XXIII
T
HE SEA FELT
pure beneath them, its spray salting their cheeks, stinging, refreshing; a sea of mists and clouds, grey curling waves hidden behind the veils; a sea to be lost on, a drifting, unchanged sea.
Flapping Eagle lay breathless on the raft’s rough boards, half-dazed, uncomprehending; Virgil Jones, a naked speck on another man’s horizons, stood by the tattered sail, on guard, the juices of excitement flowing renewed in his veins. The tableau held and was fixed.
—May I call you Virgil? Flapping Eagle’s voice was hesitant.
Virgil Jones felt inordinately pleased.
—Certainly, certainly. Certainly, call me Virgil.
A long silence, in which a bond was sealed.
—What may I call you? Virgil broke the stillness.
Flapping Eagle didn’t answer.
—Mr Eagle? Virgil Jones turned to look at the Axona.
But Flapping Eagle was asleep.
Virgil lumbered across the raft and sat by the sleeping form.
—Don’t thank me for your life, he said to it. I’m grateful to you, more than I can say. Don’t thank me for coming here; it was a debt paid, a world remembered. Don’t thank me for anything; and don’t be afraid.
The sea curled over the edges of their frail craft, and fell away; curled, and fell away, as the old bull elephant watched over the body of the young-old buck.
—I have some food, said Flapping Eagle, in some surprise. He had reached into the pocket of his ragged trousers and found two old sea-biscuits. He passed one to Virgil Jones, who hid his nakedness behind Flapping Eagle’s old coat. They ate slowly.
—Just call me Flapping Eagle, said Flapping Eagle, and then added: Virgil.
They looked at each other as they munched.
—Everything you’ve ever done, said Virgil, has been a preparation for Calf Mountain, in a way.
Flapping Eagle noticed a difference in Virgil; he was calm rather than stagnant. There seemed to be a surge of strength in him which was very reassuring. Flapping Eagle realized how mutually dependent they had become, and it was a pleasurable realization.
—Everything I ever did, said Virgil, was just the same, in away.
—What sort of thing, asked Flapping Eagle.
—O, said Virgil, I travelled, like you.
The sea whispered secrets to the raft.
—A life, said Virgil, always contains a peak. A moment, you follow, that makes it all worthwhile. Justifies it. At any rate, that’s what I find. You’re either moving towards it or away from it. Or for an instant you’re at it and you’re … full.
They were becalmed. Flapping Eagle sat up, looking at the stillness with equanimity. Virgil’s large tongue licked contentedly at the outskirts of his mouth: patrolling the frontiers.
—Have you ever thought about the phrase:
petrified with fear?
asked Virgil. Turned to stone, you see.
Flapping Eagle half-turned, half-spoke, but Virgil was far away in a train of thought.
—That’s what they’re like in K, you see, he continued. Petrified. And why? He heaved his shoulders, tossing the weight from them. Why, because of the damned dimensions. (He frowned.) You remember my saying you should fix your mind on one thing, like Bird-Dog. It’s the only defence. The effect is much stronger in K, you know. Much nearer to Grimus. It drove them out of their wits … they found the only way to keep the bloody thing at bay was to be single-minded. To a fault. Obsessive. That’s the word. Obsessions close the mind to the dimensions. That’s what K’s like. Obsessive. You can probably understand why. Petrified with fear. It’s a fearful thing to be a stranger within oneself. People don’t like their own complexities. Tragic, really.
Flapping Eagle asked: What about? Obsessive. What about?
—O, said Virgil, anything. Doesn’t matter. Cleaning the floor, whatever. Carry it to its extreme and it serves to protect. Mrs O’Toole’s obsession with constancy may well be her best protection. As I said, the Effect is spreading, you know. It spreads.
He was silent.
—Often they fix themselves a time in their lives to mull over. Live the same day over and over again. Displaced persons are like that, you know. Always counterfeiting roots. Still. If a false front’s thick enough, it serves. To protect.
There was no time; they sat, stood, moved, slept. At some point, Flapping Eagle had asked:
—What about yourself, Virgil?
—What about me? replied Virgil.
—You were saying every life has a peak … what about you?
—O yes, said Virgil. Long past it.
The silence settled again. Then Virgil said:
—Once. Then. Before. The terror of the titties, eh?
Flapping Eagle asked: —Were you married?
—O, said Virgil, yes. Eventually. Roughly. Temporarily.
There was a wind. The rudimentary sail was full; they moved from anywhere to nowhere across the infinite sea.
—Towards infinity, said Virgil Jones, where all paradoxes are resolved.
—Virgil, asked Flapping Eagle, am I getting better?
—Better?
—The Dimension-fever, said Flapping Eagle. Everything seems to be smooth just at the moment. Am I mending?
—I don’t know, said Virgil. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually one meets a few monsters. You know the sort of thing.
—No, said Flapping Eagle.
—At any rate, said Virgil, trying to sound confident, between us, we should be able to handle them.
The Gorf had made a decision. No more meddling. But he might speed things up a bit; he was getting bored. Though Mr Jones’ presence was very interesting.
XXIV
L
AND ROSE UP
from the sea to meet them, but it was unlike any soil or earth either of them had ever seen. It was not so much solid as not-liquid, a viscous, glutinous stuff. At one second it seemed insubstantial as air, at another it acquired the consistency of treacle, at another it lay smooth as glass. It seemed to smoke, or steam, a little.
Virgil Jones knew where they were. It was the nearest they would get to escape, and also the most dangerous of the Inner Dimensions. They stood at the very fringes of Flapping Eagle’s awareness, close to the point at which his senses merged with the void. This was unmade ground, the raw materials of the mind. If they bent it right, it would lead them wherever they wished to go; if they failed to master it, they could drift on its wisps out of Flapping Eagle’s existence. To put it another way, they would die.
The raft had lodged—or
stuck
—in the land. Gingerly, they placed feet upon the colourless, formless substance. Flapping Eagle looked nervous.
—We’re in very deep, said Virgil and explained.
—Now then, he said, we’ll need to concentrate as hard as we can. Try and imagine the topography of this Dimension, since it seems to be topographic. It’s a series of concentric circles.
—A series of concentric circles, repeated Flapping Eagle.
—We’re on the outermost circle. We need to get to the centre.
—We need to get to the centre, repeated Flapping Eagle.
—Once we’re in the centre, we’ll need to climb. The waking state lies directly above the centre. Do you understand?
—Yes, said Flapping Eagle.
—If we concentrate hard enough we can use this stuff to make a passage. We’ll be able to move through it to the centre without being affected by the Dimensions.
Virgil Jones had taken on a new dimension himself. He was crisp, authoritative. Flapping Eagle settled down to shape the stuff of his mind.
The passage, or tunnel, took shape around them. It was dark grey, suffused with dirty yellow light. In mounting excitement, Flapping Eagle realized that he was shaping it into a passable facsimile of the red tunnel down which Bird-Dog had fled at the beginning of the fever. His strength began to flood back; the malleable not-land stretched into a longer and longer tunnel. Virgil Jones, watching, felt an enormous relief. And finally at the very far end of the tunnel they saw a tiny beckoning pinprick of light.
—Time to go, said Virgil Jones.
Flapping Eagle didn’t speak. All his efforts were plunged into holding the tunnel, preserving its existence until it
set
. So Virgil Jones, ever co-operative, concentrated on creating a means of transport. A moment later (he derived a sizeable pleasure from the speed) they were the proud possessors of two bicycles.
—I’m sorry, he apologized, the mysteries of the internal combustion engine have always been beyond me.
The tunnel had
set
. They mounted their anachronistic steeds and headed into its depths, towards the siren light.
For all his recent achievements, for all his new-found confidence, Virgil seemed to Flapping Eagle to be a worried man.
—Virgil, he asked, you wouldn’t hold anything back from me, would you?
—My dear fellow, admonished Virgil Jones. My dear fellow.
—Well, then. You wouldn’t know what’s at the other end of this tunnel, would you?
—My dear fellow, repeated Virgil Jones; and then, after a pause, he added quietly: That depends entirely on you.
—Explain?
—In all probability, said Virgil, there will be nothing at all.
—And that’s what worries you?
Virgil Jones coughed. —You seem to be an unusual fellow, he said. Perhaps you won’t need … He stopped.
—What? asked Flapping Eagle.
—The monsters, said Virgil Jones.
When he had explained, Flapping Eagle knew what had to happen.
The cure for Dimension-fever is a complex thing. It involves more than mere survival, more than just the ability to find one’s way through the labyrinth. If that is all a sufferer has to offer, the fever can recur and recur. Once exposed to it, the sufferer’s resistance is lowered; he can expect further and perhaps worse attacks to set in without warning. Even the cure is sometimes not total; it does, however, insulate the sufferer from the worst the Effect can produce. That is, if it doesn’t kill him.
Lurking in the Inner Dimensions of every victim of the fever is his own particular set of monsters. His own devils burning in his own inner fires. His own worms gnawing at his strength. These are the obstacles he must leap, if he can. Often, sadly, they are stronger than he is; and then he dies. Or lives on, a working body encasing a ruined mind.
Flapping Eagle thought: all he had ever done was survive. To have been so much and done so little. Searching, always searching for the path through the maze that led to Bird-Dog, and Sispy, and his way out. It had left him half a man, unfound even by himself. It was this lack in himself that was now reaching a time of crisis. And, added to it, the cross it seemed he was always to bear, was his responsibility for the life of Virgil, his rescuer, guide and friend. Why, he thought in anguish, why is it that I place the lives, the happinesses of all I touch in danger? I never wished it.
As if reading his thoughts, Virgil said:
—Don’t worry about me. Glad to have been of service. Might even be able to render some assistance.
He knew this to be untrue. It was Flapping Eagle’s fight that must wait at the growing circle of light. No-one could help without hampering his own chances of success,
Flapping Eagle set his jaw.
Bird-Dog: his search: all of it. A gigantic blind alley. A voyage through the waste land that had destroyed his appetite for his greatest treasure: life. He resolved that if he emerged from this tunnel, he would abandon his search. He would go to K and make his home. The discovery and befriending of other human beings was enough, more than enough, even for a man with eternity at his fingertips. If Calf Mountain was not perfect (and it was no Utopia), then what matter? Perfection was a curse, a stultifying finality. He would seek out and grow rich in the glorious fallibility of human beings, dirty, wartish, magnificent creatures that they were.
Virgil half-guessed the thoughts going through his friend’s mind, and his eyes clouded. They had good reason to. He was thinking about his own fate, which was entirely out of his control. Now that Flapping Eagle had set his mind on the contest, it would be waiting as sure as eggs were eggs. Everything hung on the battle. Virgil ordered his mind into something approaching resignation.
The Gorf woke, roused by some mental alarm-system, and immediately began to take an acute interest in events. This was better, he thought. This was something like it. If he had had hands, he would have rubbed them.
On their rickety bicycles, dressed in their forlorn garments, Flapping Eagle and Virgil Jones, Don Quixote and Sancho, rode to their tryst.
XXV
T
HE COLOURS WERE
all wrong. The sky was red, the grass mauve, the water a virulent green. Flapping Eagle blinked, but they didn’t change. He looked at the unearthly scene for a long moment and then, gradually, as his eyes accustomed themselves to full light, normality did return.
They were on a river-bank. Behind them was a thickly-wooded hill and the mouth of their tunnel. The river filled the gap between it and the next hill, then emptied itself into what had been a bright green lake. Hills circled them, silent captors and judges. In the centre of the lake stood a stone building, tall and circular. A high-pitched voice chanted words which were, at first, as meaningless to Flapping Eagle as the crazy colours had been; and then his ears, like his eyes before them, found the key to the sounds. Bus heart missed a beat.
It was a chant he had not heard for over seven centuries: a hymn of praise to the great god Axona. He bit his lip. Virgil Jones looked at him, but said nothing.
They were standing by their bicycles at the water’s edge when Flapping Eagle saw the boat. A crude coracle with this name painted on a board tied to its side:
Skid-Blade
. Flapping Eagle, the master of the knife, felt his spirits sink still lower, and realized that he had read an omen into the name.
Where the blade skids, there skid I
. He climbed into the boat, motioning Virgil Jones to stay behind; and helplessly, weightily, Mr Jones subsided to the ground as Flapping Eagle paddled out to the stone shrine which was the voice of his past, claiming him. Their bicycles lay crookedly, uselessly, beside Virgil on the empty shore.
It was the votary flame that produced the second illusion. When Flapping Eagle, on his guard, passed through the open door of the shrine, he saw, in light once again dirty and yellow, the forms of two giants shadowed on the far wall. Vast forms: an Axona chieftain in his full headdress sitting in erect profile on a ceremonial stool as a supplicant knelt chanting at his feet; the whole tableau some twenty feet high.
It was, however, the votary flame that had done it. It burned in its stone bowl immediately below the small platform where the scene was actually taking place and cast huge shadows on the distant wall. But even when he deciphered the trick his eyes had played, Flapping Eagle found no relief; partly because, now twice-bitten by illusion, he expected a third; but mostly because he felt in himself both an absolute certainty and a crippling fear that this old, dark, hawknosed, feathered chief was the incarnation of the god Axona himself. And, the dimension being what it was, the truth was as he believed it to be.
The god Axona rose from his stool; his devotee continued his chanting until the chief cut it short with a gesture. He was quite a small man, but the glare in his fierce, heavy-lidded eyes pierced even the temple’s stygian gloom.
—So Born-From-Dead has come at last to his god, said Axona, and the words struck a new chill into Flapping Eagle’s heart, because they revealed what the darkness and ceremonial garments had hidden.
The god Axona was an old, dark, hawknosed, feathered woman.
—Born-From-Dead.
The god mouthed his name (ignoring his self-given brave’s name in calculated insult) in tones of overweening disgust.
—All that is Unaxona is Unclean, said the god. Unclean. Had you forgotten, miserable defiled whelp that you are, what that commandment means? Is it to commit sacrilege upon this holy place that you come, whiteskin, paleface, mongrel among the pure, traitor to your race, is it to commit your supreme act of defilement that you come? Born-From-Dead has no patience with Axona; he cannot have come to worship. In death you were born and destruction is your doom. Whatsoever you touch, is soiled; whatsoever you grasp, you break; any person you love is stifled by your love; any person you hate is purified by your loathing. Is it the god Axona herself you seek to destroy? Is it this far that the worm in you has stretched?
She had touched the roots of Flapping Eagle’s own self-doubts; he could barely speak, yet he forced the words from his dry lips. They rustled weakly in the half-light.
—If I can, said Flapping Eagle. I will break you if I can.
Axona laughed, and her cachinnation rang around the room.
—From your own mouth you are condemned, Born-From-Dead, she cried; and it is by your own hand you shall die.
As she sat down once more upon her stool, the devotee, who had lain silent while they spoke, whirled round and cast off his cloak. Again Flapping Eagle’s self-control received a body-blow.
He was gazing into his own eyes.
His own eyes: but a vilely altered representation of himself. The body was the same; and, like Flapping Eagle, the creature wore a single feather in its hair; but the rest of its garnishings were utterly different. He wore a striped single-breasted jacket over a bare chest. The skin was deathly white. Around his waist was a string of beads, from which hung two squares of cloth, a yellow square covering his genitals, a blue square flapping at his buttocks. Otherwise he was quite naked. There were women’s earrings in his ears, women’s redness in his cheeks, women’s lipstick on his lips. His eyebrows were plucked into slender arches and his eyelashes were long and drooping.
And that voice: the unbroken, high, eunuch’s voice, a travesty of his own.
—Come, Born-From-Dead, it said. Come.
In the creature’s right hand was a light axe, or tomahawk. In its left hand was a rifle. Flapping Eagle had no doubt that it was loaded. He also knew that he was helplessly unarmed.
—Come, Born-From-Dead, mocked the voice of Axona, Will you not face my champion? They say you are a great warrior. Come.
Flapping Eagle sighed and came slowly forward.
He was gambling on his surrogate behaving as he would in such a situation, and using the tomahawk before falling back on the simplicity of the rifle. He had always been more at home with the throwing, infighting instruments. So he sauntered in, almost insolently, and thrust his hands into his pockets casually, to irritate his opponent.
His right hand closed over a hard, rounded object. He pulled it out, wondering. It was the
Bone of K!
The very same Bone that Bird-Dog had flung to him before she disappeared down the tunnel of herself.
The Bone of K: Flapping Eagle lost no time in speculation. He could have thought: where did that come from after all this time? Would it not have been noticed before now? But none of that mattered. He had a weapon, and that changed the nature of the contest. It was now probable that his surrogate would decide on safety and use the rifle. So he had only a few seconds, the brief “freeze” his opponent would undergo when he saw the unexpected object.
Flapping Eagle hurled the Bone, in a single, fluid movement, like throwing a large, ungainly dart. It hit the rifle at the point where his enemy’s hand gripped it. A shriek of pain and the rifle fell to the floor. So did the Bone; it shattered, with results that froze both Flapping Eagle and his alter ego in their tracks.
It was only afterwards that Virgil Jones decoded for Flapping Eagle the secret meaning of the name. It was a cypher whose key was the sound of its secret name:
Os, a bone. K, a place. Hence K-os, the Bone of K. Or, alternatively: Chaos.
At the time Flapping Eagle saw only the terrifying effect of the breaking of tibe Bone.
The shards and splinters rose like a spinning mist from the floor where they shattered and formed a cloud in the centre of the arena of combat. The rifle disappeared completely. It simply ceased to be. So did everything else.
What was left was a hole. A turbulent disarrangement in the structure of the dimension. Chaos.
Flapping Eagle came out of shock a fraction faster than his alter ego; probably because he was further from the hole. He rushed at his adversary head-first and hit him full-tilt in the belly. The surrogate Flapping Eagle staggered, stepped backwards and sideways.
And was gone in the hole, decomposed into chaos, into not-being.
Axona was on her feet, eyes blazing with wrath; but Flapping Eagle knew that behind that anger she was afraid. The Bone, the random element, had foiled her perfect plan; and now she was at his mercy. He advanced upon her with slow deliberation.
—Stay where you are, Unclean, she said, but her voice betrayed her.
—I don’t know what you are, said Flapping Eagle as he walked forward, but when I defile you, I am cleansed of my past. Cleansed of the guilt and shame that possessed some hidden part of my mind, of which your presence is the proof. To free myself, I must render Axona unclean. Do you understand?
He spoke the words with a gentle astonishment, like truths he had just understood.
Then he raped her.
When Skid-Blade returned to the shore where Virgil waited, it carried a new Flapping Eagle. Virgil listened to his account, then said: —You really must do something about your imagination, you know. It’s so awfully lurid.
With the help of Virgil Jones, it wasn’t difficult for Flapping Eagle to extricate himself from the web of Dimension-fever. They constructed their escape simply: Flapping Eagle closed his eyes and, while Virgil danced the Strongdance , willed himself to awake. It was, in the end, as anticlimactic as that, now that the battle was over. Flapping Eagle had become stronger than the inner dimensions.
Long experience, however, adds to strength a certain sensitivity to nuance and
wrongnesses;
so that as they neared consciousness (as their separate consciousnesses drew closer and closer together, almost touching for an instant, before separating) it was not Flapping Eagle, but Virgil Jones who became aware of a third presence, a third consciousness, also rising.
An instant before the blackout that spanned the fragment of time in which he was restored to himself, Virgil touched the intruder and knew it.
Wakefulness. He was naked, his clothes piled where he left them, on Flapping Eagle’s chest, the greenwood surrounding them, his body still describing the methodical, circular perambulations of the Strongdance. He felt the dead weight of exhaustion in his limbs, but forgot it in his anger.
—Where are you? he shouted. Where?
The “voice” of the unseen Gorf came calm from the woods.
—Greetings, Mr Jones.
Virgil dressed rapidly.
Flapping Eagle awoke with a splitting headache. The words
where am I?
formed on his lips for the second time on Calf Island; he dismissed them with a wry twist of the mouth. Where is anywhere? he asked himself.
Nevertheless, it was Calf Mountain; the slope of the forested ground told him so. And the cry of the dimensions, for the Effect remained, even though he had mastered it …a nagging in the corners of the eyes, ears and mind. Soon it would become like a mild tintinabulatory infection of the ear; he would become unaware of its presence except in moments of utter stillness. Now, it remained an irritant, niggling at him, a whining reminder of the world’s infinite cavities.
He stood up and found himself alone. A moment of panic; he shouted Virgil’s name into the clearing. Then, collecting himself, he heard the voice in the forest. Virgil’s voice, low and angry. He crept towards the sound with the stealth of his childhood.
In the forest, Virgil Jones was remonstrating with an old acquaintance.