‘You bring me another wonder,’ he marvelled. ‘Such bounty, such bounty!’
He became hushed, bending closer to view the impossible again. Here was a new version of the thing he valued most, another demonstration that the world was unfathomable and its resources unlimited, infinitely mysterious and ever changeable. His expertise in anatomy and charm surgery was in a constant state of amazement, but this brought a new pinnacle of surprise: a human eye, active and vital, long after separation
from its life blood and the protective surroundings of the rest of its body. What nourished it? What let it work so frantically when the optic nerve that operated it had been so definitely severed from the brain? It was like a continually working bucket that had unknowingly lost its well. He turned to Tsungali, enraptured.
‘You know my only two prices are objects of use and objects of fascination.’
Tsungali grinned through his gapped teeth.
‘You have brought me two bounties of knowledge and fascination: my service is yours. What can I do for you?’
They discussed the hunter’s arm, the Wiseman prodding thoughtfully at the bandaged stump, mental calculations whirring through the room. But at the mention of Ishmael’s face, his expression darkened.
‘No,’ said Nebsuel definitely. ‘Such uniqueness is untouchable. Why would you want to look like everybody else?’
‘Because I want to become myself and live my life as a man, not as a monster. I want to be forgotten for who I am, not judged for how I have been made.’
Nebsuel paused to digest this, then said, ‘Do you choose to be with those who see you the wrong way?’
‘Who else is there?’
‘I know some.’
Ishmael tensed at the suggestion. ‘No, I want to go back changed.’
Nebsuel made a clucking, swallowing sound and returned to his beaker of wine, shaking his head. Ishmael and Tsungali sat with him in silence, not looking at each other, eyes focused on their drinks. Too many moments had passed when Tsungali eventually blurted out, ‘Well? Will you do it? Will you operate on us?’
No answer came. The healer was hardening. Tsungali looked at Ishmael and nodded. ‘Show him,’ he said, and Ishmael dipped his head in understanding.
Ishmael pulled the long, thick bundle from under his feet and
started to unwrap it. At first Nebsuel paid no attention; he had assumed the bundle to be the stranger’s bed roll. But as more and more of the blanket was unravelled, he felt something straining in his solar plexus. He knew from old what that meant, but there was no time to register it or protect himself: the cyclops’ possession was disclosed. As the last layer fell away, he began to sweat, his heart drying and fluttering, mites and dust shaken off in the straining, sticky cage of his ribs. He could not believe what he was seeing. The dark maroon of the bow’s surface seemed to ripple and bend under his enforced gaze. Ishmael’s hand was black with effort and excrescence. The eye rolled from its safe perch on the table, gravitating towards the bow and the floor. Everything in the room seemed to be turning and twisting, yearning towards Este in a curiosity that became mangled midway into abeyance. Ishmael dragged the bow down and covered it with the blanket, crudely smothering its influence under the covering. The eye stopped short of the table’s lip; in its passage, it nicked itself on the sharp wire from around the discarded cork of the wine. The room crept back to inertia. Nebsuel sank into his seat as Tsungali grinned at the excellent demonstration. There was an eerie scent in the room: something of the sea and an exotic garden, smouldered together; a flinch of ammonia, at first exhilarating, and then turning to a whiff of dread, like a leeching memory trapped and waiting in a dream.
‘I will do anything,’ said Nebsuel, in a voice from a distant, colourless place, ‘anything you want.’
* * *
The bird activated its bell of arrival and the fine sound sleeted down into the lower room like pointed snow.
Sidrus was not expecting a communication; there was very little to be told from the river mouth. He continued rubbing the sticky balm into his porous face. The bell rang again, and he wiped the fat from his fingers, so that they would not slip as he retrieved the scroll from the bird’s dry, struggling ankle.
It was a message that should never have been sent, one laced with mistakenness from the moment Nebsuel had penned it, in a stolen pause that had masqueraded as the friendly replenishment of wine. It told of his visitors before he knew who they were and before he understood what it was that they really wanted. It said, simply:
Tsung here with a cyclops. I think they killed Bowman and took his soul
.
Sidrus dropped the note, feeling the consequence hollow him and make room inside for the wrath, which began to boil and brim. The lardish balm melted and dripped from his distorting face without the slightest trace of a flush. As the heat of it settled, he selected his canes and drugs, picking weapons with the detachment of a deadly perfectionist. It would take him three days to reach Nebsuel’s pox-ridden island, maybe another four to extract the right amount of pain from the wicked scum for performing such an act of blasphemy.
* * *
‘I cannot make you a perfect, natural face,’ Nebsuel explained. ‘It would seem that your skull has only one socket, so I will have to make a place for the other one. The living eye will be stitched into folds of constructed muscle and skin, but it will have no real nest to work in. It will not
rotate; it will remain blind but, I hope, living. Yet, I cannot promise this. Whatever keeps it vital is beyond my understanding, and nothing to do with the rules of regular anatomy.
‘I am anxious about its stability. If it were to die, it would infect the newly grafted tissue around it. But for now it is still animated, and as bright as your other. I pray it will always look like that, alert and active, not like false eyes made of glass or ivory, which always have a dead and lonely appearance. The good news for you is that because your working eye and socket are not quite central, the space between the eyes will seem more natural, if a little close together.’ The shaman paused for breath, adding, ‘Which some find most attractive – many of the European royal families have interbred to create this very effect. They might even recognise you as one of their own!’
Sensing he had pirouetted out onto very thin ice, he decided it was best to retreat to the more solid ground of surgical details.
‘I will build you a nose of normal proportion, to place between the eyes, using the little bulb you have now as a starting point. This will be the easiest part of the procedure. Did you know that surgeons are now treating injured warriors from the great European war with the same methods I have used for years? I am told that they use scrapings taken from diseases and tinctures from rotting moulds to help the healing. My charms and plants are much cleaner, but they take longer. You might look a bit like one of those scarred warriors, a man who has been in a battle and bears the wounds of his heroism with pride. Your face will look like a damaged version of all other humans. Are you sure that you want this, and that I cannot help you find another alternative?’
Ishmael looked from the bundle, which now stayed very close to him, to the doctor, who followed his gaze and his meaning. The conversation ended there.
Nebsuel attended to Tsungali first. Building a new, living hand was out of
the question, but a wooden one, with a hinged elbow that strapped on to the remains of his upper arm, was feasible.
The old mercenary seemed disappointed; he had allowed himself to imagine a fully working hand, made of flesh and bone and imbued with magic. Nebsuel explained that if he had kept the fragments and brought them with him, then maybe he could have improvised a kind of weak, articulate hook or claw. But the hardwood version would be better, he assured him. The hunter could have different models, with ivory fingernails and powerful engravings; charms and weapons could be hidden inside. He could have versions of other creatures: puma paws and boar tusks could sprout from his sleeve, eagle talons and shark’s teeth might surprise an attacker or a victim.
The old warrior came around to the idea, but explained that the days of his mercenary skills were over. His purpose now was to serve Ishmael, and use violence only to protect his master. He made this point very clearly, explaining that, while they were both healing, any attempts of outrage on their persons would send him and the bow into a frenzy of revenge, especially if he was dead. Nebsuel reassured him that they were both safe, not realising that his message to Sidrus had made his promise impossible to keep.
The patient slept in a drugged sea of his mother’s milk, his limb wrapped in layers of leaves and ointments, looking more like a papoose than a sling. The new arm was a crude affair, but had a certain rustic brutality that Tsungali admired. Considering the short amount of time Nebsuel had taken to hollow and carve it, he considered himself fortunate to have anything more than an old chair leg grafted onto his stump.
Then it was Ishmael’s turn and he was jumpy, even after the numbing drafts he had been given.
‘Young master, this is your last chance to change your mind,’ offered a blurring Nebsuel. ‘There is no going back once I begin.’
Ishmael looked out for the last time through the face of a cyclops, a
face that had already begun to disintegrate in the gathering haze. His view of the speaker began to fall away on a long track, shrinking the medicine man, whose own face muffled gibberish at him.
‘Do it. Do it!’ he said, and he heard his words float up, cooing to sit on his closing eye like a fat, indifferent bird.
* * *
‘When is the baby due?’ asked Cyrena, at last.
‘In August,’ said Ghertrude, sheepishly. ‘At least, that’s when I think it should be, but… it seems to be progressing faster than that.’
‘Carnival?’ asked Cyrena.
‘Yes, it was conceived then.’
‘Is it his?’
‘I don’t know, I cannot be sure.’
‘You coupled with more than one?’
‘Yes,’ she said, without a quiver of shame. It was too early to be assigned a father. The tiny beast of jelly turned in her soul and tried to speak in drowning verse to anything that might be its parents.
‘Can you find out? There are some medical tests available. Maybe Hoffman?’
They met each other’s gaze and Cyrena understood that the master of the skulking Gladstone bag would not be returning to collect it. Its dog-like presence behind the chair seemed to awaken for a moment at the sound of its master’s half-said name. Cyrena felt it. ‘You’d better get rid of that,’ she said.
Ghertrude stiffened, thinking she still referred to the unborn child, then saw that her friend was looking elsewhere. ‘Get rid of what?’
Cyrena pointed languidly and Ghertrude followed her wagging finger
to the shadow. She cringed when she saw it, letting out a small shudder. It was as if the good doctor’s head had been left under the chair, unnoticed, watching their every action since his removal.
She told Cyrena everything: the threat to her life; his rage; the broken pearls and Mutter’s revenge.
‘I will protect Sigmund for what he did to save me from that vile animal,’ she said with gritted determination. ‘I will protect him against all.’
The implication of her words was clear: Cyrena was inside the pact or out of it; there was no middle ground. She would take Mutter’s ground against all comers, including her friend.
‘Your secret is safe with me,’ Cyrena replied, and she meant it. The new life and old death in the room was being gifted in a one-way transaction; she was already part of them both, and wanted to be active in each of this woman’s conclusions. Anyway, the prospect of crossing a raging Mutter was too horrible to contemplate. ‘I am glad that wretched man is out of our lives,’ she said decisively. ‘It sounds like he got everything he deserved.’
Ghertrude nodded, nipping anxiously at the edges of her fingernails. Something dawned on Cyrena and she looked at her friend quizzically.
‘What did Mutter do with… the remains?’
Ghertrude paused, realising that she did not know. They had never spoken fully about that night; she had only thanked him and sworn her silence, a pact she had now broken. ‘I don’t know,’ she confessed. ‘Don’t tell him you know, don’t tell him I told you!’
She was becoming distraught again, and Cyrena wanted her confidence, not her fear. She reached out and held her hands, looking intently into her anxious face.
‘I will do whatever you want. I am with you in everything; you can trust me in this. We will put this whole horrid business behind us and face the future with your child together. I can help in all things.’
And so they rebuilt the previous weeks with vigour and companionship. They rolled up their sleeves and scrubbed away all the images and stains of memory that were attached to their dealings with Hoffman and Maclish. They burnt the Gladstone bag and incinerated the days where the monsters, humiliations and violence had dwelt. In their growing, joyous friendship, Ishmael was almost forgotten.
Mutter watched their daily laughter and the endless tidying and rearranging of furniture, the buying of flowers, the intimate lunches and dinners, their closeness; he knew that she had been told. The haughty outsider was aware of his crime, though she feigned a clever ignorance. He started to observe her more closely, wondering how he would dispose of her when the time came.
Yet Cyrena’s gleaming, over-active vision missed nothing; she saw the simple, wicked plans being knotted together behind the old servant’s red, veined eyes. If she did not deal with this now, it would soon be permanently out of her control.
Ghertrude was out shopping when Cyrena arrived at the gate. She was let in and made to cross the cobbled yard, coming to a stop on the exact spot where Hoffman had been dispatched.
‘Herr Mutter, I think we should talk,’ she said, peering down at the bunched and ready man. ‘There is a great secret,’ she began, ignoring the clenching of his fists and his boots bracing the ground. ‘A great secret that I think you should know. I am telling you because I know of the loyalty you have for your mistress. In the future we will need your help even more, and that is why I am telling you, because Ghertrude is still too shy.’