The Frenchman frowned back at Seil Kor. There was another question and he let his gaze drift to the window to formulate it, but the shifting trees shredded it, like the movement of the Limboia.
He sat back into his seat and imagined a silent giant, walking in a clearing, one hand stroking his long, white beard in deep thought. He saw angels in flowing robes, walking the noonday streets of the city; standing in a public garden, staring up at his hotel, where a woman stood on the balcony. He jarred out of the stupidity of the picture, amazed at its naïvety.
He looked back to Seil Kor for a whiff of reassurance, but he too had relaxed back into the journey; he had lost his frown, and was watching the movement outside. His eyes flickered with the trees and a mesmeric calm filled his body and radiated in his face. The Frenchman felt his power and his resolve, saw how it illuminated his presence and made him shine in an untouchable perfection. He could watch this man for hours. Every nuance of his poise and expression fed his delight; in his company, he could forget his clawing anger and the spiteful visions in his head.
Seil Kor turned to look at the white man dressed in a pantomime of coloured robes. He saw a change in the eyes of his friend and a look of uncertainty crossed his face. The Frenchman responded with a faint, unguarded smile.
They were asleep before twilight as the carriage rattled forward at its constant speed. There were no lanterns in their compartment or in any other. All were sleeping before the ultimate darkness arrived, and would remain in their slumber to a far-off dawn. Nothing could be seen of the train but a few sparks and a blush around the smoke as it left the chimney. The trees ignored its dark progress; the animals were too busy to notice it. Some of the nocturnal tribes of the rim stopped briefly to listen to its rhythmic, linear voice. Most knew it to be part of the Vorrh’s day-to-day business and kept their distance. Once, in its early history, a few of the unspeakable ones had tried to kill it, standing on the track with spears to confront the monster’s speed. Their time was short-lived and messy, and the legend had bled back into the future generations, keeping them away.
Thus, unassailed by plants, beasts or anthropoids, the train was almost automatic in its continual shuttle back and forth. There was only the trouble with the engineers and firemen, who took shifts to be awake over the rattling miles. Something objected to their vigil, something which made its presence felt on the confined space of footplate. It stared between the shovelled coals, stoking the fire, spitting embers. It leaned,
annoyed, against the burning oil and steam. Voices worried the pipes and handrails; voices from the rushing night, which could not be heard over the thunder of the engine. Some said it was the angels becoming anxious about consciousness trespassing the Vorrh. Others said it was the ghosts of the Limboia, looking for their hosts. Those who worked the engine said less and less, as they heard more and more.
They did not wake the next day. Nobody ever did. The next day was always dimmer, maybe because the forest grew thicker the deeper the train travelled, its huge canopy thrust up against the sky by greater and greater trees. Or it could have been the murmuring speed that never changed pulse or velocity, the rhythmic, chanting tracks sending the passengers into a haze of hypnotic coma, much like the metronome of a piano is said to do. Or perhaps, in this strangest of places, the natural laws of the world, which were known and trusted, came unbound and bent. Night here might have a different saturation, so that the dawn, which had begun to fragment onto the leaves, had taken forty hours to arrive.
They blinked and rubbed their eyes against the new light, standing and stretching as the train whistled. There was a strange smell in the compartment, one that goes unnoticed in normal life. He knew the scent from his younger days, when he had attempted caving in Switzerland. He and his athletic guide had been forced to enter a shallow crawlspace, deep in the arteries of the Nidlenloch. It had taken them an hour to crawl through its pinching tunnel. That was when he had first noticed it.
‘What is that stench?’ he had asked his guide at the time.
‘It is us, mein herr. Humans.’
The young Frenchman had recognised the truth in those words almost before they had been spoken. It was the smell of something inherent, innate.
Yet this was a scent that was altogether new; another, higher note, complex and thrillingly shrill; he thought it might be the breath of the Vorrh itself. Turning to his guide, intent on asking more about it, his eyes
alighted on the luggage rack, and his query was lost. He stepped onto the plush seat like a fretful lapdog and reached up, yanking at his case. It did not move. The fears of his first sight had proved correct: the rack had grown tendrils and stems, delicate branches, which extended from its hand-carved foliage and gripped his possessions, entangling themselves about the leather in licentious affection. The same thing had happened along the entire length of the rack, and the few other passengers present, noticing his reaction, realised that they were in the same predicament. They joined him, pulling and worrying their belongings away from the lustful new shoots. The Frenchman would have hacked at the foliage if he could have found a suitable tool, but Seil Kor stepped in to help him, bending back the stems and unwinding the tendrils, before lifting the unnecessary luggage and setting it down at the little man’s feet.
The train slowed to a standstill, the hissing brakes dragging against the dreary momentum with a squeal that made singular ears turn, in the impenetrable distance of trees. There was a raised, wooden platform for the passengers and a ramp for the slave carriage. The low flatbeds continued, into a distance of scarred tracks and rutted furrows. The station had no name; none was needed. A small, wooden house lay beyond the platform. They gathered themselves and walked towards it, legs stiff from the carriage, their heads still dazed from sleep; a wooden hangover, badly nailed together by amnesia.
The house was a waiting room, barren and empty. It contained only benches and a flyblown map of the Vorrh, pinned to one wall. They peered into the large, simple paper, which was wrinkled and made frail by sun and rain. It showed the city and the forest, balanced in ridiculous, improper proportions; the railway was delineated, as was the house, and there were a few lines leading away from it, which faded into nothing. The course of a river was suggested by an uncertain, faded blue contour; there was a shaded area, labelled ‘Forestry’, and a vague, dotted line which roamed about near the middle of the paper, accompanied by
the word ‘Forbidden’.
The map should have been informative and authoritarian, but its poor execution ensured that it had the opposite effect. It looked like a lost insect had fallen into the cartographer’s inkpot, crawled out and made its bedraggled route across the paper.
Seil Kor put his finger on the largest of the lines that faded away to blankness and said, ‘This will be our way.’
His finger rested in a small grey crater, almost a hole in the map, where countless other pilgrims had indicated their journey in the same manner.
They stepped outside and smelt the air, looking at the clear, even sky before turning onto the track. Behind them, three of their fellow passengers, insignificant until now, stood staring at the map, one with his finger on the same indentation identified by Seil Kor. The Frenchman saw this, and increased their pace into the waiting forest.
* * *
I have been forced to kill one man and wound another, for their attempts to trap, rob or assassinate me. I have truly left the sanctuary of our home behind, as I wade back into the ways of men.
Este is strong and forthright at my side. When I carry her, slung against my back, I feel her touch, ebbing through the rocking bow, feel her fingers on my spine, her palm between my shoulder blades. She whispers continually and spots my foes, hiding in the trees, or across the river. Together, we have seen the one who follows; a tall, dark-clad man, who looks like a shadow. He keeps his distance, but is in some way attached. She says he is the most dangerous, but we will be safe in the Vorrh: he will not dare to enter the great forest.
I begin to recognise this country where I have never been: small
corners, tricks of light and sound; odours that find recess in me, a cup to sit in for a second or two; enough to weigh down an indentation, an impression; the echo of a memory that is not there, or should not be.
I have stayed close to the river and found a boat to take me into the trees. The boatman is called Paulus. He is of unknown age, haggard from travel and nightmares, worn out by strong drink and imagination. He tells me stories of gins he has made, complex mechanisms that try to mimic the sounds he has heard while sleeping on the water in the Vorrh. He is an easy companion, because he asks nothing of me; I must only be his sounding board.
He is the only one who navigates these waters, taking his boat, The Leo, alternately powered by wind, muscle and steam, further and further into the core and further from the voices and ears of men. In this, we have much in common, and the small, objective part of his racing brain that still exists knows it, and thinks it well. I ask him how far the river will take us, and whether it is possible to pass through to the other side. He does not know, but thinks he has been deeper and stayed longer than any other could claim to.
He explains that he suffered from narcolepsy from an early age, but that it ceased when he first entered the Vorrh. Now, he stays here and makes continual trips, to balance his malady. He says that the water is in sympathy with renegade sleep; it protects him from being rubbed out and made transparent by the voices of the beings that he hears. This is not reassuring, but his commitment is. He promises to go with me until the river runs out, to the place where it is swallowed back into the earth or climbs the mountains. He says there will always be new sounds for him, that they have become his food. I do believe this is true. In the four days that we have travelled, he has eaten almost nothing, only picking at the fish I have caught and cooked from the vast abundance that lives here. He drinks much. ‘To dream’, he says, ‘to fold at the bottom of the well and listen’. He drinks until he cannot speak. His scarlet-veined eyelids
work independently, like slow spoons attempting to sagely wink and taste the passing night. Yet each morning, when I awake, he is already at the engine, preening it into life.
I discover that ‘the cooling system’, a tangle of brass and copper pipes that sits above the boiler, is in fact a still. His fastidious care of it suddenly makes more sense, and I am left to wonder whether the boat’s engine is as reliably maintained as his alcohol supply. Paulus had come here from the lowlands of Europe, the depression where Germany meets Holland and Belgium. He had been a Kahnführer on the mighty Maas, an industrious bargeman, pushing every cargo through the then-neutral, neighbourly lands, before the Great War. But that was half a century ago. He never says why he left, and becomes vague when his motives for being here are questioned.
Paulus only once asks me about the bow and why I do not use it to hunt or fish. I explain that it is not for use, being frail and of unsure design. He accepts this, and we change the subject back to his inventions. He tells me of another gin
1
he once saw; not his invention this time, but a gin that projected light, chopped into pieces to coincide with blinks, so that an impression of movement was achieved. Always the same movement, endless. The same woman on the same stairwell, taking the same three steps, continuously; a horse running to nowhere; a naked patriarch, swinging an axe. He says the more one watches, the more their time becomes real, and the watcher’s time leaks out, becoming insignificant, the same as watching the water for too long.
I can see that shadow play written on a wall. It matches our movement as we edgily drift on this monotonous tide. I feel my body recognise the spaces between the significant throbs of life, as if it has been cut into sections and rejoined in a crooked line, cut on a rough surface with a dull blade, and spliced together with the wrong glue.
By the fifth day, I am detached from the boat. Discorporate, I can see him, her and us from the trees, as if a bird has framed the boat’s path between branches, high in the wooden trellis, close to the sky.
Paulus is no longer talking, and spends more time watching the river ahead. His loose expectation is infectious, and we both look at the tiny horizon, guillotined in the moving trees. She holds my hand from the end of passage, as the ‘I’ of me is shaken loose, absorbed by meeting the other, who was born here.
Unexpectedly, the river straightens, making a long, unflinching channel, without bends or turns. He says it is like the canals of the Maas, that he has never been this far in before. The engine chugs and propels us just above the speed of the water; the surface is clear and highly reflective. As evening unfolds, we become mesmerised by the forest, which grows from the water and rises up to the clouds, ploughing down into its depths in absolute sameness; a perfect symmetry, unwound in perfect perspective. Nothing changes for hours; the dusk moves slower than our eyes, and we are pulled into the glimmering reflection without any sense of self. We are dissolved.
Both men had lost their selves. Such is the price of all trespass: clever men and dolts give it up with joy; others struggle and claw against it, burning their hand bones to hooks, until fatigued or abased to nothing.
The boat turned grey and the men glowed in the vespertine current. The Bowman gave his voice to the waters as his name floated into the branches, and his brain-tree turned to match those in the inverted sky, which was brimming with shy stars. The boatman thought of a new type of gin, a kind of water weaver, a loom for folding the sea. His imaginings brought the angels in. They awoke to the density of such trespass, to the vibration of the mechanism of thought, even when the idea it produced was of little consequence.
They came in with awareness and observed with caution, seeing the
selves float against the stream, away from the men. The angels kept their distance, for fear of being caught in the amber of the human auras. Sticky sunlight stuff, not made for here, and shedding profusely.