Celebrant (40 page)

In Votu:

There are galleries on the walls overlooking spring leaves in constant motion, trees with flexible whiplike branches adapted to the long winds.
There are tides in the grass and in the trees wiped as the sky wipes, the sound they make is called “sifr.”

From these galleries it is also possible to make out the sugar land, which from afar looks like a white triangular notch or pyramidal heap in the foothills.
This is the opening of a deep canyon.
Trees on inaccessible slopes growing in patches of rare earth are so wildly overfed their armpits exude a fragrant resin like frankincense and finely-powdered, pure glucose that floats to the valley below like waterfall mist.
The valley has a barren sandy bottom littered with boulders, and an underwater river flows there, beneath a layer of groundwater that clots the sand so the ground looks like satin, faded patterns in the sand like the smooth back of a worn nickel.
The drowned river emerges from beneath the water here and there to form small crystal brooks that retreat underground again after a short passage in the open air, looking like seams of trembling, clear stitches in the fabric of the ground.

Few plants can grow here, and those that do are inedibly sweet
—
just licking a leaf one time will produce an intense sugar burn in the mouth, painful tingling in the gums, and to consume a leaf can bring on death from overstimulation.
The fruit of these plants is so sweet it can’t even be touched, and they impart their fragrance and sweetness to anyone who even comes near them, making eyes water and smart.
The flavor in the mouth is cold, glassy, liquid sweetness like caustic sugar slush, a taste known as ‘platium.’
Despite the sparse and deadly vegetation, however, the valley floor teems with life specially adapted to these conditions.
These animals need to eat only occasionally, replenishing vitamins and minerals by chewing the stalks of woolly shrubs and the sluggish, floury termites that live at the edges of the sweetened zone in an area kept fertile by the droppings of the valley dwellers.
These lively, hyperventilating creatures are brightly colored, red, orange, yellow, and purple things that absorb airborne glucose directly through their open mouths and the lungs beyond.
Many move so quickly that they actually cannot be seen with the unaided eye and are known only by chance photography.
The flesh of these creatures is overpoweringly salty, not sweet, and consequently also inedible in any appreciable quantity.
Giant sloths, dholes, the gigantic snails of the sugar lands, entelodonts, wisents, nilgai, the different colored lamps in the windowless cells of the future parts of the city, all colors including white
—
soldiers come to hunt the giant sloths, when fear of whrounims doesn’t keep them off.

*

Burn keeps her eye on the wire-gammed warrocksen, like a loudspeaker on insect legs, as it stalks by her hiding place, a steady,
amplified mutter buzzing in its round, gridded mouth.
Some officials are there by the gate, comparing badges, specifically the features that had come with the different plans assigned each badge.
Burn is waiting for a chance to zip out into the trees, not wanting to be seen, but also not wanting to stir, and change the headblood and lose the mind it creates.

She doesn’t think deeply;
her thoughts, like pigeon thoughts, are the ephemeral concatenations of a moment.
The day is brilliant, the buildings rebound with elastic light
—
a taste in the air
—
enchanted stillness
—
pigeon feet don’t break the leaves
—
girls in a tableau, the scene soaking into all their alerted senses
—
not just the holy city but the holy glade
—
buoyant autumn light
—
my hatred
...
my hatred
...
is it right?
is it right?
...
cool trees against a caustic sky
—
whater weels, whater weels
...
a horizontal water spout, the passer-by makes shaping gestures with hands in front of the spout, a little like washing
...
clouds run errands in solvent haze
—
errands on Saturday, for virtue nor peace of mind nor dignity isn’t a luxury
—
those dark shapes up there are giant, lighter-than-air sloths that hang from the undersides of clouds and can be seen swimming upside-down through the sky with wheeling strokes of their shaggy forelegs.

Burn walks with her hands behind her back.
She passes a small cemetery beneath the walls.
Movement attracts her eye.
A number of graves have tiny mineshafts sunk into them, shored up with shaved sticks and thrusting out little tongues of railed tracks.
Lights the size of pinheads are strung down into the graves.
Almost too swift to see, little miners are at work there, bent forward pushing coal carts full of chipped buttons, fragments of jewellery, bits of fabric, shoe leather, gold fillings, teeth.
A fragile-looking crane winches a brown femur up out of the earth with glacial slowness, as the shadowlike figures at the base wave their arms and call to each other in voices too faint to hear.

She wonders about her parents from time to time.
They all do.
Sometimes there are tears and sometimes bitter words;
or just the mouth and the eyes are bitter.
Later comes the gallant little effort to turn aside to present things, which a moment later is fortified by the insistence that these bitter thoughts are what lie aside and out of the way.

Burn remembers the outline in the corner, and the great bird she saw, the fierce female thing out in the snow like an exasperated leopard and the comet streaking remorselessly toward the horizon.
Now buried far beneath or behind the world.
She tries to imagine herself with her parents, looming above her like two tall trees or a building.

All she can see are two dull black streaks, one with legs and one is a cone, fading out into broken grey sunlight.
Part of her, all the same, but then this thought angers and pains her and above all she wants to know why they ran away.
She doesn’t want to know why, exactly, she wants to know if it was
her
they ran from, or if it was some kind of mistake.

Why do you always run from me?

She yells it silently at them both like a frustrated interrogator shouting at an uncooperative prisoner.
The words are a reproach and an accusation.

Here are the meadows breathing sleep musk
—
the reverie assembles there
—
only walk into it
—
soft feet pat the bracken, a frond bows, a tuft is unbending slowly
—
openings going through the plants
—
all around there are sky caves you can hide in, drag along behind you by the rim like balloons
—
docile sky calves, partable sky buttocks just brushing over Votu’s towers half lost in sky milk, the high dairy sun.
There she notices the black tupelo trees fringing the glade of the Long Figures
—
and there are some people tossing a hard ball back and forth.
A big man is walking sombrely along a sunken path down the slope from them.
The ball sails over outstretched hands and Burn makes no doubt it will strike that tall man, right in his head.
The ball bonks against the trunk of the tree and drops to the ground, as the man appears again, having only just been obscured from view by that tree.
Somehow she’d missed the intervening moment
—
she remembers the ball speeding toward the man’s head, and no tree but one beside the path a dozen or so feet away from him.
And yet that tree, in that spot, came between him and the ball.

Burn watches the man, who walks without looking around, without turning his head.
He is wearing a high black velvet hat with a pair of wings outspread at the back, formed by two oblong loops of wire or something stiff and covered by black crepe.
Two long ribbons trail in the air from the joint of the wings, which spread to either side of his ears.
Which she can’t see, any more than she can see the rest of his head, because of course there is a veil sandwiched between hat and head, floating down over the shoulders.
At first, she’d missed that veil because, in the radiance of the daylight, she’d caught a glimpse of the wan face.

Cautiously, into cool darkness under the trees, she follows his path, nearly overgrown with large, soft, feathery shrubs eight or nine feet high.
Through their motionless fronds she can see through the copse to the gleaming meadow on the other side, and no sign of him anywhere.
Burn can thread her way through the shrubs in silence, without stirring them, and she prefers this to showing herself on the path, dim as it is.

She freezes without a sound when the hands settle on her shoulders.
Glancing down, keeping her head still, gathering her icy self for a spring away, the black rubber gloves and chilling power pours down into her body.

Can I jump?
(she asks herself)

Somehow she is waiting for those weirdly calm hands.
They seem to say, calmly,

You are mine already, and always have been.

The impulse to escape suddenly matures and, feeling many times heavier than she should Burn hurls herself forward.
The fingers slip from her shoulders like the fringes of leaves and when she spins to see who it was there’s nothing to see but trees, and the daylight they break into spangles, and the still, downy bracken.

Keeping to the margin of the path, Burn carefully rushes out of the copse into the meadow on the far side.
She flits into the tall grass, looking around, but sees no one.
When she emerges again, there is the mathete she’d met before, with the white hair and the single black forelock, sitting on a bench beneath a black tree all wattled with growths.
He is smiling as if he’s been waiting for her, but that’s all he does.
She vanishes with darting steps, leaving him behind, so she hopes, finding her way back among other pigeon girls.

It hadn’t felt as if there were anyone back there but her.

They’ve scattered themselves in the trees and bright clearings, scamper and play.
Some are drowsily nestled in trees.
The day you live
...
the screen of defocussed leaves waving like a jeweled screen of gem flakes
...
the boys all ate gem flakes and died
...
minute white flowers make galaxies on the black grass beyond the watchful black tupelo trees.
The sky foams against the distant mountains and catches its hems in the trees, the bouncing of the bird in flight low to the ground.
While they still go hungry much of the time, Burn has led them to more food lately, and today pigeon girls can forget about food for an afternoon.
Their hair, their eyes, have new luster, their bodies are just a bit more suety, and they are livelier, playing like other little girls, snatching baubles from the jewelled bed of the day, stealing together the unwatched jewelry of the simple, unjewelled day, spiriting them away to drink.