The Physiognomy (20 page)

“We found one of you in Mount Gronus,” Beaton tried to tell his guide, but the Traveler motioned for him to be quiet.

An instant later, Beaton perceived the Traveler was wrapped in deadly combat with a white phantom of a snake. Again and again, he plunged the double-bladed knife into its scaly back. White blood poured from the wounds, but still the creature kept tightening its stranglehold. The suddenness with which it happened shocked Beaton. It was almost as if the Traveler had always been fighting the snake.

Beaton finally came to his senses and lifted the rifle. He fired once, a direct hit through the jaw and into the brain of the monster. Then it was gone, disappearing like a memory forgotten, and they were walking calmly along again. The Traveler was smiling. His knife put away, he was smoking a long, hollow twig. How he had lit it, Beaton never saw. He passed it to the miner, who inhaled.

That day they forded streams and rivers, crossed vast barren tracts of snow and ice, climbed mountains, and walked along the shoreline of another inland sea. As the sun began to set, they came upon a village in a clearing in the woods. It was situated between two rivers, like an island.

“Wenau,” said the Traveler.

People came streaming out of the simple dwellings and over the earthen bridge to greet them. There were children and women and old men, all made like the Traveler. Beaton was brought into the center of the village and fed a dinner of fruit and boiled grain. Stories were told, some in another language, until the rest of the inhabitants of Wenau discovered the language of the visitor.

Beaton was told he was welcome in the village, and they helped him to build a shelter for himself. He soon came to know all of the children and men and women. In the days that followed, he traveled throughout the island between the rivers, taking samples of all the myriad strange plants and flowers that grew there. Wenau always had a beautiful scent of spring to it. The days were always clear and warm and peaceful. One night, when he wandered by himself just outside the perimeter of the village, he planted Moissac's seed in a small stand of violet flowering trees.

He marked his time in Wenau by the progress of the tree that grew up from the spiny brown seed. It grew rapidly and by the end of a few weeks, it was the size of the Traveler himself. The miner brought his friend to see the growth of Moissac's offspring one day. By then, it had brought forth on one single branch a white fruit like the one that had sat on the altar at Anamasobia.

“The fruit of paradise,” Beaton said to his companion.

“Where did you get this seed?” said the Traveler.

Beaton told the story of the foliate, and as he did the Traveler shook his head.

“But the fruit holds immortality,” said the miner.

“Come with me,” said the Traveler.

Beaton followed him back to the village and then to a particular hut. There, on the floor in the main living quarters lay an old emaciated woman, gasping for breath. Two young women sat by her side, holding her thin hands, the webs now cracked and brittle.

“But she's dying,” said Beaton to the Traveler.

“No, she is changing,” he said. “The white fruit that grows from the seed of your friend disallows change.”

“But she is physically dying then,” said Beaton.

“I understand what you mean,” said the Traveler. “I wasn't sure at first. This word death is a difficult idea. If you want to reach the land where there is no death, you must travel due north from here, a twelve-season journey. I will show you the path, but I will not go with you.”

“Then I haven't reached paradise?” said Beaton.

“What is paradise?” asked the Traveler. “That white fruit is an unchanging dream. It is death, as you call it. Now I must take it back to the world of those like you. We cannot have it here.”

“You mean you will journey back with me to Anamasobia?” asked the miner.

“No, your people will discover me one day in a sealed chamber beneath a mountain, holding the white fruit,” he said.

“But we already have,” said Beaton.

“There are trails through the Beyond, if you know of them, that can take you back in time or ahead into the future. I will show you one to take that will return you to your town in two days' journey. Now I must hurry so that I can get to the mountain before the slow buildup of blue mineral seals the chamber three thousand years ago. There I will wait to meet you again.”

Back out in the Beyond, I lost track of them, though I tried to stay close. I was exhausted and lay down on the ground beneath a bush whose tendrils curled and uncurled in the breeze like the arms of a kraken. As I closed my eyes on the wilderness, I opened them to see the face of Silencio. It was night and I was back in my room at the inn, lying on my bed. Every inch of me was in exquisite pain, and the monkey had just brought a glass of Rose Ear Sweet to my lips.

20

I sat up in the bed, extra pillows behind me. The sun streamed in the window, and the ocean breeze rolled through the room. I sipped at a cup of herbal tea. Silencio had applied his leaves to me through the night and saved my skin from anything worse than blistering. The most dangerous of my afflictions was dehydration, which the monkey had also cured over a period of hours by administering water, cabbage juice, and Rose Ear Sweet.

Corporal Matters of the night watch, with his winning personality and long white hair, stood before me with a nervous look.

“You say your brother has run off?” I asked him.

“Yes, he came by my place yesterday afternoon. I was working in my garden on the veranda overlooking the sea, when he suddenly appeared from behind a potted shrub,” said the corporal.

“Was there violence?” I asked.

“None at all. He implored me to go to the mine to release you. He said his mind was full of paradise and that he must journey out into the wilderness. I think he has finally gone mad,” said Matters.

“He said he'd been tampered with by the Master,” I said.

“That's what they all say,” said the corporal, sitting on the end of my bed.

“He told me that you too had been subject to some invention on Below's part,” I said.

“Nonsense, Cley. It's all lies. Why are you willing to believe a lunatic who tried to kill you?” he asked.

“I saw a scar,” I said.

“That scar,” he said, “was made by a saber blade on the fields of Harakun.”

“I had a suspicion that you and your brother were one and the same Corporal Matters,” I told him.

He laughed. “Forget about that oaf. He's gone down the island. I doubt he will ever return. I'm in charge now, always. My first edict is no more mine. My second is, Silencio, go get us a bottle of Sweet and three glasses.”

We drank, but I did not drink a lot. How could I not be leery of the corporal? He seemed to be truly the affable fellow of the night in broad daylight, but I knew I would have to watch him closely. Where Silencio stood, as an enemy or friend or maybe even the instigator of my salvation, was hard to tell. He seemed to have some personal agenda I couldn't yet figure out. Still, I was alive, and these two were the ones who had cut the ropes and dragged me from the mine. I gave myself up to the moment and conversed with the corporal about the fine weather.

It took a few days before I could get on my feet. With the constant attention of Matters and Silencio, I made a full recovery. As soon as I was up and about, I began spending my mornings down along the shore and my afternoons going to see certain sights suggested by the corporal. One day he and Silencio accompanied me to a lagoon that cut into the south shore of the island. It was surrounded by palm trees and flowering oleander. The monkey walked down to the water's edge and began doing a dance, flapping his arms over his head and screeching.

“Watch closely,” said the corporal, who sat next to me on a blanket up the beach a way. As he spoke, I noticed that the birds, which had been squawking and chirping, suddenly fell silent. Now Silencio stopped moving and also quieted down. Although he had his back to us, I could tell he was staring intently into the clear waters. Off to his right, what I had thought to be an eel slithered up onto the shore, but when it kept coming, growing out of the water, and I could see the circular cups that lined it, I realized this was the kraken.

“Watch out, Silencio,” I yelled, and got to my feet, but the monkey had already begun to move as the huge, slippery arm swept the beach for him. A series of back flips brought him clear of the danger. Later that day, as we sat eating radish sandwiches and swilling Three Fingers, we saw the kraken surface. Its bulbous head, three barrels wide, had a single eye that watched us as its numerous tentacles undulated through the water.

We spent the nights sitting at the bar out on the screened porch. It was these times that almost made me forget that I had nearly been cooked alive a few weeks earlier. There seemed to be an endless supply of alcohol, and Silencio wouldn't take no for an answer on the refills. Sometimes we played cards by candlelight. The monkey invariably won, but we had decided to play for points—demarcations on a sheet of paper that stood for nothing owed. Many times, we did not go to bed until the sun was coming up.

On a morning after we had turned in rather early, the corporal came to my room and invited me to join him on a trip to the center of the island. He told me that we would have to bring guns in case of wild dogs, but that they probably wouldn't bother us in daylight. I agreed to go, seeing that all the sites the corporal had so far taken me to had been interesting. It was also my desire to know the island as well as I could.

When Silencio found out where we were going, he declined an offer to accompany us. This made me somewhat suspicious. The idea of the corporal toting a gun reminded me that the issue of him and his brother had never been sufficiently settled. Ever since my rescue, though, I had seen no sign in him that he was anything but what he professed. We had actually become good friends and companions. It was an effort to remind myself to be wary.

On the way to the center of Doralice, we did encounter a rogue dog that jumped for my throat from off the side of a dune. The corporal felled it with a rapid shot from his pistol. Very close to the spot of the attack, Matters showed me the bones of an enormous sea creature that had crawled ashore in a storm one night and died in the dunes. We continued on, passing through a valley in the sand that was a small oasis. There was a clear pool at its center, and fruit-bearing trees grew all around it.

“Sometimes I come here and think about my brother,” said the corporal as he picked a lemon off an overhanging branch.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“You know, it all goes back to your mother,” he said, biting into the fruit. Its aroma was one-half of Arla's perfume.

At almost exactly midday we came over a particularly tall dune and saw below us an enormous wall constructed of seashells, behind which were tall mounds with openings, like sand castles melting in the surf.

“Palishize,” I said to Matters.

He looked quizzically at me. “Very ancient,” he said. “Once I found some writings by Harrow up in the attic of the inn. His theory was that it was built by people who came out of the sea.”

We walked through the streets and, as in my vision, they were cobbled with large clamshells, backs to the sun. I found the experience so startling that as we wound around the bases of the mounds, I told the story of Beaton's journey to paradise. It took me the entire return trip to the inn to recount all of the adventures I remembered, and I finished up on the back porch at midnight, drunk on Rose Ear Sweet.

The corporal just shook his head when I finished. A few seconds later, his eyes closed and he fell off his stool onto the floor. Silencio soon came with a pillow for him. The combination of Three Fingers and the Beyond had been too much. We threw an old blanket over him, and I stepped outside to see the stars. As I walked through the dunes, I thought about Arla and how I would get to her. I saw the Well-Built City in my head, but its vicious power scared me. I decided to simply think first about getting off Doralice.

I stopped in the path and looked up at the sky. As I traced the lines of the constellations, I heard someone approaching on the path. I thought it was Silencio, since, back at the inn, he had signaled to me as he finished his drink that he might join me on the beach. That is when two hands grabbed me by the shirt collar. I looked down into the face of Corporal Matters of the day watch. The scar that ran through the center of his head split my vision.

His breath was foul with alcohol, and, as he spoke, he spat all over me. “Cley,” he yelled, “I order you to paradise.” He pulled on my shirt, trying to drag me along with him. “I've located it; it's here on Doralice.”

“Where is it?” I said, though I was still dazed by the suddenness of his appearance.

He stopped and loosened his grip on me somewhat. His eyes wandered as if he were trying to remember.

“I was there,” he said, and tightened his grip.

I poked him in the eyes with two fingers of my left hand, and he instantly let go of me. His scream echoed behind me as I ran at full speed through the dunes, back toward the inn. I had to see if the corporal of the night watch was still asleep on the floor. Either I had him or I didn't, but at least it would settle these matters.

As I came through the screen door onto the back porch of the inn, Silencio was playing a somber nocturne. I was gasping for air from my run, but I pushed on across the porch to the bar. There, I found Corporal Matters asleep where I had left him. I poured myself a drink and sat down and stared at him. It seemed to me that the white hair was rather askew, that he appeared to be breathing heavily for someone asleep, and that the blanket no longer fully covered him as it had before. On my second drink, I was not so sure of these things. By my third, I began to believe that the corporal of the day watch was really out there, searching for paradise.