Lucia's Masks (11 page)

Bird Girl’s arrival meant that each of our turns at the night watch was considerably shorter, but I still took the last because I was accustomed to being wide awake in those last few hours before dawn.

“Five,” I thought to myself that night and the wonder of it for me was how vastly different we were one from another. We had come across each other by chance and the simple crossing of paths. And chance would likewise rule how our journey went and what other human kind, well-intentioned or not, we met on our way north.

He did not appear that night, or the next — the one who was to become our sixth member, and the most mysterious of us all. It was on the third night after Bird Girl’s arrival, deep into my watch, that I heard something approach behind me. I could hear no claws; nor could I pick up any scent of animal fur or flesh. I assumed that whatever approached was human and I prayed that he or she came alone. One of my worst fears was that we would one day or night be swarmed by many more assailants than three women, an old man, and an adolescent boy could fight off.

I already had my knife drawn when he knelt beside me. I could smell burlap, rubber, and a touch of fever. I felt the heat of his breath in my ear as he said: “I wish to serve you and your friends.”

Of course the question why immediately sprang to my mind, and almost to my lips. He answered my unspoken query by walking around to the other side of the fire so that he was opposite me and illuminated by the flames. I knew a monk’s garb when I saw it and I guessed as well, that his gown with its capacious hood, which he wore up obscuring his face, was likely purchased from a costume shop.

“I am doing penance,” he said. The gravity of his tone conveyed this was no jest.

“I have shadowed your group for two days. You will benefit from having a strong man to watch out for you.”

“Do we have a choice?” I asked him, and immediately regretted it lest he think me ungrateful. I could certainly appreciate the advantages of having such a man accompany us. He was exceptionally tall and from the sinews in his naked feet and hands (the only parts of him that were visible) I could see he was probably as strong as he claimed.

“Should you all accept my offer of service,” he said most courteously, “there is only one proviso. And that is that I will keep my face hidden from you. To be faceless,” he added, “is a part of my penance.”

This struck me as somewhat odd, but who among us is not at least a little odd these days? In a time so fractured and blighted, it would be strange indeed to be normal.

I thanked him and told him I would introduce him to the others in the morning so that we could make our decision together.

“Prepare them well,” he whispered. “I do not want to frighten the young ones.” I gathered he meant Chandelier and Bird Girl but my chief concern was — as ever — Candace.

“Are you insane?” she exploded at me when I described my night-time visitor and his offer. “Don’t you know how dangerous these people are who dress up? There’s usually some severe mental slippage. They just flip and start swinging their axes, chopping off heads . . . ”

“He doesn’t have an axe,” I said.

“You don’t know that,” she countered in her most patronizing tone. “He might have a whole box full of weapons you didn’t see.”

I didn’t say anything, but I had to admit she had a point. Other than my intuitive trust of his voice and his intentions I was largely ignorant of both the man and his weaponry. As a result I was probably more anxious than any of the others as we waited for him. Candace, who sat cross-legged on the ground, had set her long serrated kitchen knife in full view in front of her. I had not even tried to dissuade her from this. Bird Girl paced and did a series of high kicks. Chandelier kept looking anxiously at Harry who would smile and nod reassuringly at him. In fact Harry was the only one of us who appeared totally at ease. I kept asking myself if I was deluded in putting my trust in a man without a face.

Despite my best efforts to prepare her, Candace screamed when he did appear. I suppose I readily associated the monk’s garment with images I had seen of Saint Francis cradling a dove in his hands. What Candace saw, I presume, was something loathsome and unholy.

He made his case to the others in almost exactly the same words he had put it to me.

“What is your name?” asked Harry.

“You can call me the Outpacer,” he said, “for I would always be a few steps behind you or ahead of you, or to your right or left. I will maintain a kind of invisible cordon around you.”

Candace gave him one of her frostiest glares. “Speaking personally,” she said, “I find your disguise really suspicious. What exactly are you hiding?”

“The hood is part of my penance.”

“So you say. But how do we know we can trust you?” she challenged him. “What guarantee can you give us that your intentions are honourable?”

“None,” he answered her. “I can only give you my word.”

Candace heaved one of her overly dramatic sighs. “I’ll be frank. I decline your offer. I can’t accept the word of someone whose face I cannot see.”

I looked at the others. Chandelier was staring up at Harry as if seeking to read his thoughts on his face.

“I think we each need to mull your offer over,” Harry said. “And then discuss it as a group.”

“I agree,” said Bird Girl. “We’ll have a parley. Isn’t that a nice word?”

“Harrumph,” said Candace.

“Can we speak with you again tomorrow?” I asked him.

The hooded man bowed his head. “I will be nearby,” he said, “should you have need of me.” He left us as silently as he had entered our midst, and we all began to make ready for the day’s trek.

“I liked the sound of his voice,” Bird Girl announced. “I really think he means what he says. He wants to help us.”

Candace simply shook her head in disbelief. But as I was stamping out the last of the embers of our fire, she came close and whispered harshly in my ear. “You have some wonderful qualities, Lucia. But you are being dangerously naïve about this madman in his ridiculous costume. Naïve.” She repeated the word with an emphasis that made her exasperation with me abundantly clear.

“Can we not just consider his offer as we walk, and then discuss it this evening?” It took me all my effort to put this question to her civilly.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” she snapped at me. “Accepting his offer would be madness. He’ll murder us, one by one. And heaven knows what else.”

We all set off, and Candace aggressively took the lead. She assumed an uncharacteristic quick-march step, with her shoulders thrown well back. Every so often she would glance behind as if we were a row of ducklings in her charge. How tedious I found her domineering ways. I decided to fall in behind Chandelier and Harry and be the last in the line so as to avoid as much of Candace’s posturing as I could.

It was shortly after I moved to the end of the line that I caught a scent of rancid meat. At first, I thought it must be the carcass of an animal rotting on the forest floor. Then I saw a flash of sliver and black bearing down on Candace from the left out of the trees. She screamed as a dog with ragged fur and yellow eyes, sent her sprawling. I drew my knife out so quickly I nicked my palm, and pushing past Harry and Chandelier, ran to her aid. My intention was to plunge my blade into the dog before it could harm her badly.

At that moment, a man’s voice roared and there was a flash of fire. I looked on, the blood thundering in my ears, as the Outpacer thrust a blazing brand into the dog’s jaw. The animal howled in such pain I could not help but pity it, especially when I saw the mange that had stripped the fur from its flanks and left exposed its sore, pink, swollen skin. The dog slumped on its side, stunned and whimpering. I foolishly yearned for it to run off, but understood why the Outpacer felt he had to come up behind the animal and slit its throat. I turned my face away from the wound and the gushing blood, but not before I saw that the dog’s eyes were not in fact yellow, but ringed with a purulent matter.

Candace was still curled like a ball, her arms protecting her head. “It’s all right now,” I said. I touched her shoulder as gently as I could.

I helped her stand and tried to interpose my body between her and the dog. She insisted on looking at it. “Ugh!” she said.

“The Outpacer stopped it...” I began.

“Yes,” she said. “I appreciate that.”

He made her a silent bow.

“But we must still consider your offer,” she told him. “It was obviously a sick dog after all.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely she realized the hooded man had put himself at some risk?

“We will speak with you again tomorrow.” She addressed him in her best regal manner. I wanted badly to chide her for being so ungrateful and arrogant with him. But I knew from experience how pointless my efforts would be.

At the end of the day, we all sat together over a frugal meal of gruel mixed with the berries I had gathered along the way.

“Have any of you considered,” Candace asked, “that the dog might have been his; that he set it upon me deliberately so that he could stage a rescue?”

“For God’s sake!” Harry exclaimed.

Bird Girl managed to say politely what the rest of us were thinking: “That’s really unlikely, don’t you think, Candace?”

“Unlikely perhaps. But not impossible. However, I’ll go along with the rest of you,” she conceded. “But it is with misgivings. We may yet all live to rue the day we agreed to this.”

I saw Harry roll his eyes. Then Bird Girl did the same in mimicry. I tried not to laugh.

And so we became six.

There is a great comfort in knowing you have an invisible protector and I found my night-watch and foraging missions the easier for it. Although I stayed as vigilantly alert as ever, I was not quite as tense as I had been. It lightened my own load to think that he was somewhere nearby keeping watch, and pacing out his invisible cordon in his sandals of rubber and rope.

I recalled how well cared for and shapely his feet were. Not at all like mine with their many calluses and disfiguring bunions. I wondered then about the others, and whether our feet were as distinctive as our respective characters.

Chapter Four
Their Feet

I
N
V
ENICE,
H
ARRY HAD BEEN DRAWN
each day to the window of a shop that specialized in exquisitely wrought terracotta mouldings and small-scale sculpture. His eye and soul delighted in the detail and imaginative span of the work. There were complete bestiaries, dominated by the Lion of Saint Mark, his admonishing human features shown full-face and in profile. He was painted the red sienna of his desert home, then outlined in indigo. Roman matrons, in headdresses rayed like a medieval sun, looked down on prospective purchasers with a bemused serenity. Children gambolled with lambs in recessed tablets that might have been openings to paradise.

But it was one particular moulded frieze, small enough to fit in his pocket, that captured Harry’s full attention. Set against a background of sunburst yellow were two pairs of naked human feet, depicted in the act of walking. And what feet they were. Flawless, palest ivory, sturdy yet elegant. They were the feet of the young, as yet unblighted by corns or calluses, set upon some brisk and happy purpose.

In part, it was the surprise of the subject that charmed him. Who would have chosen to make feet the subject of an artwork? A part of the body so often despised, except, he supposed, by fetishists. Harry could not understand fetishists. And there was nothing at all unsavoury about these feet. They held a promise, he thought, an assurance that the act of walking could still be an innocent and splendid undertaking, and not a desecration.

He considered the word “footfall” and shuddered at its heaviness and the fateful shadows it cast. He was thinking, as always, of Antarctica, and of the damage tourists had done by their tread on her glistening floor. The perilous stuff they had brought in on the soles of their boots: bacteria, microbes, alien plant life. Thankfully, tourism anywhere in the continent had at last been banned by an international protocol. Harry had always made a point of purifying himself before he stepped out of his plane. The clothes he donned to step into the Antarctic air were sterilized, as was his footwear.

To set foot down and do no harm. To make a pilgrimage. To bring humanity to a better pass by the simple act of walking, barefoot and sprightly. This was the testament Harry read in the pocket-sized tablet in the Venice shop window.

For years afterwards, he had deeply regretted not buying the terracotta. He was not a man given to material possessions, and it would have grieved him sorely had he ever broken the tablet in his travels. But eventually, the fact he did not own the moulding of those innocent and blessed feet seemed to him both good and fitting. For in some deep and holy well of his mind, the sculpted feet became purer and more blessed. They were the feet of young gods, robust, primed by an energy that was boundless, fed by the very veins of the cosmos.

Now, as he leans upon his stick, dismayed by the jangling of nerve pain that makes a devil dance in his spine, it is the image of those god-feet that drives him on. Toward sundown, he often has to grip the boy’s shoulder to steady himself. The boy is willing. The boy is habitually at his side. Harry speculates that beneath those bizarre windings of silk strips that serve Chandelier as shoes are feet innocent as young doves. Whereas his own are daily more cracked and brittle and grey, except for his toenails, which have the consistency of dense horn and have grown so long they are talon-like, tinged the brownish-yellow of bad teeth. As he struggles to stand erect each day-break, his joints resistant as rusted metal, he pictures himself as an aged heron, his first steps of the day tentative and rigid. He sees his own stick-thin figure superimposed against the sky: a hieroglyph of a heron-man, a silhouette as frail as hope making its way across the horizon.

Harry is wrong about Chandelier’s feet. Underneath the windings of silk, the blood has begun to seep from blisters the size of pigeon eggs. It was Miriam who had wound the silk round his feet. But she had no leather or rubber with which to make him protective soles. Chandelier’s fragile footwear had started to tatter a little during his trials in the City. Like Candace, he yearns for sturdy, supple boots and soft cotton socks. It is one of the few wishes he and Candace have in common.