The Narrator (3 page)
You aren’t on your way to death, and I am; this is my moment—you get out of it.
I put the money on the table and go inside. The counterman’s doughy face makes him seem older than he is.
“Is there anywhere I can stay around here?” I ask in Cvaivrenew.
“Spare room upstairs I could let you have.” He holds up three fingers. I put three coins down on the counter and he waves me along behind him, points me up the stairs to the door. The room is tiny, without windows but not close, because the roof is nearly half gone; an irregular, round hole shows bare timbers. Warm air eddies around the room softly, there are stacks of boxes, ladder against the plaster wall, a hammock strung beneath the gap in the roof. I spin in place a little, back and forth—not much chance, I decide, of rising sun shining on me here. Huddle under a thin felt blanket in the hammock, head down on my chest. Sound of the wind lightly dragging its fingers over the city. Tears spill from my eyes in silence. Over me is pulled a cap of vigilantly staring night.
*
Among the constellations I can see the flitting shapes of the Imperial deputies, the Predicanten, to whose persistent attentiveness I owe my entanglement here. Although they can be any size, take any shape, now they are like little winged men, naked, hairless, and rubbery, flapping convulsively high overhead, or clinging like bats under the eaves of the buildings. Do I dream it, or does one perch above me, peering down a long moment as I sleep? Running away? Would you be ... running away?
The next morning I find I am long looking at the changing blue sky, and rising all around me is soft foam of treading feet. I am lying on my side now, looking at this mummy-ape hand of mine, a preserved leathery paw or fleshy antler, with a dot of reflected light glowing at each fingertip, the light going down into the tissue makes a pinkish ember of each finger; the palm is a webbing of fine creases and deep. I work my muscles and balance myself, rising onto my feet. I can just peer out the hole in the roof. I watch in fascination this white girl walking down the street, the precision bipedal movement, setting the weight down first on this foot then on that.
Downstairs I sway out guardedly into the cafe, where people tap crockery and talk. It’s hard not to rub my eyes or my head, but my college haircut is hard to muss and I believe I look presentable enough. Up to the counter, I point to a heap of rolls. The proprietor deftly sweeps one of them onto the plate just bussed and set before him, still covered with the crumbs which technically are still the property of the previous customer, and hands it to me, so that’s how it is.
Sitting at the table are obvious old hands, taking their time. They will eat, and stroll at their leisure to their places of business, jingling their keys and gradually opening up shop. Most regular business is confined to a commercial district straddling the river at the butt end of the town.
Now I’m alone. The street launches me without warning into the great sluice of another of these vast boulevards where the air is never still, flooded with sparkling bicycles that shoot dart and veer in shoals. The city is ribbed with vaulting aqueducts, which step high on tall stone pylons with arched stone groins in several leaping lines over the streets and rooftops. These aqueducts vent their water into elevated cisterns and, more spectacularly, into public fountains, descending many stories through the air in clear, discrete streams bearded with refreshing mist. The sun strikes them making transparent membranes around the jets like a flame calyx.
I wander ... wander over to a newspaper and tobacco kiosk, ask the woman if she knows where the mustering point is, or Captain Makemin. She just smiles and shakes her head. I try Chiprena, Hiuv, and Bouzenush and get just the head shake.
“Got yourself drafted?”
Big friendly-looking fellow with a thinning black beard. He thinks the mustering point is in a place I’ve already checked but I don’t correct him, sound him out instead. He turns out to be a know-it-all, attached to the surveyor’s fund. I take him up on his invitation to accompany him to his office.
“The natives have always called this place Tref, at the base of the mountain, and so the city acquired that name because it was built here. Its real name is Dusktemper—bit strange, right? Religious separatists from Sjilte were the founders, and, in addition to the
Manual of Techniques
, they had their own holy book, a kind of allegorical short story. I can’t recall its name, but most of the local place names here they drew from it. Anyway, that’s why the Subashi of Dusktemper is called a Precentor instead.”
“What was Dusktemper named in the story?”
He thinks, and puffs out his mouth a little.
“It was an inner property of man, like spirit, or maybe it was a particular spirit. I think it might have meant holiness, but they had their own ideas about that.” He gives me a frank look that admits he’s told all he knows.
“And they divided the city into the two precincts?”
“I’m not sure. It seems right, and the city I know has had no other plan, but these priests, and people,” he waves vaguely around, “aren’t separatists. And I think this division involves a separate association of places that had been determined by the natives. They buried people over there—” he gestures over the river, “and had birth huts over on this side. The huts were raised up on high stilts and the women would hunker down in a frame over a hatch in the floor, and the midwife or whoever would reach up and lower down the child.”
I ask about the separatists. He tells me there probably aren’t any left anymore, or very few.
A carefully ramified division of labor regulates the operation of the life and death priests. Life priests, urbane, serene, dressed in satiny white and cream gowns, preside at weddings, naming ceremonies, tend the sick and perform healings when they can; death priests, subdolous and mordant, dressed in shabby subfusc, officiate at funerals, conduct autopsies and embalm bodies, attend to the dying and insane, and cast out or even imbibe possessing demons. Life priests are permitted and encouraged to marry; death priests, while not enjoined to celibacy, are forbidden to marry or to bear children. The life priests exhibit dazzling vitality; they eat only the freshest and most pure food, drink only water and fruit juice, abstain from smoking, and are alone permitted to chew bennoch resin, which gives them balsamic breath, shining teeth and sparkling eyes. They smell sweet, even the old ones. The death priests, on the other hand, are sallow or even greenish in complexion—whatever their original color—with grey whites of eyes and yellow hyena teeth. They smell stale, or wear olfactorily-garish perfume, and shed whiffs of carrion where they go. They are forbidden more than a minimum of nourishing food, and eat almost nothing that has not been dead preserved or fermenting a long time. They all drink ardent spirits, smoke copiously, and most are inveterate sweet eaters. There is no enmity between these two groups of priests, although they are compelled to avoid each other as a rule in order to maintain a pure distinction. When they do meet, a complicated protocol governs the exchange of formalities. In fact, since no one is ever born in the death precincts, all death priests are delivered into this life by life priests of the previous generation. Naturally, all life priests are ushered into whatever dream comes after by the generation of death priests who will bury them in the death district.
The separatists’ city charter forbids the construction of churches and bans all but a handful of religious writings, and even these cannot be bought and sold in the city. They may however be given away. Printing religious matter is banned, although copying books by hand is not. The life and death priests conduct their ritual observations in cemeteries, hospitals, offices, libraries, basements, attics. The lifers tend to change venue often, the death priests change far less often.
I was told, or read, that everyone visits Veciofeni’s cave sooner or later. He stood in there and wept himself to death, evidently, and this manner of dying, so gently incremental, brought about the perfect preservation of his body as a consequence of his mummy-like dehydration and the saturation of his person with his own lachrymal salt. His remains stand there still, unsupported, hands folded over his heart; the flesh of his face is pliable, his hands, his nose, even his ears are unshrivelled. The air in the cave is redolent of the odor of his tears, a salty air like sea breath, but without the underlying, living mustiness. Two deacons, with feathers in their hair, sit on the floor by his side. They live in the cave, keep watch over the saint, and further his medicine with their singing. Each takes his turn echoing the other, and the song is long deep sinus notes that hum in the stone, consonants as light as rustling leaves.
Visitors come daily, bearing offerings of flowers and votive body parts. Organs lie embedded in enormous bouquets of flowers, and the walls, which in places have been terraced, glow with vivid ruby hearts, piles of severed arms and hands, muscles like bundles of carmine wire, platinum braids of nerves, topaz pancreases, lungs pale rose as dusk’s first shadings, plaited rivers of hair, majestic livers of royal purple, slabs of snowy fat, fragrant pink brains smelling of soluble minerals, elaborately knotted ivory intestines ... by the entrance, air sluices through grates of stretched human vocal cords, the sound joining the deacons’ song. All these treasures are fresh and glowing with dismembered life. They glitter in the vaults of my imagination as Beardo describes them, and seeing them so vividly in there I feel as though a voyage to the cave itself would be redundant now.
Shade of trees with long-bladed leaves, a dusty corner courtyard with cool sunlight on the stone walls. Flat, leathery pods, like bumpy little belts, litter the pavement. He waves me into his small office, all leather this and rosewood that. I am shown ranks and ranks of uniform volumes with gold edgings; these are the encyclopedic writings of Alak specialists about the natives here—their history, language, religion. Of course, no Alak has ever actually visited Tref; or if any have, they didn’t draw attention to themselves, and that would have been out of character. The books were written in the capital, on the other side of the world, and brought here—unless they are copies made somewhere in between, in which case nothing of the capital adheres to them. Like most of the citizens of the Empire, I have never laid eyes on an Alak.
*
Air fresh and cool round my shoulders, still early in the year.
Everything seems to spin away from me as though I were near the center of a vast level wheel, which collects and disperses and collects again out of the substance and people of the city. I can feel the dizziness whirling up to me, and I have to stop and hold my head in my hands. How can I leave this place in uniform, march and get shot at? It’s a bad dream. The worst dream.
I duck into the post office and line up in the clammy gloom under a low arched ceiling. Like being inside a clam, I imagine, deep under the sea I’ve never seen. The counter is marble topped with greasy steel and the clerk behind it is no less impassive, explaining to me that the money I was told my parents would wire to me here has not come, pointing numbly again and again to the spot in his thumby ledger where my name would be if there were any legitimate reason for me to expect such a money order which there isn’t. I feel something cold and disgusting splash behind my face, trying to ooze out of my eyes, but satisfied with warping my voice so that I can hardly make myself understood. This, on the assumption that there were any human beings present to understand me. I am sickly trying to explain myself to a glazed crust filled with grey clam mush. The other patrons are understandably curious about this adventure of mine, and I can feel their runty eyes peer after me as I leave in a hurry.
It all seems less gay and diverting in the stark blare of sunlight outside. I have only the few lonely amber coins of Shoanly clacking in my pocket, already too little to send a message of explanation back home. What do you do with a good explanation no one can hear? I feel conspicuous and cursed. I take those ways which seem likely to lead me away from all these people who have places in the world. Of course, so do I, but it’s not one I want. I reject it. I would reject it. The Edek ...
Wherever I turn my head, small panes of glass shoot light spears at me, hunting my eyes. Now I wend along bookstall streets, funnelled in light as air on the wind. Bits of paper hurry around me, in and out of shop doorways and alleys, cross and recross the street in front of me. As paper goes, it’s a busy street. The books stand in neat rows sandwiched in together, and among them sit figures perched atop tall stools within the obscurity of a deep doorway, barely visible in the gloom. My finger etches a groove in the dust that clings to spines patched with gilt titles. Look at this
The Seven
[dull old]
Syntagmas
. I had to read that. Here’s a bright new copy I’d buy if I had the money of
Séance Paralogia
by Hathebeth Huthebie, who used to be my teacher. Perhaps I could trade my
Syntax
for it.
I may never be anything better than a journeyman narrator now. If I ever were to write an account of these events, which are in any case written, my narrative would be incoherent and inconclusive; I never know enough to say. Neither buying nor selling, I keep on my walking feet that take me out from this lane of cool dust to brighter streets with shop windows, a blonde square with indistinct people strolling in the shade of a few half-sized trees in the distance. The light recoiling from the bright ground distempers the shadows and makes these people resemble figures in an old and faded picture. I beguile myself enjoying the grimaces of ranks of iron gargoyles, which rise from the gutter all the way to the dizzy steeple above. Crouch and pull faces all day—that’s a good job. They’re well fed and healthy, with bulbous muscles thickly rippling. I wouldn’t half fit in as a woman sails by, the uplit light reflecting from her white blouse barely tints her wan face with its glow. She’s not for you, nor any of them, as you know. That wasn’t a very kind thought. Icy wind blows into the deepest of my spirit’s stiff fractures. Still hypnotized, thinking you can when you know these are impossibilities we’re talking about; known only to me as my vision is clearest—clear, clear as a bell. From the steeple, the bell can see everything in the town. Meet a woman, you will meet another. They always enter in twos.
