Ishmael padded softly down the hallway and found her in her favourite room, drinking golden wine from a long-stemmed glass. She did not hear him arrive, so light was his footfall. He was wearing Chinese silk slippers that she had left for him. Very quietly, he said, ‘Thank you, Cyrena.’
She stood up and looked at him, allowing herself to linger on the details of his presence, basking in his proximity. He was wearing silk pyjamas and the blue dressing gown that she had left him. His hair was still wet. She looked at his face, at how the scars around his eye seemed to gather his features together at that point, giving it a bunched squint. His nose was a little worse for wear; the straight line of it veered a little between loose folds and taut stretchings. Apart from this, it was the normal face of a slender young man who looked as though he had lived a troubled and weather-beaten life. He began to raise his hand again, his insecurity blooming under her gaze, but she crossed the room to stop him, reaching out to his hand and holding it in her own. She led him to the window seat and they sat looking at each other for an endless, unruffled time, the evening darkening around them.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said eventually. Handing him her glass, she moved away to fill another, then turned back to him. ‘It’s been a long time since the carnival, and many things have changed for us both, I am sure, but… perhaps we should begin where we left off before?’
He stared at her for a moment and then smiled, his new eye gleaming almost as brightly as the other. He reached for her hand and together they walked up to her bedroom.
Outside, the swallows were changing to bats, to measure the space of the sky with sound instead of sight. Inside, contentment had come to the house of Cyrena Lohr – all except for the bow, which seethed in its wrappings.
* * *
I have emerged into a morning that is cold for this season, in lands whose heat I can barely envisage.
I have escaped from a tunnel of years and come out from beneath a great shadow. When I look back, I expect to see a vast and endless forest, but there is only a desolate bog land, black with peat, its undulating hummocks stretching for miles before being broken by distant, ragged peaks. A night sea of wet earth laps the horizon; I cannot make out the path that I must have forged along its compacted surface. I have been standing on this rise for over an hour, attempting to recall myself and everything that must have been around me in that place, but it will not come to meet me. There is only the faintest image of another land like this, sheltering in absence at the beginning of my life, a battlefield of churned earth and oblivion, yet it will not come forward to be recognised or superimposed over this one.
My belongings tell me little. Most of them were obscure and foolish, and I have discarded them; to prove their worthlessness, I will walk over them when I leave, trampling them into the mud of this place. The only thing of any use is an obscure map on torn, stained paper, which has faded over a period of unknown time; that and a large handgun with a box of its heavy bullets. I must have been carrying it to hunt or for protection, but it is difficult to imagine any kind of creature or threat stirring in that featureless mire.
The only thing that holds me here is waiting. I feel that there should be somebody else, that they are missing, catching up with me maybe. I find myself scouring the black land below, looking for a trace of movement, for a companion making their way to here. I feel, on the periphery of my awareness, that someone will walk beside me. But nothing moves and no one comes.
I have waited and puzzled for long enough; it is time to move on and shake off the shadows.
I think the map has been made with oblique reference to the black bog below me, possibly conceived and drawn from this very vantage. It shows the vast mass as an oval, egg-shaped depression. There are noticeable scars in its interior, though some are now half-erased and swallowed up. The scars are crescent-shaped, and rotate around the edge of its interior; they look to be areas of ancient deforestation, which would explain why they are numbered, but these seem confusing and random. The largest cutting seems to have been at its centre: it is numbered ‘1’. I am using this ragged thing to gain some alignment to the new country, which is, of course, just another blank on the map. But there is a tiny arrow in the lower corner, which suggests direction of some sort.
There is nothing to lose; all ways are good. I turn the fluttering paper, marking the distant features of landscape that align with the arrow.
Without warning, the paper gives up the ghost and shreds into the wind. My last sight of it, just before it disappears and is blown from my hands into the dark mass, makes me think that it might not be a map at all. It flashes before the sun and its afterimage burns in my eyes. Its negative reveals a crude, mocking face, the countenance of one startled eye, a morbid grotesque, gawping at me. Its features are scarred; its mouth has fallen open. It glares in cartooned astonishment. I blink and it begins to fade; my lids wipe it away as the paper is blown into nothing, tattered and dissolved by the gusting air and the damp earth.
Now I know: it is time to leave this place of amnesia and illusion forever.
* * *
She clasped her hands across her belly, feeling the movement beneath; the blunt nudges and kicks, the stretching and the turns. It was difficult to
walk now; there were long periods of the day when she could only rest.
Abungu was greatly swollen with the child. It had grown much in the recent months; her pregnancy could no longer be hidden. She still had far to go, so she made an asking charm, one enmeshed with all her will and love. She asked the child to be patient, to hold on and snuggle back inside her; to sleep longer, curl deeper and grow slower until they were home.
So impassioned was her asking, and so powerful was the child’s response, that its age would be held back throughout its life. Her own people would always understand this as a blessing, a sign of the power and uniqueness of the child.
The journey had taken over a year. During that time, she had started to speak: not out loud, and not in the ugly tongue of the whites who had owned her parents and so abused her, but in the language of her mother and father, the singsong words they had whispered together in that cold, filthy land. The words came through the child who nestled inside, rising up through the shared blood that looped between their brains and hearts. She spoke every day, until she was unsure who had instigated the asking charm; had it come from her or the little one? Not all things were known to her. There was a confusion about it, a fog, as there was about the old, white shaman who had put rightness in her eyes, he whom she had harvested.
The rightness guided her; such doubts and forgettings were discarded, unimportant. It led her home; the child and the time were growing. But when she reached the great forest, the time was heavy and could wait no longer. To be born here was unknown – the meaning and force of the Vorrh was beyond the understanding of all people. But this birthing was ordained; the trees were waiting, and something was waiting in them.
In the depth of the forest, on her way to the True People, her daughter was born. Wondrous omens heralded the event: snow fell through the tropical night; violet seas were seen to shimmer in the twilight of the far western shores; luminous insects clustered into balls and floated above
the villages. Some said the Erstwhile awoke and brought the pair out of the Vorrh, into the human lands of the True People. Others said that the infant belonged to the Erstwhile and had been sired by one of them, as in the olden days.
The only known truth was that the dying Abungu and the sacred Irrinipeste were found on the edge of the village, by an old warrior on the night after the day of the feast, when the sun was eaten by the moon and reborn in crescent fragments under the black sea. The mother was recognised as one of the tribe by the scarification her parents had inscribed by dismal candlelight, in the slums that clung to the mud banks of the River Thames, far beyond London’s city walls. Before she died, she gave a crown of gold and mirrors, encrusted in mud, for the safekeeping of her daughter, along with a picture of a shield, which bore the same sun fragment as those beneath the waves. The dawn of the next day took her, and the child received the light that lingered in her dead eyes for hours.
* * *
His pink, scrubbed hands were in her bed. She felt them parting her legs. She turned slightly. One of his fingers was moving on her, caressing and opening her bliss. No: this could not be. His hand was inside her, groping upwards. She pushed out, the other hand holding her leg down. Her cry woke her into a panic, though the old house was empty. She was alone, but his hand was in her womb, grabbing at the foetus, trying to squeeze the life out of it and pull it from its safety. She felt his other hand enter her and almost fainted, ready to burst with fear. Her shouts echoed through the house, from the hollow well in the cellar to the attic, where it strummed against the long, taut wires and bounced in the white hollow of the obscura’s table. She felt the doctor’s ring dig into her bone as his
fat, pink finger rotated. Her final scream pulled her from the layers of nightmare and into the dim, pre-dawn haze of her room.
She was wringing wet and brutally cold. The bedroom had not quite settled into reality and she feared that Hoffman still lingered nearby: maybe under the bed, or behind the weighty curtains. She breathed heavily, not daring to detach herself from the safety of the damp sheets, and waited for the morning to release her again from another night of blind, vengeful terror.
* * *
Cyrena and Ishmael had not stepped outside the house for almost a week. The world beyond the mansion’s walls had dissolved in its own continuum of noise and bustle. They never left each other, talking and touching and succumbing to their courtship through all the hours of the day and night. Even the division of light and dark held no meaning for them: the richness of their realm was more than all else.
The servants ferried food and drink and kept out of their way. So powerful was their love in the house that it evaporated all gossip and below-stairs speculation. The staff just grinned knowingly, shrugged their shoulders and grinned again.
The bow lay neglected in the hall; Ishmael no longer moved it with him from room to room. Occasionally it would fall in the night, clattering noisily against obscure items and leaving unpleasant odours and resistant stains. Eventually, he placed it as far from the heart of the house as the walls allowed, resting it in the small porch that joined the garden to the cellar. The servants were warned not to disturb it under any circumstances. It was a somewhat unnecessary order: the long, black bundle was loathsome to all.
Under a nearby bush, Tsungali’s ghost dozed peacefully. His grandfather had caught up with him a few days after he arrived. He had decided to wait with him for their business to be concluded, so they might travel together into the awaiting worlds. Tsungali slept to conserve the strength of what was left of him. His grandfather kept a wary eye on the bow while he dozed.
The arrival of the letter dislodged the peace of the house. Its sharp, white envelope was like a porcelain blade. It was from Ghertrude.
My dear friend
,
Have you forsaken me? Please tell me what I have done to cause your silence? I felt such relief at your support in this strange, incomprehensible time; I cannot begin to express my despair at your absence
.
I am so alone. Nobody comes. I only ever see Mutter, and I cannot speak to him
–
his smile unnerves me, it is more than I can tolerate at this moment
.
The house has never been so empty. I am racked by nightmares, which I think might be omens; the evil spirit of the doctor comes to steal the life from within me and I wake in terror every night. Please, if I have not offended you in some unknown way, come to me soon. I need your strength and friendship to see me through these desperate times
.
Yours always
,
Ghertrude
Cyrena was mortified. She had not considered Ghertrude’s needs for days, even though she and Ishmael had talked about her frequently with
warmth and care; she had to go to her friend at once. She called Ishmael and showed him the letter.
‘What is the significance of this doctor?’ he asked.
She shut her eyes to the answer that tangled in her throat. There was so much to explain, and so much more to forget.
‘He was one of the men we paid to find you. He was a vile man, corrupt and dangerous.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He disappeared,’ she lied, ‘ran off somewhere with the other vermin who tricked us.’
Ishmael was content and asked no more questions, letting her rush about as she dressed for the first time in days.
‘I don’t know how long I will be,’ she said at the door.
‘I am coming with you.’ He had his shoes on and was buttoning his shirt. ‘I am coming to see Ghertrude.’
The car sped through the city and she gripped his hand tightly, moving back and forth in her seat as if it might help the lilac Phaeton gain speed. Ishmael tried to talk, but it was impossible to engage her, so he sat back, enjoying the speed and the vista of the city, without the disguise of a mask or a scarf. He was beginning to feel grand in his new face and the plush elegance of the car’s interior.
Minutes later, they arrived at 4 Kühler Brunnen and she rattled at the gate and the bell. Ishmael stepped into the street and was suddenly overwhelmed; he was transported to a very different place, with a tide of memories flooding back.
When a dishevelled Ghertrude eventually came to the gate, the sight of her friend unhooked her and she immediately began to weep. She yanked the barrier open, throwing herself, sobbing, into Cyrena’s arms. Cyrena held her tightly, patting her back in soft, soothing strokes, heavily aware of their unseen companion but overcome with a maternal sense of
responsibility. ‘I am so, so sorry for deserting you. Please forgive me, it will never happen again.’