The next day, Tsungali gave his thanks and said goodbye. For his treatment and recuperation, he had traded three-dozen safety pins, twelve blue shells collected by the coastal tribes, and five ampoules of adrenalin stolen from army medical supplies. He had also, unknowingly, traded a week of his life, and all possibility of the fulfilment of his commission.
After his patient’s departure, Nebsuel opened a slanted box and removed a tiny piece of pungent, scrolled cloth, designed for the purpose, stretching it between intricate brass flaps. He took a delicately nibbed pen and scratched a musical, Arabic tracery into its waiting. When it was dry, he unpinned it and rolled it into a tiny tube, which he screwed into a weightless tin cylinder, not much bigger than the curved nail of
his little finger. He cooed and hummed to the black pigeon he cupped in his hands as he attached the cylinder to one of the bird’s legs. He stepped outside and cast it to the skies, towards a flutter of rising stars, whistling after it to increase its speed.
* * *
The cleric sat at a circular table in his house, close to the forest. The bird arrived out of the sun and flew to its familiar perch and food tray in the Langhorne tower above him. Its weight set a light silver bell in motion, which called the gaunt man to attend. He peeled the message from the bird and straightened the scroll:
‘The assassin goes on into the Vorrh to kill the Bowman. He is spoored. Act with speed or be lost.’
The cleric put the slip of cloth into a glass phial, and locked it in a steel box. It was impossible for him to enter the forest, but he needed to prevent the Bowman from dying within it. He would have to send another in his stead, someone to wipe out the fearsome warrior on the Bowman’s trail. There was only one: the Orm.
The Orm lived and worked within the Limboia. It was at home in their blankness; it hid in their absence. In fact, no one knew what the Orm was: if it was to be used, a message was given to the lost core of them all. Something of them, something or other, stepped out; no one knew what, and most did not care to. It was said that its brain was black and hard as granite, unlike the limp mush that swilled in the walnut skulls of the Limboia. The process and the price of contact chilled even the cleric’s contaminated heart. But it had to be done, so he went to the slave house
near the station, where the Limboia were kept when not toiling in the forest’s interior.
* * *
The slave house was isolated from all other buildings, three storeys high and surrounded by a fenced enclosure. It had been a prison, constructed to hold slaves in one part and criminals in another. Most of the criminals were simply escaped slaves, and eventually the two parts of the grim building had merged. The uncomfortable history of slavery was far too close; even in these more civilized times, its scars were far from healed. In other parts of the world, the abolition was a matter of growing moral rightness. Here, it changed by evolution, some said to a state of increased degradation. The slaves had been superseded by a deformed generation which developed inside them, replacing the stolen workforce with another that had been hidden all along. Continual, forced exposure to the Vorrh bred an alternative clan of beings, and within the original slave army grew another: the seed of the Limboia.
Most of their number were black and of local origin, some were white, and a very few had strayed from Asia. Getting them to work was easy: they all longed to be in the Vorrh, and their addiction was easily exploited by controlled, rotating shifts. The train carried a continual exchange of those whose week’s containment in the slave house left them desperate to return to the swallowing forest, and those whose fatigue left them too dazed to know they were leaving it.
The slave house and its upkeep was the collective responsibility of the Timber Guild, a society made up of the larger factories and exporters that fed richly from the forest’s abundance. The Limboia were far more difficult to control and explain than their abducted predecessors. There
was something so terrible in their collective presence that most normal humans could not abide their company. Overseers lasted only a few weeks; even the most callous and brutal of souls found that, within a few days, they were questioning their own existence and the meaning of mortality. Those who could previously whip a man to death without rage or guilt found themselves waking at night, sobbing as questions about eternity bubbled in their ill-shaped minds. In the early days, it appeared as though it would never be possible to organise and focus this mass of free labour. Then the stillborn came, to offer a tool of control.
There were some ragged legends, and a few squalid myths, but the truth was even more bizarre. The cleric knew that truth, and how to use it. He knew that it began with William Maclish, an ex-Black Watch sergeant, once a hard-drinking, no-nonsense kind of man, with a muscular personality and a wiry, red-haired temper. He had obtained the position of senior keeper to the slave house, and moved in to the keeper’s house with his pregnant wife and their few possessions. It had been a new beginning. He had changed his ways, his job and his country, and there was a bright, gruff optimism in the teetotal air. Three weeks later, beset by Limboia-induced depression, he was thinking of suicide. But his desperate plans were abruptly halted, and the course of his life forever altered, by the death of his first-born child.
He had sat by his wife’s bed while the doctor wrapped the lifeless bundle tightly and put it into a canvas bag. A noise had come from outside, a growing song mixed with broken glass. His first thoughts were of riot, and he had hurried the half-finished doctor out of his house, unable to face the possible collision of these two parts of his life while in the man’s melancholy presence.
His departure secured, Maclish had listened more carefully. One hundred and nineteen lost souls – the entire population of the locked house – had broken the windows of their dormitories and were singing out into the night. It was a call of loss – discordant, pure and hairraisingly
eerie. His head cocked to the song of the Limboia, he heard pibroch woven inside the wail, highland dirges that uprooted his nerve and stitched him to a childhood which had been so gapingly forgotten. He stood at the door of his squat home and stared at the slave house, its every window filled with mooncalf faces, all calling to him.
The next day he walked slowly from his sobbing home to the slave house. They were still singing. He unlocked the door and they fell still, remaining silent as he walked among them, each pointing at their own heart. He returned to reassure his wife that all was well, but she was sleeping at last, so he walked instinctively to where the doctor had left the bundle, picked it up and tucked it under his coat. He did not know why he was doing this; he could have given no man a sensible answer. He carried the concealment out of their home and into the hushed, glacial silence of the slave house. On the table that stood at the centre of the recreational hall, he placed the treasure, unwrapping it and arranging the tiny, stiff corpse for all of them to see.
The response was astonishing. They became galvanised, moving as one, forming a queue from all parts of the three-storied jail which tapered to the hall and its table of focus. The first of the Limboia brought a piece of broken mirror, which he held close to his head. A tension was rising in the space between understanding and fear. When his bony legs touched the table, he looked away, holding the mirror with both hands. His body and head contoured so that he could hold the glass in a difficult position, to the side of his face. He squinted into the mirror, at the backwards-peripheral reflection of the dead infant. He looked there for a few granite- solid minutes, then passed the mirror to the next man, who imitated him exactly.
Hours later, they had all made the same ritual, all seen his child in a squint, all shown respect. Maclish was exhausted and could not explain what had happened, except in the way of the tongue: deep inside, he knew that they had all taken something, not from the dead infant, but from the world that it would never walk in. He also knew that all of them
were now his. He wrapped the little body up tight, and took it back to his home, hidden in the dark, silky lining of his winter coat, next to his rapidly beating heart.
Obedience had been bought or given that strange day, and with it a protection against the Limboia’s unconscious but pernicious influence: Maclish had become master of the workforce of the Vorrh. He had done it without violence or force, and the Timber Guild was amazed. Nobody knew how it had been achieved, but all who were engaged in the commerce of the forest talked about it, and he was marked as a man of consequence. It changed every aspect of his life and gave him the position of respect he had always desperately craved.
It took the company doctor several days to return and collect the tiny body. He had been detained on the other side of the city, and apologised profusely for his tardiness in completing the prescribed task. They were walking through the scullery as they talked.
‘I haven’t told my wife that the child’s body is still here,’ Maclish said. ‘She assumed that ye took it with ye on that night.’
‘Oh, I see,’ the doctor said. ‘Well, I can only apologise again for placing you in such a position. I will take it with me now and spare you both any further upset.’
Maclish thumbed the noisy metal latch of the pantry door and they both entered. From its shadowy seclusion at the back of the narrow room, he produced an old, circular biscuit tin. He opened it clumsily and offered the contents to the doctor who, with a flicker of hesitation, reached in and removed the bundle. There was an instant response. He frowned deeply and started to manipulate the cloth-bound form in his wise hands, taking it out of the room and placing it on a low table surrounded by cooking utensils. He unfolded the fabric gently to examine its contents.
‘I am very sorry to have to do this in your presence,’ he apologised,
‘but something here is not quite right.’
Maclish was indifferent to the incident, but intrigued by the doctor’s response.
‘Extraordinary!’ muttered the practitioner, touching the tiny body on the table and examining it closely.
‘What is it?’ asked Maclish.
‘It has been three days since the child’s passing, and there is not the slightest trace of decomposition. It’s quite remarkable.’ He turned to the keeper in obvious awe, then remembered the nature of his visit and brought his excitement under scientific control. ‘I don’t want to sound callous, but would you permit me to conduct some slight tests before the burial?’
‘What, cutting?’ the startled father answered.
‘Not as such, no; more observation.’
‘The poor wee bairn has gone. Do what ye must. But not too long, mind! I don’t want my wife upset any more than is necessary.’
The doctor agreed and gathered up his prize. As he left the house, an excited air graced his expression, one which had never before been seen about his usually dour countenance.
It was a week before Dr. Hoffman again knocked at Maclish’s door, to be answered by the less-than-civil warden.
‘Where is my child?’ he demanded. ‘Why have ye kept him this long?’
‘I must apologise for the delay, but the fact is this is a most remarkable incident, I think unique.’
Maclish looked at the pink, grinning face, screwed into its pinching, celluloid collar; at the pink, over-washed hands, restrained in their celluloid cuffs. White and pink, pink and white. He had heard rumours about this man, rumours that suggested his services, his skills and his oath could be bent at a price. Pink and white, white and pink.
‘Come in, man!’ he said sharply, his abruptness scratching a warning
in the air between them. The doctor stepped hurriedly over the threshold and into the dim hallway.
‘The truth is,’ the doctor continued, turning to face the keeper, ‘your poor child has been untouched by the process of corruption: he is the same today as when he was born.’
‘Aye, dead!’ growled Maclish.
‘Well, yes, dead, of course. But perfect! In all my years as a physician I have never seen the like. Pray, please tell me, did anything unusual happen while I was away, between the birth and my retrieval of the remains?’
Maclish did not like the question and asked one of his own. ‘How many have ye seen?’
The doctor looked confused. ‘Born-dead bairns? Oh, perhaps thirty a year. It varies.’
‘And what normally happens to the bodies?’ asked the keeper.
‘Normally? They are buried within three days. I don’t usually keep them; as I said, this is a very unusual case. I can assure you that the greatest care is -’
‘Does anyone else see ‘em?’ Maclish cut in.
‘Er, no,’ frowned Hoffman.
Maclish took the man’s arm and led him through to a small sitting room, the kind that is never used; over-furnished, smelling of wax and stale lace. He seated the puzzled doctor and quietly closed the door. The conversation that was to follow was not one to be exchanged loosely, especially beneath the floorboards of the pale bedroom above their heads.
They talked a knot of meaning and purpose, closing in on a subject that neither of them understood.
‘Can ye make a profit from this?’ he asked the doctor.
‘Not in financial terms, no. But I can find benefit in knowledge,’ he said, sounding more earnest than he had for years. He was beginning to believe his own prescriptions.
‘Supposing it never goes off?’
The doctor blinked in silence. ‘Goes off?’
‘Aye, never rots: wouldn’t the mother want to keep it with her, keep it close and quiet?’
‘That’s not really what I had in mind,’ said Hoffman uncomfortably. ‘My focus would be on medical research; on discovering a new understanding of mortality; finding the distinction between the quick and the dead!’
‘Aye, and that,’ said Maclish.
Two days later, the doctor gave in. He arrived at the warden’s house in a purple dusk that made all things shine, bringing another small bundle with him.
They took it, together, to the house of the Limboia. Something more than silence greeted them on the other side of the door. On echoing shoes, they took their prize to the table, and the ritual of the mirror slanting began again. Of the time that passed, little can be said. The Limboia shuffled back and forth, their breath becoming even and untroubled. The doctor and the warden hid in silence and tobacco at the other end of the building.