The hiss of the final expletives drained away; the Frenchman was ready to turn and stomp back to the hotel when, with a smooth and simple action, Seil Kor took a fine, silken scarf from his head, and loosely knotted it about the red and raging throat of the small man before him. The world dropped away. The blue of the linen and the sky melted together, a fresh breeze cooling his heart and soothing his mind.
With all the venom and distress gone, Seil Kor took his hand and led him on, bringing them to the doors of a nearby church. He directed his dazed companion inside, and they sat in the cool of the interior, on one of the dark, carved pews. The Frenchman tried to find words of apology, but it had been so long since he’d used them that he remained dumb.
‘I have brought you here to understand the Vorrh,’ said his guide. ‘This house of God is for those travellers who pass near its sacred heart.
The Desert Fathers founded this church before one stone was laid on another, before even a single tree was cut. They came out of Egypt like the prophets of old, came to guard and wait, to protect us and those travelling through us.’
The Frenchman looked around the chapel. Images of trees dominated the iconography; trees and caves. Black, kohl-rimmed eyes stared out of a face that looked like it had been carved with an axe. Dark, shoulder-length hair and a tangled beard framed the whiteness of the Father’s staring expression. In one hand he held a bible, in the other a staff. He sat in a cave, surrounded by the deep green of an impenetrable forest. The scene had been set on a square piece of thick and gnarled wood. The Frenchman stared at the icon while the tall black man spoke over his head.
‘The Vorrh was here before man,’ he said. ‘The hand of God swept over this land without hesitation. Trees grew in its great shadow of knowing, of abundance. The old silence of stones was replaced by the silence of wood, which is not quiet. A place for man was made, to breathe and be thankful. A garden was opened at the centre of the shadow and the Vorrh was given an occupant. He is still there.’
The Frenchman’s eyes unlatched from the gaze of the saint. He turned to look up at Seil Kor. ‘The Bible says the children of Adam left the sacred lands and moved into the world.’
Seil Kor made a gesture over his own head, a cross between wafting a scent and stroking a halo. ‘Yes, so it is written – but Adam returned.’
They continued to talk while the heat of the day prowled around the chapel. The Frenchman had given up the last remnant of sexual desire for his companion. It had been present from the start, a rich, thick musk of fantasy that had excited their meetings. He had seen no reason, initially, why he should not possess the black prince, and add him to the list of urchins, sailors and criminals who had spiced the gutter of his sexual greed. He was handsome, and presumably well-endowed; his obvious poverty would have made him easy to purchase for a short time.
But the words in Seil Kor’s mouth – the certainty of his vision and the kindness in his eyes – had washed away those stewed perfumes, replacing them with an ethereal distance that shocked back the very pride and circulation of his vital cynicism. The tired ghost of his ennui had been offered colour and hope. He had begun to sense, with some fear, that Seil Kor tasted of redemption. He even found himself giving weight to the ludicrous myths of the Vorrh, and the salvation that might shudder in them. They talked of the serpent sin, of deliverance, of the starry crown, and the origin of purpose; Adam’s house in paradise, his generations, Eve’s punishment, and all the crimes of knowledge. During those moments, his eyes had wandered back to the saint, and to his brothers lining the walls. He took in the black and white prints of angels; some he’d recognised as being pages from a book, torn and framed excerpts of Gustave Doré’s visions of heaven and hell. The images were solid, almost marble in appearance, so different from the glowering Desert Father patriarchs of the icons, who all had the same eyes, an impossible combination of tempera infinity and point-blank, chiselled authority. It had occurred to him that Seil Kor had younger versions of the same eyes, and that they would mature into that same gaze of stern wisdom.
As the conversation came to an end, the Frenchman noticed another painting. Smaller than the rest and set in a far corner of the chapel, away from any source of light, it was made on the same dense, gessoed wood, but something had obviously gone wrong with its process, for the pigmentation of varnish had turned black. He drew closer to examine it; it was as if the picture was empty, or only contained painted night. He put his fingertips on its crusted surface, discerning a raised outline, the contours of a head, the painting’s swallowed occupant invisible in the tarry depth.
‘What is this one?’ he asked of his guide.
The young man looked bashful and evasive, and refused to look directly at the block of darkness.
‘What is this one? Please tell me.’
‘Some of the stories from the Vorrh are older than man and they become confused with the Bible,’ replied Seil Kor. ‘I think this is one of those. It is said that a being will come to protect the tree, after all the sons of Adam are dead. He is called the Black Faced Man. This might be him.’
The Frenchman looked closer at the picture. As he did, Seil Kor turned away, saying that he thought they would need a complete day to discuss the Vorrh’s entrance, and that this day had been sidestepped to catch a different knowledge. It was the way of life, to scent the direction of the breeze or a man’s falling. That day had been about the chapel and their place in the wheel of time. He noisily picked up the Frenchman’s cane from one of the pews and gave it to him – it was warm and light. A whisk of dust swirled from its tip, looking like smoke in the shafting rays of the afternoon that waited outside. They never spoke about the tablet of darkness again.
* * *
The woman’s voice boomed in a sluggish yowl. It was hideous, but human, and he recognised something of himself in it. She was the first of her kind he had ever seen or heard, and she was a monster – oversized, with a face that made him retch repeatedly. The shock of being alone with this creature chilled his bones.
Misinterpreting his disgust as fear, Ghertrude tried to say something kind to the imprisoned child, something that would tell him she meant him no harm. She was practising kindness and the novelty made her feel righteous, in the purest sense she had ever known.
She spent a long time almost motionless, speaking softly to demonstrate her distance and restraint. Ishmael began to look at her less warily, moving
his hand away from his protected eye and gradually standing up in his bed. She saw that he was not a child, but a stunted adolescent, diminished and grossly deformed, but very human.
High above, the sun had risen in the tangled garden, shooing off the clinging mist and unveiling a bright blue sky. Its radiance dazzled the kitchen, sending thick, curling rays that shafted through the basement windows. Without breeze or any other movement, dust was lifted up into its magnitude to be exalted in the stillness. The room sang to itself and rejoiced in its unoccupied beauty, as all rooms do when left for such long periods of time: untainted by even the slightest trace of rearrangement or the hectic purpose of humans, their invention and design become their own once more.
Ghertrude had cautiously begun to cross the room to make contact with the youth; hands and arms wide, the crowbar left behind, she felt possession flood her future and justify her present. She moved slowly past the leaning remains of Abel, but her caution was not enough to stop him toppling over, spilling the remnants of his fluid in a noisy pool. It triggered an unexpected rage in Ishmael which leaked into every part of his fear. They had left him. Luluwa had abandoned him without a word. The Kin had failed to defend him – all the care of their work and time together had, in the end, meant nothing to them. He looked at the broken Bakelite body, slumped stiff and clumsy in its milky puddle. Abel’s lifeless head lay on the other side of the room, but the memories of their conversations had already begun to elude him. His confusion and anger were meeting at a crossroads, and the shadow of this giant woman was waiting there to greet him.
She had quickly become accustomed to the pained squint of the shrunken adolescent, feeling a surge of protection towards him which was an innovation and added sanctity to her confusion. She had never experienced such emotions as when she touched Ishmael, but he shrank back from her contact – its softness was without meaning, and queasy. He pulled the light blue bed sheet around his nakedness, and bit into
his hand.
From a vocabulary of fiction, Ghertrude said, ‘Shush now, you’re safe.’ In her hot mouth, the words bunched like his improvised loincloth. ‘Those creatures are gone, and I will protect you.’
He knew what the double eye meant, but could not understand what had caused her to say it. In the voice of the Kin, a brittle flutter, he said, ‘They were my family, my friends.’
Ghertrude was incensed. Not for another second would she let those abominable puppets stay in his deluded head. Sweeping aside the last traces of unfamiliarity, she helped him out of the cot with both hands, pulling his face close to hers as she knelt, saying, ‘They are monsters, keeping you here, away from your own kind. They are abominations.’ He blinked and dribbled. ‘They will be found and destroyed for what they have done to you and your poor face.’
She sat him on the floor and wrapped the sheet tightly around him, tucking its ends beneath his shivering weight. ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
She quickly crossed to the point where the Kin had vanished and looked into the next room, where another door was left ajar. Cautiously, she squeezed past the charging bays and the open crates, reaching the tiny kitchen on the far side of the room. The open doors there led to a spiral staircase with darkness at its base. There was hollowness below, far greater than its architectural structure. A resonance sounded towards her, a solid emptiness that tolled in silence: this was the infamous well.
Nothing moved there except volume itself, stretching downwards in a shaft of waiting echo. She could not tolerate its dominance and shouted into its length.
‘WHAT!’
The word found itself in her mouth without passing through her brain. It spat itself out, not as a question, more like a challenge or a curse, a gob of noise to state her territory and show that she would not retreat.
It should have been defiant, but it quivered. Too late, she understood that it was the last word, in any tongue, to choose to screech into such a rifled abyss. Such questions must be answered at some point, and she prayed that it would not be now, for fear was finally invading her sense of control. What came back to her was a shattering rumble that described how far out of her depth she really was. The reverberation of ‘WHAT!’ crashed up the stairs, hissing and booming between the magma and the stars. For a micro-eternity, everything inside her gave up its colour and mobility. White blood blocked her heart, filled her ears and coagulated in her eyes, cracked stiff in the capillaries of her brain; white breath’s film stopped in the gate of her lungs; white muscle glued to white bone; white urine waited to burn white legs, and her white nerves clicked with opacity and hid in the transparency of water.
As the echo still shuddered, she jerked back into life and bolted. Crashing the door behind her, she sprinted through the careful congestion of the next room, colliding with packing cases, straw and specimen jars, upsetting tables and gashing her leg. She barged the next door, scooped Ishmael up in her arms and ran towards the cramped, upward corridor, slithering on the congealing fluid that had once been Abel, sending his head clattering once more across the wet floor. She pushed up hard into the bright tunnel, her dress squealing in friction against the smooth walls. Panting against the boy’s sobs, she slipped on wet hands and feet into the quiet kitchen, through the splintering panel of the secret door. The slanting sunlight glazed her, offering benevolence, but she barely registered it as she fled with her charge, through the room to the upper stair, bursting at last into the still dignity of the old house. She slammed the door and, taking a deep breath, used one hand to turn the skeleton key, while her other arm propped the limp boy between her hip and the wall. The bolt turned into place. Tears flooded her eyes. Her relief was poised for release when she heard something move behind her. She spun around, summoning fury in a spray of voice, sweat, tears, and the nameless gruel from the broken Kin.
Teeth bared, hands like claws, she came face to face with Sigmund Mutter.
* * *
Both men had grown tired of each other’s presence. The work had been done, the arrangement made. Tsungali had agreed to the hunt. He would take the unknown man’s life and empty it somewhere, out in the wilderness.
Walking into the night, he was in control of his world. He would shape it with the gods and demons into an understanding of forces, each with their own price, marked in blood. He walked to the back of the compound, where his purloined motorbike skulked in the shadows, a puma skeleton of upright metal. He knowingly placed the Enfield in a brass scabbard on the bike. The rifle was named Uculipsa – ‘lullaby’ in his mother tongue. It sat snugly in the dull, scratched metal, itself scratched and dented by abrasion and impact, but with a dense slumber of non-ferrous richness which kept all moisture at bay. Uculipsa was safe here, the flesh of the wooden stock and the muscle and bones of the mechanism protected in the tight, resounding darkness that smelt faintly of metallic blood. He drove past the sentries and the thick wooden gate, out of a past home and into the darkness of his unflinching confidence. The tyres rumbled and bucked a regular pulse against the red earth as he drove towards his encampment and a task he would enjoy.
He had no hatred of the white men – that would have taken energy away from his purpose. He just knew them all to be thieves and liars. When they made him a police officer in his early twenties, he was already an important visionary for his tribe, a neophyte priest waiting for greater manhood to achieve full status. The prized Irrinipeste herself had seen his value and praised his courage. To be noted by a shaman of such power was a great blessing. When she had asked for the headphones of his cousin, he
had willingly given them to her.