Travellers #2 (11 page)

At evening we gave Jak and Jess a few laps of water, wet our own lips, and stumbled on. Some time during the night the twin peaks disappeared. Despair no long mattered. We dragged our feet through loose, shifting sand. The dogs suffered more. Sometimes they lay, first Jak and then Jess, refusing to move. We pulled them up, shoved them into stumbling on. Once I kicked Jak, and he looked at me, his eyes glazed in the starlight. Once I sat down myself, collapsed, and the dogs fastened their teeth in my tunic and dragged me to my feet, Taur encouraging them. I remember drawing two lines in the sand with my finger to show a hawk had flown over.

Single file we trudged, strung out. I became aware of a third person walking beside me – long dark robe, cowled beneath a black scarf – but did not dare look round. I knew she was raising and lowering a spindle as she walked, thread spinning out of a bunch of fleece she carried in her left hand in the manner of the Travellers. And because she was beside me, I kept walking.

Grey wisps strung a spider’s web in the east. I could see we had spent the night climbing a vast, slow-backed dune so high its crest had hidden the twin peaks. Triangular summits floating gold in the dark, they sprang to view now as we breasted the dune. Too tired for relief, I looked listless down the dune’s southern scarp, at what seemed mist, and realised my phantom companion had disappeared.

Taur and Jess caught up to us. In the rising light the mist below the dune turned from white to opal and through it floated a crescent lake of sapphire-blue water. On its far side I saw trees, grass, and red flowers – like the earlier mirage. Taur sniffed, and I realised these were real, we were smelling them. Ducks flighted off the lake. Herons stalked its edge.

The dune’s scarp beneath us was made of grains of quartz, shifting, shimmering, a sheen like a kingfisher’s wing. Taur
croaked. Jak and Jess tried to bark. We let ourselves slide down the iridescent sand, the dune vibrating as though the strings of a musical instrument twanged. Downhill we leapt. The sandhill thundered and rang like great bells.

Tumbling, rolling, the colours shifting, the dogs howling at the ringing sand. The air trembled. Afraid, I clutched my bow, felt for an arrow. Then we were at the edge of the crescent lake, its blue water so still it reflected four haggards. We dived in through our own image, smashing the picture, drinking, laughing. My recriminations and bad temper vanished. Taur went under and came up heaving me clear of the water. I tried to shove his head under, but he tossed me backwards with a jerk of his thick neck.

He still carried the last empty gourds. We jammed in their stoppers, put them in our packs, lashed spears, bows, and arrows on top. This time we slipped into our own reflection in the crescent lake. Taur hung on to our floating packs. Heads slick, Jak and Jess followed as Taur kicked, and I towed him towards the trees, flowers, grass the other side. Safe across the desert from Squint-face and the Salt Men.

What followed seemed a dream. Still seems a dream. Yet there are times when it comes back to me as real as the ice-ogre in the cold valley north of the desert. Sometimes the memory returns to haunt me as a nightmare. Is it then a dream about a dream? And how does a dream return in the high cold light of day?

A thousand suns jigged sapphire ripples as we crawled out the far side of the crescent lake. Indented in the sand between my hands – another footprint. As Taur got his breath, I brushed it out.

The beach was fringed by red-flowering trees, trunks and branches twisted, tormented. Behind them, impenetrable, a hedge of iron thorns. And through those terrible defences came birdsong and the splash of water falling – like the music of the pipes the Travellers played. We staggered under the trees’ eccentric ceiling.

“There’s a bit of dried meat in my pack,” I said to Jak and Jess, but they were already trampling and circling, dropping asleep in the shade.

It seemed strange, trees growing so close to the desert. I tried to say that to Taur, but he was asleep, too. Between twisted roots, I scraped a hole and buried the green stone dolphin. “Now I can sleep,” I mumbled to Tara in my mind, and she withdrew. Drowsy ripples lapped the beach.

I found myself standing in a desert, painting red-flowered trees upon a wall of air, painted Taur, Jak, Jess, and myself upon that transparent wall. Taur’s voice came, “Gaw, Urgsh! Gaw!” as I stepped into and through my own image, out of the desert heat into cool shade.

Even in sleep I knew I had seen these trees before, remembered one on Marn Island, the tree Taur called an apple. Its fruit had been green-skinned; these were the same shape, as big as Taur’s fist, and red. One hung so close I saw my face in its polished skin. Something moved beside my reflection on that gaudy surface, and I heard my name. “Ish!” For a dizzy moment my face reflected in the mirrored eyes of a girl who leaned down and kissed me.

I knew I need only say Tara’s name aloud, and she would be alive again. But the girl who stooped above me had black eyes, black hair, snow-white skin, and blood-red lips. Her gown swept the ground. Beneath its hem, slim feet barely dented the sand. Her embroidered bodice, its tiny gold buttons brushed my face as she reached past and plucked the rounded apple. My eyes followed the curve of her breast as she laughed, held out the apple.

I bit through red skin into white flesh. Juice spurted in my mouth. “‘Surely, slumber is more sweet than toil,’” the girl sang. I lifted heavy eyes towards her. “Sodomah,” she smiled. “My name is Sodomah. Come!” She took my hand.

“Gaw, Urgsh!” a voice called in the distance. I heard a scurry of feet and “Gaw!” as the hedge clashed shut its iron thorns behind us.

Sodomah led me through banked flowers, under trees, beneath a strange, gentle sun. We came to a wall, unlike those of the long-vanished People of the Walls, upright, painted white, and shaded by a vine. Sodomah led inside where leaf-dappled light fell through windows on to the floor.

“What would you eat, Ish?” How did she know my name? I no longer remembered Tara, saw only black hair and eyes, blood-red lips, and skin white as snow.

Sodomah poured something she called wine in cups so fine my hands shook. Red drops flew on to her white gown, and a picture came to me of Taur hewing a bloody circle
through the Salt Men on the floating island of ice. One mouthful of the heavy wine – musky like blood – and the picture faded.

I was looking down on a man lying on cushions beside a table. A man with arms and legs burned dark by the sun, scratched and scarred. He looked up at me, stared. His eyes, a bright blue, flashed in his brown face. He leapt, whipping out a knife. Knocked aside cushions, overturned a stool as he landed on his feet and jumped to one side. Suspicion peered out of his blue eyes. He glanced about even more quickly, less sure of himself, uncertain what to do next.

“Nobody is going to harm you.” Sodomah led me across to touch the wall which reflected both of us and everything else in the room. Once, Tara had shown me a piece of polished metal which showed my face when I looked into it. But this mirror was a huge wall and ceiling of something Sodomah called glass.

I had to run my hands over its cool, smooth surface. Where I leaned close my breath covered it like a layer of fog so the reflection dulled, uncertain. My fingers left marks on the glass.

Sodomah laughed as I explored the strange wall. Could I step through and into that other room, find those others, ourselves repeated there again, mimicking everything we did in the real room? And which was real, the room in which we stood, or that one from which I stared back at myself?

Sodomah laughed again. I watched her in the thing she called a mirror, and turned to see her beside me in this room. Dizzy, I knocked the glass with my knuckles.

“You will crack it,” Sodomah warned as I went to rap it with the back of my knife. “Broken glass cuts sharper than any blade. Come. Eat. Taur and the dogs are being looked after.”

She pointed, and I looked through an opening in the wall. In the distance Taur, Jak, and Jess sat eating under a
red-flowered tree. Taur drank and wiped his mouth. I knew the gesture.

I threw myself down, stared wordless at my reflection on wall and ceiling as I sank deeper in the cushions’ softness. My stained tunic, scratched bruised legs and arms looked out of place, sprawled on the delicate woven coverings. I ate and drank, and my double copied me in that other room.

Sodomah poured more wine. Fumes pulsed in my head. I woke between sheets of neither wool nor hair, but some other yarn, fine and white. A mild sun fell pleasant across my bed. It is one of the things I remember of the garden, that the sun was gentle there. I raised on one elbow. Down a long vista through flowers and green branches, I saw Taur asleep with the dogs beneath the tree.

My gear hung on the wall. My pack and heavy cloak hanging. Instead of my old tunic I was wearing one made of fine stuff. Most astonishing, I had been washed. All over. And my skin was soft with oil. It must have taken several people to carry, bathe, dress me in this tunic, and lay me on the couch.

I felt for the green stone dolphin round my neck. It had gone! I opened my mouth to shout to Taur, but remembered burying it under the tree.

Another huge mirror made up one entire wall and the ceiling of my room. Again, I was dizzied by images of myself, the room and all its furnishings. Echo upon echo, reflection upon reflection. My skin looked paler. The dust and dirt of the desert washed off. Whoever scrubbed me must have been amazed by my whiteness beneath.

Three dwarfs appeared side by side in the door. Arms and legs solid with muscle. Bodies thick as the walls. One of them clapped his hands to where his ears had been lopped. The second dwarf pointed to his eye sockets, painful empty holes. The third pointed to his mouth, stitched up until it
was only a healed scar. The blind dwarf produced a grotesque moo, a questioning note.

“You want me to follow?”

They bowed, led me into a corridor lined with more mirrors. I was still uneasy at the reflection of myself walking nearer or, when I turned around, diminishing behind. A thousand confusing images.

The dwarfs led into a large room where Sodomah, her back to me, played the strings of a long-necked instrument, her true voice unwinding a song. I looked at the fall of her long black hair, the lovely movement of her arm. She turned, smiled, led me to a bench covered with soft cushions. The dwarfs vanished.

Sodomah smiled. “You have escaped great evil, Ish. This is Dene, the end of all your travelling. Your journey has been long. Here are no more hardships, no unhappiness. Learn now to enjoy life.”

Again I wondered how she knew my name, but forgot to ask. Life was sweet in Dene, an endless garden in which it seemed perpetual noon. The dwarfs foresaw my every need, but one. Whenever I questioned them, one pointed to his eyes, one to his ears, the other his mouth.

I ate each day with Sodomah, listened to her sing and play, walked hand in hand with her through the garden, plucking and eating the red apples. The days drifted past like clouds or their shadows, and I forgot my questions. I even forgot Taur, Jak, and Jess.

Sodomah was curious about our journey. Had we any other companions? How did we cross the desert? From where did we come? I answered as best I could while keeping Squint-face and the Salt Men a secret. All that seemed a bad dream, a world of deceptive reflections: the floating island of ice, the pursuit, the cannibal feast. Only Dene and Sodomah were real.

I explained that Taur and I were the last of our people,
had travelled south after they perished by massacre. In Dene where the present was reflected again and again in the cold walls of mirrors, I did not think I was lying by not telling Sodomah the whole truth of our past. There were times I wondered if the mirrors might begin to reflect that past, mingle those images with the present. My mind became confused at the thought. I still could not understand how the garden existed beside the desert and, although I sometimes wondered what lay further south, a reluctance prevented me repeating to Sodomah the questions the three dwarfs would not answer.

Each night there was soft rain to keep the flowers blooming, the trees green, the fruit ever fresh. Each day the sun shone, a sun that never burned, never raged an orange tower up the sky. Life in Dene was a succession of contentments. My limp vanished. Indolence seemed the way life should be. And most of all there was Sodomah.

I remember seeing the curve of her breast as she reached for the apple above me, that first time I saw her, feeling her embroidered bodice brush my face, the cool lipping of its golden buttons. And, as we walked together, I was excited again by the movement of her hips, glimpse of ankle, narrow foot. Her white arms, bare to the shoulder: I wanted to touch her skin, find if it was as soft and cool as it looked.

One morning I returned to my room to find a sheet of the glass, a mirror, set upon a three-legged frame. Brushes on a shelf, and thick, oily paints of many colours, rich and thick, and looking good enough to eat. I loaded a brush with red paint and, bending forward to lay a stroke across the glass, saw my reflection there and stopped. I had been about to paint a girl’s face, someone forgotten.

Through the window and far in the distance at the end of a green avenue, Taur stood under the red-flowered tree, Jak and Jess behind him. I thought I heard a distant, “Urgsh!” and Taur raised his arms, beckoning. I glanced at the wall
of mirrors around the room, saw a pair of black eyes repeated many times as they grew smaller, distant, and disappeared, and I dropped the brush.

That night, bathed and clean in a fresh tunic, I ate and drank with Sodomah. “Gaw!” I thought I heard a voice in the distance. “Urgsh!”

Sodomah laughed, filled my glass with the red wine. I knew I desired her. I had never known a woman’s body, though I remembered dreaming of another young woman whose name vanished as I thought of it. I remembered wondering about Hagar’s old woman’s body as I grew up, when we were the Travellers. But here was a beautiful young woman laughing, brushing against me, leaning forward so her breasts swung against her gown. She held my eyes with hers, moved her legs, and from under the cloth came a silken shirr! shirr!

Sodomah offered fruit she called grapes. Held the bunch towards me, danced away, and offered it again. I snatched. She laughed and held it behind her. Perhaps it was something to do with the red wine, the silken rustle, but my mind confused the thought of the grapes and her hidden breasts. I was unsure which of the dancing girls I saw was real, which mere images. Sodomah leaned forward in her dance so I looked and gasped and grasped once more, and once more she laughed, a grape between her red-painted lips.

Clumsy, I tried to seize it. She laughed, shook her head. I leaned forward, and she swayed to meet me. As I took the grape from her lips with mine, Sodomah bit so juice spurted like blood on my tongue. I cupped one breast with my hand, her lips pressed mine, and I fell face down in the cushions. Stiff with lust I struggled up, but only her laugh floated on the perfumed air.

Head thick with red wine, body hard for hers, I set out to find my room, angry with desire. The three dwarfs appeared with lamps which threw our shadows up the wall and across
the roof, distorted in yet more mirrors. They bowed and led me along corridors. In my room, I threw myself down, pressed against the cushions as if they were Sodomah.

I dreamed our bodies were entangled, making love. At last I woke, wondered if I was dreaming still or in some reflected room of unreality, smelled her perfume, heard the echo of a laugh, and slept again.