Celebrant (47 page)

deKlend:

Scrambling tragically on through wet, cold and dark, which only resembles night.
It’s as if he were forcing his way through the downy feathers of a drowned bird icy with rain, endless, no carcass, unless he is the carcass pushing to escape itself and its own cold cape of feathers that has thickened to infinity.
Here and there an edge will glisten, and vivid flashes of pallor flick by him, like a glimpse of shocking dead white skin.

There are abrupt, discrete shouts of sound like a rapidly dialling radio, through the gamut of acoustic conditions from open air to muffled against the wall to reverberating in a large enclosure, migrant activity of polyorganized humans
—

Votu!
(he thinks)

deKlend pushes through more vigorously, with less and less heed to his balance and footing.
This is space that has to be shoved aside constantly.
His clothes are sopping, and drag at him.

It’s just on the other side of this dark, thinning dark (he thinks) I’m so close to it now!
How can I be, when I didn’t make any special effort?
It’s chance, even better, if I can get to it!

He can almost see again the streets he saw in his vision, the thronging people, the choiring, exalted light of these monuments raised by fellow human beings like himself.
From the void at his left there is a laconic music, little more than a modest vortex of rhythm with shakers, blocks and rattles braided around it, a moose whistle too, going on as if it were going to keep him going on.
Accosting, joking, conversing is going on there in the nothing and deKlend can see himself in all his colors racing on through the abyss and there, just a step away, are the actual streets, the people
—
he can hear them!

A violent shock, in a straight line down the center of his body, crashes into him and he falls back.
He ran directly into the edge of a brick building in an irregular block, and some people are helping him to his feet.
deKlend gathers himself together impatiently trying to get on his way.

Are you all right?
(he is asked)

Yes!
Yes!
I’m fine!
I’m sober!

The man standing too close to him has a ruddy face and hair that’s just beginning to get shaggy, a cloth cap on his head and a garish kerchief around his throat.

I’m on my way to Votu
—
can you tell me which way it is?

Well, but you’re in
—

IN
Votu yes (deKlend snaps)
But how do I find the place?
The proper
place?
Itself?

I don’t know what else you could be referring to
...
Say
—
(a flicker of recognition is stealing into the man’s face, and his mouth begins to shape itself into a smile, like a bit of fabric caught up by a breeze) aren’t you deKlend?

Of course
I’m deKlend (he snarls, turning sideways and bolting past the man)

—
Thanks!
(he adds, tossing it over his shoulder and lifting his hand as he goes, turning his head to look back)

With a jolt he collides with a pillar, which he hadn’t seen because he’d been looking behind him, and this collision also dislodges the ladder of the pillarpainter who’d just started at the top and who now drops to the ground from the top of his ladder with a cry of alarm.
Gritting his teeth in frustration and pain deKlend stops and bends slightly at the waist, pressing his hands to his smarting body.
The pillarpainter managed to land on his feet although not while retaining his balance, and also stumbling over his paint pot, and also losing his paintbrush in an awning.
deKlend begins to walk again in the direction he had been going, bracing himself for the remonstrations of the painter he expected at any moment would come dashing over his back like an invective wave, and suddenly feeling completely defeated and at the brink of tears.

He is racing on now, through utter darkness, his ear keenly attuned to the noises of the city that are all around him, like lures, like snares, too close, but without light.
Nothing but the flakes of snowy winter daylight that whisk past him, illuminated windows of fleeting trains.
Phryne
—
he thinks suddenly of her again, cold, wet and blind, just at the threshold but running no matter how always parallel to it, never at the right angle to cross it and enter Votu at last.

Has she been there?
(he asks himself)

Yes!
(he answers at once)

The answer was an experiment, and the rightness he feels in saying it seems to confirm it.
If imagining Phryne in Votu seems not simply plausible but emphatically correct, then this alone might be some kind of proof.

Yearning for her fills deKlend.
He longs for her beauty.
He runs.
Empty space whistles past his ears.
Where is she?

Did she go off?
Go off with someone else?

These are familiar thoughts (deKlend thinks) and I am on familiar ground among them.
Instantly, out of dead calm, all the lights go red, the sirens woof and howl, and I brace for loss again.
Bracing for another loss seems to be called up like a curse by the power of my longing for her, or any woman.

Either I’m no good, or I meet only weak women who can’t
...
(he thinks)

That might not be the choice (he very faintly thinks)

That’s the choice
(his other voice says in a tone that won’t brook any back talk)
Either one or the other or both is the choice
and that’s an order.

(So why do I think it’s not right?
(deKlend asks within his other voice))

Images of her betrayal
—
betraying what?
—
pry their way into his mind
—
he sees her pallid body engulfed in the plumage the cape the rubbery paws the hands the veil of the Bird of Ill Omen, her arms reaching up to encircle the staring, rigid, shrouded head, beneath the unblinking, chilling stare of its dead moon eyes, with punishing close ups of the bliss and abandon on her face.
The tip of her tongue licks the edges of black pearl teeth, darkened with ohaguro, she takes her medusa braids in her hands and pulls on them to either side of her head.

Foolish!
(he says to himself)
Foolish!

And I should be thinking of Votu, where they know how to receive pilgrims (he thinks a moment later, hearing these words spoken in his own voice, subdued, in a tone of regret)

The darkness breathes on him, letting out a long-held breath of bitter cold into his aching eyes, raw lungs, cold air like fumes in his chest and throat
—
getting inside him until he can feel his frigid skeleton inside him, his muscles shrinking from the touch of the harshly cold bones.
Lost to his sight in the darkness ahead, like darkness in darkness, is a head whose grisly jaws gape unhinged and belch the cold
—
and two dead moon eyes stare above invisible jaws
—
two black wings with feathers like chips of ice
—
the veil-wind bitterly caressing deKlend’s living warmth away, to be lost in icy vacancy falling away on all sides.

She’s
not going to warm me up (he thinks)

Mindlessly pressing on, deKlend, as is his habit while travelling, exhales his sword from his lungs and begins to work it in his hands as he goes, without even looking at it.
The air he draws into his lungs to push the sword out is so sharply cold he gasps with pain, it’s like a foretaste of being impaled.
The gust snatches at the smoke but his hand finds the blade surely and draws it down into his hands.
As he works the metal, the heat from his hands glows up onto his face.
He breathes it in, and his lungs seem to hold that heat
—
his body is so cold the contrast is so intense it’s as if he’d filled his lungs with acid, but there is something fierce and defiant about that sensation.
The darkness falters
...
or something happens.
It remains darkness but it doesn’t have the vehement opacity it had a moment ago;
now it seems spacious, as though it had relaxed.
The sensation of cold relents.
The effort to go on is so light deKlend seems to move merely by thought, although this makes it more difficult to know he does move.
He has only the sensation in his body to tell him he presses a surface with his feet, transfers his weight from leg to leg, and so presumably goes on.

No glowing scraps for a while.

Now there is something to look at and he goes over to it and stops.
Looking at it calms him.
He blinks away tears.

It hovers just ahead of him, turning silently in place.
A galaxy.
The stars are floating in their orbits like fluff on a pond.
deKlend finds himself bating his breath
—
he doesn’t want to breathe on it.
A mobile of luminous fog.
It turns in silence.
In silence?

Something
...

deKlend cocks his ear toward the galaxy.

Piano!

For a few moments he waits, thinking it will open out into something.

No
...

deKlend looks around.
Nothing else to see.
No change.
He resumes his watch.
The galaxy turns.
The piano softly plays.

Maybe I will open out into something (he thinks)

Yes!

...
Yes?

*

Rain, rain, rain.
A pair of portly children eating blue fuzz and drinking pink fizz.
A businesslike blonde woman with a bushy ponytail a boney pushytail and wearing from head to toe a tight black suit with a long jacket, like a clergyman, is turning with long strides into the alley between two cubes made of red bricks.
The honk of a car horn yanks him gallingly back like a jerk on a leash.
Fallen all the way back.

Groaning with disappointment and homeless fatigue he dashes his hands into his hair, sitting bent over his knees on a bench.
A bawling truck clatters past trailing exhaust like stale breath.
Exhaust settles on everything in a pasty film.
That film seems to interfere with his memory.

I was going (he thinks unclearly) to Á Un.
Toward Á Un.

To get to Votu.
This is not Votu.

Frenzied emergency vehicles career through the street with incomprehensible impatience.
Police car with siren set into the mouth of a baby head, the siren is exactly like the petulant whining of a spoiled child.
Is this dignified?
If there were as many emergencies as that, the whole town would be nothing but a smoking crater lined with dead criminals.