Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (10 page)

 
          
“Catch
a
Knossos
by the toe!” he panted.

 
          
Reddened
by the thin tough wall, some shape outside was drifting through the sky towards
the tower. Squashing his nose to the wall, he paused to stare.
A flying shark?
Something with glider fins—a cross between
a torpedo and a glider, but
alive!
On
the shark’s back perched a helmet-headed merman. Its forked tail curved over
its head; it gripped the tip in one hand, forming a hoop. Its other hand held a
spear, or staff, with a ball dangling from the point upon a cord. The
shark-and-merman came closer and closer.

 
          
Only
moments before Sean himself reached the cleft of the meatus and a chance of
catching hold of Knossos’s ankles, the clothed man jumped . . . aboard the
fish, astride the merman’s arched back. The great flying shark cast off again,
backpaddling its fins, gliding off through the sky.

 
          
Sean’s
head emerged. The true color of shark-and-merman was green, though the ball
that dangled from the merman’s staff was cherry red.

 
          
“Please!”
he cried. The shark was still almost within jumping distance if he could have
taken a running leap; then no longer so.

 
          
Knossos
saluted Sean. The clothed man looked
genuinely sorry for all Sean’s wasted effort. He pointed down at the tiny corpse
splayed upon the table-top, ridden by the heron.

 
          
“Only
whatever can destroy itself is truly alive, you know,” he
called—sympathetically. “Only in the place of danger do you find the secret.”
The shark, steered by the blank merman, drew away.

 
          
Sean
slid back, exhausted. The temptation to let
himself
continue sliding was great. Then he remembered the rugged steps which the
helter-skelter led to lower down. Doggedly, he backed down the helix of the
shaft, one pace at a time. Taking care, avoiding danger.

 
          
“I
think the
fish evolve into mermen in
time,” said Jeremy excitedly, “on their way to becoming full people. Or maybe
it’s the other way round sometimes—people devolving through mermen into fish?
Should / know? Anyway, mermen aren’t real men yet. That’s why they don’t have
human features. Now, you say that one carried a ball? That’s the perfect shape,
Sean—the potential it inherited, the cause working on it, so
it
really must have been a fish earlier
on . . .”

 
          
Sean
panted like a beached fish himself from his descent back down into the grotto.
Once he’d gasped out his account of the climb Jeremy had launched into a flood
of comments or suppositions, as though his lonely vigil in the grotto had had
an effect on his mind. Now, in the green fight of the grotto his eyes seemed to
be bulging, as if the cave itself was squeezing invisible hands around his
throat, making him gabble like some alchemist’s apprentice having the truth
squeezed out of him.

 
          
“Ah,
you think it’s too soon for evolution from the fish psyche to the psyche of the
merman? What, even when there’s a God involved in the act?
He’s
the transforming agent, Sean. His creatures incarnate his
transforming ideas at the same time as they’re their natural selves, don’t you
see? For example, the merman and that winged shark together make up the Spirit
of Mercury—in other words, spirit drowned in the watery element and striving
for the air to redeem itself. But the thing isn’t integrated yet—so they’re
still two separate individual beings. Their partnership can literally fall
apart—in mid-air! Well now, if we look at our friend’s escape route this way,
it suggests we’re on the right track—we’ll catch up with
Knossos
yet.”

 
          
Jeremy
rubbed his hands together enthusiastically, and a trace of phosphorescence took
fire on them, green flames in his palms. “You’re going to be my luck, Sean!”

 
          
“You
sound like a gipsy fortune teller,” said Sean. He felt sadly out of
condition—all those years spent coldly hibernating, and an orgy at the end of
it all to tone him up ... He felt that he needed to be dipped in something,
like the child Achilles, to toughen him up and temper him! He understood what
Jeremy was saying, all right—it echoed many things from way back. Only, it was
one thing to deal with such psychic currents by way of dreams and symbol
language; it was quite another to have to pursue them concretely, on foot, even
on hands and knees.

 
          
“Oh,
I know you’re disappointed,” said Jeremy. “But don’t you see how you’re making
progress?
Knossos
gave you a hot tip. That’s more than he
ever gave me!”

 
          
“A tip?
What—to seek the place of danger?”

 
          
But
yes, oh yes, it
had
been advice . . .
Knossos
really had sympathized with his efforts.

 
          
Hauling
himself off the stone floor where he had collapsed, Sean stepped into the blue
pool to wash the sweat off his body—aware as he did so that he was performing a
kind of rite as well as an ablution. He was dipping his ignorant self, inside
this alchemical cromlech, in a vessel . . . which
illuminated
the grotto. So the pool was a vessel of illumination .
. . Dunking himself under the surface, he opened his eyes underwater; but he
could see as little as a fish on land.

 
          
In
water we drown, he thought. Water is the sea of unconsciousness where we
evolved as fish with no consciousness at all, no self-awareness, only
preconsciousness—the old hindbrain that still sits atop the spinal stem which
we share with fishes—What is baptism but a memory of this?
As
well as of the amniotic waters of the womb?
By returning underwater, we
drown our consciousness in unconsciousness, seeking reintegration and a higher
consciousness. Why did that acrobat dive down from the agave spike on to dry
stone, as though it was the sea? Was he driven to despair by “
The

 
          
Work’?
Or had he seen a short cut—a route through?
A sublimation
? If I drown myself here and now, if I breathe
in these waters of distillation, shall I awake as a preconscious fish dragging
my fins across land, trying to struggle erect again into my former state—more
fully integrated with the hindbrain?

 
          
His
lungs ached, fit to burst. He let his head break the surface. Shaking his ears
free of water, he stepped out and shook himself dry.

 
          
“We’d
better tell Denise and Muthoni that he got away . . . Wait a minute, they
should have seen him hop aboard! Where are they?
Muthoni!”
Sean ran to the rear exit, and out along the thistle path.

 
          
He
spotted the Kenyan woman immediately. She sat cross-legged some way off. A
white unicorn was nuzzling at her lap. Its long corkscrew horn dug into the turf
beside her—gouging it.

 
          
“Muthoni!”

 
          
At
the sound of his voice, the unicorn pranced away from her. Looking mightily
relieved, Muthoni jumped up. Halting, the unicorn eyed them both then drove its
horn into the earth a few more times.

 
          
“So
the lady tames the unicorn!” laughed Sean. “I thought that was a prerogative of
virgins!”

 
          
“It
isn’t
tame, Sean.”

 
          
“
Knossos
—”

 
          
“I
saw. I had a ton of unicorn on top of me, that’s all.”

 
          
Now
the beast was stropping its horn to and fro, to clean off the soil it had
skewered. Abruptly it cocked its head and trotted off toward the maze of the
flower-wood, vanishing into it.

 
          
“Its
horn was covered in blood, Sean. It’s been cleaning itself. Look.” She held up
her hand. Blood smeared her fingers where she had gripped the horn to push it
from her.

 
          
“You’re
hurt!”

 
          
“No,
it isn’t my blood. But I thought it was going to be!”

 
          
Was
Knossos
’s hint about seeking danger a taunt, after
all?
Because danger was already actively seeking them . . .

 
          
“Whose blood, then?”
'

 
          
They
raced round the thistle jungle to the far side of the cromlech, calling,
“Denise! Denise!”

 
          
Her
body lay, quite neatly, on the green sward. As they ran up to it a bird took
wing and flew away.
A red-backed shrike—a butcher bird.
A red hole impaled Denise’s chest. A hoof mark bruised her breast where the
unicorn must have thrust against her to free its long horn.

 
          
“Dead.
She’s dead!”

 
          
“I
can see that,” snapped Muthoni. Kneeling, she rubbed her fingers in the grass
to clean them. She swung round. “Is she really dead, Jeremy? I mean, dead for
ever?”

 
          
The
once-Captain shook his head. “Not unless God hasn’t got you in his register.
You being strangers—new arrivals.”
“But if He
has
. . . registered us?”

           
“Oh, so now you do want to believe
in Him!” Jeremy seemed to have been overcome by a mood of argumentative piety
since his sojourn in the grotto—as though he was about to be saved, though from
what (or for what) was hardly clear, perhaps least of all to him. Denise’s
death at least proved to him that something important was about to
happen—unless it already had, in his absence ... He grinned crookedly. “She’ll
have to pass through Hell, that’s what.”

 
          
“He’d
send her to Hell? Why, the vicious—!” Muthoni stroked Denise’s Primavera hair:
her joy upon awakening, her gift from the cold. Then she closed her eyes
tenderly with finger and thumb.

 
          
“You
have a warped understanding of the purpose of Hell.”

 
          
“Isn’t
Hell painful, then? Doesn’t it hurt? How can it be Hell if it doesn’t hurt?”

 
          
“Meeting
one’s own deep self is often a painful thing. One must step into that furnace.”

 
          
“Don’t
be so goddam
holy
about murder!”

 
          
“You
want me to tell jokes? Here’s one: perhaps Denise is feeling a bit holy herself
right now? She has a big enough hole in her chest!
Which is a
bit of a holy joke in the circumstances.
” Jeremy laughed asininely.
There was
a bitterness
in his laughter as though he
had just been elected to play the buffoon at the foot of a crucifixion. Or was
it ... a fear?
A fear that he might also be so honored?

 
          
“We’ll
hunt that bloody unicorn,” vowed Sean, ignoring him. “We’ll nail it. It’s the
danger-beast.”

 
          
“But
it’s innocent,” protested Jeremy sweetly. “It was only an instrument in His
hands.” It was impossible to tell whether he was being serious or sarcastic.

 
          
“It
killed Denise. So we’ll hunt it. We’ll take
Knossos
at his word—we’ll hunt danger. Come on,
it’s getting away.”

 
          
“But what about Denise?
Do we just leave her here for the hyenas?”
Muthoni clenched her fists. “What hyenas? Nothing here eats flesh.”

 
          
“Look,”
pointed Jeremy. “Look before you leap.”

 
          
A
gaggle of men had appeared over the brow of the hill, on the run. They were
bowed down under the weight of a great black half-open oyster shell. The shrike
flapped ahead of them, leading the scrum with its cries. Ignoring Sean and
Muthoni, it landed upon Denise. It bent its neck and, with its beak, deftly
reopened her sightless eyes. Grunting and puffing, the men arrived. They laid
the open bivalve down beside Denise then stood back, grinning and mopping their
brows. Both valves of the oyster were plump with milky flesh. The nacre around
the shell rim shone iridescently blue and silver.

 
          
“Who
are you people?” screamed Muthoni.

 
          
Paying
no attention to her,
then
thrusting her back when she
actively got in the way, three of the men picked Denise’s corpse up and slid it
right into the open shell. They pressed down on the upper valve, closing this
coffin lid upon her.

 
          
“Where
are you taking her?”

 
          
Grunting and heaving, but with no explanation, the undertaker team
hoisted up the oyster shell again, maneuvering it on to their backs.
Thus bowed down, they left in the same fast scrimmage of shoulders and elbows
and straining thighs.

 
          
Jeremy
restrained the two from following. (He was restraining himself too, trying to
remember that he was The Witness.) “The old body will dissolve into the
prima materia
of flesh—a protoplasmic
jelly. When the shell opens again, it will host a new being.”

 
          
“A new Denise?”

 
          
“No.
She will have to hatch in Hell. Death leads to Hell. Hell leads to new life.”
Jeremy sounded convinced enough, but he was sweating. “Did she have much of a
devil in her?” he asked cautiously.

 
          
“Perhaps
a tiny little imp of the perverse,” said Muthoni sourly, remembering Denise’s
fantasies about psychotronic radiation—a biomysticism which she’d kept locked
away in a secret cupboard in herself. (But were those fantasies any longer?)
“She was gentle. Does she have to be tortured to make her devilish?”