Celebrant (19 page)

Terror gathers to leap up from his body into his head but is suppressed the same moment, like a hand quashing a candle flame;
he forgot, distracted by the woman’s voice, and he is borne along like a dream body on the tide.

The land is level as a table, the white buildings of the town unlit and far away like bluish phantoms, and nearly as far off in the other direction a colossal animal, like a huge burning haystack with elephant legs, plods along the horizon trailing smoke high into the air.

Consulting the manual:

“Theem,” singular and plural, is the name given to these vast life forms.
They originate on a planet of reeds
—
one half water, one half reeds.
They rove back and forth across the plains without ever stopping or leaving any trace behind them, ponderously gathering nourishment.
What appears to be smoke rising from the upper portion of the trunk is actually a great twirling fan of silk that trawls its food from the clouds and the upper air.

Stand downwind of one, and ocean surf will be smelled.
It’s unmistakeable.

Theem are colony animals consisting of millions of tough, eel-like creatures like living metal strips twined together.
They form in tidal swamps, far inland, when, miraculously, the eels, churning up from the mud in a nervous eruption, knot together in immense serpents, as big as fallen redwoods.
These roll to and fro, crushing everything to the earth, until they find each other;
then they knit together, forming a crotch at one end.
Still more swarm together and, as the being hoists itself upright like a living derrick, the upper bulk takes shape, forming itself into a hollow hull or band shell.
Finally, the sail of wire smoke is unfurled exuberantly into the sky.
The metabolism of the whole is adjusted so that the lower eels consume the waste of the upper eels, and the bottommost eels eat nothing, or perhaps dirt.

The Theem walks without crashing, without even shaking the earth, and leaves no footprints because it has no feet to speak of.
Vines spread from the base of each leg as it is raised, dropping to the ground in coils well in advance of the shift of its many tons, and, when that shift comes, they distribute the pressure so evenly that the ground is indented no more by the weight than it is by the wind.
Then, as the leg is lifted again, the springs uncoil and, withdrawing, sweep off their marks.

Theem are eerily quiet for their size;
even directly beneath the groin, horrid with dangling, staring eels, one can hear only a creaking noise, reminiscent of the sound of an overburdened rope bridge.
Infrequently there is a sharp crack!, like a popping knee or neck joint, when a bolus of tension is squeezed.
But the Theem’s silence is no sign of deafness;
each of its millions of eels retains its powers of hearing and of sight, even those buried deep within the body.
The Theem is at every moment wakeful, fully conscious, seeing and hearing every inch of its surroundings, and itself.

Being composed entirely of independent living organisms, Theem are virtually immortal;
when an eel dies, it is completely consumed by osmosis.
In the meantime there is a constant pulmonary motion of eels up the body to the cradle in the torso, where there are always a few hundred spawning in a pool.
Hence, the Theem need fear only an internal epidemic or some catastrophe, like a blast of lightning, which might disrupt its form.
If it fears.

Sometimes a Theem abruptly subsides.
The body collapses, sloughing eels to the earth.
It looks, when it happens, just as if the Theem were succumbing to taedium vitae.

In Votu:

Burn watches the mathetes from a rooftop across the street from urchin’s shrine.
They trot briskly back along the path through the narrow walled garden that runs along one side.
To Burn they are foreshortened, dark and light heads, soft blots of black, some in their shirtsleeves.
They are gathering for their supper, she knows.
She waits for them to clear out.

It’s just after sunset.
The mountains are pulling back mysteriously, like villains, behind capes of gloom.
The spring is still new so the air is fresh and mild, scented with odors of last autumn’s stale leftovers and a custardy smell, like a healing wound, from the ground itself.
A ribbon of birds streaks by in silence, boiling flakes in the sky above her.
The outermost envelopes of remote music float past.
The neighborhood is growing quieter, the lights are strolling away, leaving the buildings dim.
Burn cranes forward to get a look at a small group of girls roughly her own age, chaperoned past the shrine by two women and a man.
The girls have neat little outfits on.
Their words, their piping voices, murmur along with them like familiars.
Burn watches them with empirical curiosity.
They are well-fed and spend their time in school.
They sleep in beds.
They are watched constantly.
She would make them nervous;
not knowing what to do, they would hesitate to speak with her, and shrink from her touch as if she were diseased.
Having all kinds of inner feelings, they would stiffen and look for a quick way to escape without seeming to escape, to take action.
Then later when they were back at the sanctuary they would trade with each other the feelings they had saved, make conversations about her, and turn her into a bad mascot and an insult.
Burn doesn’t hate them or envy them, nor does she comprehend them, or understand their superiority.

A couple strolls into the shrine.
Burn waits for them to leave.
During the half hour that takes, she turns and sits doubled up, looking up at the sky or out across the city, which is taking on the appearance of a black crusted pool of congealed lava with red fires.

Inchoate images of those girls performing rituals in their sanctuary pivot in and out of Burn’s imagination.
One unusually distinct one involves them leaping, one by one, down from a high platform to the floor.
They drift down slowly, feet first, as if they didn’t weigh any more than bubbles.
The ribbon trailing from the back of each hat flutters up behind them.
Then they take a few bounding steps across a room full of ornaments and waft up to a high vent or something in the opposite wall.

A dog comes sniffing around the base of the building whose roof she is using.
The girls in Burn’s imagination sit bolt upright around a huge table, and adults carrying thousands of dishes of candied food are waiting on them.

The dog goes on sniffing.
The scalloped edge of the awning ripples gently in a gust of wind.
The dog scampers off.
The couple leave the shrine.

When they are gone, Burn slips downstairs, crosses the street swiftly, and enters the shrine.
She wanted to have another look at urchin, and vaguely to know something about it.
Then it occurred to her to dance for it, so she brought her baton.
Apart from her slippers and “tardoleo,” the steel baton, with white rubber tips at either end, is her only possession.
She crosses the open porch of the shrine and enters through the narrow central door, avoiding the archways that lead to the cells.

The room Burn now enters is round, and urchin is there, visible through the thin blue curtain embroidered with gold stars that screens its alcove.

Look around
—
no one.
Go out to the center of the floor, urchin there not fifteen feet away, feeling completely exposed and vulnerable.
Burn looks levelly at urchin and, with a nod of her head, she starts dancing for it.

She does a drum majorette routine, holding her body straight, alternately lifting each leg and then stamping it down, raising and lowering the baton.
She spins, twirling the baton so rapidly it buzzes like a hornet, and urchin stirs, responding to her at once.
Its whole body rolls in place, nodding like a massive, spiny head protruding through the floor.

Burn dances until the sweat carves trails in the dust on her face and stands in dirty beads on her cheeks like tears, and her shoulders and throat gleam.
Panting, her eyes glazed, she is dancing herself into a state
—
staring at urchin, now through it, without raising her eyes even when she tosses the baton like a sparkling asterisk high over her head and catches it again as it swoops to the floor.

Urchin’s tubes undulate and the machine utters a low, harsh drone that rings in the marble.
The stars she can see through the doorway now off to her right are snowflakes.
The room is a studio with windows along one side, a bare wooden floor, barres, and officials sitting in chairs opposite her.
These persons sit as still as figurines and absorb all the light thrown on them by the lamps set on the floor in front of each chair, so she can make out only their humped shadows.
Shadows thrown onto the wall behind them.
There is almost no light in the studio;
the night outside the windows is a tangle of naked tree limbs, pitch blackness, and fluorescent snow, slanting down in streaks, now crashing and bouncing in place like swarming gnats.
For the first time in her life, Burn feels as though she is in the presence of her parents.
Her father might be behind her
—
the long shadow in the corner across from the windows watches her dance with what might be fatherly pride.
She
knows
her mother is outside.
She’s prowling out there in the snow, the flakes pasted to her hot forehead, and caught in the fray of her hair.

Burn catches sight of a girl
—
herself
—
dancing, from high in the shadows, and through the windows.
Her legs lift and drop, her arm rises and falls steadily, the baton glints reflecting snow light, and turns evenly
...
The fabric of her tardoleo shows the delicate ribs.
From time to time she pulls the baton back burring in a rapid twirl past her body and up in an arc into the air, turn to catch it behind her back.
Every time she does this there is a tremor, like a weak earthquake, or like something heavy being flung to the floor in a distant room.
The building may be collapsing, one room at a time, but there are still many rooms left.

These moves are followed by mannered bows of the head in formal acknowledgement of what applause?
Her parents still feel near, but with some difference.
Burn feels her body moving, and knows she still is dancing, but it’s as if she were standing alone in a stone street, lined with small, tomb-like stone houses, wreathed with lianas.
There are niches in the walls for slender stone and metal figures, and huge dreaming heads, some bigger than the houses, keep watch with closed eyes and smiles of absence or knowing smiles maybe.
It is a calm, still, warm night, with a new moon hanging in the sky like a gigantic coal.

Now here is a pool in a stone basin.
The stars shine in it, and the comet, high overhead, is mirrored nearly in its center.
Looking up at the streaming blonde tresses of the comet, she notices a shadow approaching swiftly over the rooftops.
She can’t see what casts it, a black moustache on the livid blue slates, and now it travels across the pool
—
the shadow, cast by some other light source, cast she now sees by a big black bird, flits up and covers the comet’s reflection in the water and in that moment a little person springs from the upright shaft of that shadow in the comet light and the bird that swoops past and disappears in silence behind the roofs.
The little person is a nothing more than a transparent whistle of movement, that overtakes her where she stands, making one.