The Vorrh (12 page)

His cousin had died the week before Tsungali’s promotion, after the incident with the invaders. Many of the True People had worked hard to understand and adopt the new ways, converting the foreign senselessness into some usable part of the real world. His cousin had been one of those. He had watched their ways and seen the fetish that they held dear. He had made copies of the things they guarded and held in reverence, assuming that likeness would clarify everything, even make their words become clear, so that all could share the great wisdom. He made compressions of leaves and earth, bound together with spit and sap. He moulded them into the black steps that the white holy men called bibles. He even carried his own, pressed against his heart like the padre of the invaders.

Yet they had responded badly to his dedication, and confiscated all of the imitations that he had given out. When he’d retreated into the forest and had started building the hut, they seemed relieved and glad of his departure.

The hut was just big enough for him to enter. Above it, he had erected a very long stick, tying together a collection of the straightest reeds and branches he could find. From this rickety mast dangled a long vine that he had tied to its very top. The vine passed through the roof of the hut, where it was connected to two halves of coconut shell, joined together by a bent twig. This sat on the head of his cousin, one half held over each ear. He, like the whites, was listening to the voices of ghosts floating in the air. Like them, his mast caught them on its line and drained them, down to the cups and into his head. He sat there for days, his eyes tightly shut, concentration absolute. When the invaders found him, they laughed until tears ran pink out of their eyes. He had laughed too, and had given them the headphones, as they called them, to hear the voices.

The officer had taken the shells, still wiping the laughter away from his eyes, and cupped them over his ears. His smile had dropped immediately and he’d thrown the things away, casting them from him
as if they were a serpent. He shouted at the cousin, and told his men to burn the hut down. But the cousin refused to leave, saying that the spirits wanted it this way, and that the fire would pass through the wand, over his hut and into the air, where it would wait to enter the wand on the Whiteman’s hut at another time. He had burnt there. Tsungali had picked up the discarded headphones and watched with the others as the hut, and the spirit-mast above it, collapsed about the squatting figure in the smoke.

Nobody had understood the incident then, even the invaders who said prayers for the fire and for his cousin’s soul. That understanding would take several years to fully ripen.

It was after that debacle that they had made Tsungali a policeman. To balance things, he thought, and because he’d never accepted one of the solid bibles. He was an excellent policeman from the first day, obeying all orders and achieving all of his tasks. It was simpler than it looked – he explained to his people what they must be seen to do, they agreed and so it was done, and the new masters believed their wishes had been carried out. So good was he, in the eyes of his masters, that three years later they rewarded him by flying him from his land, into theirs; a long and meaningless journey, to show him the magnificence of their origins. By the time he had arrived in the grand European metropolis, he was without compass, gravity or direction; his shadow had remained behind, bewildered and gazing at the empty sky.

They dressed him in smooth cloth and polished his hair. They put gloves on his feet and pointed boots; they called him John. They took him into great halls to meet many people; he had conducted his duties perfectly, they said. He was trustworthy, they said, a new generation of his clan, a prize in their empire.

He just watched and closed his ears to the drone of their voices. He touched everything, felt its texture and colour to remember the difference, the size, and the fact that all things there were worn down,
smoothed out and shiny, as if a sea of a million people had rubbed against the wood and the stone, curving its splinters and hushing its skin. The food they gave him made his mouth jump and sting, burnt him inside and skewered him so that he had to shit continually; even this they kept contained. He was not allowed outside into the clipped gardens, but locked in a tiny room, where all his waste had to be deposited, washed away in a cold stone cup. He could endure all of it, because he knew he would return soon.

It was the museum that changed everything and explained the volume of their lies. Like the churches he had been to, it was lofty and dark; everyone whispered and moved quietly, respectful of the gods who lived there. One of the army men had guided him through, showing him box after box of impossible things, all caged in glass. They told lies – the scenes, the guide – about men, living in ice and sleeping with dogs; pointing to tiny totems that glowed in the dark; murmuring their magic; nodding together. Steadily growing more sickened, he had walked ahead and turned a corner, coming to a standstill before the next great case. In it shone all the gods of his fathers. The prison of glass and wood held them, cleaned and standing proud, so that all around could see their power and worship them. But on the floor of the prison were the prized tools and cherished possessions of his clan, all mixed and confused: men and women’s tokens, implements and secrets, entangled and fornicating, lewdly exposed and crushed under writing. Manila tags were tied to each, scrawled Whitemen lies gripping each cherished thing, animals in traps; the poached, the stolen and the maimed. All those things which had been taken away, discarded as shoddy and replaced with steel. And there, at the centre, was his grandfather’s sacrificial spear. The one that had been handed down towards him for centuries, its wood impregnated with the sweat and prayers of his family. The one that he had never touched. He had walked into a trove house of all that was significant, all that was cherished – all that was stolen.

The visitors were humbled before these objects and deities, quietened into reverence by their influence. One of the uniformed elders got down onto his knees, nose almost touching the glass, to come closer to a carved manifestation of Linqqu, goddess of fertility and the fields.

On the far wall were pictures. Almost in a state of trance, he walked closer to these, into a memory of his village, pinned to the wall and drained of colour. This was the final sacrilege; the exposure of the sacred, the dead, and the souls of the living.

His sponsors were enjoying his visit, pleased with his attentive behaviour. They watched as he stared at a photograph of an elder of his tribe, sitting before an elaborately carved dwelling. It was a significant image of anthropological value, a first contact document that showed an uninterrupted culture in domestic vigour. Tsungali stared at his grandfather. The old man had never been photographed before, and he’d had no idea why the stranger was covering his face and shaking the box at him. Sitting on the steps of their Long House, legs holding an animal-tailed fly swat, the other hand quietly trying to cover his balls; his expression was confused, cocking his head slightly to see around the box, trying to look at the photographer’s face. His grandfather’s eyes and mouth had just been wounded by strangeness, he was too dazed and absent to ward off the event. The outside of the Long House was encrusted with climbing, crawling, and gesturing spirits. All of their carved and painted faces were alive, talking to the stranger, laughing at his manner.

The old man looked through the box, through the stranger, through to his reflection, and appeared to shudder. The doorway to the house was dark, but another figure could just be seen inside. A boy, happy and grinning, all teeth and eyes in the darkness, open, smiling amazement. It was Tsungali, caught young, and in opposition to his beloved grandfather’s nakedness, bewilderment and pain.

Tears filled his eyes as he secretly begged the print to move, to turn away or turn back, to do anything but confront his memory with such resistant
loss. He could look no more. To find his grandfather trapped behind glass and nailed to a wall, so far from home and his earthly remains, was beyond sacrilege and blasphemy. It gnawed into him, along his genetic ladder, an emotional, hidden thing, chewing back into extinction. He slid backwards into the crowds and quickly became dissolved among their throng. He ran from that place and became lost in the streets of liars outside.

He was, of course, found and returned to his homeland, where it was trusted that he would explain the splendours and dominion of the masters. Instead, he explained that the True People’s gods had been stolen and replaced by cross-sticks, that all they once were, all they had once worshipped, had been given to others. He explained that their masters had cheated them, had stolen their ancestors and locked them in prisons of glass. He explained that there was only one way to treat such wicked profanation: on the third of June, on a bright spring afternoon, he began the Possession Wars.

By the next day, two-thirds of the invaders were dead or dying, their houses burnt and the church torn apart; the airstrip was ripped up soon after and the cricket pitch desecrated beyond recognition.

Peter Williams vanished into myth. So had the blessed Irrinipeste, child who never grew old, daughter of the Erstwhile and heart of the True People.

* * *

It was difficult to know who was the most shocked. They had shuddered into the dining room of the old house without a word, Mutter swallowing loudly, trying not to look too obviously at either of them, but continually dragging his eyes up off the floor to make sure of the vision before him. Ghertrude was ruthlessly busy, daubing and
scrubbing the mess from her clothing with a rag she had snatched from Mutter’s pocket.

And Ishmael? It was impossible to guess what the little, half-naked cyclops was thinking behind his hands, which had locked over his face the moment Ghertrude had released him from her protective grip. It was she who broke the silence with a command.

‘Mutter, you will tell no one of this.’

He looked up into her dominance, which was rapidly drying off her humiliation, the steam it produced smelling of anger. Mutter nodded automatically.

‘You must help me hide this poor, hurt child.’ She put her arm around Ishmael to emphasise the point. She had ignored him while repairing herself and the sudden embrace made him jump. ‘Does anybody ever come here?’ she demanded.

Mutter assured her that he was the only one with keys, and that he had never seen the owner or anyone else here; neither had his father.

‘Good,’ she said to herself. She was thinking fast now, and the clarity pleased her. ‘Do you have the keys to the rooms upstairs?’

‘Yes, Mistress, but all the doors are unlocked,’ Mutter said, a tone of unease creaking in his voice. The room was beginning to feel cold, and she became aware of the boy’s shivering.

‘Go and fetch some clothing for him,’ she said. ‘Anything will do. And light a fire in there.’ She pointed to the reception room next door. ‘Go man, and say nothing.’

He nodded and made for the door.

‘Oh, and…’ she called out, as he made to leave. He turned to question her and she met him halfway, pushing four heavy coins into his hand. ‘Bring food and drink, something hot.’

With that, he was gone instantly. She returned to Ishmael and pulled the sheet more closely about his white body.

Two hours later, the boy was dressed in hand-me-downs from Mutter’s
children. They had eaten, and the room was warm. The exhaustion had put the cyclops to sleep, and left Ghertrude free to make her plans. She questioned the anxious servant about his unseen masters, the house, the crates and how his family had been paid over all these years. When she realised that he knew nothing, she started to build her palace of lies.

The foundations of this baroque edifice were dug in need and fear: Mutter’s fear of becoming unemployed, or being held responsible for the damage and strangeness that so deeply perplexed him, gave her a foothold with which to begin her journey of deceit. She had explained in some detail that kidnapping was a crime punishable with the gravest of verdicts; that he was the only person with keys; that many would have seen him take food to the house each week. Moreover, there was nobody else there and any statement from Ishmael would be inadmissible, if he was allowed to speak at all.

The need, however, was hers. She wanted to keep the little monster to herself, to find out more and not share him, yet, with the many and the mindless. But she lived in her father’s house. She needed another place to hide him, and 4 Kühler Brunnen was perfect. She would seal off the lower floor, and any abomination that lived there, and keep him in the attic, or the rooms on the third floor. She would visit him every other day, nobody would know. Mutter was the key to making her plan work. He would be the engine to drive the day-to-day mechanism of concealment, and she would stoke the fires of that engine with dread and money. The only unknown in all of this was the response of his invisible masters, when they learned of her trespass and the destruction of one of their puppets.

She waited for their appearance, but it never came. Meanwhile, Mutter carried on as usual, collecting the crates, taking them to the house, opening them, shuffling their contents, nailing them shut and taking them back. He brought regular food; he cleaned the stables and looked after the horses. Now he had two wages for doing the same job and keeping his mouth and his eyes shut.

The upper floor had been full of furniture, so it would be easy to make a usable suite of rooms. She could set about making a home that was comfortable and discreet. But before that, there was work to do in the basement. She told Mutter to bring tools, locks and a gun.

Drawing a chair up to the door of the basement, she instructed him on what had to be done below. With his keys in her hand and his shotgun across her knees, she told him only what was essential to make him do the work, calling instructions down the stairs that she had so recently escaped. He was to go down, beyond the old kitchen and into that shrunken place. He was to take the remains of that repulsive thing and drop them down the well shaft. He was to change all the locks and board up the doors. She would guard the house and listen to his progress from the stairs.