Lucia's Masks (13 page)

“An inner song may serve us best for a while, don’t you think, Candace?” Candace merely stares. We all stare at the talking cowl. The Outpacer so seldom speaks. He has not uttered so many words at once since he first made us his offer of service. His voice puts me in mind of steely cold water. Put your hand in and it will freeze. I pictured this water moving down my spine, drop by drop. Why does this image come to me? Because I am so damnably thirsty? Then I feel both confused and ashamed because I realize I am imagining the touch of his mouth on my naked back. The Outpacer’s mouth and teeth and tongue. A mouth I have never seen. I must take care, for these woods would be a foolish and most perilous place for the birth of desire.

Is it his voice that pulls at me so powerfully, I wonder, or the simple fact of his mystery? Even a full mask would suggest more of his features than does the engulfing hood.

In the City I learned well that some shadows can be protective. But not the shadow play I believe underlies desire. Such shadows shift and slide, and make a mockery of what is real. On the shadow-stage of desire, I know that gods can transform themselves into devils, ears to horns, noses to beaks, all in an eye-blink. Nothing is as it seems. Nothing is to be trusted. And certainly not the seductive resonance in the voice of a man whose face I have never seen.

“Shall I tell you,” the Outpacer inquires formally, “my own inner song?” I see that every one of us is hanging on his words. Five people are fixed on the utterance of a mouth we can only imagine in a face we cannot see. I notice Candace run the tip of a pink tongue over her upper lip. It strikes me too, how uncommonly still Bird Girl is standing, in her little lilac skirt that barely covers her hips.

Old Harry leans forward, his left hand on Chandelier’s shoulder. Harry’s eyes have a glitter-hard brightness, like the eyes of birds I have seen in photographs. I have observed this almond-shaped glint in the eyes of all the old men I have met in my life, few as they were. I always supposed this was because their souls were preparing themselves for flight. It is their eyes that are ready first, piercing the void and mapping out likely channels for the passage.

Chandelier’s lovely face is rapt. I wonder briefly what he sees in the Outpacer for I am quite certain Chandelier perceives far more than he lets on.

“These are the words of a song my grandmother taught me,” the Outpacer begins. “I will not sing them because I am no singer. So I’ll recite what I recall:

Old Mother Moon has lit the lamps
The stars that light us on our way
As we travel toward the Mortals’ Hotel
Where sleep will be peaceful and morning gay.
”

There follows a silence so total it is worthy of Old Mother Moon herself. It amazes me how, with a few simple words in his deep bass, the Outpacer has succeeded in recasting our mood, dispelling the jangled, whirring state that Candace foists on us each morning. He has offered us an impossible storybook destination, a moonlit hotel where we might come together for a night of blissful rest. I realize he was trying to take the fear out of the night for us — no, he was doing something more. He was subtly challenging Candace’s presumption of authority. He was offering himself as our leader. He was implying that he could be more than just our shadowy watcher, who tailed and circled our group and kept off the ravenous dogs with his flaming torch.

I glance at Candace to see if she has grasped the Outpacer’s intent. Her mouth is turned down in a sullen arc. I hear her take one of her excessively dramatic deep breaths before advancing to stand directly in front of the Outpacer.

I offer up a silent request. Please do not let her say: “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

“Thank you for sharing your song with us, Outpacer,” Candace says. Her tone is thickly patronizing, much as it was when the silly woman told me to keep my head up when I walked.

Immediately she has finished speaking, Harry lets loose a howl that propels Chandelier to his knees. The old man then begins braying like a tormented donkey.

I am momentarily stunned. Then Bird Girl and I go to help Chandelier to his feet. His face is an unsettling white that makes me think of shattered eggshell. Yet it is Harry to whom the boy turns, touching the old man’s face tentatively as if to reassure himself his aged friend has not been monstrously transformed.

Bird Girl sends me an enquiring look; then abruptly confronts Old Harry: “See how your foolishness has frightened him!” Her heart-shaped face is stern, and for the first time I see that Bird Girl may be considerably older than the adolescent image she projects.

Harry puts his arm round Chandelier’s shoulders in an unsteady embrace. “I am sorry,” he says.

“It seems to be your morning for being sorry, Harry,” Candace chides him. “Maybe now is the time to talk over what exactly is troubling you.” I am uncomfortable at just how heavily she weights the word “exactly,” and worse, at the way her mouth is stretched wide in a painfully false smile.

We are all unprepared for the old man’s reaction. Harry straightens his spine, squares his shoulders and thrusts out his chin. I sense the supreme effort this movement costs him, based on my Great-Aunt Fontina’s description of the arthritis that blighted her last years. I wonder if Harry must daily master such pain. My aunt said it was like rats’ teeth gnawing incessantly at the nerves of her already twisted limbs. To my enduring shame, I thought Fontina must be exaggerating at least a little. Then, at the age of fifteen, I was hit by a virus that caused me such cruel arthritic pain I had to bite my lips to stop myself crying out. It was a harsh lesson. But I learned then that courage assumes many forms — not least the quiet, resigned stoicism of the aged.

So when Harry raises his arm and points angrily at Candace, I watch him in a kind of awe. Behind that slow, deliberate motion, I read not just the physical pain he must bear but also the red-hot source of his fury.

“I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong,” Harry barks. “It’s you. You and your infernal phony optimism. You are nasty and pushy and interfering, and you are coming very close to driving me mad.”

Bird Girl splutters in a failed attempt to swallow a laugh. This is infectious, and I have to look down at my feet and concentrate on the soreness of my wretched bunions, in order to quell a fit of giggles.

I expected Candace to be indignant with Harry and then launch into one of her condescending homilies. To my astonishment and dismay, she looks terrified. Her eyes roll upward. Then she collapses.

Bird Girl is the first to reach her. She puts her finger under Candace’s nose and feels for the pulse in her wrist. “She’s all right,” she announces. As City dwellers, we had all witnessed plenty of sudden and inexplicable deaths, even among the young and apparently vigorous. There is a collective sigh of relief, with Harry’s exhalation the loudest.

Together, Bird Girl and I straighten Candace’s legs. She is wearing Bermuda shorts that have fanned out above her knees. I tug the cloth down so as to preserve her dignity and feel a revulsion of which I am at once ashamed. Candace’s knees are so fleshy, they are dimpled. I have never before touched anyone whose flesh was not spare. It crosses my mind that my reaction to Candace’s plump form is basically aesthetic; that it somehow relates to the way I shape my clay. Then I tuck this thought away where it belongs and unknot my long-fringed, embroidered black shawl which I always wear now tied about my shoulders. I wind the shawl round my fist, making a bundle to serve Candace as a pillow. Bird Girl and I then gently raise her head and I slip the bundled shawl underneath.

Bird Girl tips the last drops of water from her own flagon into Candace’s mouth. “Her lips are pretty parched,” she tells me.

Bird Girl has hardly finished speaking when Candace vomits up the water. Then she sits up abruptly, her eyes wide and wild. “Devils,” she cries out in a voice guttural and grating. “Devils.” She falls back with a little sob and her whole body begins to convulse.

“Her pulse is racing,” says Bird Girl, a touch of panic in her voice.

“The effects of the dehydration,” I hear the Outpacer say. I am already kneeling to tighten my shoelaces when he asks me urgently, “Lucia, can you find us water now?” I nod, feigning a confidence I do not feel; then rapidly straighten my belt to which is attached my knife in its leather sheaf. I take several deep breaths, raise my right hand in farewell and set off.

As I run, I keep close watch for any signs of moisture that might indicate the presence of a spring. But this part of the forest strikes me as particularly unpromising. The huge trees are all so similar in height and girth they appear to be clones of one another. It is perhaps a forest originally raised up so that it could be hewn down and the logs sent to factories. I see no insect life whatsoever, and I wonder if the tree bark might be poisoning other life forms. This does not bode well. Grasshoppers, slugs, and shiny-backed beetles are all edible. We still have small reserves of the honeycomb that was my first lucky find. We also have some raisins and a little oatmeal left.

Three days before, I had crept up upon a noble brown hare. He looked glossily healthy. I grimaced as I slit his throat. When I got back to the group and took the bleeding carcass from my pack, Candace yelped in disgust.

“Don’t eat it then,” I snapped. Candace took a step back, and looked at me in consternation.

“Do you think I found it easy?” I had hurled the question at her. It was guilt, I suppose, at murdering the poor animal that made me lose my temper with her. But it was worse than that. In fact, I wanted to slap her. Slap her so hard she would yelp in pain. It disturbs me to think of this now.

It was the Outpacer who had interceded, for it was evening and he had already joined us by the fire.

“Thank you, Lucia,” he said. “It is a fine offering. Shall I skin it for us, or will you?”

“I will,” I answered. I had already taken out my knife because I had a great need to busy myself. The anger churned in me so wildly, I had to will my hand steady.

The Outpacer intervened judiciously that evening, just as he did this morning. The difference was the degree of light. I realize he has gradually been coming closer to us, and doing this so subtly I was almost unaware. But this morning was the first time since he joined us that he stood together with us in the daylight. I wonder if he will stay with us now in the daytime. And if so, how will he manage to have the hood always in place? Or will he eventually come so close he will at last forsake the disguise?

It occurs to me that under the obscuring cowl he might wear a full-face or half-mask as a double insurance of keeping himself hidden. What if he is terribly disfigured? What if he is absolutely prepossessing, with features I immediately wanted to copy in clay?

And if his revealed face initially disappoints, would his authority still stand? But surely that powerful voice would prevail? I have to shake off the memory of the disquieting effect his voice had on me. This is where physical desire leads, I chastize myself, for it dawns on me I have been oblivious to my surroundings for some seconds. Certainly long enough to put my life in peril from potential attackers. Rat-Men. Dogs with a taste for blood from a human throat. Or a solitary, disgruntled outrider from a murderous band who would take pleasure in cutting off my hands.

I run on, with my sense of purpose cleansed and cleaving the way before me. I must find water. I notice that the quality of the light is changing and that ahead, the forest appears to be thinning. I run toward, and then through, a purplish mist spangled with dew. Abruptly, the forest ends and I find myself at the edge of a field of long, yellowed grass. The field rises toward the horizon so that I am unable to see what lies beyond.

I begin to work my way cautiously through the waist-high grasses, but their dry rasping declares my presence at every step. I feel more and more exposed as I advance. The field continues to the limit of my vision. I keep scanning the surface of the grassy sea, alert for any tell-tale shudder or ripple. What predator might be slinking toward me, belly slicking the ground? Every few minutes, I stop and listen. The utter silence and stillness unnerve me. There is not the least breeze and already the sun is hot enough to scorch exposed flesh. I keep my hands in my pockets as I move on. A white head scarf, pulled low over my brow, protects the top of my head. My hair, wound in a thick knot, keeps the nape of my neck shaded.

I stop and pray for cloud cover.

At that moment the air stirs. A breeze comes, scythe-clean and fragrant, making my nostrils widen. What is this scent that swirls round me where I stand? I feel a sudden joy as I recognize its source as mown hay. I move forward again, made fearless (and probably foolishly so) by the recollection of one of those rare childhood times when the world seemed good and bountiful and all beings well-intentioned. I was six years old when my mother and younger sister and I spent a month on a dairy farm belonging to friends of my father. After we returned to the City I treasured that stay in the country as a kind of paradise. I would try to remember exactly the effects those honest pastoral scents had on me: the reassuring fug of the cattle’s breath in the barn, and the full, round perfume of the cut hay that made me want to invent a dance in answer to its bracing scent.

By the time I reach the crest of the field I am still absolutely lost to reverie, and the vista before me snaps me back to the present. I am made aware again of my own vulnerability and instinctively duck down. I picture what my lapsed attention might have cost; my flesh speckled with blood, my throat and belly ripped open. And if I die because of my own stupidity, what will become of Candace, whose need for water is so desperate?

I move forward as quietly as I can, on my knees. Once again, the air is absolutely still.
Too
still, I think. In fact, the silence now is paralyzing. I realize I am waiting — every hair on my body erect — for someone or something to emerge from this unearthly quiet.

They stand up from where they have been squatting or kneeling, hidden by the long grass. There are three of them, dressed in black rags. Their faces and arms are newly bloodied, and there are fresh gashes of the crosses they have cut, probably earlier that morning, into their shaved skulls. I sometimes saw such women in the City. They are penitents who believe that by shaving their heads and slicing their flesh, they may secure God’s forgiveness for our sins. The
piagnoni
, my mother used to call them, the weepers. These women wail and howl and beat their breasts in unison as they wander about in little knots of three or four. It is a frightening thing to witness when they stop moving, as if prompted by an unseen hand, and clutch each other’s shoulders and sway together and start their cacophony. Whatever power possesses them at these junctures is not just unnerving but invasive. When I came upon them in the City, I always tried to avert my eyes and get away from them as quickly as possible before the reverberation of their wailing chorus caught in my throat. If I stayed and stared, the frightful sounds they made, and even their grotesque self-mutilation, began to cast a hypnotically persuasive spell. The
piagnoni
gave a living shape to the latent despair of my City life, which I strove each day to subdue. I had to protect myself from the threat they posed. I could not let them contaminate my disciplines, or my nourishing of hope.