“May I introduce myself?” he said cautiously.
Cyrena quickly nodded assent.
“I am called Seil Kor.” And the name settled in a part of her mind that she did not know.
“I am Cyrena Lohr,” she said, the name sounding rather detached in the space between them.
“I know,” he said, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Ishmael had been making greater and greater circles away from his woven dwelling, until it took him two days to return. He had been hunting small game and secretly hoped to bump into one of the ugly but nutritious yellow dwarfs who lived hidden in the trees. He was on the outermost rim of his orbits of discovery where the paths and animal tracks were at their most slender. The trees were stronger and more insistent here, their presence individually felt. Each of the giants had its own voice in the vast resonance of the forest. Even though the vines tangled and hid the contours of their singular semaphoric growth, the sound of their presence and age cut each a unique place of dominance to be respected. The shared external field around them was also highly charged and Ishmael could feel the ghost magnetism of turgor tugging at the thin salty waters of his brain. But still he had not suffered the outcome of all other men who dared to walk in the precincts of this leaching pressure. The walls of his personality cells had stayed intact. Not warped or broken or turned to mush like the brains of the Limboia. He shuddered at the thought of becoming one of them without knowing, and to reassure himself he clapped his hand against the solid trunk of nearest tree. This was more than just touching wood to fend off the bad luck of the horrible idea. It was a signing with the might around him and an agreement with its opposition to intruding man. A wish of union with the power of the place. He looked up into the high branches to see if his tap had registered, secretly hoping for a nod of acceptance in the tiniest of twigs. The distant sun spat and fingered through the canopy, churning the leaves and charming the sugars to rise. His isolation seemed complete against such everlasting forces. An exile in all living kingdoms.
An unprepared and vindictive recollection of Sholeh, Ghertrude, and Cyrena flounced back into his dismal ruminations. A flicker of the best of their company. Naked, laughing, and kind. Past pockets of contentment with each were exposed before him. He flinched at the warmth of the startling, vivid sentiment and drove the memory away with a whip of artificially inseminated spite. A vengeance lash against all those who had betrayed him and given him over to the executioners of that feeble city. He walked on, fuelled by the nightmare of blood that he would administer when next they met. He forgot where he was and the energy about him that had almost humbled his determination a few moments earlier. He swung noisily into a clearing where the absence of the tree that once held it was stronger than all the others’ territories put together. The blast of its invisibility hurt. He stood dazed and dumbfounded, waiting for his senses to return. When they did he saw a bent figure at the far-off periphery of space, sitting over a hole in the ground, weeping. As his eye started working again and realigned to look outwards, he thought that it was wearing a coat made of porcupines, the same kind that he had seen scurrying away from him in the undergrowth. He lifted the spear he had made and crept around the rim of the clearing towards the back of the stranger. Then he saw the black pointed hands and a side-on glance of its face full of bristling quills. The creature was bigger than he, but looked old and fatigued. He dropped his small sack of possessions and took the spear in both hands and moved closer.
Without turning to confront his creeping visitor the being said, “I mourn my gentle brother who departeth this fair ground.”
The voice sounded like it was spoken through layers of tin and desiccated grass. Ishmael watched the tears dropping into the hole where he imagined the newly deceased lay. He stepped forward for a better look, the burnt pointed end of the spear never leaving its aim at the being’s broad back. The grave was shallow and empty.
“Behold the hollow that we were going to share. It’s where he slept in preparation.”
Ishmael knew that this must be an Erstwhile; he had finally come face-to-face with one. But it seemed pathetic and did not really notice he was there. He lowered his stick and crossed to the other side of the hole to get a clearer look at its strange and compelling face.
“Is he dead?” he asked, without knowing why.
For the first time it looked at him and its violet pupils rippled with a circular motion, as it cocked its head to one side like a curious dog.
“Have thee been dead yet?” it whisper-lisped. “Because thou canst have this hollow. It is made for sleeping, for our plural. Thou canst have it, it’s not for the dead. It’s for-spoken, I made it for him, he who believed himself to be totally Rumour. He has been sleeping and here for many seasons, becoming ready for our plural. He was mine, I found him, lost and forsaken. He had a name, you all have names, what is yours.” The creature turned to look at Ishmael intently for the first time.
“Ishmael.”
“That was not his name, not the same, he had two bites.”
Ishmael remembered Nebsuel’s distaste and distrust of the Erstwhile. He even indicated that they had grown mad, living with the centuries of guilt and failure.
The expression on Ishmael’s injured face must have given the wrong signs because the creature continued, now animated by a greater need to protect and explain its nurtured hole.
“See its shape and the impression of our earthly forms.”
It pointed one of its long black hands that looked like the tip of a raven’s wing. “See the white roots there, threading their way from Etz haDaat tov V’ra to feed and meld the plural. But he woke too soon. Only rolling centums will unite.” It looked up and straight into Ishmael’s eye and seemed to be deeply sniffing at him. “He was needed for another, to make the plural on hard lands for hard gatherings of fire and stone. He is to plural with one that thee mated.”
The tin and grass of its voice had become dryer and the eyes wider, more hectic, and baleful. Ishmael did not understand or know what to say. So he reversed and picked at the bones of his previous confusion.
“So was he like me, this one that was buried here?”
“No!” the creature spat out. “He was part us, but he did not know, that is why he had to dream backwards to become more like his father. Who was us.”
“Do you mean that he was part human, part angel?”
At the word “angel,” the creature covered its ears with its pointed feathered hands and let out a sound that was beyond description.
“I have learned language so as to never say or hear that name. Do not sound it.”
After a grim and irritable silence Ishmael said, “I know nothing of you, I did not even know that you could speak.”
The creature shuddered all over.
“I learned these sounds with Adam and much more since…eh…he…came…” It was again searching for the departed one’s name. “He would speak in his sleep under the soil and plants and I would lie above him and listen, pressing my ears into the damp earth.” Suddenly the creature elongated and shook its head. “Seilkor…Seil Kor! That was his name. His name when I found him lost.”
The name meant nothing to Ishmael.
“He spoke much underground. I heard and learned much, and I could even hear the juice of Etz haDaat tov V’ra passing through him.”
“What is Etzadatovfra?”
The being pushed his spiky head forward and lifted a hand to point menacingly into Ishmael’s face. “You say tree of knowledge. Good and evil.” It lowered the hand of accusation and pointed back into the grave. “Its roots worm and feed there. We suckled from it and it suckled from us.”
They both stared into the hole without saying a word, until the being harshly broke the spell.
“You should sip of it.” It stood up and ext
ended its arm across the hole to take Ishmael’s hand. For some reason it seemed the most normal thing to do and the cyclops raised his nervous paw on the strings of polite automatic response. The touch and the solid grip was totally unexpected as it guided him around the grave and back into the centre of the clearing. There was a shifting of temperatures in the being’s hand that made the strangeness of its bristling dryness unimportant in comparison. The hand flushed from fever pitch to frostbite every half minute or so. It created a tactile pulse that seemed to bear no relationship to anything else in the world around it, but it began to create a similar rhythm in Ishmael, as if his heart were slowing to listening from inside his chest, trying to understand and match its beat, pushing its wet ear up hard against the dark cage of ribs. After an unbalanced and clumsy walk, they stopped. Before them was a raised disk of a gleaming black substance that glistened and shone like midnight chrome. It was ten feet across and nine inches above the smooth surface of the ground.
“Here was its above in the times of Adam, before all became Rumours.” The being raised his other arm and extended it high above Ishmael’s head. Ishmael looked up from the circular table-like stump and imagined the magnificence of a tree that once had this girth. The black surface shimmered under the shadow caused by its visitors, and both looked down again. The being had forgotten that one of his arms was still held up, pointing at the sky. The surface of the stump writhed, and Ishmael realised that it was not some kind of exotic polished ebony but a seething mass of thousands of black ants. They covered every inch of the ancient wood, capping its remnant form exactly.
“The tree is now below ground, an inverted plural, hidden, occulted, safe from all the Rumours.” The being suddenly let go of Ishmael’s hand, letting his heart fall back into the noise of its natural speed.
“Then why do you show me?” he asked, panting.
“Because I now know thou are not one of them, as well thou knows.” He took his eyes off the cyclops to give him time to think, feel, and recall. And while he did the Erstwhile started clawing at the earth near the tree, digging scoops of it away with his long, pointed hands. He dug deep into the new trench and pulled up a pale colourless root as if he were unravelling a ball of twine or a reel of stubborn hose.
“Come, little one, come and taste.”
Ishmael followed the request like an instruction, like a sleepwalker with a riot in his head. He knelt down close to the proffered root while the being chanted or whisper-sang a prayer over his hands. Its voice was drier than desert sand. A hooked greenish nail or talon extended from one of its fingers and was sawing at the pale sinewy vein. It cut through with a slight gush as the pulsing liquid escaped, and the being raised its spiralling eyes to the cyclops, indicating that his mouth was quickly needed to suck at the sap of God’s greatest gift to man. It tasted like the cream of the Kin, but much more alive. It too had the pulse of temperature change and again his heart shifted to its demand. He sucked into its throb as the fluid changed from a thin milk into a gel that drove deep into every tendril of nerve and capillary in his quaking body. It swallowed him in its wealth, all else dispersed and became transparent around him, except for the far-off voice of the Erstwhile.
It stood above him and was shouting: a sound like burnished metal being beaten with a stick. One of its hands was on Ishmael’s head, the other still holding the root. It was trying to separate them, to prise the cyclops’s manic suckling mouth away from the mangled root. But it was not working, he was not letting go. His mouth was ferociously clamped around the hard, shaking fibre. The being was using all its might to pull him off without snapping the root. It twisted his head against his neck and tugged at his hair. It became unbalanced with the effort, one of its feet slipping in the freshly dug earth. It fell, flailing, alongside the cyclops, now grabbing at anything to restrain him. Earth, twigs, and fallen leaves were thrown up in the kicking scuffle over the sacred site. Without either of the participants noticing, another movement flowed towards them. A mobile, glistening black stream aimed itself at them from the base of the stump. The being was now hitting the side of Ishmael’s face, its long arms windmilling ineffectually, trying to hammer him away. Then it saw the brittle implacable river and shrank back, its feet kicking up dry earth and leaves as it fell over itself in a scrabbling to get upright again. The ants had reached their target and stopped to pool for a second or two before invading Ishmael’s face. They came by the hundreds and covered his face and neck. They came by the thousands and streamed inside his clothing to make a new skin. His mouth came away from the root, the sticky whiteness running down his chin. It was quickly gone, the black tide covering him without a single one of them tasting the fluid’s joys. He felt no panic, it was soothing. He simply slumped into a sitting position like a fallen sack and let the infestation swarm. There was now a knotted black tributary between him and the stump. It pulsed with ants going back and forth, messages and commands carried on their twitching antennae. The Erstwhile flapped his hands at his side, his violet eyes bulging from their spiny sockets, watching Ishmael shudder under his umbilical joining to the living black circle, looking like a lost earthbound doll tethered to a pulsating nightmare balloon.
The throng moved over him for hours as they sat in the great circular clearing, which gave the clearest view of the heavens from anywhere inside the Vorrh. The Erstwhile had not moved, he just looked back and forth from Ishmael’s seething black face to the calm of the night sky, seething with static stars. Eventually a greyness entered the dark, extinguishing the depth of the universe and painting in a single sky in preparation for the pink shadow of the rising sun. When it was high and the circular arena panted under it, the ants began to move back to the stump. Three-fifths of them returned; the rest remained on Ishmael’s face, where they would live and breed forever. He stood up, brushed down his dusty clothes, and looked at the Erstwhile. As he did it his features shifted through different contours and profiles. At one moment looking Roman, the next African, then Asian, and thus through all the races of man. He beamed a great smile with his glistening ant lips and winked with his shiny black eyelid at his companion who appeared to be hanging in space, as if hoisted by its collar on some invisible hook, its limp arms dangling at its side. For all its wisdom and timeless horizons, for all it had seen come, go, and await to arrive, nothing had prepared it for this. This cyclops’s head was outside of all evolution, including the mythical. When it spoke, its voice too had changed. Ishmael’s vocal cords had been altered. His voice box had been breached and surgically changed. Specialised members of the insect tribe had nipped and cut, injected with formic acid, and bent backwards several delicate flaps of tissue, sealing them into a new form. There was still a rough edge to it, a soreness while it healed, but the clarity and oval sound could be heard below the pain.
“I will not speak for some days, and in the future never to men,” he said. Another broad smile followed the statement.
A human onlooker would have wondered if the expressions of the new face were indeed a true readout of Ishmael’s inner feeling or a surface manifestation of the combined will of the colony. It was impossible to know. His body language also gave nothing away, for now he moved with simple grace. Without hesitation or speed, impulse or doubt; a smooth linear action without a trace of meaning.
The Erstwhile, who had long since forgotten how to read the expressions of Rumours, accepted all that he was given and told by the new co-occupant of the place that had once been called the garden.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Lutchen estimated that they had made only twenty or so miles in three days. The extended rest periods that Kippa needed after carrying his burden were slowing them down. The strength of the young man was not equally distributed throughout the day, so that he often used great bouts of energy early on, which generated fatigue towards the afternoon.
After each rest he would hoick up the flapping Wassidrus, who yelled at the shock, and went m
arching forward like an eager standard-bearer in front of a restless army. Kippa’s instant enthusiasm lasted minutes, after which it sank into puffing resolute struggle. Sometimes his leaping ignition caused disastrous results, as when he thrust the pole too high and jammed the man-flag’s head into a thick mass of overhanging branches. Wassidrus screamed for fear of his head being ripped off of his puffy neck, especially when Kippa yanked at the pole in a violent attempt to get it loose. If the girl hadn’t shouted, Lutchen might not have moved back from his position several paces in advance before the decapitation had taken place, and Kippa would have marched ahead again unaware of the change to his dependent prize.
Lutchen tried to explain to the young man how he might save his strength, but it was a useless task. He just let him go ahead at the beginning of each stretch and then fall back until he could walk no more. So this became the shunting stop-start process of each day. It was in the middle of the fifth day that Lutchen realised that he hadn’t heard Kippa’s plaintive cry to tell them that he had fallen back to a complete standstill. He stopped and asked the girl if she had heard him. She shook her head and they turned and followed their tracks back the way they had come. Then suddenly jarred to a halt. Back along the beaten path stood Kippa, eyes popping out of his head, holding the pole still, its weight resting on the ground. All around him stood a horde of squat yellow manlike horrors, who stared up high at the Wassidrus, who was making odd coo-cooing sounds. There must have been about eight or ten of them, moving in and out the high, sharp grass. They had no necks, their cyclopean faces growing straight out of their chests. So to see the Wassidrus clearly they had to bend backwards in an uncomfortable manner. It was this that made them unaware of the approach of the priest and the woman. Some had pointed sticks, others had wooden knives. Lutchen drew out the massive automatic pistol that the Sea People had given him.
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