The Narrator (43 page)

I breathe out through my mouth, feeling less and less a master of myself. This pretending has brought up such a heavy sadness in my chest, and sudden misery. Death ... death, waste ... violation of every single precious, horrifyingly vulnerable, precious thing. All at once, it seems to me there is nothing in the world but terrifying frailty and the nothingness that waits for it, that will always inevitably overwhelm and violate it. The whole world is untasted ripeness rotting.

My breath keeps catching on my throat on its way out my mouth, I feel as though boiling water were streaking down my face in searing lines, and I taste salt.

In my mind, she sits in the brilliant day, in the regal gloom of her veiled trees, only a memory and that not even so clear a memory. Can I remember what she looked like? Looks like? I’m exhausted, and I’m going soft—my own young hands, the trees, this soft eerie air and light, Silichieh’s worried eyes, Thrushchurl looking at me too with a weird knowing concern because he’s seen through me but won’t betray me, the kindness of my friends, all too beautiful.

Aren’t I a man? Why am I still playing idiotic games like this? I can’t do it—I should reveal the secret of the charm, give it away and disappear into the woods, melt into their emptiness. I’ll never write anything—what could I possibly say when I haven’t understood anything? What one word could I possibly write about war, as though I could pick it up and handle it like it were a sane thing? It’s more than I can handle—I can feel the war close like black water over me—it has me—I’m in its stomach. All my strength is pouring out of me.

*

Sticky air, trees, that irritating noise.

That noise is making us all angry and hasty—it’s bad. It bodes badly.

Grey sky. Now there are trees ahead of us as well. Looking up, I catch sight of flying wings, the first birds I’ve seen in the interior. They soar above us, just in the fringes of the fog, fuzzed shapes. Their dull bodies look like iron. Those are
their
Predicanten, the most ancient ones. They feed in the ruins, I think, maybe they feed on that poisonous light. A few shots split the quiet and we all fling ourselves flat—the loonies are trying to bring them down. Makemin grabs the nearest of them, shakes her violently and slaps her face.

“You shoot at the enemy and only at the enemy! Ignore them!”

How—how—how—?

The white abutment ends and we climb laboriously down to the curdled white ground. The trees here are less crowded together. It looks like there’s open country not far ahead. The trees, air, rocks, soil, the movement of the wind, even the noises we make ourselves, are all hiding places for spies. I have a suffocating sensation of being watched, peered at in silence, and with it I experience oppressive, hot closeness. It’s like I’ve been stuffed into someone’s pants pocket.

Now that we’re out in the open, the space itself stares at us. The trees give way to a wide rocky place in the fog. The ground here is sandy and trackless. The land ahead is curtained in mist. The perennial noise of the trees falls away, but I experience no relief. Feeling a million eyes on me, I put on a dreamy face and point wanly into the distance, the direction the charm pointed last time I checked.

“There ...” I murmur, trying not to overdo it. I step forward as if a mysterious force were pulling at me, and raise my hand—I don’t thrust it out, nothing too emphatic—just point loosely.

Silichieh is watching me.

“What is it, Low?”

Thrushchurl says very loudly “He’s in a
trance!
”—angling his head so Makemin will hear.

“That’s the way,” I say softly.

Other voices—“He was right about the storm ...”

Silichieh turns to Nikhinoch, but speaks loudly enough for Makemin to hear.

“Well, our scouts haven’t turned up anything—I mean, if there were enough of us to fan out, maybe, but ... but as it is ...”

Makemin consults with Nikhinoch.

We move out in the direction I indicated, moving quickly to get out of the open.

The air all round us is thick with that feeling of watchfulness; a baleful sniper stare I can feel drop down on me like a lead mantle.

A wave from one of the scouts—they’ve found some empty ration boxes hastily buried in the loose earth. Makemin inspects them personally, then throws a sharp look at me.

We go on, following the course the charm indicated. Makemin calls me to the front, takes me familiarly by the shoulder—he keeps me close—sends me out to scout ahead telling me to report back directly to him. I can run out ahead and check my charm easily.

The day passes without seeming to. Nothing changes, not even the light. The land ahead is blackened, sprinkled with flat shapes, dark against the pale ground; they are slashed and bullet-riddled bodies of wild men, their upturned faces powdered with blue mold. Saskia strides indignantly among the bodies.

“Those monsters!” she snarls, drawing a Yashnik sabre out of a dead body she holds down with her foot. No dead blackbirds, but here’s one of their caps.

I orient us again and we move out, trying to put the site of the massacre behind us before the sun is gone. Makemin walks with me. I feel his probing eyes every moment, with hate. Finally, he orders us to set up camp on a low rise and the men collapse in silence. Makemin takes me aside and we stand looking out into the mist.

“If you try to undermine my authority with the men, I’ll shoot you. If you try to leave us, I’ll shoot you. You will always be watched, and if you are shamming, if you are leading us into their hands, I will shoot you in the head. Understand—you are
my man
. You are not inexpendable.”

He looks at me, preparing some further words he plainly does not want to say.

“One more thing. If you guide us correctly, I will see to it that you receive whatever you want.”

*

Empty, colorless expanse.

Sandy gravel under our feet. Damp, stale air in our mouths, that leaves a drably insipid film on the tongue, like rebreathing your own breath. The iron birds appear to make wide circles at the extremity of our field of vision, keeping us in a vast, invisible ring. They are not watching us themselves—they may not have eyes—but their circling seems to attract a monstrous gaze to us. As the interminable day wanes, trees break through the mist before us like ocean cliffs. We pass through them almost obliviously ... there’s that old clacking sound again, that until this moment I had thought I missed, and no reduction of the feeling of malevolent watching.

The trees give way in a few hundred yards to an oblong, clear spot, like a barren meadow, open at one narrow end, trees thick all round. Despite the exposure of the spot, the sun is going down and Makemin feels we risk being divided if we camp in the trees.

Camp again.

*

Shouts—

—and something beating me—

—rain is falling hard—men are veering this way and that in it.

I lurch up and a hand yanks at me.

Shots—a man slops up near me aims and fires—turn and see another firing in the other direction. Jil Punkinflake sprints by, face and eyes white, his black mouth open, groaning with a kind of rage again and again, like a stricken horse. Dark shapes run and shots snap all around—the night explodes in shooting.

A despairing voice wails somewhere near me. “Where did they get guns?”

I run, I get down, I want to ask somebody something—man splashes to within a few feet of me raises his gun aiming and it bursts in his hands swatting him to the ground and he’s clawing his face and kicking on his back. I get to him and start trying to stop the bleeding, sew his face shut. He screams at me the bone of his jaws bare on one side his eye is red black jelly his nose is a rag. He punches and rips at me gulping and crying a flurry of explosions comes down like an avalanche on top of me and I can’t think, I’m staring weirdly at my own sopping hands streaked with rain-thinned blood fingers pale thick and nerveless like sausages fumbling stupidly with the suture—a yakking face shoves into mine—

“He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!”

Figures dropping down onto their knees around me with heavy thuds thrusting out their rifle barrels like lances firing jubilantly and I swim past them in the other direction. I hear them sing out all around me like men at a wedding party. What are they shooting at in this pitch dark? Shapes in the rain. Saskia yelling “Press forward!” Which way is forward? All of them? The mud by my left calf shudders flying up into the air—dressed only in a long shirt, one of the women from the asylum staggers toward me making a convulsive animal sound in her throat, six or seven carbines hanging on straps from her shoulders and arms. She empties the smouldering one she has in her hands—and just shot at me with—firing now over my head into the mayhem behind me. She drops the empty carbine and unslings another still making that noise, a depraved giggle, firing into the movement, shooting anything that moves, and I know there’s no one back that way but our own. I throw my hand out toward her.

Someone comes up from behind and to the side of her, opposite me; Nikhinoch, even in the mud he is neat and orderly his step still springs light as a jackknife. With one smooth continuous motion he pulls a compact gun from his vest pocket and fires a bullet into her head. She collapses in a heap of rattling carbines. Nikhinoch steps over to her body and checks the guns. He takes a loaded one and continues looking, his pursed blue face unhurried, lit sideways by muzzle flashes from the soldiers at the tree line. He takes another loaded gun and tosses it sideways to me, economically indicates I should follow him and walks toward the shooting with the same heron step he always uses.

We stop by a clump of trees. Nikhinoch fires into the dark, I can’t see at what, but he aims with precision and fires swiftly and surely. Empties the gun, turns to me and for a moment his rain-streaked glasses, which must be impossible to see anything through, glint into me. His hand snatches the carbine I uselessly carry. He coolly aims and fires again, then walks back in toward the worst of it, flicking open his vest pocket pistol, pinching out the spent shell, and sliding another one in, snap it shut and pocket it again, all while picking his way unerringly through the puddles and stones. Not a glance for me.

I spot a man cowering by a stone—he’s only nicked, but he lies trembling, staring. There’s a group of soldiers not far from him, gathered in a knot, guns pointing out in all directions, aiming and firing at who knows what. Silichieh is there among those men; I can see him searching desperately for the enemy. I can’t get near them for the shooting, pull away toward a rockier place. I cross toward the far tree line. To my left I see Thrushchurl hunching along the ground—he gives a sickening jolt and spin his hat flies off and he is on the ground with a cry—I rush toward him but the air is alive with bullets and the rain is blinding me. I search in the mud calling his name—I can’t find him. Searching toward the tree line—

I can’t mistake Makemin even in shadow nor can I mistake his voice—“Spread your fire! Bring them down!” Shadows fan out from him and aim toward the group I’ve just left, blasts rip up and down their line. My pistol is there by my side, heavy, fully loaded. I want to see him cut down. I want it so much it shocks me.

“Those are ours! They’re ours!” That’s the Captain’s voice, from somewhere nearby. “They’re ou—!”

Cut off, as though he’d been struck in the stomach—I go toward the sound, but legs drive hard through the mud, racing men ram me back; I lose the direction.

I run back toward Silichieh shots flying by me—screams in the dark—a figure silhouetted against a clot of firing men and their muzzle flashes, this one with something flapping from his shortened face—I follow the screams to the soldiers Makemin had shot at and find them rolling in the mud bellowing in pain pushed out from the bottom of the heap. They flail and claw at me, drag me down as I try to help. Hands shove my face down into muck and I taste the blood that soaks it, I twist and push my brow down to tilt my chin back and keep my mouth free, rainwater sluicing down into it and my nose. I kick wildly hitting out with the back of my heel and though I barely feel what I’m doing the weight is suddenly removed from my head and I haul myself forward with both hands.

I’m in a broad, flat hole—I get to the brink and look back at bodies. A man falls spilling with a scream not six feet from me—I scramble over to him—he lunges at me trying to grab the front of my tunic drawing back his knife—tiny droplets of blood tremble on his eyes—“I’ll kill you!” he croaks, “I’ll kill you!” flopping toward me on his side, dragging himself over his own spilling bowels, knife shaking in his upraised grey hand ... then his eyes go out, and he slips forward, slowly, onto his face as the war leaves him. His bent arm stiff at his side. The knife presses into the mud by his limp features. The knife is driving its own blade into the mud under the weight of his hand, the night is exploding in the roar of guns all around me.

We’re slaughtering each other—I catch sight of Makemin pointing, crying out his orders—I slap my hand to my side but my pistol is gone—Will I find a gun? I pull one up from a dead man’s hand—grip it—point it at Makemin and jerk back in anticipation of a shot but the gun thuds inert in my hands. I throw it down with a grunt of frustration and search the dim ground for another going from one corpse to the next—a rifle lies there across some stones—I seize it and turn. In the sluicing darkness I’ve lost Makemin. I rush off into the deeper part of the rain and dark hunting him, shouting his name ...