The Malacia Tapestry (35 page)

As I surveyed these evil beings, I perceived that one of them was an ape, dressed in man's clothes and accepted by the rest as a sort of man. Another was a lizard-man, his face with its shallow jaw and hairless head peering at me through the stench rising from the sacrificial stone. The others shared his immobility.

It was the woman who spoke first. She raised her head slowly, looking at me from under fair brows. She was not old. Beauty was still about her, although her forehead was dewed with sweat and her mouth was bleeding.

‘Help me,' she said.

Smiles flecked the lips of the magicians.

‘Help me,' the woman repeated. She dragged herself into a sitting position. ‘They claim that I am the Empress Theodora, widow of Theophilus, or a reincarnation of her. It's all lies. I never harmed anyone – Theodora's regiments fell like wolves upon the ancestors of these … these devils, pursuing them into untrodden forests, tearing them apart like wild animals, drowning or burning them in their hundreds of thousands … It was no affair of mine. Help me!' She stretched out a hand towards me.

Petrified as I was, I saw no way of helping her or myself.

The leading wizard said, ‘Of what moment are your trifling personalities? What matters it who you believe yourselves to be?' These questions I felt at the time to be tremendously annihilating. ‘Until you have understanding of your nature, your errors – like the errors of history – repeat and repeat themselves in an endless fiction. That is the only knowledge there is.'

I did not know I spoke, but I said something on the woman's behalf.

The second wizard spoke. He leaned forward stiffly, as if breaking through fabric, his beetling brows working as he lifted a hand and pointed at me.

‘You are no more inviolate than a blade of grass, to be crushed beneath a casual tread.'

His mouth opened, yet it did not move as he seemed to speak. Something sulphurous lurked between his lips.

‘The Original Curse that binds Malacia binds you also, boy, so beware!'

‘What must I do?' I asked.

My voice came to me from far away, from another place or time. The words took an age to travel and, as they left me, I watched while the satyrs – they were seven, two of them females with pendulous dugs – galloped forward and seized the hapless woman who was accused of being a reincarnation of Theodora. They bore her to the ground, fighting for positions round her. Her shift was torn from her. She screamed. One of the goaty females bit her between the thighs, only to be pulled away and molested in her turn. The other satyrs piled in, until there was an obscene heap on the ground, comprising from the outside mainly kicking heels, heaving buttocks, and flailing tails. Pulling up his cumbersome gown, the first wizard lumbered forward to join in the animal sport, showing his fangs in a grin as he did so.

All this appeared the transaction of a moment, for the second wizard was answering my question – though whether in veritable words I could never afterwards determine.

‘You must hope and despair, reform and sin, triumph and fail. How else do we live out our duality of spirit? Now you will learn the additional curse of knowledge – it will gain you no wisdom – it will only make more painful what you hitherto enjoyed through ignorance.'

‘Of what knowledge do you speak?'

‘The only knowledge there is – knowledge that ages you.'

In some fashion which I cannot explain, I was then facing this reptilian visage across the smouldering altar, and he was saying, ‘In conformity with our dual nature, every reward carries punishment, every punishment reward. Now that you are to be burdened with knowledge, you are permitted one wish, which will be immediately granted wherever our powers extend.'

Almost without thought – I was beyond that – I said, ‘Then I wish to impress Armida Hoytola in some grand way, to save her from overwhelming danger, so that she may …'

My voice faltered and died. Not from the terror I was in but from the working of something – perhaps that dreadful
knowledge
already in action – which told me that I could never be happy with any woman whom I believed to be chained to me by reason of a spell or compulsion.

I stood with my mouth open, and smoke swirled about us. Darkness gathered, the cries of the woman became fainter. The fanged mouth of the wizard whispered something which might have been ‘Your wish is granted.'

The flame blazed up between us. He raised his ragged sleeves above his head like a leather-tooth's wings and cried, ‘Begone, youthful phantom!'

With his words came severe cold, cutting my eyes. I saw indistinctly. The horrid rout on the ground blurred with the undergrowth. The line of grimoire figures, man, ape and bird, faded into haphazard trees. Even the great stone melted into shadow indistinguishable from path. Only the flame on the altar, licking upward like a serpent tongue, remained clear to my vision, and that shrank into the distance. I fell to the ground.

I was alone in a remote grey world of old trees. Once again I became conscious of my poor self. Once again I heard the sound of the stream behind me. Once again I remembered that death was not the force that prevailed in the world.

Rain began, in the upper branches of the trees at first, then upon my body, approaching softly to remind me that weathers and seasons came and went. Slowly, I pulled myself up.

I had looked on accursed things. I turned to see how Bramble had fared. Poor creature, he had none of my human resilience. His rein dangled from a skeleton – a perfect skeleton of a horse, every bone shining as if still moist from the flesh of which it had been so sharply bereft. Even as I beheld it, the skeleton collapsed into a clattering pile of bones, which no one could ever make into a horse again. I picked out the spring-loaded spear from the remains, where it was attached to the saddle. There might still be natural dangers.

In the dark trampled grass, something gleamed: my amulet. Lifting it up, I found it almost too hot to touch.

After rinsing my face in the waters of the stream, I managed to quieten my quaking limbs.

If I had undergone satanic enlightenment, then I had to ask myself what exactly was the knowledge thrust upon me. Had I been visited by a religious revelation, couched in the accents of Natural Religion but fully in accord with the tenets of the Higher?

Was this something that happened to all men, but about which they were naturally reluctant to speak? Saying nothing about such a striking event – but what could one say about something so outside experience? – would create a barrier between oneself and one's friends. Dully, I wondered if such silences accounted for a fact I had observed, that whilst the young were cheerfully gregarious, the old wore acid countenances, on the whole keeping themselves apart as if friendship was something they mistrusted.

One thing was certain. The repulsive second wizard had granted me a wish. I must be careful. I thought of Desport.

It was said that when the great founder of our state first crossed the Toi and stood on the site of what was to become Stary Most, midnight fell at midday and a great magician – the First Magician – appeared to Desport. The First Magician allowed him one powerful wish, whereupon Desport wished that the city he and his scarcely human followers were founding as a monument to the two religions should forever remain unchanged, according to his plan. This wish it was that people referred to – not always for apotropaic reasons – as the Original Curse. Since then, according to legend, time had congealed about our city. Time and change may be distinguishable; they are inseparable as far as the affairs of men are concerned.

That odour which had led me along with the satyrs to the accursed site had been, I felt convinced, the very aroma of time.

The malevolent stillness of the forest brought me from my trance. Night moved hushed through the entwined trees. I had been squatting by the stream, transfixed. Now all that remained of my dread visitation was a distant glow of light, resembling the serpent tongue of the altar fire.

For minutes, I stood speculating on that flame, until it occurred to me that I could shake off the memory of the altar by discovering what the light was. If it indicated human company, it was more than welcome.

Stepping past the bones of poor Bramble, I made towards the glow. This hour was considered a propitious one by ancestral hunters. Ancestral animals, whether large or small, lost their energy at night and crept back into their lairs. Last to go were the giants, feeding as they went. The onset of dark made them easier game; but, on foot and lightly armed, I had no wish to get between one of them and its boudoir.

Keeping my spring-load spear at the ready, I climbed between the trunks of the trees, whose foliage formed a confused roof above me. Ahead, I made out a scene of human misfortune very different from the terrors I had recently confronted, yet sufficiently related by time and place for me to approach it with caution. A rough road crossed my trail. A carriage stood lopsidedly in a ditch by the side of the road. Two lamps gleamed on its side-brackets. Nearby burned the flambeau whose flame had led me to the spot; its tarry smell was pleasant to the nostrils. Between them, these lights formed a tent of vision in the entangled night.

The flambeau was stuck into a patch of soft ground, so that it shed some illumination on a young man crouching at the front wheel of the carriage with his back to me. I observed him and the girl nearby with the caution of a deer, stationing myself behind an ivy-maned oak to do so.

He was trying to prise up the wheel of the carriage, and meeting with no success. He interspersed his tugging with heaving, throwing in a swift kick now and again for luck. The horse, its eyeballs red in the reflected light, stirred anxiously between its shafts. When it whinnied, the man cursed it.

The young lady stood in the middle of the track. While neither cursing nor whinnying, she showed her dislike of the situation by walking about within the small circle of torchlight, twitching her skin and her hands.

There is nothing unusual about carriages running into ditches, or about young ladies being vexed by such accidents. What rendered this scene particularly interesting – and drove all thoughts of the recent visitation from my head – was the fact that the young lady was Armida Hoytola.

Impulsive fellow though I am, I did not immediately dash forth to her side. Surprise kept me where I was. And not only surprise. The scene had a piquancy in its own right; besides, it is always advantageous to observe a young lady when she does not know you are watching.

She was angry enough to be speechless. She made every motion eloquent with contempt, her skirts flicking scorn at the rough road, the night, the wretch who crouched in the ditch. He was almost under the carriage now. I could only see his heaving shoulder. I could not help wishing that she was in danger, so that I might leap forward and rescue her to our mutual advantage.

Hardly had this wish formed in my mind than there came a crashing in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, where shadows and trees alike grew impenetrably. As the noise registered on Armida's ears, she stopped and stared in an attitude of delightful agitation. La Singla could not have played it more effectively.

‘Guy!' she called.

The man in the ditch climbed up from his wheel. I had no eyes for him. I was looking where Armida looked – to the nearby bushes which were suddenly dashed aside.

They say that the leopards and tigers of the Orient are endowed by nature with a cunning equal to man's. They stalk their prey and overcome it by surprise. They have strength, but their agility is superior to their strength, just as their cunning is superior to their agility. The great carnivorous ancestrals have only maniac strength.

Devil-jaws and their cousins, saw-mouths and tyrant-greaves, are primitive machines. When a devil-jaw – arch-ventail, to give it its proper name – scents prey, it heads for it direct, without considerations of silence or of any obstacle in its path. Unlike the leopard, it needs neither agility nor cunning, relying on its gigantic bulk, its mad stride, to bear it down at full tilt upon whatever it desires to destroy. Little stands in the way of seven metric tons of ravening animal.

At one moment, the shadows beyond the road were as empty as a mask. At the next, they were torn asunder and a head as long as a canoe was thrust into view. Behind its smooth snout, its eyes were sunk under brows of bone which led into the massed warts and folds of an enormously thick neck. The head twisted once to left and once to right before cracking open, revealing serrated rows of teeth, as it let forth a bellow of wrath.

In that-bellow, Armida's scream of terror was lost.

With scarcely a pause, the devil-jaw burst forth. Betsy, Armida's little horse, drummed her hooves against the woodwork of the carriage, hurling herself against the shafts as she fought to escape.

Armida's cry brought me at a run into the clearing. I had my spring-load at the ready. As Armida came rushing towards me, I shouted at her to jump into the carriage. I dropped to one knee and aimed the spear. A stench of decay assailed me.

In a crisis, details are absorbed instantaneously, acted upon immediately by a brain freed from the gears of thought, digested later. As I confronted the devil-jaw, I saw that the monster had sustained a previous wound, probably in an earlier hunt, and was handicapped by a suppurating gash in the armour of its left knee-joint. I may have owed my life to that wound.

The monster swivelled to face me. Its eyes glittered black under their horny brows. As they fixed on me, the body emerged fully from the forest. It kept coming until it reared over me on its great legs. It was three times taller than I.

In the wash of action, I knew only the clawed, stamping feet before me, the enormous cabled belly, the jaws snapping down towards my head. I saw its rippling muscles and leaves plastered against its skin. I fired my spear into the throbbing wattles of its throat, fell over, rolled, ran like mad for the safety of the nearest tree. As I ran I drew my sword.