The Secret Book of Paradys (58 page)

He sat on a stone bench in the street, near to a baker’s. All the town passed him, the carters and loafers, the powdered girls with their attendants, a Christian priest, a sweating bricklayer who asked him to move his feet and said, when he did, “Thanks, dad.”

Vusca sat all day on the bench. No one knew him. He was some old worn-out dad to this town where he had lived his manhood and commanded the Fort and walked the arrogance of Rome into the streets.

When it was dark, the whores began to call from their lamplit doors.

He shouldered his life and his soul, and went to the temple of Mars.

He had finished the priests’ wine.

Only death could warm him now.

Retullus Vusca, purified for the act by an elder priesthood, took up the sword. He drove it in through the abdomen, upward, leaning into the agony to meet the point, until it bit into his heart. Then he rested. The stroke had been exact. He need do nothing more. He was not afraid. He did not mind the
pain, which was already flowing out from him. A tender warmth blossomed where the pain had been, on the blade in his heart.

It was then he discovered the final task still to do. By the miracle of the sword cut, a warning had been left to him, under his hand, to give – somehow he must achieve it.

The Roman crawled over his blood to the spot where the Medusa shield leaned on the wall. Through the nothingness of death, he struggled to see and feel her wounded face.

He prayed for an impossible strength. The god heard him.

As he fell back on the floor of the cell, Vusca dragged the shield with him. It covered him against the cold and dark. He could sleep now.

Because it was obvious he was mad, the crowds in the market made way for him. Only when he seemed likely to prove difficult did they shove at him, though once or twice urchins, and others nearly as or more unfortunate than he, pelted him with clods of dung and small sharp pebbles off the ground. Formerly, he might have been well-dressed, fashionably got up. Now the doublet was unlaced, half the points ripped out, the shirt filthy and torn, and he had lost a shoe. His hair was matted. Some said he had been come on sleeping or swooned among the pig-pens, like a regular prodigal. Even those that attacked him were wary, however, for he was young, and strong in his body. He might have been handsome, but for the affliction, and a curious film across his dark eyes.

Near the area where the pig market gave on the Dyers Street, a commotion ensued. A bird-seller was coming down with his wares in their cages strapped on all over him, and met the madman with twenty paces between them. Instantly every bird in its cage went wild, fluttering and cheeping, dashing itself on the wicker bars. The bird-seller tried vainly to quiet his charges. Seeing the madman, too, he nervously pressed back and invited him to pass. The lunatic, though, appeared smitten with weird fright. He fell against a wall, and beat his fists on his head. Then, with a shout, he ran straight at the bird-seller and felled him. The man went down hard at the impact and some of his cages were splintered and the panic-struck birds sprayed up into the sky. The madman meanwhile ran roaring up Dyers Street, where a few came out and pursued him, thinking he was a robber making off with something.

He was lost again in the alleys on the west side of the markets.

Raoulin
, said a voice in his head,
you must go at once to the university
.

No
, he answered.
No
.

In the courtyard of the Sachrist, the grave tutor led them in a discussion in the Platonic mode, but a girl stood under the colonnade, with a skull in her hands. Blood dripped from her skirt. The master indicated her. “Here we view the progress of corruption.” And her flesh slid from her bones. Only a skeleton at last, holding in its latticed hands the second skull.

The madman sprang up from his bed of refuse under the ruined wall, and ran away.

Images hunted him through the alleys of Paradys like dogs. He would race until he went down, and then they were on him.

Even as he ran, he heard their belling behind him.

Raoulin
, said the voice.
Raoulin
.

Yes
, he said. But he did not know who Raoulin was.

Find a priest
, said the voice.

He had sinned, and would die unshrived.

For some priests had already passed him, going up to the cliff of the colossal Church. They told their beads and murmured as they walked, unaware of anything beyond them in the world. Only one, younger than the rest, glimpsing the madman, quickly crossed himself and looked away.

What could he say to a priest?

I, a poor sinner … I lay with the dead. My fault, my great fault.

In the night, he travelled aimlessly, an escaped beast that takes the City for the jungle, and so cannot comprehend it. Down along the quays he rambled. The rats watched him as he drank from the dirty river. Under the water he saw a corpse go by, her hands clasped at her bosom, her hair brushing his drinking lips.

Near where some ships were moored with swags of sails across their broad arms, a fire was alight on the stones. Men sat dicing and he slunk closer, attracted to some forgotten code of fellowship.

Presently the men were aware of a presence.

“Something’s out there.”

“A dog. Can smell our dinner broiling.” (This could have been true, for Raoulin had noticed that meat and spices cooked over the fire in a pot.)

“Doesn’t the scripture say, as you do even to the least of my brothers?” asked another man, and digging in the pot with his knife, he took out a bit of meat, and threw it away into the dark where Raoulin was.

The other men cursed him. The benefactor cursed them louder.

Raoulin gnawed the meat down to the bone. But when he reached that bone, his gorge rose, he flung the bone from him and ran away from it, into the jungle tangle of the night.

In the hour before the summer dawn, two women went by the broken shed he had found to lie in, sweating and tossing and dozing, and they heard his
sounds, and glanced as they crossed the doorless door. They were two harlots from the quays, who plied there dusk to dusk.

“Well,” said the taller girl, “there’s one won’t be wanting our comfort.”

And they laughed in the way of women who have nothing on earth to find amusing, and can therefore be amused by anything.

When they were gone up the shadowy path, Raoulin shuffled to the shed’s opening. He had an idea, a want, to go after. No sooner did he feel this, and act on it, than his mind was wonderfully swept clean. No images or thoughts or voices started up to appal him. With a blissful singleness of purpose, he climbed behind the two women.

In a brief while he saw them before him again, outlined in the black by some vagary of night-sight that had come to him.

They did not converse, and walked sluggishly, doggedly. Then one hesitated, and turned to look back with a gleam of her pale face.

“Something is behind us.” The tone was not amusement but dread, now.

“Oh you and your night fancies. Three years you’ve worked the bank with me, and you still see ghosts.”

“I saw its eyes. Green, like a cat’s. But up in the air.”

The other turned then. She stared at Raoulin, and did not apparently make him out at all.

“There’s nothing. If there was, they’ll want the same as the others. Charge twice for a ghost.”

They went on, and Raoulin continued after them, though hanging back rather more. Instead of the roiling abyss within him, now he knew a dim excitement. It was not hunger or thirst, nor lust, yet it was something, a need that was undeniable, though nameless.

In an impoverished street whose tops bowed together, the harlots parted. The scared girl flitted away under an arch. The other pushed open a door and went into the night hole beyond.

There was no bolt or lock to the door. It was simple to steal upon it, to peer in at the crack.

The girl had lit a candle, which made a huge light in the nothingness. Raoulin saw her like a cameo, white on umber. There was another, too. A man unbeautifully asleep on a pallet, who at the light sat up and snarled, “Is that you? What have you got?”

The harlot took out a few coins from her sleeve and let them fall into his hand.

“Is this all? You’re not keeping anything back, slut-face? I’ll –”

“I know what you do if I try to cheat you. And it’s harder, my work, with bruises.”

“Well and good. Now take a penny and go out and get me a pot of ale.”

“Sweet Jesus. At this hour? It’s almost morning and haven’t I been out all night –”

The man rose up and slapped her glancingly across the head.

“Stop your nagging. Do as you’re bid.”

The girl palmed the penny and came suddenly back to the door.

No one was there as she stepped outside, but as she began her trudge towards the tavern, something did appear, like a greater shadow thrown up at her back, with, near the apex, two narrow green incandescences.

Eastward, over the heights and scoops of the City, the sky was draining of its black. The creatures of Hell, which preferred darkness, would be seeping down into the ground.

Years ago, when she was only a brat of five, there had been atrocities committed in the dark. Her own mother, a whore before her, had sat whispering over the cooking fire with her cronies, all telling each other of the woman by the fish market who had had all her parts torn out. And the body was burned, for they said a devil had done it and evil’s infection might be there on the rags of the corpse. That thing, certainly, had toiled by night at its ripping, as she and her sisterhood toiled against posts, trees, and walls, or flat in some leaky boat under the wharf.

These were the thoughts in the trudging girl’s head. She put them aside briskly and promised herself a swig of the stink-pig’s ale.

As she was turning aside into Goat’s Alley, the harlot realised that a man was behind her. She could smell him, and feel his heat, and next moment he caught her round the body.

“Hey, hey,” said the girl, who was used to rough embraces, and she turned herself to look.

Her first impression frightened her, for the alley was still all of the night, and what she seemed to find had hold of her was a black shape, maned, and with teeth drawn, luminous-eyed, uncanny.

But she sloughed the notion, and stared, and saw instead the sick beggar from the shed-shelter.

He was shaking with a fever, hot with fires, and his eyes, if they were not demoniac, had a rabid glare she knew to be careful of.

“Now what can you be wanting, sieur?”

His teeth glittered as he panted. He seemed to try to force her to the wall.

“Not now,” she said, “my old man’s waiting. And you’re not fit for it.”

To Raoulin her voice was barely audible, and she herself seemed a great way off down a tunnel of mists and lights. It seemed he must have her, carnally. His loins had readied themselves, and so after all this had been the want which drove him to hunt her down. And yet, the want was not solely lust, as he had known it was not, in its parched starvation, a hunger or thirst. His entire body strained towards a sort of stretching and yawning, and the picture in his mind now was of a snake yawning off over its head its entire skin.

But the girl resisted, playful and determined.

She seemed scared now, too, like the other one.

“If I call,” she said, “Jenot will hear me at the inn. He’s a big man. He’ll come and see to you. Now leave off.”

She thrust at him and Raoulin slammed her into the wall. At that she did scream, and the cry brimmed through his brain. He saw himself, as if from the air above. He saw himself – and another.

A corpse-light was over him. It was in his eyes. It altered him. This one could throw the girl back and rape her. At the crisis, the stem of flame would mount through him, as he had seemed to feel it before, from phallus to sacrum, through the vertebrae, into the skull. And then –

And then the demon which possessed him, which he had conceived at his union with the dead girl – the demon would yawn off his skin and make him, as it had made Heros d’Uscaret, into the mindless, feeding unlife which was
itself
.

Raoulin, by an effort of flesh and will, wrenched himself from the terrified whore. He seemed, as he did so, torn apart. Nausea boiled in his guts, he went blind with pain and illness, and staggering away, left her. She ceased yelling at once, and let him go. No man came rushing to her aid, either. The alley was empty. And the next. Not that he saw.

He tried to pray to God. No words would come. He had mislaid all the orisons, all the entreaties.

But what he had almost done, to her, to himself –

It came to him he had been hearing her thoughts, those memories that concurred with Helise’s tale, and that might be the prelude to the latest tale, the rebirth of the demon.

In the nightmare he had no compass points. There was nowhere he might return, no sanctuary to be had. Friends, family, the swamps of raptures, the pinnacles of debate and learning – nowhere could he perceive salvation.

And he recalled how an elderly stern sour priest had warned him of the loose women of Paradys, of some dire disease he might catch. But he had caught the contagion of the Devil.

The sky was bright now, over his left shoulder, where Satan stood in the stories.

Then the last alley broke into a slender street that passed under some tall houses. One had a vine growing up its timbers. He gazed at it, as if at a creeper from Atlantis. Then his legs gave way. He fell in the street. He lay there, and heard the world start to be industrious all about, the notes of brooms and pans, a donkey’s complaint, a young girl singing. The Prima Hora was sounding from a score of churches.