The Vorrh (24 page)

Yet, even amid this gaiety and triumph, a shadow nagged. Something of the past was travelling backwards, from a journey made in the future, and the rattle of it harried him continually. ‘Doubt’ was too small a word, too uncertain. What troubled him, and curdled his first ever joy, was that the shadow was known. Something was understood, without having a face or a name; it was like the after-blur of his treatment, the moon smear that the surgeon had warned him of, but it was moving in advance of the fact.

The thing it resonated with the most was the Ghost Dance, or rather his ignorance of the Ghost Dance’s meaning. He had photographed it many times and talked at length with its instigators, but he still did not understand; its workings remained a mystery to him. There was a mechanism, on the inside of its action, like an iris or a newly developed shutter on the other side of a lens; he saw the desire and the subsequent result, like the plate, which received the inverted image and displayed it; similarly, he understood the achievement of the circular dance, bringing
the dead back to join the living braves in one last war. But he could not feel the process, nor the delineation of its occurrence.

He met several people with interests in psychic photography, but thought them fools. Even though a small cog turned against his will and brought to mind the effects of Gull’s perithoscope, he mainly shrugged them aside. But it was rumoured that higher and higher society was engaging in the new fashion of spiritualism, that the Queen herself had some interest. Sensing there might be a market for an honest man among the charlatans and quacks, he perched the opportunity on a shelf against the collapse of his present, just in case the disquiet which gnawed at his glowing success proved to be the sound of tables turning.

* * *

She had combed the city and caught three names, which now wriggled in her teeth. Two had been regular partygoers, inconsequential gentry of deplorable reputation, the kind of creatures whose very existence is antagonistic to miracle. The third had no name. He was said to be the companion of a young woman whose family Cyrena knew. She made more enquiries, buying information and paying street-eyes to unwrap small morsels of sight or whisper.

She found out that the man she so desperately sought had arrived at the carnival with the affluent heiress, Ghertrude Tulp, and that, whatever their relationship was, it allowed them to slip separately into many different beds over those three spectacular days, which had been such travesties of life. She discovered that, some time after he left her bedchamber, he had been involved in a street altercation, in which an ageing doxy had received permanent damage to her saturated brain. She knew that Ghertrude and the man lived at 4 Kühler Brunnen, and that
he had never been outside in public. She could not be sure, but suspected that the Tulp girl held some power over him; that she imprisoned him there, her prize, her possession, which she bitterly hoarded.

She stood before the double gate, magnificent in her knowledge and the certain triumph of her discovery. Taking a quick, deep breath through her feline nostrils, she stepped forward and hammered on the shaking wood.

In her heart, she felt sure that he would open the door to her love; that she would see him, beautiful and beaming, moved by her persistence in finding him. As the scene played in her mind, she saw Ghertrude unlock the great secret and give in to her overpowering enquiry and rightful passion. What she did not expect was the hump and shuffle of Mutter, whose sour response did not even seem to recognise her grandeur.

‘Is your master at home?’ she asked, unprepared for the sound and need of her stilted formality.

Mutter gawped at her through bleary eyes. He removed the dead cigar stub from his wet mouth and said, ‘I have none here!’

She jittered slightly. ‘Your mistress then?’

‘Out!’ he said, as he started to shut the gate.

‘Where is he?’ she demanded, her hand against the gate, equalising Mutter’s pressure from the other side.

‘Who?’ he said, genuinely unaware of who she meant.

‘The man,’ she said softly, through a nervous smile. ‘The mysterious young man who lives here.’

There was a long pause while Mutter came to, looking into her working, expectant eyes. ‘Gone,’ he said, ‘he’s gone. The monster has left.’ And with that, he shoved the gate shut.

‘Listen to me. The worlds swarm with an infinity of creatures. Those we see, those we never see: Naga snakes, who live in the depths of the earth. Rakshasas, monsters of the forest’s night, who live off human flesh. Gandavas, frail creatures who glide between us and the sky. Apsovahs, Danavas, Yakshas and the long glittering chain of gods, who live like all beings in the shadow of death.’

The Mahabharata

‘So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’

Genesis 3:24

Dawn, like the first time. The lead-grey clouds are armoured hands with the weak sun moist and limp inside them. The night still sits in the high branches, huge and muscular, rain and dew dripping to the pungent floor. It is the hour when night’s memory goes, and with it the gravity that keeps its shawl spun over everything in the forest. The crescent-eyed hunters sense the shift, feeling the glory of darkness being leeched and, ultimately, robbed of its purity. The vulgar gate of day gives no quarter, and its insistent brightness will tell lies about all, forcing the subtlety back into the interiors of trees and the other side of the sky.

The brightness lets the humans out and all those who are like them, as well as those who walk in their stead. The trees breathe and accept it all again. Unnatural greens cuckoo the sensible blacks, where all the great forests live. Men, and other, weaker beasts, grow in confidence and dare to believe that the place is theirs. For a few hours they stride and hack at the rim, shouting to match the sunlight. Twilight will soon shush them away
and return the forest to its true condition. The sap still rises in the dark; the sun’s pump sucks in the veins, long after the fire is hidden. It is this squeezing, from root to leaf, that finds sympathy in the stenotic memory of men. It is this force field, like magnetism or pressure, that influences all similar structures inside it. The effect on modern men could be explained thus, the persistent rumours of sub-species, living comfortably inside the rings of trees, could find a foothold.

Herodotus and Sir John Mandeville had already written of the unthinkable: ‘
the anthropophagi
’ and
‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders
.’ Beings such as they would thrive in this environment, where evolution was robbed of memory, hope and purpose, and distortion was not ironed out by the Darwinian uniformity of blind greed.

* * *

They stood on the platform. It was painted grey. It had always been painted grey. The layers of its skins had boiled every summer, sleeping when the sun set, and freezing in the freak, imported winters, waking in fear in the uncertain times that many called spring. They stood in the flapping colours of their robes, in the weird entanglement of midday wind and pulsing steam. The engine was at the back of the train, its heartbeat reverberating through the wooden ribs of the nameless station. The trio of carriages were next, followed by three simple boxcars with ‘SLAVES’ stencilled on their sides. The words had been painted over, but their message bled through, making them all the more conspicuous. Far beyond them, and the boundaries of the station, extended the flatbeds, each gently hungry for their cargo of tons of bleeding wood, some still wet from their previous journey. Like a perspective drawing, they pointed towards the lush darkness of the Vorrh.

There were four other passengers on the platform, but it was the solid bunch of men standing in a compacted block next to the boxcars that held their attention. These were the core workers, the ones who had made the trip many times. They no longer had homes or families, but only work and sleep. They stood shoulder to shoulder to resist the cold, facing predators en masse, like the legendary Musk Ox. Here, it was not the freezing arctic wind or the wolves, but some other external agency that seemed to threaten them. The Frenchman could not take his eyes from their expressions of agitated blankness, and he spoke without moving.

‘Who are they?’

Seil Kor was pretending not to see them, and it took him some time to answer, which he did by turning his back on them and speaking through his teeth. ‘They are the Limboia, some call them ‘Die Verlorenen’ – the lost.’

‘But what has happened to them?’ the Frenchman asked.

‘They have been to the Vorrh too many times. Some part of them has been erased, forgotten. It can happen if you go too often or too deep.’

‘Are we in danger of this, Seil Kor?’ he asked worriedly.

‘No, effendi. These men have been hungry for work, or have hidden themselves in the forest, disobeying the scriptures and offending the angels. We make only one return journey and will stay close to the rails.’

They turned, instinctively, to look more intently at the Limboia, who instantly stopped moving and turned into their enquiry, staring back. Then, in unison, the workers unbent the index fingers of their left hands, raised their arms and pointed to their own hearts. The Frenchman was amazed and embarrassed at such a poignant answer to the question that he had been about to speak, a question that had formed between his mouth and his mind, in the vapour of his heart, and evaporated in exact proportion to the intensity of their physical response.

The doors of the slave carriages opened. The huddle of men dropped their hands and eyes to the ground, turning from their unified gaze to move forward into the train. There were no seats in the boxcars, just racks of
narrow bunks. The Frenchman watched as they climbed into their shelves and fastened wide, leather straps over their prone bodies. His melancholic curiosity was violently bleached by the engine’s whistle, its shrill steam sounding departure. They climbed into their carriage and prepared for the long, slow journey away from the reluctant city. The Frenchman fussed in the wooden luggage rack over his head, moving and adjusting his wrapped possessions against the elaborately carved scrolls of ivy and oak leaves decorating the shelf. He was still rearranging when the train began to move. Seil Kor touched his arm and guided him back to his seat, where he could cool down and stop his breathy mutterings.

After the first hour, the Frenchman had stopped looking out of the windows. The view was of trees, only trees, passing by in incessant uniformity. The track had been cut in a straight line through the density of the forest, forming a tunnel between the living mass. The train was built for power and the movement of great weight, not speed, and they travelled at an unhurried pace, gently rattling along the tracks. The driver sat at the back, reversing them forward into the forest. The long line of clattering flatbeds had no human guard or observer at their head, no one to look out for obstacles or problems, because there would be none. The sharp wedge at the front of the train would push aside any twigs or debris that may have drifted onto the track, but nothing would. The dull, insistent velocity never changed.

‘How many times have you been here?’ the Frenchman asked Seil Kor.

‘This will be my second complete journey. I made the first pilgrimage when I was a child, with my father. I was twelve years old then. It was the week before my confirmation.’

‘Oh. I thought you had been many times,’ the Frenchman said, unconcealed disappointment stealing his volume.

‘No, a man may only visit the heart of the Vorrh three times in his life. I have told you, more is forbidden.’

‘But you said that it is forbidden to go beyond a certain point in the forest, not the number of times you visit.’

‘It is the same thing.’

‘How is it the same thing? How can trespass into a sacred place be the same as the time a man spends arriving?’

‘It is the same because all of the Vorrh is sacred, from its outer rings into its core. The time and the space are an intrusion: all will offend.’

‘Then how can all this industry survive? Surely it intrudes more than a single man could, and takes far more from this sacred place?’ The Frenchman was becoming increasingly perplexed.

‘What the city takes is material,’ Seil Kor answered. ‘Lone men enter the Vorrh for more than trees; they seek something else. This track and the eastern lung, where the trees are cut at the moment, are a given. They are a balance between the Vorrh and the world of men, between those who dwell here and those who dwell in the city.’

‘But how can there be a balance, when the forest and its gods don’t need the city to exist?’

A vertical furrow appeared on Seil Kor’s forehead. He did not like ‘gods’ in the plural, he had explained all this before. ‘Essenwald is a library to the forest, an appendage. It was attracted here when the Vorrh was already ancient. The physical closeness of so many people gives God a direct index to the current ways of mankind; his angels can learn there. It is an open shelf.’