The Cloven

by Brian Catling

Seil Kor spoke to the driver and took a shovel from the back of the car.

  “We are here, my lady.”

  Cyrena completely awoke, her eyes eclipsing back into sight. She looked around her, at him and the implement in his hands.

  “I will show you the exact spot,” he said and took her hand.

  As they stood motionless the car reversed and found the road, onto which it turned and drove away. Cyrena was looking at her nakedness under the white sheet, but was thinking only about the car. She was about to ask when it was coming back when Seil Kor answered, “It won’t be coming back, there is no need.”

  They walked into the stinging grass for a few minutes and then he stopped and pointed. She looked at the stupid earth and he waited.

  “Here?” she said.

  “Yes, Cyrena, exactly here.”

  She slowly settled down, first on her knees and then curling in the grass, pushing her face into the earth where some essence of his blood must remain. Ants moved between her cheek and the soil, they multiplied as she tasted the earth, and Seil Kor began to dig around her.

  He had taken his robe off and stretched it out on the ground nearby. She turned her head to look through the long filtering grass. To see him shovelling spadefuls of earth onto its once intense colour. She had a fleeting, flickering image of another naked man digging earth. It had been in the strange books of animal locomotion that she had seen so very long ago. In with the baboons and horses were men and women, children and deformed people, walking and climbing, going about their daily chores without a stitch of clothing. The one she now remembered was older than the rest. A bony white man with the beard and intensity of a biblical prophet. His muscular labours had seemed so very lonely, different from the rest. His simple task had become Sisyphean and tragically unobserved. There had also been a beautiful female dancer. The only one allowed a modest costume of an almost sheer classical dress, very much like the one that she was wearing now. Both of their statuesque bodies were as bright as polished marble and perhaps as heavy as hers felt. Seil Kor moved around her and started digging on the other side. He was six feet down in the trench when he hit stone with the sound of a cheap bell.

  “Ground rock,” he called out and continued digging around it. The entrance to the cave was farther down and clogged with earth and ugly root fibre. He clawed it away and hacked his way into the deep resonance of his growing hollowness.

  “Cyrena, my lady, come see.”

  She stepped down carefully into the loose earth and peered into the lips of the access.

  “Put on your crown and wait for me.”

  He then bounded up the steep loose banks of shovelled earth.

  “Wait inside the cave,” he called, and she ducked and squirmed in.

  Seil Kor stretched up and grabbed the hem of his robe. Most of the dug earth sat upon it in a great heap. He tugged it and the drier earth fell around him. He jumped down, pulling the cloth after him. A great avalanche of gathered earth slid into the hole, its movement encouraging a landslide to follow. He crested a sliding mass of earth that rattled and hissed around his descent. He ducked into the hole of the cave as the carefully stacked hill slumped down from above. A great rain of dry darkness sealed them in.

  “Make it work,” he said.

  And Cyrena fumbled at the brass switches on the crown that had once been William Gull’s peripherscope. It fluttered into action, seemingly catching the subtle light that was escaping her luminous eyes. She placed it on her head, and it magnified and spun, sending silent splutters of blurred light darting about the stone walls.

  They moved as sleepwalkers inside its tunnel of flickers, like pilgrims sheltering from an ancient and irrational rain. Time became obsolete as they spiralled lower and lower, occasionally stopping so that she could rewind the little motors. Each flicker of light that escaped her was replaced by a sugary darkness, peeled from the walls by exactly the same magnitude of luminescence. Cyrena was becoming drunk with so many hollows of shadow, her attachment to the surface forgotten. The path finished at a blank rock face with a manger-like recess cut into it.

  “We are here,” whispered Seil Kor.

  “Here?” murmured Cyrena.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Kessler’s pier looked different in the light of day, or rather in the luminous haze of the summer afternoon. Nicholas stood on the shaky wooden decking with Hector at his side. The time had come; they were to travel down to the estuary and find their place beneath the mouth of the Thames. Solli and Albi stood behind them, close to the alleyway. They had said their goodbyes and it had been hard. Solli hated showing any emotion that was softer than rage. He had not spoken since Hector embraced him and wished him a good life. A cannonball made of tears sat in his throat and he turned his attention away from the water and stared back up towards the street and the hard, unflinching sanctity of his violent life. Hector stared into the swollen water. Nicholas pointed at the hanging tarpaulin that concealed the dented bugle.

  “Call him,” he said to Albi.

  Ten minutes later the Cromwell could be seen heading towards them. It tied in against the jetty, the pilot’s son and Albi tying the ropes. The passengers were stepping over the gunnels when the Patriarch appeared. He, like his boat and his pier, appeared totally different in daylight.

  “Afternoon, gentiles,” he said and then stopped speaking while he looked at Nicholas. Hector had seen the two men together before. Seen them ignore each other, on and off the boat. All that had suddenly changed. The Patriarch took one step forward and knelt, bowing solemnly so that his forehead touched the deck. Nicholas twisted his head around, making the gnashing sound that Hector was becoming used to. When he turned back, he was somebody else. He placed his hand on the pilot’s yarmulke and whispered. Only the boat and the river moved.

  Hector watched the pier with its sticklike figures diminish in the haze and the first slouched bend in the river. Then he turned to look forward, the chugging steamy throb of the Cromwell’s heart beneath his feet. An insignificant momentum above the churning mass of the epic Thames, where deep down, the silt of Roman bones gritted with a pumice of wild oxen and the infinitesimal grains of gigantic mammoths. All ground down to form a shifting dim landscape, where older stains of petrified forests darkened the restless grey. In this curd, last week’s murder merrily bobbed in its sunken slow motions of chains and concrete, alongside discarded prams and bits of nameless ships and all the dissolving tippings of the city. This was the pool bed and a long way from the soft sands that they were heading towards. It was also unlike the marshy ground of the upper Thames where Nicholas had been before. They were moving into wider bends that swirled across its mighty snakelike flexings. The entrances to the docks on each side were getting larger. Top-heavy vessels queued to be let into their labyrinths of canals and woodyards, warehouses and barges. The trepidation that sat like a constant bird on Hector’s shoulders said nothing. It also stared out across the water and would have sleepily preened its feathers, if it had had any.

  They were passing Greenwich when Hector started asking questions. Nicholas ignored the first attempts as if deaf. They were both at the front of the boat, the fresh wind buffeting their faces. Hector was quiet for a moment and then he decided to changed his tactic. They were passing a squat lighthouse on the north shore, which marked the entrance to the river Lea. Large spheres and huge cagelike cones leant at odd angles around the tower. Some were painted red. Men climbed over their imposing surfaces.

  “Trinity Buoy Wharf,” came the gruff tones of the pilot from behind them. “That’s where they make ’em and repair the ones broken by the sea.”

  Hector grinned politely and turned his back on the information.

  “Nicholas, tell me for one minute about why you are different from all the others?”

  Nicholas turned and flattened his perfect hair with one hand and began his answer witho
ut repetition, hesitation, or deviation. “Because I have lived longer and escaped the forest earlier, having the opportunity to collect unused parts of fading men to gather myself and thus become as I am today.”

  “Will others come out and become like you?”

  “Oh, I doubt it, it’s far too late for those left behind, they should have slept their way out years and years ago.” He suddenly slapped his hand over his mouth, saying, “Oh no, repetition of years.”

  Hector pushed on. “Will you get any older, ever?”

  “That’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer. I know it’s possible to get younger while sleeping, but don’t know about the other way round.”

  “How do you get younger?”

  Nicholas looked back at Hector, pointed, and laughed, twisting his head backwards over his stiff neck.

  “You are so funny, Hector, both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. I can never get younger. I was talking about the Before Ones, the ones that left the forest long before us, some of them were excavated as children. They have grown up as Rumour, lived so long as humans that they have forgotten what they are.”

  “Do you have contact with them at all?”

  Nicholas stroked his chin and looked across the churning water, its brightness making him squint.

  “Not really, I just know they are there.” And then with a bolt of enthusiasm he continued. “Many of my kind will be making the plural. One of the old ones has been in your world for so long that she has forgotten what she is. So her plural is made with a fellow who is half Rumour and half Erstwhile, back in the old caves of Africa.” He slapped his thigh and twisted savagely to gnash at his collar, his weird energetic giggling sending the pilot scurrying back into his wheelhouse.

  The boat bobbed and its engine throbbed alongside the thin nailed-together jetty that looked like it had been made out of the charred, gnawed bones of ancient chickens. Hector’s bad memories of another boating trip flapped back. The jetty shook with the vibrations from the Cromwell and Hector felt it in his hands.

  “Is this safe to walk on?” he said in a voice that nobody heard.

  The Patriarch was again prostrate before Nicholas, who had his soft hand on the old pilot’s head.

  “Honoured malokhim, will we ever see the likes of you or your kind again?” the old man asked, without ever raising his eyes.

  “Bad pennies always turn up,” Nicholas joked, removing his hand and walking to the gunwales and daintily stepping over onto the complaining, creaking structure.

  “Come, Professor,” he said, offering his arm to his hesitant companion. Seaweed peeled away beneath them, taking black gleaming muscles back into the salty water as they walked along the narrow boardwalk. Hector looked down into their ripples.

  “Poor demented things,” said Nicholas.

  “Who?”

  “Those sea mice, gone mad with the changing of the tides. Twice a day their world changes. One minute they’re enjoying the taste of warm shit soup coming out of London. The next it’s all cold, salty brine. Poor things, moon-cast like the lunatics of Bedlam.”

  The pilot and his son held on to the firm handrails and stared, transfixed. Nicholas remembered that they were there and called back over his shoulder, “Be careful not to miss your tide,” and as if an afterthought, he said, “Take care of Hyman and young Solomon for me.”

  The skeletal wood became firm ground and Hector rushed forward, starting to breathe again. The engine changed tone behind them and the solid little boat slid backwards into the churning estuary. All the men waved, but the Erstwhile was already moving on, his interest in the past vanished. They walked into the broad evening of the open countryside, Nicholas taking exaggerated lungfuls of Kentish air as if he were back bathing in the limelight on the stage of the Pavilion theatre. Hector looked around him at the slump of marshlands on one side and broad cultivated fields on the other. They were walking on a slow downward gradient and any sign of the estuary vanished under the hedgerows. Hector became unsure why they were walking away from the water.

  “Aren’t we going in here…?” he stuttered, facing back into the direction they had just come.

  “Not yet, Professor, the tide is rising. That would never do, we would be washed back to Shadwell after taking the second step. Anyway, don’t you want a hearty supper, condemned man’s privilege and all that? They might even have the odd crust or a bone and a bowl of water for the cunt of a bitch.” He chortled while Hector blushed under his scarf and new hair.

  Eventually he said, “Who might?”

  “The trusty publican of the Rose and the Crown.”

  “We are going to an inn?” His disbelief was lost amid the calls of a flock of gulls swooping inland.

  “A pub, Hector, a pub. You are not in Baden-Württemberg now.”

  The old man still found this strange being’s knowledge of his life unnerving, even after all their weird encounters.

  “We must blend in with the locals tonight.”

  The idea of Nicholas blending in with any normal humans was difficult enough, but to merge with what Hector suspected would be ignorant yokels, of the kind that he had encountered in Southampton, was grotesque.

  “Are we staying there?”

  “Yes, of course, we have to change your dream shutters and your weight, that would have been impossible in London, wouldn’t it?”

  Hector had no idea what he was talking about, but nodded because it was the easiest thing to do.

  “Are they expecting us?”

  Nicholas stopped dead, beaming. He waved his hands about as if conducting the birdsong, making skipping motions on the rough road.

  “Look about you, Hector, this is Hoo Allhallows. I don’t think they have ever expected anybody.”

  They walked for another fifteen minutes or so, until the squat spire of the village church showed above the small bent trees and low-lying bushes, the humps of a few houses rising out of the seagrass and reeds. They tuned onto the rising path that skirted the wall of the cemetery, up into the crossing of a larger road where the Rose and the Crown sat stoutly at its corner.

  “There she blows!” said Nicholas with glee.

  They pushed open its solid door and stooped into the musky darkness that was constructed of the reassuring smell of log smoke, stale beer, and tobacco, with a distant hint of cooking to heighten the effect. Two customers sat at opposite ends of the room. The only sound was the fire dimly crackling and the drip of an unseen tap.

  “Good eventide, gentlemen,” said Nicholas theatrically.

  The customers ignored him, but a shuffling could be heard behind the bar and a long-faced pinched woman appeared. She looked them up and down and then put her hands on the blades of emaciated hips.

  “Yes?” she said through her long doglegged nose.

  “We would like a room to share and dinner for tonight,” Nicholas announced.

  “Ain’t got none. Out of season. No call for it now.” There was no flow in her words, just chunks of statement that fell out of her large, thin-lipped mouth without effort or finesse.

  “A front room overlooking the sea,” said the angel as if he had not heard her previous emphatic statement.

  “You deaf?” she said. “We ain’t got none.”

  “But it must have one big bed, a dooble, so that we can sleep together.”

  One of the customers’ chairs grated on the dark stone floor as he turned to look at these oddities.

  “What?” she said, her mouth curling as if by the harsh application of sour invisible pliers.

  “A dooble so that we can snuggle up.”

  Hector was now very embarrassed and had no idea why Nicholas was talking like this and why he was pronouncing things in a very strange way. The woman was speechless and both customers were looking over their shoulders.

  “We are German
s, you see,” added Nicholas, beaming.

  The hag flushed and filled her scrawny lungs with rank air, ready to give what Hector had learned was called a “mouthful.” But before she spoke, Nicholas placed two heavy gold coins noisily on the bar, very much in the manner of a conjurer who had just performed the conclusion to a lengthy and complicated trick. The sight of the gold stoppered her mouth and the pent-up air escaped through her shrill nostrils in a wet squeak.

  “And this one is for you, my lovely,” said Nicholas, advancing the third coin towards the baggy collar of her worn-out dress. But finding no cleavage there he daintily posted it in the slit of her mouth.

  She instantly changed. Softened and unfolded. It was as if her bones had just inflated and a radiating warmth had suffused her body. An astonishing pulchritude reshaped her stance, pallor, and total demeanour. Hector involuntarily took a step back. She wiggled and blushed and started speaking in a soft befuddled manner, her words slurring over the gold. Nicholas pointed at the coin in her mouth and she retrieved it, flushed again, and curtsied.

  “Just the one night, sirs?”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Nicholas kindly.

  She whisked the coins off the bar and Hector noticed that the irregular disks had a portrait of a surly wide-headed man imprinted on them. Nicholas saw his curiosity and winked.

  “Nero,” he said.

  Before any more could be said or choked upon, the woman was back with two carefully balanced glasses before her.

  “Speciality of the house,” she said.

  Nicholas beamed and brought the dark red liquid to his lips.

  “Ah! The blood, my favourite,” he said.

  “Blood?” said Hector peering into the heavy glass apprehensively.

  “Port and brandy mixed like us, making the blood.”

  Hector sniffed the glass.

  “Of the hero. Nelson’s blood.” He then turned towards the room and its gawping occupants. “To the hero, Britannia and death to all our foes abroad!”

  The two elderly customers attempted to stand and raise their glasses, but before they could drink, Nicholas had quaffed his and returned to the attentions of the bar lady. At that moment another presence appeared behind the bar. A grim, unshaven man in an apron. He was just about to speak, his eyes fixed suspiciously on the strangers, when his wife grabbed his hairy wrist and opened her hand, so that the gold glimmered.