Authors: Hal Duncan
Ink (78 page)
Anat goes limp. Her hand falls from the angel's mouth, and he holds her there by her crushed throat, dangling. Throws her body to the side. And raises his cold gaze toward Jack, who's looking up at the angel Michael now, the angel of ice he's on a collision course with, getting closer, closer, as the fucker's words explode around him, left and right, above and below. Even if the bastard hits him now he'll fucking well take the angel down with him.
Azazel, the angel of death, spreads his wings, looks to the east.
Jack can't take them both down, though. Christ, fuck, he can't take them both down.
So we come, a crack in the earth straight from the impact crater in the Ink Wells, splitting the ground along the fault line that runs down this valley of salt, cracking it wide and pouring up and out of the crack, we buried and forgotten dead of worlds long gone, and at the head of us a sixfold soul that was once Joseph Pechorin, murderer of dreams. He comes out of the darkness clothed in the iridescent armor of our ink, hitting Azazel with all his strength and speed, slamming into him and carrying them both through the angel's field of binding and into the city of Sodom.
As Jack's thopter hits the angel Michael, and wings snap, and metal buckles, and the two of them hurtle as a spinning ball of crumpling chaos through the air and down.
Jack hangs in the wreckage of the ornithopter, caught up in a jumble of torn clothing, torn canvas and torn flesh, suspended like a corpse in an Indian burial. A sharp twist of metal spears his right thigh. Shreds of leather wing snarl his left hand. The smell of blood and steel, burning meat and fuel, the smell of war, fills his nostrils; is that his flesh burning, the archangel Michael's, both? He twists his head but all he can see is the shattered arch of the Jericho Gate, the path of burning destruction gouged through pillars of salt now shattered, drifting on the wind. Beyond the Gate, the cigar shapes of the Futurist zeppelins move in from the north; they'll reach the city in a few minutes now.
The sky above, through the smoke of the burning thopter, is dark green with the storm of ink, swirls like a forest pool thick with algae, dotted with burst of brilliant color like one of Monet's lily ponds. The ink swarms around the airships, bringing down this one and that, but it's an inchoate attack, and the Ink Wells are burning now. If these creatures cannot be destroyed they can be … disrupted, scattered into confusion like a soul stripped apart at death, into skan-das, strands of identity.
Et in Arcadia ego
, thinks Jack. Even in Arcadia, I am.
A low moan comes from somewhere behind; he can't twist his head to look, but he knows it must be Michael. Fuck. Jack twists his right hand, scraping it free from the two metal shards it's trapped between with a yell of pain. He unravels the leather wound around his left hand, grimaces as in turning to reach he presses skin against blistering-hot fuselage. The smoke is billowing up from that side, though he can't see the flames; the metal is too hot even for him to use it as the leverage he needs to tear his thigh off its spear. He tears at the leather until he has enough to wrap around one hand. Places it—tentatively at first—on the jagged edge where the windshield was, and pulls at his thigh with the other. His pain drowns out the sucking feel of flesh coming free from steel.
He slides up and out, grabs a broken strut and tumbles over and through the wreckage, out onto sand. He can see the fire now and he rolls himself clear of it, drags himself up and away from the ruined thopter. His disrupter lies, torn from the machine's side, a few yards toward the Gate and he drags himself to it, pulls
it up and swings himself round to train it on the smoldering wreck. He can't see the angel, but he can hear the fucker moaning. The noise is wordless, but there's enough Cant in it to make him sick to his stomach. He digs the butt of the disrupter into the ground and pulls himself up onto one leg.
Starts to limp round to the other side of the wreck.
Impaled on and embedded in the wreckage of the ornithopter, Michael tries to reach toward him, screaming soundlessly and clawing ineffectually at warped steel and wound cloth. Fire licks around his legs, twisted round in away that says he'll never walk again. Never walk into a city, sure and certain of his duty to destroy it. The angel moans again and his mouth gouts blood—tongue bitten off, Jack would guess.
“Let the fucker bleed to death.”
Jack turns.
It's Pechorin. He recognizes the man instantly, couldn't fail to, but he also knows it's not his Pechorin but another, the Pechorin of another time, another place, another fold, just as cold in some ways, just as cruel, but in some strange binding of sympathies, of understandings, a friend. Looking at the black tear painted under his right eye, Jack just knows that this is less his antagonist than his … complement.
Pechorin holds the head of Azazel by its dreadlocks.
Jack reaches down into the pocket of his trousers, feels the soft smooth texture of the folded page of vellum, the almost imperceptible warmth of still-living tissue. He pulls it out. He keeps Pechorin in his peripheral vision—just to be safe—as he limps over and holds it out toward Michael, just out of his grasp. The creature goes berserk, scrabbling at the metal, trying to tear itself apart to get to him, its manicured fingernails breaking and bleeding.
“You want this?” says Jack. “You want to bind God into this” [he nods at Pechorin] “anointed of yours. This slaughterer of angels.”
And he drops it into the flames that lick around the angel's feet, watches the fucker trying to reach into the fire, trying to rip its own arm out of its socket so it can save the last page of the Book of All Hours, which slowly ignites, burning and blackening and crackling to ash as white as salt.
“The rest of the Book is already gone,” says Jack. “See that head over there, your mate's? Blame him. He burned it when he tried to wipe me out of existence because I had the fucking audacity to call him the cunt he was.”
Jack smiles, thinking of a wooden box full of tattered scraps. Not the Book of All Hours, but Hobbsbaum's notes, journals, selected translations from the
tome that he'd switched, slipped into his leather satchel as he crouched up on the rock looking out over the city at the angel of death and wondered how they could possibly get out of this alive, any of them. How he could get Tamuz out of this alive.
A leather satchel with the Book of All Hours in it, held up as a sacrifice and as a shield against the wrath of self-righteous, murderous bastards.
“The Book is gone,” he says. “Story's over. No more destinies. No more gods with any luck. We're free. That was the last page of the final edition.”
“I wonder what Reinhardt will think when he opens the box,” says Jack.
“Knowing Fox,” says Pechorin, “he'll probably appreciate the trick.”
The angel's scream dies into a gurgle of blood as they walk away, walk toward the Gate and the approaching zeppelins, the host of war machines coming clear of the ink storm now, almost directly overhead, all set for their pointless razing of an already devastated city. Up in the cockpits, captains and commanders, bombardiers and gunners will be looking down and probably wondering what happened, why and how and whether they really need to be here. But mostly they'll just shrug and carry out their orders.
Jack looks at Pechorin. The Russian steps out past the Gate and picks up the disrupter dropped by MacChuill, tosses it to Jack. Then walks over to retrieve Anat's disrupter for himself.
Down where Anat's body lies sprawled on the dry ground, a stalk of wild-grass grows out of a crack of soil, somehow shooting up green-gold and vigorous in this valley of salt. This region has plants evolved to survive in even such a hostile climate, and Jack has a sudden image of the fields outside the city, to the north, fields fertilized by ash and blood, covered in olive and orange and fig and pomegranate trees, trees twisting up out of the soil, gnarled and branching, the intricate fractal scribblings of nature. Even the most arid region can be irrigated. That's how civilization began.
The city behind them is in ruins, devastated. There's not a man, woman or child left alive in it. There's nothing to fight for, nothing to save, except perhaps its memory, which could be wiped out forever or held fast against all those who'd like to write its liberal, libertine, licentious
beauty
out of history. And even if they fail?
Jack leans on one disrupter as a staff, a crutch, raises the other to aim.
Fuck it.
A city, like a soul, can be rebuilt.
DAWN, A WOODLAND, NOW
Happy Ever Never
very epic, I used to think, should end with the hero's death. Picture it: Two rows of crucified slave-rebels, Spartacus on his cross, his right hand pointing down the long road to a city of death; El Cid riding out of the gates of that city, riding out against the Moors, a dead man strapped to his horse; among the dust of stomping hooves, Achilles stumbling as the arrow strikes his heel. Ancient poets even added an encounter between the hero Gilgamesh and the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu to the first recorded epic, one step away from having them meet again, at the end of all adventures on the threshold of the house of no return.
It is as if the story is seeking its own form. And for all that it's easy, for all that it's obvious, there's something just so right about that end.
“Bollocks, mate,” Jack would have said. “Give ‘em a fucking happy-ever-after. Fuck that tragic-ending shit.”
“What are you working on now?” asks Anna, chin on my shoulder, one hand tracing along my forearm to the gripped pen, folding fingers round my fist.
“A happy-ever-after,” I say. “Or a happy-ever-before, I guess, would be more accurate.”
Feel of my own brows furrowing, face rumpling into a
well, that's not quite right.
A tap of pen on paper.
“No,” I say. “Ahappy-ever-never.”
I turn my head toward her wrinkling, freckled nose. Her red hair slides over
my triceps, tickles a nipple, as she twists to smooch my cheek with a peck of
top of the morningtoyou.
Angled enough, I can just see that she's wearing my boxer shorts.
“I'm doing a cut-up-and- fold-in of a couple of Virgil's eclogues,” I say, “sort of a rural, pastoral thing to try and tie up the
Songs
with an epilogue.”
I wonder if, somewhere in the back of my head, that's why I suggested this log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a break for the three of us. I'd talked of good hunting for her, of teaching Joshua constellations and cosmologies, flora and fauna, and of quietude in which to finish my epic cycle of poems. But it's entirely possible that Jack and Puck just wanted to cavort naked in the hills, in my imagination.
In Virgil's Latin and my annotated English, on the page in front of me, I fold two eclogues into one: a goatherd and a shepherd shift from singing contest through to celebration of the deified Daphnis; the Roman poet's characters Menalcus and Damoetus blur, become Menalcus and now Mopsus, shift again; I think of them as Mainsail and Dampseat, Mainsail and Moppet. A flash of white piracy on the high seas. Green combats dark with dew on the butt. A grinning Jack with Puck in headlock, scruffling his hair:
“My little moppet,” Jack would josh.
“Geroff me!” Puck would protest.
That's my names for the idyll's id and the sylvan self, the kid and the lamb of these evers and nevers, from Gilgamesh down to my own metamorphoses, byway of Virgil: Jack and Puck, I call them. I based a little of Puck on what Anna's told me of her brother Thomas, invented Jack out of whole cloth. But both of them, I think, are as much creations of the idiom itself. They're not really mine, not mine alone.
I know my Jack and Puck don't really exist, never really existed, but the Jack and Puck who're more than mine… they've been around forever.
“Orange juice?” she says. “Pancakes? Bacon? Maple syrup? We had a deal, you remember. Me hunter-gatherer woman bring venison and rabbit; you stay-at-home medicine man make strange scribbles. Make breakfast in bed, more to the point.”
She drums her fingers on the table.
“I was on my way to the stove,” I say. “I just… I realized how the book should end, had to act on it, you know, get it down on paper before … before the coffee and the crumpled bedsheets and the two of us licking each other's sticky fingers and…”
I nuzzle her cheek.
It has to end in elegy, I'd realized, and that means it has to end in idyll. The idyll and the elegy are two sides of one pastoral form, each idyll shaded with an elegiac sorrow for what's lost, for what will never be again, and every elegy lit up with the idyllic joy of what was found, of what will
ever
be, again and again and again, each time the song is sung.
And they all lived happy ever never.
“The Songs of Unknown Lands,”
says Anna, “by the poor starving poet Guy Reynard Carter, can wait until after he's paid for his room and board… with breakfast in bed and services rendered.”
“You make me feel so cheap and tawdry,” I say as I put down the pen.
“You love it,” she says.
“Is that so?” I say.
I lay a paperweight on top of a page.
Match of Music
“So, tell me, dumbass,” says Mainsail Jack, “is it Old Mellowbow who's master of these sheep?”
Puck of the Dampseat pokes the faggot finger at him, middle finger of the right hand, down and forward.
“Fuck you too,” he says. “No, Argon gave me them to keep for him.”
“Poor sheep,” says Jack. “Unlucky fucking flock! Their master traipses after mistress Narrow, panicking in case she's after me…”
Jack scritches at a leg, his exomis shorter even than the usual knee-length linen chiton, baring his thighs so high it is, and fastened at the left shoulder so it seems he's out for exercise, horse riding or hard labor. He's even gone for the short cloak of a chlamys rather than the long himation. Cock-hipped, he grins, cocksure of his own charm, tongue in his cheek.
“Meanwhile, Argon gets fleeced,” Jack carries on, “his hired hand left in peace to milk the sheep twice hourly on the clock, thieving the lambs’ milk from the flock.”
“Joke all you want,” shrugs Puck. “But, while you jeer, remember, Jack, I know by who you were”—he flicks a fist up with his hand in nook of elbow, with a thump, a wink—”and while the billy goats all blinked and peered the other way. And in a shrine!… although the naughty nymphs all cheered.”
They have a history together, Jack and Puck, you might have guessed, a history
of slingshot slander… though it's mostly just in jest. Of all the herdsmen of the hills, we bitmite nymphs like Jack and Puck the best.
“Like when they saw me trashing all the trees and vines,” remembers Jack, “in Micron's orchard with a hook.”
“Or right here by the beech trees where you broke poor Dovenest's bow and reeds. Man, you were green as ivy with your envy, jealous Jack, to see those shiny toys all given to another boy… dying to find some way to get him back.”
“But, hey, what can the farmers do, when thieves like
you
run free?” Jack says.
“You're
worse than me. Did I not see you, while the sheepdog barked aloud, scrag, leaping from ambush in the hedges, snatching Demon's goat? Then when I cried—
Hey, where's he running? Tightarse, guard the flock!
—you hid behind the sedges.”
Puck kicks a stone downhill at him but Jack darts to one side. One of his goats bleats in complaint, bell tinkling round its neck.
“Had I not beaten Demon in a match?” grumps Puck. “Had I not won that goat from him with my own song, with my own pipes? As if you didn't know, that welching twat as much as said the goat was mine. He just refused to pay. Why should I let him get away with that?”
Jack snorts, switches a stick to guide his goats uphill past Puck's shamble of sheep and ambling cow.
“ When havej/OM ever beaten Demon in a singing match?” he says. “Come on. When did
you ever
have a proper set of wax-bound pipes? Don't you just stand down at the crossroads, dumbass, murdering a bad tune on a squawking straw?”
Jack licks his lips as he strolls past. Hands on his hips, Puck glares.
That's fucking rich. Right then, you prick…
“OK,” he says, “let's make a match of music. Let's take turns to show what each of us can do. I bet… this heifer—no, don't cock your snoot! She suckles two calves from her udders and still comes twice daily to the milking pail as well. So, come on; tell me what you'll put up as your stake.”
“Oh, it's all right for you,” says Jack. “But some of us don't bet what we don't own. I've my old man at home, a wicked crone of a stepmother, ugly sisters, and a poor old widowed mother, with just me to care for her and all—and, see, they count the whole flock twice a day, and one of them makes sure none of the kids have gone astray.”
Puck tucks his hands under his armpits, clucks at Jack—
puk, puk, chicken
—till Jack gives up.
“OK, OK, if you're so keen to play this game,” he says, “this puts your cow to shame—I'll bet a pair of beechwood cups, carved by the subtle knife of the divine Alchemy Don, with scattered berries on a supple vine weaving around pale ivy
Puck knows the ones he means. In each one there's a portrait: Cunning and… that sage who mapped the seasons in the skies over the whole world with his compass, telling the farmers when to put their shoulder to the plow and when to reap. He can't remember who, not being very good at history and all.
“They're brand new,” Jack says. “They're unused. I keep them stored away and haven't even touched my lips to them. What do you say?”
Puck shrugs, and flicks his hand as if to wave away a fly.
“Alchemy Don made two of those for me as well, you mug, wreathing the handles round with soft acanthus, Jack, and setting Orphan in the center with a trail of trees all marching at his back.”
He mocks Jack's voice.
“I haven't supped. I keep them all locked up.
So what? So fuck? Look at the cow I'm putting up; then you'll shut up about your poncy cups.”
“Right then,” says Jack. “Like I'm about to let you off with that, pup's tail. No, not today: I'll take you on. Come on, we have soft grass to sit on; and what with the crops fresh in the fields, fruit ripe upon the trees, and all the woodland thick with leaves, now is the fairest time of year.”
He flops down on the slope of grass, leans back on one arm, one leg stretched, the other nooked. Puck looks upslope, and up Jack's slant of thigh under the exomis that's hitched—deliberately, he's sure—
well
high. He's hooked.
“You first, dumbass,” says Jack—who, Puck thinks, might as well be in the buff. “We'll sing in turns,” says saucy Jack. “That's what the Muses love.”
“The music begins,” Puck sings, “in Dewpatter who loves all things and holds the whole world dear. And to my songs Dewpatter turns his ear.”
“But Apple loves me more,” Jack sings. “His gifts are ever near me: boys who blush; and the sweet flush of hyacinth.”
He fiddles a finger round a flower and Puck looks down the hill toward the town. He points out a woman in her yard, girdling her floor-length woolen peplos
at the waist, gathering its folds into a pouch. She drapes an epiblema over her head and shoulders.
“So?” says Puck, pointing at her. “I've got my Galaxy, my flirty tart. She throws an apple at me, darts away into the willows, wishes that I'd share my pillow.”
Jack waves this off, points at a youth, lithe and loose of limb, at his exercises in the open square of the gymnasium.
“Mint, my flame, is bolder,” Jack says, saucy and sweet. “He comes for my touch without being told, so much that now our dogs know him as well as all the spirits of these forest dells.”
Trust Jack, Puck thinks, to be drawn to the gleam of sun on skin.
“Dovenest divine in the sleep-dunes of dawn,”
I whisper,
“down of a cunt dappled by the daybreak's sun and dust, as you stretch through the shaft ofspringlet in through a window, as you yawn.”
Anna stretches, rolls over in her half sleep, mumbling as I push the hair back from her eyes. Lying there on top of the white sheets, in a hunting cabin so spartan that there aren't even any curtains to keep the rising sun from pinking her freckle-dotted flesh more rosy even than it is by nature, she's my Muse, I think to myself, my Irish rose, my Celtic knotwork of complexities too intriguing to entirely untangle, as intricate as the tattoo that sleeves her right arm. A whole secret history, she has, I often think, written down in that tattoo she never speaks of, less explicable to me than all of Virgil's Latin.
“Can you explain to me what your
Songs of Unknown Lands
is about?” she'll say. “In twenty words or less.”
“If I could do that I wouldn't have spent the last ten years writing the sodding poems.”
“Well, if I could explain the how and why of the tattoo I wouldn't have got it in the first place,” she smiles.
I run a finger over the untranslatable ink of her now. Dust motes dance in a sunbeam above us, Jack and Puck riding photons that bounce between them, in my imagination.
“I have a gift to give my love,” says Puck. “With my own eyes I've marked the place where doves have built, high in the trees.”
“Let's see,” says Jack. “What joys might I have sent
my
boy, what goods? Ten golden apples plucked from deep within the woods. Ten! And tomorrow I will send the same again.”
He lies back in the grass, his hands behind his head.
Beat that.