The Narrator (44 page)

*

This is a dream of mine war took from me. It owns it now, and owns me. I am and have been leaning up against a tree, my shoulder at the trunk, with the carbine I shouldn’t have and that isn’t mine in my hands. The branches keep some of the rain off, but I’m drenched through, numb and heavy. Frail daylight is gathering in dense ropes of rain. I watch it, drone of rain alone in my head. I’m alone. I’m not alone. The rain watches.

A sound of wet bracken breaking nearby. I turn abruptly toward it raising my gun—all my frozen joints squeal and I can’t stop myself pitching over onto the ground. I’ve stood there too long and my body has seized up. My mouth stinks. Gibbering in panic I thump the mud with dead fingers trying to find my dropped carbine with deadened fingers when the weight of a hand drops on my shoulder and flail weakly away from it. I look up at Thrushchurl’s head, rain ribboning from his viny locks, silver on broadcloth shoulders. He strides forward and shows me his upper teeth.

“I’m not a ghost,” he says seriously. “You had better get back up again.”

I find a carbine and climb it, regain my feet. I have many lives—the lonely one, that was just here, is melting, and the other, that I’ve lived so far, is returning, unwelcome.

Thrushchurl has already begun moving off out of the trees toward the clearing, and I want to ask him something. Back in the open the weight of the rain pushes down on me. Gun in both hands, barrel lowered, I rush to catch him up. I raise my head, and beyond him see the struggling party. With desperation I feel it begin all over again—nothing’s changed.

There is Silichieh, and I am happy to see his bearlike figure there swinging his arms in his sopping sweater. But there is Makemin, an inflexible blue shadow in the streams, pointing, shouting orders. There is Saskia—her arm launches out to catch a slipping soldier before he can fall, thrusting him roughly forward onto his feet. Jil Punkinflake’s face is swollen and rigid with freezing rain, drops fall from his dangling lower lip. Everything will go on and on the same—I’ve stopped in place—Thrushchurl brings himself up short a few feet away and looks back at me with an expression the rain smears out. Guns have been lifted. One of them cracks. I just stand and stare wanting them to kill me while I’m still numb with cold. Makemin’s arm flies up into the air and I hear his order to hold fire. His cruelly keen eyes have determined that I am one of
his men
.

Thrushchurl takes my shoulder again with a glistening hand, and I go dumbly with him. The carbine I carry suddenly seems disgusting to me, like a runny rotten leg, and I throw it down. Out of the rain glare Makemin steps toward us, solid, compact, strong high steps, and I watch him come into my heart like a worm flopping over. His face is hard and severe as a block of wood. I am turning into nothing, just water. I know I will have to cling to him just like all the rest of them do, and even clinging to him will take all the strength I have.

“Good, you still live,” he says flatly. “You will march with me. Your guidance is essential in this rain.”

We go on. Behind us, there is a field littered with our own soldiers.

*

The carts bog down and force us to stop again and again. As we scrape through the mud, we come quickly to the flat, uniform surface beneath that it covers. I peer ahead, where another line of trees has gathered like a barrier, and above them a vast looming presence of something I can’t quite make out, like the shadow of a mountain. Looking back down the column from the front, I see the same behind us.

Regular shouts through hard sound of the rain. One of the carts lurches forward as its wheels come free. An object jostles out from the back and drops at the feet of the Captain, who twists like a top, mud belches up in a cloud around him with a muffled splat.

Muck plops back down to earth.

I rush to him, my heart pounding. The grenade blew the Captain wide open.

*

When I was young I read a story about a madman who drowned two people, crept up behind one while he was at his shaving basin and thrust his head down into the water—for months I felt him behind me, I hated to get near to water. Now I feel him again. It feels as though it had already happened.

I’m walking with Silichieh.

“What do you think?” he asks me abruptly, tossing his head in Makemin’s direction. As usual his voice doesn’t go up at the end of his question.

“He’s insane.”

Walking.

“I think you are right.”

Walking.

“I know it ...” he says gravely, his eyes downcast. “Because I catch it too, every time they shoot. It’s kept me alive I guess so far ... I’m maybe afraid to think how much farther though.”

“Who’s alive? I don’t feel alive.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re more alive than they are,” he says evenly.

*

The trees come up around us again. The rain stops quickly, like a faucet shut it off, and the white ground dries, the pale grey mud that clings to us dries. Marching, the air space and silence staring at us as we grind ourselves down past nothing. We camp in three tight groups in line of sight around the base of some bigger trees, with more open space under their branches. I almost falling on my face, roll over and sleep, the last respite. It isn’t rest. Makemin and Saskia seem to have endless endurance—I can hear them still, from time to time, behind me. I’ve never known fatigue like this before, and I’m far hardier than the others. I gaze indifferently at the trees and their wonders ... and then I sleep, despite the rapping of the boughs.

I awake in darkness with a heavy weight on my chest. I can’t see what it is—I take it in my hands, a weird, irregular, cold, thing, gritty, too—it moves, loathsome to feel under my hands like a slug. As I struggle, and breathe out, its weight keeps my chest from expanding. It’s crushing the breath out of me—I struggle—I foam, snarl madly and push off the ground with my feet and as I turn myself sideways I feel it topple from me at last.

I pitch back gasping for breath, and two black pinions spread in the air with a glassy scream. The wings whip through the air and clash together—a blast of oily-smelling wind and I get a brief glimpse of flapping against the light between the trees.

It’s gone. I sink down against the roots, shaking.

*

Crusts of blue mortar thrown up in waves show where outskirts of the city once were. The unnatural white soil is part of the ruins. We are already within the city limits, although the trees are just as thick. Between them, I see the shape of a black hare, ears up, motionless as a statue. From far off in the distance a ripple comes waving through the trees, though there is no wind.

The branches clatter together. The black hare is gone.

Men in Wacagan uniform hang from the trees here. We’ve wandered right in among them. They dangle in space, chins on their breasts. I see some tangled in the boughs high overhead, as though they had dropped into them from a great height. Far ahead, I see a shape perched on one’s shoulder, picking fiercely at its head. The bird stops and stares at us. From its head rise two long leaf-shaped ears, and it flies straight up through the canopy of dead branches, disappearing into iridescent sky.

Thrushchurl half-climbs a trunk to look at a hanging man. The body is covered with a thin integument of clear, shiny material, like clear amber, that seems to have dripped from the branch, down the rope. The swollen, discolored face shimmers like a bright mask. They’ll be preserved here forever.

Makemin’s voice splinters the quiet, again and again. His barked orders press down on our exhausted heads and we blunder further, blunder further again. We are becoming stupid and forgetful. We are losing ourselves. Soldiers drawn away by the beckoning sunlight of golden afternoon that seemed to melt the trunks of the trees from behind, melt them into softness like candles. The soldiers melt into empty space that sucks up cries of “Come back, will you—come back!” One woman who fell ill said she saw a little wild pig, all naked, snuffling at the roots of the trees. Its brief grunts were loud there, as if she and the pig were alone together in a small room. She shot the pig in the head, and it flopped over on its side instantly limp; slaughtered the pig and tried to eat it, but the meat was bad. The flesh was layered with flakes of rust. Her skin turned a dingy yellow and she weakened, but she survived and marches on with us now, though all her hair has fallen out.

Saskia stares out into the trees, by the carts—turns to me abruptly as I come up.

“What do you want?” she snaps. I came to serve myself and wanted nothing from her. Jil Punkinflake stands, I notice, nearby, eyes on the ground; shot his dog and then became her’s. I choose to point to one of the bundles of rifles. She stares at me, then turns, removes one, inspects it with a glance, and holds it out to me. Her eyes probe me with a look so knowing or expectant I almost don’t take it from her. There’s the butt of the gun, steady in the air; my hand floats up and closes on it. The weight is transferred to my hand and arm, so that the top of my forearm goes taut. The trace of satisfaction in her eyes puts me off.

She is the least changed of us all—or is she? I can’t tell. But her face is, it now strikes me, white, and drawn; the doughty oratorial spirit of her is frayed to threads.

Something unnameable, with many layers or many heads, suddenly returns my gaze from her eyes; her brow contracts a little as she turns to go.

Jil Punkinflake’s face is blank, like a corpse’s, eyes glazed. He snaps his arm out and punches me. His fist drives into my chest making a disc of pain there, and I go down, off balance.

“Stay away from her,” he says hoarsely, his eyes barely focussing on me before he walks away. At first the sounds make no sense. I have to think about them for a while before I understand them. I’m not hurt. The cold and the rain have cured me, made a numb rind of my outside.

*

Thrushchurl and I are chosen to scout together. No one leaves the group alone. We leave stakes to mark our path back, while the others regroup in one place. Thrushchurl turns his face like a dog catching a scent—he rushes forward, leaving me to hurry after planting stakes. I call to him, but he is preoccupied. I rush up to him, and as I catch him I see a shape loom ahead of us; the shape draws Thrushchurl to it. He is panting for it.

The trees have not encroached on the structure, which is a many-angled squat shape buttressed with tapering, inverted cones whose regularly-spaced flat round tops form a crown. The roof is irregular, with many gable-like shapes. The white enamel skin is like a tea kettle’s, cracked and flaking to reveal a drab black subsurface. The whole thing sits on a raised, smooth stone foundation that runs on into the wood shadows showing where the much vaster original edifice had been.

Thrushchurl, open-mouthed, rushes forward and lays his splayed hands on the stone as if he were placing roots there. He caresses the surfaces in rapture. I follow him, now oblivious to my presence, around to the opposite side. Here the building has been ripped open, and the rest of it is gone without a trace; not even a single loose stone or bit of broken glass, nothing but the unscarred, unmarked foundation to show it was ever there. The exposed edges of the small remnant’s walls and ceiling are shockingly jagged where the building was ripped away, with long triangular edges projecting out into space and many fine needle-like teeth in between.

We face a rounded inner wall that folds back on itself to make an aperture. Passing through it I feel a sudden oppressive vibration, like an organ droning at its lowest registers. We enter a hall-like space tall for its width, its floor strewn with cinders, tools lying in discs of dried grease, broken glass vessels and shards shoved rudely aside to form a rough path lined with curled bundles of green wire.

Now into the colossal main room. Thrushchurl dashes forward arms flung open. Everything is slightly phosphorescent. The floor is springy metal with a rectangular central panel of a glossy hard black substance like glass. Set into this panel are thick, transparent hexagonal tiles a little more than two feet across, and a corpse floats upright, head up, beneath each one, in honeycomb-like cells filled with a grainy scarlet fluid. Thrushchurl kneels crooning and running his hands over the tiles, his palm sweeping a dim shadow over dark heads.

Tables are bolted to floor around the walls. There’s a dark booth projecting from an upper story with a spiral staircase drooping from its underside. The dim glow of the chamber illuminates a few dials on the back wall of the booth—I see their needles flicker convulsively every time Thrushchurl touches the cells. I point this out to him, and his reverie breaks. He crosses to one of the tables and picks up a pink-red vessel of glass or ceramic; the vessel is heart-shaped and pearly, like a red conch turned inside-out. There is no lid, and Thrushchurl sniffs at the contents, then pours out some of the thick scarlet fluid onto the table. Setting the vessel aside, he crouches down and peers at the stuff, sniffing and prodding it with a piece of metal that might once have been something. I detect a thin sour odor, like the smell of rotting brawn that came from the square structure on the tower.

Thrushchurl withdraws from his pocket a pinch of mercury—where did he find that? has he always had it?—and drops it into the center of the dish-like pool of scarlet fluid. The shapeless mercury gathers itself in the center, its blue-white radiance brilliant against the red. I’d barely noticed how his hands shake now. The grooves in his fingers seem all filled with dark mercury.