The Vorrh (48 page)

* * *

Tsungali knew that the voices of men, like their breath, did not always live in this world alone. He knew they could pass into others, and sometimes bring back different sayings. That was what the child, Irrinipeste, was so wondrous at doing: her voice had passed into many worlds and brought great wisdom back. So, it could be the voice of his grandfather behind him; but it could also be the voice of a ghost or demon who had stolen it. If he believed, and turned to confront it, he would be lost.

‘Come, take my hand,’ his grandfather said.

In that moment, he heard the echo of those words spoken above him, in the mouth of his prey. Without looking back, he looped up towards the track ahead of them, no longer caring about the noise he made in his approach.

He crept with speed to the edge of the track and saw them in his path, unprepared and engaged in a type of bizarre Whiteman’s game. They had become silent, and the Bowman, the one he knew, held his weapon away from his body, thrusting it in the face of a smaller man.

All this Tsungali saw in a fraction of a second. Whatever this ritual was, it had left them exposed and unprepared: the field was his. He attached the long-bladed bayonet and bolted a round into the breech,
then climbed up onto the track and began to charge, head down like a bull, the blade cleaving through space towards them.

* * *

So intent was Williams in his self-imposed blindness that he did not hear the fast rustle of leaves or the velocity of the twigs breaking behind the cyclops. But Ishmael did, and he swung around, glaring down to where he imagined he would see the squat yellow bodies of the attacking anthropophagi. To his shock, he was confronted by the charging blur of an enormous black warrior carrying a rifle, a viscous knife gleaming at its snout. It was coming fast.

Ishmael did the only thing that he knew would awaken Williams into that lethal moment: he snatched the bow from his hands with such force that it jarred the Bowman’s eyes open and alert.

The cyclops turned again to the assailant, and his glare was like a slap across the hunter’s eyes. This was not a Whiteman – it was not a man at all. Ishmael’s glaring eye hit his sight and he faltered, slipping on the sticky path. He slid to almost all fours, but never lost his momentum or his grip on Uculipsa. He caught himself without falling and stumbled forward, pulling his lope upright and back into a charge.

Williams saw the charging man; watched him lose focus and slither in his approach. Lifting his hand to his shoulder bag, he pulled out the hefty, eager weight of the Mars pistol before the hunter had righted himself and gathered speed.

As he ran, Tsungali saw the creature raise the bow over his head, he saw the quick, unfolding movement of the other man and he knew the voice he had heard below really had been his grandfather, not a demon or a ghost. The monsters did not whisper below: they were up here, with
him, and he was running straight at them.

Williams cocked and aimed the pistol as he saw the Blackman’s eyes.

The point of the bayonet was within two metres of Ishmael’s chest when the great roar put a stop to all motion; all, that is, except for the birds, who threw themselves from every branch and beat their wings upwards and out of the forest, into the bright, dazzling air and away from the terrible sound.

Ishmael had dropped the bow, letting it spring away from his fast hands as he grabbed at his ears, a hot, white flame passing over his shoulder. He sank to his knees, howling.

Williams stepped past him, the pistol never wavering from its attention. He stared down the track to where Tsungali lay, lifted off his feet and thrown back to the exact spot where he had regained his momentum only seconds before. He writhed in an excruciating tangle while Williams slowly walked the narrow distance to stand over him, the smoking barrel at his side.

* * *

Charlotte watched him as he stared out to sea from the quarterdeck of the great white and silver ship. He was motionless and uncommunicative; every day spent on the endless water made him drift further and further away. She tried to be close, but a barrier was forming as he fell inward. She had never felt so lonely or so helpless as she did while watching the sea turn from blue to green, pondering on its unfeeling and enormous depth.

At night, under fierce stars, they ate in silence, with all her attempts at gentle conversation ignored or rebuffed. She knew he could not help it, that it was not vindictively aimed at her, but it still wounded her. She told herself that her hurt was nothing compared to his; his most
overwhelming feelings were attached to an irredeemable absence. Every hour of his waking and sleeping life was given to searching the recesses of his blank memory for a face or a moment to hold and flood with his tidal wave of emotion. But all he ever found was a distant, grey, empty shore, and by the time they had reached Marseille, he barely noticed she was there at all.

He no longer shared his hurt with her. Instead, she became the brunt of his disappointment and his growing, aimless anger. Their return to Paris was peevish and numb. He refused to be enlightened by her happiness of homecoming. Every effort she made was wasted and disregarded. He was punishing her inability to solve or reduce his misery, demanding rather than asking her for things, especially his fastidious meals and his increasing supplies of barbiturates. She had to keep a record of his experiments with these, so that he might calculate different alchemies of unbeing and find the limits of his non-existence to balance against the volume of his pain.

He was listless, he could not settle or write. He roamed the rooms, peering through the curtains into the diminished City of Light; he talked about travelling again, used movement as a surrogate for thought. For the first time, she seriously considered breaking their contract, of giving up his mother’s money and fleeing his baleful presence. But she stayed for him, knowing that without her, his life with the indifferent servants would be even worse. His death was the enigma that stalked her life, and she came to recognise that it was not the tangled weight of responsibility that made her care and kept her close; it was something stronger, something strangely unnecessary and totally essential; a kind of love; a constant need to contain and guard with unflinching proximity. It was not maternal, and was certainly not fed by perversity from the injuries of his brutality. It was her presence which had become entangled with his, beyond circumstance and sometimes even personality. She would stay until the end and remove all judgement to do so.

She remembered a conversation she had once heard in her childhood.
She was nestled under the thick legs of dark furniture, while a Jewish relation explained stories of his faith. He talked about many peculiar and difficult things, but one stuck in her young mind: the division of day and night, and how dusk and dawn had two characteristics, the twilight of the dove and the twilight of the raven. She now understood that the rest of their time together would be like this, a constant dusk. She would maintain it, and work on its luminance. It would be the twilight of the dove, and the raven would never be allowed in.

________________

1
Abbreviated name for any kind of engine or mechanical contrivance, as in cotton gin
.

2
Noxious fog that sometimes thickened with soot and sulphur dioxide into a greenish-blackish smog
.

“In some country everyone is blind from birth. Some are eager for knowledge and aspire after truth. Sooner or later one of them will say, ‘You see, sirs, how we cannot walk straight along our way, but rather we frequently fall into holes. But I do not believe that the whole human race is under such a handicap, for the natural desire that we have to walk straight is not frustrated in the whole race. So I believe that there are some men who are endowed with a faculty for setting themselves straight.’”

Nicholas of Autrecourt
, Exigit ordo

“The grandiosity of ‘paper buildings’ like Brueghel’s tower of Babel, Boullee’s funerary temples, Piranesi’s prisons, or Sant’Elia’s Futurist power stations have been realized, and by an amateur, a fanatically motivated little lady from New Haven whose dream palace was crafted with Yankee ingenuity.”

John Ashbery

“…and as the disputational .44
occurred in his hand and spun there
in that warp of relativity one sees
in the backward turning spokes
of a buckboard,

then came suddenly

to rest, the barrel utterly justified
with a line pointing
to the neighborhood of infinity.”

Ed Dorn
,
Gunslinger

He stood before the oval mirror, combing his beard. He had lost weight again, and the furrows under the white strands looked dark grey, deep rills and valleys in a late, gaunt sliver of moon. He wore his finest shirt, one he had bought in Jermyn Street, at London’s most renowned tailor, The Consort’s own shirt-maker. There was a flicker in the peeling glass, tarnished silver curling away from the polished transparency, the shadow of a woman passing. He ignored the unimportant flicker of the past and looked closely at himself, catching the roaming eyes for a moment and holding them out of focus, not wanting to see into their meaning. The glass had warped since the time of his wife, become thin since her fatness had moved away. Perfumed colour and greasy powder no longer wallowed in its gilt frame; now, it was only the empty grey of his eyes reflected in its shallows, sphinctered tight against search or understanding.

The doorbell rang: his carriage had arrived. He donned his surtout coat, picked up his cane and his new formal day hat and hurried for the
door, his old bones creaking against the speed. He was on his way to meet the Grand Dame, and he must not be late.

The carriage rattled as he held tightly to his stick, jittering with excitement and nerves; he had always wanted to meet her. She had sent the request through the Stanfords, inviting him to take tea with her on this bright March day. He was fascinated by her diminutive beauty and gigantic wealth, having seen the former many years before, across a ballroom as he passed through the garden. She was not a classic beauty, like one of the willowy Long Island sirens who fluttered and coiled in the gleaming white of society’s grandest parties. Her attractiveness came from within and radiated her every movement with grace and charisma; not a polished diamond, but an energetic nugget of strength and robust dignity. Since then, she had been overwhelmed with money and grief. The wasting death of her only daughter and untimely demise of her husband left only her loneliness to break her, and her vast inheritance to haunt every hope of an afterlife.

Sarah was the only benefactor of the fortune earned by the enormous success of the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that ‘won the west’. It was a greatly evolved version of the clumsier Henri rifle, and a revolutionary design: a tubular magazine sat under the barrel and fed twelve rounds into the breech by means of an under-lever, which also acted as a trigger guard. The lever action carbine could be rapidly fired from horseback. The firepower and speed of delivery made it a superior weapon to all that had gone before it.

It tidied away the few remaining tribes who refused to yield to the white invasion. The gun, and its heavier calibre brothers, cleared the plains of the buffalo and every other creature with a price on its tail or horn. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the northern army bought the gun in vast quantities and money gushed and splashed into the Winchester coffers. It shot one bullet per second, and possessed a trajectory that wiped out half a generation of neighbours and friends.

Sarah’s tears never really ended. After the first five years, they simply turned inwards. Her eyes would well and weep inside her lids, hollowing the flesh beneath the fine skin of her cheeks and finding her throat, so that she might swallow down the wet pictures of little Annie wasting at her breast. The child had nothing except ferocious hunger and pain; between its skeleton and its skin, no flesh or fat grew.

Almost fifteen years later, she would swallow her pain with the rotted lungs of her young husband, as disease ate him away. He, like his screaming daughter, shrivelled in her arms. It was said that she balanced precariously on the edge of madness at the beginning of the 1880s, but some kind of resilience kept her from stepping over its line. She wasn’t sure where it came from: it certainly wasn’t rooted in the mountain of money that grew behind her grief, for she had no interest in that; there was nothing it could buy and so it stockpiled, a burgeoning model of her ballooning anguish. There had to be a reason why so much horror had quenched so much joy; when she eventually found it, it was appallingly obvious.

He had come to explain. With his pale smile and his gentle hands, she had no doubt that it was her husband being described, standing at her side, beyond the reach of her untrained eye. He was here to explain their evolution, and lay her personal guilt to rest: none of this was her fault.