They walked on, into a clearing with six or seven large and ornately decorated dwellings. A few chickens scurried about in their passing, and a peacock watched them and shrilled. He looked about them and was ready to call out, when the old man was suddenly there. His tattooed and bangled arms held out for the girl. She folded into them and let Williams leave the clearing. As he looked back, he saw her beauty standing between them. It was detached, older and breathtaking.
* * *
On a brilliant sunlit morning, I shoot the next arrow. The curve of its fletching sings in the vibrant air as it flies out over my path of hard stone, which rises into the distant hills.
With each step I seem to climb out of the past, lift away from the flat gravity of waiting. From now on, memories will only flow forwards and await my arrival, the way it happens in dreams, where they give continuity and momentum. In the same way, the arrows went before to sense the void, taste its colour and name its happenstance. She had written my understanding of this high in the continual pathway. What waited in my dreams to resume the path will be explained to me between the flights of the arrows. My walking between them will unravel the knowledge, while my feet erase the path of all arrivals.
* * *
Stout yeoman Mutter pulled the gate closed on his Sunday morning duties in 4 Kühler Brunnen. He turned the key in the heavy lock which jarred against its closure, causing him to totter in the street. A tarry, wet cigar, chewed into the corner of his badly shaven mouth, accentuated his shallow breath in the cold air. He was returning home to the rich, swollen musk of his wife’s lunch, and his attention was slurred between last night’s schnapps and the saturated sleep that wallowed on the other side of the thick food of the afternoon; perhaps that is why the lock wasn’t quite properly engaged and he fumbled the keys, dropping them into the icy mire.
‘Good morning, Sigmund,’ fluttered a voice above his mittened stooping. He groaned himself into an upright attention to respond to the shining woman smiling over his moleskin hump. Her height was accentuated by the full-length beige winter coat that glowed around her, her radiance framed by a brightly patterned scarf which held a wide-brimmed
hat over stacked curls of auburn hair. Her green eyes shone with a strength that was uncomfortable.
‘Good morning Mistress Tulp, a fine, cold day.’
For a moment they were suspended between gestures. The street became narrow as it rose, funnelling from a broad hip for carriages into a stilted neck of roofs, the chimneys crooked and attempting to mimic the calligraphy of trees, burnt black against the madder sky. High in the nape of the street was a clock, unworking and roughly painted out, an act of erasure which had no story. Like its blind face, the meeting below seemed equally gagged.
‘How is Deacon Tulp?’ Mutter blurted out, with a barked volume that disclosed his need for departure.
‘My father is well,’ she said kindly, knowing that she could play with this stupid man’s inferiority. A fierce gust of wind wrestled in from the cathedral square and paused her calculated sport, agitating the heavy door just enough for her to see that it was unlocked.
‘Do give my regards and affection to your wife and the little ones,’ she piped. He blinked clumsily at her, not quite believing the ease of his escape. ‘And do tell her not to worry about the lateness of the rent; my father understands that things are hard at this time of year.’
This sent him scurrying away, stuttering his beaten hat against his flaky head with felicitation for all of her kin. She was left in the empty, windblown street with her excitement distinctly rattling in the mouth of the half-open lock.
Mutter’s main task was looking after the house and the horses, beasts that he and his family had the use of when not ferrying crates from locations across the city to the cellars below and vice versa.
Each week he collected a numbered crate from a warehouse an hour’s drive away, brought it to the house and exchanged it for the previous week’s used one. He had no idea what was inside the beautifully made, simple wooden boxes, and he did not care. Such was his temperament; it was
fiercely consistent, as it had been with his father and hopefully with his sons. It wasn’t his or their concern to pry into the business that had kept them secure and employed for the last eighty years. Anyway, such enquiries were not the property of his class. Imagination was always inevitably a disastrous activity when operated or purloined by those in service.
The boxes were of varying weights and he occasionally took one of his sons along to help with the heavier loads. It was good training for the boys, to see and understand the house, to repeat their duties and guard the quiet. They had known the building from the moment they could walk. It had been the same with him when he was a lad, standing behind his father’s legs as the gate was opened, terrified by the size of the horses and the richness of their smell, mesmerised by the stillness inside the lofty, empty rooms, and always waiting to see the masters appear. But they never did. He never saw anybody there, because the house was empty. Only his father had keys.
One day, when he was twelve and waiting in the kitchen, swinging his feet from his perched seat, he thought he saw something in the far wall, a brown, polished shadow of something that moved out of his sight. He sensed, even then, that he must not see it, so he unbound it from his memory and never spoke about it, especially not to his father.
He was in the same basement kitchen now, gingerly dragging the box across the room to the middle wall, where the dumbwaiter was concealed behind a panel of polished wood. The kitchen was dominated by a rectangular marble table which occupied its volume with a dignity of purpose. This would have been the focus of the entire kitchen staff when preparing food for the household, or when resting at the end of the day and feeding themselves.
Mutter panted as he put the box down and steadied himself, gripping the cold stone and wiping his red, wet face with a towel that he always kept folded near the sliding wall. Over the years, he had perfected a technique of lifting and sliding the boxes in and out of the lift interior
of the dumbwaiter, but now it was getting difficult. Not because of weakness, but from a slowness that seemed to be dissolving his energy, like a flame passing over the wax of a candle. The image of a cold, sallow puddle, flooded on its white saucer, its bristling wick tilted and sinking, made a chill run through the bulk of his body. He gathered himself and heaved the crate into the lift with an echoing thunder that was swallowed into the depth of the shaft below the floor. The dumbwaiter worked in reverse. Instead of servicing the rooms above, as would usually have been the case, it travelled downwards into a self-contained and undisclosed part of the house. He had always assumed the queerly shaped elevator had something to do with the well that must be down there, giving the house and the street its name.
He closed the lift door and slid the panelling back into its position of concealment. Dragging the lighter, used crate out of the room, he slowly closed the door behind him, pausing momentarily until he heard the lift begin to be winched down on its long, thick ropes.
He listened, not out of curiosity, which would have been impermissible, but out of a sense of impending satisfaction. His duty and his task were again complete.
* * *
The crates were a teaching library. Each box contained poignantly selected examples of the world outside: its structures, materials, animals, tools, plants, minerals and ideas were represented for explanation. Some were preserved samples, sealed in jars; some fresh, some alive. There were also photographs, prints and reproductions.
The Kin, which is the name they called themselves, would open the crates away from their pupil. They would become silent and stiff, their
heads in the boxes. He thought they were listening for instruction, or having their memories prompted. But he never heard a voice, just a long, piping whistle.
They would take turns to explain the wonders to Ishmael. Sometimes they specialised in certain subjects. Abel would delineate materials and processes; Aklia would explain plants, minerals and the earth in which they grew, also their attendant insects; Seth would demonstrate tools, act out history and show inventions; Luluwa would illustrate the animals, how they worked and how they might be used.
There was always a small box inside the large one. This was taken out and examined in the kitchen, and would then be turned into food for him. He loved the word ‘kitchen’; it was one of the first he’d learned. It was nourishment, perfume and warmth, and he smelt its sound long before he tasted it. It also made the others’ mouths go very strange. He watched when one of them said it, all of his attention turning to the speaker. It was the first thing he remembered making him laugh – not knowing why, just in response to their reactions. It somehow got better when they did nothing but stare blankly back.
They only ever laughed once, some days after he had shown them how he did it. They had watched his demonstration with such solemn attention that it had turned his perfunctory titters into full-blown guffaws. But when they came back and laughed for him, it was horrible. He could not explain why. It was simply wrong, the grating opposite of what he’d felt and heard during his spontaneous outburst. They had been practising it for him, for his sake, to join in, but they had no depth of reference. It was not in any of the crates. They promised never to do it again. In return, he promised never to scream again, never to sob uncontrollably.
Their care and tenderness was much better expressed through action and movement and touch, through the gentle unfolding of knowledge, companionship and food.
The day that Luluwa showed him how his body could extend into her
and produce nectar was overwhelming. She had cleared away the lesson of flies and he had posed a question about the thing she had called ‘pleasure’. He knew it was like the white dry ‘sugar’ or the thick yellow ‘honey’, not outside or on the tongue, but all over. She said that his kind had many ways to find it, and that they were all connected to knowledge. She said pleasure was made of cream, like her motor.
Some weeks before, Abel had shown him a small part from one of their bodies – the curved hollow of a Bakelite shell. Its interior was notched and ingrained with tiny lines, small dents and channels. Bumps covered its surface, very different from the smooth perfection of its gleaming other side.
‘We are hollow, only fluid inside,’ Abel had said, ‘not like you and the other animals, packed full of matter and organs. We work in another way. All of our forces are held in a thick cream contained within us; all that we are is alive in that cream and it feeds and talks to the inside of our shell through these complex ducts and circuits.’ He pointed to the inside of the fragment in his hands. ‘We know nothing of its workings, it is forbidden that we question and examine its process. We have a greater knowledge of you than we do of ourselves.’
Ishmael wanted to know more about pleasure and pressed Luluwa for a description. She said there were no words to explain it. ‘Your kindred have a connection between their breeding and their sweetness, a swelling of both that works like the magnets in Lesson 28. Their conception also follows the same construct.’
He wanted more.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is time to show you. You are like the animals that we have seen – you must place your tube inside the pouch of the female to breed. The seeds then pass to fertilise the egg. This you know. But what you will learn is that its action is layered with pleasure.’
Ishmael understood her words, but not their consequence.
‘When you release your seed,’ she said, ‘there is a great song of warmth.’
He stared and spun inwardly. She coiled down closer to him. Her hard, gleaming hand stroked his thigh. The firmness of her shell drew an erection.
‘I will show you that I have been fashioned like your kind to explain these marvels to you. These lessons of humans have been clearly taught to me alone, for you.’
She showed him a latch in the crease between her legs, normally hidden by its underside position. She asked him to move it and, with chattering fingers, he felt the mechanism of this secret thing. After a while she joined in, her nimble fingers sliding its notch down the entire length of her division, leaving the long cleft open.
‘Touch inside,’ she said.
It was warm and soft. He looked closer, some of his hand now within her, fingers moving the folded layers.
‘Kelp,’ he said. ‘It’s made of kelp.’ Kelp had been in Lesson 17. Jars from the sea.
If she could have smiled, she would have. Instead, she stroked his head and said, ‘No, but very like it. It’s a material you have not yet seen.’ She pushed the notched bulb in a little further and moisture flooded his touch.
‘You leak like me,’ he said. ‘Like me and the animals. You never did before.’
‘This is not the same. This is not the passing of waste fluid, but a special oil to let you move inside me without friction or hurt.’
She guided him towards her, positioning her prone body, and with the same attentive concentration that she showed when peeling the animals apart, she drew him into her. An inner clasping made Ishmael flinch, but she rectified it with the pressure of her left hand in the small of his back and a series of whistling clicks that he knew were declarations of satisfaction, the same sounds she made when he understood her other lessons. A growing wave of succulent achievement overcame him, and he began to push deeper inside her. His hands gripped the hard perfection of her curved hips, making the contrast of her hot interior a wonderful benefaction.
This was different from all the other things she had shown him. The understanding was in his whole body, churning with sugars that gave him a direct power he had never dreamt of before. He tasted might and dominance and the impossible joy of retreat as she fed his anxious childhood into the past. They rocked together while he cried, sobbing pleasure, locked in her arms, sensation boomeranging sensation with continual vigour. Suddenly she began to shake, every joint shuddering, her voice impaling itself on an imprecision of sound. This had never happened before, and she had no understanding of its purpose or meaning. Only Ishmael knew that one of her inner ventricles had been flushed directly to the shunt mechanism of her sleep and recharging mode, had switched into total response as he reverberated against her, causing her to flick in and out of sleep in a fast stutter of consciousness and oblivion, producing something like pleasure constructed of surprise in her old, servile body of juice and stringency. As long as the rule regarding her Kin was in place, she would never be able to comprehend her reaction. The mystery would be for Ishmael alone to understand.