The Narrator (17 page)

Presently a doughy corporal with a clipboard makes his way down the cue. As he approaches us, Makemin’s diffuse anger condenses and he strides forward on the beam toward the corporal with me in tow.

“We have wounded and we’ve been waiting more than four hours!”

Without looking up the corporal takes Makemin’s information and flips through his sheets. He ambles further along the line. Makemin, his face horribly drawn, calls after him. The corporal makes a sort of fluttering gesture at waist level, a hold on move, without turning around, which proves to be a mistake as Makemin switches him across the back of the head so swiftly his ferrule whistles and the corporal howls puts his hand to the new part in his hair and spins around his eyes popping. Makemin drives his fist into the corporal’s face splitting his lip and squashing his nose. The corporal makes a choked sound, his knees buckle, and with amazing celerity Makemin’s left hand shoots out to seize him by the lapel and slow his fall to a sag, the better to smash him again bursting the flesh along the left cheekbone. He takes the limp, squealing corporal in both hands and drapes him over his horse’s ass, plucks up a company insignia from one of the casualty carts and claps it onto the man’s lacerated cheek like a bandage. The corporal chirps and his legs flip weakly. Nikhinoch meanwhile has retrieved the clipboard and is there when Makemin reaches for him, calmly pivots the board into Makemin’s hand the proper page bent back. The latter holds it before the corporal’s streaming face.

“Now you’re
one
of my wounded. Sign.”

The corporal fumbles his signature and presses his seal ring into the document and Makemin calls “Piglets move up! Where’s that worthless standard man?”

He mounts, and Jil Punkinflake, giving me a feeble smile only thinly veneering the fear that has sickened down into him now, advances to walk beside him. Using principally the minatory expression on his face, Makemin clears a path for us right up the middle of the columns ahead. I do not notice much because I’m trotting alongside his horse holding, as best I can, an ether sop under the mouth and nose of the corporal, who seems unhappily unable to lose consciousness for more than a moment or two. He gags a bit, and I clear a plug of red muck from his mouth. Bits of broken teeth come away, adhere to my finger.

Some officer strides up wigging his arms and Makemin without a word points his holdout gun in the man’s face. Thrushchurl’s people are exhilerated by the action and are raving all around us, out in front and on all sides. They gibber and gambol, and the soldiers in the road reel back appalled and avoiding contamination.

And suddenly the sky is interrupted by the arch of the gate passing overhead, and we’re safely inside.

*

No one meets my eyes in the street. Fringes of dread hang in the lower part of the air, roll sluggishly down against the town’s grain. Deserted buildings, houses and stores eviscerated by looters their innards spill from windows and doorways.

Looking around I see a grimy sweat like bitter metal soot on everything, gloom and nauseous headache that makes me wish for something really clean and frightening to happen. I catch myself the object of cowed and smouldering looks from hidden faces; they heat my uniform chemically. I want to escape, but even here there are Edeks. They don’t come from the capital. They don’t have to—they know.

A cry is rising all over the place—“The Redeemer’s coming!”

I blunder along with the other soldiers if only so as not to be knocked down. When I can, I take my chance and slip up a stairway that tops out in a partially covered plaza, street-level with the slope on the far side, a few benches and tables where the town’s old liars could sit drink and play pinochle, so I stagger over and officially commandeer one empty table. From here I can follow the pointing fingers to where something godlike is moving against the horizon.

That’s the Redeemer, the Alak flagship. Even at least a mile away it rises high into the sky, towering over a fleet of massive Alak hulks; its immense, broad prow is shadowed beneath a winged steel colossus, his stern face nearly in the clouds, wings folded back along the lines of the ship, a huge shield in his left hand and his right, brandishing a sword, is raised four hundred feet above the waves. There are guns protruding from hatches in his rippling garment, and his legs are lost in their folds.

The Redeemer is unique, with so many engines and so many guns, all superlative numbers—its battery can, on one side, level a town in minutes. Its grapnels can drag enemy ships on massive steam winches; captured ships may be drawn into bays, or crushed between hydraulic rams in special compartments. Even from this distance, I can see the bristling, smooth-slabbed fortress rising from its midsection, and hear the fury of its engines, sullen and far away. Some of its forward bays are open and emitting barqots, which are not able to escape its shadow for many minutes.

I watch the barqots pull into the harbor and back their drawbridge tail gates to the piers with clamorous reports. Around me, gulls’ wings glint like swords as they circle. In the streets now there are soldiers marching.

These are not conscript hicks. These are Alak regulars, the real fanatics. Now the larger barqots are open and disgorging a phalanx of Ministerial Ghuards. They dwarf the regular infantry around them, striding along the piers.

The armor worn by these Ghuards is worth describing in some detail. It is all or nearly all made of a special paper-light metal, the same kind Wacagan use for their legbands. It’s an uncanny experience seeing the Ghuards in their armor—you begin to wonder if you’ve gone deaf, because, massive as it is, the armor makes almost no noise at all. No thundering footsteps, no clattering. Huge forms sail by you as quiet and easy moving as balloons.

The helmets are traditionally moulded to resemble the heads of berserk jackasses, with ears three feet long bolt upright on top them. The eyes are great blind concavities with a slit for each of the occupant’s eyes recessed at their innermost edges, flanking the false-perspective nose ridge—actually a flat trench, not encroaching on the Ghuard’s field of vision. In a perversely-inspired bid for perfect ugliness, the designers had trapezoidal openings cut on either side of the muzzle, and mail jowls hang flabbily out of these. The rest of the false face is a wedge snout with a horrifying if rather nicely-rendered snarl of projecting axe-head shaped teeth. A narrow, shaggy mane of needles runs in a tapering stripe down the rear of the helmet to the small of the back, rippling hypnotically like the scintillation of a wheeling school of fish.

When have I ever seen a school of fish wheeling?

Those manes must be fantastically expensive and time-consuming to make.

The chest, shoulder, and upper arms are plated over with two layers of armor separated by an air layer. There are two sets of hands—proper man-sized ones, in fine and elastic metal gloves, and colossal mechanical gauntlets that can crush a man in their grip. Strips of mail hang down from ledges at the tops of the thighs. From chains affixed to each armored groin dangles a pair of dull metal balls, bigger than a man’s head and dotted with scratch-shined pimples, which clack meditatively together with every stride. The legs are thick pistoned trunks with ponderous hinges at the ankles, and incongruously prim pointed feet. They puff along in swarms of flies—their hindquarters and thighs are caked with excrement, as the Ghuards exhibit a marked disinclination to divest themselves of the armor once they’ve got it on.

Makemin watches them disembark with a sour, twisted mouth, and crossed arms. I know from his expression he has not been able to recruit more soldiers. I should go down to him, but I find I would rather not move. I sit and I watch. I will go down to him.

*

With aching legs I drift down mudslopped streets. No more whore’s drums and pimps clapping their horny hands together on street corners. They fled at word of the Ghuards’ arrival. I can see the camp of the Ghuards in the distance, through gaps in the buildings, where it lours like a chancre on the opposite side of town. Smoke, laced with seams of red fire and convolving bulbs of flies, hovers over the camp. Behind a rampart of chain-bound barrels they are smashing their screaming prisoners to paste in massive iron mortars, or pulling them apart in demoniacally gleeful tugs-of-war. I know there will be others, a rape ration is what they call it, brought in soon if they’re not there already. A woman’s, for example, right arm might set alight, or her face, for example, or his, might be mauled by dogs, as the Ghuard travails upon her.

*

The port’s wall extends in a broad bow with both ends in the sea, encompassing an area in excess of the dimensions of the town itself. I can walk past the point where the houses peter out, and there’s nothing here but dunes and ashen, sandblasted trees, all strangely deeply dark in the gathering dusk that layercakes the sky in fire ribbons. I’m gratefully still perverse enough not to miss even the beauty here, that flips adjectives and such around in my brains, as though this refreshing air, that seems forcibly to inflate my lungs and threatens to puff me up so I bob off across the sand, is stirring up in me a dust devil of whirling expository phrases. The particles tick against my skull’s insides. I’m hoping any moment they’ll blow out my far ear and inside and out my head will be all sliding wind, and I’ll see my own shadow weirdly dark as well.

I’m simply too numb and tired to take in the ocean. I don’t believe I can say I’ve ever seen one before.

After catching a few z’s, lying in some romantic sand with a kerchief over my eyes, I wake up to still sun and breakers. The front of my face aches with the drying out of the wind, and nicely getting up there’s a rill of pain shoots from my left heel along the back of my ankle. I hobble my tendonitis back in the direction of town.

There’s a spot I faced as I slept, where a heap of stones receded into a jumble of details I didn’t bother to make sense of at the time, and as I glance at them again I feel a memory come on, a dream of a black-streaked mouth in the stones, that spoke dream talk to me along the wind. I remembered the voice, but not in the way I normally remember voices. I didn’t hear it in recollection, but my memory started making vocalities at me and it was the affect of the voice that it partially imitated; distracted, sexless, neutrally old, talking off at an angle and to itself, but I was meant to overhear. I only overheard it speak. A strong definite sound, but it trembled. It was a death’s bed murmur, words maybe addressed to death, or through it, by a dying speaker. I get away from the beach fast, and as I walk the stiffness goes a bit out of my foot.

This broad bit of path seems to have lasted longer than it should.

*

Oh look another one of my outdoor cafés what about that. A handsome girl and brave asks me what I want and goes inside to get me whatever it is I’ve ordered. Everywhere, the same thing. I see mouths in motion on all sides. Incessantly in motion, on all sides. There’s another; and now two more have joined us. They eat, and their jaws work the food around among the teeth, between the jaws, pressed this way and that so that the different kinds of food find the teeth specialized to destroy them. The tongue does this, and also churns saliva into the food, so that everything tastes like saliva. Although the tongue naturally tastes, while having no taste of its own to speak of, not that I’d notice. I watch this or that patron lifting a cup or glass to the mouths they come here to honor with this fine food and drink, and the mouths stretch themselves out toward the cups or glasses, reaching out to meet them before the hand has finished bringing it near, as the eye judges. These people, like me, are marked for death. But not entirely like me. They can run.

So much strain and muscular labor involved in absorbing food. I’m exhausted just watching it. But above all there is speech, incessant speaking, where the inflated edges of the tube are stretched and contracted, knotted and unknotted, ripped open or pressed shut, flued and drummed, hammered and gnawed. Licked. That tube has two ends. To the far end goes all ignominy, and to the fore end all the glory, hymns of praise. Her lips were lovely. The swollen ring at one end of the tube, fastened to rings and riggings of muscle.

All these sounds. It’s exhausting.

I notice the upper jaw doesn’t move at all, only the lower. You see the skull so clearly I wonder people don’t think of death whenever they witness speech, or speak themselves, feeling that hinge flap up and down, and even back and forth a bit—how can it go back and forth? Is the socket that loose, or is it something else, like a leather hinge, like a book binding? A man sitting near to me is speaking emphatically. I’m wrong. He’s reciting something from memory, either that or he talks like a book, and some of us do. I imagine a book that stumbles and blunders, um-ing and uh-ing and stop start again what I mean to say—well, put it like this, you see there’s too or rather what matters here the emphasis ought to it’s more productive of consideration it’s more produ-producti thoughtfully produ it’s a fertiler field of it’s a more sophisticated it’s a less crude it’s a more sophisticated ... and so on.

I watch emphatic speaker’s mouth, and I can’t hear his words really, only the strident tone. I am falling under the spell of that clipped speaking of his. There are moments where the mouth seems to take an entirely new position without any intermediate movement, simply jumping from one to another like a sleight of hand too fast to follow with the eye, so that the mouth actually seems to flash like lightning. I feel something like a weak panic at this man’s unceasing, precise, emphatic mouth speaking those written words he has fanatically memorized. What other motion of a part of the body, and only a part, the rest still, so controlled, rapid, transfixing? But then, after all, it isn’t hard for me to shift my gaze to the flame of the lamp on the table.