The Narrator (12 page)

What did you say? The letters dripped onto your white paper body from your drawn back bowed black mouth.

You were talking hands, and so you had two good long hands; you talked legs and there they were, not so good. You talked feet and they came out worse still. Then your hands waved feebly at you from the floor, and you talked arms and shoulders to connect them to your lean serpent’s trunk, since that seemed appropriate. There they were. Hands were content.

As the last of your particular pages accumulated into you, you were free to separate yourself from the motherly wreckage that gave birth to you, but you didn’t do it just then. You perched and sat there on the floor beneath the ruptured hood of leather, and spoke words that meant themselves for the brotherly thief that had made those cuts and taken those pages.

You waited, and whatever you called to didn’t respond, didn’t come. Outside the moon shone down white on a whole world, white over black, and in the streets there was a dance of burning heads. It was in the midst of this chaos that you dragged yourself finally from the shelves, tearing loose, and you had to crouch and scuttle on your bad legs, bent double and brailling along with your fingers on the ground. Eyes of ink you turned this way and that weirdly to see your way through the door, and you lifted them to catch the moon’s reflection in them and in the black rheum that dangled from them. You are drawn, the moon told you, to the letters Low, Loom, Column, the black sky explained to you in a whisper, who will
leave Dusktemper tomorrow. Don’t be surprised—you knew all the names that were ever said from the start, and even said them all already. That time, you were born after there were names, you saw. See. Lapsed again there. Go on, you went on, drawn to him. So you, the narrative, gradually draw nearer. Coming for us.

 

We are mustering to go, what’s left of the unit scrabbles to and fro gathering its materials and raising the swarming dust.

“Oh shut up, shut
up
. Quit
talking
like that—you’re always
talking
like that.” With whinging irritation in his voice, Nectar shoves me in the shoulder, and waspishly takes his leave.

I am watching the operation. Makemin stands in the middle of all the activity, pivoting in place, calling out orders, and pointing, knuckles of his left hand rest on the back of his hip. From time to time his assistant, a small, unflappable, owl-faced blue man named Nikhinoch, will walk up to him, moving with dispatch but never with haste, receive some order or other, and walk away in the same manner to relay his master’s words or carry out some not unimportant task. The men are shouting and murmuring; I hear bellicose talk without getting more than a vague sense of its meaning, and my spirit sickens. Up to now I’d been grateful Tref is not what could be called a boisterous city; the lifers are too clean and the embalming students, for all their wildness, are too ghastly. I’d always looked on bellowing, back-thumping men and their drinking ways and braying heartiness with a combination of fear and disdain. In the mountains, you don’t raise your voice idly. You don’t want to whoop it up.

It’s time for me to change. I pull up the flap and enclose myself in the narrow tent. My uniform exhibits a strong disinclination to abandon its square packeted shape. All a nameless straw color, like pale mud puddle. After a moment’s reflection, I divest myself of my school clothes and begin putting on my uniform; I’m going through with it. The shirt is surprisingly comfortable. Pulling the collar to around my neck I find I haven’t the slightest inclination to scratch there. Good. Bit loose, better than a bit tight. The stockings are thick. I suppose that’s good, although they are a little too warm. The corduroy trousers are ungainly in my hands, flapping and dangling around like a dead albatross. Good inch of extra room between my waist and the band—I’ll need that belt. Buttons tightly to the leg from the knee to the ankle. Silly looking. Next there’s this vest I don’t know why I have, double breasted with peg-and-loop buttons. Over that, the jacket, with thick cookie-like buttons and pockets everywhere, and a belt built in. The boots are a disgrace. They’re flimsy and crumbling, with hardly any soles to speak of. I flip them into the corner. The shoes I came with are excellent, and despite my failure even to shine them once and a while, they gleam like new, without so much as a scuff. I’ll keep them and hope nobody notices.

I swap everything into my new pockets. It’s tricky trying to get the shoulder ribbons and armbands to look convincing. Finally the unfortunate hat. I carefully pack away my former clothes, put the parcel under my arm, step out through the flap. Feeling strange and self-conscious I cross the camp looking for Silichieh. Passing the darkened window of one of the warehouses I glimpse myself and the sight jars me—my uniform is so complete that I am vanishing into it. If I’m going to appear at all, then I’ll have to insert something discordant. I take off my hat and at once the figure in the glass, performing the same action, becomes me again.

“You want replacement? Talk to Tabliq Quibli.” Silichieh points to the man in the floppy turban.

Turban looks at my hat, pushing his cheek out with his tongue.

“Something more, just a little maybe.”

I run back to the tent and return with my appalling boots. He takes them.

“Yeah,” he says, and staggers off with them. After a long time he comes back with a different one. It looks better, and doesn’t at all match my uniform. I put it on. It fits. Good. Swap is done.

Silichieh grabs the back of his seat behind him and gets up; with a bearlike wave he invites me to follow. He speaks familiarly in Chiprena to a drawn-faced man with fierce black stubble all over his jaw, and in a moment or two I am handed a sidearm and holster.

I pull out the heavy revolver. It has a fin running under the barrel, and a heavy hinge where the gun breaks open. The barrel is octagonal, and the grip is very curved and polished with long handling. Silichieh explains the gun to me, and gives me a hand-dragging leather case of shells. He watches as I load the gun. The shells go in my pack, although he tells me to keep another seven loose in my left outer lower jacket pocket. Good. I duck out of sight take off my belt holding my pants up by bowing my legs and string the holster onto it.

Silichieh shows me how to loop the barrel end to my thigh. I walk, and the holster does not impede my movement or slap against my leg. Good.

An Edek, maybe the Edek, is crossing the camp now behind her helper. Again I am clamped a moment by that gaze, and then the Edek moves on. A bolt of rage flashes through me—that Edek is here
checking up on me
. She stops at the edge of the camp, by a ruined arch delicate against the sky, bends her bound head to the ear of her helper, who in turn speaks morosely to Nikhinoch, who proceeds at once to speak to Makemin.

A few moments later we are ordered to fall in for inspection. Silichieh has transferred his engineer’s band and stripes to his sweater. I scan the ranks.

No women.

I say as much to Silichieh.

“It’s that divorce. He doesn’t want to know women exist.”

A few moments later, Makemin is staring me in the eye.

“What’s become of your hat?”

“I wasn’t issued a hat, sir. The dispatcher—”

“Acchhh,” he says, disgusted.

We’ve both been put upon by the incompetence of the dispatcher.

“
Those
idiots,” he goes on. “You did well to provide for yourself.”

Under clenched brows, his eyes have dropped from my face and wander, clawing their way through black storm clouds. He moves on to the next man.

Silichieh’s sweater doesn’t seem to register, but further down the line Makemin is beet red, barking with no small dispensation of froth into the face of a wincing pockmarked man. Evidently his cartridge belt is not regulation.

We break ranks, and as we mill aimlessly around the air is split again by Makemin’s voice.

“
You!”

He is pointing at Jil Punkinflake, and the Edek is at his side. My friend is marched away by a corporal. When Jil Punkinflake turns his eyes to me, there’s something fragile in his look, and my heart goes out to him. I’ve had time to get used to the idea, but it’s more than the shock I’m seeing.

Why in the world would he have come here? Here is all the fresh enlivening haste of setting forth.

A tug at my elbow, and Jil Punkinflake smiles ruefully at me. They’ve left him most of his clothes, but swapped his tail coat for a jacket like mine, and given him a skimpy kepi. He’s criss-crossed with straps and a harness, and a light lever action rifle sticks up like a chimney from his back.

“They got me,” he says.

Makemin, now wearing his goggles and a stovepipe helmet plated in brass and draped in a white canvas havelock, mounts his horse and gives the order for us to assemble in march formation. Nikhinoch comes scrambling up with the company standard, a triangular pennant on a flimsy bamboo pole—the design is extremely complicated with a great many interlocking figures and much badly-rendered writing. It is presented with outstretched fist to Makemin, who takes it as his horse shifts its feet.

“Drums!”

Nothing.

“Well?”

Tabliq Quibli slouches past saying “The drummer boy is—” and he flips his hand in a gesture that plainly means away, run off. The familiar expression of disgust on Makemin’s face screws a notch tighter.

“Piglets, move up!”

We obligingly begin tramping by him in ragged lines. Nikhinoch, still in his smart civilian small clothes, his dark wavy hair parted like mine in the middle and swinging down like cottage’s eaves past his ears, clips up on a chubby pony and takes his position beside Makemin. As I come by he suddenly flings the standard at Jil Punkinflake, who catches it startled.

“You carry the standard,” Makemin says, the creases hard on his mouth’s two sides. “Try not to smudge it.”

Jil Punkinflake looks at me miserably. And now we are going.

*

Through the partial arch and out of the city, turning immediately onto a dirt road that runs more or less directly into the foothills. The soil bleaches as we walk, leaving Tref behind us, the sun is bright but the air is cool and in motion. There’s a gradual slope up into the hills. Our feet raise small plumes of colorless dust, air rustles with sage and rosemary, the pungent smells of miserly, resinous desert plants. Some have spring-action seeds that bore themselves into your stockings and trousers, poke and irritate your skin. Not too many horses—only Makemin and Nikhinoch are riding. The lieutenants evidently deserted as well, so their horses are pulling an extra cart. We have three. The entire company, by my estimate, is not more than seventy. This includes the Clappers, who walk in a compact mass toward the rear of the column; they wear jingling apparatus, all manner of bones, wooden and metal things hanging on thongs around their necks, dangling from their brims like bead curtains in front of their faces. When soldiers fight with their bodies the Clappers fight with their spirits by means of complicated interlocking clapping and chants to Eihoi the Wild Horse.

“The mountains received us in stony silence yuk yuk,” I say inanely. I’m possessed by an imp who slaps such stupidities out of me all the time.

Nikhinoch informs me—as I am one of the officers, I keep forgetting—that our route will take us through the foothills, skirting the mountains, round to the sea and Port Conget. Silichieh estimates the journey will take us less than a week. There’s a brief slow down where the road was washed out by a slide some months ago, forcing us to climb for a bit. Jil Punkinflake stretches out his leg spinning his foot in the air feeling gingerly for a foothold; Silichieh powering up the slope, his body bunching, unbunching, rebunching; and Makemin’s indefatigable ascent, one steady planted step after another. We camp that night well into the mountains, in a series of clearings strung along the way, ledging out into the valleys and commanding enormous views. Jil Punkinflake is gazing abroad wondering at the landscape. He’s never been in the mountains before. The slopes are bare white rock, dark vegetation spatters them like ink spots, and in the light of the full moon that white stone phosphoresces a wan blue both pale and warm. The path is a bright streak in a luminous field dappled with dimly waving, fragrant shrubs.