‘I mean you no offence,’ said Williams, ‘but what you speak of holds no meaning for me. There is nothing like a forest out there; I know because I have been walking for days. There is only a vast, dismal mire.’
Sidrus, so eternally contained and controlled, was finally undone. The truth that he had sought for so long, and come so very close to, slipped further from him with every word. Had the Bowman really forgotten all
and been blinded into an illusion? Was this the ultimate effect of exposure to the forest, its greatest defensive irony? Or was this all a foul, vindictive game, a vicious lie to keep him from a life of riches and wealth beyond all imaginings?
‘Have you ever travelled through or lived in a forest?’ asked Sidrus, searching out any avenue that might separate truth from lie.
‘I have the dimmest recollection of a forest destroyed; broken stumps and hacked roots; a place of mud and death, illuminated by thunder and lightning, which tore men into pieces. But that was a long time ago and far from where we now stand.’
More lies.
‘Were you alone? Apart from men, what other creatures dwelt there?’
Williams paused, as if in thought, his hand moving slowly into the corner of his canvas bag. ‘I can think of only two: mules and angels.’ The pistol clicked into gear and he swung it up, letting the bag drop to the floor. But he was no match for the speed of indignation. Before he could commit to a shot, Sidrus bounded across the space between them, arcing one of the sticks up and over, its practised blade exposed. It severed the bag and its strap, slicing through the tendons of Williams’ arm. Sidrus spiralled around him in a blur; he was standing behind the Bowman before his cry had reached the cleric’s ears.
‘I have had enough of your mocking lies!’
Williams grabbed at his bleeding arm; the rest of the world fell away from under him.
When he came to, it was darker; the shadow, which seemed to construct the room he was in, smelt rank. He gagged against his consciousness and tried to move. Nothing shifted; he was held in some sort of constraint. He could hear the wind nearby; it sounded as though he were outside, on some desolate landscape. Then he made out the snapped lead and its fringed remnants of light: a stained glass window, long, meagre and
broken, its coloured frames all stolen years before. He recalled the tiny chapel behind the figure at the crossroads; its description fitted his rudimentary assessment of the space he strained against: he had been tied to the simple altar.
Sidrus’ voice had changed: there was no sign of his earlier emotion. The anger had been distilled.
‘I mean to have my answer from you today. I will not tolerate any more of your foolishness. I have been a servant to the Vorrh all of my life; I have tended to its needs and commands; I have engaged with its watchers and culled its predators. I know that the child they call The Sacred Irrinipeste opened your soul to it, and I know you carry its essence locked in your heart and head. My knowledge of it is extensive; yours will make it complete.’
Williams choked against his restraints of rope, throttled by his own ignorance.
‘If you will not give it to me,’ continued the cleric, ‘then I will take it.’
‘I have nothing to give!’ spluttered Williams with all of his strength.
‘Then I shall cut you down and peel you away, until you are only your voice. You will have no choice but to tell.’
The wind cascaded through the broken window, flickering the last of the afternoon light. It bent the puckered fragments of clear glass and the fatigued lead arteries that held them in their tenuous position.
‘It is said by some that parts of memory reside outside the brain, saturating themselves into the muscles and running the length of the spine. I believe that to be true, and so I am going to dig them out, one by one; wake them and release them, so that what you know of the core will be free to reach my ears.’
The purposeful cleric attached a tourniquet to Williams’ upper thigh. A small brazier smouldered nearby, a quenching iron glowing in its heat. Sidrus saw the Englishman’s terrified eyes staring at it.
‘Not a drop of your precious blood will be wasted. By the time I finish,
it will exceed the organs it has so faithfully served. It will rush and buffer your brain with over-rich oxygen; only your pain will equal its need to empty its power. Together they will shriek the truth that you refuse to give.’
The first cut only felt like pressure, until he skinned the nerve and everything in Williams’ mind turned white.
He did not know how many times he had passed out or how many times he had come to. New agonies awaited him with every breath. The night arrived and the wind dropped; he was about to scream again when he felt it change, its velocity fluttering and calming into a whisper.
‘Now,’ he heard himself say. But now what?
He felt something, far outside the chapel, searching him out, rushing to his side. Was this what Sidrus searched for? A secret approaching, to be given to him and then passed on? A secret whose journey was triggered by blood? Sidrus moved closer.
‘Speak up, Oneofthewilliams: your time has come, as I told you it would.’
The whistle outside was shrill and fast, only moments away. Sidrus was oblivious; he pushed his disgusting face closer to his prey’s mouth, but the sounds he heard had no meaning.
Williams saw the voice from the corner of his eye. It flashed white in the window for a fraction of a second before slicing through his throat, pinning his words to the altar.
Sidrus sprang back in a shower of blood, his white face drenched pink.
‘NO!’ he bellowed at the dying man, tugging desperately at the white arrow impaled in his neck. But it was no use: Williams was gone, and the arrow would not move. Sidrus slumped backwards, defeated and dejected. He wiped a grey, shaking hand over his bloodied face. He sat there until the dawn’s grey sheen made the chapel hover. The thin light moved across the room, momentarily highlighting a tiny painting of a heavily bearded prophet, standing in a black, flat landscape of featureless
insistence. The colourless prism illuminated the dead man’s face to reveal an expression of pleased contentment. No man who died in such pain should look like that. Sidrus scrabbled to his feet and grabbed at the ropes around the corpse. There was a smile somewhere in that face, under the bone, working like a battery and powering an expression of total peace. Sidrus shook the dead body in rage. The arrow fell loose, as though it had merely been resting there.
He could bear no more. Grabbing his belongings together, he speedily shovelled the blunted probes and knives into a sack. The brazier had not fully cooled and he left it behind, pushing impatiently out into the damp, brightening air.
He ran towards the forest. It took him an hour to reach its sanctified enclosure; it already felt different, less troubling: he felt at ease there. Had he got it? Were those words, those few, strange words, the secret? Could he at last go deeper and contact the Erstwhile directly, communicate with them in some tangible way? The forest warmed and flamed with beauty as the full power of the sun rose over it: he was welcome here. He had it. It had begun.
He dropped the sack of tools and made straight for the core. His patience had run out: he needed to find the older being and be cleansed of the wounds he had already carried for too much of his life. It was midday; huge shafts of light flooded down from the canopy, shuddering with life and birdsong. He could see the swallows darting in the sky between the spaces of trees; something rustled in the undergrowth, followed by a trill in the air; the swallows spun into a line and parted the leaves above. A great arc formed and glided down from the clouds to the forest floor. It approached at speed, almost upon him before he understood what shrilled inside the arc. The old white arrow twisted and warped, spinning to the ground with huge purpose. It struck its target and a grey-skinned creature fell to the ground in front of Sidrus with a force
that he felt through his feet. It cried out, thrashing momentarily before falling silent.
Birds spiralled upwards, fluttering through the chattering leaves and out to quietness. He bent to examine the creature’s grey skin, unable to decide if it was man or animal; it seemed much too shrivelled, as if it had been dead for years rather than seconds. His interest faded with the recollection of his purpose; he walked away from it, not noticing the two black ghosts who drew close in his departure.
* * *
Tsungali disregarded the mangled presence: there was nothing to be gained from such a lost and empty being; he was like a white sack, limp and vacant, only standing because he did not have the wisdom to fall.
The hunter and his grandfather approached the dead creature, the old ghost pulling the arrow from its dryness and passing it over his shoulder to Tsungali. The old man’s eye never left the grey carcass as he circled his gnarled hand above his head. He thought he knew what it was, but could not believe how far it had strayed from perfection. Lifting the hand of the slaughtered creature, he parted the fingers, removing the moss and lichen that clung there. The fingernails had turned into horny claws, and two of them passed through the old ghost’s tangibility and hooked themselves into him. He ignored this and continued his investigation, pulling at the tendrils of ivy that grew under the skin, alongside what had once been veins. As he did this, the flesh fell away like parchment from what had once been a human hand. The first human hand.
Tsungali lifted the bow, fitted the dart and bent it with all his strength, pointing its attention into the shafts of light.
* * *
From the moment the arrow left the bow, followed on its journey by the duo of earnest spirits, his vision started to fail. The sound of the bow echoed behind Sidrus’ eyes, which in turn quivered in his head and lost focus. His skin crawled with a shiver that had previously been the avatar of Mithrassia, but this was something else, something altogether different. It must be the blood, he thought, or else the thrill at the beginning of his repair. It was as though his entire body was alive with thousands of ants, running over and inside his changing skin, rewriting his structure and purpose. He came to a murky pool and plunged his white head into its brackish waters to wash off any last traces of Williams’ death. The water felt cool and cleansing against the heat of his purpose, his exposed body embraced by the closeness of the trees. He emerged and dried his wrecked face carefully on his shirt, breathing heavily into its comfort. When he opened his tight, button eyes, all that lay before him was mile upon mile of black, desolate peat.
* * *
Ghertrude’s hands were damp and she was flushed with the child as she walked through the echoing, empty hall. Mutter was elsewhere. He spent most of his time in the stables or cleaning the yard; only invitation lured him into the house these days. Now that she was larger, he seemed more bashful, yet incapable of averting his eyes from the protuberance.
She walked over to the basement door and unlocked it with the key she had carried in her wet hand for the last two hours. The nails were loose and fell to the floor with the soft, disintegrating sounds of
liberation. She unchained the padlocks and pushed into the waiting kitchen; the warmth of disinterest still pumped at its enigmatic heart. She ignored its invitation to stay and think, to let time drift, and went to the dented panel.
She was a very different shape now, and had to adjust her new balance in the tightness, easing herself down the stairwell and squeezing through the narrow entry, stepping at last into the room where the puppet had broken beneath her feet so long ago. The memory of her most forgotten dream enveloped her. She edged, cat-like, across the space. No trace of the haunting action was evident: no stains; no cobwebs; no history. She entered the next room and was somehow unsurprised to see Luluwa, sitting on the crate that had laid open since Ghertrude’s last visit; she was still and soft, her stiff brown hands resting on her thighs, head bowed. Ghertrude observed her calmly, waiting for direction.
‘You are the one who broke Abel,’ Luluwa said in her high, sing-song voice.
‘Yes,’ said Ghertrude.
Luluwa raised her polished head; her eyes swivelled between their brown surface scars, looking for the question that Ghertrude’s observation had not yet formulated.
‘I hear the child,’ Luluwa said. ‘I hear the squalling of the movement; the child sucks at your interior, and thrashes with its limbs.’
Ghertrude suddenly understood why she had not recoiled from Luluwa instantly, why she had not been immediately shocked to see her. Two eyes of cunning observation now adorned her face, surrounded by scars, as if the sockets and lids had been smeared with a hot knife. Her features had been altered with an amateur technology that had misunderstood the perfection of both the new and the original material: it was a botched and graceless job at rendering her more human.
‘We will be your servants now,’ said Luluwa. ‘I and the remaining Kin will be teachers to the child.’
Ghertrude was running out of emotions, or at least the connective tissue that made sense of them.
‘I did not mean to kill him,’ she said.
Luluwa bobbed her head in understanding. ‘Life is not durable. There is no blame.’ She got to her feet, then looked again at Ghertrude. ‘You did not know that the camera tower is aligned over the well?’
To emphasise the point, she walked over to Ghertrude and placed one hand on her abdomen and the other above her head, where a halo might float. She made a small rotating movement; Ghertrude could smell the hum of Luluwa’s Bakelite. She realised that they were the same height. Luluwa had grown and stood looking at her, shoulder to shoulder and eye to eye.
The book was a present
Best to throw it away, to the bottom
Of the sea where ingenious fish may read it
Or not.
John Ashbery
,
A Snowball in Hell
Belgium, 1961
The streets are livid with bright cars; they seem to run at the same speed as their horns. The sunburnt boulevard is engorged with primary colours.