Virgil Jones, too, was making plans, and plans which involved Flapping Eagle at that. For now, now that he had brought Flapping Eagle to K, was the crucial time. If he should react to it (and it to him) as Virgil hoped, he would be ready for the task Virgil wished him to perform. If not, then there was nothing to be done. Virgil no longer had the strength to approach Grimus. He had had a glimpse of it, there in the forest; but it had been ruined once more, in his struggle with the Gorf. Now it was up to Flapping Eagle. Virgil derived some dark amusement from the fact that he was planning exactly what Deggle would have wished; that would amuse Master Nicholas, too, if he knew. If there were no god, we should have to invent one, remembered Virgil, and made this reversal of that aphorism:
since there is a Grimus, he must be destroyed.
This, then, was a return to a long-lost war. There would be O’Toole to face, and possibly even Liv. But there was no going back.
—Flapping Eagle, he said, I’d like to tell you this: we are all most vulnerable to the ones we love.
Flapping Eagle was only half-listening. Virgil went on, gazing into the night-mist lying lightly over the plain, giving the town itself a shimmering, insubstantial air.
—I mean yourself, said Virgil. I hope you will not end by causing me pain. I really am very vulnerable to any wounds you may care to inflict. That, it appears to me, is what a friendship means.
Flapping Eagle was listening now. Virgil had spoken haltingly; the words had been hard to say. They were a plea for help, a cry of need from a man who had now saved his life twice.
—Agreed, he said. Virgil nodded briefly.
They had been at the woods’ end for some time now. Night was well under way.
—Well, said Virgil Jones, shall we?
On an impulse, Flapping Eagle linked his left arm around Virgil’s right; and they marched, in step, comrades-in-arms, towards their separate dooms.
The moon, filtering faintly through the mist, shed white flecks on their moving heads.
PART TWO
TIMES PAST
XXXI
K BY NIGHT: houses huddling together as though clustered for protection, drawing warmth from each other. Rough exteriors, stained by damp and mist and time, dirty-whitewash crudities, architectural cripples, surviving defiantly for all their crooked tiles and ill-fitting doors.
Around the houses, the streets. Lifelines of dust, eddying and swirling among the deformed homes, coming from nowhere, circling aimlessly, existence itself their only purpose. A place must have streets; blank spaces between the filled-up holes.
One street, and only one, could hold its head high. An avenue of cobbles bifurcating the eddies of dust, it stalked through the night town from end to end, proclaiming its seniority, a roman among barbarians.
A man, decrepit as his clothes, stained as the houses, dusty as the streets, on all fours, crawling the length of this majestic thoroughfare, a pilgrim on the road to Rome, engaged for all appearances in an act of worship.
This was Stone; he answered to no other name and rarely enough to his chosen soubriquet. Silence was his way, the road his hill and the stones the stones of Sisyphus. He counted them daily, one by one, enumerating the cobbles for posterity. A task without end for a man with a poor memory, an infinite series of numbers without a sum. At first, so long ago that he had forgotten, he had tried; his parched tongue would stumble over the large, ungainly figures; they would slip his mind; and patiently he would return to the beginning. Now the counting was only an excuse; his real purpose was the constant renewal of his friendship with each single stone. He greeted them like old friends, coming with pleasure across a favourite cracked cobble here, a particularly round and pleasing one there. To some of them he gave names; others were the scenes of great adventures in his dreams. The street was his microcosm and afforded him all his delights and pains. Small and attenuated, he was as much a part of the road as any of his stones. In one of his rare sorties into the spoken word he had said earnestly to Elfrida Gribb, wife of Ignatius Q. Gribb, the town thinker, —If it weren’t for me the road would crumble. Stones need love as much as you. And in a practical sense he did protect the road, guarding it zealously against the onslaughts of dust from the side-streets, and against the injuries of animals on its progress through the fields. He washed it and nurtured it, It was his. In return for this labour of love, he was fed by whomever he was nearest to when hungry and housed by whomever he was nearest to when tired. It was his road along which Virgil Jones and Flapping Eagle made their way into the ill-made community.
As they passed the occasional farmhouse, Flapping Eagle felt his pulse quicken. Lights glowed in windows through thin curtains, warm islands where a traveller might shelter. He glanced eagerly at Virgil and was about to voice his new-found exhilaration; but his companion’s face was clouded and immobile. It was a time to keep one’s peace: Flapping Eagle restrained the bubbling enthusiasm within him.
Home: that was the word that had done it. It crept into his head as he stood looking at the town from the breaking waves of the forest. It had come announced, filtering into him on a shaft of light from the distant windows. Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill. Flapping Eagle was coming home, to a town where he had never lived. He saw home in the mist lying softly over the fields; he scented it in the perfume-laden night; he felt it in the cobbles; but most of all it was the windows that were home, the closed eyes of a protected life, glowing with contentment, the closed windows.
Flapping Eagle stopped for a moment. Virgil looked at him curiously, and then, unknowingly, returned his compliment: restraining his words, which would have been an intrusion.
The farmhouse stood at the side of the road. It was long and low and white. No doubt animals were sleeping in the shed; it was the closed window that had transfixed Flapping Eagle. People were moving behind it, lives were being led. Abruptly, he vaulted the gate and crept up to the yellow light. Virgil Jones stood in the road, watching.
Slowly, Flapping Eagle raised himself from the ground to look through the glass; and found himself staring into an unblinking granite face. The farmer must have drawn back the curtains just as Flapping Eagle looked in. It was a face filled with crevices; deep valleys and pocks scarred it, but the eyes were strong and showed no anger or astonishment. They stared through Flapping Eagle as though he wasn’t there. Shaken, mumbling wordless apologies, he backed away to the gate, the road and Virgil, who fell into step beside him. They walked away from the stone face in the window and Flapping Eagle discovered that his hands were quivering. The eyes had done it: they had told him that he was still pariah. The untouchable.
Pariah. That word rose from his past to increase his discomfiture.
—Virgil, he hesitated, where shall we stay?
Virgil shrugged. —We’ll find somewhere, he said. Or other. His tongue slobbered in the corner of his mouth.
On the very outskirts of the town itself stood its tallest building, the only one Flapping Eagle had seen that stood two storeys high. It was in immaculate condition, which fact alone set it apart from the rest. Its walls rose straight and true, gleaming white in the blue-mist dark, a spotless sentinel and guardian of the town. It was a brothel. Madame Jocasta’s House of the Rising Son, a discreet wooden plate by the door proclaimed. And by the plate someone had scrawled an inexplicable phrase. Tomorrow, no doubt, a new coat of whitewash would expunge it, but tonight it stood, blemishing the whitewalled purity of the house of pleasure. A Rushian Generals Welcom, it said.
Virgil saw the phrase and muttered to himself: —Alex got out tonight, then.
—What does it mean? asked Flapping Eagle.
—Childish joke, said Virgil. Product of a child-mind.
Flapping Eagle was forced to repeat his question, since Virgil offered no more.
—The Russian Generals, said Virgil, are called Pissov, Sodov, Bugrov and Phukov. Childish.
But Flapping Eagle, already disconcerted by the stone eyes in
the granite face, felt even more uneasy for knowing the meaning of the jejune phrase.
In the town now; flurries of activity around them, sporadic because the hour was late. A glimpse through another window: an old woman gazing at a photograph album, immersed in her past. It is the natural condition of the exile—putting down roots in memories. Flapping Eagle knew he would have to learn these pasts, make them his own, so that the community could make him theirs. He entered K in search of a history.
They saw ahead of them on the street the crawling form of the man called Stone, greeting the cobbles. Flapping Eagle could also hear a clip-clop of hooves, somewhere near at hand, hidden by the clustering houses; and every so often the noise of laughter came to them on the breeze, muffled by the mist.
At the far end of the cobbled road, the opposite axis from Madame Jocasta’s stood the source of the laughter. This was the moment Virgil had been dreading and which he knew must be faced. This was the Elbaroom, home of the drinking community of K, centre of village information. According to his plans, they would have to go in, not just to find a place to stay, but to show Flapping Eagle to K; so they would have to meet its keeper.
His name was O’Toole.
—Able was I ere I saw Elba, murmured Virgil Jones. Apart from the language called Malayalam, it was the only palindrome he could ever remember.
XXXII
FLAPPING EAGLE SAW her first; and an eerie shape she made, half-woman, half-quadruped, coming at them through the circling mist. As she drew nearer, it struck him that she was one of the most palely beautiful women he had ever seen.
Elfrida Gribb suffered, albeit infrequently, from insomnia. When it struck, leaving her dry-eyed and awake in the midnight hours, she would get up, don her warmest shawl and ride through K on a small velvet donkey. Wrapped up well to spite the mist and damp, she found it a soothing thing to do. One had to keep oneself occupied, after all.
Elfrida: the name suited her, and she abhorred all diminutives. —A name is a name, she said. Elfin-faced and elf-boned, there could have been no other name for Mrs Gribb. She was delicately roseate skin fitting perfectly over soft rises and falls of flesh; her mouth small and softly-pursed and her eyes like sparkling water. Her clothes were old lace, her shawl embroidered with lilies, her hats as wide-brimmed as her wide green eyes, drooping across her face like long quiet lashes. Often she wore a veil. Mostly she was happy, her lightness of spirit infecting all around her; and when she was sad she kept it to herself. Other people had their own worries to fret at, she told herself stoically. She could cope with herself perfectly well.
Thanks to Ignatius. Ignatius Gribb provided her with a secure, immovable centre for her being. Her entire life and all her delight revolved around him. I thank whatever brought us together, she would tell him. If marriages are made in the heavens, then ours was made in the seventh. And he would grunt and nod and she would sniff his reassuring new-socks smell and be comforted and whole. A woman needed a love like this in a place like K. It kept away the darkness.
Shored up by the strength of this love, she felt it her duty to do her level best to impart something of her strength to the weak. To nurse the halt and feed the hungry was to her a privilege and a debt paid. This zeal made her as many enemies as friends. Not everyone likes to be helped; not everyone in K responded to her cosy goodwill. And the obverse of her sunny life was that Elfrida Gribb was something of a prig.
She was, however, beautiful, even through a veil; and Flapping Eagle stood entranced for a moment at the entrance to the Elbaroom, framed with Virgil in the filtering yellow light of the doorway and the flicker of the lamp above their heads, silhouettes watching the pale, lovely ghost on its night ride.
An instant when their eyes met; and at that instant, the universe went out for an instant, freezing the inhabitants of the town in a series of characteristic positions, a tableau fixed in the aspic of a blink in time.
The most unlikely duo in the Elbaroom sat at a low round table about halfway down the long, narrow hostelry. One of them was enormous, a bear of a man, an impression he heightened by wearing a bearskin coat practically all the time, for all that it was rarely very cold in K. Perhaps it was the coat that gave his face its bright red colouring. It was a face like a craggy tomato. Beads of sweat stood excitedly on its brow. Its eyebrows beetled inwards and downwards towards the rough peak of his nose, spilling over gleaming eyes on their way. He spoke rapidly; his hands swung in huge, dangerous, clawing arcs.
His companion was as slim as he was wide, as slight and elegant as he was cumbersome; a dainty man with a young face and Calf Island’s traditional ancient eyes. At present, these eyes held a look of infinite boredom—held it, moreover as though accustomed to doing so. They were discreetly downcast, watching his tapered hands pulling the legs off a spider, sharply, cleanly.
The dainty man was called Hunter. His full name was Anthony St Clair Peyrefitte Hunter, but his companion called him The Two-Time Kid. The name had stuck, not particularly because of the insult latent in it, but thanks to Hunter’s frequent avowal that he would ‘try anything twice’. The bear-like man, with his unerring gift for the obvious, had asked, why twice? and Mr Hunter had replied, with the slight disdain of centuries of good inbreeding:
—Once to see if one likes it; twice to see if one was right.
—Wal, guffawed the bear, you little two-timer! His bellow had effectively overpowered Hunter’s dainty sneer.
The bear was called Peckenpaw. K knew him as ‘One-Track’ Peckenpaw. He told stories no man questioned; he was too big to be accused of telling tall tales. His stories were full of the legends of the Old West; the time he stood up against old Wild Bill and stared him down; the time he bent William Bonney’s rifle into a knot with his bare hands; gold rush tales of mining towns where men were men and women were grateful. But at the time of the blink he was boring Mr Hunter with his favourite story, told a thousand times before, that was one reason for the title of ‘One-Track’. His repetitive, compulsive tale-telling was the other.
One-Track Peckenpaw had once spent centuries of his life hunting the North American counterpart of the Yeti: Big-foot. He had never caught him. His tales were full of the aggressive melancholia of failure, sterile inventions about how the big one got away. It was to catch Bigfoot that he had accepted the burden of immortality; it was the grudging certainty that he never would which eventually made him a Candidate for Calf Mountain.
—There was this time, he was saying, I got sure he was a woman. It was the cunning of him, the way he played me along, the bastard. I got to thinking, if he’d been a human-been he’d’ve been a woman for sure and a cockteaser to boot. It was a fool idea, him being a female, but it climbed in my head and wouldn’t get out. Once I dreamed I fucked him … her. Jesus that was a wrestling match. Woulda broken you in two at the least, Mister Two-Time.
—I’ll try anything … began Hunter mildly.
—Twice, bellowed One-Track Peckenpaw, drowning his audience’s voice. Yeah. Anyway. It was a pleasure to track him. Like being on the heels of a wilful woman needing taming. I’d think how a woman would behave when I saw his footprint near a stream. Was it a bluff or a double-bluff? Which way was he really going? I’ve always trusted to instinct. You get a feel of your quarry stronger than any scent. If the signs don’t add up with the feel you ignore the signs. That’s the difference between a lousy tracker and a great one.
—You never caught it, though, interposed Two-Time sweetly.
—Saw him twice, said Peckenpaw from a distance. This shape, huge like a mountain, going through thick forest growth like it wasn’t there. When I got to the spot it was like a tank had gone through. It gives a man respect seeing a thing like that.
He was silent for a moment.
—The second time, he went on, was the time he came to visit me. Sleeping’s a risky business in Bigfoot land. I used to put an alarm system round my campfire—tripwires everywhere to ring bells and clatter my pans. One night I wake up and the
re he is, just standing there, looking down at me. Walked through all the alarms as neat as you please just to take a good look. That’s when I stopped thinking he was a woman. I lay there still as the grave and he nodded and walked away so then I turn to grab my rifle, IT WASN’T THERE. He moved it to the other side of the fire. O he was clever all right. And I’ll tell you something else, Mr sophisticated Hunter. I may not have caught the motherfucker but he made me more of a man than You’ll ever be. COME AND GET ME, he meant when he gave me that stare, CATCH AS CATCH CAN. YOU see: he showed me a point of no return. didn’t matter that I was the best tracker that ever lived with ten lifetimes’ experience. He had a million years’ practice at running away. So now? Now I respect his privacy.
One-Track Peckenpaw leapt to his feet suddenly, his arms windmilling as he shouted: —COME AND GET ME, YOU BASTARD! CATCH AS CATCH CAN I and burst into convulsive laughter, great gulping laughs that shook his eyebrows; while Two-Time Hunter pulled the last leg off his spider, leaving it a round, wriggling, dying core.
Blink.
Elfrida Gribb had always thought the trouble with Flann O’Toole had to do with two things: his preoccupation with being such a disgustingly uproarious broth of a boy, and the fact that his middle name was Napoleon. An Irish Napoleon was a concept so grotesque it had to end up like O’Toole.
O’Toole made potato whisky in a back room and seduction attempts upon the person of every female who entered the Elbaroom; he swore oaths regularly and broke promises unfeelingly; he was prone to fits of violent temper, but thought himself a reasonable man; he was likely at any moment of the day or night to keel over in an alcoholic stupor, but he considered himself a man of power; he was carried to his bed every night in a haze of obscenity and vomit, but was convinced he was a leader in the community; he quoted poetry as he did ugly things. To Elfrida, his presence darkened a room and denied the beauty of life; to himself, he was a lightning-rod, conductor of electricity, Prometheus unchained, raw, carnal man in his prime, the very vitality of life. There was, too, a strong religious streak left in him; on mornings-after he could be seen mortifying his flesh with a cane, or heard crying in agony through the door of Mlle de Sade’s chambers at the House of the Rising Son. It was one of the reasons Dolores had left him; those who undergo physical suffering or mutilation involuntarily naturally loathe those who inflict it upon themselves in the name of God. Her only possible reaction had been flight.