The Vorrh (26 page)

* * *

Seil Kor raised his hand at the end of the journey along the three-hour track.

‘We must turn here,’ he said. ‘Either back, or to the right.’ His body strained towards the right, one foot already on the track.

The Frenchman looked up into his friend’s gleeful face. ‘I think we are going right,’ he said.

They headed down the narrow path, wanting more of the wonders they had already seen. The day was unpredictable, but the allure was worth a dark return. They had witnessed the flowing winds of the Vorrh, long, singing currents of turbulence that flew and rippled between the contoured ground and the vast canopy of still leaves. Its profound, limited hurricane was still in their lungs, the cleanest air ever breathed; sharp as lime, soft as new snow. It bore youth and purity in its rushing particles, setting the eye clean and level. When it first hit the Frenchman, he choked, as the corruptions of the cities and his own store of malice were dredged from his tarry crux. Scales fell from his cemented being, and he gave up all in a cough. There were no words to glue the two friends’ experience together; it was all shared, in moments that existed forever.

They entered a small clearing that felt virgin, untouched – the animals and plants seemed surprised to see them, and dropped their normal attention, their continuum, to acknowledge the presence of the strangers, before vanishing into the sound of parting leaves. Seil Kor walked ahead and into the middle of the clearing, looking intently at the ground.

The Frenchman examined the perimeter and was amazed to find dozens of tracks leading away from the space. They were regular, but overgrown, like paths leading out from the centre of a clock face. The path at four o’clock was the widest, as if made by a beast much larger than the others. He assumed the assortment of animals had come from various directions to drink or eat at the clearing, but he could find no trace of water or food, nothing that might obviously attract them. He turned to his friend, and found him standing in the middle of the space, a yellow book in his hand: here was the answer. He walked over to the black man, who was gleaming blue in the mottled light and wore an expression of agitation tinged with magnitude.

‘Seil Kor?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’

‘This is the place,’ the black man said quietly. ‘I was here before. This is where he lived.’

‘Who?’

‘Saint Antonius,’ he said, barely whispering. ‘See the ground, look! There is still a scar of his shelter.’

The Frenchman’s eyes examined the space, which did seem to have an indentation, or a scar. It looked like the rectangular footprint of a hut or small house, drawn in the plant growth of discolouration, faint and without significance. He might have walked straight across it without noticing anything was there.

‘This is where he lived, centuries ago; his simple home was in this place.’

‘How do you know?’ questioned the Frenchman, uneasily.

‘This is the place I told you about, that my father brought me to, when I was young; he told me the story, showed me the signs, just before I was confirmed into the true faith. We prayed here together that day.’ Seil Kor looked at his friend. ‘This is why I agreed to come with you here, so that you might touch this sacred place and see the way. We can pray together here. That is why I brought you.’

The Frenchman was astonished with this revelation. He felt a shiver of anger against his friend, an emotion he thought he had shed, something that felt most out of key in this place. The moment was a towering mistake that shuddered louder than the trees and longer than the metal rail that brought them here, to the centre of nowhere.

‘I came to see the forest,’ he said, with controlled limpness.

Far too quickly, Seil Kor answered, ‘This is not a place for seeing, for curiosity! Nor is it a place to be observed and then forgotten. It is sacred and all-knowing, men must give themselves here, sacrifice some part or all of themselves. You cannot walk in and out as you please; it is not a park, or a city garden.’

There was a pause, when only the ringing in their ears was present, sounding the sudden iron in their distance. The jaw locks at such moments, as if waiting for the noise and hurt to stop resounding. The animals and birds that first held the clearing had long since departed, the rising tidal wave of conflict driving them out through the trees. Seil Kor’s next words were far too loud, but they snapped the tension.

‘I told you, journeys here are limited; this will be my last and I give it to you. I have never met a more needy man. I bring you for salvation, it is your only chance.’

He then knelt, opened the book, and began to read out loud; the book was of vellum and loosely bound. He read about Eden, after the expulsion; it was a different version of Genesis that the Frenchman had not heard, dense with local details and obscure references. His patience waned; he was disappointed by his friend’s motivations. Their expedition had been spoiled for him, turned into a grotesque, evangelical ruse, a trick to convert him to a gibbering Christianity of Old Testament nonsense. He turned his back and walked out of the clearing, leaving the droning voice to recite the names of angels. He would wait for him at the station and there explain his inbuilt resistance to this kind of thing.

He marched down the track, talking under his breath, rehearsing all the
lessons he would have to teach Seil Kor if their friendship was to last. Low vines and abundant foliage dragged at his ankles as he stormed through, and he faltered on pebbles and flat stones that had gone unnoticed on their smooth, leisurely walk here. He pushed harder against the path and its growing resistance, all the while muttering his embarrassment of the situation. The dialogue stopped when the track ran out. He stood, silent, eyes wide open, staring at the blank wall of vegetation before him, at the end of this, the wrong track. A tiny trickle of panic sped coldly through his blood. Looking around, he heard his own laboured breathing. He struggled to see the track he had just walked, though he had not deviated from it, and stood on it still. He knew he must control the moment. Closing his eyes, he tried to remain calm, laying his hand on his heart and letting his blood flood the fear away. He opened his eyes to an impenetrable jungle. Slowly, he began to walk back the way he thought he had come, expecting at any moment that the path would clear and become smooth and straight like before, that it would blossom out onto the chanting Seil Kor and the way home. But his footsteps led him to the trunk of a vast, dark tree, the path ending in the way that paths never do. He turned with his back to the tree and stared into the tangled forest, dread now rising like fumes from its pathless floor.

Over the next tangled decade, which must only, in fact, have been hours, he shouted and called until his voice ran out. He had walked in all directions, seeking a path or a sign, but there were only trees and the growing wind. Surely his wise friend or one of the workers would find him? Even the Limboia would be a welcome sight. He thought he heard calling and had hurried towards it, but it had faded back into the other sounds, leaving him no closer to an escape.

He was irretrievably lost, with very few provisions, the main bag being in Seil Kor’s possession. He stopped to ferret in his shoulder bag, expecting to find hope, along with solution, in its cramped interior. Instead, he
found the secreted Derringer, loaded, and with two extra bullets in the snug of its holster. He could afford only one to signal his position; the others he would need for protection. God knows what horrors lived in this matted place; he had seen the paintings, had heard the tales.

He took the little gun out, carefully cocked it and held it above his head. He fired into the sky, or where the sky must be, on the other side of tons of leaves. The sound stopped the quiet and gave him silence back for a moment. He bellowed ‘SEIL KOR!’ with the last cracked and serrated edges of his voice. Then the quiet gushed back in, carrying the small foam of a sound: the long distance whistle of the train. It seemed miles away and unfocused, without direction. For a few moments, he thought it must be in response to his signal, that they had heard the report of his gun from this dismal patch, determined his whereabouts and begun their search. Then it sounded again, and in its reverberation he heard movement – it was leaving the forest, laden with wood and a few exhausted passengers, and he had been left behind, forgotten, maybe never seen at all. All those who cared and knew he existed were in another time and place, all except the one he had walked away from and would now never find. His legs buckled and he slumped against the ancient tree, sliding down into the hard, veined nest of its serpentine roots.

* * *

The jaw now worked in a sideways motion. The Wiseman who had performed the repair was a healer named Nebsuel, who lived in the outcast isles, just inside the mouth of the great river. Tsungali had visited him on his way into the Vorrh.

Nebsuel possessed a great knowledge of the body, of its fluids and lights. His services could be bought, but were better given. He was not
a kind man; he did not apply his knowledge for the wellbeing of others. He performed surgery and operated the chemistry of plants to see further inside the workings of the human animal. His true ambition was to isolate the gum that joins flesh to mind, and mind to spirit. His tools and procedures for such work were simple. He would divide and subtract, add and multiply the pain and its relief, while probing the interior of structure and sensation. He was not a man to be taken lightly, and Tsungali knew he might be killed or rearranged by his practices. He also knew that if he did not get help soon, his jaw might never heal. Starvation and blood poisoning seemed a far worse conclusion than Nebsuel’s intrusions.

The outcast isle had been a leper colony. Nebsuel’s family had lived there and suffered the relentless disease, but he had not. Some potent resistance in him had kept him ‘clean’, while he watched all around him suffer. He had seen how the outsiders had treated his family and friends; on trading expeditions to the outside world, he had witnessed open disgust and cruelty against his loved ones.

How he became a Wiseman was not known, but the legends were thick and terrible. Some said he cut open all the dead of the isle and read the complex tales of their mechanisms; others said he travelled away, to collect the wisdom from many tribes, some from beyond the sea. He was rumoured to commune with forbidden spirits, and unspeakable creatures that came to trade knowledge for the souls of men he kept in jars. None of the reports could be confirmed, and they grew more fantastical in their ambiguity. But his powers of healing were not so unclear. They were the only thing about him that was certain, and they were worth the risk of contamination and agony.

Tsungali had sat in a large chair made of sturdy wood, a strap holding his arms tight to his body and firm against the chair. He had laboriously drunk the mixture of stewed leaves that Nebsuel had given him, and now his face drooped numb and cold. His broken teeth had been removed and dropped to the earthen floor, where ants flocked to harvest them,
swarming in collective shoves to nudge the prize along their conveyor-belt lines of frenzied, black bodies. Metal and wooden probes extended his jaw, giving access to the glistening muscles, unnaturally exposed inside. Nebsuel worked from both sides, one finger in the exterior wound, which he had unstitched, the other hand teasing and adjusting the tools inside Tsungali’s mouth. His arm, already treated, lay throbbing under the strap, An hour later, he lay in a sweat of recovery, beaming in pain.

‘Tell me of this Bowman,’ Nebsuel said as they sat around a smouldering fire, three days later. Tsungali spoke through gurgles and splutters, as though a wet sock were stuffed in his mouth. He explained his quest and how it had been foiled on both attempts. He told of the Whiteman with Blackman skills, of his cunning and excessive knowledge. He did not tell of what he feared, of what he had seen for those few minutes at close range: the shock of recognition; a face he knew from years before, unchanged by time while his own grew old, and his body, slow. It must have been a mistake, a trick of the mind – the man’s son, perhaps, grown identical in form. The alternative, though it would have explained his power and his automatic place in Tsungali’s memory, was impossible.

‘I will kill him in the Vorrh,’ concluded Tsungali.

‘Or he will kill you,’ Nebsuel stated blankly. ‘Why do you think he heads for the Vorrh?’

‘Because he has a destiny there, something unfinished. Something the white soldiers don’t want to happen.’ Tsungali prodded the glowing embers with a stick, making a new citadel within their flickering hearth. ‘Perhaps he means to meet the angels or the demons that dwell there.’

‘Ah!’ said Nebsuel. ‘I know nothing of demons, but the Erstwhile you call angels are another matter, they have a presence everywhere.’

‘You have seen them?’ asked Tsungali.

‘I have sensed them, felt them near, watching, when a soul shudders on my knives. Some are attracted to the extreme action of men, wanting
to see deeper and understand, and maybe become part of man. Have you never known their presence amid your actions of war and butchery?’

There was no answer, so Nebsuel continued.

‘The Erstwhile in the Vorrh could be different, older; a residue, like something left in a closed pipe or one of my test tubes; concealed and contained, too viscous to climb the sides. At least, that would match the stories that are told of that region.’

He made a brief sign over his head, as if stroking some invisible coiffure above his shining, bald scalp. He knew Tsungali had seen more, that there was an understanding which had not been mentioned. For that little act of selfishness, he would give him weak, inexpensive balm to close his wounds. Had he shared all his knowledge and fears, he would be leaving with an ointment that would have healed the wound in two days.

For the wrongness of his quest and his inability to alter or change his purpose, Tsungali would have to pay dearly, but not yet, and not to this doctor. Nebsuel attached a trace scent to the scarred warrior; he would be trackable for up to a year, trained beasts could be used to carry message of his whereabouts; it could be used to find him if he never returned – the state of his body, intact or otherwise, would not hinder its efficacy.