it had never been his plan to agree to this. He still carried enough gold and charms to bribe the paddlers, who were mostly ignorant of all but their physical task to go and deliver their cargo and return, to take him with them. He would slip the boat at the estuary and find his way back to Essenwald on foot. But that had been before he had gathered the girl into the boat and his future.
They had pulled the canoe up on a shallow single beach and emptied its contents under the shade of a vast drooping tree that he guessed was a species of tropical willow. The frail strings of hanging leaves were nibbled and tossed by the slightest breeze, which gave their encampment a cool and reviving agitation. Kippa had propped up the man-flag, so for the first time since they had begun, he was vertical for a prolonged period of time. The rowers sat huddled together with their backs to the weird pair, while the old priest and the girl sat farther under the tree and talked.
“What place is this, are we going farther?” she asked.
Lutchen was silent.
“I know this is the great Vorrh and that I am destined to be here, but I did not think I would come this way.”
The old man looked from the swaying dappled shadows to the bright shingle, and it made him squint.
“I did not know that you would come and take me.”
“Neither did I,” he said quietly.
The men were anxious to leave, wanting to be as far away as possible from the malign forest. But Lutchen insisted that they made camp here and leave early the next morning. They tried to argue, but he had been given authority over the journey. At least this far.
He wanted more time to think about the options and what all the circumstances meant to him. It would have been so easy to stick to the original plan and wave goodbye to the ill-assorted trio at the jungle path. But the sickening sense of responsibility was growing stronger every minute he shared with Modesta. All she had said confirmed it and he was beginning to accept that his fate was in some way entwined with hers. He watched her closely while the men made camp, trying to remember everything that Father Timothy had said about her in his anxious, petrified letters. But little surfaced, only a distant taste of her perverted innocence when she was a child. But there was no strength in that past: It had been obliterated by the magnetic pull towards the future. Even the
Vorrh itself seemed complicit. The ragged mount, the beach, and the willow were having a powerful soothing effect on him. There was a beauty here that was unexpected and it was stilling his heart. Maybe he could stay here and accept the compromise as the best solution. There was nothing of the menace or the pressure that he had sensed before. The water seemed clear and wholesome, the sky bright, and the trees beautiful and rich in their generous shade. Fruit had fallen in and near the water and perfumed it with their radiance. And yet the path from here into the core of the mythical jungle also called. This would be the peak of his explorations, of all the reading and listening to myth and fable; God knows what real wonders he would find in its uncharted depth.
* * *
—
That night, while the others slept, he watched the flames of the campfire on the beach. Watched the sparks rise and the thin smoke swirl. At the height of his deliberations, Kippa appeared out of the shadow, his enormous bulk shifting from one foot to the other.
“Yes?” said Lutchen.
“It wants talk you,” squeaked the falsetto voice from inside the looming fool.
The old man was about to tell him to keep it quiet and lay it down in the reeds when he changed his mind. Curiosity and instinct overcame him, so that he got up and followed the shambling mass towards the horror leaning against the tree.
Kippa had washed it down, cleaning some of the filth of the bilge from its malformed head and body.
“You have something to say?” he asked. The Wassidrus started moving up and down against the pole that held him together. The pumping motion increased in rapidity and vigour and resembled nothing less than some sort of deformed masturbatory practice. Kippa was giggling and copying the motion.
Lutchen was about to leave when the first word gushed out. He then realised that the action was a way to pump its damaged lung into a concertina action before speech.
“I’ve-bin-er,” it said.
He had never considered the intelligence of the deformed fragment of the man. It was a marvel that it lived at all, let alone had the capacity of even a glimmer of thought. He had seen its guttural hisses and wet mouthings as little more than an involuntary grimace being expelled from the blinding fury that obviously powered all that was left. Lutchen was here now more to keep Kippa quiet than anything else, never expecting actual coherent words to come from the wreck.
“Bufor…Er bufor.”
Lutchen suddenly heard and understood the asphyxiated sounds. He moved closer to look into the piglike eyes for a sign of intelligent animation. Surely it could not be possible. What worse torture could ever be devised? He had helped men die who were suffering smaller injuries than this. Some residual part of Lutchen’s ambition had been stirred by his meeting with the tribal witch who seemed to be responsible for keeping the two impossibly deformed men alive. He might learn something of her techniques and take them into the civilised world. There must be an extraordinary secret in her methods of surgical repair or in the herbal drugs that she so studiously protected. Whatever was keeping this tatter of humanity alive was down to her. He planned to return again to the Sea People and forcibly discover her wisdom.
The Wassidrus was wetly hissing and it brought him swiftly back to the moment.
“You have been here before?” he asked carefully, as if he had already said it.
The pole and its tenant shook horribly. “Yss.”
The effort was damaging and it forced Lutchen to finally recognise it as a man, a human soul tethered before him.
“What can I do to help?” he asked.
“Go im.” He pumped up and down again and Kippa joined in. “Im ver.”
“In there?” translated the monk.
“Yss…Im ver I cun bi hild.”
“It will hold you?”
Another level of rage strained the next sounds out. “Hild, it cun hil mi.”
“Heal you? How can this happen, how do you know it?”
“T’hupen bufor.”
“How?”
After a long pumping pause, one word dribbled out of his collapsing mouth: “Puradice.” And with that he was spent, sagging back like a deflated wet sack dangling from the creaking pole.
Kippa was by his side, washing his face, prancing from one foot to the other and chanting, “Puradice, puradice, puradice!”
The last candle of doubt in Lutchen’s mind about what he should do next had just been extinguished by a mighty wind. He looked back at the wretched man and saw that Kippa was feeding him tiny shreds of food from the bag that he always carried over one shoulder and never lost sight of. He had not seen the Wassidrus being fed before and never even thought about his nourishment. The overgrown child was carefully pushing the black tobacco-like fibres into his slobbering mouth. The care of the operation touched the old priest’s scarred heart.
“Kippa, what do you feed him?”
Kippa turned, surprised at the question. He looked into the bag and at the stuff in his gentle hand.
“Im, bwana.”
“Yes, Kippa, but what do you give ‘im’?”
He grinned an enormous smile. “Im, bwana, I giv im, im…”
Lutchen realised that any conversation in the abstract was a waste of time with the poor soft-brained child. So he turned away, saying, “It’s all right, my son, it does not matter.”
Kippa was still looking at his hand when he said, “Plenty leavings over after the split. Tyc feeds im imself.”
The old priest stopped in his tracks and let the words settle before his gorge began to rise.
The canoe floated off the shingle with a crunching shush as the last paddler jumped aboard after pushing it into the stream. Lutchen waved them off, but they did not respond, just paddled hard until they were out of sight. He turned back to the party that waited for him to lead them into the demented forest, searching for paradise. He looked at them and his heart sank. He was about to share an unknown path into unknowing with a fool, a young woman, and a monster or a victim. And even worse, he guessed that the ownerships of those qualities might be exchangeable. And worse still, he did not know which he would finally be allocated.
The vastness is the first thing to misunderstand. There is no space in the mind to hold it, either as a distant dark mass seen from above or in the endless labyrinthine folds of its interior. All become lost in those overlapping gaps that sometimes appear to be pathways between the trees. The vertical trunks confront and shutter all distance and any sense of volume.
But all these majestic flowerings were nothing compared to what occurred below. The root mass extended deeper and farther than the tallest tree in all directions away from the light; its iceberg proportions creaked and slithered in the ancient soil, clenching the particles of mud and stone with a relentless blind determination, while the strangeness at the very tip of the roots nuzzled and sensed all around them. There is no structure of mind or body in the animal kingdom that parallels the uniqueness of roots. There is no understanding of why or how that delicate mechanism becomes a sensing tendril and seeks out the nutrients it needs. No animal understands the process that makes it decide to turn this way as opposed to that way. To snuffle with force in its “chosen” direction. That sightless tip without any apparent organs or methods of perception moves forward to devour and conquer with a will that is outside the meagre appetites and instincts of all the blood-filled inhabitants.
Behind each moment of acute sensing lay solidification, each blind nuzzle dying back into the terse density of colourless fibre, the water squeezed through the now-inert roots and passing upwards. If the mass of the forest that lived in light was alien to humans, then the mass that lived in night was positively hostile in its indifference. Even the burrowing Erstwhile would not be tolerated. Even though their supposed purpose was a form of protecting the forest. When they dug down they never snapped or cut a root. They sim
ply pushed them aside and squirmed in between their languid violence. But as the sleepers hid, the roots turned, often trapping them in fearful embraces. Or sent out more tendril extensions of themselves to penetrate the mothlike bodies, digging into their ribs and hooking through their faces. Those that eventually awoke often bore the scars of these intrusions, looking like ill-formed knotted arteries wandering under their jaws, cheeks, and eyes. Some no longer had eyes. The tips of the roots had found their moisture and sucked it into all the others, sugars to sprite the distant, frivolous leaves that jiggled and danced in the warm sunlit air.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Hector was enjoying meeting the dead in their ornate stone blocks. Great names were here under the tons of the poised cathedral. He was soberly dressed, the new strands of hair concocted into a much less elaborate arrangement than before, and it made his head feel light and strangely fresh. He respectfully visited John Donne. Eventually he found clever, subtle Wren tucked into a modest cleft in the far wall. He shuddered under the sealed black polished marble bath of Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington’s impregnable sarcophagus of Cornish porphyry. He pondered on the brief tablet to the absent Blake. Nicholas’s obscure words sung in his memory. The voice detached Hector’s vision from the vast window in the Bethlem Royal Hospital, a vision of the angel shuffling his ol’ man through the streets of London, pointing ahead towards the gigantic cathedral. But the words would not attach to that vision; they preferred to cling and render to Nicholas’s description of holding the old poet’s head to the curved wall of the whispering gallery and demanding him to recite his last poem into the abstract depth of the stone’s surface. Hector looked up, knowing that somewhere its implacable mass encircled the area above him. He dismissed himself from the company of the famed dead, many of whom he did not know. The good, the mighty, and the honoured barbaric, whose gritty bones formed a webbed foundation to strengthen the mud and hold the gigantic white cathedral aloft.
The Cloven Page 24
